Transcript Programs and Research The network rewrites the library Lorcan Dempsey Phineas L. Windsor Lectureship GSLIS, UIUC Feb 23 2007

Programs and Research
The network rewrites
the library
Lorcan
Dempsey
Phineas L. Windsor
Lectureship
GSLIS, UIUC
Feb 23 2007
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Photo: Robin Alston
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… a hive-like dome …
Louis MacNeice
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Private and social
Collection and catalogue
Space and place
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Some environmental factors
 Workflow
 Attention
 Gravitational hubs
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~18 months old
No FaceBook, MySpace
Library?
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University of Minnesota
http://www.lib.umn.edu/about/mellon/KM%20JStor%20Presentation.pps
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Netvibes, onfolio, my yahoo, myspace, RSS aggregator, …
Self assembled digital identity
Prefabricated (e.g. CMS)
Database > website > workflow
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Workflow
 Then
 Users built workflow around the library
 Now
 The library must build its services around user
workflow
Get into the flow
Disclose into other environments
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What information consumes is rather
obvious: it consumes the attention of its
recipients.
Hence a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention and a need to allocate
that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that
might consume it.
Herbert Simon
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Attention
 Then
 Resources scarce, attention abundant
 Now
 Attention scarce, resources abundant
Competition for attention
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Space
Expertise
Collections
Systems and
services
 Then: vertically integrated
around collection
 Now: moving apart in
network environment
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Place
 Place
 Space
 Space infused with value
 How has the value
changed over time?
 Engagement with
resources?
 Opportunity costs
 Valuable real estate
 Growing pressure in many
environments
 New spaces
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Place
 Exhibitions
 Access to scarce resources – people, equipment,
…
 Social and learning encounter
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Collections
stewardship
high
low
Books
Journals
low
•Open source software
•Newsgroup archives
Research and learning
materials
high
Special
collections
uniqueness
•Newspapers
•Gov. docs
•CD, DVD
•Maps
•Scores
Freely-accessible
web resources
•ePrints/tech reports
•Learning objects
•Courseware
•E-portfolios
•Research data
•Rare books
•Local/Historical
newspapers
•Local history materials
•Archives & Manuscripts,
theses & dissertations
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Collections
Ingest into
local collections
•Print collections
•Storage, digitization, …
•ERM
•Knowledge bases
New behaviors and
support for research
and learning
Digital ‘record’
more important
(prospectus, course
catalog, student
records)
Focus of much digital
library activity.
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Collections
[Shift of expertise]
 Rebalancing system focus
 Industrialized practices in
upper left quadrant.
Elsewhere expensive
 ERM/resolver/knowledge
base
 ILS/catalog
 Repository
 Digital asset management
 More digital everywhere
 Archival perspective
(provenance, versions,
context, integrity, …)
 Situational and relational
(rights, …)
 Collection development:
all quadrants?
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Services &
systems
 The website is not the sole
focus of a user’s attention
 Get into the flow
 Engagement
 Examples
 Workflow
 Attention
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 The catalog: discovery
and disclosure
 Research and learning
support
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Chris Beckett
http://www.scholinfo.com/presentations/2006/8/10/the-new-world-order-in-collection-development-the-commercial-perspective.html
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Discovery:
focus on catalog with some related …
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Local Discovery Environments
Shared Discovery Environments
Syndicated Discovery Environments
Leveraged Discovery Environments
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Local Discovery environment
 Some (not necessarily aligned) motivations
 Make data work harder
 Integrate access to locally managed resources
 Escape from ILS limitations
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NCSU
Rochester
SOLR
Worldcat 2.0
Primo
Encore …
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Shared discovery environment
 Increase impact
 Create gravitational pull
 Aggregate demand and supply
 Reduce costs
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Some comments
 Integration of discovery to delivery becoming
essential
 A move to shared environments seems more
likely with increased ability to ‘view’ different
levels
 Increased gravitational pull: greater use of
collections
 Growing evidence
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Syndicated discovery experience
 Syndicate data or service or links
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Syndicating services
 RSS
 Portlets
 APIs, Protocol-based
 Projects
 Sakailibrary
 …
Not as rapid as one might expect?
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Some remarks
 Syndication of data now common among data
providers
 Routing issue for non-unique materials
 Resolution services
 Worldcat and other union catalogs
 Libraries exposing licensed content holdings
interesting
 Google Scholar
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 Service disclosure of growing importance
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APIs
Web services
Portlets
HTML fragments – ‘search boxes’
Toolbars
Widgets, extensions, …
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The Leveraged discovery experience
 In some ways the most interesting
 Use another discovery service to connect back to
your resources
 Compare to the situation with article databases
and resolvers
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Some remarks
 Some of these are toy-like now, but indicate a
direction
 Increased capacity to ‘sense’ structure
(microformats) will improve ability.
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Expertise
 Developing network
services
 Supporting research and
learning environments (see
Minnesota study)
 Focus more clearly moving
from collection to
supporting research,
learning and personal
development in a network
environment?
 Educational role in relation
to scholarly
communication,
assessment of sources, …
 Developing high value
social spaces
 Separation of information
role from local collection?
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Space
Expertise
Collections
Systems and
services
Web scale
Network level
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Network environment
 Small: everybody is a publisher
 Big: Gravitational hubs are characteristic of the
network environment
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The world only needs five
computers
Greg Papadopoulos
http://blogs.sun.com/Gregp/date/20061110
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“Let's see, the Google grid is one. Microsoft's
live.com is two. Yahoo!, Amazon.com, eBay,
Salesforce.com are three, four, five and six.
(Well, that's O(5) ;)) Of course there are
many, many more service providers but they
will almost all go the way of YouTube; they'll
get eaten by one of the majors. And, I'm not
placing any wagers that any of these six will
be one of the Five Computers (nor that, per
the above examples, they are all U.S. West
Coast based --- I'll bet at least one, maybe
the largest, will be the Great Computer of
China).”
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Long tail information providers
Systemwide
efficiences
Aggregation of supply
•Unified discovery
•Low transaction costs
Aggregation of demand
Impact?
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Libraries and the long tail dynamic
Each book
its reader
Each reader
his/her book
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Aggregate supply?
 1.7% of circulations are ILLs
 (60% of aggregate G5
collection owned by one
library only)
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Aggregate demand?
 20% of collection accounted
for 90% of use
 (2 research libraries over ~4
years)
Note: All statistics are
preliminary and subject
to change. Final report
forthcoming soon.
The Library Long Tail
Number of Holdings
(using holdings as measure of popularity)
“Head”
Figure not drawn to scale;
for illustration purposes only
“Long Tail”
Items ranked by system-wide popularity
Head:
Top 10% of WorldCat records (ranked by holdings)
account for 80% of total WorldCat holdings
Long Tail:
Bottom 90% of WorldCat records (ranked by holdings)
account for 20% of total WorldCat holdings
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Note: All statistics are
preliminary and subject
to change. Final report
forthcoming soon.
ILL and the Long Tail
(FY 2005 OCLC ILL transactions)
Number of Holdings
~75% of ILL requests were
directed at the “Head”
~25% of ILL requests were
directed at the “Long Tail”
Items ranked by system-wide popularity
By comparison, Chris Anderson (The Long Tail, 2006) reports:
Amazon: ~ 25% of sales from the “long tail”
Netflix: ~ 20% of sales from the “long tail”
* Question: are current ILL systems adequately supporting
demand for the library long tail?
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Multilevel approach to …
 Collections
 Shared offsite storage
 Aggregate and analyse
digital collections
 Institutional repository
 Digital storage and
preservation
 Social and consumer
environments
 Social networking
services: tagging,
reviews,
recommendations
 Virtual reference
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 D2D
 Consolidated discovery
 Knowledge base
 Resolution - Service
routing – fulfilment
 Business intelligence
 Synthesize and mobilize
shared usage data
 Recommendation,
management decisions
 Digitization and offsite
storage
A new resource sharing …
Share everything … a pattern for
more efficiently allocating resources
within bigger units
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Uncertainty
The collective collection
Service development
 Concentrate expertise and share outputs
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Space
Expertise
Collections
Systems and
services
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Collections
Systems and
services
Expertise
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