Click to edit Master title style OCLC Online Computer Library Center Collections, networks, places Presentation to New York University Libraries Faculty, April Lorcan Dempsey, VP Research, OCLC

Overview ! !

When, early in this century, Virginia Woolf needed to find out the truth about women, she headed to the Round Reading Room of the British Museum, for ''if truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where,'' she asked, ''is truth?'' Truth, it pains me to report, decamped last month to a new library near St. Pancras Station, loosed from its moorings in the British Museum after an intermittently happy marriage of nearly two and a half centuries. … Among divorces, it was perhaps one of the more easily predictable, but nonetheless painful to those of us whose inner landscape has been irreversibly redrawn. Angeline Goreau. New York Times, Nov

© R. Alston

Libraries in the space of places have … …been vertically organised around the management of places –multiple redundant repositories –Information hubs. … facilitated particular economies of presence and patterns of experience –‘inner landscape’ –Agora, archive and service. … manifested the institutional role of libraries –authoritative, well-understood and persistent agency.

Click to edit Master title style OCLC Online Computer Library Center Organization and architecture

user environments resource environment lab books exhibitions PDAs learning management systems campus portal course material text book new scholarly resources reading lists Institutional repository Digital collections E-reserve Catalog Licensed collections Aggregations Virtual reference Cataloging ILL Library service environment

Collections grid highlow high stewardship uniqueness Books Journals Newspapers Gov. docs CD, DVD Maps Scores Special collections Rare books Local/Historical newspapers Local history materials Archives & Manuscripts, Theses & dissertations Research and learning materials ePrints/tech reports Learning objects Courseware E-portfolios Research data Freely-accessible web resources Open source software Newsgroup archives uniqueness

The Archival Research Center is a direct outgrowth of the belief that primary resource materials should be a major focal point of instruction and research. …. However, traditional access to these materials is cumbersome and labor-intensive and most institutions do not allow copying. …Digitizing these materials keeps them alive and relevent for modern users … (ARL report)

Knowledge bank – OSU – in planning April A proposal for the development of an OSU knowledge bank

Biomedical informatics Source:

Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) Motion Capture Lab Source:

Below the line There is growing appreciation among libraries that unique or rare materials –are valuable research and learning resources –have been underutilized. There is a growing interest in digitizing cultural heritage materials –as it offers opportunities for releasing their value in new ways –as a way of disclosing the memory and identity of communities. Research and learning behavior is increasingly entering the network space –Library resources need to be available at the appropriate stage within the learning or research environment –New forms of engagement and support. –Research and learning outputs will present major management and curatorial issues –Institutions and faculty are interested in ‘disclosing’ research and learning materials as part of the scholarly enterprise (OAI)

Manage commodity materials and services - cost. Streamline discovery to delivery for print (bought) and digital (licensed) materials Portalization and resource sharing Management intelligence – collection management and analysis (print collections) Incentive to preserve? Institutional digital content management Immature (diverse metadata creation practice -- hierarchical description, multiple standards and practices, diverse content management approaches) Disclose metadata for harvest? Extend knowledge organization approaches? Incentive to preserve

highlow high stewardship unique “Special collections” Disclosure, Licensing highlow high stewardship unique Scholarly communication highlow high stewardship unique The google factor Trends

Centralization and decentralization Cataloging/metadata Archiving –web pages, third party content, insitutional content Harvesting Virtual reference At what level should services be secured?

Click to edit Master title style OCLC Online Computer Library Center The economy of presence

Presence We will, I believe, plot our actions and allocate our resources within the framework of a new economy of presence. In conducting our daily transactions we will find ourselves constantly consulting the benefits of the different grades of presence that are now available to us, and weighing these against the costs. William J Mitchell. E-topia

Hubs All networks produced privileged places at their junctions and access points. William J Mitchell. e-topia … the web pages to which we prefer to link are not ordinary nodes. They are hubs. The better known they are, the more links point to them. … We prefer hubs. Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi. Linked

lab books exhibitions PDAs learning management systems campus portal course material text book new scholarly resources reading lists

Hub Create hub? Project services into other hubs Reconfigure services – fine-grained

“Creative knowledge you can put in your pocket”

Presence The dialectic of place and network Analysis, linking, comparing, manipulation,.. Agora Services Archive

Presences Agora –The monumental, spectacular and special –Third place – social fabric –Social exchange and learning –Commons - commonwealth –Trust – the ties that bind Archive (grid) –Distributed collection requiring different forms of attention Service –Fine grained –Engage with research and learning –Recombinant

Supporting scholarly behavior in humanities …contextual mass. (not the canon and top scholarly journals) Iterative reading? –personal, full-text collections Wide reading and chaining? –federated collections anchored by bibliographies Collaborating? –collection communities Searching and browsing? –“rich” finding aids that cross institutions and fields of study Tracking of reading, searching, and writing Carole Palmer, various

Click to edit Master title style OCLC Online Computer Library Center So..

The end Organization: The recombinant library – collections and services are building blocks. Economy of presence: A new economy of presence drives a reconfiguration of services. Institutions: Institutional value bound up with a reengagement with research and learning.