Feral Librarian » future of libraries

LibraryThing’s Tim Spalding on Social Cataloging and Libraries

Chris — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:39:40 +0000

At the end of his recent What is Social Cataloging presentation at LIANZA, Tim Spalding of LibraryThing assures us that social cataloging will not result in end of the world scenarios such as teenagers in their underwear cataloging our books, dead kittens, or the end of traditional cataloging. Tim has posted Just the LIS/ranting/inspiration parts! on Vimeo, and it is definitely worth a listen.

I think the idea that social cataloging means “the end of intellectual structures rooted in the limitations of the physical world” is a very important concept. Tim may be overestimating the power of social cataloging to topple the physical paradigm that has ruled libraries for so long, but I do agree that it is time (past time, probably) for a paradigm shift. Social cataloging will hopefully hasten the shift.

Despite sharing some of Tim’s “doom-iness” about the future of libraries, I am encouraged by the fact that many libraries, including my own, are already doing things like exposing their catalog records to Google and other search engines, and allowing linking and bookmarking of catalog records.

Stanford’s new discovery environment SearchWorks does both these things. SearchWorks is based on Blacklight, an open-source application that was originally written at University of Virginia. VuFind is another open source tool, developed at Villanova University, being used by a number of libraries to leverage Web 2.0 in a library discovery environment. I don’t know much about PennTags, but it is an example of a major university library experimenting with social tagging of library materials.

Tim is absolutely right that libraries must recognize the limits of practices rooted in a physical books paradigm and move beyond them. I’m encouraged to see that many leading libraries are already well on the way towards embracing new social tools and new ways of thinking about organizing information. A part of me reacts to Tim’s presentation with “Doesn’t he realize all the cool Web 2.0 stuff libraries are already doing?”; but a bigger part of me welcomes “rants” from library outsiders like Tim Spalding that keep pushing us in the right directions.

Tagged: digital libraries, discovery, future of libraries, google, metadata, social media, Stanford

What academic librarians need to know about academia

Chris — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:23:47 +0000

The world of academia is a strange and complex place, and I have found that understanding certain key aspects of its culture and norms has served me well in my current work and in contributing to conversations about the future of academic libraries.
Here are a few things that I find helpful to know/understand:

A faculty members’ peers are NOT necessarily the other faculty in their own department or their own institution. A scholar’s peers are other scholars who do similar work. This is literally true for activities such as peer review, and tenure & promotion reviews. It is also true in terms of social identity and social networks. Knowing this, I might realize I can helpfully point out similar research happening on a scholar’s own campus; since they may reasonably not know about it. I also need to know this because when scholars talk about doing collaborative work, their collaborators are likely to be located all across the globe — and that has implications for how libraries support that work.
Publications serve many purposes for faculty, but the primary purpose for most is to support tenure and promotion cases. Given that, faculty will publish their research in whatever venue has the highest prestige value in their field and their department. Understanding whether books or journal articles are more highly valued for a given department is helpful. It is also good to further understand which publishers and which journals are most important for a given department. Note that there will be variation within disciplines–what makes a good publication record for a tenure-track Sociologist at one university might not be so impressive at another school.
For tenure-track faculty, virtually everything they do & every choice they make will be based on how it contributes to their chances of getting tenure. For example, if teaching plays an insignificant role in tenure decisions at my school, then I can’t expect tenure-track faculty to devote much time to innovative teaching. If I want to support tenure-track faculty, I need to offer services that help them do things that increase their chances of getting tenure. If I want to offer library support for their classes, I need to be willing to do so in a way that requires little to no extra effort on their part, and perhaps even provides them some free time.

I’m sure there are plenty of other norms from the world of academia that academic librarians ought to understand. What am I leaving out?

Support for Research: An Academic Library Manifesto

Chris — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:33:25 +0000

Support for the Research Process: An Academic Library Manifesto has just been published. This brief call to action document represents the collaborative work of the RLG Research Information Management Roadmap Working Group.
The goal of the document is to set forth a “top 10″ list of action items for Academic Libraries to focus on in the face of a rapidly changing scholarly research landscape.
Much of what is currently written about the future of libraries focuses on how to save libraries, or on whether we even still need libraries. In this document, we tried instead to focus on what academic libraries can and should do to ensure that “current and future researchers will have the support they need to navigate and exploit the full potential of evolving digital scholarship.”
One potential follow-up to this document would be for members of the academic library community to take each of the action items and develop examples, use cases, and best practices:

1. Commit to continual study of the ever-changing work patterns and needs of researchers; with particular attention to disciplinary and generational differences in adoption of new modes of research and publication.
2. Design flexible new services around those parts of the research process that cause researchers the most frustration and difficulty.
3. Embed library content, services, and staff within researchers’ regular workflows; integrating with services others provide (whether on campus, at other universities, or by commercial entities) where such integration serves the needs of the researcher.
4. Embrace the role of expert information navigators and redefine reference as research consultation instead of fact-finding.
5. Reassess all library job descriptions and qualifications to ensure that training and hiring encompass the skills, education, and experience needed to support new modes of research.
6. Recognize that discovery of content will happen outside of libraries—but that libraries are uniquely suited to providing the organization and metadata that make content discoverable.
7. Embrace opportunities to focus on unique, core services and resources; while seeking collaborative partnerships to streamline common services and resources.
8. Find ways to demonstrate to senior university administrators, accreditors, and auditors the value of library services and resources to scholarship; while providing services that may seem invisible and seamless to researchers.
9. Engage researchers in the identification of primary research data sets that merit long-term preservation and access.
10. Offer alternative scholarly publishing and dissemination platforms that are integrated with appropriate repositories and preservation services.

As Ricky Erway at hangingtogether says:

You don’t need to nail it to your library’s door, but you might want to think about how many of these things you currently do, how many you could do, and what you could stop doing (or streamline) so that you can better support your institution’s research mission.

Tagged: digital libraries, future of libraries, information literacy, library services, publishing, research, scholarship

A manifesto for academic libraries

Chris — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:36:46 +0000

In an effort to get in on some of their Collaborative Rabble Rousing, I volunteered to chair an RLG Working Group that is writing a manifesto for academic libraries, addressing the need for change to better support changing research and publishing practices.

Once Dan Greenstein’s remarks about the the university library of the future started attracting attention, we decided to offer a preview of our work at hangingtogether, the RLG Programs blog.

Please head on over there and let us know what you think.

Tagged: future of libraries, librarians, libraries, library services, research, scholarship