Are Archives the New Libraries?

1. Are Archives the New Libraries? John MacColl, European Director OCLC Research (with a little help from my friends) Nationaal Archief 18 September 2008

2. I will cover … • Missions and modes: discussion • Recent trends • Boundary shift • Drivers: scale; exposure • Controversial imperatives • Recruiting the users • New methods: quality trade-offs; repurposing

3. Of growing interest?

4. What do research libraries do? • Collect published materials used in support of teaching and research • Provide discovery tools for their own and external collections • Provide delivery of materials via their own circulation service, and resource-sharing collaborative schemes • Provide specialised collections - ‘Special Collections’ - in support of research, containing rare and unique materials - a mix of published (early and rare editions) and unpublished (manuscript treasures and literary archives)

5. What do archives do? • Provide depositories for historically important unpublished materials - papers and records • Store official records of organisations, including their own parent organisation (eg in universities) • Store the records of companies in their region or otherwise associated • Store official records of governments and government agencies • Store the papers of important scholars • Store the papers of creative writers and other artists

6. How do libraries do it? • By organising essentially tractable, post-coordinated and well-defined materials (print and microfilm) in which scholars (from undergraduates through to graduate students and researchers) make new associations which deepen their scholarship and can create new knowledge • By giving the appearance of comprehensively describing the published materials they collect • By placing unassociated documents into new collections • By being explicit

7. How do archives do it? • By storing largely intractable, pre-coordinated and undefined materials, in which researchers can make discoveries and map new knowledge • By abstracting their deposited materials at a level sufficient to allow researchers to have access • By mapping the hierarchy of their deposited materials • By respecting the original historical order and place of documents • By means of implicit promise

8. Archives Libraries Control Comprehensive description Low High Scholarly development Soc Sci/Humanities research High Low Hierarchical mapping Original research Spectra

9. Archival principles (Respect des fonds) • Provenance • Respect for original order

10. Mutual education Archives Libraries Rapid processing Exposure methods Place of historicism Hierarchical description

11. Whose mission is creeping? • Libraries are waking up to the power of their unique assets • Many of these are in hidden collections • Archivists are better at revelation

12. Gravitational pull: University model Google (Worldcat?) Library Archives

13. Yale University

14. Mass digitised textual corpora • Is Google Books a library or an archive? • Published material, so like a library • Hierarchical structure (title, chapters, sections), so like an archive • How should librarians present collections within large-scale corpora? • Respect des fonds?

15. The Greene-Meissner contribution • ‘Cataloguing is a function which is not working’ • Forget item level description • “Insanity is when you do things the way you’ve always done them, but expect a different result” (Einstein and/or Emerson) • ‘Good enough’ beats perfection • Hail ‘the demise of the completeness syndrome’ (Ross Atkinson)

16. Scale matters Network level Concentration A web-scale presence Mobilise data Web-scale Diffusion Disclosure of links, data and services

17. Mass digitisation of special collections

18. Fulfilment?

19. Fulfilment!

20. Access vs preservation …

21. Access wins! No one has been throwing away originals … so preservation needs are best served by them Only by surfacing presently ignored collections can we justify their preservation Our brave new world shows we can go back and do it again

22. Selection has already been done Don’t spend time selecting items to digitise Capture materials as accessioned For important collections, capture it all For others, sample and allow user interest to guide your choices Capture on demand Capture ‘signposts’ and devote more attention when/where warranted Woodcut from Sebastian Brant, “Stultifera…” The ship of fooles… 1570 University of Edinburgh Library

23. Handle once (then iterate) Handle incoming items once for both description and digitisation Compromise on image resolution and metadata as needed to achieve throughput requirements Create a single unified process Let usage guide further efforts

24. Programmes not projects Forget ‘special projects’ — it’s long past time to make this a basic part of our everyday work! Digital capture must be embedded in our basic procedures, budgeting, etc. Figure out a way to fund it yourself and you’ll figure out a way to do it cheaper

25. Scan on demand Change in Photoduplication Policy As of March 17, 2008, the Ransom Center's policy regarding research copies of items from its collections will change. We will no longer furnish photocopies. For all requests received on or after March 17, our default procedure will be to make digital scans of the originals and furnish PDF files (72 dpi) either by email or on CD-ROM. For patrons who are unable to make use of PDFs, printouts will be available in lieu of digital files. For publication purposes, high-resolution images will still be furnished on the same terms as before. Harry Ransom Center, UT Austin

26. Engage your community in description Do not describe everything in painstaking detail Start with basic description, then… …allow serious researchers to contact you for more detail, and… …engage your user community with adding to the descriptions

29. January 16th 2008: LC photographs on Flickr

30. 24 hours later Exposure

31. Impact: exposure Flickr: Top 50LC: Top 6000

32. How to lose control Contributions

33. Go with it

34. Feeding back into our work 89 records updated

35. Quality vs quantity: quantity wins! The perfect has been the enemy of the possible Achieving excellence can have a substantial cost Any access is better than none at all Instead of measuring cataloguer/archivist output we should be measuring impact on users

36. Discovery happens elsewhere People don’t discover our content by coming to our lovingly crafted web sites We must expose our content to web search engines and hubs like Flickr

45. Discovery happens elsewhere Then: Users built workflow aroundlibraries and archives Now: Libraries and archives must build services around user workflow Discovery happens elsewhere

48. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” —Charles Darwin Image: Auckland Museum

49. Be where the users are Image: informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-2008-beta/

50. Combine approaches