A presentation I gave at Senate House Library about what IT Systems can do for libraries of similar size and quality. I added some pretty innovative applications of IT Systems to Libraries.

1. How can IT systems and technologies be applied to
Senate House Library,
with its unique volume, range and quality?
7 November 2014
Senate House Library
Giuseppe Sollazzo
@puntofisso

2. Me
Senior Systems Analyst at SGUL
● IT Operations team leader
● 250+ servers, 30K users
● Library-related R&D
Ministerial Advisor on Open Data and Transparency
● Open Data User Group - Cabinet Office
● Health and Social Care Transparency Panel - Dept of Health

3. Problem 1: Discovery

4. Search
● OPACs
● Google-based approach
○ The more it knows you, the less it tells you
● Discovery Tools
○ Summon, Primo, Ebsco Central…
○ Popular with “normal” users: they look like Google
■ Advanced users don’t like “advanced search”

6. The “Answers People”
● By Essex County Council
● Search as a human skill, through an IT medium
○ iterative and interactive

7. Research Approach
● Metadata is good, content is king
● Big Data
○ what can we learn about our collections?
● N-Grams, LDA, etc
○ novel ways to search for content
○ analyse content to make search more interesting

10. Problem 2: Physical vs Virtual

11. The Big Issue for Libraries
● The world is increasingly digital
● Not all digital is good
○ e.g. e-books can be used as a platform lock-in
■ what about spreading culture?
● We still need physical space
○ to store books
○ to study
○ to meet

12. Archiving
● Remote locations
● Experimental solutions
○ Robots, Drones
○ NFC, iBeacons

13. Digitisation
● Increase access to rare books
● How?
○ Open standard/source as a way not to be locked in
● Reaching out to users
○ “Libraries without Walls”
■ Bringing libraries to public spaces

14. Library Box

15. Problem 3: Building Knowledge

16. Traditional Activities
● Deposit & Access
● Networking
● Serendipity
How do we use IT Systems in this context?
● Digital Scholarship

17. New methods
● Foster information literacy
○ build participation
○ run courses
● Extend access to resources
○ MOOCs
● Digital Humanities
○ OCR, Text Analysis, …

18. VIVO Web
● Semantic Web approach to encouraging networking
● Linked Data
● Machine-readable description of people, papers, etc…

19. Crowdsourcing
● British Museum: MicroPast
○ Archaeological Research
○ Tasks that need human intelligence
■ location of photographed scenes
■ identification of subject matter in historic archives
■ transcription of letters and catalogues
● Applications for digitised books

20. Conclusions

21. IT + Library
● “Blacksmiths of Knowledge”
○ Traditional library service support
○ Knowledge services
○ Data analysis
○ Skills building

22. Open
Open
Source
Open
Collaboration
Open
Data
Open
Access

23. Thanks!
Giuseppe Sollazzo
@puntofisso
www.puntofisso.net

25. Open
Open
Source
Open
Collaboration
Open
Data
Open
Access
Innovation

26. The Virtuous Loop
Search
(books)
Data
Produce
Knowledge,
tools

27. Public vs Academic Libraries
● Public Libraries are laboratories of R&D
○ meeting points for learning
○ hackspaces, tinkering, making
○ “we lend x”, where x is no longer just a book
● Academic Libraries have a traditional mission
○ more difficult to innovate
○ scholar-to-student
○ book-oriented

28. Senate House Library Specificity
● Central University
● Users
● Humanities
● Rare books
● Large collections
● Thesis deposit

29. Open Data

32. Open Data
● Share knowledge
● Encourage people to join in the academic conversation
● Opportunity for revenue streams
○ courses, apps, data visualization, sale of librarian skills
● Research Data Management
○ bespoke, CKAN, …
○ what in a digital humanity context?