Oxford University Staff Conference

1. In part what I want to talk about today is changes in the nature of scholarship. This is not to be confused with dumbing down, but is in my view a slow but inexorable shift in the tectonic plates of scholarly communication. Now of course dumbing down does exist. Just before Christmas, and for the first time, I felt moved to complain at my local Waterstone’s about the products on sale.

2. Action Man: Available from All Good Bookshops…..

I understand that an Einstein Action Man also exits. Happily they removed it, although it’s still available on the Internet.

3. The End of Libraries

The title of this slide comes from the book by one of my professional heroes, Jimmy Thompson. It was the first ever book of professional literature I ever bought. Prophecies of the end of libraries are not, of course new. Thompson was by definition wrong, but perhaps in timescale rather than substance

4. The Threat to Libraries

The fireside myths of library history tell of a resolute four thousand year journey through change: from the oral tradition through the great library of Ashurbanipal with its tablets of stone to papyri then the monastic scriptoria. Then we moved on to Gutenberg and the printed word and further development into sound and film collections. The profession comforts itself that throughout these four thousand years we have often been buffeted by the great waves of change, but never yet capsized. Librarians are adept at finding comforting statistics showing that the slumbering power of libraries remains real. A recent report from OCLC (OCLC, 2003) recorded that:

- There are five times as many library cards as Amazon users;

- there are more libraries than McDonald’s outlets in the USA;

- one person in six in the world is a registered library user;

- there are over one million libraries and over 700,000 librarians worldwide.

- The number of books printed is over one hundred thousand a year and rising

•The absence of the Boolean gene

• The real threat, which I shall return to, is illiteracy rather than ignorance, the growing number of people for whom books – and by extension libraries – are an optional extra and not a core value

•Community Centres without books

•Liverpool treadmills while waiting for your session on a pc

•Tim Waterstone and books

•Transformation of the user experience. A visit to Waterstone’s is a pleasure

•Amazoogle, iTunes, AbeBooks, eBay and Paypal

•Purchase is painless. With only a few clicks you can get what you want delivered within 48 hours rather than waiting for the next time the library is open and wasting time hunting for stuff

•Wikis and Social Information Hubs

These have brought new opportunities to what Prensky describes as digital natives. More accurately they have a set of activities which they take for granted as normal rather than new. It is worth considering their characteristics and assumptions of these digital natives. The Beloit Mindset List (Beloit College, 2006) sets out to define this group in soundbites and notes some of the attributes of new college students:

•“Ctrl + Alt + Del” is as basic as “ABC.”

•They have never been able to find the “return” key.

•Computers have always fit in their backpacks.

•Stores have always had scanners at the checkout.

•They have always had a PIN number.

•Convenience trumps quality

•They don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors.

It is easy to forget that today’s twenty-one year olds spring entirely from a digital world. John Naughton pithily described this in the Observer (Naughton, 2006). For today's twenty-one year olds born in 1985 the Internet was two years old which was the same year as Nintendo launched 'Super Mario Brothers', the first blockbuster game. As they went to school, Tim Berners-Lee was busy inventing the World Wide Web, which emerged as a phenomenon as they moved into secondary school. The Palm Pilot was launched at the same time. Also at that time, pay-as-you-go mobile phone tariffs arrived, enabling teenagers to have phones. Napster and Blogger.com were launched in 1999, just when they were doing GCSEs. The iPod and the early social networking services appeared in 2002, when they were doing A-levels. Skype launched in 2003, just as they were heading for university, and YouTube launched in 2005, as they were heading towards graduation.

And what do these digital natives expect?

•Choices

•Selectivity

•Personalization

•Instant gratification

•Cheap, fast, and good

•Mobile anytime anywhere technology

As a consequence, 73% of college students reported using the Internet more than the library. (Hong, 2006)

Holliday and Lee (2004) undertook studies which confirmed this and discovered that the digital natives:

•expect research to be easy and feel they can be independent in the process.

•They do not seek help from librarians and only occasionally from professors or peers.

•When they can’t find what they need, they give up and assume that the information cannot be found. [Shades of Pluchak’s “satisfied inept”]

•Students often stop after their initial searches thinking they have completed the research process and fail to choose a particular focus.

•Access to full text articles seems to have changed students’ cognitive behavior. Instead of having to read through material at the library, they can now download material at their desks. They do not have to take notes or read through them to develop themes and ideas, an activity central to a focused research project. [BECAUSE}

•Electronic articles enable cutting and pasting, almost certainly leading to increased plagiarism – although I suspect that this is down through ignorance more often than malice

And so we have a growing group of users for whom the library is at best a secondary resource and where library usage statistics are maintained and bolstered by the provision of network connectivity rather than book collection quality.

5. So consider how the Web 2.0 world has superseded almost every professional function performed by libraries

6. But I would then go on to argue that if we choose we can readily respond to the Web 2.0 world with a Library 2.0 world.

7. The Failure of Librarians

•Making the technology work too well

It doesn’t break down, it’s not visibly centrally organised and managed and it’s rarely branded.

•Lack of underpinning philosophy

In my view this is perhaps the biggest single failure of my generation of senior librarians. We have rested lazily on the shoulders of giants and ignored what lay ahead, looking backwards to constantly improving the past. This is in part due to the

•Rise of the managerial technocrat

When I began my career it was in a world where the University Librarian was a senior figure in the University and often one of the three or four named office-holders in the statutes of the University. More often than not, he or she would be characterised as a scholar-librarian with some small record of publication in a decently obscure minor area of the Humanities. But nonetheless a clear member of the academic and university community. As libraries grew more complicated and more technically dependent and in need of serious fiscal prudence the managerial technocrats came to the fore. It is now quite uncommon to find a university librarian with a set of academic publications who is seen as a senior member of the academic community. Libraries have arguably never been better managed, but the Librarian now tends to have all the power and influence of the Head of the Estates Office. That is just another of the university’s professional service managers.

•Failure to engage with e-resources

These two aspects have combined with our failure to engage fully with e-resources, because it’s fast moving and difficult. I know of no library which has developed a coherent philosophy in this area, although some, such as Oxford, have attempted to deal with the issue of funding commercially available electronic resources

The nature of content has progressively changed while libraries have not. The nineteenth and much of the twentieth century can be defined in terms of words, whether spoken or written. Short phrases can encapsulate major events. No explanation is required for “Let them eat cake”, “the thin red line”, “Custer’s last stand”, “Dr Livingstone I presume”, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few” - or even the formula “e=mc2“. Conversely the last fifty or so years can be defined almost entirely in images: film of the burning airship Hindenburg; the Dunkirk beaches; the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, the assassination of JFK; Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon; the beauty of fractal images; the obscenity of the aircraft crashing into the Twin Towers. Digital natives expect image content, hence the huge success of Youtube and Flickr. This shift in medium has largely passed libraries by – although the JISC has made noble attempts to address the issue in the face of a supine constituency.

Frighteningly but perhaps aptly, Prensky describes this:

“It seems to me that after the digital "singularity" there are now two kinds of content: "Legacy" content (to borrow the computer term for old systems) and "Future" content. "Legacy" content includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc - all of our "traditional" curriculum. It is of course still important, but it is from a different era. Some of it (such as logical thinking) will continue to be important, but some (perhaps like Euclidean geometry) will become less so, as did Latin and Greek. "Future" content is to a large extent, not surprisingly, digital and technological. But while it includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them.” (Prensky, 2001)

Digital content is also changing from the concept of “authoritative” as embodied in the printed word, to user created and often image based. 57% of online teenagers create content for the internet on social spaces such as Myspace, Youtube and Flickr. 62% of content viewed by online users under the age of 21 is generated by someone they know. (Hong, 2006). And user created need not mean poorer. The user created films of the Indian Ocean tsunami or the bombing of the London Underground are every bit as valuable as historic documents as any written record of previous events. But community based written content can also have validity. Wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2006) is a free encyclopaedia and a wonderful community based resource. Jordanhill Railway Station in Glasgow has the distinction of becoming the one millionth entry on Wikipedia. The entry was begun on 1st March 2006 with a single sentence. Within 24 hours it had been edited 400 times and expanded to become an entry that prints out as five pages. There is no such entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is barely 10% of the size at 120,000 entries. Wikipedia is currently the 17th most popular site on the Internet at 14,000 hits a second. And much more up to date than Britannica. The first entry on the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon conflict appeared on the wiki within six hours of the capture of the two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The argument rages as to accuracy and whether a thousand amateur administrators can provide adequate quality control – or as Jorge Cauz, president of the Encyclopaedia Britannica recently put it, “Wikipaedia is to the Encyclopaedia Britannica as American Idol is to the Julliard School” (McGinty, 2006). This comment seems to miss the point entirely.

The prevalence of "good enough" information is shaking up the commercial content industry in ways that remain unresolved. However what we can see is the emergence of large aggregators of data meeting current user need as compared to libraries aggregating data against historic assumptions.

•Complacency

I have already suggested that commentators have reached for the comfort blanket of the library as a place and for the precedents of history, when faced with these challenges. The library as place has been variously pictured as the last remaining substantial social space in universities; as the last remaining public place of trust in society, in the case of public libraries as where young children can be left in the care of strangers while parents shop. The precedents of history trace a 4000 year path from the oral tradition through tablets of stone to papyri, the printed word and even sound and film. We comfort ourselves that through these 4000 years of history we have often been buffeted by great waves of change, but never yet capsized.

The underlying issue for libraries is not an overload of information but a shortage of attention for the abundance of information. This is as true of research as teaching, where we increasingly want to gather create and share. We are only just beginning to understand how data flows through the research process from research bids and bid management to human resource management and research outcomes. Instead of the historic position where users adapted their workflow to the library, visiting us at fixed times, now we have to adapt to their workflow.

8. The Threat to Librarians

•Bangor and SOAS

Don’t need subject/area/language specialists.

The rapid decline in the study of foreign languages in the UK

English is the language of choice – except, perversely, in US where Spanish is taking over

•The British Library approach of specialised skills not professional skills

•No distinctive professional voice

Until terrorism, the Patriot Act, and the Terrorism Bill

· “libraries are a source of power, this power deriving principally from the fact that libraries are the storehouses of knowledge and the repositories of the records of mankind’s achievements and discoveries.”

That should be a wake-up call. A statement in defence of libraries manages to highlight the crux of ther problem. We are and remain the sorehouses of the printed word. But knowledge is increasingly appearing in new forms.

9. So I’d now like to look at how a number of librarians and libraries have responded to these challenges. I recently turned down the chance to build a new library, because I have no real idea of what a library will look like and do in five years, never mind fifty – which is the normal lifespan for a building. Others have more courage. Look first at buildings from the last few years.

10. Architectural Statement: Seattle

“ the library was a great space filled with interesting things to look at and useful spaces, but far too subtle for an obvious functional space like a public library.”

11. Airport Terminal

The Book Bunker:

“it has long strips of study and office space that is organized around a central hall.

12. The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen

A glittering building with resonances of the North. An inviting, finely-landscaped public square, drawing the visitor in to a spacious, light and airy ground-floor plaza, with luminous views up through the open atrium, and connecting the lively public spaces of the café, exhibition and event area with the monumental foundation of our historical collections below and the flexible, functional, bookstacks and study areas of the floors above – the whole crowned by a roof terrace looking out over the campus and coastline, connecting the library with the community it serves.

13. Cafeteria and Student Centre

The Saltire Centre is a learning centre. It links the teaching blocks on campus, providing easy access to 1800 places to study; including a 600 seat learning café, 500 computers and 150 laptops to borrow and use anywhere.

14. Idea Store: Tower Hamlets

They offer a wide range of adult education classes, along with career support, training, a creche, meeting areas, cafes and arts and leisure pursuits. And perhaps a Post Office?

15. Reshaped roles

•Financial guardian

•Selector and acquirer

•Seamless access

•Educator on differentiation

•Management of datasets

The technical issues around digital preservation remain uncertain but the lack of understanding and preparedness is all to clear. It revealed that fewer than 20% of UK organisations surveyed have a strategy in place to deal with the risk of either loss or degradation to their digital resources. This was despite a very high level of awareness of the risks and potential economic penalties. The survey further revealed that the loss of digital data is a commonplace – and indeed is seen as a routine hazard by some – with over 70% of respondents saying data had been lost in their organisation. Awareness of the consequential risks is high, with 87% recognising that corporate memory or key cultural material could be lost and some 60% saying that their organisation could lose out financially. In 52% of the organisations surveyed there was management commitment to digital preservation – but only 18% had a strategy in place.

•Intellectual asset manager

16. New roles

•Primary sources and IPR Manager

•Research data collection

•Information arbitrage

•Training (Law’s Second Law)

•Kitemarking as a trusted selector

17. Cabinets of curiosities

I’d like to turn now to the Digital Library environment and to explore what little thinking has gone on to develop some kind of philosophical basis for thisWhat we have done so far is to concentrate on digitisation. Oxford and many other libraries have done this. And what we have done has been fine in terms of learning about digitisation, but what we have created is cabinets of curiosities not coherent collections. We are closer to Dr Caligari creating a horror movie than to Panizzi creating an overarching concept such as the universal library

18. Inevitably such thinking as has taken place has happened in the States rather than the UK, although we may take some comfort from the fact that this slide comes from Lorcan Dempsey, late of this parish. The interesting thing in this fussy complicated slide of a student’s future workspace is that the Library does not appear at all.

19. If we turn to research, Lorcan has produced a much less complicated slide, based on Liz Lyons work at UKOLN, much less complicated because we know much less about the changes in the research process. The decline of academic physical use of the library is a much discussed but little analysed phenomenon of the last decade, although it is now it seems generally assumed that at least in the sciences, delivery to the desktop is the norm.

20. Myspace: European History: War on five fronts

Of course not all socially provided information will stand up to academic rigour. For reasons which need not detain us here I had occasion recently to find out some basic facts about the Great Northern War. I started with Myspace

All I can think of off hand is The Great Northern War--which was Sweden against just about everybody--Russia, Denmark (which also included Norway at the time) Saxony/Poland, and eventually Prussia and the I think a couple other German states--Hanover---Hesse maybe. Thats five at least. Kinda like the war--Basically it was Peter the Great et al trying to take advantage of a 18 year old new King of Sweden--Charles 12. Unfortunatedly, it turned out that Charles the 12 LOVED war and was really good at it. He pretty much kicked everybodies ass at the beginning. Scared the crap out of Peter the Great on a few occasions to the point he fled a few battlefields and ran all the way back to St Pete

Barely enough for a multiple choice question, never mind an essay. Wikipedia on the other hand proved excellent

21. The Great Northern War – Wikipedia

•Between 1560 and 1660, Sweden created a Baltic empire centered on the Gulf of Finland and comprising the provinces of Karelia, Ingria, Estonia, and Livonia. During the Thirty Years' War Sweden gained tracts in Germany as well, including Western Pomerania, Wismar, the Duchy of Bremen, and Verden. At the same period Sweden conquered Danish and some Norwegian provinces north of the Sound (1645; 1660). These victories may be ascribed to a good training of the army, which was far more professional than most continental armies, and could maintain much higher rates of fire due to constant training with their firearms. However, Sweden was unable to support and maintain her army when the war was prolonged and the costs of warfare could not be passed to occupied countries.

•In 1617 Sweden's gains in the Treaty of Stolbovo had deprived Russia of direct access to the Baltic Sea, and internal strife during much of the first half of the 1600s meant that they were never in a position to challenge Sweden for these gains. Russian fortunes reversed during the later half of the 17th century, notably with the rise to power of Peter the Great, who looked to address the earlier losses and re-establish a Baltic presence. In the late 1690s, the adventurer Johann Patkul managed to ally Russia with Denmark and Saxony and in 1700 the three powers attacked.

Taking these elements together leads inexorably to a change in the research process itself. It is a commonplace that the Internet has internationalised research. Papers now appear with literally hundreds of joint authors, while research data, debate and papers are shared across the Internet in real time. The growth of digital natives and user developed content then combine to create a concept which can best be defined as aliteracy. It should not be confused with illiteracy or even dumbing down, but reflects the growth of a constituency which can function perfectly effectively without reading, or books or libraries. Clever and well informed people no longer find libraries essential and there is growing evidence of two parallel worlds – on-web and off-web. It is at least conceptually possible to acquire a PhD without reading anything, at least in science and technology. The student engages in tearoom discussion – where most information transfer has always taken place - formulates a hypothesis, writes software, runs computer controlled experimental equipment and uses more software to analyse the results. The literature review which is always an element of the doctorate requires cut and paste skills, not reading skills. Even that will not require library access for long. The Google Library project plans to digitise some thirty-six million volumes over the next few years, (Milne, 2006). Who will then need even a large university library? The aliterate hive mind ignores the off-web in favour of the big gravitational hubs of the Internet and these are increasingly the places where other people build systems and services on top of the hubs.

So how can libraries respond to this? Well you’ll hear more about that in the next session, but let me just show two or three more indicators

22. Penntags is a brilliant new version of the ancient rule that the best guide to what will be used in future is what was used in the past.

•The librarians at the University of Pennsylvania are experimenting with something they call PennTags. They’ve created a social bookmarking site for members of their institution so that sites of interest, bibliographies or links to other user-created content can be collected and shared by the user community. Users can download a specialized toolbar or use a bookmarklet created to facilitate adding content to PennTags. The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done. They are categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the user experience, and it’s working. No longer do the experts have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users have been empowered to determine their own cataloging needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman – but using the classic library school rules

23. Worldcat Or how about this page from Worldcat showing a local search in Edinburgh. It shows not just the location of the book but will show availability – and if they are all out on loan it shows you where to buy a copy secondhand and for how much

24. CybraryCity2

If we move to the more exotic cyber world of second life there is a CybraryCity. Here my avatar – you know it’s me from the tartan – has entered the Michigan Library. All the tags don’t show on this screen dump, but I can move to different departments, make enquiries of the subject specialists whose pictures are on the wall and order books. It wilkl take very little to link this to digitised texts.

25. Openwetware Or look at this quite different form of social networking It’s a site for sharing information between researchers in biology. MIT is there along with Imperial College, MIT, Manchester, Chicago, UC Berkeley, Paris, Nanyang and Tufts. And Cambridge – but not Oxford. Why not? Isn’t the exchange of information something to do with what we are about?

26. Summary

•Users are moving to a “just enough” mode

•Social networking platforms are growing in importance

•“Hubs” are attracting key developments

•Libraries need to work on the theory of e-collections andtheir aggregation

When tens of millions of books are directly available through Google, what will libraries have to offer? It has arguably been the case that library collections were built for the future user not the current user, certainly in the humanities and historically based disciplines. It was also the case that and probably still is the case that research libraries collect more non-commercial items than commercial items. Archives, ephemera, local publications, government publications and so on are all acquired. It is a major failure of the present generation of librarians not to have engaged with collection policy for born digital material. There is no real debate on what should be collected and by whom and as a result valuable material is already being lost. Not just electronic mail, but increasingly the wikis, blogs, text messages, video clips and photographs never mind the research data, electronic maps and electronically plotted chemical structures which will form the historical documents of the future are simply ignored. Our successors will rightly blame us for this. An easy answer is that Libraries 2.0 should collect the born digital material which will give us brand differentiation. The same is true of all the intellectual output of our universities. The Institutional repository is an activity and space which librarians are ideally equipped to manage. We can see some elements of this future – although not yet with born digital material – in such deep archives as the immensely rich Valley of the Shadow – pulling together resources from a range of media, on the American Civil War. As was always the case, in the text-based age it will be our special collections and archives of electronic materials which will give libraries both purpose and brand differentiation. To follow the argument to its conclusion we should then accept Dempsey’s (2006) premise that it is the aggregation of these resources that will turn libraries into a major gravitational hub where any salvation must lie.

Having created the content, its preservation is another obvious activity. Research libraries have the great advantage of not being commercial activities. They have the luxury of storing material which may not be needed for decades.

27. Options for libraries

And so to sum up.

1. Building e-Research collections

2. Importance of kite marking, quality assurance and relevance ranking

3. Co-created services – across sectors?

- Providing infrastructure to bring sellers and consumers together