Transcript Libraries, digital libraries and digital library research Lorcan Dempsey OCLC Keynote presentation at European Conference on Digital Libraries 2004 University of Bath September 12 – 17 2004

Libraries, digital libraries and
digital library research
Lorcan Dempsey
OCLC
Keynote presentation at
European Conference on Digital
Libraries 2004
University of Bath
September 12 – 17 2004
Overview
Holes
‘There was once a man who aspired to be the author of the
general theory of holes.
When asked “What kind of hole – holes dug by children in the
sand for amusement, holes dug by gardeners to plant lettuce
seedlings, tank traps, holes made by roadmakers?” he would
reply indignantly that he wished for a general theory that
would explain all of these.
This man’s achievement has
passed totally unnoticed except by me.’
Digital libraries and holes …
 ‘Digital library’ has no
precise or agreed referent
 Different communities of
practice
 Different incentives
• Serve
• Build
• Research
 Compare ‘archive’
• Archival institution
• Archival materials
• OAI
• A promise of
preservation?
Digital
library
Research
Digital
library
Library
Digital
libraries
Anthropology/ethnography/
social science
Library and
Information science
Grid
Digital
library
Research
W3C
Computer science
Economics
Industrial R&D
HCI
Semantic web
Entertainment
Digital
library
Jorum
Library
E-research
E-learning
Banks
Cultural
heritage
‘Business’
Digital
libraries
Artstor
Libraries …
Amazon
Inst Rep
arXiv
Internet archive
BBC archive
Digital
library
Research
Emphasis:
Library
Digital
library
Library
Digital
libraries
A library as institution
Libraries
‘So why have I written
this? I can’t show it if it’s
going to contradict or
undermine my case.
There are a number of
reasons. First and
foremost, I am a
librarian. I live for
records and documents.’
A library as institution
Because the purpose and result of absorbing information
is always finally to produce further information, i.e., to
continue the conversation,
the function of the library must be understood as one
that assists members of the community both in taking
particular positions and in recognizing and assessing the
positions taken by others.
Ross Atkinson. Contingency and contradiction: The place(s) of the
library at the dawn of the new millennium
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology, Volume 52, Issue 1, Pages 3-11. Published Online:
2001.
A library as institution
We often hear it said that libraries (and librarians) select,
organize, retrieve, and transmit information or knowledge. That
is true.
But those are the activities, not the mission, of the library.
… the important question is: "To what purpose?" We do not do
those things by and for themselves.
We do them in order to address an important and continuing
need of the society we seek to serve. In short, we do it to
support learning.
Robert Martin. Libraries and Learners in the Twenty-first Century.
http://www.imls.gov/scripts/text.cgi?/whatsnew/current/sp040503.htm
Libraries and digital libraries
 Support research and learning.
 Discover position of others and form one’s own position.
 In order to uphold their mission and values…
 … they must renovate their practices.
“Search engine mindshare”
John Regazzi


“In a survey for this lecture,
librarians and scientists were
asked to name the top scientific
and medical search resources
that they use or are aware
of. The difference is startling.”
Scientists:
• Google
• Yahoo
• PubMed
Librarians:
• Science Direct
• ISI Web of Science
• MedLine
Source: John Regazzi,
The Battle for Mindshare: A battle beyond access and retrieval
http://www.nfais.org/publications/mc_lecture_2004.htm
Pattern recognition – libraries now
 The ‘Amazoogle’ effect
 Value
 User behavior
opaque
 Uncertainty about
digital directions
‘The future is
here. It's just
not evenly
distributed yet’
William Gibson
The difficulty in creating a digital management strategy stems in
part from the bewildering convergence of technological
developments.
Developing a digital management strategy is further
complicated by the fact that there are no recognized patterns or
models for managing digital assets.
Some managers seek to develop fully distributed institutional
repositories but still must choose between open-source
solutions or commercial providers. Others prefer to place their
material in one of a limited number of dedicated storage
institutions. While best practices may exist for given technical
processes, library managers do not have a single paradigm to
use as the basis for developing operational plans and policies to
capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual
output in digital formats.
Managing Digital Assets, CLIR primer
program, 2005
Impact of digital library research?

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User studies
• How much do we know about changing patterns of research,
learning and engagement?
Federation and metasearch
• FDI, IndexData, Cheshire, iPort, …
Local
• OAI/OpenURL
• NISO metasearch – issues still to be addressed successes …
Repositories/digital library systems
• Multiple communities
… but we
• Dspace, Fedora, CONTENTdm, DLXS, ..
Metadata
have many
• Growing acronymic density
open
• Collections, rights, policies, services, …
questions.
• Complex objects, relations
Identifiers/citation
Preservation
Collections grid
Stewardship
Special
collections
Archives
low
•Newspapers
•Gov. docs
•CD, DVD
•Maps
•Scores
low
Freely-accessible
web resources
high
Books
Journals
Uniqueness
high
•Rare books
•Local history materials
•Archives & Manuscripts
•Theses & dissertations
Research and learning
materials
•ePrints/tech reports
•Learning objects
•Courseware
•E-portfolios
•Research data
Untransferred records
Collections grid
high
Publishing
low
disclosure
D2D
low
Amazoogle
high
Reformatting
Cultural
heritage
E-learning
E-research
Digital asset
management
lab books
PDAs
campus portal
learning management systems
exhibitions
course material
text book
personal collections
reading
lists
user environments
resource environment
library
Virtual
reference
Institutional repository
Aggregations
Digital collections
E-reserve
Catalog
Cataloging
ILL
Licensed
collections
The world is changing …
 Why is it difficult?
Scope, scale, diversity
 Systemic issues
• No single system is the sole focus of a user’s attention
• How do systems and services work across the four
quadrants of the collections grid
• How do they fit into wider enterprise systems
 Structure of costs does not reflect users’ value perception
• Reallocation of resources difficult
• Little substitution – ‘and’ not ‘or’
A new world
 Co-evolution with research and learning behaviors which
are themselves changing
 Unsure about appropriate “economy of presence”
• Place, network hub, channel, …
• Web services, portlets, channels, …
• Ambience, diffusion, ubiquity, recombinance, …
 E.g. Trajectory of search
• Search system
• Search system, machine interface, metasearch
• Provide data, externalize search
• Google, OAI
Webulation …
 Monolithic applications resistant to
• Webulation
• Service oriented architectures
 Massive legacy investment in knowledge structure
unconnected to the web
• How to release its value in a network environment
 Content does not easily flow into user space for
manipulation, packaging, aggregation
Vendor environment
 Many libraries have outsourced development effort
 Library vendors do not have large R&D budgets
 Poor out-of-the-box support for ‘below-the-line’ materials in
digital form
 Interesting tension between commodity (standards) and
added value
 OSS environment very unsophisticated
 Limited support for logistics/supply chain/integration
services
Limited application platforms

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Consider
• Google
• Amazon
• E-bay
• MapQuest
Massively central applications
platforms working in loosely
coupled webby world
Software as a service
• APIs
• GMAIL
• Paypal
• search

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Library world
• Fragmented systems and
development effort
• Does not benefit from
scale
• Unsustainable local
development agendas
Organizational rearticulation
difficult.
Application platforms?
• CDL
• JISC
• DEF
• OCLC/RLG
Architecture? Theory?
 Do we need a big picture?
 Allows the articulation of technical and business discussion?
 An unnecessary constraint?
Without it we are susceptible to ….

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Marchitecture
Techeology
Portal envy
Gratuitous acronym requests in RFPs
Beauty contests
• Dspace, Fedora, ….
A history of consumption means that we are
unprepared for contribution
 Standards
 Open source software
 Common services
 Limited structures to capture contribution and support.
And finally ..
 Libraries need to think about libraries not digital libraries
 And they need help from wherever they can get it!