93,670,148 Worldcat records this morning

 

Lorcan Dempsey – Vice President and Chief Strategist, OCLC

 

Lorcan spoke about the ways in which networks are changing, and the ways in which libraries work.  The structural changes we are seeing in the networked environment some of the ways in which skills and people need to develop. 

 

He began with an image of current reading room at British Museum Library, a stereotypical view of a library that we have—a large reading room.  There is a sense of privacy in this large room—each table has its own small light, at the same time it’s social, passageways and reference materials around the edge.  To use the library you have to use the catalogue—heavy physical books.  The actual books are outside the reading room so you have to use the catalogues to get the books, which are brought to you—you are fed.   You have a sense of the vast array of knowledge in the sky—the books, the arches, the windows, a feeling of being within a universe of knowledge.  It is a place that supports private research and social space.  Louis MacNeice in a poem described the space as a “hive-like dome.”  Everything is vertically integrated around the collection—space, expertise,–systems and services all organized around the collection and they are organized in the physical space.

 

A network environment is a reconfiguration of that integration that is coming apart. The relationships don’t need to work that way.  We need to think about physical spaces, the expertise, the systems and services, and the collections themselves in separate ways because they are pulled apart on the network.   This means, because of the different type of focus, that increasingly we begin to think differently about these things.

 

When expertise is about learning and developing resources to the web, or relating collections to the contours of a discipline, that’s very different from how one establishes a collection for a constituency.

 Place = space infused with value

British Museum Library is an interesting space infused with value because of the resources, support, colleagues, and learning opportunities. Over time the type of values that you want to get out of a space changes

 

Place

–Space infused with value

–How has the value changed over time?

–Engagement with collections, expertise and services

 

Space

–Opportunity Costs

–Valuable real estate

–Growing pressure in many environments

 

Place – Infrastructure -> “customer relations”

High touch engagement with users, places where you create higher-value types of activities that can’t occur on the network.   Move storage away and move in high touch, engagement, conversation, demonstration

Higher value activity

–access to scarce resources—people, equipment, specialist advice, exhibition, ….

–individual, group, social

 

If you think about skills, as you think about how to create these types of places, one has to think about students (of all types) want to work together, it requires a type of engagement with the fabric of the building, about how place and space are designed and requires some new skills and aptitudes.

 

Collections -New Directions

 Shared a collections grid with the audience as a useful way to think of library content –you can see it here.  http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/projectdocs/papers/collection_grid.gif  Or you can visit Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog and read about it yourself http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001450.html Trends in libraries 

Mass digitization and off -site storage

Licensed materials

Special collections onto the web

Thematic collections of web resources

 

The ways in which libraries, archives, and museums have traditionally treated materials comes together in the University–published materials in discourse.  Archives have a focus on evidence.  They exist to establish the integrity of resources.   Museums support a variety of activities but primarily they interpret materials, they educate.  Libraries still have to manage the discourse of scholarship, increasingly though they have to manage evidence (they have to work in archival ways) and increasingly, thinking about how they make things available on the web, they have to think like museums.

 

Expertise – The person is an entry point

 

People have become important.  People, their interests, are central to the network environment.   Social book-marking services, reviews in amazon.com.  We get to understand resources in a way that is filtered by people we trust.  If you think about the future of media, if you think about Facebook—people are using media to create social encounters.  What Facebook does is bring people together around their views of media.  Library websites, on the other hand, are anonymous, so they increasingly are different from the places that people spend their time because they aren’t infused with personal choice.   Libraries in Facebook would be like parents at a party. What libraries can do is  provide opportunities for chat and personality. 

 

***OK, Lorcan used this example of the University of Rochester which discovered (d’oh) that students need the most research help at 2 a.m. so they started late-night live reference librarians available by phone.  BUT, they also discovered that students are likely to turn to their parents first at 2 a.m. so U of R folk want to provide parents with an understanding of library research tools.  [I thought when he went off to college he became somebody else’s problem—at least the schoolwork part!]

 

Specialist consultancy: GIS, Metadata, IPR

Marketing and Assessment: understand needs

 

You have to determine how to build your workflow around users, not determine how users are going to work within your framework.

 

Systems and services

 

Support for faculty and student

Place the library in the flow

Digital asset management

More sophisticated sourcing decisions

 

Leadership

 

–Value translation: showing the value of the library in the context of the values of the home institution

–Secure resources

–Create conditions for success

 

 

Rush Miller – Hillman University Librarian and Director, University of Pittsburgh

Beyond Merely Surviving: Keeping Libraries Relevant in the Digital Age

 

What do we have to do as libraries to be relevant?

Why do libraries have to change?

 

How did we lose control of the internet?

Why don’t people use the library as much as they used to?

What do you mean, we don’t need libraries anymore?

 

The general perception is our world is that libraries are becoming irrelevant because everything is on the web.  In China you still have a captive audience, in America we’ve lost that audience.  We used to be the heart of the University.  We forced students to use our systems.  We came up with the subject headings.  We forced students to understand our terms and we had very strong support from faculty, administrators, and trustees.

 

Here are some of the issues:

–There are, today, lots of alternatives to find information—Google, yahoo, etc.

–Administrators are questioning the costs of libraries today.

–Boards wonder why we need libraries and librarians since everything is on the web.

–Specialty libraries are closing as universities need space for new faculty members and labs.

–Use of library “databases” and other electronic tools is small and traditional library use is declining. 

–Even our digitization agendas are usurped by Google (e.g. an ARL project to digitize all government documents, now shelved in favor of Google)

–Buying power of libraries has declined steadily in face of inflation and budget cuts

–Libraries no longer necessary as distributors of information resources

–50% of all searches are Google searches

–they are the 3^rd largest company in the U.S.

 

Is Google more of a universal library than we ever will be?

Claiming to be valuable is NOT ENOUGH.   Value of libraries and librarians cannot be maintained by simply staing it, no matter how eloquent we are, but only by demonstrating value to the students and facultuy of our school, colleges, universities, and communities.

To survive libraries must:

-Become user-centric, not user-focused (listen to them, re-think our services, re-think our prcessess, assess, assess, assess).

–Rethink our mission.  Libraries aren’t about books.  They aren’t about information.  They are about people–connecting people to resources.

–Re-engineer our operations

–Rethink how Space is used in libraries

–Collaborate on innovation

–Build expertise for the future

–We have to change the organizational culture

Xudong Jin (Ohio Wesleyan University)

Haipeng Li (Oberlin College)

CALA 21st Century Librarian Seminar Series

 

For the past few days we have talked about collaboration.  The United States is the present and China is the future.  That’s the philosophy that encourages us. 

CALA is the Chinese American Librarians Association founded in 1973. http://www.cala-web.org/   We have slightly more than 1000 members, most in the United States (also Canada, China, Hong-Kong and Taiwan).
The focus of our project is two-fold.  The first deals with the practical issues of librarianship identifying the issues and discovering solutions.  The second area is public service.   The program has a flexible, collaborative structure. Seminar topics are chosen by the Chinese and then CALA finds appropriate speakers among its members.  Funding support is also collaborative.  For example, China will cover the cost of domestic airfare and housing.  

CALA has done a lot of rethinking about the structure. Last year we finished a strategic planning process.  This seminar project was approved by CALA board as a long-term project. 

Wrap-Up Speakers

Wang Dongbo – Director, Operation and Coordination Division, National Library of China

Possible next conference 2009 in Beijing.  The Chinese delegates represent 17 institutions with 23 representatives from China.  In a keynote and eight themed sessions, the Chinese participants spoke on a range of topics from past and current collaborations, common-ground for archives, libraries, and museums; exciting projects currently in process in China, and proposals for future collaborations.  In addition, very interesting papers on information sharing, the National Collection, and standards were presented and several cases of archive management.  All of the Chinese delegates were chosen for their high scholarship and worked very hard on their presentations.  We enjoyed the many opportunities for learning about OCLC and the tours of the campus.  We also enjoyed the many social opportunities for getting together–particularly the singing.
Beverly Lynch – Professor and Director Senior Fellows Program, Founding Director California Rare Book School, UCLA

Beverly began by discussing convergence is an important topic and noted that we were privileged to have Robert Martin, who has done so much work to bring the topic before the North American information services audiences.  She mentioned Clifford Lynch’s keynote in which he introduced a shorthand name ”cultural memory institutions” that he is hearing more and more often applied to libraries, archives, and  museums.  He also pointed out that many new institutions feel they should be considered cultural memory institutions. 

(***Note from me:  over drinks, lunches, and dinners for two days a group of us–Joyce Raye , Beverly Lynch, Robert Martin, James Neal have continued to discuss the implications of the terms “cultural memory institution”  and “cultural heritage organizations.”)

There have been many exchanges identified and no one place to find out about those.  Jay Jordon stepped up to the plate and said a registry run by OCLC might help out with this.  The organizing committee met and has committed to continuing this series of conferences.  Some topics have been discussed but we will wait before presenting those any further.

The importance of workshops and training is known to all of us but if this conference is to continue as it has, it ought to focus on policy issues.

Jay Jordon, President and CEO, OCLC, Closing Remarks

After many kind comments and discussion of the importance of the work we have accomplished here, Jay closed with the Irish blessing:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

And as the conference closed the screened showed  93,686306 WorldCat records 

That folks, is  68,801 records that have been added in these two and a half days.

While we’ve been sitting discussing big issues here in Columbus–librarians across the world were busy doing the equally as important work that allow us all to access the world’s cultural memory.