A bit of required reading for academic librarians

On Lorcan Dempsey's blog: The Collections shift
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002160.html

Read his blog, watch the embedded media, and read the reports and other writing's he cites.

This is the starting place for today's required reading. Dempsey notes a few things he's read or heard of recently about "several central trends: the move to electronic, the managing down of print collections, and the curation of institutionally-generated learning and research resources." These are the big three transformative trends for academic libraries and how librarians and libraries and the universities they serve deal with these three trends will determine the survivial of academic libraries.

The "move to electronic" is more precisely the move from paper-based media to digital media and the resulting transformation in the economics of the distribution and manufacturing of written materials--artistic, scientific, business-oriented, scholarly, personal etc. The sub-strata of materials has changed and that change has transformed the economics of production, distribution, and use of written work [and photography and music and etc.] Relatively expensive, durable and scarce materials such as books, reports, and journals that had to be distributed by ship, plane, train, truck or cart are now produced, distributed and used digitally. That transformation is not yet complete, but the completion date is approaching at an accelerating pace and will soon be here.

One consequence for libraries is the diminishment of the importance of existing print collections. Libraries must manage the shift from the centrality of the print collection to its successful fulfillment of its mission for the university it serves to a peripheral role in the _library's_ enterprise. Surviving that transition will not be easy. Thriving through that transition is almost unthinkable for anyone who equates libraries with books or thinks anything like "libraries are all about the humanities." Many academic libraries will flounder in this transition.

Curation of "institutionally-generated learning and research resources" is an opportunity for universities and not necessarily an opportunity for their libraries. A unveristiy press, university research labs, university museums or archives, offices of public affairs, IT units, and such newly formed entities as Yale's Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure may take on much of a unversities curatorial role for their "institutionally-generated learning and research resources." Additionally, curation may not be best done in a networked, digital environment on an institution by institution basis. Curation of "institutionally-generated learning and research resources" is likely to require the scale of the network itself to be successful. Universities will need to coalesce around discipline-based networks to curate their "institutionally-generated learning and research resources."

OCLC report on managing print collections in mass-digitized library world

Malpas, Constance. 2011. Cloud-sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-digitized Library Environment. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/2011-01.pdf.

Cloud-sourcing Research Collections is a 76 p. (pdf) analysis of the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories.

Mass digitization projects like Google Books and shared online collections like the HathiTrust have given substance to the visions of a transformation of library use from paper to online resources. This "flip" and related demands for physical space and care of paper resources has resulted in renewed attention to print collections in academic libraries. This is the time for discussion within and among research libraries on how to construct new systems of services based on aggregations of digital resources, local paper resource collections and shared storage repositories for online and paper resources.

The report's main conclusion is:

"Based on a year-long study of data from the HathiTrust, ReCAP, and WorldCat, we concluded that our central hypothesis was successfully confirmed: there is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations. Significantly, we also found that the combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers."

This points a way forward for academic libraries. The report might be an interesting frame for a discussion at Yale of how we think of our collections in this environment and how we move to use the environment to create services for readers. It is one of the few reports that integrates questions of online resources with paper resources. That kind of integrated approach to collections, preservation, user/reader services makes a lot more sense than digital only or print only approaches.

Digital information seeker--a report on OCLC, RIN, and JISC projects

The Digital Information Seeker: Report of findings from selected OCLC, RIN and JISC user behaviour projects is out. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/2010/digitalinformationseekerreport.pdf

It was produced for JISC by Lynn Silipigni Connaway, PhD and Timothy J Dickey, PhD, OCLC Research. Dated Feb. 15, 2010.

This report gives a really nice look at the landscape of user studies. Its 61 pages are a succinct review of a selected sample of studies.

The report was not intended to be definitive. It provides a synthesis. The report makes it easier for librarians and other information professionals to better understand the information-seeking behaviors of libraries’ intended users. It also makes it easier to review the issues associated with developing information services and systems to best meet users’ needs.

The 12 studies included in this report:

Perceptions of libraries and information resources (OCLC, December 2005),
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/2005perceptions.htm

College students’ perceptions of libraries and information resources (OCLC, April 2006),
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/perceptionscollege.htm

Sense-making the information confluence: The whys and hows of college and university user satisficing of information needs (IMLS/Ohio State University/OCLC, July 2006),
http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/imls/default.htm

Researchers and discovery services: Behaviour, perceptions and needs (RIN, November 2006),
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/researchers-and-discoveryservices-behaviour-perc

Researchers’ use of academic libraries and their services (RIN/CURL, April 2007),
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/researchers-use-academiclibraries-and-their-serv

Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (CIBER/UCL, commissioned by BL and JISC, January 2008),
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmemes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf

Seeking synchronicity: Evaluating virtual reference services from user, non-user and librarian perspectives (OCLC/ IMLS/ Rutgers, June 2008),
http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/synchronicity/default.htm

Online catalogs: What users and librarians want (OCLC. March 2009),
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/onlinecatalogs/default.htm

E-journals: Their use, value and impact (RIN, April 2009),
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicatingand-disseminating-research/e-journals-their-use-value-and-impact

JISC national e-books observatory project: Key findings and recommendations (JISC/UCL, November 2009),
http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/

Students’ use of research content in teaching and learning (JISC, November 2009),
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/studentsuseresearchcontent.pdf

User behaviour in resource discovery (JISC, November 2009),
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/userbehaviourbusandecon.aspx

Implications for libraries:

• Each library serves many constituencies with different needs and behaviors.
• Each library must do better at providing seamless access to resources.
• Each library must recognize that more digital resources of all kinds are better for users.
• Each library must prepare for changing user behaviors.
• Each library's access tools need to look and function more like search engines and Web services since these are familiar to users and they are comfortable and confident in using them.
• Each library must value high-quality metadata for its resources since metadata is vital for discovery.
• Each library must better promote its brand, its value, and its resources within its community.

Lorcan on library systems environment

Lorcan Dempsey has commented before on library systems environment. Here he updates his earlier comments, links to the recent NISO presentations, and provides incomplete but insightful notes on the presentations.
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002015.html#

Recently at Yale, we interviewed three candidates for an E-Collections job. Each of the three gave a talk with the title (more or less) trends in e-collections. Not one of them cited Dempsey. Is that the fault of each speaker or a sign of a larger disconnect within the library profession? The E-Coll. candidates were all thinking (sensibly so) only about licensed (purchased or rented, but licensed just the same) e-resources. Perhaps Lorcan is seen as a cataloging guy or an OCLC guy or a systems guy and not paid attention to by those in related but distinct activities like using an ERM to manage a collection of licensed resources.

Oh, here is the link to the NISO Forum: Library Resource Management Systems
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2009/lrms09/agenda

Helene Blowers on libraries

OCLC distinguished seminar series Oct. 9, 2009: Finding the Phoenix ... with Helene Blowers.
http://vidego.multicastmedia.com/player.php?p=v1g45788

Very interesing presentation.

She blogs at http://librarybytes.com/

VIAF now available as linked data.

Thom Hickey of OCLC posted on the VIAF as linked data on his blog.

Search the VIAF beta at http://viaf.org/

Thom says,

There are some 9.5 million personae described in VIAF and have established more than 4 million links between the files. To us linked data means:
URIs for everything
HTTP 303 redirects for URIs representing the personae our metadata is about
HTTP content negotiation for different data formats
An RDF view of the data
A rich a set of internal and external links in our data