“No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century”
by the Council on Library and Information Resources
http://www.clir.org/pubs/
This is a great read if you spend anytime wondering what society will do about the plethora of digital resources that are being created or how libraries should present themselves to the next generation. Although the title mentions research libraries, I think this type of thinking is groundbreaking in redefining the general belief that all libraries only house stacks of tangible publications and that they may not have a future in the digital world. The article identifies many gaps in society’s management of digital information and how libraries might and should fill them.
Focusing on digital media my whole career has caused me to reflect a lot on our management of it. We still struggle with the different types, where they intersect and how to persist them into the future. For example, we are all comfortable with digital photos and documents yet we still struggle with how to manage such content, along with corresponding metadata, in a way that we can be sure it will be easily discoverable, accessible and persist into the future. Interactive multimedia and integrating resources are in a completely different league. And I have no idea if anyone has thought about capturing the data that is fed through social aggregating services like Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed. Its a little more of a technical problem then newspaper on micro-fiche. (at least for now)
I am pretty excited to see how we – as in society, markets, industries, universities and libraries – respond to these changes.
Recent Comments