Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Choices for libraries

Shannon Bohle, The choices you make extend beyond delivering digital content, Library Journal, July 15, 2008.  Excerpt:

...We need to take a step back and consider how librarians in the last decade have found themselves on the fast track from the sequestered content villas of subscription databases to the sprawling information architecture of our new socially networked digital environment.

There are basically three competing models at work in the metadata and digital asset management (DAM) world at large. For lack of an existing terminology, we can label these groups the “competitive isolationists,” the “exclusionary collaborateurs,” and the “free mashups and crossovers.” ...

At one end of the spectrum, there are “competitive” institutions that vigorously and successfully protect their holdings, regardless of copyright status, using expensive software packages....[T]he costs for these systems, including software, staff time, and service contracts, usually extend into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and thus are an option only for the elite. Two popular examples of these systems include CONTENTdm and Digitool. These top institutions pay for the best technicians but cannot use their human capital to the fullest owing to software companies’ desire to protect their intellectual property. Library staff and technicians, for instance, cannot access or modify the source code. Other drawbacks to these systems can be a lack of built-in collaborative tools for user input and the inability to be crawled by search engines like Google via deep linking.

Another reason that places these systems at the far end of the metadata continuum is the benefit this “isolationist” model derives from their use of others’ metadata without necessarily relinquishing their own, akin to a “we’ll take yours and keep ours” approach....

At the far end of the spectrum from the competitive isolationists, there are individuals and organizations that have begun to explore new ways to free their content and metadata, allowing it to be reused and remixed in exciting new ways. One example is those groups that have “relinquished” their noncopyrighted and/or copyrighted holdings by crossing over to the “Creative Commons” (CC) for all noncommercial use. For example, Duke University Libraries now includes the CC license at the bottom of every page of its online special collections. Another example is Wikisource, where archival content can be deposited under the GNU Free Documentation License....Recently, the Library of Congress (LC) joined a small contingent of archival repositories when it mounted one of its out-of-copyright collections on the social tagging–enabled web site Flickr....

Perhaps the greatest advantage of these collaborative and Web 2.0 tools is in their ability to facilitate cooperation across all kinds of boundaries....