Project Bamboo, last 4/6
(I ought to have blogged the “what are new people doing?” and “if you had a magic wand…” discussion, but I am running outta steam here.)
Karen Brown, Dominican University. “Libraries and the Scholarly Process.”
Building on Judith Nadler’s talk. Things happening in libraries in support of scholarship; also challenges.
Three considerations: resources and materials, the scholar (and the process of scholarship), the institution (of librarianship). “Clouds” as metaphor coming up a lot.
Resources: the library provides systematic cataloguing/classification of materials. The way this is done hasn’t kept pace with current applications (e.g. Web 2.0). You used to have to know LCSH to get anywhere with your search, but that’s changing. We’re also starting to use visual metaphors, clouds of related terms, to help navigation (e.g. AquaBrowser). Learning how to help browsing, amassing resources, navigating the universe.
Personal information clouds: increased expectation to take your tools and resource access with you (mobiles, wireless networks, collaboration/sharing). How do we enable this in libraries? “Seed the clouds” to get info to people who need it.
Clouds of collaboration: large-scale projects, infrastructure investment, huge funding issues. Example: Making of America project. No one institution can do these things alone!
Q: Cloud is pretty from without, “debilitating fog” from within. So who is it that’s making the associations in AquaBrowser? How important is it to expose the identities of the cloudmakers? A: AquaBrowser works with subject terms as well as terms you add as you do your search. You end up with a mix of controlled and uncontrolled subject terms.