Librarianship

On Digital Library Services

By sdellis ⋅ October 31, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Many library services that were once separated into technical and user categories are converging in digital environments (Pomerantz, 2008).  Furthermore, new service opportunities are emerging, and we can now see, as has been argued, that all services are user services.  We should explore in-depth the endless service opportunities digital libraries offer.

Self-service is incredibly appealing to many people, and one of the most compelling enhancement to services digital libraries can enable.  It should be appealing to librarians as well, though many frame their identity around the services they’ve been offering for years and are resistant to give up control.  For example, “tagging” is a digital library service that actually allows a user to personally or communally catalog, an activity that was once performed almost entirely by librarians.  While this fulfills a user need to classify and store my own information, the user is also performing the technical task of cataloging an item with valuable information for other library services.  Tags may be mined by systems or librarians to provide even more services, such as cross-disciplinary keyword suggestions.

I also think that the digital libraries can get closer to collecting and capturing work at the moment of creation.  In fact, in order to best service research and archive datasets, we must create services that allow research data to be entered directly into our publishing and archiving systems (i.e., institutional repositories).  As these datasets are accessed and cited, we need to make sure that the data cited in an article can be retrieved the way it was when the author accessed it, even if data has been continually added to the dataset.  Otherwise, the citation cannot be audited.

The solution to the preservation of artifacts that libraries can’t provide tools for creation is a bit more complex.  Many works are digitally produced these days and users are becoming more and more aware of the value of backups.  One service that university and academic libraries could provide would be to offer networked data backups of important faculty material to our repositories, kind of like what Amazon offers with its S3 service (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/).  In this way we get closer to the original source material and also potentially fund the project.

Dr. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, outlines many digital improvements to the Copyright Office (Billington, 2007).  For this reason, The Library of Congress (LOC) plays a key role in resolving both copyright issues and interoperability issues.  Because the LOC houses the Copyright Office, they can facilitate digital lookups of copyright and licensing information by exposing their datasets of copyrights.  If licensing information is readily available and interpretable, the benefit to digital library services would be amazing.  One example of such a benefit is the digital library of sheet music I am working on for my Digital Libraries class term project.  If I could query licensing information, I would not have to rely on user flagging or deal with copyright owners asking me to remove free access to their sheet music.  I could simply use the license terms and date of copyright to determine whether something can legally be distributed or not.

I was rather frustrated with Billington’s description of the “Preserving Creative America” project.  The aim of this project is to join with commercial producers of creative content and “preserve American creativity in all its forms”.   My frustration stems from the idea that commercial producers are fully representative of the America’s creativity.  While I don’t make much money from my artistic activities, I do feel that they are culturally significant, along with hundreds of other works I’ve discovered which never made a dime for their creators.  In fact, one of the LOC’s premiere projects, American Memory, preserves Appalachian music recordings, performances that were a highly creative, yet non-commercial activities.  If the oral history projects Billington mentions aim to record American stories, not only those whose professions involve supplying vocal talent, then the Preserving Creative America project should broaden its scope and not rest on the assumption that creativity is purely a commercial endeavor.  By extending such services to commercial entities and not the general public, I believe the LOC could offer not a novel service, but rather a disservice and an insult to the American people.

We are at a period of history where we must adapt to a changing environment.  The dinosaurs didn’t become extinct because of climate change, they became extinct because they couldn’t adapt (Abram, 2008).  Science tells us that the organisms which have the best odds for adaptation are those that can mutate rapidly.  We should take a cue from biology and frequently try novel services and mutations on traditional services, taking notice of what is valuable to our users.

REFERENCES

Abram. S. (2008). Evolution to revolution to chaos? Reference in transition. Searcher, 16(8), 42-48.

Billington, J.H. (2007). Testimony to Congress. Washington, D.C. The Library of Congress. Retrieved Jan. 7, 2008 from http://www.loc.gov/about/welcome/speeches/digital/digitalage.html

Pomerantz, J. (2008). Digital (Library Services) and (Digital Library) Services. Journal of Digital Information, 9(27).

Tags: digital_library, libraries