Mass Malleability and the Collaboration Imperative Trends for

Mass, Malleability, and the Collaboration Imperative: Trends for the Digital Library David Seaman Executive Director, Digital Library Federation Access 2004, Halifax, Nova Scotia 15 October 2004

Preamble: Digital Library Federation http: //www. diglib. org/ Ø Ø Thirty-three members – major academic and national libraries, including The British Library; four allies (CNI; RLG; OCLC; LANL) Created in 1996 by directors of US research libraries; fills a need not simply met by larger library organizations: focuses exclusively on DL needs and strategies for large libraries Nimble, agile, collaborative Practical and strategic areas of activity

DLF Work -- background Ø Ø Ø Ø USER SERVICES Dimensions and use of the scholarly information environment www. diglib. org/pubs/scholinfo IMS –repository/courseware integration Distributed single collection of our own material METADATA STANDARDS OAI (Open Archives Initiative) METS (Metadata Transmission Standard)

DLF Work -- background Ø Ø Ø Ø RESOURCE MANAGEMENT XML format for license content (ERMI) Registry of Digital Masters PRODUCTION Production benchmarks and good practices PRESERVATION Journals preservation Global Digital Format Registry

Decoding Buzz: Finding Order in Chaos Ø Ø Ø New library disciplines still solidifying; new skills sets and work habits Tipping points -- when does a new item move from irrelevant to “surprisingly non-terrible” to indispensable? Non-library arbiters of access to scholarship Ambition, Ignorance, and Lack of Money Seismic events are routine and continuing (Mosaic; Google; e. Bay; Palm Pilot; wireless).

Decoding Buzz: Finding Order in Chaos Ø Ø Ø Wireless delivery of library content Text messaging, IM, BLOGS, and WIKIS Harvestable metadata critical (OAI) Acronymic Promiscuity 1: XML; XSLT; CSS; FOP; OAI-PMH; METS; MODS; MIX; DOI; DC; ONIX; SCORM; MARC; EAD; TEI; YAP; OEB; ARK; et al Embrace the churn 1 term borrowed from OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsay

The Collaboration Imperative Ø Ø In all of this whirl of change and possibility, collaboration is raised from something that is good to do to an imperative survival skill Even for libraries (a more collaborative discipline than most), fundamental collaboration is really hard Means shifting focus on where we compete onto services and local customization, not access to content? The challenge of sharing our stuff. Means being deeply reliant on others (OCLC model of shared cataloging extensible to data too? )

Beyond Buzz: Courseware systems and the Library Ø Ø Ø Blackboard/Web. CT/rol your own Open. Course. Ware at MIT Flecker/Mc. Lean DLF report: Digital Library Content and Course Management Systems: Issues of Interoperation http: //www. diglib. org/pubs/cmsdl 0407/ Libraries often absent from VLE decisions SAKAI – a collaboration imperative at work Libraries have an opportunity to be in the classroom like never before

Beyond Buzz: Digital Preservation – wide and deep international dialogues Ø Ø Ø Ø National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) Global Digital Format Registry (DLF) Digital Curation Centre (JISC UK) Digital Preservation Coalition (UK) Preservation metadata/tools (New Zealand Natl Lib) PADI (National Library of Australia) OCLC; RLG; DLF; CLIR Cornell (excellent online training guide) http: //www. library. cornell. edu/iris/tutorial/dpm/

Beyond Buzz: Institutional Repositories Ø Ø Ø “There is an growing interest in the more coordinated management and disclosure of digital assets of institutions — learning objects, data sets, e-prints, theses, dissertations and so on. ” OCLC Environmental Scan, 2003. www. oclc. org/membership/escan/research/default. htm Not really demand-driven. Some evidence that different disciplines react differently to the service and opportunities that repositories offer. Real resistance from faculty to being seen as asset workers for an institutional content management system. Intellectual capitalism: hoary question of who owns faculty (or student) output and who can exploit it and for how long? Faculty loyal to discipline and department more than to institution?

National, trusted repositories Ø Ø Ø British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. Scientific Publications: Free for all? July 2004. (HC 399 -I). http: //www. publications. parliament. uk/pa/cm 200304/cmselect/cmsctech/3 99/39914. htm Ø “This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way. ” The U. S. House Appropriations Committee draft report, concerning NIHfunded research – requirement to deposit in Pub. Med Central’s repository. New Zealand: “NZD$24 million funding from the latest budget will allow New Zealand to ward off ‘digital amnesia’, and protect New Zealand's documentary heritage. ” www. natlib. govt. nz/bin/news/pr? item=1085888952

Beyond Buzz: Institutional repositories Ø The key issues are social and not technical: Ø how to populate it; who gate-keeps it; how to build trust in it; how to advertise its worth; Ø how to stop in becoming last year’s thing and the first thing that gets cut in lean times? That is, how so you embed deep in the institution’s conscience a sense that the IR is a long-term pledge of persistence. Ø Real danger of broken promises between institution and faculty. Ø Core question: how is the arrival of the Institutional Repository (and Open Access) tied in with changes in the faculty rewards system? How integrated into institution’s reflection of valuable and rewardable contributions?

Beyond Buzz: Open Access Ø Ø Ø Exciting glimpse of a future where all scholarship is free, with rich metadata that allows virtual aggregations of content held in seamlessly integrated IRs across the globe, all controlled by libraries and leading to a productivity boom and a global public informed by the best data there is. New roles for libraries – publishing from IRs; customer support. New roles for publishers – add value not control access. Investment needed to ad value to public content favors largest publishing operations – threatens smaller and society publishing? May lead to fewer publishers?

Beyond Buzz: Open Access Ø Most journals now allow self-archiving: Ø Only 5% of journals are gold (typically “author-pays” model), but over 90% are already green (i. e. , they have given their authors blanket permission to self-archive); yet only about 10 -20% of articles have been self-archived. http: //www. elsevier. com/wps/find/authored_newsitem. cws_home/companynews 0 5_00145 http: //www. ecs. soton. ac. uk/~harnad/Temp/impact. html Ø Ø Now it is up to us – no legal barriers to having (most) scholarship published in traditional peer-reviewed journals also freely published from our IRs So, how are our scholar-authors motivated to self-archive, learn metadata skills, publishing skills? Why should they do it? Should they be encouraged to do this for the general good? How to reward them?

Beyond Buzz: Mass Ambitions Ø While any or all of these specific examples may fail to come to fruition, the trend is solid: Ø Ø Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DOIT): $20 billion “digital gift to the nation. ” Massive digitizing for the public good <http: //www. digitalpromise. org/> US Government Printing Office: government documents print/film conversion – 2. 2 million items Carnegie Mellon’s Million Books Project Google’s Project Ocean. Massive library digitizing of out -of-copyright material.

Beyond buzz: Malleability Ø Ø Integration of content, especially licensed journals. Every publisher (and library production unit? ) is an island; we produce silos of data that plays badly with others. A good silo is a lovely thing – but not sufficient always. OAI – Open Archives Initiative (XML, DC) Open. URL/Cross. Ref The need to have content that encourages local reorganization and creation of services, and that permits “beyond browsing and searching” engagement by individual users

Beyond buzz: Malleability Ø Ø Ø Little ability to work with content or even metadata cross-publisher and cross-aggregator. Or crosslibrary. Digital couch potatoes versus rip/mix/burn: We invite our users to visit sites and watch content channels (TV); they want to sample, re-use and repackage as a personal library, a classroom presentation (the music mix)

Embrace and enrich Ø Ø Ø Google, Yahoo, Ebay, and Amazon are your friends Rich personalization and communal ownership OCLC/Worldcat Yahoo and OAI via Michigan Crossref/DOI and Google Amazon and Google together at last: A 9. com

Major Force: Time Ø Ø Users are simultaneously over-whelmed with the time it takes to find relevant information in a “data silo” landscape, and (outside the sciences) under-whelmed by the lack of good material in their particular discipline. TIME: 39% of all respondents (60% faculty) report insufficient time as their major problem [Dimensions and use]

Major Need: discovery Ø Ø Much more content, and much richer, domainsensitive, finding systems are vital, as is the ability to enrich, re-shape, re-package, annotate, and contextualize the data once one has found it. Respondents frustrated with finding information, determining its credibility, and analyzing it [Dimensions and use]

Distributed Open Digital Library Ø Ø Ø DLF Strategic Goal New level of interdependence and deep sharing of master files Two-phase Finding System, initially OAI Digital Object Sharing or richer library services and better scholarship New infrastructure and data creation needs – what are the characteristics of sharable content?

Closing Ø Ø The transformation from isolation to integration is our central challenge and opportunity– with some enormous payoffs when we get it right. Innovative users need malleable content with which to innovate; need to learn to re-shape content in a mutable library. It is not sufficient simply to offer the current fragmented set of websites defined by a publisher or aggregator. This frustrates use, wastes time, and hogties library services. Our collective response to frenzy of change is a demonstrably powerful force – DLF groups working together and across industries have had great success meeting local needs and global ones.