"Libraries are early and enthusiastic adopters of digital innovations. But these innovations bring the values of the marketplace with them. Through innocuous incremental stages, academic libraries have reached a point where they are now guided largely by the mores of commerce, not academe.
Commercialization has impinged on two core facets of university libraries—their collections and their user services. The ownership and provision of research materials, especially academic journals, has been increasingly outsourced to for-profit companies. Library patrons, moreover, are increasingly regarded simply as consumers, transforming user services into customer service. Both developments have distanced libraries from their academic missions."
"By outsourcing ownership to mega-vendors, libraries have introduced the commercial interests of the journal providers into what had been an internal academic transaction between a library and its patrons. Purveyors of e-journals provide access to their titles on sites that are designed to bolster brand recognition and encourage repeat visits. This practice is good for business but not for scholarship. It is common to hear library patrons say that they found information on "Informaworld" (the platform of publisher Taylor and Francis) or "ScienceDirect" (Elsevier's platform) and not to know the name of the journal in which the article was published. Students especially have become purveyor-dependent, when they should be familiarizing themselves with the best literature, in the best journals, regardless of who sells it."My first thought on this is, does it matter, as long as they get the content they need? But it does. The journal in which an article is published should indicate the authority of the piece based upon the journals' editorial credibility. To some extent, journal vendors are possibly unwittingly eroding the value of peer review. He also warns against the same problem occurring with ebooks:
"It is time, now, to articulate a plan for e-books that better serves the needs of the academic community. University libraries should opt out of the e-book market until it conforms itself to the values, needs, and wallets of academe."Pretty radical stuff. Its worth taking the time to digest and read. I've often felt that ejournal vendors have forced us to arrange the digital library by publisher, rather than by subject or author. Goldstein also warns against the 'good enough' data that Librarians increasingly fall back on when dealing with digital material. This is also a strong argument, although one I don't always buy. After all, access to full text will surpass even the most well constructed metadata. That said, getting accurate metadata to run a library link resolver remains a real challenge.
Faced with layoffs and budget cuts, or simply looking for ways to expand their reach, libraries around the country are replacing traditional, full-service institutions with devices and approaches that may be redefining what it means to have a library.
Later this year Mesa, Ariz., plans to open a new "express" library in a strip-mall, open three days a week, with outdoor kiosks to dispense books and DVDs at all hours of the day. Palm Harbor, Fla., meanwhile, has offset the impact of reduced hours by installing glass-front vending machines that dispense DVDs and popular books.
The wave of innovation is aided by companies that have created new machines designed to help libraries save on labor. For instance, Evanced Solutions, an Indianapolis company that makes library software, this month is starting test trials of a new vending machine it plans to start selling early next year.
"It's real, and the book lockers are great," said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association. "Many of us are having to reduce hours as government budgets get cut, and this enables people to get to us after hours."
"The basis of the vending machine is to reduce the library to a public-book locker," Mr. Lund said in an interview. "Our real mission is public education and public education can't be done from a vending machine. It takes educators, it takes people, it takes interaction."
The report, Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025,” sponsored by ACRL, provides nine likely, high-impact scenarios for the future of higher education and the supporting role of librarians. Understanding that universities and their academic libraries take time to adapt to change, the purpose of this study was to start preparing for the likely — or inevitable — future. These scenarios involve:
1. A breaking of the textbook monopoly — creating flexible content that allow pieces to be assembled and allow feedback from users.
2. “I see what you see” — large touch screens that allow for collaborations.
3. “Write here with me” — automated mobile devices that allow students to collect and reference work.
4. Bridging the scholar/practitioner divide — open access publishing and open peer review
5. Stultifying of scholarship — the antithesis of #4 where the current status quo is maintained and strengthened.
6. Everyone is a non-traditional student — moving beyond the 4-year resident college experience.
7. Meet the new freshman class — preparing for the digital divide between in-coming tech-savy students and students with need of remedial technological training.
8. Increasing threat of cybercrime — as campuses lock down their technology, online privacy and intellectual freedom are compromised.
9. “This class brought to you by . . . ” — disaggregated education provided by corporate sponsors.
The spectre of the Enola Gay's public display caused a tussle before Harwit's moral inquiry even began. The exhibition was mounted because 1995 was the 50-year anniversary of the bombing, and veterans were anxious to see the plane exhibited that year.
Archivists had other ideas. They wanted the job done properly. They knew that in 500 years, when historians examined the aircraft, they might ask an array of arcane, academic questions. For example, what materials were the alloys in specific engine parts comprised of? Investigating minute details such as these and acquiring or rebuilding complex parts for complete veracity takes a great deal of time and effort. They may not have been interesting for veterans who wanted to see their bird fly one last time, but skimping on such tasks for short-term satisfaction puts the whole archival endeavour at risk.
The more I think about the quandary facing archivists preparing the Enola Gay exhibit, the more I worry about our digital existence. Increasingly, our lives are articulated digitally. We share our experiences with others online, and carry out more of our transactions in binary form. The amount of information that we create is accelerating exponentially. "Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information created," said Google CEO Eric Schimdt recently. "We [now] create five exabytes every two days."
Archiving this stuff is going to be really difficult, in a way that the Enola Gay's archivists couldn't begin to imagine. For one thing, there's the physical media involved. Information may become increasingly stored in the cloud, but it must still be held on physical media, in some data centre somewhere.
Estimates for the longevity of this physical media vary, but all of them point to instability; eventually, data storage decays. It turns out that tape, which is increasingly becoming an archival medium rather than a backup one, is particularly prone to damage because of the way that robotic tape libraries work. In order to access the information that we store today centuries hence, we'll need media that stands the test of time.
Attention: What are the new ways that we pay attention in a digital era? How do we need to change our concepts and practices of attention for a new era? How do we learn and practice new forms of attention in a digital age?
Participation: How do we encourage meaningful interaction and participation? What is its purpose on a cultural, social, or civic level?
Collaboration: Collaboration can simply reconfirm consensus, acting more as peer pressure than a lever to truly original thinking. HASTAC has cultivated the methodology of “collaboration by difference” to inspire meaningful ways of working together.
Network awareness: How we both thrive as creative individuals and understand our contribution within a network of others? How do you gain a sense of what that extended network is and what it can do?
Global Consciousness: How does the World Wide Web change our responsibilities in and to the world we live in?
Civic Responsibility: How we can be good citizens of the Internet when we are off line, working towards real goals in our communities and using the community practices of sharing, customizing, and contributing online towards responsible civic action off line?
Design: How is information conveyed differently, effectively, and beautifully in diverse digital forms? How do we understand and practice the elements of good design as part of our communication and interactive practices?
Narrative, Storytelling: How do narrative elements shape the information we wish to convey, helping it to have force in a world of competing information?
Procedural Literacy: What are the new tactics and strategies of interactive games, where the multimedia narrative forms changes because of our success or failure?
Critical consumption of information: Without a filter (editors, experts, and professionals), much information on the Internet can be inaccurate, deceptive, or inadequate. How do we learn to be critical? What are the standards of credibility?
Digital Divides, Digital Participation: What divisions still remain in digital culture? Who is included and who excluded? How do basic aspects of economics and culture dictate not only who participates in the digital age but how we participate?
Ethics: What are the new moral imperatives of our interconnected age?
Advocacy: How do we turn collaborative, procedural thinking on line into activism in the real world?
Preservation: What are the requirements for preserving the digital world we are creating? Paper lasts. Platforms change.
Sustainability: What are the metrics for sustainability in a world where we live on more kilowatts than ever before? How do we protect the environment in a plugged-in era?
Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning: Alvin Toffler has said that, in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in one’s tracks, see what isn’t working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn.
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