The Emergent Library: New Lands, New Eyes
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Over the last two decades libraries joined thousands of other organizations in a massive rush to claim "new lands" on the Web . Yet at the end of the first decade of the new century, libraries may have network space but insufficient network attention (“eyes”). This talk introduces the notion of the “emergent library”--attracting more attention for library analog, licensed, and digital collections ; moving to cloud-based services; effectively deploying physical and virtual space; and playing a stronger role in the support of scholarly communications, especially through repositories.
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The Emergent Library: New Lands, New Eyes
- 1. VALA 2010 Connections.Content.Conversations Karen Calhoun 9 February 2010 The Emergent Library: New Lands, New Eyes
- 2. VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun “ The real act of discovery is not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”—Marcel Proust Heliocentric universe, Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1705 Andreas Cellarius
- 3. A History of Modern Civilization (delivered at the speed of the Internet) Tres riches heures du Duc de Berry, Octobre Detail VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 4. New Forms of Human Enterprise VALA February 2010 Disruptive ^ Thomas Luny, artist. HMS Endeavor, James Cook, captain. http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an2280897
- 5. Small Things That Change Everything VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:80486DX2_200x.png Photograph by User:Uberpenguin of the upper interconnect layers on an Intel chip taken with an optical microscope at 200x magnification
- 7. Empowering Connections and Conversations in an Entirely New Way VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun Cell phone mania. By vanhalligan. http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanhalligan/3126639463/
- 8. Disintermediation and Disruption … Newspapers and Journalism VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun http://intelligencesquaredus.org/wp-content/uploads/Mainstream-Media-102709.pdf
- 9. Disintermediation and Disruption… Libraries VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun (2005) College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: a Report to the OCLC Membership : http://www.oclc.org/reports/perceptionscollege.htm
- 10. Brace for Change … Embrace Change VALA February 2010 It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. --Charles Darwin. Photo of Charles Darwin by Ernest Edwards, London. Prior to 1882, Repository: Smithsonian Institution. http://photography.si.edu/SearchImage.aspx?t=5&id=3525&q=SIL14-D1-09
- 11. Library Cooperation as Adaptive Behavior VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 13. 1. Cooperating to embed collections in the Web Find It on Google, Get It from My Library VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 15. My Report to the Library of Congress VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf 2006
- 16. EXTEND STRATEGY EXPAND STRATEGY LEADERSHIP STRATEGY “ Outward integration” Improve the user’s experience Greatly enhance delivery (fast!) Standards development/compliance Recycle and reuse catalog data Innovate and reduce costs Invest in shared catalogs Link pools of scholarly data Seek partners Mass collections & catalogs Digitize Open access Participate in the substitute industry “ Thirty-two Options & Three Strategies”— A Radical Abridgement Calhoun. LC report, p. 14
- 17. “ Outward Integration”—Into the Cloud “ Integration should be outward rather than inward, with libraries seeking to use their components in new ways” --Interviewee for LC report on future of the catalog VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 19. “ Discoverability” Report: University of Minnesota Libraries, February 2009 http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/48258 Trends VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 20. Data Synchronization and Syndication WorldCat & WorldCat Partners… Data synch Other partners Flickr Commons VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 21. What is Syndication? Low resolution image of copyrighted work used for commentary on the topic of syndication. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Features_Syndicate For news features like comics, syndication publishes the feature in multiple newspapers simultaneously. Web syndication makes website material available to multiple other sites. VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 22. Global Integration: Being Where Their Eyes Are: the Flickr Commons VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryqueensland/3197460723/ State Library of Queensland
- 24. VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 25. Pushing metadata out, pulling users in: It’s all about linking metadata VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 26. GLOBAL GROUP LOCAL Outward Integration, Exposure, and Linking of Collections (e.g., Cloud services, WorldCat, other aggregators, Libraries Australia, Te Puna, group catalogs … Local/Group Authentication, Discovery/ Delivery Services Data Sharing, Syndication, Synchronization, Linking Coordinated Global, Group, and Local Metadata Management VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 28. 2. Cooperating to enable discovery and delivery of a wider range of information objects “ Today’s catalog covers an important core collection (mostly books and journals, electronic and print), but a shrinking proportion of what students and scholars want to find and use.”—LC report, p. 28 VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 29. The Emergent Library: Do We Know Any Longer What “The Collection” Is? VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun [T]he stuff of cultural heritage collections, digital assets, pre-print services and the open Web, research labs, and learning management systems remains for the most part outside the scope of the catalog. Scholarly information objects now include digitized rare and historical materials, textual primary source materials, graphical images, materials described in institutional and disciplinary repositories, conference Web sites, scholarly Web sites … data sets, software, simulations, a rising array of multimedia resources, learning objects and courses—the list goes on. Calhoun. LC report, p. 24
- 30. Research into use and users of digital library collections “ Digital libraries, far from being simple digital versions of library holdings, are now attracting a new type of public, bringing about new, unique and original ways for reading and understanding texts.”—BibUsages Study 2002 [3] “ The availability of primary sources has been crucial for the success of my teaching in history. Students have remarked what a difference it has made, and I have noticed a big difference between this course with the availability of online primary resources to those I have taught before that were based on printed resources.” –History instructor, University of California [2] “ The function of searching across collections is a dream frequently discussed but seldom realized at a robust level. This paper … discusses how we might move from isolated digital collections to interoperable digital libraries.” — Howard Besser [4] See final slide for citations.
- 31. Rising Interest in Digital Collections on the BnF and LC Web Sites Source: Alexa.com, 15 Nov 2009 Where do people go on bnf.fr and loc.gov? BnF: Expositions: 30% Catalogue: 26% Gallica: 26% LC: American Memory: 41% Catalog: 17% Legislative information (THOMAS): 6% VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 32. 17% of the traffic to natlib.govt.nz goes here VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun Source: Alexa.com 8 Feb 2010
- 33. Queensland University of Technology ePrints: Ranked #22 of World’s Top 400 Repositories VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 34. Open Access Repositories Gaining Visibility and Impact Sources: Alexa.com 15 Nov 2009 and the Cybermetrics Lab’s ranking of top Repositories (disciplinary and institutional) at http://repositories.webometrics.info/about.html 2008-2009 Traffic Compared: *Social Science Research Network *arXiv.org *Research Papers in Economics *British Library (bl.uk) VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 35. arXiv.org in OAIster in WorldCat VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 36. 3. Cooperating to understand and engage with local communities VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 37. Library as Place, Place as Library Connected on the network No need to choose … we can be in our communities and … VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 38. Books Continue as Mainstay in North American Public Libraries VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun Source: Bowker Annuals for 2004 and 2008.
- 39. VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun Delivery “ In the age of new online services, people want simple and quick options for the delivery of library content. This project will develop a standard service model for us to deliver digital copies and physical books directly to people at their home or place of choice. It will enable improved options and speed of delivery.” http://www.nsla.org.au/projects/rls/delivery
- 40. New Eyes VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun “ Respondents urged librarians to take a fresh approach … and give users what they want.” Calhoun. LC report, p. 42
- 41. VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun Kate Edger Information Commons University of Auckland Library Largest facility of its kind in New Zealand Source: http://www.information-commons.auckland.ac.nz/?page=gallery Used with permission.
- 42. The Print Collections in Academic Research Libraries $108M USD renovation of the Ohio State University Library: “ The books had come to clutter the library” http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Library-Renovation-at Ohio/4700 VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 43. What’s the Value of the Print Collections? --Median Circulation and Reference Transactions in North American Research Libraries 1991-2008, With Five Year Forecast Data source: ARL Statistics 2007-2008 http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arlstat08.pdf VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 44. An Eroding Role for the Library as the Campus Central Gateway to Information VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun http://www.ithaka.org/publications/facultyandlibrariansurveys
- 45. Offsite Storage … Full to Overflowing? By: Watson Library http://www.flickr.com/photos/watsonlibrary/1336894299/ VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 46. 4. Cooperating to realize a culture of continuous improvement VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best. –W. Edwards Deming
- 47. Cooperative Systems at the Crossroads Alice: 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?‘ 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 50. Users Print Vendors Library Electronic Vendor Meta- search What if we could manage collections in the cloud? OPAC ILS Circulation Cataloging Self Service Acquisitions Cataloging Utility National/ Global System Consortial System A to Z List Resolver ERM Institutional Repository Data Library Users Suppliers Partners
- 54. Metadata Sources VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 55. VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 56. VIAF: Virtual International Authority File VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 57. VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
- 58. Thank You! No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main. Meditation XVII , John Donne VALA February 2010 Karen Calhoun
Editor's Notes
- VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun Thank you for opportunity to participate in program, etc Thanks to those in charge of the weather for not covering us with two feet of snow, like at my home in Ohio
- I have always liked this quote from Remembrance of Things Past. [read] Mental frameworks, experience, a sense of what to expect – all of these are extremely useful in daily life. But artistic and scientific breakthroughs most often come about when we set aside conventional wisdom. This was the case when Copernicus, then Galileo after him, defied the science and religion of the time to make the case that the earth orbits around the sun, rather than the other way around. As painful an experience as it was for Galileo, and in spite of the respected authorities of his time, he let go of an outdated mental model of the universe that was blocking the advance of knowledge. He saw with new eyes. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun I’d like to begin with a 5 minute history of the rise of modern civilization. I mean it, 5 minutes. In his book The History of Classical Physics*-- a book my physicist-son gave me for a birthday present--J.D. Bernal discusses the medieval horse harness, specifically the horse collar, shown in this manuscript illustration from the early 15th century. The horse collar appears to appears to have been used in Europe from the 8th or 9th century, and Bernal makes a startling claim for what we see today as such a humble object: He claims the horse collar represented a technological leap forward, so much so that the collar gave Western Europe technical supremacy. The horse began being used by people around 2000 BC. They did not know how to effectively harness horses. In fact, the way the Romans harnessed horses, through the use of a neck collar, actually imposed pressure and stress on the horse’s neck. The medieval horse collar, by contrast, rests on both the shoulders and breast of the horse, shifting the load to the horse’s body and giving the horse much more pulling power. This technological advance allowed the agricultural use of the horse to flourish, particularly because the new collar and harness made it possible to plow uplands as well as flat lands. As a result, Bernal claims, the area under the plow in Western Europe almost doubled, as did agricultural production in countries like England and France. So, the horse collar had a transformative influence on European civilization, because with the doubling of the ability to feed ones’ people comes the possibility of new kinds of human settlements and new kinds of human enterprise. --------------- *Bernal, J. D. A History of Classical Physics: From Antiquity to the Quantum. Originally published as The Extension of Man.. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1997, c1972. pp. 122-3.
- No, that’s not what I meant to say. Getting back to our story of the horse collar and the rise of modern civilization … when people are well fed and even have a surplus of food, they can create towns and then cities, create new professions, and engage in new forms of human enterprise. It is not uncommon for those new forms of human enterprise to disrupt their own and other societies. As we now know, the age of discovery, in which people like James Cook sailed around the world in ships like this, finding new lands, transformed the Western European nations and greatly disrupted the indigenous societies that he and his men encountered. That disruptive influence also played out as the age of reason, the industrial revolution, and so on, until several hundred years later … VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- … Another small thing happened that changed the world. This is a reproduction of a photograph of the upper interconnect layers on an Intel chip, taken with an optical microscope at 200x magnification. What has constituted wisdom, the nature of our institutions, what has been fundamental to our societies have been all been changed by this chip and what it eventually made possible, the rise of the World Wide Web. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Now the world has moved on to cloud computing, whose essence it seems to me is pretty well captured by the statement “I don’t care what’s up there as long as it works.” VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- And it has led to the almost incredible impact, from the perspective of someone of my generation, of mobile devices. The impact of this new age of discovery, on the Web and on our iphones and droids, has been and continues to be at least as disruptive as that first age of discovery, when the sailing ship was the mechanism of profound social change. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Printed newspapers and mainstream media are among the social institutions that have been disrupted by ordinary people’s direct access to a whole new array of sources of news. People now get their news from the Internet and cable channels. National Public Radio, or NPR in the US, recently organized and aired a debate in which two teams of three people each debated the motion “good riddance to mainstream media”—meaning newspaper and mainstream broadcast journalism. I listened to this debate and at times they could easily have been speaking about the disintermediation of libraries. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- As much as we might argue that citizens are NOT better off getting their information from the Internet, by way of search engines, the evidence suggests that libraries are being equally disintermediated and disrupted by the Web. Go thru slide VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- On a daily basis, I find that what has been fundamental to libraries and higher education, what has constituted professional wisdom and best practice has been upended by these new, turbulent conditions. As little as we may like to admit it, as is the case for the newspapers and mainstream media, there are perfectly respectable people who are willing to say our societies no longer need libraries. It does little good to get locked into a defensive posture , call these people stupid , or bury our heads in the sand. To assure that strong institutions will emerge from this period in the history of libraries, continuing with plan A simply will not do. We need a plan B. We need to adapt to the new conditions facing us. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- The issues are too big to be solved by libraries working alone. For strong, vibrant libraries to emerge from this period, I believe that library cooperation on a scale previously unheard of will be necessary. Libraries Australia, Te Puna, National & State Libraries Australasia, and OCLC provide a foundation for collective action. I invite you to look at them with new eyes. Given the turbulent conditions that libraries face, if we were building a network of library cooperatives today, what collective actions would we choose to undertake? That is what the rest of this talk is about. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Here are my starting points for discussion. I hope you will consider them too as I go along and jot down your comments and ideas for discussion. Some of these ideas you will have heard about before, others perhaps not. The point is to kick off the VALA conference with a thought exercise --to get those new eyes open and looking around. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Before joining OCLC almost 3 years ago, I worked for ten years at the Cornell University Library. I had the great good fortune to have Ross Atkiinson as my colleague there. Ross led the building of the collections of three great research libraries—Northwestern, Iowa, and Cornell. He was an exceptional librarian and thought leader who helped to define research library collection development and then, how to transform it. In late 2005 Ross convened the Janus conference, whose goal was to re-envision collection development in research libraries. Click. The paper Ross gave at the Janus conference, cited here, was a kind of ‘last lecture”—in which he urged us to consider these fundamental challenges to building collections in the digital age. He began with the recognition that collections are becoming more universally available and less institutionally focused. [read bullets] Click. He ended by calling urgently for a level of library collaboration previously unimaginable among research libraries.
- Calhoun At about that same time I was finishing up a report commissioned by the Library of Congress on the future of the library catalog in the age of search engines. If you recall, the finding that nearly 90% of college students start a search with a search engine, and 2% start with a library web page, had recently hit the airwaves. This is a screen shot of the title page of that report.. HKUL - Trends in Tech Services
- October 20087 Calhoun As the slide indicates, this triangle is a radical abridgement of a figure from my full report to the Library of Congress. I proposed three strategies for libraries seeking to revitalize their catalogs—leadership, expansion, and extension. In the context of the leadership strategy, I argued for “putting library collections where their eyes are” or “outward integration.” into the wider Web, beyond the library’s Web pages There are many other possibilities for large scale collective action in this diagram, but for now I’d like to focus on “outward integration.”
- May 2008 Karen Calhoun
- Mar 2008 Karen Calhoun If we were successful at outwardly integrating or embedding our collections in the Web, so that an information searcher could start … In as many places as possible on the web, and end up in a library, what would that look like from a librarian or technologist’s perspective?[click all] Let us imagine a new age, in which an individual library catalog is a node on the Web that is attached to other nodes, and the user can traverse these nodes easily to connect to his or her libraries’ collections. Today’s separate library systems could be independent but loosely connected, the way so many things on the Web are today, or we could have many more shared systems, or we could rely on the cloud and “not care what’s up there as long as it works,” or some combination of solutions.
- Five years after the release of my LC report, a team at the University of Minnesota Libraries completed an excellent study called Discoverability that extended the conclusions I submitted to LC. They found these trends. Again we see the finding that users find materials of interest on the larger network, outside library systems. The Minnesota team is placing a lot of emphasis on tools that capture this traffic, for example from Google Scholar, and lead it back to the U of M collections. I’ll also note here the last trend, that users increasingly rely on emerging nontraditional information objects.
- Indeed many libraries are working to capture as much attention on the Web outside their own system as they can. I’ve tried to illustrate this visually for the NLZ. The NLZ puts a big digitized photo collection out on the Flickr Commons; they push their content out into the NZ library catalogue, and so on. As I’ve said I call this “outward integration” of the collections into the Web—Collections data is synchronized with other aggregations and syndicated in other Web environments. As you know, one of the places that the NLZ is outwardly integrating its collections is WorldCat.org.
- June 2009 Karen Calhoun Just a very quick gloss on how I am using the term “syndication” of collections in multiple locations on the Web.
- But before turning to what the OCLC cooperative makes possible, let’s talk about syndicating metadata from cultural heritage collections on the Flickr Commons. The State Library of Queensland has done this. To the great benefit of us all. I mean really, who would have expected four boys riding goats? VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- I now turn to the opportunities created by library cooperation and aggregation of the collective collections of many thousands of member libraries, in WorldCat. This creates another kind of outward integration of library collections at a global level. Go thru example.
- What is happening here becomes possible through collective, light weight but deliberate cooperative metadata management involving thousands of loosely coupled systems. The key pieces are data sharing, sychronization, syndication, and linking protocols. At the global level, the collective collections of OCLC members become more visible on the WorldCat partner sites, for example Google Book Search, and WorldCat operates as a kind of giant metadata switch or bridge from where information seekers find things leading back to group and local collections. Strong independent national library collaboratives at the group level, like Libraries Australia and Te Puna, as well as other regional hubs, also play a role. Many kinds of library partners, library service organizations, vendors, can also play important roles, if they are willing to collaborate and help libraries get more attention on the web in this way. Finally, the searcher making his way along these paths traverses the last mile and is connected to a local library. Now if this graphic doesn’t make you love and deeply appreciate library metadata, you are a hopeless case.
- Here, summarized on a single slide, is some of the really important stuff that makes it all work behind the scenes. The point to take away is, the better we are at paying attention to these details, the better experience end users will have discovering and getting hold of things from library collections. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Turning to the next large opportunity for cooperation ... The evidence from a variety of studies suggests that scholars, students, and citizens take interest in a wider range of information objects than are traditionally ‘collected’ or ‘privileged’ as part of library collection development – and which are therefore not normally surfaced in catalogues or library discovery and delivery systems. .
- Going back to the point that Ross Atkinson was making in his last paper, do we know any longer what it means to build a library collection? [read] Information of interest to the communities that libraries serve now includes digitized materials, primary sources, images, new forms of scholarly communications, research data, learning objects, and more. How might we collaborate to “collect” or draw attention to them on behalf of the communities we serve, even though they can’t be collected in the traditional sense? VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- June 2009 Karen Calhoun Build slide. Digital library collections, which I define a bit later, are greatly increasing in popularity. The results here are for the Univ of Wisconsin collections over the last 7 years. As an indication of the public’s interest, it is also worth mentioning that more traffic goes to American Memory on the Library of Congress web site than to the catalog. Click. In a study that interviewed scholars using digitized special collections, one said how useful it is to teaching and learning to be able to easily incorporate primary sources into the curriculum. Click. In a study of Gallica (the digital library of France), the authors found that the collections attract a highly interested, loyal, and new type of public. Click, Last in this short list of citations is this quote from Howard Besser, a well known digital library expert in the US, who points to the breakthrough that will be achieved for research, teaching and learning when collective collections of digital collections can be interoperably aggregated on the network.
- As I mentioned, there are indications that digital library collections, for example, are attracting more attention than expected. This is a chart from Alexa. com, a Web traffic analysis service, showing Web traffic to the bnf.fr and loc.gov domains. Alexa provides data about where users go once they are on a site. In the case of those who visit bnf.fr, 30% visit the expositions pages—a virtual gallery of curated exhibits around the collections. More than 50% of the traffic is split between the BnF library catalog and Gallica—the digital library of France. Over 40% of the visitors to the Library of Congress web site go to American Memory, which LC describes it as a digital record of American history and creativity. Contrast this with the other two most popular destinations for loc.gov visitors—the catalog, at 17%, and federal legislative information at 6%.
- This is happening to a degree with the traffic that goes to Te Puna. 17% of the traffic to the NLNZdomain goes to paperspast, a repository of digitized newspapers, according to data on Alexa. Com.
- Turning now to open access repositories, QUT has a highly successful, well known open access repo of scholarly eprints. Thanks to OAIster, an aggregation of 23 million metadata records from over 1100 open access repositories, metadata for the QUT’s eprints are now harvested into WorldCat.
- Like the QUT’s open access repo, other open access repositories, both discipline- and institutionally-based, are gaining in visibility and impact. This chart, also from Alexa.com, tracks traffic in 2008 and 2009 to three of the top open access repositories, as ranked by the Cybermetrics Lab, against the traffic to bl.uk, the British Library’s domain, to give you a sense of the scope and scale of attention received by these repositories.
- This is an example of the user’s path to discovery and connection to one of the arxiv.org preprints, now that the metadata is also exposed in WorldCat. It is another place for the collections contributed to OAIster to be discovered and connected to.
- Thanks to the power of library cooperation, we do not have to choose between local, group, and global visibility of individual library collections and services. The library continues as a place, but can also be found from a lot of starting points in virtual space. If we wish to as a profession, we can push this type of cooperation much further.
- Let us turn to consideration of what kinds of library cooperation might be interesting around library book collections. This chart tells a story about public libraries collections in the US. Comparing expenditures reported in 2004 vs 2008, US public libraries are spending about the same percentage of their materials budgets on books—roughly 40%--but twice as much as they were on media, comparatively little on printed periodicals and serials, and a bit more on electronic resources. Books are still really important in public libraries. The picture is very different for academic libraries as we will see in a moment.
- Remember another of the findings of the Minnesota Discoverability research? End users expect discovery and delivery to coincide or at the very least, they expect delivery to be easy and convenient. I was delighted to learn of the cooperative project around delivery that is associated with the major Reimagining Libraries initiative of the NSLA. I would invite you to consider how might this kind of cooperative model be taken to another level? VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Thinking collectively and at scale is part of the exercise of seeing libraries with new eyes. Another key element is giving end users what they want and need from libraries, not what we as librarians think they want and need, or should want and need. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Take university students as an example. Librarians often think they should be behaving in ways they don’t. Truth is, they come to the library to study and socialize. Why not truly invite them in and give them a terrific space to use the library they want to use it? That is what has happened at the U of Auckland with the Information Commons building, which I was lucky to walk through during my stay inn Auckland. The Commons has been a huge success. Looking at this success with our new eyes, is there a way for libraries to collaborate to make library space more useful for students? Is that a crazy idea? Maybe. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Another library that has accommodated what students want and how they work is the Ohio State U Library. Increasingly in the U.S., space on central campus for the print collections loses out to other priorities. This is a photo I took last fall shortly after the official grand re-opening of the main library at the Ohio State University. The decision to move nearly half of this library’s collections to offsite storage was controversial, but it was made to give priority to more--and more inspiring--high-tech space for the campus community . The library is truly lovely and daily traffic in the library has risen since the renovation to 12,000 visitors a day. The quote is from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the renovation.
- A bit more about the print collections. The trends suggest there are some big opportunities for library cooperation here. Those of you from academic libraries may know instantly what this chart depicts, even w/o looking at the captions. This chart tracks median circulation and reference desk transactions in North American research libraries since 1991. Circulation is in blue, reference transactions in red. I have added a linear trend line to the chart. If the trend holds, around 2010 annual median circulation will dip below 200,000 transactions—on collections generally comprised of 4 to 7 million volumes. As a rule in North America, coming to the research library to take advantage of the local collections and services is in decline.
- Engaging with the local community requires knowing who they are and how they accomplish their work. This 2006 study from Ithaka suggests that faculty increasingly neglect the library building as a starting point for their research. They want to work from their offices and homes, and search engines are increasingly important to them, as are a few key electronic resources for their discipline. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Another possibility for new forms of library cooperation has to do with all of the related issues to the decline in the use of research library print collections, like offsite storage, delivery from offsite storage facilities, and more.
- Here’s the last of the four possibilities I offer today for thinking about how libraries acting collectively, at previously unimagined levels, can successfully adapt to the disintermediation and disruption created by the Web for libraries as social institutions. It has to do with collectively embracing a culture of assessment, evidence-based decision making, and a commitment to continuous improvement. Now more than ever, libraries cannot rest on their laurels, and they cannot assume that what made libraries successful in the past will make them successful going forward. Good intentions, hard work, and an old blueprint for service are insufficient. Some of you will be familiar with W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, who perhaps coined the phrase “continuous improvement.” Thinking about that approach using “new eyes” again, Deming says [read quote] VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- Calhoun Winding this up, I have now talked about some big trends affecting libraries, collections, and library services. We have some big, important cooperative systems, like OCLC and Lib Aus and the NZ libs I believe we need to find and massively commit to new, previously unimagined levels of library cooperation going forward. We are at a crossroads, like Alice in Wonderland (Click) If you recall, Alice says to the Cat 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?‘ Mysteriously, yet some say wisely, the Cat responds 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' . HKUL - Trends in Tech Services
- To wrap up, I ask a series of what if questions. As you head for the concurrent sessions, and talk over coffee, drinks, and meals over the next few days, I urge you to consider what these “what ifs” might mean for library cooperation at global, regional, national and other group levels in Australasia. I invite you to envision the next generation of library cooperatives by seeing with new eyes. And then tell me and each other what you see. Here are some key questions. You may think of more. Read
- Here’s a real grocery bag full of what ifs. Some of these reflect initiatives already being considered or underway. What are these initiatives in Australasia and how could carrying them out benefit libraries even more than they are now? How might obstacles be removed? What are the risks, and how might they be mitigated? I invite you to think big. For example, might it be possible to build and share a single knowledge base in the cloud? If not, what are some alternatives that would help libraries reduce the cost and redundant effort that now goes into linking end users to online full text?
- Knowledge bases for the management of licensed electronic collections is only part of the complex, costly IT scene that libraries are saddled with today. What if we could take this current picture of many systems to support locally and move these systems up to a Web scale solution, or cloud computing? CLICK
- Moving to those hidden treasures in our libraries, some digitized and some not, how might we, as Howard Besser suggests, achieve the goal we have long aspired to, to move from ….
- In this regard, I’d like to just briefly mention the efforts OCLC is taking on behalf of its members. We have introduced the Digital Collections Gateway to make it easier to aggregate metadata and point to digital library content from the WorldCat aggregation. Our goal is to aggregate the metadata from a very large number of digital library repositories, to make them easier for students, citizens, and scholars around the world to find and connect to.
- Near and dear to my heart is what’s next for expanded library cooperation around metadata. What if …
- In libraries, in traditional abstracting and indexing services, and in the publication data supply chain, metadata has been for the most part professionally produced. We are beginning to see in addition a good deal of author and/or user contributed metadata which needs to be usefully folded into what we have in some way. Some call this “crowd sourcing” of metadata. On top of that there is metadata being produced through large scale data mining of aggregations like WorldCat, for example to produce FRBR work sets and other new services like WorldCat Identifies, which I’ll show you in a moment.
- What if we can turn the world’s largest aggregation of bibliographic and holdings data into the world’s largest aggregation of information about authors and other creators? WorldCat Identities is like People Australia but larger in scope. It is a product of data mining, an example of the kind of thing that can be done if you have enough aggregated data. Identities mines, reuses and remixes, bibliographic and authority data in a service intended for end users. You can think of it as, in a way, a Facebook or My Space for important people . Click. Here is the Identities page for Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career. Based on mining information in FRBR work sets of bibliographic data, and combined information from a number of authority files, we can tell a lot about her. Click. I have skipped most of the middle of this entry. This is a free public site. At the bottom of this entry is a tag cloud, drawn from facets mined from LC subject headings. One could imagine using such a cloud to seed further contributions from end users and creators themselves.
- VIAF is another new attempt at global levels of library cooperation with the potential to much better support multilingual search and bringing value to national, regional and local levels. It is an aggregation of interconnected yet separate national authority files. The NLA participates, as you can see from this list of participants. It is interesting to contemplate how this effort might play into the several separate initiatives now in play having to do with the management of researcher identities. Let us make sure that libraries are not pushed aside by these initiatives! They have a great deal to offer. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
- I thought you would also want to see VIAF briefly. This is also a freely accessible public site that you can play with later if you like. I have shown here the contributing partners to this joint effort of several national libraries, hosted and implemented by OCLC. I think this work creates the foundation for a set of new services that members could employ to establish and promote online communities for researchers and other types of creators. Click. Here is the page for Miles Franklin, showing the various heading forms used by different national libraries and a wheel illustrating the relationships between the heading forms. Such tools might be helpful not only to make library collections more discoverable in a multilingual environment, but combined or reused in the context of a variety of services outside libraries to create higher quality discovery and delivery services for all.
- October 2008 Karen Calhoun - University of Kansas Thank you for your attention and to the conference organizers for the chance to participate. I hope I have given you some food for thought and debate as you enjoy the conference and each others’ company over the next few days. The prize of achieving new levels of library cooperation is nothing less than commanding a much larger, more visible and effective presence for libraries in our societies. We are disintermediated and disrupted. Library cooperation is an effective adaptive behavior that has the potential to keep libraries strong and vibrant in the communities they serve. I look forward to hearing your opinions and comments either now or during the course of the conference. I will be here participating in the sessions with you.
- June 2009 Karen Calhoun Here are the references I mentioned to the use studies of digital collection, in case you are interested.