Digital Convergence – Libraries of the Future Rae Earnshaw and John Vince (Eds) Digital Convergence – Libraries of the Future 13 Rae Earnshaw, PhD, FBCS, FRSA, CEng, John Vince, MTech, PhD, DSc CITP Emeritus Professor in Digital Media Pro Vice-Chancellor (Strategic Systems Bournemouth University, UK Development) University of Bradford, UK Festschrift in honour of Dr Reg Carr British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2007933087 ISBN-13: 978-1-84628-902-6 e-ISBN-13: 978-1-84628-903-3 Printed on acid-free paper © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2008 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be repro- duced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. The use of registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement,that such names are exempt from the relevant laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. 987654321 Springer Science+Business Media springer.com Contents Foreword .................................... ix ListofContributors .............................. xi Introduction .................................. xxiii Part 1 The Organization and Delivery of Digital Information 1 From “Boutique” to Mass Digitization: the Google Library Project at Oxford ............................. 3 Ronald Milne 2 Digital Services in Academic Libraries: the Internet is Setting Benchmarks ................................ 11 Norbert Lossau 3 The Early Years of the United Kingdom Joint Academic Network (JANET) ............................. 31 Mike Wells Part 2 The World Library – Collaboration and Sharing of Information 4 World-Class Universities Need World-Class Libraries and Information Resources: But How Can they be Provided? ... 55 Sir Brian K. Follett v vi Contents 5 The International Dimensions of Digital Science and Scholarship: Aspirations of the British Library in Serving the International Scientific and Scholarly Communities ...... 65 Lynne Brindley 6 CURL – Research Libraries in the British Isles ........... 75 Peter Fox Part 3 Cultural and Strategic Implications of Digital Convergence for Libraries 7 For Better or Worse: Change and Development in Academic Libraries, 1970–2006 .......................... 85 Bill Simpson 8 Combining the Best of Both Worlds: the Hybrid Library .... 95 David Baker 9 Beyond the Hybrid Library: Libraries in a Web 2.0 World ... 107 Derek Law 10 Libraries and Open Access: the Implications of Open-Access Publishing and Dissemination for Libraries in Higher Education Institutions ......................... 119 Stephen Pinfield Part 4 Shaking the Foundations – Librarianship in Transition 11 Scholarship and Libraries: Collectors and Collections ..... 137 Fred Ratcliffe 12 When is a Librarian not a Librarian? ................ 155 Frederick Friend Part 5 New Dimensions of Information Provision: Restructuring, Innovation, and Integration 13 From Integration to Web Archiving ................. 163 John Tuck Contents vii 14 Not Just a Box of Books: From Repository to Service Innovator .................................. 173 Sarah E. Thomas and Carl A. Kroch 15 Learning Enhancement through Strategic Project Partnership ................................ 181 Mary Heaney 16 Libraries for the 21st Century ..................... 191 Les Watson Part 6 Preserving the Content – The Physical and the Digital 17 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: Poor Players on the Digital Curation Stage ......................... 207 Chris Rusbridge 18 Some Key Issues in Digital Preservation .............. 219 Marilyn Deegan and Simon Tanner Part 7 From Information to Knowledge – the Human–Computer Interface 19 From the Information Age to the Intelligence Age: Exploiting IT and Convergence ........................... 241 Rae Earnshaw and John Vince 20 Cognitive Implications of Information Spaces: Human Issues in the Design and Use of Electronic Library Interfaces ..... 253 Sherry Chen, Jane Coughlan, Steve Love, Robert D. Macredie and Frankie Wilson 21 Mobile Media – From Content to User ............... 273 Antonietta Iacono and Gareth Frith Part 8 Historic Collections and Case Studies 22 Special Collections Librarianship .................. 295 Richard Ovenden viii Contents 23 Defending Research and Scholarship – United Kingdom Libraries and the Terrorism Bill 2005 ................ 303 Clive D. Field 24 Politics, Profits and Idealism: John Norton, the Stationers’ Company and Sir Thomas Bodley ................... 327 John Barnard 25 William Drummond of Hawthornden: Book Collector and Benefactor of Edinburgh University Library ........... 345 John Hall 26 de Gaulle and the British ........................ 359 David Dilks Part 9 High Level Applications of Content and its Governance 27 Great Libraries in the Service of Science .............. 381 Alan Eyre 28 Governance at Harvard University Library ............. 401 Dudley Fishburn 29 Higher Education Libraries and the Quality Agenda ...... 407 John Horton Author Index .................................. 415 Foreword Sir Colin Lucas I first met Reg Carr when I was a young Lecturer at Manchester University and he was a young Assistant Librarian there. I came across him again some 25 years later when he was appointed Bodley’s Librarian and Director of the University Library Services at Oxford, shortly before I became Vice-Chancellor there. The new addition to that old title of “Bodley’s Librarian” symbolized obliquely how much had changed in the challenges facing libraries between those two moments of encounter. Reg Carr had become in Leeds, and was to continue to be in Oxford, one of the principal influences in trying to think how to adapt to them. I learned to do historical research at a time when major libraries were fine and private places. As one entered them, their characteristic and reassuring smell announced already the mysteries that awaited – card indexes, printed cata- logues (or even ones with slips pasted in by hand) and bibliographies to be perused with imagination as much as method, references to be culled and fol- lowed, inspired guesses at the contents behind seemingly irrelevant titles, books patiently read in search of a singlefactoranideasparkedbysomething apparently outside one’s line of enquiry, the sense of treading where few others hadbeen,andsoon.Thelonescholar can still have this sort of experience, although immeasurably enhanced and hastened by the appearance of elec- tronic catalogues. However, it echoes a time when knowledge was closely held bythefew,difficulttoacquireindepthandtohandleinbreadth.Thatisdecreas- inglywhatlibrariesarecentrallyaboutnow. The purpose of libraries would have been limited indeed if they had served only to preserve the accumulation of human knowledge, belief and imagination by locking it away.Even so,the revolution that has been wrought in our world gen- erally by IT, digitization and telecommunications has transformed libraries rapidly and profoundly (and continues to do so), not only in how they do their business but also in some senses in what they are. To traditional and new library users the most immediate effect is on access. What is (perhaps glibly) referred to as the “Google generation”has quite differ- ent expectations about access to information and quite different assumptions ix x Foreword about how research is to be done. Across the spectrum of research – whether academic, commercial, creative or personal – users expect speed and conve- nience in work, comprehensiveness combined with sensitivity in search engines, and the capacity to manipulate large data sets. The digitization of holdings responds to this, most obviously to date in the initiatives launched by Google and Microsoft. Other forces push in the same direction. Digitization seems to offer one solution to the endless effort of pres- ervation, though we are already learning that its own particular forms of obso- lescence and decay are as daunting as the physical deterioration of objects. Further,the electronic revolution clearly reduces costs in processing and trans- mission and also by compressing storage requirements dramatically. Beyond this, however, the function of libraries is changing into a future as yet unclear.Libraries are only part of a complex information system globally acces- sible and thereby seemingly ever more present, ephemeral and voluminous. At the most ordinary level, libraries face new problems on how to capture this information, especially when born digital, how to adapt their traditional func- tion as preserver and authenticator of text in all its forms, and how to manage copyright issues in an electronic world. At a more innovative level, libraries have to confront the problem of the continuing evolution in how their users relate to them. How far will they eventually travel towards something more closely resembling a website