The changing scholarly and cultural record

Lorcan Dempsey

Hall Center for the Humanities, University of KansasDecember 5, 2007

Thanks to Constance Malpass and Brian Lavoie for some contributions

“And in this way my own relationship with Georges Bataille will not be adversely affected either, something I would like to maintain, both because of his assistance at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and because of my plans for naturalization. - The fragment would not escape his attention since the Institute journal is openly displayed in the reading room where he often works; and he is hardly the type of person to react serenely to its contents.”

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The record

• George Bataille deposited the manuscript.

• Quotations: is it possible to imagine a book which rests so much on quotations without the libraries which preserve the scholarly and cultural record the quotations point to and make it available to readers?

A pragmatic look at some issues involved in managing the changing scholarly and cultural record.

The very beginnings of the collection, in Duke Humfrey's Library above the divinity school, showed how Thomas Bodley's own bibliographic vision had to react to a technological shift. The new collection was built to accommodate the transition from the long-established, tried-and-tested technology of unique handwritten texts to the hot new mass-produced technology of the printed codex: in other words, the book. Duke Humfrey's Library has high stacks of shelves, which the reader can't directly access: the world's first closed stacks. These were designed to accommodate the increasing number of books too small to chain securely to open shelves …. Issues of copyright and of access to information were thus built into the institutional DNA from the start.

[John Lanchester: Who owns what in the digital age? | News | Guardian Unlimited Books]

… 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

high low

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sBooksJournalsNewspapersGov. docsCD, DVDMapsScores

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

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

•Institutional records•Reports, newsletters, etc

Freely-accessible web resourcesOpen source softwareNewsgroup archives

Selectively acquire andpersistently manage?•Bought?

•Licensed?

Memory•Libraries, archives,museums.

Institutional and personal processesgenerate materials:Records, data sets,….

Books

Rareness is commonE-volution

Rareness is common … in the G5

G5 aggregate collection:• 10.5 million books• ~60 percent represent unique contribution by one or another of the G5 libraries

61%Held by 1

20%Held by 2

10%Held by 3

6%Held by 4

3%Held by 5

… and beyond

System-wide print book collection (as of January 2005)• ~32 million print books

37%Held by 1

5%Held by > 100

3%Held by 51 - 100

5%Held by 26 - 50

20%Held by 6 - 25

30%Held by 2 - 5

Cumulative age distribution of G5 holdings

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0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

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Years

Pro

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> 80 percent of Google 5collection post 1923

> 80 percent of Google 5collection post 1923

• Space – opportunity costs• Value in research and learning: disciplinary

differences• Mass digitization• Off site storage• Converting ‘owned’ materials into ‘licensable’

materials

Mining text

Thematic research collections

Beyond books

“It is only when we translate the old style-based thinking and language of historians into new modes of representation that we can begin to grasp the complex relationships between architectural production and the creation of … cultural identities.”

Stephen Murray, Columbia University

Then: E. Viollet Le Duc Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1874) (1st American Ed. 1875)

Now: Interactive, multi-dimensional navigation of a networked resource

• Increased emphasis on collective management: preservation, storage, resource sharing, digitization

• Emergence of alternative institutional models for print sales?

• E-volved formats: – Thematic research collections– New representational modes– Deeply mined digital collections alongside print

collections– Special collections of the future?

Stewarding Unique collectionsMoving into network environmentReconfigurations

Then: Rich description with little scholarly content and few opportunities to remix or re-use; continued reliance on library mediation for scholarly access to material

Now: Federated access to multi-institutional holdings with support for personal collection-building and sharing

“On bokes rede I ofte, as I yow tolde.But wherefore that I speke al this? Nat yooreAgon it happede me for to beholdeUpon a bok, was write with lettres olde”

Unbinding Chaucer’s bokes (and bookes)

41 occurrences

111 occurrences

33 occurrences

• In vanilla world, the institutionally unique becomes more important?

• Digital visibility creates use– The digital copy creates interest in the aura of the

original?

• Computational potential reveals new possibilities

• Significant curatorial challenges for the library

• Published materials: discourse

• Primary materials: evidence

• Interpreted materials: exhibition

• Library

• Archive

• Museum

The products of research, learning,and administration

Technical reportsRecordsLearning materials…..

University of Minnesotahttp://www.lib.umn.edu/about/mellon/KM%20JStor%20Presentation.pps

• Research and learning behaviors change– Then: Final ‘product’: publish and archive– Now: Process generates reusable outputs

• E.g. data sets, learning materials, blog commentary, …

• Institutional memory– Reports, course catalog, …

• Traces– Surveillance, logs, social, …

The open network

The Northern Ireland Political Collection (NIPC) is a unique resource. No other institution in a localised conflict has systematically collected material from all sides. Much less has it been done in the field, and often literally across the barricades.

The web?

Kewl!!!!

The library takes a networked resource and adds value for the local constituency:• Faceted browse based on genre/document type• Full-text searching of achived sites• Selection of seed URLs and frequency of crawls informed by subject specialists and scholars

• The medium of identity construction• The venue of dissemination of scholarly and

cultural materials• Evidence• What and who to collect?

So…

Securing the scholarly and cultural record

Community?

Institution?

The record ain’twhat it used tobe?

•Intervention required•Preserving print?

More assumes the attributes of the ‘special’

Curatorial responsibility for

more unique materials?

Institutional Capacities?

Collaborative sourcing?

Examples•Thematic research collection•Curated databases•Institutional ‘identity’

Managing digital?

An archival perspective?

ProvenanceEvidential integrityVersioning

The scholarly and cultural record is “incorrigibly plural”.

Curation requires a plural response.

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.’

THANK YOUhttp://orweblog.oclc.org