March 2010

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When one door closes…

March 21, 2010 in *OIINEWS, Libraries, Uncategorized | No comments

Last week as the New York Public Library opened a new branch in Battery Park, Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer said,

Any day we open a library is a good day.

Meanwhile, Boston announced the closure of perhaps as many as 10 of its 26 branch libraries and Los Angeles announced huge budget cuts that will likely mean similar closures.

As someone who spends more time thinking about academic libraries than public ones I am interested in the language used on both sides of the debate to characterize libraries. And while I am saddened by the potential closure of so many libraries (mostly because I think once you close a library you are never really likely to get it back…despite the new NYPL branch), I am almost more saddened at the language used in the American Libraries article to describe libraries.

“Libraries are about books and librarians,” said one of the Boston residents protesting the closures. And BPL’s president Amy Ryan called librarians “information navigators” and said, “we can’t take a car designed in the 1970s onto today’s information superhighway.”

I think they are both wrong. If you look at the opening of the NYPL branch it seems to me that the most important thing in public libraries are the people who go into them. As much as I hate to say this (being both a fan of books and a librarian), we can’t build or sustain libraries for books, information, or librarians, we have to build them for people and communities.

On Browsing

March 17, 2010 in *OIINEWS, Libraries, Metadata, Uncategorized | No comments

The University of Michigan recently announced that it was finally getting rid of its card catalogue. This elicited many a  response from librarians on some of the listservs I monitor who were sad to see it go. Most of the responses were emotional, revealing warm and fuzzy affection for the old system; but it led me to wonder what we are actually losing when we replaced cards with OPACs… and I think it has to do with browsing. The card system facilitated a type of browsing that we have not yet achieved online. It nicely complemented shelf browsing, but was not a substitute or virtual replacement for shelf browsing. Upon approaching a card catalogue you got an immediate sense of the scope of the collection and browsing within the cards did the same within sub-units of the collection.

At the risk of sounding too much like a change-fearing librarian myself, I am not saying that we can’t do this with online catalogues, just that we haven’t — and we certainly haven’t in libraries (that I know of…I would love to be proved wrong on this).  Monica Bulger has a nice post on affinity-based browsing (and a follow up) and I would love to see an application of what she is talking about in an academic setting. It is still search-based (that is, it starts with a search) but could be an interesting way of providing new types of browsing in libraries.

A Matter of Audience

March 10, 2010 in *OIINEWS, Digitization Projects, Libraries | No comments

I just came from a meeting with the creators of the Virtual Museum of the Gulag. They were very interested in how the question of intended audience changes the kind of digital project you create. I shared my experiences with the Open Collections Program and how we initially designed the collections versus how they are designed now (for a different audience).

Coincidentally, my friend, Megan Hurst just released the latest issue of her journal, Glimpse, and it has a great article on the modification of Google Earth and Google Maps into Google Moon and Google Mars and how it is used by both scientists and the general public. The author, Dr. Ross A. Beyer says:

Although the primary audience for the Moon and Mars in Google Earth is the general public, we’ve added enough information to make this tool useful for scientists and engineers as well. I can’t overstate how useful it is to be able to communicate via a shared, dynamic, interactive map.

You can read the whole article here.

Library, Archive, and Museum Convergence

March 10, 2010 in *OIINEWS, Libraries, Uncategorized | No comments

There is a lot of discussion these days about the convergence of libraries, archives, and museums.The Center for the Future of Museums had a recent guest post on this topic, also introducing the IMLS-funded wiki on the same theme. The University of Calgary has actually merged its libraries and museums into what they are calling their Library and Cultural Resources, which also interestingly contains their university press.

This is all inevitable, I think, but it is really important to realize that this is not a convergence, but a re-convergence. If you look back far enough there was no difference between libraries and museums… or publishers for that matter. These were spaces for scholarship, regardless of the objects they held. And they were usually run by philosophers who spent much of their time assembling new editions and collected works (i.e., publishing).

It is easy to get caught in the newness of all of this and the result is that people get lost in the details (eg., what would an integrated search of library and museum catalogues look like?), or in why the convergence is happening now. Perhaps there is some value in looking at why these institutions separated in the first place? And the most important thing is to figure out what these institutions are converging around. (Hint: it isn’t technology, or services, or metadata, or economic sustainability, or even physical spaces…it is the thing that all of these elements purport to serve.)