Transcript Training Needs for Librarians in Digital Libraries

Training Needs for Librarians
in Digital Libraries
Gerhard Budin
University of Vienna
[email protected]
Overcoming the culture clash
• ‘Traditional’ communities of librarians, archivists,
documentalists, museum curators, etc.
• Computer scientists who developed an interest in
digital libraries (see for instance the ECDL community
in recent years)
-> ‘cross-fertilization‘ has started, and it is gaining
momentum
-> toward a ‘new species‘ of truly digital librarians,
cybrarians, digital archivists, virtual museum
specialists, etc.
-> division of labor and cooperative work, workflows
Cross-disciplinary competence mix
needed for new professional profiles
• ICT, metadata architectures, data modelling, dbm, web
engineering, new media management, data warehouses and
repositories, W3C/ISO standards and technologies,
interoperability/access protocols, mining, filtering, HLT, …
• Digitization techniques, intellectual property mgmt.
• Storage, archiving, preserving methods and strategies
• Information design, web design, usability engineering, user
studies, web services, CRM, communication strategies
• Digital library management, collection management,
collaborative/federated approaches, content management,
project mgmt., cross-cultural and multilingual issues
• Knowledge organization, ontologies, advanced indexing and
retrieval methods, visualization...
New Policies for Digital Culture
• Discuss broad concepts of culture
• Strengthening the cooperation among
heterogeneous entities and networks
• Interlink local and global responsibilities
• Assessing the impacts of digitization
• Toward user orientation, targeting, focusing
• Enabling, empowering, emancipating
• Best practices, standards, for both, low end and
high end technologies
• Economic models, sustainability
• Intellectual property right management
• Information ecologies, epistemologies
Scientific and Cultural Digital Heritage
-> to cover all aspects of culture
• Science as culture
• Popular culture
• A coherent content management approach
needed, beyond preservation and digitization
• Beyond mere access toward re-use, reintegration, re-interpretation of historical
information
• Think of the history and heritage of tomorrow
(today’s culture is the heritage of tomorrow)
• We need many more digital cultural heritage
specialists
Cultural technologies
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Preservation technologies
Digitization technologies
Storage, archiving technologies
Visualization technologies
Digital libraries, digital archives, virtual
museums
Access methods, information filtering
Virtual reality technologies
Copyright management technologies
New cultures: online cultures, net art,
telepresence, virtual communities, etc.
An example: the i-MASS project
Information Management and
Interoperability of Content for Distributed
Systems of High Volume Data
Repositories through Multi-agent Systems
EU-IST-KAIII-IAF (2001-2004)
The vision: Virtual Reference Rooms
• Integration of several pilot projects in digital
culture into a coherent system
• Using a distributed meta-information system for
accessing heterogeneous cultural information
• Interoperability of content
• Building of ontologies
• User modelling
• Technical approach: XML, RDF, XMLS, RDFS,
JDBC, RQL, agent technologies
Knowledge landscape and
content interoperability
Goals
• Toward a new understanding of
– cultures, digital cultures, forms of art
– Data, information, knowledge, content
• New epistemological models of online culture
• From cultural heritage to a global knowledge
heritage as a pre-requisite for creating new
knowledge
• Contributing to new professional profiles with
new competences
Challenges
• ‘Semantic Web’, ‘Trans-cultural Web’
• Interaction between personal knowledge,
objective knowledge, between local and global
knowledge
• Convergence of language technologies, media
technologies, cultural technologies
• Ecological models
• Life-long learning for librarians, information
specialists, cultural heritage professionals
Merging Communities
Four groups involved
• Subject experts (history of art, anthropology,
linguistics, etc.)
• Computer scientists, engineers
• Librarians, archivists, museum curators
• Managers, marketing experts
-> finding a common understanding of the goals
and of the methods to reach them
-> a basic knowledge of the “other” communities is
necessary
Implications for Education and Training
• New curricula for basic degrees and advanced
degrees
• New specializations (M.A./M.Sc/PhD)
• Cross-disciplinary degrees (cultural studies,
historical disciplines, philosophy (of science), the
subject disciplines (humanities, social sciences,
natural sciences, law, medicine, life sciences,
etc.), archival studies, library and information
science, computer science, linguistics,
economics, arts)
• Continuous education, on-site training,
professional development,
• Integration with applied research
Implications for academic,
research, and training institutions
• Changing their structures
• New teaching methods, new pedagogical
models – eLearning, blended learning
approaches
• Building learning communities, communities of
practice (CoP) using eLearning platforms
• Train the trainers, professional development of
teachers, researchers
• Cooperative approaches and cross-disciplinary
efforts (at local, national, regional (e.g. ICIMSS),
European, international levels), increasing the
mobility, division of labor, alliances between
different types of institutions
European Masters and Doctorates
• Common practice in some disciplines
• Ministries of education encourage universities to enter
joint degree programs and supra-national initiatives
• Currently a work package in E-CultureNet to design a
European Master and a European PhD program in
Digital Culture (covering specializations such as
museum management, archival management, digital
library management, preservation of cultural objects,
etc.): Benedetto Benedetti at Scuola Normale in Pisa
(building upon their international courses in Cortona),
Francesca Bocci in Bologna, Manfred Thaller in
Cologne, Gerhard Budin in Vienna, ICIMSS, Free
University Amsterdam, many “memory institutions” and
companies are actively involved, and additional partners
are highly welcome!
• Still many legal, administrative, and logicistical problems
have to be tackled
Cooperation in E-CultureNet
• Focus: education and research in digital culture
• At present a thematic network project in the
digicult area
– Research matrix
– NAS and beyond
– DEER (distributed Europ. electronic resource)
– European Masters/Doctorates
• EoI for 6FP, consortium building going on,
cooperation with other groups, membership
being extended in NAS and beyond