synthesize-specialize-mobilize

interim blogging assignment: liberal arts library

2010-12-07T16:36:00.000-08:00

Since I'm serving as interim director of Watzek Library this year, I decided to start a new blog about liberal arts college libraries cleverly entitled liberal arts library. I wasn't sure if I'd have time for this, but I've managed to get a few posts up so far. I'm going to take a hiatus from posting on ssm for awhile.

Power of Pull and liberal education

2010-08-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

I read through most of The Power of Pull (Economist review) earlier this summer and have been thinking through the implications of the book's ideas for higher ed and libraries. The book contrasts the old way of doing business or getting where an agenda is "pushed" down from above to "pull", which the authors define as “the ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges.”

The idea is that in today's network world, innovation can happen much more quickly when people at the cutting edge of a field collaborate with others that share their same passions.

In one sense, this book is advocating that business innovation happen more like innovation in the academy: sharing knowledge is the way. On the other hand, they are very critical of education that is programmed or 'pushed' from above.

The book also emphasizes the importance of geography and the serendipitous encounters that can happen with those in close proximity. Even in this networked world, they argue that living among those with similar passions is highly beneficial. Perhaps the intellectual connections and community of the liberal arts campus can model this phenomenon. The authors argue that networked technology can enrich our connections to people in a certain place: one might maintain meaningful connections in a handful of cities and better coordinate in-person meet-ups with mobile tech.

They argue that "knowledge flows" have overtaken "knowledge stocks" in importance. Big repositories of knowledge don't give a business (or perhaps a university) a major advantage anymore. It's having access to the knowledge flowing at the cutting edge that really enables innovation. They emphasize the importance of transferring tacit knowledge between individuals at the edge of a field. Another argument for the opportunities that the liberal arts provide for close encounters with experts in a field. At a presentation the other day at the Lewis & Clark Fall Retreat on faculty/student research, a biologist said that once a student begins working at the cutting edge of knowledge, a switch is flipped and their passion for learning changes in a dramatic way.

Towards the end of the book, they talk a lot about "shaping strategies" and "shaping platforms": Shaping strategies being a way of moving an entire industry or community to a new model, and the platform being some system put in place to do so. In the library context, this made me think that a big platform like WorldCat could have a bolder shaping aspiration behind it. Project Bamboo seems like an attempt at a shaping platform.

I was excited to see that one of the book's authors, John Seely Brown, is a NITLE fellow. Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for pointing this book out at an Orbis Cascade presentation in July (see also his blog post on the book).

Jim Kopp

2010-08-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

As some of you may have heard, my boss at Lewis & Clark, Jim Kopp died August 5th after a struggle with a rare and complex medical condition. Jim was a big part of my life over the last decade, bringing me over to Portland from Bend to work at Lewis & Clark in 2001. As a boss and mentor, he gave me the support, freedom, and encouragement to grow in my career.

One of a now nearly extinct breed of librarian/scholars, Jim had a restless sort of ambition and an appetite for new challenges. He worked at the libraries of Columbia, Washington State, University of Portland, and the NLM; he was a VP at a startup library automation company, a head of a library consortium, and finally, a liberal arts college library director. A librarian, technologist, historian, and book collector, Jim's eclecticism in a way suited him perfectly for the liberal arts. He was never totally content where he was, however, and perhaps the utopian in him always kept his eyes open for greener pastures.

Like me, Jim cut his teeth in the library world as a technologist. He was of an earlier generation of systems librarians than me and by the time he brought me on staff this aspect of his career was done. What he retained from it was an ability to recognized innovative work and find ways of supporting it, and Jim did this in many areas of the library including those affiliated with technology.

As a manager, Jim understood something that I'm just coming to understand: your top priority to create the support system needed for your employees to perform in their positions. Jim was a hands off manager but he made sure that everyone on his team had the resources needed to do their jobs. He cared about his employees as people and understood that doing so was not only right, it also made for a stronger organization. Watzek's excellence owes much to Jim's wisdom here.

If you worked with Jim, you got to know his affection for writing. He favored longish memoranda written in a learned sort of prose. Even when writing something like a performance evaluation, Jim wrote elegantly and played with words. He was also a smart ass and often had fun lampooning those absurd obstacles and circumstances that would sometimes frustrate our work at Watzek.

I still can't believe Jim is gone. On any given day, I feel like I'll turn the corner in the library and see him or that an email will come through from him somewhere in the ether. Though he lived a full, rich life, I believe that he still had much work left to do in this world.

I will miss him.

digital projects from class

2010-08-01T08:59:00.001-07:00

Just wanted to share the excellent student projects from the Digital Initiatives class that I taught for Emporia State University this summer. Working in groups, students were asked to identify and organize a set of digital assets in a way that created some new value.

In particular I would note that the 'Amusing Atheneaum' project made very creative use of the Blogger platform and the 'Artistic Reflections on Deepwater Horizon' project took an ambitious approach to collecting digital objects around a contemporary theme using Omeka. Enjoy!

code4lib NW: Developing a Digital Initiatives Program at a Liberal Arts College

2010-06-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

code4lib NW was a great time yesterday. The location at U of O's Portland campus in the White Stag building made for a nice bike ride in from my house, and there were a bunch of interesting presentations. I especially enjoyed the ones on Needlebase, NoSQL databases, and the challenges of managing U of O's outgoing president's electronic papers. And, I was lucky enough to win a brand new Netbook. (I got a hard time about it because I was complaining about how much I've grown to hate typing on Watzek Library's netbook earlier in the day). This netbook does have a nicer keyboard, though.

The only thing missing from the day, of course, was the presence of Terry Reese, who's bike accident a couple weeks back has him taking some time off.

Here are my presentation slides:

I noticed last night that Lorcan Dempsey was kind enough to reference the blog post on the presentation the other day.

code4lib NW: digital initiatives presentation

2010-06-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be giving a talk at the code4lib Northwest conference on Monday and I thought that I'd put together my thoughts for it here. The theme is creating a digital initiatives program at a liberal arts college.

I believe that we're in the middle of a paradigm shift for academic libraries. As content shifts to the network and as discovery is disintermediated from the library, the work needed to support the library's traditional roles as buyer, archiver, and gateway to information is slowly diminishing. Concurrent with this trend is the rise of potential opportunities for new roles. The new roles that we hear most about, perhaps, are instruction in information literacy/fluency and the management of digital assets.

Within the digital assets area, I think that the development of thematic digital projects is a particularly fertile area. When faculty approach teaching, their own research or a collaborative research project, they now have opportunities to do sophisticated things with information resources. Some examples include:

a ceramics professor uses his connection with hundreds of artists around the world to create digital collection of ceramic art images (accessCeramics)
an environmental studies program uses social bookmarking software to develop a virtual library of research resources on environmental issues at various geographic sites (L&C Environmental Studies)
using an online digital collection, students observe the process of writing a poem by viewing its evolution from an initial draft through various stages of revision and eventual publication (William Stafford Archive)
students do primary historical research on a topic and contribute their work to a publicly available online collection of historical research (History Engine)
a biology professor studying hundreds of different spider species wants displays her findings geographically on Google Earth and Google Maps

I think academic libraries should develop the expertise and capacity to support these kinds of thematic projects. This is relatively new territory for libraries. We are more comfortable managing our own internal catalogs and collections and providing standardized services. The institutional repository is really not much of a leap for us: it's an attempt to go out and uniformly collect and catalog objects. Many digital collections don't go much further than digitize and catalog a defined set of photographs, manuscripts, etc. held in the library.

But I think there are more interesting opportunities when we actually wade out into the messy world of teaching and research and offer up our expertise at organizing information. A way of doing this is to establish some kind of a digital initiatives program that faculty can engage with directly. We see this at large institutions such as University of Virginia and Columbia, but also now increasingly at liberal arts colleges like Hamilton, The University of Richmond, and Kenyon. The programs at these institutions in one way or another offer support to faculty for teaching or research related digital projects.

At Lewis & Clark, it is my goal to develop a digital initiatives program from the library that provides support for academic projects that involve sophisticated information management problems. Our library has been ramping up support for digital initiatives for the last seven years or so. We began with initiatives to digitize student theses and put some of our archival collections online. We also developed a digital image collection to support arts and humanities instruction. As a side project a few years ago we started working with an studio art professor to develop a collection of images of contemporary ceramics: accessCeramics. The project has involved all sorts of interesting technical and organizational challenges. Above all, it has been a a truly collaborative effort between several library staff and the faculty.

The success of this project made me want to expand the library's digital initiatives to include more collaborative academic projects. However, I wasn't really sure if demand existed for these kinds of projects. To find out, I made an effort this spring to speak with at least one faculty member in each department at Lewis & Clark about potential digital collaborations with the library.

After talking to about 15 faculty, I have a good handful of ideas for projects, some more imminent than others. They include: web mapping wine and foi gras regions in Oregon and France for an anthropologist, digitizing, translating, and annotating collection of published documents from an early 20th century Moroccon Jewish community for another anthropologist, creating an online map to accompany a book about Mount Fuji by a historian of modern Japan, developing an online archive of historical depictions of Lewis & Clark's slave York for a communications scholar, building maps and phylogenetic tree of various spider species for a biologist, developing an archiving system for recitals for the Music department.

A few trends emerged in my conversations. Even though I unearthed some real cool ideas for projects, traditional scholarly communication methods still seemed to dominate faculty thinking when discussing their academic work. Digital work in non traditional forms is bonus work in their eyes and those working for tenure are hard pressed to find the time for it. Geocoding and web mapping were popular projects. There is a seemingly insatiable demand for assistance with generic web design, development, and upkeep by faculty for their personal pages and pages related to their research and other academic endeavors like conferences. Among the handful of scientists I spoke with, I had been expecting to find a need for long term preservation and access of scientific data, but I found that most of these researchers had disciplinary level destinations on the internet for the research data that they believed was critical to preserve and disseminate. The scientists' interests were in making their scientific work more accessible to a broader audience via the web rather than than data preservation.

Right now, I'm still in the process of talking to more faculty to get a feel for the types of projects that might be useful for their teaching/research. My goal is to come up with a digital initiatives program that offers certain services based on what faculty want and what we can do. As of now, I'm thinking that our digital initiatives program should prioritize projects that involve a sophisticated information management problem and provide a relatively broad impact, especially among students of our institution.

I'm hoping that we can provide a couple different levels of support: one level would be consulting. We would offer our expertise to jump start someone on an information management project: building a Google map, organizing a wiki or a database, teaching a class about mashups. A second level of support would be project based: we would take responsibility for a finite project: developing part of a website, a database etc. The top level of support would involve making a long term commitment to a digital resource or collection, the kind of commitment we now have to accessCeramics.

The other critical aspect of this initiative is to find the human resources internal to the library to support it. To do so, we need staff with expertise in a few key areas:

metadata profiling
metadata assignment
information architecture
web design
web programming
project management
grant writing

In our shop, we have a Digital Services Coordinator at Watzek with voracious appetite for web development and programming who likes nothing better to be given free reign on a challenging, creative project. As our portfolio of projects has grown, however, he is stretched for time. Fortunately, we have a cataloging assistant who is emerging as a talented designer and creative metadata strategist, and due to some increased efficiencies in our tech services operations, we've been able to reallocate some of her position to design and digital project metadata work. Special Collections and Visual Resources do most of the metadata work on digital projects in their areas. I do some web programming but recently, more project management and grant writing.

Nevertheless, to expand further, we'll need to find more time and expertise among our staff in a budget neutral environment. As manager of our cataloging/acquisitions (Collection Management Services) operations, I'm looking hard to find ways that we can save time on things like copy cataloging, serials checkin, and govt. docs. Even if we can free up time, developing the skills among staff in areas needed to support digital projects remains a challenge. Making the switch from traditional cataloging to digital project metadata work isn't a huge leap. But finding staff who can do work like web design and web programming is a bigger shift. As a manager, if there are any signs of that kind of aptitude in existing employees, I'm looking to foster it.

There are some potential pitfalls to a digital initatives program like this. The first one is overloading library staff: we have a lot to do just keeping our own house in order, and my faith in network level services lightening that load may be a bit naive. Many institutions would view this kind of function as more appropriately filled by a unit independent from the library, perhaps in IT or instructional technology. In our case, I want to keep IT in the loop at all stages, make sure that we don't overlap our services, and partner when possible. Another criticism is that the services provided by this program could represent a very uneven distribution of library resources to support the interests of particular faculty. As a library, we're used to providing relatively broad based transactional services like checking out books and answering reference questions that benefit a wide swath of the institution. This is something to be conscious of when designing this type of program. The other side of it is that these projects are often immediately beneficial to current students and faculty whereas many library-centered or institutionally-oriented digitization projects have somewhat diffuse, long term benefits.

I think developing this kind of program has some compelling advantages. These kinds of services can really advance faculty research and teaching and help assure the continued relevance of the library. If we help faculty do the heavy lifting needed to do more advanced projects and get more grants and recognition, they will back the library that much more. Administrators like deans and presidents love to see this kind of innovation as it can truly advance an institution's core mission, and in fact many of the centers I mentioned above have been started in top-down fashion by such officials.

This kind of creative work can help energize a library and connect library staff to the academic mission of the institution. I also think there is a tie in with library liaison work and library instruction. Collaborative work with faculty on collection development, instruction sessions, and information literacy can foster connections that lead to some of these digital projects. I'm hoping that reference/instruction librarians can be partners in this endeavor as well, especially when it comes to recruiting interested faculty.

To put this in perhaps more tangible terms for the code4lib crowd: starting this type of program can lead to more cool projects. I think the code4lib phenomenon is about the library becoming that much more of a creative organization, and starting a digital initiatives program will move it further in that direction.

debt and for profit colleges

2010-06-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

At the Frye Institute and in EDUCAUSE circles, I've often heard a lot about how we should be keeping our eye on the for-profit higher education sector. This speech (referenced in IHE), given by Steven Eisman, an investor who was profiled in The Big Short, is pretty interesting.

faculty perceptions of academic libraries

2010-04-23T15:43:00.000-07:00

There were a few things that I found interesting in this recent ITHAKA report by Schonfeld and Housewright on faculty views of academic libraries. First was the delineation of five library roles:

Gateway
Archive
Buyer
Research support
Teaching support

The buyer role continues to be perceived as the most important. These roles are fuzzy, of course. One could say that a library fulfills its archive role when it buys services such as JSTOR or Portico that effectively archives materials.

They find that the library's role as a gateway to information is continuing to decrease in importance in the eyes of faculty.

Helping users “locate information for their research” has become a far more competitive endeavor than it was in the days of print, and the library now competes with Google, publishers, aggregators, and other network-level services to serve its constituents. The fact that the perceived value of the gateway role has declined is a point that must be factored into libraries‟ resource allocation decisions;

Does this mean that we should invest less energy in discovery tools because Google has it covered, or does it mean that we should invest more in them? I think the conventional wisdom has been that libraries need to invest more, but this is perhaps worth rethinking. My view has been that the gateways that we do manage (our catalog, our website, and more distantly, research databases) provide unique functionality and we need to invest more resources in them to meet user expectations even though they are becoming less important on a relative basis.

The two new roles in our most recent survey, teaching support and research support, suggest unique opportunities for libraries to further develop campus relationships. But notwithstanding noteworthy library investments in everything from the information commons to data curation services, faculty members across disciplines do not yet value the teaching and research support roles nearly as highly as they do the “infrastructural” roles.

I think that it's possible that the new teaching and research support roles of libraries will by their very nature unevenly benefit faculty constituencies. Whereas traditional library services tend to focus on the provision of broadly beneficial, transactional services such as access to books and journal articles, these new roles are more consultative in nature. They may benefit a smaller percentage of faculty who's teaching and research needs align themselves well with new library teaching and research support services.

On one hand, the fields whose practices are most traditional also appear to contain the library‟s greatest supporters; therefore, if the library shapes its roles and activities based on what is currently most highly appreciated by faculty, it may lose a valuable opportunity to innovate and position itself as relevant in the future. On the other hand, if the library develops new and innovative roles and services that address unmet needs, becoming newly relevant and even essential to those scholars who have moved farthest away from it, in the near term it may lose the support of its most ardent supporters.

I find this to be a relevant question. Should libraries simply give up on the scientists who seem to be more self sufficient and concentrate our services on the humanists who continue to regard the library as their 'laboratory'?

digital humanities at liberal arts colleges

2010-04-16T15:26:00.001-07:00

At the NITLE Summit, I became aware of some digital humanities programs at liberal arts colleges. I'm working to move our digital services work here at Watzek towards a more fleshed out digital initiatives program, so I was really excited to see other colleges moving in this direction including Hamilton, Wheaton, Occidental, and Willamette.

open access and institutional repositories

2010-04-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

I have been watching with interest as some liberal arts college libraries adopt faculty resolutions on open access and commit to archiving preprint versions of journal articles in their institutional repositories. Oberlin did this not too long ago, and Rollins passed a resolution in February.

I spoke with Jonathon Miller about the Rollins initiative at the NITLE Summit in New Orleans last month. He said that one key to their success was that a couple faculty champions backed the process. Faculty were motivated to support the proposal because of a.) an awareness of the financial problems related to the current systems of scholarly communication and b.) a motivation to more widely disseminate their work, especially to scholars without access to pricey journals.

While I am supportive of such resolutions, I do question whether associated mandates to deposit scholarship in an institutional repository make sense. As an alternative, I would propose adopting a faculty resolution in support of open access with a mandate (or at least a suggestion) that faculty deposit preprints of articles in an appropriate disciplinary repository like arXive. It seems to me that most faculty work fits better alongside other work in the same discipline rather than alongside mostly unrelated work done at the same institution.

Institutional repositories can be beneficial as a way of showcasing and tracking the scholarly output of an institution. But I think that newer platforms like Vivo and BibApp that support scholarly bibliographies but also aim to achieve broader things like scholarly reputation management and the fostering of interdisciplinary connections are a potentially more effective way of doing this.

WorldCat Local and Electronic Resources

2010-02-16T11:38:00.000-08:00

One of our biggest frustrations with WorldCat Local has been the difficulties involved in surfacing e-book collections. The standard way of adding an ebook set to your catalog--uploading a file of MARC records provided by the vendor--doesn't surface records in WCL.

To get records for an e book set in WCL, you need to add records to your local ILS catalog, make sure those records have OCLC numbers in them and have your holdings set on the corresponding records in OCLC. This can be hard to achieve if vendor provided record sets don't have OCLC numbers on them to start with.

OCLC has an initiative in place to get vendor supplied MARC records into WorldCat, but agreements are not in place for all vendors and the process is somewhat cumbersome. Also, as I understand it, in some cases these vendor record sets aren't truly in WorldCat, they just show up in certain WorldCat Local instances where the library subscribes to the ebook collection. Effectively, this is creating "shadow" records in WorldCat that are only available to certain subscribers.

I really wish that we could just flip on and off collections of ebooks in WCL in the same way that one adds and removes collections of e journals in Serials Solutions' management interface. Having to load records into a local system and worry about connecting those records to OCLC records is a big hassle. I realize that there may be some vendor licensing issues that prevent this, but this seems like a good goal.

Perhaps there could be some kind of connection between Serials Solutions and OCLC along the same lines as their e serials holdings project that would achieve this sort of ease in adding and removing e book sets.

Another question to ask within the e book arena: why are we so dependent on vendors for bibliographic records? Libraries should be able to collectively catalog e book sets, especially in cases where the vendors want to hold their records tightly to their chest. Some kind of crowdsourcing application for cataloging an entire e book set might achieve this. Any libraries who want records for a certain e book set sign up, and the app divvies up cataloging between them.

shared ILS concept

2010-02-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

The Orbis Cascade Alliance's Collaborative Tech Services Team has been charged with implementing "a Shared Best Practices working group to develop guidelines for effective technical services policies and operations that support the Alliance goal of a shared ILS (Integrated Library System)."

At our team's first meeting, I was charged with taking a shot at what an ideal Alliance shared ILS might look like. I am supposed to produce a white paper on this topic for consideration by the Team.

The work of the Shared Bibliographic Database Task Force serves as a good starting point in this thinking process. Their report points out many of the potential implications of a shared ILS as well as advantages and drawbacks (scenario 3).

Perhaps the most common notion of a shared ILS would be all 36 Alliance members piling on board a traditional ILS software package that was designed for large, complex organizations (but might not be designed to handle as many separate and large organizations and sub organizations as comprise the Alliance). A big advantage in doing this would be savings on system maintenance, local system administration and hardware costs.

To make this happen successfully, member libraries would have to standardize their operations around certain system settings like circulation loan rules because the system simply couldn't handle as much local variation as is in place now. This standardization might create efficiencies in itself in that it would promote common best-practices workflows around the shared settings. A shared system could also create efficiencies through the reuse and sharing of data. For example, by sharing bibliographic records, we could reduce the overall time and effort required for database maintenance.

The big disadvantage in sharing a system this way would be a potential lack of flexibility to tailor the system to the each institution's needs: whether this customization came in the form of special loan rules, distinct subject headings, etc. Another issue might be that the system would simply become unwieldy for staff to use because data from all the institutions would overload user interfaces for staff. Imagine having to wade through hundreds of item records for a given bibiliographic record (of course these effects could be mitigated by special views, etc.) And finally another disadvantage would be the potential red tape needed to make any change to system settings.

Another model of a "shared ILS" would provide every library with an independent "virtual" ILS delivered in a Software As a Service (SAAS) fashion. Because the software would be delivered over the web, we would "share" the underlying software and computing infrastructure. We'd be "sharing" an ILS with other Alliance members (and perhaps whomever else the vendor contracted with) but we wouldn't even know it. By doing things this way, we wouldn't lose any independence and we'd still potentially save money on system maintenance (both vendor supplied and via our own staff). But we wouldn't be gaining any potential benefits possible through the sharing of data.

The third option would be a hybrid of the two above and is the one that probably corresponds to the most likely reality. The ILS would be shared where there were benefits to be gained, separate where there were not. For example, in circulation every library could have their own patron types and loan rules, but those patron types and loan rules would map to higher consortial levels of abstraction in order to support borrowing between institutions (kind of like they do now in Navigator but in the same system). In acquisitions, data about what materials were on order at each institution would be shared, but fund data wouldn't. In cataloging, we would share bibliographic records but perhaps control some of our own fields. In e resources, both individual and group purchases and licenses would be supported.

Another twist, of course, is the notion of sharing the ILS on a global level, which is more or less the vision of OCLC webscale management services. This creates the need for an even higher level of abstraction than at that of the consortium.

In coming up with a model for an ideal shared ILS for the Alliance, I'll be considering all of these scenarios.

Liberal Arts and Web Collaboration

2010-02-15T13:33:00.001-08:00

Pete Vidito, of our Environmental Studies program, recently published a web page that suggests how elements of liberal arts learning can be developed using Web 2.0 tools.

Semantic Web at Liberal Arts Colleges

2009-12-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

As a NITLE online seminar, NITLE's Director of Research Bryan Alexander gave a great overview of the semantic web and potential applications in academia. It was impressive how much he fit into an hour long session. Today, I was thinking about how this would have made a cool day long workshop, but then we really would have needed to move from the theoretical to the practical.

Semantic.edu, an introduction

View more presentations from BryanAlexander.

I think that as more academic content gets marked up semantically, it should change the way we do research. Searching and organizing content as one does academic research should get more sophisticated.

We could start marking up data in our digital collections using RDF. Looks like there is a good way of doing this for creative commons data. Search engines are starting to use this information more.

Digital Initiatives at a Liberal Arts College Library

2009-12-04T09:24:00.000-08:00

At work, I've been thinking about new digital services that the library could introduce, potentially in partnership with other units at L&C. Here is the draft of a short paper that I've put together on the topic:

Potential Future Digital Initiatives at Watzek Library

This paper is intended to stimulate thinking and discussion about potential digital initiatives involving a variety of constituents at Lewis & Clark including faculty, the Library, IT, New Media, etc.

As the nature of research, scholarship, and learning changes in an increasingly digital environment, academic libraries need to rethink the services that they are providing. This rethinking is even more crucial in a tight budget environment where we need to maximize the impact of the funds expended on library services and resources.

In the past five years, Watzek Library has developed its capacity to support digital initiatives in three main areas: enhancements to the library website and the functions it provides to support research, the Visual Resources Collection, and Special Collections and Archives. Some of the projects that we have completed include the Special Collections and Archives Digital Collection, the MDID image collection, our senior theses collection, accessCeramics, and the William Stafford Archives. Work on these projects has allowed us to develop expertise in information architecture, design, web programming, metadata management, Web 2.0 technologies, and digital scholarship.

As we look towards the future, we would like to broaden the impact of Watzek's digital initiatives and make more connections with academic endeavors across the College. These are a list of possible digital services that the library could offer in the future. In one form or another, they are being offered by colleges and universities around the United States. We are putting this list forward to gauge interest and applicability at Lewis & Clark.

Thematic Digital Collections: Faculty may have interest in developing an online archive of primary materials, scholarship, or data associated with their scholarship and/or teaching. The Library might partner with faculty on the development of online collections of images, documents, or other media surrounding a particular topic. We could provide the expertise in digitization, software selection, database design, metadata schemas, information architecture and search engine optimization needed to develop such projects. Our collaboration might take the form of a consultation or a more extensive partnership for larger collections that would fit in with Watzek Library's long term digital collections. One example of such a project is accessCeramics, a database of contemporary ceramics images developed as a partnership between Assistant Professor of Ceramics Ted Vogel and Watzek Library. accessCeramics has paired Vogel's connections to the ceramics community and interest in curating an online collection of images with Watzek Library's expertise in digital collections. A few other examples of thematic archives arranged around faculty research interests include the Gerald Warner Taiwan image collection, a project of Associate Professor Paul D. Barclay and Digital Inititives Librarian Eric Luhrs at Layfayette College, the Anarchy Archives, a project of Professor David Ward at Pitzer College, and the Murals of Northern Ireland collection a project of Tony Crowley, the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College and one of numerous thematic collections in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.

Institutional Repository: The library could support an online digital archive devoted to storing and making accessible digital objects associated with the academic life of the College. The content might include faculty and student scholarship, materials from College symposia, and other media. The library already archives student theses, as do some individual departments. For an example of an institutional repository at a liberal arts college, see Macalester's Digital Commons.

Platforms for Collaborative Student Research: In the digital environment, there are growing opportunities for students to work together on research projects. Using social bookmarking software and wikis, students can share resources with each other. Lewis & Clark's Environmental Studies program uses delicious.com to accumulate and organize research resources around particular sites. Software like the History Engine gives students a platform for the publishing of original research using primary sources. The library could serve as a consultant with faculty in the deployment and use of these resources. The library could also act as an agent to preserve the output of these collaborations over time.

Data Curation: Lewis & Clark has several active research laboratories in the sciences and social sciences. The library could serve as a consultant in the organization and long term storage and preservation of data output as a result of this research, whether in local or remote repositories. The library could recommend remote digital archives, storage technologies, metadata schemas, and information architectures that suit the needs of a particular research lab. To our knowledge, this is a relatively new area for liberal arts colleges and we do not have successful examples of this type of service.

Expanding Visual Resources: Our Visual Resources Collection currently supports teaching with images of art and culture through a local collection of images (MDID) as well as licensed collections of images such as ARTstor. These images are used primarily by Art and Art History faculty, but are also used by faculty in other humanities disciplines as well as the social sciences. Should we expand our support for images to include scientific images and the scientific disciplines? Currently, our expertise in images is limited largely to still images and 2d images. Should we develop expertise in acquisition and delivery of moving images as well as three dimensional image technology?

Web Archiving: Content on the web represents a range of activities across Lewis & Clark, both academic and non-academic. Meeting minutes, departmental rosters, symposia programs, syllabi, campus news, etc. all live on the web. But much of this content is ephemeral: it is taken down and disappears after it no longer has currency. Should the library take responsibility for archiving all or part of Lewis & Clark's web output for the needs of future generations? Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore have a web archiving initiative underway using the Achive-It software from the Internet Archive.

Services to Support Scholarly Communication in the Digital Environment: The library could develop a menu of services to support faculty as they publish their research. These services could include: consulting/education on copyright and open access, assistance with acquiring rights for digital assets (such as images) for use in publication, advice on publishing research data, assistance with scholarly reputation management on the web. Oberlin College's Library has an initiative focused on transforming scholarly communication, which includes advising faculty on copyright and open access opportunities.

Mark Dahl
Associate Director for Digital Initiatives and Collection Management
Watzek Library
Lewis & Clark College

flatlands and failures of curation

2009-10-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

As a counterpoint to my last post on the rise of the verticals, I've been thinking about the importance of horizontal library collections. On the one hand if a library wants to make a difference in the web environment, they should develop unique vertical collections that focus in on particular subject areas and are of interest globally.

But what of the notion that libraries, particularly college libraries like my own, should provide their users with a strong general collection in line with their institution's curriculum? In the long tail, hybrid print/digital environment of the early 21rst century, this idea of a broad and shallow local collection perhaps doesn't make as much sense. As we try to expand our patron's information universe with consortial borrowing and large aggregations of e content, not to mention awareness of what's out there on the web, the idea of a limited general book collection seems quaint, like your neighborhood book store.

Somehow, we still want our patrons to be able to be able to identify the most important works in a subject area without getting overloaded with choices. One might argue that Google's success is based on doing something like this for the web as a whole. Google is able to reliably pull up the most popular and trusted websites on a given topic.

Our discovery systems need to do a better job of giving some relief to the information landscape. Our users should be able to tell if some titles are more popular, more widely cited, etc. than others. If a text is a classic work of literature or a classic in the field, it should be obvious s in search results.

Ranking search results based partly on the number of holding libraries like WorldCat.org does is a step in the right direction: the collective intelligence of collection development work, if you will. FRBRization is another one. Use of citation analysis could be another. Folksonomies and recommendation engines another. Human curation also has a role.

The commercial world is getting good at using these techniques. Libraries really have a chance to lead in the FRBRizaton arena, I think. This is something the commercial world hasn't figured out, as Mike Shatzkin points out out here:

Recommendation engines aside (”based on what you bought before, have we got a book for you!”), online book retailers have a long way to go to enable the customized curation that seems both possible and desireable in the digital age. Even as sophisticated a retailer at Barnes & Noble will present multiple duplicate entries of a public domain scan from Google to an ebook search for a Shakespeare play. And even as sophisticated a retailer as Amazon will sell you a Kindle ebook that is a self-published tome in a way that is indistinguishable from a book from a legitimate publisher. These are failures of curation.

the rise of the verticals

2009-10-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

Mike Shatzkin, a commentator on the book publishing industry, makes the following observation:

Horizontal aggregation was more efficient in a world of physical delivery. Vertical aggregation makes more sense in a world of digital delivery. And enabling the customer or user to have some control over the curation is possible in the digital world but hardly is in the physical.

Shatzkin sees the future information ecosystem trending towards niches or 'verticals' with global audiences.

He is contrasting this model with traditional bookstores and trade publishers that cover a wide range of subjects. It also seems the opposite of the way that a traditional academic or public library is setup with books spanning a wide range of subjects and positioned to serve a local audience.

old=local and horizontal
new=global and vertical

I would argue that in the academic repository arena, we can already observe the difference between these two approaches.

Institutional repositories aggregate scholarship that crosses a wide range of subject areas only tied together by affiliation with a single academic institution. They might be described as local and horizontal.

Disciplinary repositories like the Social Science Research Network and arxiv.org concentrate content in certain academic disciplines. They might be described and global and vertical.

Which model is more successful, the disciplinary repositories or the institutional ones? If this ranking is right, it is the disciplinary repositories. They have the most momentum and interest behind them.

Generally, I think that digital initiatives in libraries will be most successful if they are able to build on a vertical community. Projects that are too wide in scope end up being about nothing.

Summon 'web scale'? I don't think so.

2009-09-23T09:31:00.000-07:00

I think it's strange that Serials Solutions is attempting to apply the "web-scale" adjective to their Summon Service.

As far as I can tell, the library community has really co-opted this term from its original use, which pertained to computing infrastructure that could support web sites that handle huge amounts of traffic. Perhaps Lorcan Dempsey widened the use of the term in January 2007:

'Web-scale' refers to how major web presences architect systems and services to scale as use grows. But it also seems evocative in a broader way of the general attributes of the large gravitational hubs which are such a feature of the current web (eBay, Amazon, Google, WikiPedia, ...).

This reference to 'web scale' is now at the top of Google results for the term, making me think that the library community has just about taken over the term.

I attended a webinar on Summon yesterday, and found out that with Summon, Serials Solutions creates a broad index of content available to your library: books, journals, digital collections, etc. It gets the data from your library uploading data and from the e content vendors with which your library has relations. The data goes in a SOLR index, which then can serve as a comprehensive discovery tool for your library's content. Because it is built on local data and tailored for a particular user community this sounds much more like an 'intranet' type search than anything that is "web scale."

WorldCat Local with its upcoming metasearch features does something similar, but I think that it can make a more legitimate claim to the "web scale" designation because it is attached to the WorldCat.org database. In my opinion, WorldCat.org is web scale in the sense that it is used and improved by a global community.

Summon and WorldCat Local are competing in the same discovery interface space. On first glance, it appears that Serials Solutions is ahead of OCLC in the incorporation of article content, perhaps because of their close relations with content vendors. OCLC seems to have the edge in books: they are able to leverage holdings data in relevance rankings and they have a more sophisticated treatment of various editions of the same work (FRBR). OCLC is also endeavoring to provide delivery services in addition to discovery.

It will be interesting to see if OCLC can use its global database and the Web 2.0 principle "it gets better the more people use it" to differentiate its product from competitors like Summon.

I don't think its obvious, but what OCLC is trying to do with WorldCat is much bolder than Serials Solutions and Summon. With Summon, libraries are basically throwing all of their content into one index to break down the data silos within an institution. But what you end up with is a big search silo for that institution.

With WorldCat, the vision is to break down not only the silos within institutions but also the silos between institutions. And not just break down those silos in the sense of harvest-and-search. The concept is that libraries and their patrons will be working together to improve a shared database through intentional and professional metadata. This shared database will be big enough to have a real impact on the web. Its records will surface in search engine results. Its interface will be familiar to many, and it will be customizable for a particular audience via the WorldCat Local route.

We'll see if this grand vision takes hold.

WorldCat Local Review

2009-09-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

I've written a fair amount in the abstract about the benefits of WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local.

At Watzek, we launched "L&C WorldCat" around July 1. Here are some thoughts based on my experience with the implementation.

There is already a sense developing at our school that "everything" is in or should be in WorldCat Local. People expect all articles and books to be there (even though they aren't). I may post more on this later.
Compared with launching an III OPAC, the process of bringing WCL up is refreshingly simple. They have consciously limited customization to the very basics (logo, colors, etc.)
Even so, as I've said before in this blog, I'd prefer a greater level of customize-abilty, kind of on the level of Blogger. Give me full access to the stylesheet. Let me add code snippets.
It's backward that the software pulls in live holdings data for print items from your ILS, but can't pull in links to digital content from your link resolver. When students come upon an article, they want the direct link to it up front, not a click or two away. OCLC should scrape resolvers like they do ILSs to embed link resolver links in records for articles.
I'm excited about the idea of OCLC partnering with content providers like EBSCO and indexing their content in WC. One thing I speculated on when writing the Digital Libraries book in '06 was that following on the success of search engines, meta indexing services for library content would eventually emerge. We now see that with Serials Solutions Summon and WorldCat.
The idea of also incorporating in traditional real-time meta-searching seems like a backward compromise: OCLC should be firm with content providers and resolve to only incorporate content that they can put into their index.
The stats module for WCL is basically a commercial web analytics package slapped onto WCL with a few limited custom reports. Basically, you can look at your site traffic and search terms being used.
I like the idea of using standard web analytics software on WCL, but please let me drop the code snippet in for Google Analytics.
If they did some url rewriting so as to map some of the search/browsing activity to clean URL paths (eg "/author/" "/title/" "/facet/video/") web analytics software becomes more useful because you can collate together like activities based on url paths.
For a minute, I was thinking that to provide access to an e book package we purchased through WCL, all we'd need to do is "flip the switch" and activate our holdings for those records in WCL, forget about ILS records. But then I remembered: the URLs to that package need to go through our proxy server so they need to be drawn from our ILS. WCL is not making our lives easier yet.
A little off the subject, but now that OCLC owns EZproxy, aren't they in a great position to develop some better, more graceful form of remote authentication than proxy? OCLC could act as a trusted third party and provide single sign on to content provider websites.

I will likely post more comments at a later time.

Economist on Google Books

2009-09-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

The Economist has a leader supporting the Google Books Deal, and an interview with Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries at Univ. of Michigan.

He talks some about the product that Google will be offering to libraries with this deal.

I have to wonder if this product will be the watershed moment for e books in academic libraries. If Google's library of books is big and broad enough to serve as a general library on its own, Google's platform for e books could become the place to do research in books.

Much of its success will depend on how much current content is in their index, and this is really dependent on Google doing deals with thousands of publishers. If Google's index is largely made up of older scanned books, it'll be a useful research tool, but not compelling as place for general research.

Google might become the place to do research in books, whereas recreational e book reading will happen through other vendors like Amazon.

What I did for my summer vacation

2009-09-03T12:55:00.000-07:00

Our library picked up an Amazon Kindle for staff to try out, and I brought it on our family vacation to Manzanita on the Oregon Coast a couple weeks ago.

Let me give you some of my thoughts on it. My first impression was that it was kind of awkward to navigate. The little joysticky thing that functions as a mouse isn't all that intuitive. I kept wanting it to be like an iPhone/iTouch with a larger screen.

Once I figured out how to navigate content, I liked reading on it. The very simple presentation of text is refreshing. It eliminates the distractions of a PC operating system and really lets you concentrate on the text. The e ink technology works well, though I do wish it could illuminate itself in the dark. It is slim and fits into a beach bag as easily as any paper back, though I popped it in a ziplock to keep out the sand.

I found myself navigating around the Amazon store some, reading samples of various books. Having this limited body of content to chose from--just books with a recreational bent, as opposed to the whole web--felt kind of relaxing. Sort of like I was in another limited media environment like a movie theater or flipping channels on TV. (I know it has a web browser built in, but I avoided it because I was on vacation.)

After I got back from vacation and was preparing for a class that I'm teaching on digital libraries, I decided to download a couple PDF reports to the Kindle, just to check out how they would work. (I had assigned a few reports for students to read and needed to read them fully for myself.) I used Stanza to convert them to Kindle format.

It was nice to go out in the backyard and hang out on the hammock and do the reading on the Kindle as opposed to my laptop.

The Kindle is a nice device for concentrated reading in the same way that a big flatscreen TV is a nice device for watching a feature length movie.

In some ways, I wish it wasn't even connected to the network. That way there would be even fewer distractions.

In other ways, I wish it was an iPhone with a bigger screen.

Video for Seattle Pacific U Retreat

2009-09-02T12:09:00.001-07:00

I thought that I would post this video, shot as an introduction to my article in the Spring OLA Quarterly on the "Evolution of Library Discovery Systems in the Web Environment." Seattle Pacific University Library is using the article as a discussion piece for their retreat.

Evolution of Library Discovery Systems in the Web Environment

funding models for digital projects

2009-07-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Liberal Education Today for the reference to an Ithaka report called "Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today." We've been having discussions on how to sustain our comparatively tiny accessCeramics digital project and came up with a similar list of options offered in this report, including: subscription, licensing to publishers and users, custom services, corporate sponsorship, author fees, endowment, and grants. Not surprisingly, it doesn't have any easy answer regarding which one is best.

The report is very critical about relying too much on what can be the invisible support of parent institutions.

To some extent, I think one just has to accept that these kind of projects can be somewhat transitory in nature. The report appears to be reaching for some kind of formula for permanent sustainability. But, indeed, if a project has a viable life for a decade and then its content migrates along to a new home, all is well.

The Symposium on Teaching with Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts in May at Reed College had a few cases of small scale digital projects at liberal arts colleges. In most cases, they revolved around supporting a research and teaching interest of a particular faculty member. The product would be used in instruction at a local institution, but at the same time had a global reach. Lafayette College's image collection of Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, co curated by a historian at the school and the library's special collections unit was one example. Claremont had several others. In these kinds of cases the institution is really supporting the work as part of faculty teaching and research and the library is acting as a kind of institutionally-sponsored laboratory.

I wonder if there are system-wide solutions that could make it easier for small scale digital projects to create revenue streams. Should digital collections software like ContentDM make it possible to sell high quality images, for example? Should it facilitate donations or sponsorship of collections?

OCLC now offers the ability to post local digital collections into WorldCat. But what if a library wants to license out some of its digitized content? A player like OCLC could develop pools of topically oriented, "premium" digital content from member libraries and charge for it. I have to believe that libraries will strive to keep their digital projects open and free.

The reality is that we get a lot of information on the open web for free now. But what incentive is there to pay that back by contributing something ourselves?

How to gain efficiencies in technical services?

2009-07-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

I'm on a task force whose mission is to, more or less, figure out a way that the Orbis Cascade Alliance consortium can save money in technical services operations across its institutions, which range from small private colleges to big universities. This conversation was started with a report from R2 Consulting, The Extended Library Enterprise: Collaborative Technical Services & Shared Staffing.

How can we achieve this? Let me take a stab at this question from the perspective of acquisitions, cataloging, and processing of physical materials. (Saving money on handling digital stuff like e books and e journals is another topic worthy of consideration, of course.) I'll add the disclaimer that these are my personal thoughts and not those of my employer, this task force, or anyone else.

My general belief is that libraries should outsource as much work as possible in this area. One approach is to outsource cataloging and processing work to book vendors. The vendors are already handling books and they have the economies of scale in their favor, so let them handle stuff like spine labels and matching to the correct OCLC record. One of the ideas that we've discussed in the task force is sharing expertise in the implementation of these services.

Even if a library outsources as much work as it can to its primary book vendor, it is still left with plenty of tech services work to do locally. For example, sending in orders, managing duplicates and superseded editions, interfacing with the institution's financial system, dealing with materials coming from non-mainstream book vendors, gift processing, repairs, weeding projects, etc. As we've found with WorldCat Cataloging Partners, the book vendor outsourcing helps speed up your main artery of materials coming in, but there are plenty of other categories of stuff to deal with.

The very specialized work such as cataloging foreign language materials, preservation work, etc. that can't be handled locally can be outsourced or shared with other institutions fairly easily. The Alliance could develop a better method of doing this, but this doesn't strike me as a high-impact area. There are already ways to outsource these things through providers like OCLC and MARCIVE.

The nuclear option in the context of this conversation is to consolidate institutional tech services departments into an a single (or perhaps a few regional) tech services department(s) for the consortium. The obvious advantage would be greater economies of scale for both common tech services tasks and more specialized ones. And if indeed we're moving into a future with less and less printed materials, it makes sense to consolidate the expertise in handling them.

The main problem with this idea, as discussed in the R2 report in a few places, is that it creates an extra stop for the materials between the book vendor and the library, adding to shipping and logistical costs. It also removes employees from a home institution and probably makes their jobs more specialized and mundane. A disconnection between the tech services workers and the collections and institutions they support would likely develop.

I wonder, realistically, how many economies of scale would kick in in this scenario: there still would be idiosyncrasies in interfacing financial transactions to individual institutions, for example.

Ironically, the prospect of fewer and fewer print materials adds to the risk involved in building such a center: as soon as it is created, there might need to be a continual downsizing of it as its services are needed less and less.

These approaches all outsource and/or centralize the work of technical services: ordering, receiving, cataloging, processing, etc. But I wonder if this is where most of the savings are to be had? It might be that we'd gain more efficiencies by centralizing the management of technical services operations and leaving the technical services work distributed geographically.

It seems like every library has its own idiosyncratic practices for things like checking for duplicate orders, applying spine labels, choosing book vendors, copy cataloging procedures, updating standing orders, etc. (See this R2 report from Rollins College for some examples) It can be hard and time consuming for acquisitions and cataloging librarians to keep on top of the best ways of doing these things. If the methodologies and procedures for doing technical services were handled centrally, perhaps there could be big efficiencies gained, both in terms of time saved doing technical services tasks and time saved by librarians figuring out how to do them and documenting them.

The Alliance could create a "virtual" centralized technical service department that establishes best practices across a variety of technical services tasks. Participation in the virtual department could be entirely voluntary, but in principle would go along with the idea of the Alliance having a shared collection. I'm sure this idea would encounter a lot of skepticism and resistance, but when seen in the context of the many other big changes our libraries have absorbed in the last couple decades, it might work, especially if it went along with some other systematic change like a migration to a new library management system.

upgrade/downgrade

2009-07-01T11:32:00.001-07:00

We just upgraded our Innovative Interfaces system to their latest release. One interesting thing to note: they removed some of the data that they were providing through the XML access to item and checkin (serials) records.

I wonder, is their intention to hinder the use of third party software with their systems? We had been using this data our course reserves application and our journal title search.

The upgrade also broke a few connectors in place with WorldCat Local, and WorldCat Navigator (we use for Summit). We're quickly repairing everything now. All in all, it shouldn't be too painful, but does demonstrate the difficulties of using a closed system like Innovative with other applications.