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."

Digital forensics

A CLIR report on digital forensics for born digital collections is out. Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum,Richard Ovenden,Gabriela Redwine with research assistance from Rachel Donahue.

The report makes a case for applying digital forensics, an applied field originating in law enforcement,computer security, and national defense, to the archives and curatorial community since libraries, special collections, etc. increasingly receive
computer storage media (and sometimes entire computers) as part of their acquisitions of "papers" from artists, writers, musicians, etc. Upwards of 90 percent of the records (i.e. personal and corporate "papers") being created today are born digital (Dow 2009, xi).

Here's a quote from the introduction: "Digital forensics therefore offers archivists, as well as an archive’s patrons, new tools, new methodologies, and new capabilities. Yet as even this brief description must suggest, digital forensics does not affect archivists’ practices solely at the level of procedures and tools. Its methods and outcomes raise important legal, ethical, and hermeneutical questions about the nature of the cultural record, the boundaries between public and private knowledge, and the roles and responsibilities of donor, archivist, and the public in a new technological era."

This report cites an earlier one that sounds good, too. "The starting place for any cultural heritage professional interested in matters of forensics, data recovery, and storage formats is a 1999 JISC/NIPO study coauthored by Seamus Ross and Ann Gow
and entitled Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources. Although more than a decade old, the report remains invaluable."

code4lib 2010

Just back from code4lib 2010 in Asheville, North Carolina. A few quick comments today--mostly about the 2 keynote talks. Cathy Marshall, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and Paul Jones, ibiblio, etc., each gave an excellent talk. Marshall's ethnographic investigation into people's behaviors over time with their digital stuff (especially with respect to keeping or not keeping it) was a fun and thought-provoking start to the conference. Her work points to complexities with the intersection of keeping and losing, discovering and remembering, neglect and curation.

Jones' talk built in part on Robin Dunbar's anthropological studies of primates' behavior in building and maintaining social relationships. His work shows how human urge to relate to one another drives what we know and act on. He noted the shift in the past year from Web use driven by search engine results to Web use driven by recommendations via social networks. It's all about how the power of small talk--gossip--to build trusted relationships among people drives how we think and act.

Marshall's talk keeps recurring to me as I think about preservation, discovery, and use of our shared digital stuff. How do Marshall's insights into how we actually behave with our own digital stuff affect our thinking and actions as institutions preserving digital stuff for later reuse?

Jones' talk keeps recurring to me as I think about how libraries might facilitate discovery and use of information by focusing on social networks rather than search tools. What would happen if we thought of a catalog as part of a social networking environment and not as an isolated search engine?

The many talks varied a lot in character, topic, approach, and quality. As a whole, they were good to excellent presentations, and aggregated like this they presented a snapshot of where the coder and librarian intersect is now. The lightning talks work well to diminish the distinction between active presenters and passive audiences. Dan Chudnov's ask anything hour worked well, too. The key to code4lib is "only connect." The conference became a kind of exemplar of Jones' point about how we create trusted relationships and thus think and act individually as members of small groups.

Overall, my first time at code4lib was great. Gathering this community together is a powerful catalyst for development within the library domain.

two studies on scholarly communication

I saw these in a post on hangingtogether, the OCLC RLG Programs blog. Both are worth a look.

1. A comparison of repository types and the affect on scholarly communication

Comparing Repository Types: Challenges and Barriers for Subject-Based Repositories, Research Repositories, National Repository Systems and Institutional Repositories in Serving Scholarly Communication by Chris Armbruster Research Network 1989 Laurent Romary INRIA November 23, 2009
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1506905

Four kinds of publication repository are described: subject-based, research, national system and institutional. Two shifts in the role of repositories may be noted. For content, a well-defined and high quality corpus is essential. For service, high value to specific scholarly communities is essential.

Challenges and barriers to repository development are laid out in three dimensions:
a) identification and deposit of content
b) access and use of services
c) preservation of content and sustainability of service

2. A case-study-based look at how researchers work and how they relate to policies and services from information service providers and employers.

Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences: A report of research patterns in life sciences revealing that researcher practices diverge from policies promoted by funders and information service providers by the RIN and the British Library.
http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/disciplinary-case-studies-life-sciences

The report concludes that ‘one-size-fits-all’ information and data sharing policies do not achieve scientifically productive and cost-efficient information use in life sciences.

Carr's Big Switch redux

I'm about 1/2 done with Big Switch, and its good.

Carr's thesis is that information services (hardware and software) are now and increasingly operating on the scale of the electrical power utilities. Just as companies don't generally create their own power, they now no longer need their own IT depts. As network access speeds and reliability approach that available on one's own computer, the network itself becomes one big machine. He's look at and past things like Amazon's EC2 "elastic computing cloud" that allows companies to use Amazon's computers (H&S) as if they were their own. Another example is 3Tera's AppLogic, a cloud computing platform.The customer pays for the computing power consumed when they consume it--just like we pay for electricity. Wow!

Carr briefly highlight large-scale consequences of the electrical gridon society and suggests that similarly large-scale effects will follow from the utilitization of computing. I think he's right. Consider the consequences of large-scale, utility-style cloud computing on digital preservation. If say higher education institutions outsource their computing utility-style to global third-party providers, then preservation of the digital content (an oxymoron; what we mean is curation of digital content over time via migrations) also moves to the third party. There the scale is much larger, part of the ongoing access to content, and costs to individual institutions is amortized across the aggregate of all the institutions using the third party computing utility. In short, indiviual institutions (here colleges and universities) need not themselves directly work to preserve their digital content. They have out-sourced it to their computing utility. It (digital curation--my prefered phrase for digital preservation) still has to be done but not repeatedly at a local (say we call it--retail) level. There are many trust issues here, but then most of us trust our utilities now for water and power.

Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch.

I've just started reading Nicholas Carr's new book, The Big Switch. He claims information is the new electricity--a utility-based commodity that powers the economy. The sub-title, Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google gives one a sense of its scope.