Emblematic Literature and the Digital Library: Challenges and Opportunities

1. Speaking Pictures Newly Construed: Emblematic Literature and the Digital Library David Seaman Executive Director, Digital Library Federation Emblems in the Twenty-First Century: Materials and MediaThe Seventh International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies July 26, 2005

2. Digital Library Federationhttp://www.diglib.org/ • 34 members: major academic and national libraries -- The British Library; Bibliotheca Alexandrina; 5 allies (CNI; RLG; OCLC; LANL; JISC) • Created in 1995 by directors of US research libraries; fills a need not simply met by larger library organizations: focuses exclusively on DL needs and strategies for large libraries • Nimble, agile, collaborative • Practical and strategic areas of activity

3. DLF Work -- background • USER SERVICES • DLF Scholars Panel • Dimensions and use of the scholarly information environment • COLLECTIONS • METADATA STANDARDS • RESOURCE MANAGEMENT • DIGITAL LIBRARY ARCHITECTURES • PRODUCTION • PRESERVATION

4. Where we are now? • Production and delivery of rich text and image combinations such as emblem books now well-understood • the long-term preservation and curation of this type of digital material is also much more understood as a result of a network of international preservation initiatives. • Less well known is the next step beyond simply placing largely static materials on websites that one is invited to visit and use only in the context and with the tools that the producer deems appropriate.

5. The challenges and opportunities • How to create material that encourages innovation by empowering scholars to engage deeply with digital library material, allowing them to annotate, contextualize, enrich, and re-use this online content? • Where to find or develop the processes and tools that allow us to join up disparate collections across the globe, and to engage as active scholars with active, malleable, easily discovered and re-used content? • How to have a voice as humanists in national and international forums where major issues are decided?

6. 1) The Library in the Classroom • Blackboard; WebCT; local software • OpenCourseWare at MIT • Flecker/McLean DLF report: Digital Library Content and Course Management Systems: Issues of Interoperationhttp://www.diglib.org/pubs/cmsdl0407/ • Libraries often absent from virtual learning design and architecture discussions • Librarians and teaching faculty have an opportunity to partner in the classroom like never before.

7. 2) Deeper Interdependence: tools • SAKAI – a collaboration imperative at work: • University of Michigan • Indiana University • MIT • Stanford University • uPortal Consortium • Collaboration is now a survival skill, not just a good thing to do. Same true for disciplines like Emblem Studies that are based on scattered physical material.

8. Deeper Interdependence: services • DLF Strategic Goal – a Distributed Open Digital Library: http://www.diglib.org/aquifer • Two-phase finding system, initially using harvestable metadata (Open Archives Initiative -- OAI) • “Deep Sharing” – the movement of digital files -- for richer library services and better scholarship • New infrastructure and data creation needs – what are the characteristics of sharable content?

9. 3) Harvestable Metadata • Open Archive Initiative http://www.openarchives.org • No longer enough to build to local standards and put it on the web • Need to push out simple metadata for others to grab and use in service-building. Good for domains such as emblems. • OAIster http://www.oaister.org: 5,696,717 records from 498 institutions (July 2005) • Slide 1; Slide 2

10. 3) Institutional Repositories and Open Access • “There is an growing interest in the more coordinated management and disclosure of digital assets of institutions — learning objects, data sets, e-prints, theses, dissertations and so on.” OCLC Environmental Scan, 2003. http://www.oclc.org/membership/escan/research/default.htm • Resistance from faculty to be thought of as “asset workers” for an institutional content management system. Yet – can be used to the scholar’s advantage in a scattered area of study such as emblems. • Core question: how is the arrival of the Institutional Repository tied in with changes in the faculty rewards system?

11. Open Access • Exciting glimpse of a future where all scholarship is free, with rich metadata that allows virtual aggregations of content held in seamlessly integrated IRs across the globe. • New roles for libraries – publishing from repositories, which is the public face of scholarship for an institution; customer support. New roles for publishers – add value not control access. • Potential new audiences for scholars – the question of impact.

12. Open Access (STM) • Most STM journals now allow self-archiving (including all of Elsevier, Nature, etc) • Now it is up to us – no legal barriers to having (most) STM scholarship published in traditional peer-reviewed journals also freely published from our Institutional Repositories • So, how are our scholar-authors motivated to self-archive, learn metadata skills, publishing skills? Why should they do it? Should they be encouraged to do this for the general good? How to reward them?

13. 4) Tools for Digital Content Creation and Use • Better tools make for more innovative and involved users of our digital content – personalization, annotation, re-shaping and re-publication; classroom presentations. • Do libraries have a role to play in building and supporting such tools, especially for the humanities? • The Interactive University Project at UC Berkeley is a fine example of a practical demonstration of a set of scholars’ toolkit items;

14. Tools • New Zealand’s Greenstone -- simple digital library delivery system and a personal library environment • Michigan State’s MediaMatrix provides innovative ways to think about annotating streaming media files • George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media provides an “online scrapbook”; a note-taking application; tools to build online surveys and polls; and a Syllabus Finder to allow a teacher planning a course to compare syllabi from thousands of universities and colleges.

15. 5) Mass and Malleability • Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO-IT): $20 billion “digital gift to the nation.” • Digital Library Federation, the American Library Association, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public Television Stations, the Association of Research Libraries, the George Lucas Educational Foundation, and EDUCAUSE endorse it, and senior personnel from eBay, Google, IBM, the Internet Archive, RealNetworks, and 3Com all in planning.(http://www.digitalpromise.org/) • Whatever happens with it, its arrival on the scene in 2001 spurred us on to think about what we would do in the face of a massive public investment in digital content, tools, evaluation, and learning systems.

16. Mass and Malleability • US Government Printing Office: print documents conversion – 2.2 million items • Carnegie Mellon’s Million Books Project • Google Scholar; Google Print. Massive digitizing of library material, in and out of print (Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Michigan, NYPL). 7 million volumes at Michigan alone. • Google’s aim – to drive users to the physical book – to a bookseller or to a physical library. What’s ours?

17. 6) From Isolation to Integration • Every publisher is an island; There is little ability to work with content or even metadata cross-publisher and cross-aggregator. Or cross-library • The need to have content that encourages local re-organization and creation of services, and that permits “beyond browsing and searching” engagement by individual users • We invite our users to visit sites and watch content channels; they want to sample, re-use and re-package as a personal library, a classroom presentation (the music mix)

18. An aside: Finding Order in Chaos • New library and academic disciplines are still solidifying; new skills sets and work habits • Non-professional arbiters of access to scholarship • Ambition, Ignorance, and Lack of Money • Seismic events are routine and continuing: Mosaic; Google; eBay; PDAs; Yahoo; wikis; blogs; podcasts; Google Scholar, Google Print, Google Earth. • Embrace the churn.

19. 7) Closing • Need to think strategically and focus on our core mission to advance pedagogy and scholarship • Any library, teacher, scholar, or service that can be replaced by Google, should be. Really. • The transformation from isolation to integration is our central challenge and opportunity– with some enormous payoffs when we get it right. • Celebrate and promote the “long tail” to our work – surprising usage for materials that have no use in print when locked in academic libraries http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

20. Closing • Standards abound, and we are getting better at applying them in ways that work across institutions • Innovative users need malleable content with which to innovate. You should be demanding this. • Collaboration is not just a nice thing – it is a survival mechanism for libraries and publishers. And scholars? • Managing digital content over time – selecting it, describing it, using it with the best tools-- is a tough business – and your library is equipped to do the job. Use those skills.