The virtual cultural heritage

1. The virtual cultural heritage Lorcan Dempsey With contributions from Constance Malpas LIBER Think tank on the future value of the book as artefact and the future value of digital documentary heritage, National Library of Sweden, 24-25 May 2007

2. Virtual? Cultural? Heritage?

4. … the function of the library must be understood as one that assists members of the community both in taking particular positions and in recognizing and assessing the positions taken by others. Ross Atkinson

5. A unifying schematic to show ‘collection attention’. And yes, I know it is simplistic!

6. stewardship high low Books Journals Newspapers Gov. docs CD, DVD Maps Scores Freely-accessible web resources Open source software Newsgroup archives low uniqueness • Research, learning and administrative • materials, • ePrints/tech reports • Learning objects • Courseware • E-portfolios • Research data • Institutional records • Reports, newsletters, etc Special collections Rare books Local/Historical newspapers Local history materials Archives & Manuscripts, Theses & dissertations high

7. Selectively acquire and Persistently manage • Bought? • Licensed? • Memory • Libraries, archives, • musuems. Institutional and And personal processes Generate materials: Records, data sets, ….

8. Books Rareness is common E-volution

9. Rareness is common … in the G5 • G5 aggregate collection: • 10.5 million books • ~60 percent represent unique • contribution by one or another • of the G5 libraries 3% Held by 5 6% Held by 4 10% Held by 3 61% Held by 1 20% Held by 2

10. … and beyond • System-wide print book collection (as of January 2005) • ~32 million print books 5% Held by > 100 3% Held by 51 - 100 5% Held by 26 - 50 37% Held by 1 20% Held by 6 - 25 30% Held by 2 - 5

11. Cumulative age distribution of G5 holdings > 80 percent of Google 5 collection post 1923

12. Space – opportunity costs • Value in research and learning: disciplinary differences • Mass digitization • Off site storage • Converting ‘owned’ materials into ‘licensable’ materials

13. Mining text

14. Thematic research collections

15. Beyond books “It is only when we translate the old style-based thinking and language of historians into new modes of representation that we can begin to grasp the complex relationships between architectural production and the creation of … cultural identities.” Stephen Murray, Columbia University

16. Then: E. Viollet Le Duc Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1874) (1st American Ed. 1875)

17. Now: Interactive, multi-dimensional navigation of a networked resource

20. Increased emphasis on collective management: preservation, storage, resource sharing, digitization • Emergence of alternative institutional models for print sales? • E-volved formats: • Thematic research collections • New representational modes • Deeply mined digital collections alongside print collections • Special collections of the future?

21. Stewarding Unique collectionsMoving into network environmentReconfigurations

22. Then: Rich description with little scholarly content and few opportunities to remix or re-use; continued reliance on library mediation for scholarly access to material

23. Now: Federated access to multi-institutional holdings with support for personal collection-building and sharing

24. “On bokes rede I ofte, as I yow tolde. But wherefore that I speke al this? Nat yoore Agon it happede me for to beholde Upon a bok, was write with lettres olde”

25. Unbinding Chaucer’s bokes (and bookes) 41 occurrences 111 occurrences 33 occurrences

26. In vanilla world, the institutionally unique becomes more important? • Boundaries between curatorial traditions less important to creative use • Digital visibility creates use • The digital copy creates interest in the aura of the original • Computational potential reveals new possibilities • Significant curatorial challenges for the library

27. The products of research, learning,and administration

30. University of Minnesota http://www.lib.umn.edu/about/mellon/KM%20JStor%20Presentation.pps

33. Research and learning behaviors change • Then: Final ‘product’: publish and archive • Now: Process generates reusable outputs • E.g. data sets, learning materials, blog commentary, … • Institutional memory • Reports, course catalog, … • Traces • Surveillance, logs, social, …

34. The open network

35. The Northern Ireland Political Collection (NIPC) is a unique resource. No other institution in a localised conflict has systematically collected material from all sides. Much less has it been done in the field, and often literally across the barricades. The web?

37. Kewl!!!!

39. The library takes a networked resource and adds value for the local constituency: • Faceted browse based on genre/document type • Full-text searching of achived sites • Selection of seed URLs and frequency of crawls informed by subject specialists and scholars

40. The medium of identity construction • The venue of dissemination of scholarly and cultural materials • Evidence • What and who to collect?

41. So…

42. Securing the scholarly and cultural record The record ain’t what it used to be? • Community? Institution? • Intervention required • Preserving print?

43. More assumes the attributes of the ‘special’ Curatorial responsibility for more unique materials? Institutional Capacities? Collaborative sourcing? • Examples • Thematic research collection • Curated databases • Institutional ‘identity’

44. Managing digital? • An archival perspective? • Provenance • Evidential integrity • Versioning

45. The scholarly and cultural record is “incorrigibly plural” • The library needs plural responses within singular frameworks.