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.