Herewith some thoughts about desiderata for a new professional librarian position, drawing on various things I've written in the last 9 months or so (see Infocommons log, On Libraries, Blogworld, and The Disgruntlement File for much more...)

IF (and it's a very big if, because it's risky) W&L wants to offer something unique in liberal arts colleges, AND if we want the library to be at the heart of that innovation, we need to think differently about our roles in support for teaching and learning. We need to enlarge the library's mission within the university, and set out to develop and promulgate new services. This effort must rest on an empirically-based understanding of people's actual use of information resources, AND take responsibility for teaching and support of emergent information technologies.

A new professional staff position is essential to any expansion of the library's role and functions, and requires skills, background, and proclivities not presently represented in the staff. I can summarize these in four functions nobody on the library staff now serves:

  1. A Bridge: Work WITH faculty and IT to explore solutions to pedagogical problems --this role involves much more (and different) classroom/course presence/involvement than librarians now engage in.

  2. A Developer: Build Web services; prepare the way for eventual DSpace, etc. --database construction/access/support. Develop and promulgate Information Management infrastructure ("Beyond ProCite..."). Desirable skill base includes Linux and .NET capabilities now in short supply, database experience, familiarity with advanced Web development (CSS, perhaps DreamWeaver)

  3. A Go-To: for technical questions in Information Management

  4. An Ear to the Ground: Monitor and experiment with emerging technologies (blogging is a current example)

I'd like to move discourse away from "computers in the library" and toward services and support and distributed resources --toward what I think of as the emerging digital library environment. We need to create demonstrations of ways in which Web services can be built to enhance teaching and learning, AND we need to extend the digital services of the library in its basic work of collecting and archiving and distributing information. To convince our users of the value of this evolution, we need to create some examples that will provoke ahah! reactions and generate creative thinking about new pedagogical uses for digital resources. Few small liberal arts colleges are working on this, and we need to develop relationships with institutions that are (Middlebury is one such, largely thanks to an administrative reorganization of library and computing services).

The fundamental task (responsibility, goal, intent) of both the Library and University Computing is to facilitate people's use of information. Our users' needs include finding and managing and producing and distributing materials in whatever media are best suited to their purposes and communications tasks. Libraries have a well-honed understanding of finding, and we support such activities well. The key innovation which the incumbent of a new position would support involves a reorientation from emphasis on information seeking (surfing, database queries, etc.) to information management --to what to do with what's found, in the very broadest sense(s).

Our students and faculty need to be able to get the help they need to accomplish their goals, AND they need to be educated about available means. As information becomes more and more digital, we need to build and promulgate and support the services that our users need. Because technologies change, we have to continue to explore and experiment, in order to anticipate demand and provide appropriate guidance to users.

At some point, there will be a growing interest in producing content in digital media, and some presumption that the Library will support and collect and distribute the content. Our users will need to build, manage, and distribute digital collections --both to campus audiences and to the growing world of interlinked digital libraries. We need to insure that they have access to appropriate construction and management tools, that standards are followed, that collections are appropriately integrated into our own array of digital assets, and that collection records are harvestable by relevant outside aggregators. Alsos is a forerunner/harbinger of this, and so are the image databases: rooted in relational databases, built and augmented to solve specific problems (collecting and distributing content for pedagogical purposes), and potentially interconnected to external users via metadata harvesters and OAI-compliant search utilities (like NSDL, OAIster).

I looked over and still stand by what I said in a page composed at the end of last January, mostly written in the context of thoughts about Information Commonses. To the quotations at the end of that document from OCLC's Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition and Cliff Lynch's Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age, I would now add the following:

from another example of an institution pursuing digital library goals: Deep Infrastructure Supports Digital Library Services By Paul Conway (director for information technology services in the Duke University Libraries)
Duke University has recognized the strategic importance of the digital library as a change agent... Digital libraries may prove to be tremendous forces for needed change in teaching and learning and, particularly, for the transformation of the roles that traditional libraries play on and off campus. Duke University is embracing digital library services as a strategic mechanism for advancing deep information technology infrastructure on campus.

...The Digital Library @ Duke is a major component of the university’s overall strategic plan... “…seizing the opportunities of new technologies to enhance traditional resources and services and to build new roles for the library, presenting it as the resource of first resort for scholars and as the shared intellectual center of the university” ... ...the digital library is conceived as a resource environment, accessible through computing tools in buildings on campus and on individual desktops on and off campus. Duke’s digital library program becomes the essential mechanism for uniting people and ideas and presenting information that lives across the full spectrum of storage media. ...Since for the foreseeable future only a part of the information resources needed for most scholarly disciplines will exist in digital form, a digital library becomes the essential mechanism for pulling together and presenting information that resides in the library on paper, film, magnetic tapes, and optical disks. A deep infrastructure is required to support the services that people see and tend to associate with a digital library... The organizational structure functions as if nearly every technology-related initiative in the library system is related in some way to something we call a “digital library.”

...digital library applications are being built as enterprise systems managed and promoted not as library systems per se, but as tools for the end-user community.

from Interoperability between Library Information Services and Learning Environments -- Bridging the Gaps (Neil McLean and Clifford Lynch)
Our hope is to open a dialog both with the global library communities in higher education and between these communities and the communities involved in instructional technologies and management. (1)

...recently... libraries have been investing more heavily in bringing other materials such as digitized rare and historical materials, and institutional research and learning resources, into the distributed information environments. There is growing acceptance that simply making resources available on the network without an additional layer of services may not be very effective... resources are made available at interfaces with low levels of interconnectedness between them. This in turn puts the burden of interconnection back on the user, and it means that in many cases the potential value of interconnection is not realized. (3)

...within any information process, it may be necessary to interact with several services which do not coordinate their activities. Until recently, these services have been conceived and designed as standalone systems, rather than as parts of a fabric of information resources on a network. So, for example, there are services which allow people to discover the documents of interest to them, and there are packages which can format requests for dispatch to such services. These may not be linked up in such a way that the end-to-end process can be automated. (4)

...while the inclusion of learning objects in library collections is one issue, there is a large disconnect between the traditional focus of the e-learning community on these typically relatively small objects and the growing need to collect, archive, and repurpose much larger and more complex objects at the level of a collaboration or a course...(5) Until recently, most learning and information content was tightly bound in learning management systems [LMSs]... transparent links between library systems and learning management systems have been rudimentary... Much of the current thinking is based on a fairly library-centric view of being able to "push" information resources into the LMS. There has been little thought given to the learner activity perspective where the learner may wish to draw on any number of information resources either prescribed, or of his or her choosing, at any given moment in the learning activity. There is a need, therefore, to develop more innovative use scenarios in order to map the dynamic functionality required in a "pull" runtime environment. (6)

In essence, academic institutions are only just beginning to grapple with the implications of developing the digital campus that includes the two important concepts of digital information management and e-learning management. Central to both of these key management challenges is the need to organize and manage the creation, flow, and use of content. In most institutions content is managed in silos that have little institutional interoperability... (8)

...service models were mostly based on "what-is" rather than "what-might-be", and it is important that library communities engage in some quite lateral thinking with regard to potential service provision in the emerging interactive learning environments. (10)

The challenge inherent in this analysis is to find common ground that transcends the seemingly endless problems that pervade the current interactions between library/information resources, services, and e-learning environments. A principal objective is to define common services and abstractions required to sit over multiple repository types so that they can be used effectively from within either learning environment applications or information environment applications... This approach requires a conceptual shift away from a traditional systems architecture viewpoint to one where applications become defined by the services provided and the services that can be accessed... It will be vital that both the library and e-learning communities look to the possibility of applying service-oriented architectutes such as Web Services, wich are now the focus of attention in many other industries... (14)

As [architectural and standards efforts] move forward, they must be complemented with experimental implementations, test beds, and other deployment efforts to validate and refine the standards and architecture work. And it is essential that we bring all of the real users and stakeholders --teachers, students, teaching assistants, librarians, records managers, graduates, instructional technologists, course authors, and others-- into the design, use and evaluation of these testbeds. (15)