I liked the EDUCAUSE Webcast Architectures for Collaboration—Roles and Expectations for Digital Libraries. Peter Brantley (currently of CDL, soon to be Director of the Digital Library Federation) gave a very clear-eyed assessment of the current state of library IT engagement, and proposed many areas in which the library can do better.
I have to admire the boldness of a presentation whose 4th slide is "Libraries have failed in critical ways".
He said that a key role that libraries have to embrace is to enable discovering books, and searching inside of them.
He had many well-constructed phrases, I particularly liked "technology wipes out our current understanding of how libraries engage the world".
He then moved on to explore the many roles that libraries can still play, both in the physical and digital worlds (including Second Life).
I asked a rather long question about the DLF Architectures group, their DLF Service Framework, library SOA and relationships to the JISC e-Framework.
In his response (and several other times in the presentation) he highlighted the DLF Aquifer project.
If I understand it correctly, it's about building frameworks for discovery and use of distributed digital resources.
We support scholarly discovery and access by:
* Developing schemas, protocols and communities of practice to make digital content available to scholars and students where they do their work
* Developing the best possible systems for finding, identifying and using digital resources in context
When asked about new DLF initiatives he has planned, he indicated a few key areas:
- mass digitization
- policy issues (e.g. rights, privacy)
- new virtual communities
- new media and discourse
He had a lot of ideas about engaging with faculty and students, as well as making better connections between the library and IT, and between libraries and publishing.
In particular, he said that libraries should explore the community aspect of dealing with faculty and students - libraries as enablers of community.
In terms of IT engagement he said libraries need to move together with IT to enable deep information discovery.
He also talked about ensuring that we take full advantage of the potential of virtual worlds, and not artificially constrain ourselves to old ways of operating in them - new libraries in new worlds, or to paraphase: No OPAC IN SECOND LIFE!
He said we need to rethink social learning, recognizing that virtual spaces are social spaces with the added aspect that they are freed from normal physical constraints.
He also talked about investigating new social media, having the library as a richer and more imaginative participant in the digital publishing process. Again a paraphrase: "imagine what the book looks like in an interactive, networked future."
He said libraries need to re-engineer scholarly communication with faculty and with the public.
He mentioned a critical task, which is that we as libraries need to learn how to get our content harvested and ranked appropriately by search engines, perhaps by working more closely with the companies making such engines.
He identified "Collaborative problems, collaborative solutions":
- massively distributed information
- rich data
- new indexing architectures
- mining and mapping our data to build interactive linkages
- challenge of providing ubiquitous access
Successful digital libraries bridge communities, build new services, and help others discover new services to build.
Digital Libraries are the architects of collaboration.
Publishing should be increasingly online and interactive, there should be digital workflows.
Challenge of "open access" to our applications - challenge for IT and libraries.
He talked a lot about how to permit remix, mashups, and combinations/
Of course my solution to that challenge is to ensure that libraries are building on a good service-oriented framework. I very much hope that the DLF will further pursue SOA initiatives under his guidance.
Thanks to Glen for pointing out this webcast.
In case it's not clear, you can hear the audio of the presentation (which is essential, as the slides are just very high-level talking points) by following the instructions on how to log in to the "HorizonWimba archive" on the presentation page. Once you're in the interface, switch to the Archives tab and scroll way way down to the bottom. (Unfortunately, I currently get 503: Service Unavailable from their QuickTime server.)
UPDATE 2007-01-31: I was able to play the QuickTime audio on both my home Mac and home Windows box, with Firefox. On the Mac the slides didn't display though. It would be nice if EDUCAUSE offered just the audio as an MP3 / podcast.
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