1. The Googlezonization of information provision:
the end of the road for libraries?
or Virtual fire and flood
John MacColl, University of Edinburgh
A co-production with
From an original idea by
Stephen Pinfield, University of Nottingham
Co-starring ideas from
Herbert Van de Sompel, LANL
Ross Atkinson, Cornell University Library
5. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
“Within the existing system, libraries are
trying hard to optimize the output of a
system with far from optimal input”
6. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
“It has become increasingly difficult for
libraries to fulfil their fundamental role of
safeguarding equity of access”
7. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
“In the PDF version of the information chain,
libraries are aggregating the aggregators.
That is a lot of aggregating for a digital world.”
8. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
“At the core of the problems that libraries
are facing is the total dependency on
information held upstream in the information
chain”
9. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
“As such, there are numerous incentives for
libraries:
• to rethink themselves
• to be pro-active in exploring alternative
mechanisms for scholarly communication”
10. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
“The academic community must consider
… the creation of a control zone. Such a
control zone should be understood as
something that is technically and
conceptually separate from the open
zone.”
Library Quarterly, 1996
11. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
Libraries: the good news
• Libraries are close to authors:
– a great position to obtain institutional material
– a great position to archive institutional material
• Libraries are fast at embracing new technologies
• Libraries have very knowledgeable people
• Libraries provide a level of redundancy in services
that is no longer required in a digital environment
• The Library as an institution that safeguards equity of
access has global representation
12. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
Libraries: the bad news
• As organisations libraries are slow movers,
hosted by slowly moving institutions
• Libraries are slow to recognize the fact that a
new technology may allow (or beg) for a new
mode of operation
• The information world runs on Internet time
13. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
What can we learn from
Googlezon?
• ‘Community of recommendation’:
citations & impact
• Need for much more content
• Need for better discovery algorithms
• Text-mining should be our business
• But is it sensible to deal with Googlezon?
• Google appears to have scholarly integrity, but is
fuelled by advertising based on inbound links,
which can be bought by desperate companies
• Just because it can’t be undercut doesn’t mean it
can’t be bettered …
14. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
“Some form of “regionalism”, that is, the
creation of private regions in the control
zone, will therefore probably be unavoidable
– because some commercial publishers will
continue to own the content of some
publications and will survive and prosper
through the sale of that content.”
Library Quarterly, 1996
16. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
Only if …
• We continue with handcrafted solutions for
metadata
• We don’t think boldly about what users want
and expect from a library portal
• We don’t value our collective power as a
major research content owner and provider
• We don’t pool our resources to build a
Googlezon of our own (‘LibraryZone’?)
17. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
Give the title of the book you want
Advanced search
Click here to request a print copy to be sent to you Click here to read an ebook version
Which research topic are you interested in?
Advanced search
Click here for latest papers
Click here for most-cited papers
How many results do you want?
Papers listed Papers summarised
How do you want them ordered? Most recent first Most specific first
Fact search: type your request here
Advanced search
Written anything for our knowledge store? Click to deposit
Peer-reviewed journal article Unreviewed journal article Conference paper Undergraduate assignment
University LibraryZone
Click here to have the Library alert
you to future items of interest
1 April 2007
5-10
Exhibition of Scott letters in Exhibition Room … Fines Amnesty during June … Library
lecture
‘The death of information’ May 15th … Have your say on eating in libraries … User survey
…
18. Edinburgh University Library, Friday 17 June 2005
Not the end of the road, but beginning the
construction of a new one?
A few years ago, Herbert Van de Sompel, who is librarianship’s answer to Tim Berners-Lee, and has given us link resolvers, URLs and the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, delivered a challenging address at Cornell University in which he prophesied the end of libraries in their current form. He called his talk ‘The roof is on fire’. The fire in his analogy is the power of digital networks. Libraries were built for and are designed around non-digital objects. Libraries are not necessarily redundant in the age of digital networks, but they are fast becoming irrelevant.
Will we regain relevance by adopting Googlezon in our operations? Many librarians instinctively bristle at the notion that companies like Google and Amazon can deliver services of the quality required in universities. Yet at the moment, they are the only game in town. I am reminded of the joke about the pious man in the flooded building. As the water level rises in the street outside, he climbs to the first floor. Some firemen arrive in a lifeboat and ask him to jump in: ‘No need!’ he shouts back. ‘I’m praying to my God, and he will save me’. The water level rises further, and he climbs to the second floor. A police boat then arrives and asks him to jump in. ‘No!’ he calls again: ‘I’m praying to my God. He will save me!’. The water continues to rise, forcing him onto the roof, where he is spotted by a helicopter. A rope ladder is lowered, but he pushes it away, calling up ‘I’m praying to my God, and he will save me’. A couple of hours later, he drowns. Arriving at the Pearly Gates, he is in a real strop with God. ‘Where were you?’ he demands. ‘I have a strong faith: I prayed to you to rescue me, and you ignored my cries.’ ‘Well’ replies the Almighty. ‘I did my best. I sent a lifeboat, a police launch and a helicopter. What more could I do?’
So is Googlezon the best we can hope for? And, as the EPIC narrator says, does it have to be like this?
Our resources arrive in a jumble of different formats. As well as printed or digital (or microform), we have a variety of digital formats to cope with, and even more unstandardised metadata schemas. We have a huge processing job to do on ingest. We also have to cope with the fact that many of our offerings are not within our immediate control – we only have a licence for their use. But that fact is not understood by, and anyway of no interest to, our library users.
How can access be equal when we don’t control the gateways? We control our own front doors, and we have control over the virtual doorways to some of our resources, via Athens, for example. But the data providers have their own doorways to be negotiated, and often will not give us proxy control. For users, this presents a seemingly arbitrary inequality in access, which leads them to distrust the environment they are in, and to become frustrated with us, librarians who have not resolved the challenge of equal access which is, as Van de Sompel says, fundamental to our reason for existing.
In the words of Ross Atkinson, we have to create a ‘control zone’. We must not abandon selection because publishers can push content onto us. We are at present being bullied by ‘big deal’ content.
Fair point. If the publisher has a portal, or if the publisher’s aggregator has a portal, what is the point of the library’s portal? How many portals does a library user need? Remember Ranganathan: save the time of the user. Libraries are of course middlemen, but our middleman role is now not a clear nor a consistent one. Here, we are needed; there, we can be cut out. We need to make our aggregation one full of positive value for the user.
Yes – and the fact that that information chain is not a simple one with clear links, of which the library is one central link. The information environment has been reshaped by digital networks. We need to stop behaving as though it were still simple, or will simplify for our benefit if we only give it time. We also need to become information publishers ourselves.
Ross Atkinson: ‘laying claim to the ‘Control Zone’.
If we seize the moment, we can occupy a space which is at least arguably a library role in the digital world, but which – if we don’t – will probably be occupied by others with less understanding. Our predilection for redundancy is a good thing in archival and preservation terms, but not if it perpetrates inefficiencies.
So the roof is on fire. How fast can we move? How soon can we rise from the ashes?
What are our users not getting – even from Google Scholar –which, in the networked and full-text age, they might have a right to expect?
The choice of reading a textbook on screen or else having a printed copy sent to them
The ability to perform complex searches against every database to which the Library subscribes, or otherwise has access; or to limit the search easily to a chosen few
An agent which delivers choice new content to them on a regular basis, according to their interest profile
An agent which extracts the key elements from documents and concatenates them meaningfully to provide summaries of arguments, key ideas and essential facts, edited completely by computer
A single-point reference tool which answers natural language questions from a range of reference sources, again automatically marshalling a coherent response
The ability easily to contribute to the knowledge store of the library, as well as to search it.
Ross Atkinson and the ‘control zone’: admitting some private companies, but on our terms. At present, we have it the wrong way round?
How do we build this environment? Only by working together as a research libraries collective – and not simply in JISC-funded projects. We all stand to gain, so let’s pool our own efforts and stump up the funding. We need to retain our frontline service staff, and lose many of our middle managers. We need to create our own CURL digital content company to build the tools, do the digitisation, and do the metadata on a wide scale. In order to pay for it,, we must slim down our staffing complements, to a level where we do maintenance only for LMS, DOMS, IRs. We need a UK OCLC, which we jointly own, and whose staff are reallocated from our backrooms and work areas. We need to stop pretending we are somehow in competition with each other, and accept our shared environment and shared mission. We need to maintain our links with JISC, with the British Library, and the Research Libraries Network, but our main strength is our own collections, our own staff, our own budgets. If JISC, the BL and the RLN vanished overnight, we could stay in business. We have unique strengths. We are there, on the ground, where the learners are, where the researchers are, where the scholars are. It is time to focus on our own needs, to stand together, and to contribute to the national infrastructure only on our own terms. Time is very short, and budgets are very tight. JISC, the BL and the RLN must meet our agenda, and not vice versa.
If we act, smartly, collectively and swiftly, we can give our learning and research communities much better tools and much stronger content than Googlezon will ever manage, since it can ultimately only be a toy of consumer markets. We have a mission which runs deeper, with values based upon the activity of research – and learning led by research – which is not dependent upon the state of the stock market nor led by the entertainment industry. Society has a sufficient need of research, and there is the potential for society to respect research enough, that our alternative to Googlezon has at least a chance of realisation. But let us credit Googlezon with displaying the boldness and vision to think about a level of provision which libraries have instinctively shied away from, believing them unattainable, ourselves too much the poor relations of the content world.
We have the content: let’s not give it away!
Perhaps it should look something like this?
The challenge is enormous. We cannot meet it if we are fragmented or if we are unfocussed. We need to be serious about our role in education at this technologically disrupted time.
We pride ourselves on developing digital library services now. We have created new posts of Metadata Editor and E-Strategist and Information Architect. But what on earth do these mean for our users? In the eyes of our users, we are still the people who buy the books, get them back on the shelves, and try to stem the tide of litter and noise in our buildings which we have already half-surrendered to the computing service with its usurping PC labs on every floor. A warm, comfortable environment in which to work, and available PCs, are indeed still highly prized by our users. So are the textbooks on heavy demand. A study environment and heavy demand books are what the library means to a high percentage of our users. But – as for the digital library, well – they have Google Scholar, and in a few years they will have Googlezon. What else do they need?
Well – they do need more. A lot more. But we need to change our expert roles. What are we currently expert in – at least in our users’ eyes? Cataloguing and classification. Yes indeed. Give us a book on any topic, no matter how abstruse, and in a matter of hours we’ll have it labelled appropriately for the aid of the serendipitous browser, and stuffed so full of DC classmarks and Library of Congress subject headings that it will be findable by anyone interested in its subject, and many who are not. But books continue to flood in, and for every book that arrives in our unpacking area, there is – or soon will be - a web site, a digitised image, a ‘learning object’, an unrefereed deposit in our institutional repository, and a newly digitised 19th century letter from one of our archives also arriving in our virtual unpacking area. We can’t do the metadata in our laborious handcrafted way any more. It doesn’t scale. We need to swap out our local effort and buy in solutions, and we need to do so on a shared basis, achieving new economies of a new scale.
What else are we good at? Getting the photocopier engineer in quickly when a machine goes on the blink. Keeping a good record of the books our users have on loan. Bringing small class libraries into our main library building with only a few weeks’ notice. Informing our School library reps how much of a balance they have left to spend on books this year.
Fine, let’s continue to be good at those things, since they are essential. But we need to be behind the screens our users are browsing, as well as organising their surroundings in our buildings. And by far the greater part of the challenge which exists in our professional roles is ‘behind the screens.’ A new motorway needs to be built, and we have not even organised ourselves to begin the task..
