The changing scholarly and
cultural record
Lorcan Dempsey
Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas
December 5, 2007
Thanks to Constance Malpass and Brian Lavoie for some contributions
“And in this way my own
relationship with Georges
Bataille will not be adversely
affected either, something I
would like to maintain, both
because of his assistance at the
Bibliothèque Nationale, and
because of my plans for
naturalization. - The fragment
would not escape his attention
since the Institute journal is
openly displayed in the reading
room where he often works; and
he is hardly the type of person
to react serenely to its contents.”
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenthcentury Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops
that were early centers of consumerism-Benjamin presents a montage of
quotations from, and reflections on,
hundreds of published sources, arranging
them in thirty-six categories with
descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion,"
"Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography,"
"Catacombs," "Advertising,"
"Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory
of Progress." His central preoccupation is
what he calls the commodification of
things--a process in which he locates the
decisive shift to the modern age.
The record
• George Bataille deposited the manuscript.
• Quotations: is it possible to imagine a book
which rests so much on quotations without
the libraries which preserve the scholarly and
cultural record the quotations point to and
make it available to readers?
A pragmatic look
at some issues
involved in
managing the
changing scholarly
and cultural
record.
The very beginnings of the collection, in Duke
Humfrey's Library above the divinity school, showed
how Thomas Bodley's own bibliographic vision had
to react to a technological shift. The new collection
was built to accommodate the transition from the
long-established, tried-and-tested technology of
unique handwritten texts to the hot new massproduced technology of the printed codex: in other
words, the book. Duke Humfrey's Library has high
stacks of shelves, which the reader can't directly
access: the world's first closed stacks. These were
designed to accommodate the increasing number
of books too small to chain securely to open shelves
…. Issues of copyright and of access to information
were thus built into the institutional DNA from the
start.
[John Lanchester: Who owns what in the
digital age? | News | Guardian Unlimited
Books]
… the function of the library must
be understood as one that assists
members of the community both
in taking particular positions and
in recognizing and assessing the
positions taken by others.
Ross Atkinson
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, learning
and administrative
materials,
•ePrints/tech reports
•Learning objects
•Courseware
•E-portfolios
•Research data
•Institutional records
•Reports, newsletters, etc
•Bought?
•Licensed?
Memory
•Libraries, archives,
museums.
Selectively acquire and
persistently manage?
Institutional and
personal processes
generate materials:
Records, data sets,
….
Books
Rareness is common
E-volution
Rareness is common … in the G5
G5 aggregate collection:
• 10.5 million books
• ~60 percent represent unique
contribution by one or another
of the G5 libraries
10%
Held by 3
6%
Held by 4
20%
Held by 2
3%
Held by 5
61%
Held by 1
… and beyond
System-wide print book collection (as
of January 2005)
• ~32 million print books
3%
Held by 51 - 100
5%
Held by > 100
5%
Held by 26 - 50
37%
Held by 1
20%
Held by 6 - 25
30%
Held by 2 - 5
Proportion Published During or Prior To
Current Year
Cumulative age distribution of G5
holdings
1
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
00
20
90
19 0
8
19 0
7
19
60
19 0
5
19
40
19 0
3
19
20
19 0
1
19
00
19 0
9
18
80
18 0
7
18 0
6
18
50
18 0
4
18
30
18 0
2
18
10
18 01
18
<
Years
> 80 percent of Google 5
collection post 1923
• Space – opportunity costs
• Value in research and learning: disciplinary
differences
• Mass digitization
• Off site storage
• Converting ‘owned’ materials into ‘licensable’
materials
Mining text
Thematic research collections
Beyond books
“It is only when we translate the old style-based
thinking and language of historians into new
modes of representation that we can begin to
grasp the complex relationships between
architectural production and the creation of …
cultural identities.”
Stephen Murray, Columbia University
Then: E. Viollet Le Duc Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1874) (1st American Ed. 1875)
Now: Interactive, multi-dimensional navigation of a networked resource
• Increased emphasis on collective management:
preservation, storage, resource sharing,
digitization
• Emergence of alternative institutional models for
print sales?
• E-volved formats:
– Thematic research collections
– New representational modes
– Deeply mined digital collections alongside print
collections
– Special collections of the future?
Stewarding Unique collections
Moving into network environment
Reconfigurations
Then: Rich description with little scholarly content and few opportunities to remix or reuse; continued reliance on library mediation for scholarly access to material
Now: Federated access to multi-institutional holdings with support for personal
collection-building and sharing
“On bokes rede I ofte, as I yow tolde.
But wherefore that I speke al this? Nat yoore
Agon it happede me for to beholde
Upon a bok, was write with lettres olde”
Unbinding Chaucer’s bokes (and bookes)
41 occurrences
111 occurrences
33 occurrences
• In vanilla world, the institutionally unique
becomes more important?
• Digital visibility creates use
– The digital copy creates interest in the aura of the
original?
• Computational potential reveals new
possibilities
• Significant curatorial challenges for the library
• Published materials:
discourse
• Library
• Primary materials:
evidence
• Archive
• Interpreted materials:
exhibition
• Museum
The products of research,
learning,
and administration
Technical reports
Records
Learning materials
…..
University of Minnesota
http://www.lib.umn.edu/about/mellon/KM%20JStor%20Presentation.pps
• Research and learning behaviors change
– Then: Final ‘product’: publish and archive
– Now: Process generates reusable outputs
• E.g. data sets, learning materials, blog commentary, …
• Institutional memory
– Reports, course catalog, …
• Traces
– Surveillance, logs, social, …
The open network
The Northern Ireland Political
Collection (NIPC) is a unique
resource. No other institution
in a localised conflict has
systematically collected
material from all sides. Much
less has it been done in the
field, and often literally across
the barricades.
The web?
Kewl!!!!
The library takes a
networked resource and
adds value for the local
constituency:
• Faceted browse based
on genre/document type
• Full-text searching of
achived sites
• Selection of seed URLs
and frequency of crawls
informed by subject
specialists and scholars
• The medium of identity construction
• The venue of dissemination of scholarly and
cultural materials
• Evidence
• What and who to collect?
So…
Securing the scholarly and cultural record
The record ain’t
what it used to
be?
Community?
Institution?
•Intervention required
•Preserving print?
More assumes the attributes of the ‘special’
Curatorial
responsibility for
more unique materials?
Institutional
Capacities?
Collaborative sourcing?
Examples
•Thematic research collection
•Curated databases
•Institutional ‘identity’
Managing digital?
An archival perspective?
Provenance
Evidential integrity
Versioning
The scholarly and cultural record
is “incorrigibly plural”.
Curation requires a plural response.
Libraries
‘So why have I written this? I
can’t show it if it’s going to
contradict or undermine my
case.
There are a number of reasons.
First and foremost, I am a
librarian. I live for records and
documents.’
http://orweblog.oclc.org
THANK YOU