Survey update

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's responded to the survey so far. After just one week, there were 85 responses, which is extremely encouraging. Not only that, but most people have really taken the time to provide some candid and detailed feedback, resulting in a much richer data set than I had imagined possible. It's reminded me that one of things I enjoy about working in this professional community is just how open and helpful everyone is as we try to move forward on our various projects. I also appreciate all the additional supportive comments and interest shown in the survey's findings - everyone who's given me their email address will get a copy of the report on its completion.

A few respondents have commented that it's difficult to answer some questions definitively as they require general opinions about what is a complex and diverse environment. I agree that this is the case, but I would say that the point of these questions is to get a gut reaction, an emotive response, based on personal experience - the issues here are too large to allow me to drill down into the details of each one, and each would probably require an additional thesis to do it any justice, with a more onerous questionnaire. Further, as many have observed, the critical challenges surrounding digital collections are mostly cultural, subjective, intangible problems that escape any technical solution, and this survey has been constructed in that spirit.

If you haven't yet filled out the survey and would like to, you can find it here.    

Digital libraries survey goes live

I've just completed a survey designed to take a snapshot of current views on libraries in the current information environment and digital libraries in particular, which you can find here.

Please have a go at it. The survey has been set up so that anyone, anywhere can fill it in, and it's brief - you can complete it in five minutes or less.

I'm extremely grateful to the Strategic Planning and Policy Unit at the Wellcome Trust for the software platform and invaluable advice regarding the survey's construction. As well as generating data for my King's College thesis (which has been the subject of this blog), the online survey is part of a project I'm working on for the Wellcome Library in line with the delivery of our Digital Library Programme.

From this snapshot I'll be adding qualitative data in the form of one-to-one interviews with industry commentators on the future of digital libraries. More on that soon.

Shall we axe the DCMS?

The Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), a free-market think tank, has proposed that to close down the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) would save £1.6 billion. Never mind the irony of the Olympic host axing its sporting ministry at the same time as the Games, it's also a useful indication of how the culture sector is regarded by some. It's another nice effort to block social mobility and reduce quality of life in the UK, the meat of the argument being that, if we all like visiting the British Library and other subsidised institutions, then we'll all be happy to pay a fee at the door.

But it's actually more than this, because £1.6 billion is really small change - the IEA recommendations have less to do with cutting Government waste by axing the DCMS than they do with simply cutting off funding to cultural institutions - why destroy mass access to a cultural education for such paltry savings? According to the report, the Government could use all this saved money to "reduce the rate of corporation tax by a further 2%", or more inspiringly, "cut fuel duty by 3p". It's not even only those without money who would be effected, but surely most of the population - my household income is pretty decent by most standards, but living in London with a child we simply avoid a number of cultural sites that we would otherwise go to because of the costs involved, frequenting the free venues instead. It just goes to show the extent to which cultural institutions have to nail their value proposition. I don't know how mainstream this IEA sentiment is, but with this Government's emphasis on big business, the culture sector will continue to have to stand up to this kind of hard-nosed free-market economics.

What does innovation mean in a library?

In the business world, innovative firms, it is said, "grow twice as fast, both in employment and sales, as firms that fail to innovate" (that's from the Hargreaves report). This raises a couple of questions: first, what is innovation in a library, and second, why is it important for libraries - to what extent are the laws that govern the business world, referenced here, actually applicable to the culture sector?

On the one hand, it's hard for libraries to innovate in the manner of a start-up or SME; not many libraries have that kind of in house development available to them. But this isn't about libraries becoming a business, they can innovate in other ways, and can outsource those development tasks as required (and if it can be afforded). The most obvious area for innovation is building collections; there are a whole bunch of ways to build content now if you take advantage of some of the stronger aspects of digital technology. At this point, for specialist libraries interested in such things, traditional targets for acquisition are becoming scarce and expensive (I'm thinking about books and manuscripts here, or the archives of persons of historical note), this is not to mention that much of modern culture has a digital presence, more so than analogue (which will include the archives of anyone of any prominance today).

Essentially this boils down to born digital content, which could take the form of archives, a shared resource digitised previously elsewhere and audio-visual material. While these collecting methods are perhaps innovative within the current context, they are probably the bare minimum for the maintenance of relevant collections development and still function largely within the traditional library operations model. However, to effectively acquire and leverage this complex content, commercial collaboration seems an obvious route. In the same way that building a digital library requires the breakdown of knowledge silos within that specific institution, the viability of libraries themselves will increasingly rely on breaking down 'silos' between sectors, specifically the commercial content industry, whereby both parties can achieve mutually beneficial goals and expand in new directions.

I'm aware of various apps that have been produced for exhibitions at some the UK's larger cultural insitutions, but I'm interested to find out the extent to which cross-sector collaborations of mutual benefit have been examined or implemented in order to build collections and user experience in a pretty fundamental way. The problem that libraries face, I suspect, is the risk that comes with innovation, and they may not be able to stomach that alone. My interest in this comes from wondering to what extent libraries are actually now in competition with other information providers, which might necessitate an innovative path forward, just as the businesses referred to in the Hargreaves report are required to do in order to thrive.

Finally, while risk is inherent to innovation, not all of it is explicitly financial and there are some areas where libraries can really take a lead. For example, the recent 'academic spring' highlights a long-standing problem: the cost of academic journals (have a look at this article in the Economist for a picture of the farsical profit margins enjoyed by publishers at libraries' expense). Libraries could really be leaders in this movement; they could also be leaders in bringing intellectual property legislation into the twenty-first century; they could (and probably already are) leaders in how to provide compelling online information resources on a tight budget.

"Tron" as metaphor for the digital library

In the Tron films, Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, enters a digital world 'inside the computer' by means of quantum teleportation (or 'digitization', as it's actually referred to in the 1982 original). Watching this recently, the demarcation of a digital world and the real world felt curiously familiar to working on a digital library. I wanted to use this post to explore a few other 'gaps' that exist in digital library development, aside from my target concern of that between collections and users, specifically the nature of the gap between digital and analogue worlds.

Behind the conceptualised information we get from our computer screen are a bunch of spinning disks existing in physical space, drawing on physical resources to support them. Ultimately we have a binary machine code making the machines operate - we use programming source code translated to binary to communicate and instruct the computer, and the resulting programs lead to user interaction and often the creation of something fully comprehensible to the human eye and brain. This conceptual level is several steps removed from the physical reality of IT systems, and it can be easy to forget. Similarly, in a space such as a library defined by analogue content, IT systems solutions implemented at the higher, conceptual level may lose touch with the physical reality of the library holdings themselves. Perfectly feasible systems solutions to the problems facing digital libraries can be found in the digital space, but they don't always bear any relation to the real world. This sort of apathy, if you like, seems to be mutual and it's far too easy for one world to forget about the other and remain disconnected.

In fact, this gap is only in the mind. Libraries have two areas that need to be addressed, which may appear paradoxical. The first is the obvious one: digital as 'paradigm shift', with more information on new formats, and where users of digital content have acquired new information gathering habits and expectations. The second is a bit more subtle, but there's nothing 'new' in digital. This observation comes from examining the phenomenon from the vantage point of human history: it's just a repeating pattern. As new technologies develop, paradigm shifts occur. It used to take a little longer, and the last one hundred years or so have seen a quicker turnover, but we should be used to this by now. This was a perspective shared by Thomas Hobbes, quoted here from James Gleick's The Information: "The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter." All the talk of the 'brave new world' of digital is nostaligic hyperbole that only serves to miss the point that it's all just information.

There's one other problem that digital libraries encounter that's worth noting here. Creating a digital library within a traditional library space throws into sharp relief the knowledge silos that exist there. They didn't particularly matter before, every person performed their separate function and it was enough to point in the general direction of a physical resource, because you would probably be able to find it. But the digital library brings together disparate roles, condensing them into a project that requires unprecedented precision, because computers demand it. In response to this, either everyone involved endeavours to develop a holistic understanding of all relevant institutional inter-relationships, or one person or department has to take on this responsibility. The latter introduces an instituional divide: instead of the integrated library that contains digital content and analogue linked together and fully amalgamated, we get two libraries - one digital, one traditional - with the digital element a 'bolt-on' or supplement, which may not be the best outcome for growth and sustainability, adding limited value to library collections as a whole.

Vocational training for Digital Curation?

The question of training is a big one that lingers around the edges of my own research and yesterday I attended a focus group to support a survey being conducted by the EC-funded project Digital Curator Vocational Education Europe (DigCurV).

So what does vocational training for digital curation mean exactly? A recent Dilbert comic strip mocked the title of 'digital curator', and in fact it's only the pomposity of the curator that's been introduced for comic effect - the digital curators I've met are adament that neither they nor anyone else understand what their job title really means. So 'digital curation' is an interesting starting point for beginning to define how a person would need to be trained for such a role. Rather than go over what we discussed yesterday, which will feature in the report, I was curious to explore how the enterprise was packaged.

It's interesting to note that such an important discussion brought forward by DigCurV remains couched in the language of the cultural heritage sector. Ideas like 'vocational', 'preservation' and, of course, 'curation' have been given prominence for describing the aims of what is, in the end, a very necessary process. The choice of this terminology certainly makes sense within cultural heritage institutions, to a certain extent it allows people within that domain to understand what these things are all about. But is that really what they are? And who should we really be looking to communicate most effectively with?

I say it's interesting that this type of language has been chosen due to the unprecedented manner in which digital content has opened up cultural heritage institutions to outside stakeholder groups in the last ten years or so. This may be stretching it a bit as an analogy, but it feels like a small country entering the UN General Assembly Hall to plead its case, yet refusing translation services. Their internal business has always been carried out in their own language, so why change now? The values held by that population make perfect sense to everyone inside that country, so they assume that such value is inherently communicable to anyone else they now come into contact with.

It actaully goes beyond simply being 'lost in translation'. Perhaps some of the biggest obstacles to functional digital collections in the cultural heritage sector come from the mindset of 'preservation', something that emerges from a model that was unsustainable when applied to anaolgue objects, never mind digital collections. In our hearts we all know that we're talking about sustainable access into the near future. By grafting the illusion of long-term preservation onto that, we've entered (or regressed, even) into a hopelessly unsustainable paradigm. Ironically, this choice of high cost digital collections strategy has been selected by the one sector least well-placed to carry it out.

As Dan Pallotta recently noted in an excellent Harvard Business Review blog, we need to "understand the nature of the box," if we ever want to get out of it.

Bridging the Gap: Digital collections, innovation and the user

I gave a presentation on my MA dissertation with the above working title a couple days ago, and thought it worth re-articulating some of the points I was trying to make here. This title replaces the more contentious 'Should Librarians Still be Running Libraries?' that got me through the initial planning stages. While previously I had considered that my research would explore the relation of digital collections to external stakeholder groups that could empower innovation with digital content (broadly falling under political, economic, social and technological concerns), it's become apparent that more fundamental goals are not being met by the digital resources currently on offer from libraries. These fundamental goals concern engagement with what I consider to be the primary stakeholder in the library environment, which is the user. This is the gap to which my title refers, while 'innovation' is perhaps the most likely means to bridge any gap between 'digital collections' and the 'user'.

Of course it's difficult to say categorically that there is a gap, but certain signs indicate that there might be. Within my presentation I made reference to a pair of competing views on digital libraries identified by Christine Borgman way back in 1999: (1) Researchers view digital libraries as content collected on behalf of user communities (2) Librarians view digital libraries as institutions or services. I would argue that this tension continues to be played out to varying degrees in a number of contexts. When Eric Meyer recently identified the 'gap' between web archives and users, this was describing a situation where significant web archives had been built over the last ten years, involving some impressive technological solutions, yet researchers were not particularly using them. Then, in the realm of digital libraries specifically, all funding was removed from the US National Science Digital Library by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in July. With an NSF annual budget of almost 7 billion dollars, this is not a 'cuts' situation as we face in the UK, but a simple acknowledgement that the project had failed on the grounds of utility and sustainability. Add to that Nick Poole's observation that we disempower users through mediated cultural collections and I think we have something worth exploring.

My methodology for investigating this has gradually emerged from a pilot interview I conducted back in August. Though a one-off, it clearly identified a general lack of strategy, with little integration of digital content within library culture and infrastructure, and no firm identification or understanding of users in a digital context. While I'm still interested in interviewing experts outside of the library domain (and specifically those who have funded or performed user studies), it seems important to establish some initial ground truths that identify the current position of digital collections within libraries and help to shed some light on the nature of any 'gaps' that may exist. To do this I'll be surveying individuals working within UK national and specialist libraries, institutions with which users choose to interact entirely under their own volition. For this reason I'm currently avoiding university libraries, who have a captive audience up to a point. A second part to the survey, which explores strategy, will then include external experts with whom the views of those working within library digital collections can be compared and contrasted.

While this methodology remains somewhat ill-defined and fluid for the time being, a good research output would be able to conclusively reveal any gaps and how to act on them, establish the extent to which advice from experts has been taken up by the library community and what a research library needs to be in terms of digital resources in the future and how we get there. We often talk about Google and understandably so - no other entity has more categorically smashed the library monopoly on information dissemination - but what comes after Google and what are the alternatives? Above all, it feels like a time of great opportunity.