Yesterday at “Digital Dilemmas”
Written on April 17, 2009 by Barbara Taranto
It’s not everyday that Cliff Lynch and Dan Cohen are in the same city, let alone at the same meeting. But yesterday New York was lucky enough to have both of them in town for a one day workshop Digital Dilemmas hosted by the Metropolitan New York Library Council in association with OCLC. If you’ve every heard either of them speak you’ll know what I mean.
Cliff began the day with a birds-eye-view of the challenges in the current digital landscape – a sort of tour de force for librarians deeply entangled in the day to day struggles of information management. As usual, the 45 minutes seemed like 10 and was chocked full of Cliff’s special blend of data, anecdote and insightful allusion. He advised the audience members to think broadly about our respective vocations in relation to the communities we serve and to not reduce the discussion to the mechanics of digital activities. Libraries, he remarked, are an integral part of, and partner with their constituents and their constituents are members of a greater society. The society is changing. Learning and education are changing and consequently, the place for libraries in the society is changing.
Dan Cohen who rounded out the day, had a similar message but delivered in an entirely different manner. Dan conducted an experiment (crowdsourcing) to demonstrate information seeking behaviors and information retrieval behaviors. Dan posted an image of an artifact on Twitter and asked those who were following him whether they could identify the object. He then turned back to his presentation. Shortly after, the Twitter dialogue box kept popping up to interrupt him. His “followers” were responding. By the time he had finished discussing the ideas of the “open library” – a virtual environment where library activities occur outside the formal, professional structure – he had made his point. The community had participated in creating new knowledge and had done so in an interactive and sometimes noisy fashion. Dan’s point wasn’t that libraries are obsolete but that libraries and librarians must engage with their communities in the places that knowledge is being acquired and since knowledge acquiring behaviors are changing, libraries and librarians must change.
This is hardly bleeding edge ….. but it does warrant repeating since it reminds us that we must remain interested in the big picture as well as the minutiae. Our communities would be well served if we imagined ourselves as partners in this endeavor rather than an endangered species.
Whatever your opinion, it is well worth checking out the meeting proceeding that will be posted shortly.
Kudos to Jason Kucsma Digitization and Emerging Technologies manager at METRO for putting this together.
Filed in: Communities, Conferences, Frameworks.
“Libraries and librarians must engage with their communities in the places that knowledge is being acquired.” I agree this is not a new concept and do not understand how it could provoke the response “knowledge acquiring behaviors are changing, libraries and librarians must change.”
I’d like to call your readers attention to the fact that partnership between librarian and researcher is a large part of the work we do in the Manuscripts & Archives Division at the New York Public Library. And for minutiae, I would point you to the fact that the Manuscripts Division continues to provide duplicates of its collections for research patrons. This means a researcher can find a reference to an archival collection, perhaps the file on Thomas Mann in the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars records held within the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. The researcher can then contact the Manuscripts Division by filling out an application at http://www.nypl.org/mssref wherein they explain their research topic and/or project including their need to see the records in question to possibly schedule an appointment to access the collection and other related material.
After checking their coat and bag at the Schwarzman Building first floor coat-check and hopefully making use of secondary sources available in the General Research Division, Milstein Division, many other NYPL locations or another library entirely, the researcher is then able to access the archival material in room 328, the Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts. Then carefully surveying the material, understanding it both within the context of the archive and the secondary literature, the researcher may then ask for selected material to be photocopied. Pending review, a low res scan will be made, for example of the Thomas Mann file found in Box 23, Folder 4 of the Emergency Committee records.
This file is fascinating. Whether it was photocopied, microfilmed, or digitized, the research in which the knowledge acquisition took place does not change. Nothing could now stop a person from linking to this file from any number of social networks, though a footnote to the material in a published work would be the most appropriate. For it is not the task of the librarian to interpret material in the infinite ways possible, but rather to create a single stable reference for users old and new to share.
Now, if only there were a way to connect digitized files to archival finding aids within the website of a repository, anyone who later wanted a file could not only locate it quickly but also understand it within the context of its creation. I have seen examples of this and would be happy to share at a later time. I fear, however, librarians too often hide behind a notion of constant change to realize the power of tools already in place, tools with which our users are demonstrably proficient.
Thomas Lannon
NYPL Manuscripts & Archives Division
P.S. I apologize for any broken links — commenting in blogs is difficult stuff.