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Whither Academic Information
Services in the Perfect Storm of
the Early 21st-century?
Michael A. Keller
Stanford University
For the 8th Bielefeld Conference
060208
Elements of the Perfect Storm
• Ubiquitous network access
• Low cost computers & PDAs
• Plentiful, cheap magnetic
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memory
“Just in time” commercial
culture;
Public Internet an “open”
culture
Investment market based on
quarterly reports
Google, Yahoo, MSN, millions
of other providers, some
free, some fee
• Blog-sphere, Wikis, RSS
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feeds
Course Management Systems
Collaboration environments
Virtual, global communities
Anonymous institutional
information environments
Google Project
Library Partner Motivations
• Vastly expand intellectual access to our
collections
• Populate digital repositories for long-term
persistence of digital avatars of our
collections
• Defense of fair use, by employing it!
• Alternate reader functions from the ones
Google presently offers
Course Management Systems
• Increase use of web resources to
enhance/extend in-person instruction
• Dominate in most American universities
• Produce lots of digital objects for
institutional repositories and sharing
• Make use of functions: locate, gather,
deliver, create & sharing
• Drive e-portfolio services
Web services
• Discovering
• Locating
• Requesting
• Delivering
• Gathering
• Creating
• Sharing
Web Services based on systems
• On-line public access catalogs
• Internet Search Engines
• Proprietary Search Engines
• Course Management Systems
• Institutional Information Topographies
• Web Browser Applications
• The World Wide Web itself
Services beyond Google’s
• Taxonomic indexing – providing access to ideas in a text
• Associative searching – providing access by statistically
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ranked lists of co-terms
Hyperlinking of citations
GUIs to navigate search results
More subtle searching
Alerting services driven by user terms
Recommendation services
“Info-tools” assisting readers to find definitions,
locations, biographical sketches
“High Touch” Services
• First, make users predominantly self-sufficient
• Provide in-person and personalized services on
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•
demand – subject & technial specialists needed
Serve communities in responsive and distinctive
ways
Bibliographic, communication, & analytic
services advancing research, teaching & learning
How many e-books?
• Quick Stanford study 2005
• 22,892 titles in English acquired in 2005 with imprint
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years 2001-2005
Random sample of 1,373 titles (6% of universe)
181 titles available as e-books (13.2%)
Hypothesis needs to be tested on other imprints,
especially European ones
Will e-books replace physical books soon?
We conclude doubtful soon, but e-book readers are
coming
How much information?
• 9B web pages indexed by Google
• 90B web pages behind access control
• Federated searching behind access control
difficult, but important service to provide
Digital Repositories
• So far experimental
• Transparent, auditable services needed
• Portico, KB, BL, LOCKSS/CLOCKSS,
Stanford Digital Repository, others
• Later more wide-spread as techniques
proven
Aquifer of DLF
• Middleware services
• Standards, including meta-data
• Collection policies
• Intended to support the federation of
numerous local collections
• Not an architecture, but a tool kit
• Katherine Kott, director
Service Framework of DLF
• Organizes effort and resources toward…
• Integration of systems, applications,
standards to…
• Develop & evolve systems architectures
• Responsive to users
• Responsive to rapidly changing i.t.
environment
• Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC, lead
What about our people?
• Re-treading and re-engineering vital
• Employing well-qualified engineers vital
• Engaging computer scientists vital
• Shared vision, mission, goals vital
Libraries & Virtual Libraries
• Libraries as places heavily populated
– Services well used
– Millions of books move (more as mass digitization
and indexing on the web proceeds
• Virtual libraries heavily used, but metrics?
• Planning bookless libraries, e.g. Engineering
• Planning traditional libraries, e.g. Art
• Bibliographic literacy & information heuristic
Basic functions, regardless of medium
• Selection & gathering
• Intellectual access to information objects
• Distribution of content & access
• Interpretation of content; navigating the
ordered set and the information chaos
• Preservation of the avatars of content –
physical & digital
• Analysis, manipulation & presentation
Client Focus, not Guild Focus
Let the rising tide of
access to information
lift all the boats,
everywhere