1. Nurturing the Virtual Community Digital Library Collections Michael Ridley Chief Information Officer (CIO) & Chief Librarian University of Guelph NELINET Annual Collections Services Conference Collections as Services Mount Wachusett Community College March 18, 2008

2. Digital Collections Understanding Canadians Why did the chicken cross the road? Canadian

3. Digital Collections Understanding Canadians If a Canadian had written Gone With the Wind, what would Rhett Butler have said to Scarlett O’Hara?

4. Digital Collections Disclaimer… I’m an academic librarian. I feel your pain. I’m also a CIO and a university administrator. So, I come to you from the dark side.

5. Digital Collections Street Cred

6. Digital Collections “When simple change becomes transformational change, the desire for continuity becomes a dysfunctional mirage.” The Mirage of Continuity (1999) Hawkins & Battin

7. Digital Collections “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” Henry Ford

8. Digital Collections Libraries are …. Arbitrators or Gatekeepers

9. Digital Collections Paul Saffo Institute for the Future “The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but to those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace.” filtering, searching and sense-making tools

10. Digital Collections Libraries are …. Sense Makers & Coherence Engines

11. Digital Collections What Has Happened? Collections: digital, collective, ubiquitous, shared Services: collaborative, integrated, networked Staff : specialized, diverse, team-based, learners Users: nomadic, cross institutional, global, expanded Space: shared, diverse, multipurpose, community Massive interdependence

12. Digital Collections Collaboration

13. Digital Collections Collaboration

14. Digital Collections Information Ecology

15. Digital Collections Two Major Transformations to Environment 1. From database & repository to Information Finding People 2. From people finding information Towards the Information Ecology

16. Digital Collections In an age of abundance, current libraries are still designed for scarcity.

17. Digital Collections The Digital Tsunami Exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes Amount of digital information created, captured or replicated in 2006: 161 exabytes All spoken human language since the beginning of time: 5 exabytes Email traffic in 2006: 6 exabytes

18. Digital Collections Flickr Google RSS Kartoo MySpace Twitter API Boing Boing Mashups Facebook Grokker Digg Second Life Wiki Podcasts Del.icio.us YouTube JumpTV BitTorrent Bloglines uPortal WordPress Miro Netflix Yahoo! Ruby on Rails PHP

19. Digital Collections Key Issues Interoperability Smart Content Digital Preservation

20. Small changes Big impacts

21. Digital Collections What are “Digital Collections?” not really about format more conceptual than physical local and widely distributed not “selected” or “built” something grown or allowed to emerge

22. Digital Collections Interoperability

23. Digital Collections Encapsulated Content Constrains or limitations imposed by: technology laws and/or contracts financial implications

24. Digital Collections Smart Content

25. Digital Collections Information Finding People Information (content) needs new qualities and characteristics content as transceivers beyond “deep linking” to “self aware” data the semantic web ….. on steroids metadata + web services + info agents

26. Digital Collections Digital Preservation

27. Digital Collections Migration with Integrity Digital collections are extraordinarily fragile significant technology challenge greater cultural challenge more than just backups and dark archives “ecological sustainability”

28. Digital Collections Corollary #1 & #2 Permanent beta. Ignorance is bliss.

29. Digital Collections “Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better.” Samuel Beckett

30. Digital Collections Northern Examples Canadian Research Knowledge Network Scholars Portal

31. Digital Collections Canadian Research Knowledge Network

32. Digital Collections Ontario Council of University Libraries

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

34. Digital Collections Your Moment of Zen... David Penniman Executive Director Nylink “To remain what it is, the library must change...... if it does not change, it will not remain what it is.”

35. Digital Collections The demise of the Titanic was brought about by the As we invent the future of digital collections, 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...

36. Nurturing the Virtual Community Digital Library Collections Michael Ridley Chief Information Officer (CIO) & Chief Librarian University of Guelph NELINET Annual Collections Services Conference Collections as Services Mount Wachusett Community College March 18, 2008