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OCLC Online Computer Library CenterA local habitation and a name:libraries, places, and networks

Presentation to Cornell University Library Academic Assembly, 3 April

2003

Lorcan Dempsey, VP Research, OCLChttp://www.oclc.org/research/

Overview

Some pictures and text – Virginia Woolf and the library in the space of places

Some issues in the space of flows

!!

© 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. …

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.

Ciaran Carson. This is what libraries are for’. The Dublin Review, Autumn 2001

… 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-de-siècle 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 …

…been vertically organised around the management of places – multiple redundant repositories.

… facilitated particular economies of presence and patterns of experience – ‘inner landscape’/‘a house I grew up in’

… manifested the institutional role of libraries– authoritative, well-understood and persistent agency.– Card catalog, book, “people’s need for dependable

institutions”

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OCLC Online Computer Library Center

Organization and architecture

user environmentsresource environment

lab books

exhibitions

PDAs

learning management systems

campus portal

course materialtext book

new scholarly resources

readinglists

Institutional repository

Digital collections

E-reserveCatalog Licensed

collections

Aggregations

Virtual reference

CatalogingILL

Library serviceLibrary serviceenvironmentenvironmentLibrary serviceLibrary serviceenvironmentenvironment

Collections grid

high low

low

high

stewardship

uni

que

ne

ssBooksJournalsNewspapersGov. docsCD, DVDMapsScores

Special collectionsRare booksLocal/Historical newspapersLocal history materialsArchives & Manuscripts, Theses & dissertations

Research and learning materials •ePrints/tech reports•Learning objects•Courseware•E-portfolios•Research data

Freely-accessible web resourcesOpen source softwareNewsgroup archives

uni

que

ne

ss

Manage commodity materials and services - cost.

Streamline discovery to delivery for print (bought) and digital (licensed) materials

Portalization and resource sharing

Management intelligence – collection management and analysis (print collections)

Incentive to preserve?

Institutional digital content management

Immature (diverse metadata creation practice -- hierarchical description, multiple standards and practices, diverse content management approaches)

Disclose metadata for harvest?

Extend knowledge organization approaches?

Incentive to preserve

Within and across institutions

Services built across institutions

How will we support this (NSDL)

Directions

Z39.50, OpenURL,custom

Z39.50, OpenURL,custom

Links,

…

Links,

…

Catalog revisited,Appropriate copy

Catalog revisited,Appropriate copy

Emerging interest in harvesting

Emerging interest in harvesting

Services?Access and content

Services?Access and content

Below the line

There is growing appreciation among libraries that unique or rare materials – are valuable research and

learning resources– have been underutilized.

There is a growing interest in digitizing cultural heritage materials – as it offers opportunities for

releasing their value in new ways

– as a way of disclosing the memory and identity of communities.

Research and learning behavior is increasingly entering the network space– Library resources need to be

available at the appropriate stage within the learning or research environment

– New forms of engagement and support.

– Research and learning outputs will present major management and curatorial issues

– Institutions and faculty are interested in ‘disclosing’ research and learning materials as part of the scholarly enterprise (OAI)

The Archival Research Center is a direct outgrowth of the belief that primary resource materials should be a major focal point of instruction and research. …. However, traditional access to these materials is cumbersome and labor-intensive and most institutions do not allow copying. …Digitizing these materials keeps them alive and relevent for modern users … (ARL report)

Knowledge bank – OSU – in planning

April 26 2002. A proposal for the development of an OSU knowledge bank

Centralization and decentralization

Cataloging/metadata

Archiving

Harvesting

Virtual reference

Consort at what level?

Incentives?

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OCLC Online Computer Library Center

The economy of presence

Presence

We will, I believe, plot our actions and allocate ourresources within the framework of a new economyof presence. In conducting our daily transactionswe will find ourselves constantly consulting the benefits of the different grades of presence thatare now available to us, and weighing these againstthe costs.

William J Mitchell. E-topia. 2000.

Hubs

All networks produced privileged places at theirjunctions and access points.

William J Mitchell. e-topia. 2000.

… the web pages to which we prefer to link are not ordinary nodes. They are hubs. The better known they are, the more links point to them. … We prefer hubs.

Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi. Linked. 2002.

lab books

exhibitions

PDAs

learning management systems

campus portal

course materialtext book

new scholarly resources

readinglists

Hub

Create hub?

Project services into other hubs

Reconfigureservices –fine-grained

“Creative knowledge you can put in your pocket”

Presence

The dialecticof place and network

Analysis, linking, comparing, manipulation, ..

AgoraAgora

ServicesServices

ArchiveArchive

Presences

Agora– The monumental,

spectacular and special

– Third place – social fabric

– Social exchange and learning

– Commons - commonwealth

– Trust – the ties that bind

Service– Fine grained– Engage with research

and learning– Recombinant

Archive– Distributed collection

requiring different forms of attention

Supporting scholarly behavior in humanities

…contextual mass. (not the canon and top scholarly journals)

Iterative reading?

– personal, full-text collections

Wide reading and chaining?

– federated collections anchored by bibliographies

Collaborating?

– collection communities

Searching and browsing?

– “rich” finding aids that cross institutions and fields of study

Tracking of reading, searching, and writing

Carole Palmer, various

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OCLC Online Computer Library Center

Institutions

Persistant patterns of social organization with understood goals.

Roles in flux

Learning management

Computing

Digital scholarship

Library

Press

Repositories

Portal envy

Support

Promise of ICT greater than fragmented organization can deliver

U W digital scholarship (IMHO)

Library touches all staff

Library is already funded

Library is integral to research and scholarship and needs to extend that role

Institutional repository services vital

Role as technology and research partner as well as support

Digital concierge

Brand in a network age

Library as a partner in the scholarly endeavour

Understanding and supporting research and learning behaviors

Responsible to the scholarly record

Creator of social places.

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OCLC Online Computer Library Center

Sometimes we will use networks to avoid going places. But sometimes, still, we will go places to

network.

W.J.Mitchell