By Peter Sefton

Last Friday I attended the National Library’s Innovative Ideas Forum (my travel was funded by USQ). There’s a decent summary at Michael Carden’s blog.

With my CAIRSS hat on* I was thinking about the ideas and innovations in the context of University Libraries.

The presentation which I think addressed libraries most directly was Kent Fitch’s ominous sounding Resistance is Futile. The video is not up yet, but I’ll add a link in the comments when it is. It was a really good talk, with a very sharp edge – in a really strong programme – listing lots of challenges for librarians to think about and a reasonable dose of something very close to stand up comedy. Kent looked at many of the issues facing libraries – not the least of which is that with commercially produced electronic resources the “buy a book and lend it out model” is just not going to continue to happen. In the university libraries, more than public libraries we are already dealing with a great number of electronic resources, obtained under fixed-term subscription licenses which expire. I don’t need to explain that problem here.

Kent didn’t leave quite enough time to fully address the positive part of his talk where he looked at the opportunities for libraries, which was not entirely his fault**.

One of the questions was from a librarian from a small public library on the NSW South Coast prompting me to think about the value proposition for uni libraries; he noted that essentially the only thing unique to his library was the local history collection, and wondered about the wisdom of digitising it and putting it online. Kent encouraged him to do so, noting that history keeps happening, so the work goes on, and it is this kind of role which will be important for libraries. Others added that librarians are still there to help people find stuff even if the stuff is not on local shelves.

For university libraries there’s more than just local history that’s unique – there’s the entire research and teaching enterprise. University librarians can step forward to run the digital libraries that house scholarship and research data and possibly play an active role in the publishing process for Open Access journals and monographs and educational resources. In the CAIRSS community we’re almost all doing the former – most Australian university institutional repositories are associated with library services.

With research data it’s less clear who will be left holding the baby. There are models emerging like the one Vicki Picasso has developed at Newcastle where IT supply storage services, the research office supplies grants management data, the records office is responsible for data curation for completed research, and the library supplies the central registry system, staffed with data librarians who tie the process together; approving and/or sourcing metadata about data. (This model informs some work I have been doing with ANDS, you can read about our proposed repository system based on VITAL at my blog). I think that the model Vicki and team have developed is notable because there is strong research office involvement from the start – stronger that I think we had in most early IR developments, where it is still not common to have really tight integration between library and research office functions, but the library is still central and doing what do libraries do best.

Beyond housing and curating stuff, Kent talked about how context is important – merging sources of information together; there’s still a lot to do there with our repositories, institutional and otherwise, but it’s hard for most working IR people to get time to think about them when they are in the middle of testing the latest SEER system for the ERA (if you don’t know those acronyms then you’re lucky).

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

This post was written in OpenOffice.org, using templates and tools provided by the Integrated Content Environment project and published to WordPress using The Fascinator.