MyiLibrary

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

JISC and Oxford University Library Services

JISC and Oxford University Library Services hosted a meeting in Oxford on Thursday to mark the conclusion of JISC's Libraries of the Future Campaign. The event took place in the afternoon, with a series of challengingly short presentations from a set of well-known librarians and commentators: Sarah Thomas, Bodley's Librarian at Oxford; Chris Batt – former Chief Executive of the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council; Santiago de la Mora, of Google Books (Europe); Peter Murray-Rust, Reader in Molecular Informatics at Cambridge; and Robert Darnton, Harvard University Librarian. The event was amplified - in the way JISC is now becoming very good at – with bloggers and microbloggers in place, a Twitter-feed beamed onto one of the three projection screens; a Second Life version of the event (featuring the usual Star Wars cast of avatars) displayed on another; and a live video-stream of the event available from JISC's website. In fact, it was possibly overamplified, as I realised at one point when I checked the website to see not only that a particular colleague was obviously present in the audience somewhere behind me, but that his laptop screen was also in view (fortunately displaying only innocent windows, as far as I could see). Next moment, a tweet appeared on the Twitter-feed screen exclaiming about the fact that people's screens were visible. While there are some obvious benefits to amplification, the splitting of attention that it engenders can sometimes seem to defeat the point of having a conference, which is an opportunity for concentration. I expect we will move towards a happy medium in due course, and JISC is leading the way in helping us find it.

There were several useful insights. Sarah Thomas presented the Bodleian as intertwining past and future with the interesting phrase used in its literature about the New Bodleian, Rediscovering our radical past. Chris Batt thought that librarians should turn themselves into 'Knowledge Warriors' (and a glance at the Second Life audience suggested some had already done so). Santiago de la Mora, talking about Google having digitised seven million books, estimated that 75% of books in library collections were in-copyright but out of print, and so off-web. Google wanted to 'bring them back to life'. Peter Murray-Rust's presentation was eagerly awaited, since he had prepared for it by blogging as he did his research over the last couple of weeks. I had sent him a comment, of which he reproduced only the first paragraph in his blog (which gave my theory as to why so few librarians had responded to his requests for views). The piece he omitted sketched out my interests in how libraries need to be plural and address issues of multiple scale, and what this means for library leadership. It said the following:
We have many opinions within our group about the future of libraries. Lorcan Dempsey, who leads the Research Division, talks about them a lot on his blog, as do my colleagues and I who work with our 'RLG Partnership' - an international grouping of research libraries, museums and archivists – in hangingtogether.org. Some recent library future-gazing has been prompted by the recent visit to OCLC in Dublin Ohio by Richard Ovenden, Associate Librarian at the University of Oxford, whose Distinguished Seminar presentation was commented on in our blog by Merrilee Proffit. Merrilee mentions the recent Taiga Provocative Statements document, and our own Information Contexts document of almost two years ago.............





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