Where Do We Go From Where Do We Go From Here?Here?The Next Decade for Digital The Next Decade for Digital LibrariesLibraries

Adam WorrallLIS 6269 Seminar in Information

Science4/13/10

(Lynch, 2005)

OverviewOverviewOriginsRecent historyPresent applicationsFuture research directionsCritique and relevance

About the authorAbout the authorClifford Lynch

◦Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI; cni.org) “use of information technology and networked

information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity”

◦18 years in University of California system Ten years as Director of Library Automation

◦PhD in Computer Science from UC-Berkeley

◦Past president of ASIST (1996)◦ Interests

Digital libraries Information policy Information access Emerging interoperability standards

OriginsOriginsDraws from broad array of

disciplines◦Social science◦Computer science◦Information technology◦Law◦Library and information science

OriginsOriginsPre-history

◦Paul Otlet documentation, 1895-

1937(Rayward, 1997)

◦H. G. Wells World Brain, 1938

(Rayward,1999)

◦Vannevar Bush “As We May Think,” 1945

◦J. C. R. Licklider Libraries of the Future,

1965 Early ideas for ARPAnet

(became the Internet)

Otlet Wells

Bush Licklider

OriginsOriginsEarly history

◦Online information services Dialog, Lexis-Nexis, Chemical Abstracts, etc.

◦Library automation◦Document structuring and manipulation◦Human-computer interface / interaction◦Distributed search (Z39.50)◦Kahn and Cerf

The Digital Library Project Volume 1: The World of Knowbots: An Open Architecture for a Digital Library System and a Plan for Its Development (1988)

Recent historyRecent history1994-2004

◦Internet, Web enter public consciousness◦“Substantial programmatic funding” (¶ 5)

Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) and DLI-2 For constructing prototype digital library

systems

◦“Legitimized digital libraries as a field of research” (¶ 5)

◦Helped form digital library research community Different backgrounds Same conferences, journals

NSFDARPA,

NASA, NLM, NIH, LoC,

IMLS

NSFDARPA,

NASA, NLM, NIH, LoC,

IMLS

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

(ACM / IEEE)

D-Lib Magazine

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

(ACM / IEEE)

D-Lib Magazine

PresentPresent2005

◦“Substantial programmatic US government funding … is at an end” (¶ 9)

◦Novelty of constructing prototypes “has run its course” (¶ 9)

◦“Modest investments” keep community together “at least for now” (¶ 9)

◦Where to next? Apply current research New research directions

Present: ApplicationsPresent: ApplicationsReal-world digital libraries

◦Production systems, not prototypes◦Commercial sector◦“Advanced technology deployment in

production systems rather than pure research” (¶ 11)

Applications in◦Higher education◦Cultural memory◦Digital asset management◦ Institutional repositories◦Collaboratories / e-science◦Data curation

Present to futurePresent to futureDigital preservation (¶ 14)

◦Lynch felt would “attract increasing commercial interest” and “growing unease and concern from the general public”

◦“Compelling” research difficult◦Requires funding, but total useful

funding “probably isn’t terribly large”◦“Stewardship … in the digital age” (¶ 15)

Policy, ethics, culture “At best adjacent,” but important (¶ 15)

Future: Research Future: Research directionsdirections“Compelling” and deserving of

“investment [funding] and attention” (¶ 16)

Personal information management (¶ 17)

◦“Digital representations” of our lives Organize, manage, share, preserve

◦Personal (digital) health records◦Electronic portfolios (education)◦E-mail and other communications◦Personal digital media collections

Future: Research Future: Research directionsdirectionsRelationship over time “between

humans and information collections and systems” (¶ 18)

◦Systems that learn◦Personalization◦Human-computer interaction (HCI)◦Information behavior

“Seek, discover, use and share information”

Individuals and groups

◦“Very long time horizon perspective”

Future: Research Future: Research directionsdirections“Role of digital libraries … in

supporting teaching, learning, and human development” (¶ 19)

◦Life-long learning◦Long time horizons

“Environments for computer supported collaborative work” (CSCW) (¶ 20)

◦Collaboratories◦Relationship with digital libraries◦“Collaboration and social interactions”

Some find “an uncomfortable fit with the rather passive tradition of libraries”

Future: Overarching Future: Overarching themetheme“Connecting and integrating digital

libraries with broader individual, group, and societal activities”

“Across meaningful time horizons”“Recognize digital libraries … as an

integral and permanent part of the evolving information environment”

Transition from “technologies and prototypes” to “ubiquitous, immersive, … pervasive”

(¶ 21)

CritiqueCritique“Think piece”

◦Arguments not often directly supported by empirical evidence

Theme, points generally coherent and persuasive◦Assumed audience (readers of D-Lib

Magazine) knew research tradition Focus often on systems development and

information retrieval Especially in 1990s

◦Did not assume they had knowledge of pre-history of field (pre-1994) how funding shaped community

CritiqueCritiqueSlight biases

◦Against traditional librarianship “Some would argue that digital libraries

have very little to do with libraries as institutions or the practice of librarianship” (¶ 1)

Questions of intellectual property “too important to be left to librarians” (¶ 1)

◦Towards HCI, CS, IT perspective◦Background helps explains biases◦Balanced by wide range of future

research directions

Relevance and Relevance and importanceimportanceLynch not only scholar to argue for

integrating digital libraries into individual, group, societal context◦Ackerman (1994)◦Levy and Marshall (1995)◦Van House (2003)◦Gazan (2008)

Social approach to information science becoming common (Raber, 2003)

A “sea change” for digital library field, but a necessary one

ReferencesReferences Ackerman, M. S. (1994). Providing social interaction in the digital library.

In J. L. Shnase, J. L. Leggett, R. K. Furuta, & T. Metcalfe (Eds.), Digital Libraries ’94: Proceedings of the first annual conference on the theory and practice of digital libraries (pp. 198-200). College Station, TX: Texas A&M University. Retrieved from http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/goguen/courses/171sp02/ack2.pdf

American Society for Information Science and Technology. (2010). About ASIS&T: Past presidents of the Society. Retrieved from http://www.asis.org/pastpresidents.html

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108.   Clifford Lynch. (2009). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Lynch Coalition for Networked Information. (2010). Clifford A. Lynch, CNI’s

Executive Director. Retrieved from http://www.cni.org/staff/clifford_index.html

Gazan, R. (2008). Social annotations in digital library collections. D-Lib Magazine, 14(11/12). doi:10.1045/november2008-gazan  

Levy, D. M., & Marshall, C. C. (1995). Going digital: A look at assumptions underlying digital libraries. Communications of the ACM, 38(4), 77-84. doi:10.1145/205323.205346  

ReferencesReferences Lynch, C. (2005). Where do we go from here? The next decade for digital

libraries. D-Lib Magazine, 11(7/8). doi:10.1045/july2005-lynch   Lynch, C. (n.d.) Clifford Lynch. Retrieved from

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~clifford/ Raber, D. (2003). The problem of information: An introduction to information

science. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.   Rayward, W. B. (1997). The origins of information science and the

International Institute of Bibliography / International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID). Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48, 289-300. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199704)48:4<289::AID-ASI2>3.0.CO;2-S

Rayward, W. B. (1999). H. G. Wells’s idea of a World Brain: A critical reassessment. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50, 557-573. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:7<557::AID-ASI2>3.0.CO;2-M

School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. (2010). Clifford Lynch. Retrieved from http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/cliffordlynch

Van House, N. A. (2003). Digital libraries and collaborative knowledge construction. In A. P. Bishop, N. A. Van House, & B. P. Buttenfield (Eds.), Digital library use: Social practice in design and evaluation (pp. 271-295). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  

Questions, comments?