Taiga Forum
Library Journal reports
The first annual Taiga Forum met in Chicago in March, bringing together associate university librarians and assistant directors from more than 50 of the top academic libraries. The forum, named for the changing arctic layer, gave librarians an opportunity to articulate challenges and solutions for competing with online ventures and effecting deeper collaboration among technical services, public services, collection development, and information technology.
Note: notes from the program are available from the Taiga Forum website. Here's LJ's summary of the program.
Feral Professional
The hottest topic was the "Feral Professional," as James Neal, Columbia University librarian and VP of information services, dubbed the emerging trend of hiring new library staff with Ph.D.'s or degrees from related fields to help plug technology and other gaps in the library.
Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC VP and chief strategist, urged academic librarians to develop a service layer for discovering, locating, requesting, and delivering. This layer, composed of a link resolver, institutional repository, federated search, and delivery services, would enable libraries to compete in an era when "the URL is the currency of the web."
Paul Duguid, coauthor of The Social Life of Information, discussed the trade-off between openness of information (à la Wikipedia) and quality of information. Using three examples from the open source world, he demonstrated how variations in user-contributed data affect accuracy and accessibility. For instance, in the music database Gracenote, multiple user entries for composer (e.g., Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) force users to make their own authority control decisions. In digitizing the novel Tristram Shandy, Project Gutenberg contributors deferred making choices about how to show intentional blank and black pages and footnotes. And, finally, in an entertaining look at Wikipedia, Duguid revealed the edit wars over the biographical entry on Daniel Defoe, with writers adding and deleting his role as a spy. These examples highlighted how the library's traditional role as an arbiter of quality is being challenged by Google and open source content projects.
"Provocative Statements"
Forum organizers presented attendees with a list of 15 "Provocative Statements," essentially predictions that they assert will become fact "within the next five years." Among the most far-reaching and most discussed predictions about academic libraries in the next five years related to staffing, early retirement, and the death of the OPAC.
The statement is available from the Taiga Forum as a pdf but I reproduce it in full below.
Taiga Forum Provocative Statements
(March 10, 2006)
All statements are prefaced by "Within the next five years..."
traditional library organizational structures will no longer be functional. Reference and catalog librarians as we know them today will no longer exist. Technical services and public services will have merged into a new group called "consulting [something]". Public services and instructional technology, wherever it exists, will have merged or will no longer exist.
libraries will have reduced the physical footprint of the physical collection within the library proper by at least 50 percent. Support services see similar reductions and these changes impact the national libraries as well (they are probably merged).
the majority of reference questions will be answered through Google Answer or something like it. There will no longer be reference desks or reference offices in the library. Instead, public services staff offices will be located outside the physical library. Metasearching will render reference librarians obsolete.
all information discovery will begin at Google, including discovery of library resources. The continuing disaggregation of content from its original container will cause a revolution in resource discovery.
a large number of libraries will no longer have local OPACs. Instead, we will have entered a new age of data consolidation (either shared catalogs or catalogs that are integrated into discovery tools), both of our catalogs and our collections. The ERM system and the ILS will be one and discovery will be outsourced.
there will no longer be a monolithic library Web site. Instead, library data will be pushed out to many starting places on the Web and directly to users.
academic computing and libraries will have merged. The library will be a partner is the Learning and Research Support Services Infrastructure. Its value will depend on its ability to reallocate resources to new curation, workflow, and resource specialization services.
there will be no more librarians as we know them. Staff may have MBAs or be computer/data scientists. All library staff will need the technical skills equivalent to today's systems and web services personnel. The ever-increasing technology curve will precipitate a high turnover among traditional librarians; the average age of library staff will have dropped to 28.
publishers and intermediaries will have changed dramatically. Many small and scholarly publishers will fold. Subscription agents and book vendors will have new business models. Dissemination of non-STM serials and books will no longer be commercially viable.
e-books and e-book readers will be ubiquitous. Standards will have magically made this possible. Hand helds will be ubiquitous and library resources will need to be accessible to these devices to meet user needs.
simple aggregation of resources will not be enough. They have to be specialized for constituency use and projected into user environments (my.yahoo, e-portfolio, CMS, RSS aggregator). Workflow replaces database and website as the primary locus of attention. The library role is to project specialized services into research and learning workflows.
'Intermediate environments' will be as important as consumers of library services as endusers. Intermediate consumers are environments in which users construct workflow and digital identity. RSS aggregators, course management systems, uPortal, my.yahoo, flickr, myspace, microsoft research pane, etc.
libraries will provide shared curation services for important portions of the cultural, scholarly, historic and institutional record. This will move from ad hoc, sub optimal project working to a collaborative strategy, a shared approach.
research support services will become routine. The institutional repository will be one set of services within the wider set of services that assist in the researcher and research administration workflow.
the library community recognizes the debilitating fragmentation of its collaborative structures and consolidates around fewer targeted initiatives and organizations. This is driven by the recognition that system-wide efficiencies need to drive local improvement.
Posted by Tom on May 24, 2006
