Click to edit Master title style OCLC Online Computer Library Center A local habitation and a name: libraries, places, and networks Presentation to Cornell University Library Academic Assembly, 3 April 2003 Lorcan Dempsey, VP Research, OCLC

Overview Some pictures and text – Virginia Woolf and the library in the space of places Some issues in the space of flows ! !

© R. Alston

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

I have only to reach my hand up to the bookshelves above my desk and pick out a book, and open it, and plunge my nose between its pages, to retrieve that smell. The book is The Captains Death Bed and other essays, by Virginia Woolf, published in 1950, which I bought a couple of years ago at the Belfast Public Libraries annual sale. When I inhale, I am transported back to the 1950s and the Falls Road Library, where I get the allied aroma of polished linoleum and varnished shelving. I detect a gleam of brass here, too, coming from the handles of the big doors, but also from the little pulls of the filing-cabinet drawers, and I wonder are they implicated in the overall smell. Ciaran Carson. This is what libraries are for. The Dublin Review, Autumn 2001

… the growing explosion of information … creates a reactionary tendency on the part of readers to stress the familiarity and relative immutability of static texts, such as paper books. This impulse is particularly strong with respect to literature which, as an important repository of a society's identity, is a domain to which overwhelmed members of the society will turn for security, and which is consequently seen as most threatened by the information explosion. In our fin-de-siècle world, typified by informational and societal variety and indeterminacy, people's needs for dependable institutions are reinforced…. Centripetal Textuality. C. Aaron Potter. Victorian Studies Volume 41, Number 4

Libraries in the space of places have … …been vertically organised around the management of places –multiple redundant repositories. … facilitated particular economies of presence and patterns of experience –inner landscape/a house I grew up in … manifested the institutional role of libraries –authoritative, well-understood and persistent agency. –Card catalog, book, peoples need for dependable institutions

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

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

Within and across institutions Services built across institutions How will we support this (NSDL) Directions Z39.50, OpenURL, custom Links, … Catalog revisited, Appropriate copy Catalog revisited, Appropriate copy Emerging interest in harvesting Services? Access and content

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)

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

Editions of Humphry Clinker in Cornell Leathley & others, 1771 Johnston & Collins, 1771 Johnston & Collins, 1772 Longman & Robinson, 1783 Rivington, 1810 Rivington, 1820 Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 1838 Blackwell, 1925 Oxford Press, 1925 Modern Library, 1929 Dent, 1943 Oxford Press, 1966 Norton, 1983 University of Georgia Press, 1990

Centralization and decentralization Cataloging/metadata Archiving Harvesting Virtual reference Consort at what level? Incentives?

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 Service –Fine grained –Engage with research and learning –Recombinant Archive –Distributed collection requiring different forms of attention

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 Institutions Persistant patterns of social organization with understood goals.

Roles in flux Learning management Computing Digital scholarship Library Press Repositories Portal envy Support Promise of ICT greater than fragmented organization can deliver

U W digital scholarship (IMHO) Library touches all staff Library is already funded Library is integral to research and scholarship and needs to extend that role Institutional repository services vital Role as technology and research partner as well as support Digital concierge

Brand in a network age Library as a partner in the scholarly endeavour Understanding and supporting research and learning behaviors Responsible to the scholarly record Creator of social places.

Click to edit Master title style OCLC Online Computer Library Center Sometimes we will use networks to avoid going places. But sometimes, still, we will go places to network. W.J.Mitchell