Keynote Session: Keynote Conversation with Chuck Henry and Clifford Lynch
Clifford Lynch, Director, Coalition for Networked Information
Chuck Henry, Vice Provost and University Librarian, Rice University
Question 1/2: Describe ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) report on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences.
- Final draft in hand by the end of June.
- 2003 National Science Foundation report on cyberinfrastructure for sciences/engineering/etc. It’s important! Speaker said: “read it!â€
- Cyberinfrastructure is an investment and should help all disciplines.
- NSF report is for funding, ACLS is not (ACLS is not a funding agency).
- These publications acknowledge the importance of information technology for all disciplines.
- Decisions to be made here are very important.
- Libraries could play a significant role, along side other national and international disciplinary based organizations, in information technology movement.
- They keep mentioning the NSF reports, so I think it may be useful to just play around on the site to see what reports look useful. They’ve mentioned at least 3.
- Atkins report
- “Libraries are the laboratories of the humanities.â€
- Archives, special collections, rare books, etc. will need to be digitized so that the entire world can interact. This is part of the cybervision of the humanities.
- Enormous Database! Requires training!
Question 3: Issues involving digitization projects
- They’re good for the academy and for society as a whole.
- There are a lot of large-scale digitalization projects dealing with books, photos, special collections, television archives, etc. Creating a cultural record.
- Google Book Project is probably most aggressive (esp. in terms of copyright).
- Most projects are particularly careful to stay within public domain.
- Google’s motives are different. Others want to provide access. Google doesn’t want to provide access to copyrighted materials. They’re doing it more for “computational†purposes.
- Orphan works are particularly hard to deal with, and are in limbo. Would be valuable to digitize, but it makes people nervous.
- Good question from audience: “I’ve been hearing a lot about institutional repositories. Is this a new role for libraries to take on re: cyberinfrastructure?â€
- Institutional repositories are integrally related to discussion of cyber infrastructure and the academy.
- Some scholarly work won’t look like books or articles, and shouldn’t fall into traditional channels (symposia, dramas, etc). Still important to preserve & institutions should step up to do this.
- Today we have a terrible record of scholarship in the arts. Hard to capture it. Copyright issues.
- General speaker agreement that Google Books is intrinsically good.
- Sometimes it takes a prominent international organization (aka Google) to be the catalyst for the process.
- Side conversation: shouldn’t there be a website or index of the major digitized collections in all fields (with links)
Question 4: social software and impact on scholarly communication, teaching, learning in higher ed.
- They skipped this one. Too bad, I’d have been really interested in it!
- They came back to it!!
- Jury still out on this one.
- Social bookmarking goes back to late 90s. Lots of failure back then. Some work today.
- A lot of library like components to this.
- Personal repository on one level.
- Second level is the sharing.
- Third level is collaborative aspect.
- Can do anything from plan research papers to plan vacations with this.
- Sociology of knowledge acquisition
- Reconception nature of library in 20th century. More social, see each other, work on projects, and create spaces to talk. Social bookmarking fits in with this.
- It’s a virtual reflection of a zeitgeist we’re in right now.
- Will it impact scholarship, or is it just entertainment?
- Some discussion is strange. Thought folksonomy is weird because we’re using computers to do something that’s fundamentally human (describing and organizing information). Difficulty scaling across time and number of people because things change over time. Meanings change over a large group. We created formal means to scale better and perform better over time.
- Automated works as well as when done informally. Nothing intrinsically new. How do we automate a system that is scalable and performance over time?
- Looking at social bookmarks or blog citations is a lot like looking at a bibliography (assuming you trust the author).
- Google’s page rank is a little like this, too.
- Authentication and authority are always an issue with this.
Question 5: number of digital preservation initiatives. What are you involved with?
- There will be multiple approaches to all of this.
- Our knowledge is limited now, appropriate to explore alternate options.
- Monoculture is the enemy of preservation. If bank entirely on one approach, easy to lose it all over a small error. A diversity of responsibility and mission is safer.
- Boundary between research, experimental projects, and active work in preservation are blurry and not as clear as they should be. Lots of work under The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program of the Library of Congress. Funding lots of things.
- Things going on all over the world, though. Digital Curation Center-UK.
- Lots of long standing involved groups, but lots of newer organizations like the DCC and the Internet Archives (which is incredibly important).
- We will see a lot more enter the playing field.
- NSF is even building in some preservation questions into grant proposals now.
- Participant asked about LOCKSS and how that fits in with all of this.
- Idea is to keep a physical repository of journal articles.
- Fail-safe device in case something catastrophic happens to a publisher, there’s a number of places where the information is saved and can be reached.
Last Point:
- It’s an exciting time. Roles are up for grabs and libraries should be looking for ways to be involved.
Things I noticed:
- It would be nice to have a way to identify which speaker is which (in case you miss the introductions or can’t tell voices apart). This could be done with frequent naming (for example, “Good point, John, I would say….â€) or with pop-up icons to indicate the speaker.
- It would be nice to have lots of slides, just to keep your attention on the screen. However, it’s hard to have a lot of pre-planned slides in a round table or conversational method.
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