Digital Library Executive Briefing

17 April 2008

John MacCollEuropean Director, OCLC Programs & Research

The Digital Futures Forum: Delivering web-scale library systems

The Digital Futures Forum: Delivering web-scale library systems

The web-scale worldThe web-scale world

Turmoil and chaos

RLG Programs’ analysisRLG Programs’ analysis

• Large-scale information hubs (not libraries)

• Hidden resources needing network exposure

• Information consumer behaviour is changing

• Operating environments are changing

• A consensus is emerging

• But there are barriers to progress …

Within a few years …Within a few years …

• Comprehensive research collecting will soon be done by very few institutions

• Many more will concentrate on promoting their special and unique collections

• Museums and archives will seek to make their materials comprehensively available on the web

• Redundant physical collections will be managed in a centralised way

• Non-local physical materials will be acquired as digital surrogates

• Collecting foci will shift and gain emphasis

• There will be major reorganisations of staffing effort and changes in expertise requirements

Landscape upheavalLandscape upheaval

• Agile, rich, new players

• Library budget pressure

• Service fragmentation

• Redundant effort

• Shallow client connections

UrgencyUrgency

• The last 2-3 years have seen significant changes in the environment (OCLC Perceptions Report)

• Respondents use search engines to begin an information search (84 percent). One percent begin an information search on a libraryWeb site. (Part 1.2)

• Search engines are rated higher than librarians. (Part 2.6)

• Respondents do not trust purchased information more than free information. The verbatim comments suggest a high expectation of free information. (Part 3.4)

• Library users like to self-serve. Most respondents do not seek assistance when using library resources. (Part 2.4)

• Huge impact on expectations – including those of researchers

• How do we move closer to an ideal system-wide organisation?

Current contextCurrent context

• Network-level aggregation of supply and demand

• Newly conditioned expectations affect patterns of learning, research, information production and consumption

• Personal collections and data production

• Social media and social networking

Revenues of key playersRevenues of key players

Source: Michael Jubb, RIN. Conference on Sustaining the Digital Library, Edinburgh, September 2007

David and Goliath?David and Goliath?

• Profits: Microsoft ~£7bn, Google ~£1.8bn• Microsoft expenditure on R&D is equal to the UK

Science Budget (£3.4bn); Google’s is ~£1bn• UK national and university libraries’ total

expenditure is less than half Google’s R&D spend• Even in the US and Canada, the total spend of

the relatively well-endowed ARL libraries amounts only to £1.8bn

• “So an obvious point to make here is that, in a context where commercial companies are clearly already players in the business of developing, providing, and sustaining digital content, it would be foolish to cut ourselves off from the resources that they have available to invest”

Source: Michael Jubb, RIN. Conference on Sustaining the Digital Library, Edinburgh, September 2007

‘Discovery happens elsewhere’‘Discovery happens elsewhere’

1

2

4

7

9

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~20,000)(Typical UK research university library

alexa.com traffic ranking

How we are respondingHow we are responding

Trends and imperatives

Insertion into the flowInsertion into the flow

The changing LMSThe changing LMS

• The Integated Networked Library System

• Deconstructing the LMS …

• … the network-level OPAC (WorldCat Local)

• Network-level ERM (reducing redundancy)

• OSS LMSs: Koha; Evergreen

• Software as a Service

• Divesting institutional hardware and software (the ‘utility model’)

The collective collectionThe collective collection

• Industrial-scale digitisation (move away from boutique)

• Harmonised digitisation

• Digitisation on-demand (user pays?)

• Industrial-scale digitisation of special collections and archives (‘Get over it’)

• Shared print storage (who has the last copy?)

• Community solutions to preservation: CLOCKSS; Portico

Collections freed from buildingsCollections freed from buildings

• LAM convergence

• Collection revelation (metadata, then interoperability, then full-text)

• Greene-Meissner imperative

Awake in a web worldAwake in a web world

• Library services rethought for the web architecture

• Resources (URIs) not repositories

• ‘Usage Factor’ becomes the new ‘Impact Factor’

• The ‘reader’ is an ‘e-shopper’

• Employing the ‘hive mind’; users as contributors and fact-checkers

• Universal Loss of Control?

‘Feels free’‘Feels free’

• Copyright disappears

• Licensed payment - journals and textbooks

• Funder-paid Open Access

• More sophisticated barriers to unlicensed usage

The changing economics of academic libraries?The changing economics of academic libraries?

Consolidate low-use printPool licensing purchase power

Move into research flows

Curation/Preservation

Locally-curated digital content

The Research Outputs Management EnvironmentThe Research Outputs Management Environment

• The third-party-published journal article will lose its authoritative place in the research outputs environment

• Change drivers: Open Access; research assessment; academy-produced metrics; data publication

• Control moving back to the Academy

• Research funder pays: SCOAP3

• Baseline price set by libraries, not publishers?

Possibilities with web-scale library dataPossibilities with web-scale library data

Possibilities with web-scale library dataPossibilities with web-scale library data

Web-scale library data and ‘players’Web-scale library data and ‘players’

The cooperative imperativeThe cooperative imperative

• WorldCat represented cooperation in cataloguing

• Just the beginning?

• We need to continue to leverage the investment in new and imaginative ways

Thank You!Thank You!

Questions?

(Images courtesy of www.galleriaborghese.it)