David Lewis, Dean of the University Library at Purdue wrote a paper last year entitled “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century”. Now, I’ve gone off Deans of Libraries slightly since my last job when the Dean appeared to be in cahoots with the very anti-literate Dean/Chief/President of the University. He always wore chinos and seemed to be the type who only discovered email in the 2000s. Very un 2.0.
Consequently, I read this paper with some trepidation and although some parts are wonderfully vague “retire legacy print collections”- has he ever worked with Latin America, for instance? One of the Libraries of a Latin American Central Bank with whom we work doesn’t even have a computer… some parts are at least fairly interesting. One of his five strategies for maintaining the library is:
“5. Migrate the focus of the collections from purchasing materials to curating content.”
As an erstwhile e-content librarian my ears pricked up at this. On page 13 he assumes that the new special collections will be formed by “digital versions of traditional special collections” and increasingly “born digital documents and digital outputs of the research enterprise”. True, but unlike Mr Lewis, I don’t think that libraries have a proper handle on maintaining either of these collections of digital objects yet.
In all honesty, I was a little disappointed by this part of the essay. Strategy number 5 is catchy; it made me think about e-content, I was excited; but the expanded version of the strategy wasn’t very practical. It wasn’t even visionary. It just talked about the budget and how librarians need to help all campus units. Hmm. I guess, when I think curating e-content, it makes me think, wow, special collections, how to present subject resources, digital libraries, how to start capturing and gathering together e-content and including it in the library’s resources, and even, is this really the role of libraries? E-content has grown at whatever crazy exponential rate, and even people like Intute can only capture a miniscule percentage of e-content. How do we make sense of all that data? Should each library keep working on its only little collections? Is this reinventing the wheel? Or is better than letting my arch nemesis Google get their sticky mitts on it all? It frustrates me. Library 1 builds a great collection on whatever. Library 2 builds a great collection on similar whatever. Will people know to search both places, or the 36 places that have info on whatever? Can the libraries talk to each other, technically and physically?
Yes, far too many questions. But I keep cogitating and ruminating on this subject and working out that subject guides are a necessary evil. So how can I make them better, to incorporate all this necessary data/info/resources in a cool 2.0 way? And I don’t mean add a facebook widget to my subject guide. Incidentally, this article from PC World explains some of my misgivings with current social networking very neatly…
Plus ça change…
