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Boy, turn around for a minute and four months blow by. My last post was on Halloween (and noted that I have a paper in prepublication, which, to my surprise, still hasn’t seen print–is this the usual pace of professional publications?) Life here at NCSU is a blur and the pace is only increasing as Hunt is now over the horizon and looming closer and closer ahead.
There’s no end to the interesting projects I get to work on these days. A short list would include expanding our use of Google Apps, planning for the implementation of an XRM system to improve transactions and relations with our patrons, bringing in awesome communication options to minimize the issues that will naturally arise from being split across two main branches, working on virtual referrals and a unified communication workflow, and aiding our Access and Delivery Services Department with tools to bring in Lean Business Practices and systems for real-time response to demand overload and service points.
I also attended Midwinter and will be headed to Anaheim this summer. I’m looking to get more involved with LITA–I met lots of great, smart LITAers in Dallas–though finding time is obviously tricky, and won’t improve any time soon. So, we’ll see.
Life continues to be interesting–can’t ask for much more than that.
 As has been noted in some far-flung corners of the internet, I have a paper in the next ITAL. It’s currently available on ITAL’s preprint archive. I’m reasonably satisfied with it, considering it’s my first. There was a period there, when I was completely immersed in everything published on the topic in recent memory, that I briefly felt like I understood the topic as well as anyone not actively involved in digital preservation possibly could. And then I moved on to other things :)
The biggest takeaway for me was the provocative but extremely well-reasoned work of David S. H. Rosenthal at LOCKSS. I found his work rather late in the process of researching and writing and it blew a hole through many of my early conclusions. I rebuilt and I hope the conclusions are stronger for it.
So some recent marketing-type materials carried the tagline “Everything you can imagine . . . and more!” I’ll self-impose a gag rule and let you draw your own opinion about the quality (or utter lack thereof) of that line. Today, a comment from a vendor, who had just been briefed on the tech at Hunt, was passed along to me: “There’s nothing like it in the world.” now that’s a tagline.
Posting here has been sparse (read: nonexistent) since I moved and started my position at the NCSU Libraries. Part of that is pure busyness, part of it is being cautious about what I post about publicly, as much of what I’m working on now is still in the early planning stages. I can say for now that it’s really, really cool stuff and I hope to have lots more to share as we proceed. Browsing around the James B. Hunt Library site will give some clue as to what I’m talking about, but there’s also a lot going on the back end to prepare for the awesome toys at Hunt that won’t be obvious to an outside observer.
One thing that I think is safe to post about and also currently on my mind is divisions in the libraries. Hunt is going to feature an as-yet-to-be-officially-named central service desk, as some other academic libraries already have done. This naturally leads to some sort of merging of the circulation and reference staff. As I just said, other libraries have covered this ground–it’s not exactly new, though it’s still rare. What I think is new, at least in my (limited) experience is the degree of overlap between public service staff and IT forced by the high tech public spaces within Hunt. In a way, it’s a microcosm of the larger trend in libraries for IT itself as a core public service, not just a piece of the infrastructure.
I know that’s not much of a thought, but that’s all I have right now. I need time to think over what this means, both for my institution and in a general context.
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Listening to: Dave Matthews Band, Live Trax Vol. 10
I’m nearly done with Steven Levy’s excellent history of Google and it’s got me thinking about Google Book Search/Print/Books and the settlement with the Authors Guild and APA. I don’t want to get bogged down in the details of Google’s initial effort versus it’s eventual settlement because I think another important element is often overlooked when discussing these issues: the untapped market of digitized books only existed because academic and public libraries fell down on a massive scale. Sure, the project was and is expensive but it falls so clearly in the domain of what as a society we want our libraries to do. Libraries are going to pay the price for many years to come for their repeated and continuing failure to get out in front of the changes of the digital era.
As usual, someone else said it better than I could. Ovet at Inkdroid, Ed Summers nicely states what I was getting at in my comments at The PLA Blog:
Keeping an open mind in situations like this takes quite a bit of effort. There is often an irresistable urge to jump to particular use cases, scenarios or technical solutions, for fear of seeming ill informed or rudderless. I think the DPLA should be commended for creating conversations at this formative stage, instead of solutions in search of a problem.
There are lots more interesting bits to Ed’s post, both about the DPLA and in general, so go read it. I’m am particularly interested in how he talks about aligned libraries with the grain of the web instead of against it, and shifting from library-defined standards to widely accepted web standards and SEO. I’m still convinced that there’s an alternate reality that branched off from our own in the 90s, where librarians led the development of the web instead of lagging far behind other interested parties. In our reality though, that ship has sailed–all libraries can really do now it is cast a grapple on Google and let it tow them along.
I’m continuing to get up to speed on this project. One thing keeps rattling around my head as I read Nate Hill’s post and a later post at readingreality.net. I read an interesting article while researching digital stewardship–I wish I could pull up the citation to give proper attribution but I haven’t been able to find it again–which posited that the shift into digital will redefine the barriers between libraries, museums, and archives. Essentially, the thought is that the front-end of a digital collection no longer needs to be intrinsically tied to the back-end. Archives can select, acquire, and preserve objects, while libraries/museums can handle discovery and access, creating overlapping, dynamic collections that pull objects from archives.
Is the DPLA intended to be a front-end or a back-end? I need to do some more reading but I think the discussion of forking the project may be related to this question.
Not much I can argue with here. I do think his five points have a bit of the straw man to them, but not dramatically so. My comments, point by point:
- We need better statistics and a few more years perspective, but my guess is the trend go forward will be for less printed books. It’s a bit early in the eBook market lifecycle to be as certain as Darnton seems to be–it’s like saying CD sales would continue to increase when the iPod had only been out for a couple years. These shifts take awhile to ripple through the system.
- “Digital Age” is probably a more accurate label but this point is a bit nit-picky, anyway. Labels are always literally true but they can still be representative. Scholars don’t get to pick what label sticks with the larger population.
- Two bad assumptions in Darnton’s statement about Google Books–he assumes that the next 15 million digitizations will be as hard as the first 15 million. But getting off the ground is the hardest part–it will only become cheaper and easy to do this going forward. As for the “million new works a year”–how many of them won’t first exist as a digital file before being printed. With new works, you only need to preserve the digital original, not waste money redigitizing.
- No argument here. But the perception that libraries are obsolete is dangerous and can’t be hand-waved away.
- Great points, but it should be noticed that while the new modes of communication Darnton mentions didn’t kill their predecessors, they did shift them from primary to secondary importance. Also, the effect is cumulative–radio didn’t make newspapers extinct, but the next big wave, TV, hurt both radio and newspapers. And the Internet is displacing (or enveloping) all three, with newspapers hardest hit.
5 Myths About the ‘Information Age’ – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Article, not peer review:
use single example–archives for deceased author–to demonstrate various limitations facing archives today.
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