Training Needs for Librarians in Digital Libraries

Gerhard Budin

University of Vienna

gerhard.budin@univie.ac.at

Overcoming the culture clash

• ‘Traditional’ communities of librarians, archivists, documentalists, museum curators, etc.

• Computer scientists who developed an interest in digital libraries (see for instance the ECDL community in recent years)

-> ‘cross-fertilization‘ has started, and it is gaining momentum

-> toward a ‘new species‘ of truly digital librarians, cybrarians, digital archivists, virtual museum specialists, etc.

-> division of labor and cooperative work, workflows

Cross-disciplinary competence mix needed for new professional profiles

• ICT, metadata architectures, data modelling, dbm, web engineering, new media management, data warehouses and repositories, W3C/ISO standards and technologies, interoperability/access protocols, mining, filtering, HLT, …

• Digitization techniques, intellectual property mgmt.• Storage, archiving, preserving methods and strategies • Information design, web design, usability engineering, user

studies, web services, CRM, communication strategies• Digital library management, collection management,

collaborative/federated approaches, content management, project mgmt., cross-cultural and multilingual issues

• Knowledge organization, ontologies, advanced indexing and retrieval methods, visualization...

New Policies for Digital Culture• Discuss broad concepts of culture• Strengthening the cooperation among

heterogeneous entities and networks• Interlink local and global responsibilities• Assessing the impacts of digitization• Toward user orientation, targeting, focusing• Enabling, empowering, emancipating• Best practices, standards, for both, low end and

high end technologies• Economic models, sustainability• Intellectual property right management• Information ecologies, epistemologies

Scientific and Cultural Digital Heritage

-> to cover all aspects of culture• Science as culture• Popular culture• A coherent content management approach

needed, beyond preservation and digitization• Beyond mere access toward re-use, re-

integration, re-interpretation of historical information

• Think of the history and heritage of tomorrow (today’s culture is the heritage of tomorrow)

• We need many more digital cultural heritage specialists

Cultural technologies• Preservation technologies• Digitization technologies• Storage, archiving technologies• Visualization technologies• Digital libraries, digital archives, virtual

museums• Access methods, information filtering• Virtual reality technologies• Copyright management technologies• New cultures: online cultures, net art,

telepresence, virtual communities, etc.

An example: the i-MASS project

Information Management and Interoperability of Content for Distributed

Systems of High Volume Data Repositories through Multi-agent Systems

EU-IST-KAIII-IAF (2001-2004)

The vision: Virtual Reference Rooms

• Integration of several pilot projects in digital culture into a coherent system

• Using a distributed meta-information system for accessing heterogeneous cultural information

• Interoperability of content• Building of ontologies• User modelling• Technical approach: XML, RDF, XMLS, RDFS,

JDBC, RQL, agent technologies

Knowledge landscape and content interoperability

Goals

• Toward a new understanding of – cultures, digital cultures, forms of art– Data, information, knowledge, content

• New epistemological models of online culture• From cultural heritage to a global knowledge

heritage as a pre-requisite for creating new knowledge

• Contributing to new professional profiles with new competences

Challenges

• ‘Semantic Web’, ‘Trans-cultural Web’• Interaction between personal knowledge,

objective knowledge, between local and global knowledge

• Convergence of language technologies, media technologies, cultural technologies

• Ecological models• Life-long learning for librarians, information

specialists, cultural heritage professionals

Merging CommunitiesFour groups involved• Subject experts (history of art, anthropology,

linguistics, etc.)• Computer scientists, engineers• Librarians, archivists, museum curators• Managers, marketing experts

-> finding a common understanding of the goals and of the methods to reach them

-> a basic knowledge of the “other” communities is necessary

Implications for Education and Training

• New curricula for basic degrees and advanced degrees

• New specializations (M.A./M.Sc/PhD)• Cross-disciplinary degrees (cultural studies,

historical disciplines, philosophy (of science), the subject disciplines (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, law, medicine, life sciences, etc.), archival studies, library and information science, computer science, linguistics, economics, arts)

• Continuous education, on-site training, professional development,

• Integration with applied research

Implications for academic, research, and training institutions

• Changing their structures• New teaching methods, new pedagogical

models – eLearning, blended learning approaches

• Building learning communities, communities of practice (CoP) using eLearning platforms

• Train the trainers, professional development of teachers, researchers

• Cooperative approaches and cross-disciplinary efforts (at local, national, regional (e.g. ICIMSS), European, international levels), increasing the mobility, division of labor, alliances between different types of institutions

European Masters and Doctorates• Common practice in some disciplines• Ministries of education encourage universities to enter

joint degree programs and supra-national initiatives• Currently a work package in E-CultureNet to design a

European Master and a European PhD program in Digital Culture (covering specializations such as museum management, archival management, digital library management, preservation of cultural objects, etc.): Benedetto Benedetti at Scuola Normale in Pisa (building upon their international courses in Cortona), Francesca Bocci in Bologna, Manfred Thaller in Cologne, Gerhard Budin in Vienna, ICIMSS, Free University Amsterdam, many “memory institutions” and companies are actively involved, and additional partners are highly welcome!

• Still many legal, administrative, and logicistical problems have to be tackled

Cooperation in E-CultureNet

• Focus: education and research in digital culture• At present a thematic network project in the

digicult area– Research matrix– NAS and beyond– DEER (distributed Europ. electronic resource)– European Masters/Doctorates

• EoI for 6FP, consortium building going on, cooperation with other groups, membership being extended in NAS and beyond