Transcript Place in space: library services in a shared network space Lorcan Dempsey VP, Research OCLC Research Library Directors Conference, March 5, 2002

Place in space: library
services in a shared
network space
Lorcan Dempsey
VP, Research
OCLC Research Library Directors
Conference, March 5, 2002
Space and place
Overview
• Some pictures – Library in the space of
places
• Some graphics – Library in the space of
flows
• Working in a shared network space
• Some conclusions
© R. Alston
When, early in this century, Virginia Woolf needed to find
out the truth about women, she headed to the Round
Reading Room of the British Museum, for ''if truth is not to
be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where,'' she
asked, ''is truth?'' Truth, it pains me to report, decamped
last month to a new library near St. Pancras Station, loosed
from its moorings in the British Museum after an
intermittently happy marriage of nearly two and a half
centuries. The great Round Reading Room where, Woolf
said, one stood ''as if one were a thought in the huge bald
forehead,'' is to be parted from its readers. Among divorces,
it was perhaps one of the more easily predictable, but
nonetheless painful to those of us whose inner landscape
has been irreversibly redrawn.
Angeline Goreau. New York Times, Nov 9 1997
I have only to reach my hand up to the bookshelves above
my desk and pick out a book, and open it, and plunge my
nose between its pages, to retrieve that smell. The book is
The Captain’s Death Bed and other essays, by Virginia Woolf,
published in 1950, which I bought a couple of years ago at
the Belfast Public Libraries’ annual sale. When I inhale, I am
transported back to the 1950s and the Falls Road Library,
where I get the allied aroma of polished linoleum and
varnished shelving. I detect a gleam of brass here, too,
coming from the handles of the big doors, but also from the
little pulls of the filing-cabinet drawers, and I wonder are
they implicated in the overall smell. They would be
polished, yes, but the brass itself ….. I remember a
reference somewhere to a ‘Roman connoisseur’ who could
distinguish among five kinds of patina on a bronze by the
smell ….
• Ciaran Carson. This is what libaries are for’. The Dublin Review, Autumn 2001
The book
… the growing explosion of information … creates a
reactionary tendency on the part of readers to stress the
familiarity and relative immutability of static texts, such as
paper books. This impulse is particularly strong with respect to
literature which, as an important repository of a society's
identity, is a domain to which overwhelmed members of the
society will turn for security, and which is consequently seen
as most threatened by the information explosion. In our fin-desiècle world, typified by informational and societal variety and
indeterminacy, people's needs for dependable institutions are
reinforced….
Centripetal Textuality. C. Aaron Potter. Victorian Studies Volume 41, Number 4
Libraries in the space of places have
• facilitated particular economies of attention and
patterns of experience
Experience
– ‘inner landscape’/‘a house I grew up in’
Institution
• manifested the institutional role of libraries
– authoritative, well-understood and persistent agency.
• been vertically organised around the management
of ‘atoms’
– multiple redundant repositories.
Organisation
Overview
• Some pictures – Library in the space of
places
• Some graphics – Library in the space of
flows
• Working in a shared network space
• Some conclusions
Space of places
Space of flows
Shared cataloging – 70s
Space of flows
Resource sharing – 80s
Space of flows
Article discovery and delivery – 90s
Space of flows
Collaborative
reference,
Archiving,
Digitisation,
Scholarly
communication – 00s
Libraries in the space of flows
• Progressive entry into space of flows as
resources and services become digital
• Being digital suggests reorganisation to best
leverage individual and collective strengths
• Remove redundancy
– DIY digitisation and preservation
Overview
• Some pictures – Library in the space of
places
• Some graphics – Library in the space of
flows
• Working in a shared network space
• Some conclusions
Working in a shared space
• Libraries co-evolve with the organisations
they serve, themselves variably responding
to change
• A foundational reshaping of research,
learning, communication, and cultural
engagement
• Institutional uncertainty creates polarity
between ‘dreary digital apocalypse’ and
conservative resistance
A shared space: active reshaping in a
new medium
• Scholarly communication:
– Moving from author-publisher-distributor-library chain to
– … web in which all are potentially in contact with each
other.
– Co-evolution of new institutional forms with the material
support of space of flows
– Organisation
– Experience
– Institutions
flux
A shared space – on campus
• The Digital Library, providing access for staff and students, wherever
they are located, to networked information resources, which may in turn
be disclosed to the outside world.
• e-Learning systems, providing the University with the capacity to enable
learning and teaching in a flexible, place-independent, online
environment, and enhancing the existing campus learning experience.
• The public Web site, providing a means of marketing the University and
of communicating with students, potential students, alumni and others.
• The Corporate Intranet, providing staff with access to information and
communication resources, and to means of conducting their business
in a secure, online environment.
• A Student Intranet, providing students with access to student-centred
information, learning resources, course management and
communication facilities, as well as the ability to conduct financial and
administrative functions online.
• And lots of other stuff.
Hull
A shared space: on the web
• Previously distinct activities enter a shared
space.
• No resource is the single focus of a user’s
attention.
• Complementary demands
– Demand-side economies of scale
– Selective depth of access
– Surface in users’ own space
A shared space: the creative user
• Digital scholarship
• Digital learning
• Cultural heritage
• Growing importance of unique materials (u)
– Supporting creators
– Managing intellectual informational assets
– Preserving and disclosing
– Collectible?
Overview
• Some pictures – Library in the space of
places
• Some graphics – Library in the space of
flows
• Working in a shared network space
• Some conclusions
Economy of attention and experience
• How to enrich learning and scholarship
through engaging experience?
• How should the library engage with resource
readers, creators, analysers, assemblers,
…?
• Transition: ‘the portal problem’
• How to engage with learners effectively?
• How to surface resources where users are?
Institutions
• Uncertainty of transition – research, learning
and communication
• Sterility of constant reinvention
– Unique materials
• Need for ‘dependable institutions’
– E.g. preservation
• Libraries values make them such institutions
– organise to deliver
Horizontal organisation around the space
of flows
• Being digital – progressive entry to space of
flows
• Hybrid organisation
• Digital collections
– Access and preservation
Thankyou
[email protected]