In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome another guest
author, Lisa Carter! Lisa has just recently been appointed as Visiting Program Officer to work with the Association of Research Libraries Special Collections Working Group. Read more to learn about her vision and thought-provoking ideas about the future of special collections…

I’m beginning to think that what’s wrong with special collections and archives[1] today is that they are considered special.  They are set aside, revered and left as the last great mystery the Library holds.  The collections themselves are special in that they are rare, unique, fantastic and archaic and they do need special handling and care.  However, our regard for these materials has enabled us to treat them so differently that they are not accessible. We have locked these materials up in our processes and our delivery services, which has kept them out of the mainstream of information available to knowledge seekers.  They are only rarely seen as part of the knowledge building conversation[2] and it is because of how we (as librarians and archivists) treat them and present them.  We treat them as special in the sense of “separate,” “extra,” “having special needs” instead of special in that they are what make our library special as “distinctive signifiers,” “our enduring core” and “our unique contribution to the world of knowledge.”

As librarians and archivists redefine ourselves and better articulate how we add value, as we break down long established barriers in our processes, spaces and services, we need to include our most unique collections.  We regularly leverage quickly evolving trends in the information environment by refocusing on the needs and preferences of our users in the context of very real competition and economic difficulty.  In this framework, libraries can embrace their special collections and archives as a locus of distinction, experimentation and core value.  The time has come for libraries to integrate special collections into the flow in every aspect of our work.

Distinctive Signifiers

Libraries and librarians are constantly increasing their coolness quotient. American Libraries declares that “The Bunheads are Dead” and celebrates the diversity of backgrounds and work we all do to help people discover information. By adding learning/information commons and coffee bars, participating in social networks, or hiring technically oriented, experimental, responsive, and adaptable information professionals, libraries strive to stay relevant.  Special Collections areas and the librarians and archivists working in them are similarly adapting to change, focusing on users and experimenting with technology[3].  In many cases, however, they are going at it independently, because they are in separate departments with the special materials.

Today’s archivists and librarians aren’t just cool because we have mad technology skills, because our place has the best coffee and sweet comfy chairs or because we are über-helpful.  We also have the coolest stuff.  What is fundamental to our shared purpose, critical to our central mission, and key to our very identity is our ability to connect our communities to knowledge and the raw materials that inspire knowledge; and those resources exist concretely in our collections.

“As we increasingly share a collective collection of books, it is the special collections that will distinguish our institutions.”[4] The rawest representations of human endeavor and the building blocks of new knowledge are the rare materials and primary sources in our special collections and archives.  These collections are often developed around niche interests and grounded in localized expertise.  They not only address the specific informational needs of their constituency, but also distinguish their institution in the larger research community.  African-American cookbooks are collected at the University of Alabama; Willa Cather‘s manuscripts, letters, and photographs can be found at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; video and audio records in the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Collection are hosted at Ohio University; and digital assets of teaching and research are held by MIT in DSpace[5].  Public and special libraries also hold collections unique to their communities that distinguish them around the world. The Boston Public Library and the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are just two high-profile examples.  These libraries stand out from their peers because of their particular collections.  As Nicholas Barker remarks in his introduction to Celebrating Research, “To be unique in some definable way, however recondite, makes [a library] the object of an attention that it would not otherwise attract.”

Connecting our users to information captured in our collective collections is the shared central challenge in our information-laden, dynamic, instant-gratification environment.  As professionals working in libraries with special collections and archives, exposing our singular collections is our unique contribution to the broader world of knowledge.  We must do this in the context of trends in the field, including enhancing teaching and learning, increasing efficiency and productivity in creating access, and seizing opportunities presented by technology.

Improving Teaching and Learning

Information seeking is personal.  Users can be motivated by the paper that is due the next day, a group with which they identify, or a personal experience or interest.  In her November 5, 2008 post on this blog, Ellie Collier discusses “sticky ideas” and the value of simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories.  Special collections and archives contain locally relevant, unique materials and are a rich source for those kinds of stories.  In an academic library, the university archives holds materials from the past that reflect today’s student experience.  A public library can connect materials about the immigrants’ lives in the 1900s with the situation of modern-day migrant workers’ families in their community.

Primary sources and other research materials from special collections can get learners thinking critically about how a source relates to their own information seeking (and generating) behavior.  How is a pioneer’s diary about her experiences on the Oregon Trail like a student’s use of Facebook to document her service trip to Costa Rica?  What is the difference between the actual text of JFK’s address at Rice University on the nation’s space effort and your local newspaper accounts of it, and how does that compare to watching President Obama’s inauguration speech on YouTube and watching CNN’s analysis of it the next day?  By leveraging and analyzing special collection materials to enhance learning experiences, the context of information creation, analysis and transmission can become highly personalized.

As you contemplate your next discussion with your users about “the many types of useful information [and] how and when to use them”[6] and engage them in an information source’s “back story,” consider using special collections materials to make your point.  Librarians, faculty and archivists should collaborate on instructional opportunities to ensure that all kinds of information sources are considered during research.  Integrating special collections into the classroom experience and at the reference desk can significantly enrich the library’s contribution to teaching and learning.

Streamlining the Creation of Access

In a time of tightening budgets and web-based information seeking, libraries are reenvisioning the role of and activities around resource description.  This shift could directly impact the availability of special collections and archival materials.  In Karen Calhoun’s 2006 report on The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, she talks about strategies for keeping cataloging relevant including leading resource discovery by developing information systems that “surfac(e) research libraries’ rich collections in ways that will substantially enhance scholarly productivity worldwide.”

On the Record, a report from the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, provides concrete recommendations for the library field.  These include redirecting resources to enable discovery of special collections; creating basic-level access to all unique materials; focusing on practicable, flexible and user-centered description; integrating special collections into discovery arenas; and sharing special collections’ metadata and authority records[7]. To me this is a clear call to action to redirect cataloging resources to expose hidden special collections and archives, and to integrate discovery of these materials alongside that of our other collections.

While the broader library world considers directing more resources to exposing hidden collections, the archival community is also working to get more collections into the hands of the users more quickly.  In 2003, ARL published the white paper Hidden Collections, Scholarly Barriers, which notes that “the cost to scholarship and society of having so much of our cultural record sitting on shelves, inaccessible to the public, represents an urgent need of the highest order to be addressed by ARL and other libraries.”  Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner’s article “More Product, Less Process” takes the archival community to task for the problem of hidden collections.  They suggest that archivists “give higher priority, in practice, to serving the perceived needs of our collections than to serving the demonstrable needs of our constituents.”  Many in the archival community are refocusing their processing work to expedite access by undertaking only necessary arrangement, minimal preservation steps and sufficient description to promote use.

This new focus has cut to the core of activity in Special Collections and Archives. Some Special Collections have focused on creating collection-level records for all collections, processed and unprocessed, for their library catalogs.  Others are facing the challenges of providing access to minimally processed or unprocessed collections, such as materials security, researcher frustration and processing on-demand.  Archivists are setting aside perfection and learning to embrace the inherent messiness of archival records in order to put access first.  This places the onus back on researchers to find specifics and meaning in massive collections.  We are redefining ourselves from gatekeepers and interpreters of history to facilitators of access[8].

If we could combine the transformation that is taking place in our cataloging departments with the transition in archival practice, libraries could create a revolution in access.  The result will be an explosion of unique descriptive information that could be used to discover distinctive collections worldwide.  The original cataloging skills (analytical and descriptive) that catalogers have honed on circulating library materials can be redeployed (with minimal retraining) to assist with the arrangement and description of significant amounts of unprocessed collections.  Aptitude for manipulating, managing and reusing structured metadata can unlock the unrealized potential of our Encoded Archival Description finding aids.  Catalogers’ understanding of data normalization and metadata mapping can pull data out of home-grown archival description tools and deposit it in places where it can be manipulable and discoverable in user-friendly access systems.  By reenvisioning the work in cataloging and in archives, libraries will be able to offer greater discoverability for their most precious resources.

Web 2.0

Enhanced discoverability can only be truly realized when libraries develop tools that expose the descriptive work of catalogers and archivists to the surface of the Web.  This is where those tech-savvy information professionals come in.  Many special collections librarians and archivists are trying to open online dialogs about their materials with users.  Archives blogs are growing in number (check out the Society of North Carolina Archivists’  blogroll for a sample from North Carolina).  However, blogs’ reach still tends to be limited to existing users or those who seek out the archives and exposure is only on highlighted collections.

The Next Generation Finding Aids research group at the University of Michigan is exploring “new online collaborative technologies, such as filtering and recommender systems, [to] allow for new methods of interacting with and experiencing primary sources.”  Statistics from their test bed, The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections, demonstrate that even a project with a very limited (but passionate) user base can result in significant attention and engagement, particularly when it comes to users contributing descriptive information about materials.[9] Meanwhile the Triangle Research Library Network (TRLN) in North Carolina is investigating whether indexing Encoded Archival Description metadata in its shared catalog can bring combined discoverability to archival collections as it has for circulating materials.  Early challenges have exposed the differences that exist in archival descriptive practice that will need to be overcome to enable cross searching of archival finding aids.

Addressing the challenge from another direction, libraries are realizing increased access after two decades of digitizing their special collections and archives.  Digital copies of selected items are available in a wide variety of institution-based digital repositories and content management systems.  Many of these efforts have been “boutique” or highly focused projects to digitize cherry-picked items.  Just as item-level preservation has been identified as an unsustainable practice in “More Product, Less Process” (MPLP), selective digitization projects have left “our vast collections represented by a relatively small number of gorgeous images, lovingly selected, described, and presented in deep web portals.”[10] If we are to truly explode access to special collections materials, we need to take a less discerning approach to digitizing.

Following on MPLP, libraries are now beginning to test models for mass digitization of special collections materials.  Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow, an essay reflecting on the Digitization Matters forum, encourages libraries to scan for access, scan on demand, scan whole collections or representative chunks, describe scanned items minimally, and focus on quantity and discoverability.  In addition, the authors suggest that “increasing access to special collections needs to be programmatically embedded across the enterprise.  Continuing to give these activities ‘special project’ status implies that providing access is not mission-essential.”  The bottom line: exposing special collections is not a Special Collections problem; it is an enterprise-wide opportunity.

A few institutions have taken on the challenge.  The Smithsonian Archives of American Art received a Terra Foundation for American Art grant to digitize entire collections “with equipment designed specifically for increased levels of production” and to describe materials in aggregations rather than at the item level. The University of Wisconsin Digital Collections has developed a streamlined production model that has reduced their digitizing costs from $1.53 per page to $0.33 per page[11]; however, in usability testing they found that students “reported wanting MORE not LESS metadata.”[12] Experiments with providing digitized images with minimal metadata embody the sacrifice made when choosing quantity over quality.

The Library of Congress found that enlisting users in the description of materials may counteract the initial lack of rich item-level metadata.  As reported in For the Common Good the Library made two collections of photographs available online in the Flickr Commons, inviting users to contribute enhanced descriptions.  According to the report, “7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts. ….  More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.”  With engagement like that, why agonize over description and subject headings?  The ability of users to connect with collections on this personal level also increases their sense of ownership and relationship to history.  Knowledge-building is borne out of this kind of personalized learning.

Additional archives-based efforts to expose unique collections in the Web 2.0 environment are listed on the ArchivesNext blog.  To most effectively contribute their distinctive building blocks of knowledge to the broader research environment, however, libraries cannot relegate digitization and discovery innovation to special projects in Special Collections.  Alongside realigning the description and data-structure expertise provided by catalogers, libraries must apply the technical, programming and development proficiency in their information technology departments to this challenge.  The expertise cultivated in reference, instructional, outreach, and collection-management staff is also critical to insuring that these efforts are relevant in addressing users’ needs.

Convergence

For libraries to contribute effectively to knowledge-building in their communities, the constructed partition that has set special collections aside as “special” must be dismantled.  It is time to integrate the selection, description, research service and technological activities in every library with those needed to connect users to our most distinctive, unique collections.  Libraries must recognize that while the collections are special and even have special needs, the talents and skills needed to expose them are found library-wide.  Additionally, many special collection materials are now born digital and do not require physical segregation in our traditional Special Collections units.  Further, enterprise-wide effort is even more critical to born-digital collections’ exposure and survival.  Users just want the best information for their task and they want it to be available all in the same place.

The Research Library Group outlines a continuum of collaboration in libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) that begins with contact between two entities, moves through cooperation and coordination to collaboration and eventually arrives at convergence.  As LAMs move through the continuum, they grow towards shared investment and risk, but realize more profound benefits.  When collaboration becomes convergence, shared activity becomes infrastructure.[13] In today’s libraries, we need convergence around special collections that erases our existing silos.

Special Collections and Archives may sense a loss of their unique identity during such a transformation.  Partners in other library units may resist activity previously outside their purview. Yet sharing responsibility for our distinctive, valued and unique collections will raise the profile of the whole library and, most importantly, benefit our users.

Special collections reflect our enduring identities by defining who we were, informing what we will become, and distinguishing our communities.  As critical components in the knowledge conversation, special collections must be integrated with other resources, and exposed in the same venues and pathways.  As collections that each library can uniquely contribute to the overall research and learning environment, they must be mainstreamed and acknowledged as mission-critical.  It is only the collections that are special in Special Collections, not the work of making them accessible and not our users.  For the sake of our users and our libraries we need to stop treating them separately.

What you can do:

• Selectors, collection managers and branch librarians, talk to the curators in Special Collections and Archives about how you can help with strategically targeted collection building efforts. What makes a relevant, distinctive collection in your community?
• Catalogers and metadata experts, discuss the metadata generation, manipulation and transformation needs for special collections with lead processors. You’d be surprised at how much assistance you can provide but be prepared to face big challenges and quantities.
• Access and delivery services, you can’t imagine the expertise you can share regarding collection maintenance, security and tracking until you have that cup of coffee with the reference staff in Special Collections.
• Reference and information services, engage your Special Collections colleagues in your instruction activities. Consider cross-training on the reference desks, offer to cover a reference shift in Special Collections. Special Collections and Archives folks, rotate into service on the main reference desk.
• Information technology, imagine the opportunities! There are databases, finding aids and home grown systems to integrate, improve and streamline. Let Special Collections offer you a challenge that will make managing server space and device inventories look easy.
• Digital initiatives, if you want content, we’ve got content. Allow Special Collections to be your playground for implementing new, cool tools. We’ve got digital objects coming out of our ears. Can you get them onto desktops, mobile devices and course management systems?
• Special collections and archivist colleagues, share your most interesting challenges, be willing to let others muck around in your stuff, be articulate and practical about your needs and think creatively about what you have to offer your colleagues in return.

Thanks to Josh Ranger and Bill Landis for their ideas, feedback and careful reading of a draft of this piece and to Hilary Davis and Kim Leeder from ItLwtLP for their encouragement, questions and suggestions for each version. Thanks to Hilary and Brett Bonfield for last minute technical assistance.  Special thanks to Ben Carter who stayed home to provide technical support and thwart bad behavior plugins.

[2] For an interesting discussion on the knowledge building conversation and the library’s role in participatory networks, read the Information Institute of Syracuse’s technology brief Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation for ALA.  Not only do they envelop special collections as key aspects of the conversation but they also address the importance of innovating technology “at the core of the library.”

[3] For more on reenvisioning archival identity, see Mark Green’s inaugural presidential address for SAA “Strengthening Our Identity, Fighting Our Foibles.”

[4] Quoted from Ricky Erway’s “Supply and Demand:  Special Collections and Digitisation” for Liber Quarterly, 2008.  Many variations of this sentence have been appearing in various commentaries since the publication of ARL’s anniversary publication Celebrating Research with Nicholas Barker’s persuasive introduction.

[5] These collections (and more) were highlighted by their institutions as distinctive signifiers of their collections for ARL’s Celebrating Research:  Rare and Special Collections from the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries in celebration of the Association’s 75^th anniversary.

[6] Quoted from Ellie Collier’s “In Praise of the Internet: Shifting Focus and Engaging Critical Thinking Skills” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 7, 2009.

[7] Found in Recommendations 2.1.1-2.1.5 on pages 22 and 23 of the Library of Congress’s On the Record.

[8] The self identification of archivists as “gatekeepers of history” is interrogated by Barbara L. Craig, in “Canadian Archivists:  What Types of People Are They,”, Ann Pederson, “Understanding Ourselves & Others:  Australian Archivists & Temperament,” and Charles R. Schultz, “Archivists:  What Types of People Are They?”  Provenance 14: (1996).

[9] For more on the Polar Bear Expedition Project, please refer to the article by Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel, “Interaction in Virtual Archives: The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Next Generation Finding Aid” American Archivist 70:2, Fall – Winter 2007, pages 282-314.

[10] Quoted from Ricky Erway and Jennifer Schaffner’s Shifting Gears:  Gearing up to Get Into the Flow from OCLC Programs and Research, 2007.

[11] Which Joshua Ranger told us at the 2006 MAC Fall Symposium.

[12] Reported at the SAA Meeting in 2008 and in a handout to OCLC’s Member’s Council in February 2008. While the work at the The Smithsonian Archives of American Art is groundbreaking in scope and methodology, Ranger’s work explores how any library can make an effort towards quick and dirty digitization and the ramifications.

[13] For more on the collaboration continuum see Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums by Diane Zorich, Gunter Waibel and Ricky Erway for OCLC Programs and Research, 2008.

Flying high - image by Flickr member Dezz

“If where our scientists are and how they work is fundamentally changing, doesn’t that fundamentally change how we support them?” (Luce, 2008 – audio | slides)

A major change to our profession is afoot. Well, more than afoot – the “E-science” ship has sailed and has some major momentum behind it, but are we on board? If you’re one of the librarians still standing on the dock wondering what “E-science” is, you’re not alone. In simple terms, E-science is international, collaborative, technology-driven science that brings together data, research, and people around the world. The Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science describes it as an “inter- and multi-disciplinary” enterprise “with significant dependence on computation and computer science;” and as a data-intensive approach to scholarship that is focused on team-based research composed of scholars spread across the globe.

Some examples of team-based, cross-disciplinary research with people and computers connected within a “grid” of networks across the world: ClimatePrediction.net which leverages the underused computer processor power of home computers to study climate change models; the Southern California Earthquake Center which has over 600 collaborators from Tokyo to Woods Hole, Massachusetts working on ways to understand earthquake behavior in order to minimize the damages of earthquakes; and the Biomedical Informatics Network which has pooled together biomedical researchers and computer scientists from sites spanning the UK and the US to share data and research insights to enhance diagnosis and treatment of diseases.  This is science that rises above place, institution, and even country, science that shatters the boundaries upon which our libraries are traditionally built.

Stepping back a bit to take in a wider view, an ever broader term, E-research, is defined as “the development of, and the support for, advanced information and computational technologies to enhance all phases of research processes” (Luce, 2008). What this all comes down to is supporting research on the broadest scale, with added layers of depth that include high performance computing, both human and non-human consumers of information, and an utterly complex world of data types and data quantities. Add in the diverse expectations of not only the scientists conducting the work, but also their funding sources, and their network of existing and potential colleagues, and you start to get the picture (see Nature’s Big Data issue (September 3, 2008), for a nice sampling of where things are headed).

While scholarly communication and open access were the big issues of library conferences a few years ago, expect to see E-science take its place in prominence. As a case in point, I recently attended the ARL/CNI Fall Forum on “Reinventing Science Librarianship.” With E-science as the main spotlight, the conference speakers delved into themes surrounding data curation, transforming libraries to support the needs of researchers, support for virtual organizations, developing cyberinfrastructure, and training for librarians in the E-science landscape (see the Proceedings for more details).

The theme from this conference that I want to focus on in this post is what elements could be holding our profession back from being able to become major players in the E-science landscape and what elements are going to give us a leg-up in enabling us to become credible, respected participants in shaping the future of E-science/E-research. As a profession, we are at a point where the successes of what we have done traditionally act both as limitations and advantages to our ability to play a major role in E-science (aka, “What one loses on the swings one gains on the roundabouts”) – currently, the balance is weighted more heavily by our limitations. I’ll outline some of the limitations and counterbalance those with the aspects of our profession, that if they become more fully fleshed out, would shift the balance.

To begin with, E-science is global while libraries (for the most part) are not globally-oriented. In the E-science landscape, our users are no longer identified by institution nor are they even necessarily human – our E-science users are also networks of computers. However, the home institutions of libraries are our comfort zones and we are bound to them in many ways, but most importantly, we need them to be fiscally afloat. How do we break free of the mentality that we can only support our institutional users when, in an E-science landscape, our users cross all kinds of institutional boundaries? Even the licenses that we negotiate and sign reinforce the restrictive behaviors of libraries in terms of defining who and where our user communities are.

The other major issue is that we are dealing with a very fast event horizon when it comes to E-science. As James Mullins noted at the ARL/CNI Fall Forum, our profession has had over 100 years to develop best practices for managing, organizing, and curating print objects – books, journals, manuscripts, etc. But because of the rampant pace at which researchers are generating data that they need to share, re-use, and preserve “what took us 100 years to do for print, we now have to do in ten years for digital data” (Mullins, 2008). While our profession’s goal for E-science does and will include traditional roles like collecting, storing, organizing, and making information useful, we need to be able to perform these roles with datasets that are diverse and multi-dimensional in the sense that data lends itself to constantly being built upon by students and scholars. We’re going to need to help researchers by connecting datasets with articles, scholars, computer programs, and networks that aren’t necessarily easily identified/pigeonholed into a particular discipline or a single geographic area. Many disciplines are already embarking on their own collaborative research solutions (astrophysics, for example), but lack some of the standards and archival considerations that are distinctive of the library discipline; in essence, they are creating their own virtual research networks because libraries, for the most part, have not yet taken steps to meet these needs.

Despite this limitation of our profession to jump on board, many are ready to reconceptualize and reposition ours jobs to address the needs of E-science. Because E-science is institution-agnostic, this re-envisioning of the librarian process must involve crossing institutional boundaries, but we are so closely tied to our institutional identities and support structures that this is going to be a major hurdle. We will need to look to unique partnerships so that we can hybridize our organizations with other organizations that will enable us to build expertise and support beyond our institutional boundaries. These kinds of partnerships would need to be positioned to enable the active development of technologies for sharing, managing and curating massive quantities of diverse datasets while growing a workforce of data savvy librarians and information scientists. Partnerships like the Data Intensive Cyber Environments Research group (DICE) with a new arm at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the San Diego Supercomputing Center + University of California, San Diego partnership are a few great examples of these kinds of partnerships for big scientific research agendas. What about not-so-big research? It has been noted that while “small science” (research not necessarily backed by lots of grant dollars) is most in need of an E-science solution, it is most overlooked in terms of funding and support. Libraries at small schools without research grant support won’t be able to get resources to support E-science even if they’d like to. To this end, library and other academic consortia alongside professional organizations like the ARL are likely going to have to take the lead to make any headway at all. As touched on in the following sections, some potential areas for progress include training for librarians, reconceptualizing the benchmarks for what make our libraries successful, and building relationships with publishers and grant funding agencies that focus on defining standards and best practices for data sharing, re-use and curation.

The lack of E-science training opportunities for librarians has been brought to the fore as a major limitation. Swan and Brown (2008) offer many recommendations and reflections on “skilling up” for E-science. Not only do MLS/MLIS programs need to develop courses in data curation, data management and data infrastructure, but libraries need staff who are skilled enough to be involved at every stage of data generation, collection, analysis, interpretation, synthesis, preservation, storage, and re-use. Existing librarians will need to take part in practical, hands-on, career-long training for the whole data life cycle. Exemplars include data curation courses such as those offered by the Specialization in Data Curation and the Summer Institute in Data Curation at the University of Illinois. These courses are sought after by both bench scientists as well as librarians. Some have even postulated that the necessity of holding an MLS/MLIS degree is an antiquated notion in this new context. Libraries who are already dabbling at the cutting edge are positioning themselves to get in on the act by creating jobs to support E-science that don’t require an MLS/MLIS. They are turning library services on their head and hiring people who can collaborate with scientists at the lab bench, in the grant proposal process and in the classroom.

The ways in which we’ve defined our libraries based on our collections and services raise several questions that our institutions will need to come to terms with: What is unique about our research library content and services? Think about things like the published and unpublished output of the researchers at your institution – how is the library showcasing that content to the global community? What percent of our budget resources support unique services? In our drive to be competitive, we find ourselves duplicating collections that are already available at flagship universities while neglecting the truly unique content on our campuses. Libraries could begin to build collections using scholarship generated “‘at the source’—that is, collect, organize, and host data sets generated by researchers at their own institutions. In doing so, libraries have the potential to exert influence over the emerging data sets market rather than waiting for commercial vendors to harvest and package the data for later re-sale” (Davis and Vickery, 2007). Some research communities are already taking the lead on connecting datasets to publications (something libraries have been partially successful at with institutional repositories) – examples include Dryad (a database of evolutionary biology and ecology research articles and datasets) and the Angiosperm Phylogeny Website (a compilation of all known research on the systematics of flowering plants). Why aren’t libraries more fully involved in these efforts?

There are increasing expectations for scientists to save their research data and document the research process. Beyond being ethically responsible researchers, they are increasingly becoming responsible for complying with federal and institutional regulations, protecting their intellectual property rights, maintaining a record-keeping plan and an audit trail, and managing data files so they can be accessed into the future. Funding sources are increasingly mandating that researchers make their data accessible (e.g., NIH) and more and more publishers require deposit of datasets as a prerequisite for publication. These are very complex issues for anyone to deal with, but many of these are issues that libraries have deep knowledge about. Within the E-science landscape, libraries are going to be expected to evolve to act “as a catalyst for an interdisciplinary community…The role of the library moves from manager of scholarly products to that of participant in the scholarly communication process” (Lougee, 2002).  We have expertise in intellectual property and copyright and we’ve got a healthy respect for openness (Open Data/Open Science) balanced with ownership issues that impact promotion and tenure. We have expertise in standards and in developing and applying metadata in ways that support the management and curation that drive future reuse and repurposing of digital content. Educating researchers on these issues and even stepping in to help manage these issues is an important role for librarians to continue to build upon.

Information has dimension - it can exist in many different contexts and serve many different needs – as library professionals and lifelong students, we have an obligation to recognize and seize opportunities that enhance the dimensionality of information and help information seekers tap into, evaluate and fully exploit this dimensional quality of scholarship. We’ve planted our profession at the nexus of many different disciplines and organizationally we have broad knowledge across all of those disciplines. By making our depth within those disciplines go a little deeper with proper training for librarians, by helping researchers make useful connections across disciplines, by educating and collaborating with researchers on how to cultivate their data in such a way that it can be shared, re-used and preserved over space and time, we can have significant impact in shaping the future of E-science/E-research. Scientists are often hard to pin down and their research process is often hard to isolate into discrete, recognizable stages that librarians can develop relationships with and solutions for, but it’s our responsibility to become relevant within the process. If libraries can pull together, re-envision our roles, and build the sort of support networks required by the international collaborations inherent in E-science, the rewards will exceed all expectations. These opportunities for libraries to be key players in team-based, cross-disciplinary research are opportunities that our profession and the scientific enterprise cannot afford to miss.

Time to hear from you – a few question to spur your comments:

1. What does E-science mean to you?

2. What does an E-science librarian look like?

3. Do you think our profession is ready to support researchers in an E-science landscape?

Further Reading:

• E-science Talking Points for ARL Deans and Directors
• Data Audit Framework Development Project
• Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries
• The Institutional Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure and E-Research

Much appreciation to Kim and Derik from ITLWTLP for their invaluable editing skills, and to Annette Day, Honora Eskridge, and Marcus Helfrich for providing thoughtful feedback on drafts of this post.