2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. Web services Discovering Locating Requesting Delivering Gathering
Creating
Sharing

7. 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

8. 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

9. “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

10. How many e-books? Quick Stanford study 2005
22,892 titles in English acquired in 2005 with imprint years
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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

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

16. 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

17. 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

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