Greg from the team at ADFI wrote a response to Peter Sefton’s last post here – we we are giving him a guest post.
By Greg Pendlebury
I love the presentation style and I look forward to the video. I agree 100% with Kent’s message, but I always worry that the consumers of such messages get lost in the debate of ‘online’ vs. ‘print’ as a gross simplification of the issues.
As you rightly point out Peter, University libraries are mass migrating to online content already, and have been for the last decade (at least). I think USQ is at something like 75% of our acquisitions budget being spent on online resources, and that number would be higher if appropriate resources could be found. However most staff working in those libraries would probably agree they still have a role to play there, and if anything workloads are going up for two reasons.
The service delivery and training aspects of providing access to those resources are becoming more involved, and turning into rooms full of students sitting at PCs learning how to access electronic resources and troubleshoot difficulties. This seems to be a combination of poor tools and access methods (generally provided by vendors) compounded by an often mistaken assumption that the technical competence of the average student or staff member can keep up with our technology ‘improvements’.
On top of that of course is the increased difficulty of selecting resources to even spend your money on. Different packaging and financial models are throwing increased complexity into an area already difficult to navigate because of the significant amount of data now on offer to choose from.
For public libraries I always recall manning a service desk on pension day when the bus would pull up in front of the Library and hordes of elderly customers would stream through the front doors heading for the romance and western sections (depending on their gender). Of course this is one tiny anecdotal example of customers, but it is a perfect example of why I think the issues are far less urgent in public libraries. They are going to have to go through the same transitions, but at a far slower rate whilst their customer base largely demands access to traditional resources. The minority customers requiring newer service models can be satisfied with lower resourcing levels then we see in the University sector.
Now having myself grossly simplified the above points, I wanted to mention the part of Kent’s presentation that almost had me cheering: “…who is making our tools? …and why?”. Kent specifically touches on Google’s digitisation efforts which certainly has a lot of debate surrounding it, but largely revolves around where the content is housed and the cynical, but not irrelevant, ’super-vendor’ concerns of who controls it. I’m not an expert on the topic, but my current understanding of the concerns from the Library sector revolve around ensuring enough consideration is going to access from patrons physically inside (North American?) libraries as well as ensuring that Google doesn’t simply decide to change the playing field entirely once they’ve established dominance.
For all that however, Google exposes APIs for us to feed into our Library catalogues. We can get book covers, metadata, and even sample content for free in real-time. I’m kind of happy its there really. What I’ve always found amusing about such debates is that the University sector has put up with FAR, FAR worse behaviour from our vendors for a long time. The vast majority of the 75% of resources I mentioned above goes to our eBook and eJournal ’super-vendors’ who not only control the data we need, but are now moving into controlling the tools we need to access the data with next-gen discovery layer options. And if the value for money we get on the data is any indication, the costs are only going to rise.
Last year I was delighted to watch this video of Joe Lucia’s keynote at the Evergreen International Conference 2009. It resonated so strongly with me, not only because of its discussion regarding librarianship and ‘the intellectual commons’, but because of the resounding message that we need to take control of our software and tools, and to stop being so cripplingly dependant on vendors.
When I came to work for ADFI the possibility really opened up to me that the issue relates to the wider University sector as well. Wouldn’t the future of libraries be better if the research and publication output of the University was going into open tools that the University controlled? Institutional Repositories that are open source and open journals, possibly also running open source software like OJS?
Nothing can change things overnight of course. The ’super-vendors’ still have all our legacy content, but what do we want the landscape to look like in 20 years time? If we keep publishing into ‘closed’ journals and accepting crappy service from vendors for their crappy tools, it’s going to look pretty similar I imagine, we’ll just be a whole lot poorer and frustrated.
To get there of course we have to resource it, and Joe quite rightly mentions that as one of the key challenges, but I think programs like CAIRSS are a perfect example of how University libraries are starting to come together with the TOOLS as the key point of collaboration. I would love to see that extend into open source development.
Kent’s example of Trove is clearly a good example of the tools we need, but my one criticism (and it’s a small one) of the NLA is the tools still aren’t open (unless I’m very mistaken), but given their prior involvement with VuFind I hope it’s just a case of too little time/resources to contribute.
Copyright Greg Pendlebury, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia.
The link to Joe Lucia’s keynote seems to have been lost in the copy/paste:
http://www.archive.org/details/JoeLuciaKeynote_eg09
Comment by Greg Pendlebury — 2010-04-23 @ 5:54 pm