Libraries, digital libraries and digital library research

1
Libraries, digital libraries and digital library
research

• Lorcan Dempsey
• OCLC
• Keynote presentation at
• European Conference on Digital Libraries 2004
• University of Bath
• September 12 17 2004

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Overview
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Holes
There was once a man who aspired to be the
author of the general theory of holes.
When asked What kind of hole holes dug by
children in the sand for amusement, holes dug by
gardeners to plant lettuce seedlings, tank traps,
holes made by roadmakers? he would reply
indignantly that he wished for a general theory
that would explain all of these.
This mans achievement has passed totally
unnoticed except by me.
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Digital libraries and holes

• Digital library has no precise or agreed
  referent
• Different communities of practice
• Different incentives
• Serve
• Build
• Research

• Compare archive
• Archival institution
• Archival materials
• OAI
• A promise of preservation?

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Anthropology/ethnography/social science
Grid
W3C
Computer science
Library and Information science
Economics
Industrial RD
HCI
Semantic web
Artstor
Jorum
Entertainment
Libraries
Library
Amazon
E-research
Inst Rep
E-learning
Banks
arXiv
Cultural heritage
BBC archive
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Emphasis Library
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A library as institution
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Libraries
So why have I written this? I cant show it if
its 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.
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A library as institution
Because the purpose and result of absorbing
information is always finally to produce further
information, i.e., to continue the conversation,
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. Contingency and contradiction The
place(s) of the library at the dawn of the new
millennium Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, Volume 52,
Issue 1, Pages 3-11. Published Online 2001.
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A library as institution
We often hear it said that libraries (and
librarians) select, organize, retrieve, and
transmit information or knowledge. That is true.
But those are the activities, not the mission,
of the library. the important question is
"To what purpose?" We do not do those things by
and for themselves. We do them in order to
address an important and continuing need of the
society we seek to serve. In short, we do it to
support learning.
Robert Martin. Libraries and Learners in the
Twenty-first Century. http//www.imls.gov/script
s/text.cgi?/whatsnew/current/sp040503.htm
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Libraries and digital libraries

• Support research and learning.
• Discover position of others and form ones own
  position.
• In order to uphold their mission and values
• they must renovate their practices.

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Search engine mindshare John Regazzi
In a survey for this lecture, librarians and
scientists were asked to name the top scientific
and medical search resources that they use or are
aware of.  The difference is startling.

• Scientists
• Google
• Yahoo
• PubMed
• Librarians
• Science Direct
• ISI Web of Science
• MedLine

Source John Regazzi, The Battle for Mindshare
A battle beyond access and retrieval
http//www.nfais.org/publications/mc_lecture_2004
.htm
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Pattern recognition libraries now

• The Amazoogle effect
• Value

• User behavior opaque
• Uncertainty about digital directions

The future is here. It's justnot evenly
distributed yetWilliam Gibson
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The difficulty in creating a digital management
strategy stems in part from the bewildering
convergence of technological developments.
  Developing a digital management strategy is
further complicated by the fact that there are no
recognized patterns or models for managing
digital assets. Some managers seek to develop
fully distributed institutional repositories but
still must choose between open-source solutions
or commercial providers. Others prefer to place
their material in one of a limited number of
dedicated storage institutions. While best
practices may exist for given technical
processes, library managers do not have a single
paradigm to use as the basis for developing
operational plans and policies to capture, store,
index, preserve, and redistribute the
intellectual output in digital formats.
Managing Digital Assets, CLIR primer program, 2005
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Impact of digital library research?

• User studies
• How much do we know about changing patterns of
  research, learning and engagement?
• Federation and metasearch
• FDI, IndexData, Cheshire, iPort,
• OAI/OpenURL
• NISO metasearch issues still to be addressed
• Repositories/digital library systems
• Multiple communities
• Dspace, Fedora, CONTENTdm, DLXS, ..
• Metadata
• Growing acronymic density
• Collections, rights, policies, services,
• Complex objects, relations
• Identifiers/citation
• Preservation

Local successes but we have many open
questions.
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Collections grid
Stewardship
high
low
low
Uniqueness
high
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Collections grid
disclosure
high
low
Publishing
Amazoogle
D2D
low
Reformatting
high
E-learning E-research
Cultural heritage
Digital asset management
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library
user environments
resource environment
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The world is changing

• Why is it difficult?

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Scope, scale, diversity

• Systemic issues
• No single system is the sole focus of a users
  attention
• How do systems and services work across the four
  quadrants of the collections grid
• How do they fit into wider enterprise systems
• Structure of costs does not reflect users value
  perception
• Reallocation of resources difficult
• Little substitution and not or

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A new world

• Co-evolution with research and learning behaviors
  which are themselves changing
• Unsure about appropriate economy of presence
• Place, network hub, channel,
• Web services, portlets, channels,
• Ambience, diffusion, ubiquity, recombinance,
• E.g. Trajectory of search
• Search system
• Search system, machine interface, metasearch
• Provide data, externalize search
• Google, OAI

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Webulation

• Monolithic applications resistant to
• Webulation
• Service oriented architectures
• Massive legacy investment in knowledge structure
  unconnected to the web
• How to release its value in a network environment
• Content does not easily flow into user space for
  manipulation, packaging, aggregation

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Vendor environment

• Many libraries have outsourced development effort
• Library vendors do not have large RD budgets
• Poor out-of-the-box support for below-the-line
  materials in digital form
• Interesting tension between commodity (standards)
  and added value
• OSS environment very unsophisticated
• Limited support for logistics/supply
  chain/integration services

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Limited application platforms

• Consider
• Google
• Amazon
• E-bay
• MapQuest
• Massively central applications platforms working
  in loosely coupled webby world
• Software as a service
• APIs
• GMAIL
• Paypal
• search

• Library world
• Fragmented systems and development effort
• Does not benefit from scale
• Unsustainable local development agendas
• Organizational rearticulation difficult.
• Application platforms?
• CDL
• JISC
• DEF
• OCLC/RLG

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Architecture? Theory?

• Do we need a big picture?
• Allows the articulation of technical and business
  discussion?
• An unnecessary constraint?

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Without it we are susceptible to .

• Marchitecture
• Techeology
• Portal envy
• Gratuitous acronym requests in RFPs
• Beauty contests
• Dspace, Fedora, .

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A history of consumption means that we are
unprepared for contribution

• Standards
• Open source software
• Common services
• Limited structures to capture contribution and
  support.

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And finally ..

• Libraries need to think about libraries not
  digital libraries
• And they need help from wherever they can get it!