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.

Research Libraries, Risk and Systemic Change from OCLC Reseach

Research Libraries, Risk and Systemic Change: a report from OCLC Reseach is available as an online pdf at http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-03.pdf

This report is from data gathered in 2008 and used at OCLC internally since then, but it is just now being published externally. It makes a clear, concise, and compelling case for change in libraries. The identification of risks and the strategies for mitigation are sensible and prudent. One wonders how the research library community could act collectively to implement these strategies. The Association of Research Libraries seems to be one useful organization to shape collective action. Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is another.

How might this analysis be used by individual libraries or ad hoc groups (such as the Ivy plus libraries or the borrow direct libraries) to mitigate the risks and seize the opportunities for which these risks are but shadows?

OCLC report: Implications of MARC tag usage on library metadata practices

OCLC has published a report called, Implications of MARC Tag Usage on Library Metadata Practices[pdf]

I've only begun to read it.

The "implications" section of the Exec. Summ. are interesting.

1. Be consistent. Splitting content across multiple fields will negatively affect indexing, retrieval, and mapping to other encoding schema.
2. Respond to local user needs whether that is counting plates in a book or adding contents notes.
3. Focus on authorized names, classifications, and controlled vocabularies that key word searching of full-text will not provide (as full text online negates some value of descriptive surrogates).
4. Use specific MARC fields for particular types of note if they are available rather than the general 500 note.
5. Map the 200 or so MARC 21 fields in use to simpler schema. (MARC data cannot continue to exist in its own discrete environment, separate from the rest of the information universe. Leverage it and use it in other domains to reach users in heir own networked environments.)
6. Accuracy of fields that are used in machine matching becomes more important in environments using linked data to leverage fuller descriptions and other related information generated from other sources.

And MARC's future:

1. MARC is a niche data communication format approaching the end of its life cycle.
2. Encoding schema will need to robust MARC crosswalks to ingest millions of legacy records.
3. How would we create, capture, structure, store, search, retrieve, and display objects and metadata if we didn’t have to use MARC and if we weren’t limited by current library systems?
4. How do we best take advantage of linked data and avoid creating the same redundant metadata in individual records?
5. How do we integrate library metadata with sources outside the traditional library environment?
6. To meet the demands of the rest of the information universe, give priority to interoperability with other encoding schema and systems.

Toward a New Alexandria, or, Lisbet Rausing on the future of libraries

Read this article: Toward a New Alexandria: Imagining the future of libraries by Lisbet Rausing in March 12 New Republic.

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/toward-new-alexandria?

I hate to be something is a "must read," but I think this is one for all.

First, Lisbet Rausing, the author, is known to us at Yale as the woman behind the grant to support various staff positions via grants including the Arcadia Grant that is supporting our work with non-Latin scripts, our OCLC reclamation project, etc.

Second, she is calling for a broad re-definition of libraries, universities, and governments in their efforts to support access to scholarly research.

Here is her definition of the problem.

"What is the library, when the totality of experience approaches that which can be remembered? What is it when we no longer preserve only those fragments that time, fire, and barbarians have left us? When we are no longer are able to safeguard only remnants of our discourses on thought, memory, and images, but the thoughts, memories, and images themselves—complete? What do we do when we have not only the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, but also Vasari’s blog, wiki, twitter, texts, emails, chatroom, Facebook, radio interviews, TV appearances, and electronic notebooks?"

A secondary problem is the wrong she sees in the narrow scope of what we call access to the scholarly record. It is a "pay to play" world.

"But by and large, the scholarly community has not made available to the public its “core” research material, such as, to choose a few examples, the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Historical Statistics of the United States Online, BMJ Clinical Evidence, Early English Literature Online, ehRAF Collection of Ethnography, Index of Christian Art, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, Index Islamicus, Frantext, Oxford Music Online, ARTstor, and Aluka. Try accessing these databases via Google instead of through your university account. It is a thought-provoking experience. Many make very clear indeed that they are commercially owned and thus debarred to all, except for those able to pay eye-watering fees."

Those problems also present opportunities for libraries and the institutions and societies that support them. Those opportunities can be seized and the potential gains realized. As Rausing puts it,

"In other words, the question for scholars and gatekeepers is not whether change is coming. It is whether they will be among the change-makers. And if not them, then who? Who else will ensure long-term conservation and search abilities that are compatible across the bibliome and over time? Who else will ensure equality of access? Ultimately, this is not a challenge of technology, finances, or ultimately even laws, difficult though they are. It is a challenge of will and imagination."

While we are sensibly quite focused on the immediate budgetary crisis, we can't meet that crisis well unless we keep in mind these are the new challenges we must face, the new opportunities we must take.

Third, she writes well and is a pleasure to read.

My favorite sentence in the article:

"And at least the academic databases have entered the digital realm. Academic monographs, although produced by digitized means, are then, in what is arguably an act of collective academic madness, turned into non-searchable paper products."

Brilliant.

Sustainable economics for a digital planet: ensuring long term access to digital information

The final report of Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access was released recently. http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf (PDF; 120 p.)

From the preface, p. 7:

"If there is one finding that perhaps merits special attention, it is that sustainable economics for digital preservation is not just about finding more funds. It is about building an economic activity firmly rooted in a compelling value proposition, clear incentives to act, and well-defined preservation roles and responsibilities. Lacking these ingredients, digital preservation efforts—and the materials in their care—have little prospect of persisting over time; with them, our digital heritage will have a sound economic foundation for the future."

Some key points.

1. the scale of digital creation is far outpacing the capacity to store the data (by 2012 there will be 2.5 million petrabytes of data and just over 1 million petrabytes of storage.

2. 3 critical questions:

What digital information should we preserve?
Who will preserve it?
Who will pay for it?

3. 4 information types considered

scholarly discourse
research data
commercially owned cultural content
collectively created Web content

4. difference between traditional preservation and digital preservation

In contrast to traditional preservation, digital preservation is a dynamic process with multiple actions taken over the course of the digital lifecycle.

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.

Karen Coyle on libraries, metadata, and the Semantic Web

Karen Coyle's article "Understanding the Semantic Web: bibliographic data and metadata" may be of wide interest in libraries. It is about 30 p. and is the full content of _Library Technology Reports_ v. 46, issue 1, Jan. 2010. (This is available online at Yale via Gale Cengage Academic One File.) The first chapter (of two) is available online at http://alatechsource.metapress.com/content/p3022442071g7655/fulltext.pdf


Coyle briefly places traditional (i.e. Panizzi and since) library bibliographic data in its contemporary context (Internet, etc.) and calls for changing our traditions to fit the new context. She then discusses several steps necessary to make the change from what is more or less textual descriptions (e.g. catalog cards, MARC records) to sets of data elements that can be processed by computers (e.g. linked data in the semantic web.)

Overall, this is a nice brief on library metadata and its relation with the semantic web, RDF (Resource Description Framework), identifiers, and linked data. If you already know this, Coyle's article is worth the review. If you don't already know this, Coyle's article is a good place to begin.

Portico certified as trustworthy by CLR using TRAC checklist

Portico certified as trustworthy by Center for Research Libraries (CLR)using Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) checklist.

See the brief (8p.)CLR report at
http://www.crl.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/CRL%20Report%20on%20Portico%20Audit%202010.pdf

Portico http://www.portico.org is a not-for-profit digital preservation service. Portico is a dark archive (and that presents some issues of concern for the audit process.) Portico, like JSTOR, is part of ITHAKA, http://www.thaka.org a not-for-profit organization

CRL http://www.crl.org is an international consortium or university, college and independent research libraries.

Portico is looking like a good choice for a domain-wide digital preservation repository that should save libraries and their host institutions from the burdens of doing digital preservation locally.

When is an Antelope a Document?

When is an Antelope a Document?
A blog post by: Ijonas Kisselbach
in Enterprise Content Governance

http://blog.vamosa.com/blog/?p=507

Nice post on documentation. Brief. Well said.Follow the link in the piece to the fluidinfo piece.

ODAI report to CNI on digital content & strategy at Yale

http://odai.research.yale.edu/sites/default/files/file/CNI2009-Final.pdf

The above link to ODAI's presentation to CNI in Dec. 2009 is a nice summary of what ODAI is doing and how the digital strategy it has for Yale is working out.

Reading is good

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/books/05paterson.html

Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia, is reported in the NYTimes to be the newest national ambassador for young people’s literature. The article quotes her saying, "I think of all the joy reading has given me,” she said. “It is not just because it is good for you, but because it is good."

Printed books, e-books, libraries, clouds, whatever--what remains is the solid basis for it all that reading is good.

New Year

Just to note the New Year 2010. What will it bring? What will we do with it?