Michael Ridley Chief Information Officer (CIO) & Chief Librarian University of Guelph OCUL Fall Meeting 2008, Lakehead University Scholarly Communications

1. T h e m e s & T r e n d s 2. I m p a c t s & I m p l i c a t i o n s 3. Q & A Agenda Impressionistic, not comprehensive. Launching pad, not a recipe or blueprint. Provocative, but not unrealistic.

“The way forward is paradoxically to look not ahead, but to look around.”

Communications Reputation Smart InformationCyberInfrastructure Preservation Where Are We? Navigating the Landscape

Collaboration Innovation

Collaboration

The New 16GB iPod nano The Eventual 2PB iPod nano

The (In)visibility of the Library The Importance of Disciplines … … And of Science in Particular Faculty Needs in Service Development System-wide Approaches to System-wide Issues Another in a series of wake-up calls regarding the confluence of scholarship & academic libraries

“When simple change becomes transformational change … … the desire for continuity becomes a dysfunctional mirage.” The Mirage of Continuity (Hawkins & Battin)

Communications

Communication is not publishing

Old School: (e)Books & (e)Journals. New School: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Graduate Junction … and (e)Books & (e)Journals. Websites, Multimedia, Blogs, Tweets, Simulations, Visualization, Commentary, Data, Data, Data.

Smart Information

Not people finding information but information finding people

Massively distributed & ubiquitous content; with intelligent, proactive metadata. Interoperable objects/data/content: not references or links but semantically embedded dependences. The scholarship is in the network not the content nodes; focus on the connections, the relationships, the glue.

Plastic objects: adjusted, played with, riffed on, sampled, repurposed (yet with integrity, authority, authenticity preserved). An architecture of participation within a global environment. Cyberscholarship: “Correlation is enough”

Reputation

Academic values persist but morph

Old School: peer review, P&T, citations, league tables. New School: reputation management. An integration of smart information, social networks, global reach, ubiquitous content, & participatory architecture.

Trust, reputation management, verification, validation: automated (e.g. digital money – Friedman’s Future Imperfect). “Networked individualism” Barry Wellman Academic research libraries as trusted agents in managing people (reputation) not just information.

Preservation

Integrity Management

Integrity management: the information ecology

Not as much the objects and more the interconnections & dependencies. Libraries as coherence engines with sense making tools. Preservation = access Preservation = integrity

CyberInfrastructure

Platform, tools & environment

Virtual Research Organizations (VROs) Disciplinary, trans-national, emergent, large scale, proven(?), powerful. Not just big science, not even just science; transforming the humanities. CI & VROs – the new research library?

“The number of PhDs the Chinese plan to graduate with the next 10 years is greater than the entire population of Canada” Mike Lazaridis Co-CEO, RIM Chancellor, University of Waterloo Quoted in the Globe and Mail June 7, 2008

Where Are We?

Leadership roles, choices, & alternative futures

Collaboration: beyond OCUL, outside libraries. Technology: we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Complexity: data curation; full scholarly communication lifecycle. Leadership: the big picture “agency” (the academic research library consortium).

“Culture eats strategy for lunch every day of the week.” Elson Floyd, President Washington State University

The demise of the Titanic was brought about by the As we consider the future of scholarly communications, are we thinking about airplanes or icebergs ? In the final analysis the Titanic was not sunk by an iceberg. rise of commercial air travel. A Cautionary Tale...

Michael Ridley Chief Information Officer (CIO) & Chief Librarian University of Guelph OCUL Fall Meeting 2008, Lakehead University Scholarly Communications