Digital Public Library of America, a toolkit for the 21st century librarian

(The following was posted to the Digital Public Library of America discussion group, DPLA-Discussion)

When reading many of the critiques of DPLA in the "academic" vs. "public" vein, I can't help but be reminded of the lyrics from Oklahoma - "Why can't the farmer and the cowman be friends?". Why monger a crisis among ourselves when there's greater challenges we all need to face?

In the past few years, when attending ALA, I've often wondered if the streams of librarianship (public, academic, special, school) can or should gather under the big, chaotic tent that is ALA. Though I had been leaning towards the "no" in recent years, the discussion on this list and developments in the world and technology has made lean more and more to yes, we can find core shared values and missions across the range of library types.

As John Palfrey has noted, creating a steering committee in and of itself is an exclusionary act that will by fiat cause problems and dissent and related discomforted to those groups who don't feel "fully" represented. The steering committee will do important work, but I also believe that more work will be done by the librarians "on the ground".

The "P" in DPLA has raised a number of issues that I think we all need to examine in ways that don't cause us to obscure the "L" in DPLA. And in my opinion, the "L" needs to be a library writ large, one that includes elements of not just "books" but also prints, photographs, museum objects, etc. More of the conflux of "library" and "museum" that I noted in an earlier post. The type of "library" that someone like John Cotton Dana was envisioning with the Newark Public Library/Museum. A place for the academic, the common folk, the lifelong learner.

Nancy Gwinn (Director of Smithsonian Libraries) wrote an article a while back entitled "Afoot in Three Camps" about the Smithsonian's library and its role in academic, museum, and special. Increasingly, through the digital offerings of Smithsonian Libraries (disclaimer: I'm the Assistant Director of Digital Services, but these are my views and don't reflect the yadda yadda) we are increasingly a "public" library in the sense that our online offerings are for the benefit of "public" that will never pass through our doors, and web analytically, are our major audience. This is also true of the offerings of the Library of Congress and "Carnegie Research I" libraries that are creating "digital libraries for the world".

A corpus of digitized content made available to libraries of all shapes, sizes, and designations (public, academic, elite, storefront) is an important but only a preliminary step. Making that content useful, relevant, fun, educationally contextualized, is something that needs to be done one community at a time, one user at a time.

DPLA is NOT a solution to any "problems" of libraries, it's a toolkit for librarians to build solutions to problems that they find every single day on their jobs; a toolkit for library users to bring to the workshops they need to succeed in a competitive world. DPLA as a toolkit is only as strong as the tools and skills that everyone brings to the worktable.

So, you can bring a hammer, I'll bring a saw. If we work together, not everything will look like a nail.

Sorry to have extended this post to the length of a "Kindle Single"

Ad astra per aspera*,

Martin

 * Just an elite Latin phrase, but also the motto of one of the flyover states

QotD: "The move from printed books to e-books has accelerated, and seems unlikely to stop anytime soon"

Three shelves of books
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Great quote for the always interesting Scholarly Kitchen blog, so good I need to repeat it:

"The move from printed books to e-books has accelerated, and seems unlikely to stop anytime soon." - Kent Anderson

In a discussion of the move by the NY Times to add a "e-book" category to the best seller lists.

Another takeaway:

The Association of American Publishers reported recently that book sales were down 21% in September 2010 compared to a year before. Overall, book sales are up 3.8% for 2010, but this number keeps whittling lower as the year goes on. Most of the overall growth has come from sale of e-books, which were up 158% for September (2010 vs. 2009) and a total of 188% for 2010 overall compared to the year before.

So, for those of you in libraryland, think about this ... you need to start dealing with e-books, you need to stop thinking about growth space for shelving print publications. You need to start hiring staff that can handle the tasks that will come with information in digital only format. When push comes to crunch, is it libraries or IT departments that will manage scholarly information? Don't ponder this too long.

Read it all.

QotD: When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry.

Protect yourself
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Great quote from Clay Shirky (on the newspaper industry) from 2008.03.17

Complete quote is:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away (Shirky Blog) [emphasis added]

QotD: We're all gonna die one day anyway and we'll lose all our stuff

2010-08-22-IMG_9455
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Great quote from Tim O'Reilly (thanks to Gluejar @ Go to Hellman) for reporting on this:

To me, you gotta care about something more than preserving your business. Because, obviously companies have made these types of transitions, and this is just my personal response. We're all gonna die one day anyway and we'll lose all our stuff. So don't worry too much about it. Just do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers, and lights up the world and scale to that. Because what's going to happen is people who are lit up by the future are going to be pursuing that future, and the people who hold onto the past are going to hold on too long. - Tim O'Reilly (interview, 29 Sep 2010)

QotD: The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” - Alvin Toffler. Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, 1990.

Next time you complain about having to "figure out some new computer/system/reading device/etc." think about what this really means. If you could not read or write, would you complain about those who invented writing?

AACR II, Buh-bye

AACR II, Buh-bye
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Doing some more office cleaning ... or purging as my office moving consultant calls it ...

Cisco Telepresence

Future keepsgettong closer!

Education 101: Where is it written that the old way is the right way?

Just saw the new Kaplan University (since when has Kaplan been a university????). Stunningly provocative ad. A powerful statement about the future of post-secondary education in the U.S. Being someone who graduated from a private college in the 1980s, I missed the glut of "new" majors that exploded in the later eighties and nineties. It's interesting how universities (both public and private) have moved towards the more "open type" of majors just as the large post-secondary institutions (the University of Phoenix, Strayer Collage, and now it seems Kaplan University) expanded beyond basic vocational studies to start to fill a true need in the educational experience.

And what does this all mean for libraries? As large swaths of the post-secondary education market moves towards a convergence between the Kaplans and the "traditional" public/private colleges and universities, what types of library service will these students need/want?

In the Kaplan commercial, the education experience moves beyond the desks locked down in traditional classrooms; out of classrooms and into new spaces, subway stations, the beach, etc. Will libraries follow students to where they are? Or will libraries insist that their functions and services are "destination" spots.

I just read a future library scenario posted to the LITA-L discussion group. It described an event in 2015 when a student walks into the library, consults with a librarian looking for a book by "Wells" about the "future" who then SMS's the student a link from the library catalog to an e-book for the student to download (and gets some penumbra of other library resources around it).

2015? I don't think so. After reading the post, I just typed "wells future" into my e-book reader on my Droid phone, The Time Machine popped up as the first hit; I hit download and had the book in just under 30 seconds. Never got up from the couch. Where's the library there? How can we stay relevant in that transaction?

In the words of the Kaplan University commercial, "Where is it written that the old way is the right way?" If our users head off to the Kaplans (and the more "traditional" post-secondary follow behind the Kaplans), will libraries still be sure that their "old ways" are the "right ways"?

The trouble with trillions ...

Nice little video that sums up some interesting issues of the information age (such as it is at the moment). Found via my new favorite site, Obsolete.


Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Random Thought of the Day: Airport reuse in the future?

2009-11-09-IMG_5184
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

So, I'm walking past the magnificent Canadian Pacific Railway Station in Vancouver, now shops and restaurants. Earlier this summer in I was at the Union Pacific Station in Salt Lake City, also shops and restaurants.

Seems like every train station is shops and restaurants (well, of course not, Union Station in Washington is a mixed train/shops facility; Philadelphia and Baltimore are still mostly train stations). And, shockingly, when in Denver a while back, I was surprised to see the train station is actually find it was just a train station. Not a shop or restaurant in sight!

But the random thought here is airports. I just assume that our current idea of air travel (or travel in general) may change in the next 100 years. And if/when it does, what will become of all our airports?

Most are far away from population centers, so shops may be out the question. And there will be only so may air/space museums the world needs.

So, anyone want to speculate on what an abandoned DCA or ORD or SFO will be housing in a 100 years?