Places, collections and services
Closing Keynote paper
VALA Conference, Melbourne, Australia,
5 February 2004
Lorcan Dempsey
VP Research
OCLC
Overview
© R. Alston
Economies of attention, patterns of
experience
[move to St Pancras] “…painful to those of us whose
inner landscape has been irreversibly redrawn.”
Angeline Goreau (NYT, Nov 9, 1997)
“To me the card catalogue has been a
companion all my working life. Leaving it is
like leaving a house one was brought up
in.”
Barbara Tuchman
Library
• Values of stewardship and accessibility
• The stuff of research and learning
• Taking a position
– Information commons
– Public sphere
Presence
Collection
s
Place
Services
Place
• Social exchange and learning
• Personal engagement
• Third place – social fabric
• The spectacular and the special
• Commons - commonwealth
Collection
s
Place
Services
Collections grid
stewardship
high
Books
Journals
low
high
Special
collections
Freely-accessible
web resources
uniqueness
Newspapers
Gov. docs
CD, DVD
Maps
Scores
low
Rare books
Local/Historical
newspapers
Local history materials
Archives & Manuscripts,
Theses & dissertations
Open source software
Newsgroup archives
Research and learning
materials
•ePrints/tech reports
•Learning objects
•Courseware
•E-portfolios
•Research data
The engagement with research
and learning
Jim Gray, various presentations, http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/
http://www.lib.washington.edu/digitalscholar/projects.html
The library in the learning
environment
• Diffusion of information skills
and use through
the learning
process
• Life cycle management
of learning materials
• Systems interaction
between library and
learning management
systems
Picture courtesy Dan Rehak,
Carnegie Mellon University
scholarly information flow?
Discovery,
harvesting
Discovery,
linking,
embedding
aggregators
Harvesting
data analysis,
transformation,
mining,modeling
Research &
e-science
Deposit,
self archiving
learning object
creation, re-use
Deposit,
self archiving
Learning &
teaching
Repositories
Validation
Publish,
discovery
Data creation, capture and
gathering:
lab experiments, fieldwork,
surveys, grids, media, …
Adapted with permission from Liz Lyons
eBank UK: Building the links between research data,
scholarly communication and learning.
Ariadne 36, 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/lyon/
Discovery,
linking,
embedding
peer-reviewed
journals,
conferences, …
A&I services
Courses, modules,
Learning
management
systems, learning
portals, …
What is important ..
• The impact of the
network on research
and learning behaviors
• Life cycle management
of institutional
resources.
• Institutional repository
is part of a broader reengagement with
research and learning
issues
• Creation, analysis,
recombination.
• Where the money is
– Science
– Learning
• ‘excitable’
• What is the scholarly
record?
On the web
The web
• Discovery
– Selection/gateways
• Value proven?
• Massively redundant
• Automation?
• Disclosure
– E.g. Open WorldCat
• Archive
– Intellectual record
– Selectively harvest and
persistently manage
scholarly resources?
• National organizations
Bought materials
• How best to manage a distributed redundant
print collection
– B-Space
– Shared depositories
– Collection analysis and management
• Growing divide between
– mass market (see music) and
– scholarly materials (evolving forms)
• The impact of born and born-again e
Licensed materials
• Homogeneous collections
• Gated environments
– Cost
– Licenses (what is publishing?)
• Serials crisis <> Optimal diffusion and
impact?
• Fragmented
– ‘portal’ – developing integrated user workflow
over complex resource
– We pay for frangmentation as well as content!
Reclaiming the special
The Archival Research Center is a direct outgrowth of the belief that primary
resource materials should be a major focal point of instruction and research. ….
However, traditional access to these materials is cumbersome and labor-intensive
and most institutions do not allow copying. …Digitizing these materials keeps
them alive and relevant for modern users … (ARL report)
Reclaiming the special
• Mainstreaming ‘special’
as
primary research and
learning materials
• Unique to institution
• Disclose the identity
and memory of
communities and
peoples
• Special?
– Primary materials
– Costly to process
and manage
– Unique/rare
Trends
Scholarly
communication
‘Special’ collections
stewardship
low
Special
collections
high
low
Books,
Journals
unique
low
high
high
high
Disclosure,
Licensing
low
Web
Research &
Learning
Trends
stewardship
high
Web
high
low
low
Books,
Journals
unique
high
low
E-reserves
low
high
Special
collections
Research &
Learning
The
google
factor
Industrialized
Cottage
Best practice
Emerging
Out of the box
Open source/homegrown
Routine
Learning curve
Operational
Soft money
Gated
Open/reusable
Multiple copies
Unique
Local physical/remote digital
Local digital content management
Preservation a shared concern?
Preservation a local concern?
The example of metadata
stewardship
high
MARC,
Onix
uniqueness
low
Books
Journals
MARC, METS,
EAD, DC, TEI
high
Special
collections
low
Dublin
Core
DC, DDI,
IEEE/LOM, FGDC,
EAD, TEI, SCORM
Freely-accessible web
resources
Research and learning
materials
And ..
• Research and learning behaviors are
changing. The challenge to libraries is to
create value in this changed environment.
• Remove cost and complexity from
management of books and journals.
• The rise of institutional intellectual asset
management.
Presence
Collection
s
Place
Services
The final stretch …
• Integration with what?
– Integrate services with learning and research
workflows, where they are needed.
• A new look at services
– everything is a service on the network
• Some notes on integration and
interoperability
lab books
PDAs
campus portal
learning management systems
exhibitions
course material
text book
new scholarly resources
reading
lists
Library service
environment Virtual
user environments
resource environment
reference
Institutional repository
Aggregations
Digital collections
E-reserve
Catalog
Cataloging
ILL
Licensed
collections
Economies of attention, patterns of
experience
“Electronic catalogs, wherever you go in the academic
world, have become a horrible crazy-quilt assemblage
of incompatible interfaces and vendor-constrained
listings. Working through […] a relatively small
collection, you still have to navigate at least five
completely different interfaces for searching. Historical
epochs of data collection and cataloguing lie indigestibly
atop one another.”
Tim Burke, Swarthmore
Example: supporting scholarly
behavior in the humanities
• …contextual mass. (not
the canon and top
scholarly journals)
• Iterative reading?
• Collaborating?
– collection communities
• Searching and browsing?
– personal, full-text
collections
– “rich” finding aids that
cross institutions and
fields of study
• Wide reading and
chaining?
• Tracking of reading,
searching, and writing
– federated collections
anchored by bibliographies
Carole Palmer, various
Example: the library in the learning
environment
Example: the library in the
university portal
Recombinance
• Recombine in learning
and research
environments
– Metadata
• Vernacular
• DC, MARC, LOM, …
– Content
• Granularity and
aggregation
• Manipulate, analyse
– Services
• On-demand
• Unplug and play
• Need better ‘webulated’
infrastructure
– Identifiers
– Vocabularies
Interoperability
• Extract maximum value from investment in
– Metadata
– Content
– Services
• By ensuring that they are
– Sharable
– Reusable
– Recombinable
Interoperability as recombinant
potential
• Can I …
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
add a document to a repository?
add a repository to a distributed query?
fuse metadata from one repository with another?
assemble these resources into a learning package?
embed an interactive service in my exhibition, my reading list, my campus
portal?
ingest a content package into an archive?
take a content package out of an archive in 10 years time?
navigate several databases by subject, by name, by place, by resource
type, by educational level?
cite a document in a repository?
bring resources into my own workspace?
• With …
– … as little custom work as possible
– … as little precoordinated agreement as possible
Application architecture
Directory:
ILL policy
Directory:
service
description
Directory:
user profile
Authentication
Common services
Directory: local
knowledge
base
Reference db
OpenURL resolver
Circ/ILL system
Article db
Request broker
Query broker
The User
Services
Presentation
Repositories
So ..
• Responsibility to the scholarly record
involves complex balance of external and
internal, common and unique, commodity
and special.
• Rich services make collections come alive in
network environment and support the
advancement of learning and research.
• Research and learning behaviors are
changing. Libraries need to re-engage with
research and learning practice.