Collection Conundrums
Oh no, here we go again
Scenario 1: The evolution of a librarian
You have just begun working as a public librarian at the only library in a small town in the
middle of somewhere. It is a conservative Christian community. You notice that:
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The library’s religion section only includes materials about Christianity.
The library’s science section only includes materials written from a creationist
perspective.
The children’s picture books only show white families where there are two married
heterosexual parents.
These aspects of the collection align perfectly well with the values of the user community, as you
understand it. In your new collection budget, do you maintain these (unwritten, but seemingly
intentional) policies?
The town does have a small migrant community of agricultural workers who primarily speak
Spanish. These workers have children who attend the local school, but they don’t seem to use the
library. The library doesn’t have any books in Spanish. Should you include Spanish books in your
collection plan? What would lead you to do this or not?
As you settle in to your new position, you conduct an anonymous user survey to see what your
patrons’ interests are. Your survey indicates that patrons want:
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Materials about curing illnesses such as cancer with prayer and faith.
Materials about “Zionist conspiracies.”
Materials about making bombs.
Pornography.
Do you add such items to your collection?
Scenario 2: Digitization dilemma
Your eccentric, wealthy aunt was a sophisticated, if idiosyncratic, collector of miniature paintings
from different locations and periods. She collected medieval European illuminated manuscripts,
Persian miniature paintings, Mughal painting from India, and more. She had particular interests in
theme and technique that she collected for, and she delighted in how her collection demonstrated
those themes across time, place, and culture. In the end, her collection numbered about 50
examples, with about 15 from Europe and the rest with Asian (Iran, India, and Turkey, primarily)
origins.
You are executor of your aunt’s will, in which she described her wish to donate the collection, as
a whole, to the Asia Society in New York, where she had first seen and become enchanted with
the miniature style. You contact the Asia Society, and they are interested in the gift, but only in
the Asian examples. They tell you that no major museum will keep your aunt’s collection intact,
as she was not a major donor otherwise, and while the collection is a good and valuable one, and
your aunt’s ideas interesting, it is just not compelling enough to accept with restrictions on its
display and use. They make a suggestion: they can label your aunt’s donation (the items they will
accept, the Asian ones) as a collection in their online catalog, so that it will be kept together that
way. (Your aunt’s themes, though, will be lost, because all the society’s holdings are cataloged
using a standard schema with controlled vocabularies for values.) This solution will not require
any time or effort on your part.
As another potential solution, they note, you could donate the Asian paintings to the society and
sell the European paintings. You could use the proceeds to digitize the entire collection yourself
(the society would help) and organize it any way you like. You would then have to find your own
means of providing access to the digital collection. This would require time and energy on your
(or someone’s) part. The sale of the European paintings, plus other assets in the estate, should be
sufficient to keep the digital collection available for the foreseeable future, including both hosting
fees and a part-time information manager.
Your final option would be to establish a foundation in your aunt’s name and keep the paintings
together, placing them in a small gallery space and making them available to the public. But the
estate’s assets could only support this for a very short while; you would need to give up your job
to run the foundation (pursue donors, recruit a board, hire staff, and so on).
What do you do?
Scenario 3: Flickr fracas
Although you’re not the best photographer yourself, you enjoy good photography and have spent
a number of pleasant hours appreciating the world’s work on Flickr. As a way of channeling that
energy, you begin creating “galleries,” a Flickr feature that enables users to “curate” sets of
photos and describe their relationships. You’ve created galleries that convey, through the work of
others, your own enthusiasms for themes like urbanization and street art. You share your galleries
with friends and family; it’s a nice way to keep in touch on a higher level than a status update.
You have recently become a vegetarian after a long process of educating yourself about the meat
industry: its treatment of animals, the unsanitary conditions, the threats to long-term sustainability
of the planet. You create a gallery that juxtaposes photos of happy cows, lambs, and chickens
with their enslaved counterparts on factory farms and in slaughterhouses, visually documenting
your gradual shift in thinking. You round things out with some images of kitchen gardens. Your
friends and family are appreciative of your work; your dad, for example, says that it helps him to
understand your decision, which he had previously made a little fun of.
Then, however, the photographer who took and shared some of the photos of happy animals that
you used deletes them from your gallery and sends you a harsh note that says she doesn’t want
her work associated with such crazy hippie talk. She angrily criticizes your use of her
photographs in such blatant propaganda, and she tells you to stop imposing your views onto
others’ work.
You’ve never really thought about your activities that way. Is it wrong to use others’ work in your
own “composition” like this? Is it only wrong when the result might be perceived as
controversial? What should you do?
Scenario 4: Internal repository?
You find yourself managing the digital repository for a large public university. Faculty members
are instructed to contribute not only their published work to the repository but also interim
documents, such as technical reports associated with grants, accepted grant and fellowship
proposals, as well as the data sets (properly anonymized, of course, as necessary) generated
through their research activities. Currently, the repository materials are only available to people
with a university affiliation: faculty, staff, and students.
You, the repository manager, believe strongly in the value of open access to information,
particularly scholarly materials. It is through the free flow of ideas that both individuals and
society can progress. You are investigating means of converting the repository’s metadata to the
linked open data format, to enable its dissemination and potential aggregation over the Web. You
are also investigating the possibility of providing free access to some, if not all, of the
repository’s materials to the general public.
You receive concerned messages from various faculty members. One is from a climate scientist.
She is worried about the release of either data sets or associated metadata. It is, in her opinion, far
too easy for “crackpots” who doubt the certainty of global warming to manipulate data in
inappropriate ways, generating inaccurate conclusions that they then publicize widely in their
conspiracist communities, and even in the mainstream media. Even the release of metadata can
induce such people to unwarranted speculation on the nature of the data and why it hasn’t been
released to the public. This professor is tired of spending too much time defending her work to
people without sufficient background to understand it, who are only interested in furthering their
political agendas. Making even the metadata available to the world could compromise her current
research (in its effect on her time and, perhaps, in poisioning the government funding
environment even further) and provide yet more erroneous “evidence” for doubters to continue in
their dubious cause. The climatologist has clearly been affected by the activities of these skeptics
and fears much greater interference should this material become available to them.
Meanwhile, you also hear from a faculty member in the psychology department who has done
research on eating disorders in both men and women. This faculty member is also concerned
about the potential release of data and metadata, not because he feels that the data might be
misinterpreted and used inaccurately, but because even though the data has been “anonymized” as
much as it can be, he thinks there is still the possibility that participants might be identified
through analysis of their interview answers. The professor’s participants showed great concern
with anonymity, as many had worked hard to hide their conditions from those around them. The
psychologist is troubled because eating disorders continue to be a popular subject for journalists
and others without backgrounds in research ethics, and he imagines a sensitive participant (or
worse, a participant’s family, friends, or associates) recognizing himself or herself in a magazine
article or blog post. He has previously refused requests from such non-academics to use his “raw”
data, although he is more than happy to provide his transcripts to other researchers, even to
students.
Finally, you hear from a professor in the French and Italian department. He worries about the
release of interim materials, such as accepted grant and fellowship proposals. Work in the
humanities can take many years to come to completion, and this professor is concerned that such
materials can be used by unscrupulous critics of liberal education to provide “evidence” that
humanities scholars are lazy and unproductive, if, for example, the repository includes proposals
for long-term projects that have yet to result in published books or articles. With higher education
priorities becoming so politicized, and with the humanities in particular under attack, he fears a
wild “expose” of the faculty members who have “abused” government funding to pursue projects
that they haven’t finished after years of “scamming the taxpayers.”
What do you do? Do you publish the metadata? The data? Some of it?
Scenario 5: Corporate information sharing
You work as an information architect for a company that provides consulting services on Web
strategy and information design. In consulting, it is especially important for associates to share
relevant knowledge and experiences, because the company, in effect, sells its mutual expertise to
clients. (If the company books a job based on its demonstrated experience in designing faceted
navigation systems for e-commerce systems, then the new project team needs to have some
means of ensuring that expertise informs the current bill of work, even if the personnel from the
previous projects are working on other engagements.)
Previously, the company has relied on a corporate intranet that revolves around projects and
people. Each employee has a page on the intranet that describes their skills, knowledge, and
project experience. Employees can also post work materials on their pages (e.g., documentation
of the faceted metadata system they have designed). Similarly, project pages, initiated by project
managers, aggregate documentation for specific streams of work. As the company has grown,
however, problems with this system have begun to surface. In addition to changes in practice over
time, some examples are just better than others, for different reasons, and there is no way for
information seekers to quickly identify best practices amongst the rapidly growing store. Too,
materials are organized by person and project, not function, making them more difficult to find.
You and some like-minded associates form a “functional community” of information architects at
the company, with the goal of aggregating and disseminating current, excellent examples of IA
work. Some of your colleagues have concerns, though. Does this mean that people won’t be able
to freely add their work to the new community area? If so, who decides what “current” and
“excellent” means, and how are these decisions to be made? Something seems unfair and
restrictive about this idea, against the open culture of the existing corporate intranet.
How do you respond to these concerns?