http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2291/2070

A propos of our conversation here, I was struck by the following paragraph under “Some Issues for Libraries”:

“Services. As a growing proportion of library use is network–based, the library becomes visible and usable through the network services provided. On the network, there are only services. So, the perception of quality of reference or of the value of particular collections, for example, will depend for many people on the quality of the network services which make them visible, and the extent to which they can be integrated into personal learning environments. Increasingly, this requires us to emphasize the network as an integral design principle in library service development, rather than thinking of it as an add–on. The provision of RSS feeds is a case in point. Thinking about how something might appear on a mobile device is another.”

Your advice to Lynne (Hi Lynne!) points to what I was going to say in response to your comment on my posting about shifting emphasis from quality to quantity in order to tap into the information economy and provide broader access to our collections.

At the heart of your suggestion to Lynne to engage her reference, circulation or cataloging staff in digitizing dime novels is the principle of distributed workflows. Certainly one impediment to getting more done in special collections is staffing. Yet if we analyze what work actually needs to get done and then what skills and equipment are needed to do it, I think we’ll find that much of it does not necessarily need people with special collections and archival experience. Nor does it necessarily need to be done in special collections secure areas.

The problem comes precisely with engaging the commitment of other staff, as that is typically a managerial function beyond the control of the special collections department head. Higher levels of administration are typically the areas need to be engaged to get this kind of collaboration to happen. But special collections librarians can do a lot to make the case and to offer proposals of new types of workflows that will help to ensure that backlogged collections get cataloged and processed, that images get scanned and metadata encoded, and that researchers are served. Perhaps the new ARL working group report on special collections will help administrators better understand the potential of special collections to serve their institutional missions and encourage them to allocate staffing in creative ways to better support them.

Ensuring that special collections “products” (e.g., information about collections and digital collections) get delivered quickly and easily means getting them into systems that operate at the network level with network-level efficiency. From there, we need to find ways to connect users and what they find with our institutions and knowledgeable staff. Making that connection, which involves managing relationships with our users, is where the quality real comes in.

Quality cataloging and metadata description is important, but users really only need enough to find resources using the simplistic strategies they typically employ. Users do not necessarily want to be trained in how to create more complex and more powerful searches that takes advantage of sophisticated and deep metadata encoding schemes; rather they want to be able to type a few words into a search box and quickly see results that they can start sorting through, comparing and using as the basis for refining or launching new searches.

Users also want to be able to ask questions of knowledgeable experts once they get into a search process. That’s where libraries need to be able to step in provide easy links to their services and staff. Service quality is every bit as important as data quality in conditioning the user’s perception of quality and institutional trust.

Christian

I couldn’t agree more with the bulk of this post. My one concern is that many of these goals are more easily achieved at larger institutions that have more institutional resources, both in terms of finances, and staff time and expertise. I’d *LOVE* to have much more of my special collections online (50,000 public domain dime novels, anyone?), but the resources to digitize, mark up, and make available in bulk just aren’t there (yet).

I’m pleased to see that you’ve been handed a baton (albeit in the form of lead pipe!) to help raise awareness and critical knowledge about what makes special collections special – namely the collections themselves.

What your post shows so clearly, in fact, is that the challenges that special collections librarians and archivists face in trying to make their collections more discoverable and accessible are in many ways the same challenges that librarians who manage general collections also face. Increasingly, it is how collections are connected to online services at the network level that makes all the difference in who finds them and how they are used.

For those of us who have spent most of our careers working in and around academic libraries, we have witnessed a shifting of responsibilities that points toward a shifting of mission that has not yet been fully appreciated, especially by our parent institutions.

Whereas research libraries previously existed and were managed to provide maximum benefit to the faculty and students of the parent institution, global networking systems have exposed them to the larger world, which can now claim them — rightly, I think — as common cultural (intellectual, scientific, literary, etc.) assets from which everyone ought to be able to benefit. And this goes for “general” collections as well as “special” collections, where the most valuable volume is generally the one you can get to quickest.

It is the development of the global information economy that is the main responsible for this shift, even as research libraries have been shifting a lot of their resources into placing their collections in the networked information stream. Yet for all their doings, it seems to me that research libraries have not yet managed to claim a viable stake in the evolving economy, one that will carry them forward with continuity into the future. Ownership of physical collections is one asset, but ownership and control of information about those collections and ability to deliver it quickly and easily is arguably the greater asset.

I’m all for exposing collections at the network level but I do have some concern that unless research libraries can find a more direct means of tapping into the information economy that their ability to do what they have done so well for so long will be diminished. The institutional budget crises that are being precipitated by the now global recession are likely to prove a real test in this regard. Will the choices we make now in the face of economic hardship be creative ones that help us to thrive in the future or will they tend to force foreclosures of our options and opportunities we have to expand the mission of research libraries to the global level where they are demanded?

I’d be curious to know if you or others who read your post also see the situation I am trying describe.