Jon Udell is at the GRL2020 conference and blogging about it. In the post he talks about the future of research libraries. I was about to comment on his blog and remembered that my preference is to just put up posts and trackback to the original post, so here you go.
I have a very fond history with libraries, When I lived in New Delhi for a few years as a kid, I used to spend many a weekend evening at the library of our club, devouring books, fiction and non-fiction; on science, on nature, on airplanes, etc. Growing up, the fascination with libraries has continued, but I never go to a library anymore, unless it is to pick up a book from the public library. Indeed, one of the primary reasons I took up membership of the Seattle Public Library was to get access to the O’Reilly Safari site. All papers are read either online or via downloaded PDF and all research is done via the web. So what is the role of libraries today?
I would love to hear Richard Akerman’s take on this subject. He has a very succinct technology vision of the role of research libraries and librarians. I believe the brick and mortar library will go the way of the bookstore. Today we use libraries as much as a place to study in peace and get free wifi access as we do for books. The future of the library in the end is virtual. Just today I learned about BASE, a search engine for scientific literature. We already know about Google Scholar and Pubmed and other sources of literature information. Many of us are always thinking about better, more open, ways to access and mine publications etc. The development of information hubs like the recently announced PLoS Clinical Hub makes vertical aggregators available which are rather powerful and convenient. As research becomes more open (Jon has a reference to Michael Barton’s efforts at Open Notebook Science), and other domains follow, literature will become increasingly indexable and searachable. The question then becomes; how can we make it easier for people to find the material they are interested in, other related references and how should the information be cataloged. The latter is going to be an interesting problem. One cannot assign a DOI number to a blog post or a video on Bioscreencast, yet knowledge is no longer confined to formal publications. Is search the answer? I don’t know, but right now, it seems, along with services like del.icio.us and Connotea, the best approach.
Update: Richard Akerman’s post on this subject
Picture courtesy Janesdead via a Creative Commons license
Technorati Tags: Library Science, Libraries, Search, Jon Udell, Richard Akerman
2 Comments
Ensuring that your research is found will rely on conscious use of domain-specific tagging. In our organic chemistry research, a lot comes down to finding molecules used in experiments. So we have a tag section on our wiki experiment pages where we put InChIs and chemical common names. Now we’ll be adding InChIKeys, which will work better for larger molecules that have InChIs so long that they don’t index properly.
For the rest, the language we use in describing our experiments seems to be sufficient without added tags to be found using simple Google searches. The vast majority of our traffic comes from Google, friend of the Open Scientist…
Ensuring that your research is found will rely on conscious use of domain-specific tagging. In our organic chemistry research, a lot comes down to finding molecules used in experiments. So we have a tag section on our wiki experiment pages where we put InChIs and chemical common names. Now we'll be adding InChIKeys, which will work better for larger molecules that have InChIs so long that they don't index properly.
For the rest, the language we use in describing our experiments seems to be sufficient without added tags to be found using simple Google searches. The vast majority of our traffic comes from Google, friend of the Open Scientist…
3 Trackbacks
[...] I wonder if there is a role for libraries in all this? Actually I don’t wonder. There is definitely a need and a role, but how will be be manifested? [...]
[...] I wonder if that is the role of the journals (PLoS/Nature) themselves or best done by an independent third party? This also falls in with the science library question posed earlier. In the end the goal is to collect content, in this case around a subject. Using a Digg like model, we could select what posts trickle to the top, and using an aggregation algorithm we could collect information from published literature, blogs, video sharing sites and other sources. Perhaps science libraries could focus on virtual collections (or hubs as it were) around specific scientific topics where someone could go and ask specific, focussed questions and get access to the entire knowledge base of information around that topic. I have a feeling a lot is going to happen in this space over the next few years. [...]
[...] on a bunch of practitioners such as Michael Barton’s blog. I found that link by way of a discussion about Jon Udell blogging libraries and open notebook science. Somewhere in there, trust me things [...]