nirak.net - Musings of an LIS Student

There’s a post over at if:book that touches on the amount of raw material we have sitting around in libraries, archives, basements, etc, that is untouched. It’s something I think about a lot lately. A few weeks ago, the CDRH met with Jim Elmborg, head of the Writing University Archive at the University of Iowa. It was a really interesting meeting (no, that’s not an oxymoron) and I came out of it wondering just how many of these hidden materials there are across the country - materials that are uncatalogued, sitting in boxes. Some have very sketchy finding aids, some don’t have anything.

My first instinct is “let’s find all this stuff! Bring it out in the open! Catalog!” But I have a conflicting side as well that says that we don’t want to stop producing new content because we are so set on making all the old content available. This comes up again and again in library blogs and lists - should libraries be a place where people create new content? To what extent?

I, of course, say yes. This is why I got interested in Librarianship - because I am interested in the role they play in creating new content. Of course that involves delving into the past - after, all, nothing is really ever new - but it’s the creation - the interpretation - of information that I am interested in.

In the university setting, the answer to this is that you have students do much of the work that requires a lot of man hours- the grunt work of the research. The system actually works pretty well - you have a lot of people that are willing to step up and help (often for minimal or no pay because they can get course credit) that are knowledgeable about a topic and (usually) willing to learn. It’s harder outside a university setting because you don’t have that steady supply of willing workers - hiring can be quite a hit or miss prospect.

I keep going back to my community research projects idea but I wonder, could I ever get someone to participate in such a thing? Heck, I can’t even convince my family or my husband to use web services or take part in things, how will I ever convince total strangers? Still, I get really excited about the idea of people telling their stories and doing research. I know people are willing - look at how many people do genealogy research - it’s just a matter of getting them excited about something.

karin :: Nov.10.2006 :: Work :: 1 Comment »

I’m putting this up here because I find it interesting and I hope it can prove of use to students that need to write an entrance essay- not as something to emulate, just as an example. I know I always want to see what others have done before me before I delve into things.

I did, however, wait to post this until I knew I got in, so I knew it had at least some value. I get the feeling they go more by GPA and GRE scores than anything, though.

Libraries and technology in the next decade

The next 10 years will likely be a tumultuous time for information agencies, and especially for libraries. Although libraries have always faced competition when users find other sources for information, never before has it been so easy for a user to bypass institutions all together and search for information directly from home. This ability has had and will continue to have a lasting impact on libraries. However, I believe users are starting to realize that they are missing out on a lot of good information. Not only is a lot of it not available on the internet, but what is can be near impossible to find. As blogs and personal web pages proliferate, content is becoming harder and harder to evaluate. As more people create and publish information as well as consume it, libraries will become a place not only to find information but a place one can learn to compile, categorize, and publish information so it can effectively add to the corpus of human knowledge.

The rate of information proliferation on the web is such that an army of librarians could not keep up with classifying it all. It is this reality that has spawned “folksonomies,” a simple categorization system used by such websites as del.icio.us and flickr. (Kroski , 2005) What these systems lack in sophistication, they make up for in participation; every user can participate in the classification of information. Websites have used this classification system to make information not only easy to find, but to introduce a process in which more can be found through a few clicks. The inherent shortcoming of the system is the lack of preciseness, however, few if any other systems have ever been able to entice people all over to engage in classification. Libraries and Librarians can be a big help here by educating people on how to best use these systems, while perhaps building a few of their own. Libraries can encourage a whole new set of users to utilize their services: the content creator and self publisher.

Libraries have been adding to the content available themselves by entering the digital publishing arena in force. Through partnerships with academic colleges, college libraries have been adding “publishers” to their list of activities and accomplishments. Etext centers, often created in libraries as part of preservation departments, have grown into or work in partnerships with Digital Centers, such as the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. These centers serve as publishers of scholarly sites: an entirely new form of scholarly publishing. These sites can explore through sound, images, maps and text ideas that would be difficult if not impossible to explain in the traditionally published format. More than that, these sites usually include more of a scholar’s research through metadata, which allows the users to draw their own conclusions.

These new roles for libraries are necessitating a new reliance on information technology. The pairing of the information profession and information technology is a natural one, but has been one slow to progress. (Ayers, 2004, p. 50) However, both fields are starting to need each other. Librarians realize that what they want to do will require brilliant programming skills, and information technology professionals are realizing that having information available is pointless if people cannot find it and make use of it. Google has realized this, and has tried to enlist librarians in their effort to make more of the world’s information searchable, a move that librarians treat alternately with enthusiasm, reticence, and cautiousness. (Bell, Jensen and Vershbow) Libraries could and should be the most essential tool for academics and laymen alike, a place to compile, explore, use, and talk about the vast amount of information available to us today. This vitality will drive people out of their homes and into the libraries to use the resources librarians have worked hard to build.

Bibliography

Ayers, E. L. (2004). The academic culture & the IT culture: Their effect on teaching and scholarship. EDUCAUSE Review. 39:6, 48-62. Retrieved August 15, 2006 from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0462.pdf.

Bell, S. J. (2005). Submit or resist: Librarianship in the age of Google. American Libraries, 36(9), 68-71.

Jensen, M. (2005). Presses have little to fear from Google. Chronicle of Higher Education, 51(44), B16-B16.

Kroski, E. (2005 December). The hive mind: folksonomies and user-based tagging. InfoTangle. Retrieved September 3, 2006 from http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging/.

Vershbow, B. (2006 August 24). Librarians, hold Google accountable. If:Book. Retrieved August 25 from http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/08/librarians_hold_google_accountable.html.

Links

Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. http://cdrh.unl.edu.

Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. http://www.iath.virginia.edu/.

karin :: Nov.01.2006 :: Work :: No Comments »