Whither Academic Information Services in the Perfect Storm of the Early 21st-century?

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Whither Academic Information Services in the
Perfect Storm of the Early 21st-century?

• Michael A. Keller
• Stanford University
• For the 8th Bielefeld Conference
• 060208

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Elements of the Perfect Storm

• Ubiquitous network access
• Low cost computers PDAs
• Plentiful, cheap magnetic memory
• Just in time commercial culture
• Public Internet an open culture
• Investment market based on quarterly reports
• Google, Yahoo, MSN, millions of other providers,
  some free, some fee

• Blog-sphere, Wikis, RSS feeds
• Course Management Systems
• Collaboration environments
• Virtual, global communities
• Anonymous institutional information environments

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Google ProjectLibrary Partner Motivations

• Vastly expand intellectual access to our
  collections
• Populate digital repositories for long-term
  persistence of digital avatars of our collections
• Defense of fair use, by employing it!
• Alternate reader functions from the ones Google
  presently offers

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Course Management Systems

• Increase use of web resources to enhance/extend
  in-person instruction
• Dominate in most American universities
• Produce lots of digital objects for institutional
  repositories and sharing
• Make use of functions locate, gather, deliver,
  create sharing
• Drive e-portfolio services

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Web services

• Discovering
• Locating
• Requesting
• Delivering
• Gathering
• Creating
• Sharing

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Web Services based on systems

• On-line public access catalogs
• Internet Search Engines
• Proprietary Search Engines
• Course Management Systems
• Institutional Information Topographies
• Web Browser Applications
• The World Wide Web itself

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Services beyond Googles

• Taxonomic indexing providing access to ideas in
  a text
• Associative searching providing access by
  statistically ranked lists of co-terms
• Hyperlinking of citations
• GUIs to navigate search results
• More subtle searching
• Alerting services driven by user terms
• Recommendation services
• Info-tools assisting readers to find
  definitions, locations, biographical sketches

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High Touch Services

• First, make users predominantly self-sufficient
• Provide in-person and personalized services on
  demand subject technial specialists needed
• Serve communities in responsive and distinctive
  ways
• Bibliographic, communication, analytic services
  advancing research, teaching learning

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How many e-books?

• Quick Stanford study 2005
• 22,892 titles in English acquired in 2005 with
  imprint years 2001-2005
• Random sample of 1,373 titles (6 of universe)
• 181 titles available as e-books (13.2)
• Hypothesis needs to be tested on other imprints,
  especially European ones
• Will e-books replace physical books soon?
• We conclude doubtful soon, but e-book readers are
  coming

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How much information?

• 9B web pages indexed by Google
• 90B web pages behind access control
• Federated searching behind access control
  difficult, but important service to provide

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Digital Repositories

• So far experimental
• Transparent, auditable services needed
• Portico, KB, BL, LOCKSS/CLOCKSS, Stanford Digital
  Repository, others
• Later more wide-spread as techniques proven

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Aquifer of DLF

• Middleware services
• Standards, including meta-data
• Collection policies
• Intended to support the federation of numerous
  local collections
• Not an architecture, but a tool kit
• Katherine Kott, director

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Service Framework of DLF

• Organizes effort and resources toward
• Integration of systems, applications, standards
  to
• Develop evolve systems architectures
• Responsive to users
• Responsive to rapidly changing i.t. environment
• Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC, lead

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What about our people?

• Re-treading and re-engineering vital
• Employing well-qualified engineers vital
• Engaging computer scientists vital
• Shared vision, mission, goals vital

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Libraries Virtual Libraries

• Libraries as places heavily populated
• Services well used
• Millions of books move (more as mass digitization
  and indexing on the web proceeds
• Virtual libraries heavily used, but metrics?
• Planning bookless libraries, e.g. Engineering
• Planning traditional libraries, e.g. Art
• Bibliographic literacy information heuristic

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Basic functions, regardless of medium

• Selection gathering
• Intellectual access to information objects
• Distribution of content access
• Interpretation of content navigating the ordered
  set and the information chaos
• Preservation of the avatars of content physical
  digital
• Analysis, manipulation presentation

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Client Focus, not Guild Focus

• Let the rising tide of
• access to information
• lift all the boats,
• everywhere

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