The Future Is Digital
IFLA program stresses protecting and collecting digital data
Dan
Cohen, executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, speaks at
“Brave New World: The Future of Collections in Digital Times,” a program at the
IFLA 2016 World Library and Information Congress in Columbus, Ohio.
“We
are in serious trouble. The world is producing so much born-digital material.
How do we capture it? What is the role of the library in this?”
ALA
president-elect James G. “Jim” Neal opened his segment of “Brave New World: The
Future of Collections in Digital Times,” a program at the IFLA 2016 World
Library and Information Congress in Columbus, Ohio, with a warning. Digital
content is growing exponentially. The world produces daily ebooks, online
games, 3D-printed work, MOOCs, social media content, music, images, websites,
and hundreds more examples of born-digital data. A strategic, global approach
is necessary to capture and care for it all, according to Neal. The future of
libraries and the world depends on it, he said.
“The
communities we serve are going to be really angry with us in five or 10 years
when they discover we’ve not figured out how to capture and store born-digital
content,” he warned. “Can we write accurate histories of the world if and when
this born-digital content disappears?”
This
sense of urgency ran throughout the presentations at the “Brave New World”
program.
Dan
Cohen, executive director of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA),
reiterated the importance of capturing digital data and making it easy for the
public to access. “Just putting it online doesn’t mean people will discover
it,” he said.
Cohen
detailed DPLA’s efforts to ease access to digital data. He stressed that DPLA
was not a vendor but rather a service organization that serves as a hub for
digital content. It gathers digital content submitted by large institutions and
also helps small and midsized institutions digitize, add metadata, and send its
content to DPLA. This data is then made available to the public on DPLA’s website, where it can be sorted and searched based on
user specifications.
Mike
Furlough, executive director of HathiTrust Digital Library; Jeff Carroll,
director of collection development at Columbia University; and Martha
Whitehead, university librarian at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and
president of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (presenting for an
absent Kathleen Shearer, executive director of the Confederation of Open Access
Repositories), explained their organizations’ respective efforts to both
collect data and increase its availability to the public.
“Open
access has arrived,” Whitehead said. “The question is no longer if we’re going
to have it, but how we’re going to implement it.”
The
transition to universal open access models has not been smooth, she said, but
progress is being made. Currently, more than 2,000 open access repositories
exist around the world. They suffer from low visibility, but tides are turning.
Whitehead
detailed various models to open access implementation, including existing
journals transitioning from subscription-based to open access, the creation of
publishing cooperatives that would mediate the open access transition, and the
creation of next-generation, nonprofit repositories to collect and distribute
open access content. All of the models have weaknesses, Whitehead said, but the
overarching goal remains strong.
“Publications
should be seen as a global research infrastructure rather than a commodity,”
she said. “And libraries should play a leadership role in shaping this future.
We must be willing to take risks.”
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming
Events | BOSLA-NIFT ANNUAL LECTURE SERIES-2016 on Saturday,
20th August 2016 at 10.00 hrs in National Institute of Fashion Technology, Kharghar, Navi
Mumbai.
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