1. NALIS Forum – Sofia 24 September 2010 Karen Calhoun, OCLC Libraries and Cooperative Systems
2. Cooperative Systems at the Crossroads Alice: 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?‘ 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun
3. Small Things That Change Everything NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:80486DX2_200x.png Photograph by User:Uberpenguin of the upper interconnect layers on an Intel chip taken with an optical microscope at 200x magnification
4. Empowering Connections and Conversations in an Entirely New Way NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun Cell phone mania. By vanhalligan. http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanhalligan/3126639463/
6. From OCLC: Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005) The Search Engine Challenge Q: Where do you typically begin your search for information on a particular topic? NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun 84% Search Engines 2% Library Portals
7. Brace for Change … Embrace Change NALIS September 2010 It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. --Charles Darwin. Photo of Charles Darwin by Ernest Edwards, London. Prior to 1882, Repository: Smithsonian Institution. http://photography.si.edu/SearchImage.aspx?t=5&id=3525&q=SIL14-D1-09 Karen Calhoun
8. My Report to the Library of Congress NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf 2006
9. EXTEND STRATEGY EXPAND STRATEGY LEADERSHIP STRATEGY “ Outward integration” Improve the user’s experience Greatly enhance delivery (fast!) Standards development/compliance Recycle and reuse catalog data Innovate and reduce costs Invest in shared catalogs Link pools of scholarly data Seek partners Mass collections & catalogs Digitize Open access Participate in the substitute industry “ Thirty-two Options & Three Strategies”— A Radical Abridgement Calhoun. LC report, p. 14 NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun
11. NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun “ Modern librarianship is not possible without cooperation between libraries.” -- Nadya Terzieva, Radostina Todorova http://elpub.scix.net/data/works/att/208_elpub2006.content.pdf
12. “ Outward Integration” “ Integration should be outward rather than inward, with libraries seeking to use their components in new ways” --Interviewee for LC report on future of the catalog, p. 37 NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun
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14. Next steps to consider … NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun
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16. Inclusion of More Types of Content: What Is “The Collection”? Where Do Collections For Citizens, Students and Scholars Come From? “ [T]he stuff of cultural heritage collections, digital assets, pre-print services and the open Web, research labs, and learning management systems remains for the most part outside the scope of the catalog. Scholarly information objects now include digitized rare and historical materials, textual primary source materials, graphical images, materials described in institutional and disciplinary repositories, conference Web sites, scholarly Web sites … data sets, software, simulations, a rising array of multimedia resources, learning objects and courses—the list goes on.” --LC report, p. 24 NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun
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18. Outward Integration: Data Synchronization and Syndication WorldCat & WorldCat Partners… Data synch Other partners Flickr Commons NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun
19. An Example of Syndication: Start on Google Book Search … NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun Find in a library
20. … Get It From My Library NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun Pushing metadata out, pulling users in: It’s all about linking metadata
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22. Research into use and users of digital library collections “ Digital libraries, far from being simple digital versions of library holdings, are now attracting a new type of public, bringing about new, unique and original ways for reading and understanding texts.”—BibUsages Study, BnF, 2002 “ The availability of primary sources has been crucial for the success of my teaching in history. Students have remarked what a difference it has made, and I have noticed a big difference between this course with the availability of online primary resources to those I have taught before that were based on printed resources.” –History instructor, University of California “ The function of searching across collections is a dream frequently discussed but seldom realized at a robust level. This paper … discusses how we might move from isolated digital collections to interoperable digital libraries.” —Howard Besser NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun
23. Open Access Journals NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun 5,364 journals worldwide; 26 from Bulgaria
24. Worldwide Open Access Repositories Source: 1,719 repositories worldwide NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun
33. Thank You! No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main. Meditation XVII , John Donne NALIS September 2010 Karen Calhoun
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Notas del editor
NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun Many thanks to the NALIS Foundation for including me in today’s forum. In this presentation, I will be speaking to you from the perspective of a fellow librarian who has struggled with the issues of how to keep libraries strong in the age of the Internet. In the course of my professional career, I have had the privilege of contributing in small ways to many programs and projects centered on national or regional library cooperation in many parts of the world. I was honored to be asked to assist NALIS by providing a perspective on what libraries are doing to take their rightful place in emerging Web-based national, regional, and global infrastructures for research, teaching and learning. I offer the following remarks as the observations of an outsider who may or may not have relevant things to say to you. I look forward to hearing your comments and questions.
Calhoun I have observed, all over the world, libraries are looking for new ways to cooperate. At regional and national levels, libraries are exploring previously unimagined levels of library cooperation. We are at a crossroads, like Alice in Wonderland (Click) If you recall, Alice says to the Cat 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?‘ The Cat responds 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' . September 2010
Why all of a sudden this emphasis on library cooperation? Some small things have happened that have changed the world. This is a reproduction of a photograph of the upper interconnect layers on an Intel chip, taken with an optical microscope at 200x magnification. What has constituted wisdom, the nature of our institutions, what has been fundamental to our societies have been all been changed by this chip and what it eventually made possible, the rise of the World Wide Web. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
And it has led to the almost incredible impact, from the perspective of someone of my generation, on how and where people connect to the information they need, and not just young people, as shown here, but scholars and citizens at large. The impact of this new age of discovery and connection, on the Web and on our cell phones, iphones and droids, has been and continues to be the mechanism of profound social and economic change. But I imagine you have heard all this before. Where is Bulgaria in this picture? NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
The intensity of the Internet’s impact on social institutions, like newspapers and libraries, is different depending on the percent of the population that has access to it. This chart suggests that the intensity of the web’s social and intellectual impact is likely to be strongest in North America and parts of Europe. Institutions in Bulgaria may not feel the Internet’s impact as keenly yet, but Bulgaria’s position is well above the world average and it is well on its way. This is both a good and bad thing for libraries and the communities that they serve. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
One of the impacts typically felt in a country whose citizens, students, and scholars have widespread access to the Internet is a change in where people turn for information. This slide shows a key finding of widely-cited study of perceptions of libraries and information sources conducted five years ago. When asked where they start a search for information, a large majority said they begin with a web search engine. Two percent said they begin with a library web site. Since then the gap has grown wider, affecting not only the general citizenry but students, teachers, and scholars as well. September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
On a daily basis, I find that what has been fundamental to libraries has been upended by the influence of the Web. As little as we may like to admit it, there are perfectly respectable people who are willing to say our societies no longer need libraries. It does little good to get locked into a defensive posture , call these people stupid , or bury our heads in the sand. To assure that strong institutions will emerge from this period in the history of libraries, continuing with plan A simply will not do. We need a plan B. Libraries need to adapt . NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
Calhoun The Library of Congress began looking for a plan B over ten years ago. As a small part of that very large process, I was commissioned by the Library of Congress to prepare a report and recommendations on the future of the library catalog in the age of search engines. This is a screen shot of the title page of that report.. NALIS Conference September 2010
September 2010 Calhoun As the slide indicates, this triangle is a radical abridgement of a figure from my full report to the Library of Congress. I proposed three strategies for libraries seeking to revitalize their catalogs—leadership, expansion, and extension. All involve library cooperation on a scale previously unimagined in the history of libraries. In the context of the leadership strategy, I argued for “putting library collections where their eyes are” or “outward integration.” into the wider Web, beyond a single library’s Web pages. I will talk more about “outward integration” shortly. There are many other possibilities suggested for library collective action in this diagram. For now I’d like to move to what I learned about collective action, that is, library cooperation, in Bulgaria, as I prepared this presentation for you today. NALIS Conference
In my research into the library cooperation scene in Bulgaria, I learned that you have made a good start. You have experience to draw on. Now, you are at a new beginning. My hope for you is that you seize this new opportunity with energy and make it a success! I invite you to look collectively at what you have already accomplished in Bulgaria by cooperating in BIC, though BLIA, with OCLC, and regionally through COBISS, TEL, Europeana and EuropeanaLocal, and evaluate all of these activities holistically. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
There has been a deep understanding of the importance of library cooperation in Bulgaria for some time. There is also experience with a variety of cooperative projects to date. I encourage you to collectively take the opportunity of the NALIS project to integrate Bulgarian academic library systems, to take stock of where you are and what the next steps should be. What have you learned about what works and what doesn’t? What collective actions will have the most impact? What barriers will need to be overcome? The rest of this presentation provides some issues to consider at this point in Bulgaria’s progress toward cooperative solutions. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
September 2010 Karen Calhoun I mentioned earlier the concept of outward integration of library collections in a way that information seekers will encounter them not only in visits to library sites, but also in visits to the websites they use most frequently. Outward integration of library collections into the web is one requirement for optimizing the investments libraries have made in their collections. NALIS Conference
September 2010 Karen Calhoun If we were successful at outwardly integrating or embedding our collections in the Web, so that an information searcher could start … In as many places as possible on the web, and end up in a library, what would that look like from a library perspective?[click all] We can imagine a new age, in which an individual library catalog is a node on the Web that is attached to other nodes, and the user can traverse these nodes easily to connect to his or her libraries’ collections. Today’s separate library systems could be independent but loosely connected, the way so many things on the Web are today, or we could have many more shared systems, or some combination of solutions. NALIS Conference
I have argued that the global digital library must be inclusive— Inclusive in terms of all of the kinds of information seekers in the communities we serve from children and students to teachers, scholars, and citizens at large Inclusive in terms of all of the kinds of content that support community engagement, learning, teaching, research and scholarship Each of these—types of users and types of content—are important at the local, country, regional, and global levels. Let me explain what I mean with some examples. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
Provided they cooperate in new ways, the means already exist for libraries to have a greater impact, to deliver better services, and to reduce the cost of delivering those services. I have observed that what is often missing from national or regional cooperative systems is an inclusive, user-centered design. Often there will be a national research infrastructure that is designed for the needs of top researchers. Academic libraries tend to have cooperative systems that are optimized for students and scholars using physical and licensed electronic resources. National libraries pay a great deal of attention to cultural heritage materials, and the cooperative systems of public libraries tend to pay more attention to materials for citizens and children. The scope or boundaries of a country’s cooperative library and research information systems tend to reflect this. Perhaps this is inevitable. However, in light of recent research indicating that the information seeking preferences and expectations of experts and non-experts have much in common, it is perhaps time to explore the potential for more unified, or at least better connected cooperative systems. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
This slide shows a quote from the report that I prepared for the Library of Congress in 2006 about the future of the online catalog. In the course of the study I found that the collections of interest to our communities are greater in scope than what we have traditionally made available in our library buildings, or even what we have licensed for online use. Research and learning now rely on digitized text and images, plus born digital material like data sets, e-print services, learning objects, and more. Some libraries, especially national libraries and national-level information institutes, are beginning to build these new kinds of collections, but they may or may not be part of the country’s cooperative library systems. VALA Conference February 2010 Calhoun
In the rest of this presentation, I ask a series of what if questions about the potential of cooperative library systems going forward. Here is the first one. What if our cooperative systems could make many types of library collections more visible on the Web? September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
Many libraries are working to capture as much attention on the Web outside their own systems as they can. I’ve tried to illustrate this visually for the NLNZ. The NLNZ put a big digitized photo collection out on the Flickr Commons; they push their content out into the union catalog of NZ libraries, and they expose their metadata to other partners as well. The NLNZ is synchronizing its collections with other aggregations and syndicating them in other Web environments, Just as daily comic strips are syndicated in multiple newspapers, to syndicate web content is to make it available on multiple web sites. September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
Here is one example of what such syndication looks like. Elias Canetti, born in Bulgaria, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1981. His work is well represented in Google Book Search. Luckily, along with the other links to buy copies of one of his most popular novels, Auto da fé, there is a link to find a copy of this book in a library. Behind this link is cataloging data from the OCLC database, along with information about how to locate this book in an OCLC member library. If the searcher clicks on this link … NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
He or she is taken through WorldCat, where he or she can find the nearest OCLC member library that holds a copy. In this case I have assumed the searcher is in Slovenia and has borrowing privileges at one of the libraries that contributes to the Slovenian union catalog. Click This cooperative system exposes the cataloging metadata that libraries have made over the years in order to attract more attention to library collections on sites like Google Book Search. It’s all about syndicating and linking the metadata from different systems together to help information seekers discover and use libraries. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
What if this kind of approach could be used to help information seekers discover not just traditional library collections, but more cultural heritage content? Europeana and EuropeanaLocal are cooperative projects that are making this happen, and I see that Bulgarian libraries are beginning to participate in both the contribution of content and in metadata work. September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
September 2010 Karen Calhoun Digital library collections are greatly increasing in popularity. On this slide I share use statistics for the Univ of Wisconsin collections over the last 7 years.The public’s increasing interest is obvious. Click. In a study that interviewed scholars using digitized special collections, one said how useful it is to teaching and learning to be able to easily incorporate primary sources into the curriculum. Click. In a study of Gallica (the digital library of France), the authors found that the collections attract a highly interested, loyal, and new type of public. Click, Last is this quote from Howard Besser, a well known digital library expert in the US, who points to the breakthrough that will be achieved for research, teaching and learning when collective collections of digital collections can be interoperably aggregated on the network. NALIS Conference
Moving to other new types of content that could be represented in our cooperative library systems, I should not fail to mention open access journals. Increasingly important to scholarly communications, their metadata can be aggregated at a variety of levels in cooperative library systems. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
I have argued that it is also beneficial to aggregate in library cooperative systems the metadata and links to the content of open access repositories, both institutionally- and discipline based. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
An example of what this looks like is here. Waseda University in Japan contributes to OAIster, which aggregates the metadata for freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone. What the slide illustrates is the harvesting of metadata and links to the content of the Waseda University institutional repository and its aggregation in OAIster, then WorldCat. This is another example of “outward integration” of metadata into many places on the Web, thus giving the information seeker many chances and places to find this content. September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
Until about a year ago, OAIster was hosted by the University of Michigan, when the University of Michigan asked OCLC to take over responsibility for supporting OAIster. As I said, OAIster is an aggregation, or union catalog, of articles and other content harvested from a variety of open access collections, both digitized and born digital. OAIster contains 25 million records from 1100 contributing institutions. All of these are now available from WorldCat.org, OCLC’s freely available discovery service on the Web. So far, the three existing open access repositories of Bulgaria are not harvested into OAIster. OCLC is broadening and improving the OAIster harvesting service to attract more contribution. The revised service is called the Digital Collections Gateway. September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
The Digital Collections Gateway, introduced in July of this year, is compatible with all OAI-compliant repositories and it is freely available for use by both members and non-members of OCLC. September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
I cannot close without mentioning what is nearest and dearest to my heart. What if we could, through better library cooperative systems, take better advantage of the metadata that libraries have already produced? Or that exists from other providers? September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
There is a wealth of existing metadata. In libraries, in traditional abstracting and indexing services, and among publishers, metadata has been for the most part professionally produced. We are beginning to see in addition a good deal of author and/or user contributed metadata which needs to be usefully folded into what we have in some way. On top of that there is metadata being produced through large scale data mining of metadata aggregations in library union catalogs and authority files from many countries. I’ll show you an example in a moment. September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
This is a page that was automatically produced using metadata from many cooperating libraries. It is a product of data mining. The page represents information about the famous 18 th century Bulgarian monk who wrote an important and influential history of the Slavo-Bulgarians. Based on mining information from cataloging records, and combined information from library authority files, we can tell a lot about this man. This is a free public site. At the bottom of this entry is a tag cloud, drawn from facets mined from LC subject headings. One could imagine using such a cloud to seed further contributions from end users and historians. September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
VIAF is another new attempt at global levels of library cooperation with the potential to much better support multilingual search and bring value to national, regional and local levels. It is an aggregation of interconnected yet separate national authority files. So far, participants come about 15 countries. They are listed here. One of the founders of VIAF is the Library of Congress. The OCLC office of research hosts the system and provides the programming. NALIS Conference September 2010 Calhoun
Here is the VIAF page for St. Cyril, showing the various heading forms used by different national libraries and a wheel illustrating the relationships between the heading forms. Such tools might be helpful not only to make library collections more discoverable in a multilingual environment, but combined or reused in the context of a variety of services outside libraries to create higher quality discovery and delivery services for all. September 2010 Calhoun NALIS Conference
September 2010 Karen Calhoun - University of Kansas I hope I have given you some food for thought and conversation about the future of library cooperative systems. Allow me to leave you with a question and my own answer to it. Why is achieving new levels of library cooperation important? Why does it matter? I believe that the prize to be won is a more effective presence for libraries in our societies. Library cooperation creates strong libraries, which in turn sustain strong societies, an informed citizenry, economic development, scholarship, and the creation of new knowledge. We can be connected. The means to cooperate more fully and effectively exist. What is needed is the collective will and commitment to do so. Thank you for your attention and to the conference organizers for the chance to participate. NALIS Conference