30 January 2004

An extract of some essentials from my "Thinking about the Information Commons" log file (http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/meta/infocommons.html 16 September 2003-present), including both my own words and sentiments [rearranged from their chronological order], and some trenchant quotations from others' writings

From Larry Lessig's The Future of Ideas:

In these times, the hardest task for social and political activists
is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true.
The challenge is to sow doubt. (5)

"Information Commons" is both a misnomer and a tarbaby. I find the term "digital scholarship" much more successful as a description of the objective of a reformulation of library space and services: the work of scholars (that is, teachers and learners) takes place in multiple media, which are now

Our question should be
what are peer institutions doing to support digital scholarship?
and not ?how have peer institutions implemented Information Commonses?

===

Obviously, an "Information Commons" has to be more than a physical facility, and is not just a rearrangement of the library's floor plan; it has to fit into the needs and realities of the institution, and provide resources and services (infrastructure and technical support) that is both needed and wanted by professors and students alike. It's not physical facilities that should be our main concern, but information services. We're building an environment to support and facilitate what our users need and want.

An Information Commons model that thinks FIRST about space and SECOND about Information (what it is and does, who needs/uses what, how it's at the very core of teaching and learning) ...is fated to obsolescence.

To be a truly effective and synergetic use of resources, an Information Commons needs to be an integral part of a broader strategy to integrate electronic resources into teaching and learning --or else it will be just a collection of rapidly-obsolescing and little-used hardware and software, chosen to fill imagined needs.

Changing the library's role in teaching and learning is uphill all the way. Hardly anybody seems to want to entertain fundamental changes in functions or recognize that the tried-and-true territorial definitions of responsibility are dysfunctional in the face of digital proliferation and ubiquity.

It's not that traditional library or IT functions can be given up. Rather, we must find ways to add new services and create new synergies, building upon the existing organizations. Sometimes the outward appearances may change as responsibilities are redirected: just as reference desks sprouted computer monitors a decade ago, and help desks took on new duties as networks expanded, the demand for database support and multimedia integration requires that librarians and IT staff learn about each other's specialties and draw upon each other's strengths to create the environments --physical and virtual, centralized and distributed-- that users need.

===

I think it's clear that we-the-library need to develop and support some services that we don't presently do much with, and that the means to accomplish those augmentations of our role require that we have (hire, get, develop, etc.) expertise that we lack at present. Some of that expertise is available (or nascent) in the ITL; some requires training and skills not presently available at W&L; some may be a matter of reorganizing what we do as individuals and as an organization; and some will emerge as faculty are educated about the potentials of various digital technologies and start to develop their own projects.

We need to be able to create and manage Web services in the library --to direct the evolution of our digital resources. And we need to be able to offer support to faculty and students who are exploring and using those digital media for scholarly and pedagogical purposes.

===

I imagine that the library COULD become the center of extra-departmental learning and scholarship activities, by housing and hosting the services and resources that our users need OUTSIDE of (and in addition to) what their courses require. That's partly a matter of COLLECTION development (building and making accessible resources that aren't department/discipline-defined --and helping people develop the means to manage their own information universes is an obvious missing piece), partly a matter of devising and providing support for the broad spectrum of work people need and want to do with Information in many media, and partly a matter of creating a physical environment that people choose to be in for a broad variety of purposes --not just to "study" or "do research".

===

From OCLC's Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition:

Libraries need to be proactive about e-learning and not wait to be approached as a partner (76)

We have to embrace the opportunity of the changed landscape, not reconstitute the old landscape in a new space" (102)

The shift of librarianship from a role of service provider to collaborator will be particularly important if the many new varieties of scholarly output have any hope of being cataloged and therefore disclosed to potential users, and preserved in ways that will sustain their value to future scholars (63)

The most significant challenge facing academic libraries undertaking these institutional repository projects is not technical, however. The major challenge is cultural. Too few initiatives include all the stakeholders --faculty, library staff, IT staff and instructional designers [to say nothing of students!!]-- and there is no common view of what an institutional repository is, what it contains and what its governance structure should be. Faculty have rarely involved librarians in developing teaching materials, digital or otherwise, and have not routinely made these available within the library infrastructure. Librarians have not routinely created metadata for such material. (64)

From Cliff Lynch's "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" (February 2003):

In my view, a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.

...Our institutions of higher education have overlooked an opportunity to support our most innovative and creative faculty for at least a decade now, to the detriment of both the faculty members and the institutions themselves. These faculty have been exploring ways in which works of authorship in the new digital medium can enhance teaching and learning and the communication of scholarship; such innovations are essential to keeping scholarship vital and effective, and they must not only be supported but nurtured. Indeed nurturing these innovations reaches to the core mission of our universities, and to the core values of our universities.

...Scholarship has become data intensive; it is supported and documented by data and tools that complement interpretive works of authorship. For the sciences, these changes have been well documented in the recent National Science Foundation report of the Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure chaired by Dan Atkins;1 while the report is focused on cyberinfrastructure to support the conduct of science, most of the discussion is in fact applicable beyond the sciences to the broader scholarly enterprise, including the humanities.

...Institutional repositories can support new practices of scholarship that emphasize data as an integral part of the record and discourse of scholarship. They can structure and make effective otherwise diffuse efforts to capture and disseminate learning and teaching materials, symposia and performances, and related documentation of the intellectual life of universities.

===