IL2009 D101: Digital library Network — Roy Tennant

Unfiltered notes from Roy Tennant’s talk on Digital Library Network:

Perceptions report — libraries = books
Libraries were once center of information universe. Many online catalogs are simply card catalogs on screen. Libraries were built around the idea of scarcity. World today is not this way. Even in developing world — form of internet access is cell phone (more ubiquitous than computer).
Tablet devices are on the way, and soon. Epaper is comings oon, too.
Users built workflow around libraries. Now, we need to build ourselves around users.
Massively centralized services not possible. Now, this may be our only salvation.
Quotes General Shinseki: if you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelvance even more.
We need to put libraries at the network level of web scale.
We need to be an essential part of the new ecology. Whole publishing indusry uses Onix standard for bibliographic data. Libraries use MARC. Does anyone find this funny? Libraries don’t just process metadata. We add value, put in more data based on what we know about books.
What is going to save our bacon? It’s not what we’ve been doing for last century. Research process is broken — messy desktops (virtual and real). Libraries have metadata to help researchers organize and find the information they need. We have to help people with their problems. Libraries need to be the solution.
Take a look at CDL’s escholarship.org. Changed their IR into something more dynamic. Now a publishing tool for faculty. IT’s not an IR anymore — it’s a publishing service. IR is the backend, nobody cares. It’s all about publication and citation.
CDL is also archiving state government sites. See what the world looked like around pivotol events. Crawls state government sites twice a year, some more frequently. Also make tools available to others.
Make sure your site is indexed by Googl, etc. Your site must make its content available. Syndicate your content in places where it can be found.
Libraries need to create conversations, be the locus of ideas and discussion.
Question about future of federated search: is it basically dead?
Answer — yes, it’s time has basically come and gone, if we can build some of these new services like Summon, etc.