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Library Services in an Age of Super-abundant Information

Library Services in an Age of Super-abundant Information. Readex Breakfast, ALA Midwinter Sunday 25 January 2009 Denver, CO David Seaman Associate Librarian for Information Management Dartmouth College. A Growing Sense of the Challenges.

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Library Services in an Age of Super-abundant Information

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  1. Library Services in an Age of Super-abundant Information Readex Breakfast, ALA Midwinter Sunday 25 January 2009 Denver, CO David Seaman Associate Librarian for Information Management Dartmouth College

  2. A Growing Sense of the Challenges David Seaman

  3. Uneven change; widening divisions; re-think our systems & services. • STM departments have embraced digital preprints and articles and transformed their (inter)disciplines; the humanities are still often book-bound and solitary. • The physicist and the philosopher have never been further apart in working methods and information architecture needs. • Students come in with radically different network habits and privacy values than faculty. • All this is a challenge for libraries: many audiences to serve. New habits and old habits of work and service.

  4. A babel of silos and time sinks • A constant state of partial attention. • Convenience and the path of least resistance. • “Good enough” information retrieval. • Impatience at ponderous pace of change and service innovation. • Irritation at the complex, disjointed information retrieval landscape. David Seaman

  5. Major Needs David Seaman

  6. One search box to rule them all… • We currently have a super abundance of resources accessed through a complex, disjointed discovery layer. • Filtering of results and personalization of features are poor or absent. We need much simpler ways to find much more relevant information to build much better knowledge. • Next generation services must radically enhance resource integration and move us on from the isolated data silos of the present. David Seaman

  7. More is not always more… • Specificity, selectivity, and convenience are often of much higher value than undifferentiated bulk. • Customized feeds of information are increasingly necessary as the available material grows in number and complexity. We should explore services that harness staff and faculty expertise – “canned searches” designed by experts, for example. • The abilities for users to add reviews, recommendations, and “folksonomic” metadata would be useful. David Seaman

  8. Convenience rules… • In a world of growing resources and no more time, and we ignore convenience at our peril. Most users most of the time take the path of least resistance. • We make our users work too hard. Embed services where the users are through widgets and APIs that allow programmers to bypass an interface and address services directly. • Forcing users always to go to “destination” web pages – to leave the catalog to go to the ILL, for example – is frustrating. David Seaman

  9. Access trumps ownership… • We need to be sure we have broken from the “curatorial thinking” of the pre-internet library. • Discovery services need to foreground availability – they should answer the basic questions “when can I get it?” and “what can I do with it?” • This may favor a “World Cat Local” approach over the current library catalog, which highlights that which we own or to which we subscribe. David Seaman

  10. Privacy is so Web 1.0… • Users trust the library to make good use of user data if it allows for richer, more personalized services or more relevant filtering of results. • Personalization is not threatening as long as it is optional and under the user’s control. • Treat different communities to different info portals. • Services that use knowledge of one’s prior activity and/or one’s membership in a group are of increasing value. Such “recommender” services are commonplace in commercial services such as Amazon. David Seaman

  11. Strategies for Progress David Seaman

  12. Remember the scholarly primitives • Discover/gather/create/share -- a good framework within which to think about library services. • Which primitives do we serve and enable? • Next generation systems should extend our service reach beyond “discover.” David Seaman

  13. Scholarly Primitives University of Minnesota Library: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Academic Support: A Final Report.http://www.lib.umn.edu/about/mellon/UMN_Multi-dimensional_Framework_Final_Report.pdf David Seaman

  14. Don’t Lose Sight of our Edge.Kevin Kelly: “Better than Free.” • Eight intangible values (“generatives”) that we buy when we pay for something that could be free: • Immediacy • Personalization • Interpretation • Authenticity • Accessibility • Embodiment • Patronage • Findability • “It costs nothing to make a pill. We pay for Authenticity and Immediacy in drugs. Someday we'll pay for Personalization. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html David Seaman

  15. Embrace the Churn • Service design and assessment processes need to be quick, agile, ongoing, and iterative. Next generation systems must be defined by users and not librarians, which means we must be more sophisticated in uncovering what users need and what they do. • Open up beta testing of new features in systems to interested users. Make it clear that they are trying beta releases. • We need to be braver about letting users opt to try new features while we are evaluating them, even when they have rough edges . David Seaman

  16. Google Books: The Price of Good Enough? David Seaman

  17. Google Books Services: release early and often. David Seaman

  18. Summary: transform, tailor, embed • The next generation library systems need to be nimble, personalized, relevant, and convenient. • Our library organization needs to fully embody these traits too. • The library must get used to competing for attention through ease of use as well as excellence of content. • Services should to be accessible from within whatever online space a user inhabits (iGoogle; Facebook; Blackboard) and on whatever networked device. David Seaman

  19. Summary: select, excite, act. • Access, Discover, Select, Filter -- Current systems focus on the first two at the expense of the second two. • The digital library is still a tale of mass and malleability, but we need much better selection and filtering services to help us limit the massive result sets that result from the current generation access tools. • Primitives and generatives can be helpful touchstones to remind us of the needs beyond “find”. • It is time now to experiment, innovate, and act. David Seaman

  20. Thank you! David Seaman Associate Librarian for Information Management Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire david.seaman@dartmouth.edu David Seaman

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