I am conducting a survey of digital curation and digital curators.
If you are involved in taking care of digital materials of any type, form and purpose and are interested in the advancement of digital curation as a professional field, feel free to take the survey and share it with colleagues. The survey takes about 20 min to complete and can be found at http://bit.ly/1osgTQ7
A recent Digital Library Federation (DLF) forum started with an inspiring keynote by R. D. Lankes and his challenging of the monopolies of content delivery in higher education and the neutrality of the library profession. He argued that librarians should improve society by facilitating knowledge creation, which includes not only providing access to resources, but also teaching literacy, genres, and communication, creating learning environments and motivating people to learn and research. He also emphasized that a librarian is somebody who has either training, professional experience, or spirit, thereby shifting the emphasis from degrees to actual knowledge and passion.
Of lesser success was my leading of a birds-of-a-feather session about Research Data Alliance (RDA). BoFs happened during lunch and it’s probably not a good time to learn about a new organization. Spreading the word about new initiatives is also hard because they are new and there is more anticipation and preparatory work, rather than something that is ready to use. I had several good conversations about RDA, but there could have been more.
All sessions were informative and productive, but the one that got me thinking was a session that I couldn’t attend "Creating the New Normal: Fostering a Culture of Data Sharing with Researchers". It’s a rich topic, so below is some food for thought - my interpretation of the session theme based on the materials prepared for the session by organizers and community notes taken by participants during the session.
The session was based on the Data Information Literacy (DIL) project that is looking to identify skills, capacities and toolkits for data management and leverage information literacy to bridge the disconnect between faculty, graduate students (who are often the data managers in scientific labs) and librarians.
The disconnect stems from different needs in relation to data – data collection vs analysis vs preservation and access. Even though researchers may recognize the importance of data management, they rarely consider it being part of the curriculum or articulated research culture. To simplify, graduate students collect data and both faculty and students analyze it and work on publications. The messiness of data collection and storage is something that bothers many researchers, but they don’t necessarily know what to do about it.
Librarians are increasingly interested in incorporating research data into their library collections and providing access to it as part of their service. They would like datasets to be better prepared for storage and sharing, and they are ready to help. They also have a mission of helping others to address their information needs, but they don’t necessarily have the power to do that. How could these disconnects be bridged?
By working through three scenarios proposed for discussion, the session seemed to approach disconnect bridging via embedding librarians/data specialists into research teams and projects, learning about researchers’ needs and helping them with their data, while teaching them good practices of data management. Librarians’ expertise can be useful in the areas of file organization, metadata, and tools for storage and sharing.
This approach is good, but it’s quite demanding in terms of resources. I agree that data literacy should be embedded in a larger teaching of proper information management (including ethics, security, authoritativeness, etc.) and this could help re-use existing channels of library instruction and minimize resources. At the same time, I wonder whether we should also think about the culture of data sharing in terms of private/public epistemic objects. Data is still a private object, which will constantly undermine the "new normal" of sharing, because we don’t typically share objects we consider private. The new norm then should be that data are "shareable" from the beginning.
In some organizations and domains data are already open and shareable, for example, data from the large observatories supported by the US government. Consequently, data producers in those organizations may have better data information literacy. For other "private" domains, particularly, in the social sciences, there are still a lot of barriers and fears. Would a public culture of data sharing mean peer review of data collection instruments? Survey respondents as co-owners of data? Data curators as independent decision-makers with regard to choosing and preparing data for public use? A lot of possibilities come with the idea of data sharing cultures.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) postdoctoral fellowships in data curation encourage connections between library, technology and research. CLIR fellows are hosted by a variety of institutions and have widely varying skills and responsibilities. Every month they (we) get together to discuss current issues and challenges related to digital curation. The most recent session focused on faculty engagement and featured two guests: Gabrielle Dean, the curator of literary rare books and manuscripts at Johns Hopkins University and Kelly Miller, the director of teaching and learning services and head of the college library at UCLA. Two current CLIR fellows, John Kratz and Bridget Whearty, led the session.
The notes below are my attempt to synthesize many useful pieces of advice and information shared during that session.
Engagement in the context of librarians/curators working with faculty is a relatively new term. Previously, the word "outreach" was used more often. "Outreach" has a sense of a method or certain approach, e.g., providing guidelines or distributing best practices. "Engagement" has a sense of participation, shared goals and activities. As any other type of engagement, faculty engagement is rather difficult. So here are some tips:
I wish there was more literature (both formal and informal) on this topic that could answer questions and help in practice. For example, what should someone know before starting a job that involves faculty engagement? Are there certain skill that might be helpful? What is the nature of the relationship between curators and faculty - is it a peer-to-peer or a nurse-doctor relationship? Can/should it be changed? What are the best ways to gather information about your targeted audiences and their needs? So on and so forth.
To stimulate a discussion on this topic and, perhaps, encourage more writing, an engagement interest group has been created within the Research Data Alliance (RDA). The group has a narrower focus, because it emphasizes the engagement of researchers and other stakeholders in research data sharing and re-use. Nevertheless, it may be a good platform for continuing a conversation on engagement and building a knowledge base/wiki.
CLIR blog has recently posted a piece on re-skilling for librarians by Christa Williford, focusing on digital humanities librarianship. What kind of skills do librarians need in order to be relevant in contemporary research environments? The list can be pretty long, moreover, there might be multiple lists.
Another list was proposed in a report that Christa mentioned, “Re-skilling for research” by Research Libraries UK (RLUK). The report contains results of a series of studies that aimed to map the needs of researchers onto tasks to be undertaken by subject librarians.
The report is long, but the message is the same over and over: librarians’ roles and skills are quite limited and traditional; they do not match the needs. Subject librarians are not involved at the early stages of research that involve conceptualization and planning. Most of the services are still offered in the areas of literature search and information management (how to store and organize everything). Services that are related to data collection, management, analysis and preservation are in their infancy at best.
The list of 32 skills in this report includes:
While all those skill suggestions sound reasonable, I’m not sure that it’s realistic for librarians to sustain such a huge change. The skill sets described above require completely different training. Once a person goes through such training, librarianship might not be the most fulfilling career path for them. Perhaps, re-skilling in librarianship should happen not in the areas of actual skills and knowledge sets, but in the orientation of library services - from offering advise and consultation to enabling various forms of scholarly activities. As enablers, librarians are providers of spaces, infrastructure, resources, tools, etc. that facilitate preservation and dissemination of knowledge. In this case it's not about their skills per se, it's about finding the right partners and promoting the right cause.
Notes from Digital preservation, archival science and methodological foundations for digital libraries (S. Ross, 2012, New Review of Information Networking, 17:1, 43-68, doi).
At the beginning the article makes an important observation - there is more to preserving digital objects than saving the content. Approaches to preservation should also include a) retaining the environment and context of creation and use and b) reproducing the experience of use.
The middle of the article is of lesser interest. Many points, such as a lack of systematic practices, policies or research strategies in preservation, can be skipped.
Suggestions for research agenda in this paper come primarily from the DigitalPreservationEurope project (DPE). There are nine important areas of work in digital preservation:
The article concludes with the statement that there is an urgent need for a theory of digital preservation and curation. To me it seems that we have enough theories to rely on. Once structures (technological and social) that support digital preservation become adopted and used, we can start observing existing practices and then decide whether we need a new theory. Otherwise, there is a danger of coming up with something trivial and calling it a new theory.
Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project is conducting surveys about people who check out e-books and librarians who lend out e-books:
Patron survey (no password)
Librarian survey (need to email kzickuhr@pewinternet.org for password)
See also their presentation "The rise of e-reading".This article "Authors Take Libraries to Court in Face Off on Copyright Issues" came up in my news feed today. The Authors Guild, some other organizations and 8 authors filed a suit against HathiTrust and several universities (including my own Indiana University and its libraries), blaming them for the "systematic, concerted, widespread and unauthorized reproduction and distribution of millions of copyrighted books and other works." (text of their complaint).
Really? Do these organizations and individuals have legitimate concerns regarding the dissemination of their work or are they there for publicity and settlement money? It seems that if they had legitimate concerns, they would've done it differently. Why attack libraries, which don't really profit from all their work but rather try to provide better and more adequate services to their populations? Isn't it an attempt to go for smaller fish in order to get bigger fish? Libraries have an agreement with google, so this suit looks more like a move against google. If Google steps in, it can settle a better deal for everybody.
Getting one's name out isn't a bad idea either. For example, the article about the suit mentions Frances Grimble, who quoted as saying "It is time for libraries to go. Clearly, their only goal these days is to maintain their existence—with the aid of public funding, which most writers and publishers do not get—in a world where libraries have become obsolete." Hm... The argument doesn't seem to have much evidence to support itself. I talk about library obsolescence with my students all the time and we always come back to "but what do you mean by 'library'?".
It seems that Ms. Grimble's understanding of libraries needs to be updated. Libraries provide access to the internet, databases, digital books, ipods, ipads, e-textbooks, etc., etc. And they rely on public funding, because their goals are not to earn money (which is the goal of authors and publishers), but to preserve knowledge and disseminate it among those who can't afford to pay $35 for a book (the average price of most Ms. Grimble's books on amazon). Public funding allows citizens to combine financial resources (through taxation, etc.) and create a pool of shared resources so that the larger group can benefit from it. Modern resources are digital resources. It's obvious that libraries should provide access to digital resources. Why anybody would want to fight it unless they have an ulterior motive? I certainly wouldn't want to buy every book or DVD I use. I don't have that much money and honestly, most of it is not even worth it.
HathiTrust Statement on Authors Guild, Inc. et al. v. HathiTrust et al.
