A series of presentations, starting with Karen Calhoun from Cornell. She is currently referencing ‘Metadata switch’ from E-Scholarship: A LITA Guide by Lorcan Dempsey et al. Quite an interesting way of thinking about material, splitting it between high and low ‘uniqueness’, and low and high ‘stewardship’ (how much libraries ‘look after’ the resources). The bulk of our physical library collection is not unique, and requires a high degree of stewardship, free web resources are also not unique (well, more accurately, are widely available), but require a low degree of stewardship.

Some stats from the OCLC environmental scan, focussing on College Students. Some of these stats are interesting, but I can’t help but think that we are guilty of focussing too much on user perceptions of libraries.

Why should we be suprised that College students show a higher degree of ‘familiarity’ with search engines than with online library resources – this is like saying they are more familiar with WHSmith (a UK highstreet newsagent) than Grant and Cutler (a specialist foreign language bookshop)

I’m not dismissing the OCLC survey at all, but we need to make sure we aren’t unrealistic in our expectations.

Some interesting stats from Cornell, showing how much their users use e-resources vs catalogue searching – which indicate that e-resources make up 10% of the collection, using 25% of the budgets, and get 50% of the library use. I almost think this provokes the opposite question to what Karen seems to be suggesting – she is comparing low e-resource searching to high search engine use (although she is using total Google searches – 441 million – which is a pointless comparison in my view), I’d say that this suggests that we need to look at navigation of our physical collection – or get rid of it.

Some more interesting outcomes from the University of Minnesota, showing that Humaities and social sciences faculty and grad students work from home, and that there is a ‘market’ for more help from libraries in maintaining ‘local’ (almost personal) collections belonging to faculty or similar.

Overall, we are seeing more use of the catalogue by Graduate students and Faculty, compared to Undergraduates.

Karen is suggesting that the ‘traditional’ model for providing library services is just not meeting the needs of the users.

Karen recently did a report for the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf. This says that the catalogue is no longer the centre of research, hasn’t kept up with changes in user expectations, and modern retreival systems, and that the economics of traditional cataloguing no longer make sense. Apparently a real division in the community about this – IT staff and Managers welcoming the report, and others feeling very threatened by it. I guess I definitely fall into the former category being both IT and Management – but all this seems a given to me now, and not at all threatening – we need to stop obsessing about libraries as organisations, and think about them as a service – I don’t care how people get to the information they need – as long as they do get to the information they need.

I also wonder if one reaction to information overload by users has been to take a pragmatic ‘good enough’ approach, rather than aiming for complete retrieval or ‘perfect’ searches.

Some stuff about Outreach now – suggesting we need to get out from behind the desk (surely we know this by now?), but also push the resources that we manage into the environment that our users work – so the open web, course management, institutional portals…

Karen says we should be thinking of linking systems rather than building, and decoupling discovery and ‘inventory management’ systems.

The challenge for a library such as the one I work at (http://www.rhul.ac.uk/information-services/library) is that we may not be able to afford appropriate discovery systems, and so perhaps need to essentially out-source this effort – if Google or someone else can provide the discovery tools, that’s fine, as long as we can link into this (e.g. by the OpenURL).

The longer term vision Karen outlines is:

Switch users from where they find things to libraryr managed collections of all kings
Local catalog one link in a chain of services, one respository managed by the library
More coherent and comprehensive scholarly information systems, perhaps by discipline
Infastructure to permit global discovery and delivery of information among open, looslely coupled systems
Critical mass of digitized publications
[missed one point here]

So, I agree with Karen’s point – that ‘discovery’ will take place on the open web, and libraries should focus on delivery, linking into the discovery tools that are ‘out there’.

However, in the medium term, Karen sees the need for better library interface for a better user experience, drawing on the local catalogue’s strongest suit – which is support for inventory control and delivery; shared online catalogues – beginning to aggregate discovery; larger scale collaboration on collection development/resource shareing and storage/preservation.

Also, starting to build bigger scholarly information environments, with libraries playing a role using their skills in Metadata and organisation, but providing these skills to scholars – not doing it for them.

Karen sees the beginning of the era of ‘special collections’ – that is libraries promoting their local ‘high unique’ and ‘high stewardship’ collections, along side the aggregation of discovery of digital collections.

A very interesting talk, and I agree with Karen’s overall vision. I’m slighly concerned that the ‘intermediary’ stage is here, now, and not only are we (libraries) not keeping up, but that this stage is extremely frustrating for the user – they start in the open web, and find material they end up not being able to access – and until a utopian vision of all materials available (freely? – at point of use anyway) online, this will continue to be an issue.