For the 8th Bielefeld Conference Whither Academic Information Services in the Perfect Storm of the Early 21st-century? Michael A. Keller Stanford University For the 8th Bielefeld Conference 060208

Elements of the Perfect Storm Ubiquitous network access Low cost computers & PDAs Plentiful, cheap magnetic memory “Just in time” commercial culture; Public Internet an “open” culture Investment market based on quarterly reports Google, Yahoo, MSN, millions of other providers, some free, some fee Blog-sphere, Wikis, RSS feeds Course Management Systems Collaboration environments Virtual, global communities Anonymous institutional information environments

Google Project Library Partner Motivations Vastly expand intellectual access to our collections Populate digital repositories for long-term persistence of digital avatars of our collections Defense of fair use, by employing it! Alternate reader functions from the ones Google presently offers

Course Management Systems Increase use of web resources to enhance/extend in-person instruction Dominate in most American universities Produce lots of digital objects for institutional repositories and sharing Make use of functions: locate, gather, deliver, create & sharing Drive e-portfolio services

Web services Discovering Locating Requesting Delivering Gathering Creating Sharing

Web Services based on systems On-line public access catalogs Internet Search Engines Proprietary Search Engines Course Management Systems Institutional Information Topographies Web Browser Applications The World Wide Web itself

Services beyond Google’s Taxonomic indexing – providing access to ideas in a text Associative searching – providing access by statistically ranked lists of co-terms Hyperlinking of citations GUIs to navigate search results More subtle searching Alerting services driven by user terms Recommendation services “Info-tools” assisting readers to find definitions, locations, biographical sketches

“High Touch” Services First, make users predominantly self-sufficient Provide in-person and personalized services on demand – subject & technial specialists needed Serve communities in responsive and distinctive ways Bibliographic, communication, & analytic services advancing research, teaching & learning

How many e-books? Quick Stanford study 2005 22,892 titles in English acquired in 2005 with imprint years 2001-2005 Random sample of 1,373 titles (6% of universe) 181 titles available as e-books (13.2%) Hypothesis needs to be tested on other imprints, especially European ones Will e-books replace physical books soon? We conclude doubtful soon, but e-book readers are coming

How much information? 9B web pages indexed by Google 90B web pages behind access control Federated searching behind access control difficult, but important service to provide

Digital Repositories So far experimental Transparent, auditable services needed Portico, KB, BL, LOCKSS/CLOCKSS, Stanford Digital Repository, others Later more wide-spread as techniques proven

Aquifer of DLF Middleware services Standards, including meta-data Collection policies Intended to support the federation of numerous local collections Not an architecture, but a tool kit Katherine Kott, director

Service Framework of DLF Organizes effort and resources toward… Integration of systems, applications, standards to… Develop & evolve systems architectures Responsive to users Responsive to rapidly changing i.t. environment Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC, lead

What about our people? Re-treading and re-engineering vital Employing well-qualified engineers vital Engaging computer scientists vital Shared vision, mission, goals vital

Libraries & Virtual Libraries Libraries as places heavily populated Services well used Millions of books move (more as mass digitization and indexing on the web proceeds Virtual libraries heavily used, but metrics? Planning bookless libraries, e.g. Engineering Planning traditional libraries, e.g. Art Bibliographic literacy & information heuristic

Basic functions, regardless of medium Selection & gathering Intellectual access to information objects Distribution of content & access Interpretation of content; navigating the ordered set and the information chaos Preservation of the avatars of content – physical & digital Analysis, manipulation & presentation

Client Focus, not Guild Focus Let the rising tide of access to information lift all the boats, everywhere