Places, collections and services
Closing Keynote paper VALA Conference, Melbourne, Australia,
5 February 2004
Lorcan DempseyVP 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
PlacePlace
ServicesServices
Collections
Collections
Place
• Social exchange and learning
• Personal engagement
• Third place – social fabric
• The spectacular and the special
• Commons - commonwealth
Place
Services
Collections
Collections
Collections grid
high low
low
high
stewardship
uni
que
ne
ssBooksJournalsNewspapersGov. docsCD, DVDMapsScores
Special collectionsRare booksLocal/Historical newspapersLocal history materialsArchives & Manuscripts, Theses & dissertations
Research and learning materials •ePrints/tech reports•Learning objects•Courseware•E-portfolios•Research data
Freely-accessible web resourcesOpen source softwareNewsgroup archives
The engagement with research and learning
Jim Gray, various presentations, http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/Jim Gray, various presentations, http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/
http://www.lib.washington.edu/digitalscholar/projects.htmlhttp://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?
peer-reviewed journals,
conferences, …
aggregators
Research & e-science
Repositories
Deposit,self archiving
data analysis,transformation,
mining,modeling
Publish,discovery
Data creation, capture and gathering:lab experiments, fieldwork, surveys, grids, media, …
Learning & teachingDeposit,
self archiving
learning objectcreation, re-use
Discovery,linking,embedding
Courses, modules, Learning management systems, learning portals, …
Discovery,linking,embedding
Harvesting
Discovery,harvesting
Validation
A&I services
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/
What is important ..
• The impact of the network on research and learning behaviors
• Institutional repository is part of a broader re-engagement with research and learning issues
• Where the money is– Science– Learning
• Life cycle management of institutional resources.
• Creation, analysis, recombination.
• ‘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)
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
high low
low
high
‘Special’ collections
Disclosure, Licensing
uniq
ue
stewardship
Trends
high low
low
high
Scholarly communication
Books,Journals
Research &Learning
Web
Specialcollections
Trends
high low
low
high
stewardship
uniq
ue
The google factor
high low
low
high
E-reserves
WebBooks,Journals
Research &Learning
Specialcollections
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
BooksJournals
Special collections
Freely-accessible web resources
Research and learning materials
high low
low
high
stewardship
uniq
uene
ss
MARC, Onix
MARC, Onix
MARC, METS, EAD, DC, TEI
MARC, METS, EAD, DC, TEI
Dublin Core
Dublin Core
DC, DDI, IEEE/LOM, FGDC, EAD, TEI, SCORM
DC, DDI, IEEE/LOM, FGDC, EAD, TEI, SCORM
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
Place
ServicesServices
Collections
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
user environmentsresource environment
lab books
exhibitions
PDAs
learning management systems
campus portal
course materialtext book
new scholarly resources
readinglists
Institutional repository
Digital collections
E-reserveCatalog Licensed
collections
Aggregations
Virtual reference
CatalogingILL
Library serviceLibrary serviceenvironmentenvironmentLibrary serviceLibrary serviceenvironmentenvironment
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?
– personal, full-text collections
• Wide reading and chaining?
– federated collections anchored by bibliographies
• Collaborating?
– collection communities
• Searching and browsing?
– “rich” finding aids that cross institutions and fields of study
• Tracking of reading, searching, and writing
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
Directory: ILL policy
Directory: ILL policy
Application architecture
Common services
Repositories
Services
PresentationThe User
AuthenticationAuthentication
Directory: user profile
Directory: user profile
Query brokerQuery broker
Directory: service description
Directory: service description
Reference dbReference db
Request brokerRequest broker
Circ/ILL systemCirc/ILL systemOpenURL resolverOpenURL resolver
Directory: local knowledge base
Directory: local knowledge base
Article dbArticle db
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.