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Cross
Currents No 33 August 2010
A
digest of cross sectoral information management events, issues and ideas in
organisations, libraries, archives and museums, with special emphasis on
arts and the humanities.
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ARTS &
HUMANITIES Australian arts and innovation | Australian art history
| Australian cultural policy | Australian performing arts
collections | Australian Screen Online | Gramophone archive online |
Humanities scholarship | International Association of Music
Libraries | Music Index Online | New York Philharmonic Archives |
Performing arts quality | V&A Theatre Museum
DIGITISATION,
STANDARDS, & SYSTEMS Collaborative tools strategy | Digital
preservation | Digital scholarship communication | Digitisation
Guidelines Initiative | MarcXchange | Metadata for digital content |
Persistent identifiers | User-generated metadata |
KNOWLEDGE & INFORMATION
MANAGEMENT Australian funding | Australian innovation | Australian
law for libraries, archives and museums | Collections Council of
Australia | Scholarly publishing | UK heritage science strategy
LIBRARIES & LIBRARIANSHIP
British Library digitisation strategy | Challenges for large public
libraries | Future libraries | Library of Congress Flickr Project |
Library systems | Open Library Environment Project
MUSEUMS Art
museum libraries and librarianship | Discovering physical objects |
Government funding for museums in the US | MaNexus | Smithsonian
Institutions | Spectrum RECORDS & ARCHIVES
Archival management software | The Archivists' Toolkit | Encoded
Archival Context CPF standard | NZ digital continuity strategy |
Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts |
Australian arts and innovation
Brad Haseman and Luke Jaaniste’s The Arts and
Australia's National Innovation System 1994–2008: Arguments,
Recommendations, Challenges (CHASS Occasional Paper number 7, Nov 2008)
present six arguments promoting arts in Australia's national innovation
system: (1) the cultural argument - the arts create and promote an
atmosphere of innovation; (2) the skills argument - a rich and immersive
arts education builds the skills required of a future innovative workforce;
(3) the knowledge argument - the arts create new knowledge for innovation
through creative production and processes, including collaborations with
other disciplines, such as science, within and beyond universities; (4) the
commercialisation argument - the arts can convert new knowledge and research
into profits through entrepreneurial activity; (5) the economic argument -
the arts, as part of the creative industries, occupy a substantial, growing,
enabling and innovative part of the economy; (6) the systems argument - the
cultural sector is an innovation system within which various institutions
and organisations behave as innovation hubs. They recommend: (1) the
inclusion of the arts in the proposed National Innovation Council; (2)
strengthening the evidence base for 'arts and innovation' arguments; (3)
developing an understanding of arts-based knowledge that connects it to
innovation; (4) broadening commercialisation of the arts and creative
outputs; (5) developing the argument for the arts as social innovation; (6)
educating an innovative workforce. Meeting these challenges requires further
research, sector-wide coordination and leadership. Web:
http://www.chass.org.au/
Australian art history
The press clippings collection 1905-1953 of the
Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library and Archive, with more than
20,000 clippings, is now available online as a text database. Articles with
images can be requested as jpegs. Web: http://pressclippings.ag.nsw.gov.au.
Australian cultural policy
The Federal Minister for the Arts, Peter
Garratt, initiated discussion on a National Cultural Policy in 2010. For
details and submissions see:
http://nationalculturalpolicy.com.au/
Australian performing arts collections
The Performing Arts Special Interest Group of
Museums Australia held its annual conference at Newcastle City Hall, 9-10
June 2009. A number of speakers (Gillian Arrighi, Julie Baird, Allan Davis,
Gionni DiGravio, Victor Emeljanow, Vivien Jones, Ken Longworth, Sue Ryan and
David Watt) gave presentations on performing arts and collections in
Newcastle and regions. Other presentations included: Margaret Leask (on
NIDA’s oral history project with special reference to Terence Clark and
Newcastle); Magaret Marshall, Curator from the Performing Arts Collection in
Melbourne. (on curating Peter Allen: The Exhibition); Christopher Smith,
Curator, Queensland Performing arts Centre Museum, (on Bille Brown and The
School of Arts - a collection, an exhibition, a play); Georgina Binns,
Librarian, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, (on Percy
Grainger and developments at the Grainger Museum); Richard Stone, Research
Assistant, Ballets Russe Project, National Library of Australia, (on
researching the Ballets Russes in Australasia); and Jenny Fewster (on
AusStage project developments).
Australian Screen Online
The National Film and Sound Archive has
re-launched its website australianscreen online. New features include: news,
games, Green Room (a social media space), filmmaker comments and portraits,
and reviews and comment. Web:
http://www.aso.gov.au.
Gramophone archive online
The Gramophone has set up a free Web archive
with all the contents of the magazine including advertisements from the
first issue in 1923 to the present. Web:
http://www.gramophone.net/
Humanities scholarship
The Council of Library and Information
Resources, in cooperation with the National Endownment for the Humanities,
has published Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of
Digital Scholarship (CLIR pub 145). Based on a symposium held in 2008, the
report contains the final versions of papers presented at the workshop, as
well as an account of discussions and a summary of a report by Diane Zorich.
It highlights four themes that transcend traditional disciplinary
boundaries: (1) scale - making sense of huge amounts of heterogeneous
digital information will require authenticating sources through new,
automated methods and combining them in new ways to answer new questions;
(2) language and communication - researchers want to make sense of data,
find patterns at many levels, detect anomalies, and derive meaning; (3)
space and time - extracting the relevant information from text, manuscripts,
and drawings, and presenting it in new ways are challenging technical
problems; and (4) social networking - the Web of information can be read to
expose relationships that might not otherwise be evident and to illustrate
how the specific technologies affect the allocation of human attention. Web:
http://www.clir.org
International Association of Music Libraries
The Australian Branch of the International
Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres held its
AGM at the University of Sydney on 1 October 2009. Robyn Holmes, Curator of
Music at the National Library of Australia, was elected President. Further
information: http://www.iamlaust.org/
Music Index Online
The National Library of Australia has made
available Music Index Online, an index to journal articles appearing in over
875 music periodicals from over 40 countries from 1973 to the present,
available to registered library users via its eResources portal. Web:
http://www.nla.gov.au/app/eresources/
New York Philharmonic Archive
The New York Philharmonic Archives has launched
a project to preserve and make available its collection. The service traces
its origins to 1842, when the Philharmonic Society presented three concerts.
By 1984 the scores, letters, batons, ledgers, recordings, and countless
other treasures that constituted the Orchestra’s history filled up 1,000
boxes were stored in a drab, windowless basement of Avery Fisher Hall at
Lincoln Center. Archivist Barbara Haws supervised the design of the archives
in the Rose Building, which opened in 1991. With a US$2.4 million grant from
the Leon Levy Foundation, the Archives has embarked on a program to digitise
its entire collection and making it available online. The project will begin
with a focus on 1943–1970, the Orchestra’s so-called International Era
incorporating Leonard Bernstein’s leadership, the creation of Lincoln Center,
and the rise of the Philharmonic as an international touring orchestra. This
phase will involve the creation of 1.3 million images, using a team of music
and history students. Source: A Milestone for the Philharmonic Archives By
Erik Ryding 17 Feb 2010
http://www.playbillarts.com/features/article/8298.html
Performing arts quality
Jennifer Radbourne, Katya Johanson, Hilary Glow
and Tabitha White, in The Audience Experience: Measuring Quality in the
Performing Arts (International Journal of Arts Management; Spring 2009)
explore audience risk, audience experience and other factors in redefining
the quality of the performing arts. They say traditional measures of quality
include critical reviews, awards, attendance data, the reputation of the
director, company or lead performers, and attributions of success such as
festival participation or sponsorship and grants. However, in recent
literature on audience values, the quest for authenticity and personal
experiences suggest the need for empirical research into the capacity of the
audience experience as an appropriate and important measure of quality in
the performing arts. Web:
http://www.deakin.edu.au/dro/view/DU:30016687
V&A Theatre Museum
Sarah Frater, in Capturing the Art of
Performance (The Wall Street Journal 24 April 2009), reports on the Victoria
and Albert Museum's new Performance and Theatre Galleries, which replace the
old Theatre Museum, which closed in 2007. Frater says “the display cabinets
are impressive, as are their contents from props and costumes to programs,
photographs, scripts and playbills. Big names abound, with Laurence Olivier
rubbing shoulders with Elton John, and Jimmy Page with Sheridan and
Shakespeare. But the intensity of live theatre is missing, in all its
unpredictable magic and communal excitement…Perhaps its modest setting is
truer to the low material value of theatrical effects than the plushness of
the V&A. Perhaps a tutu is inherently more intriguing than a jumpsuit.
Either way, it exactly catches theatre's paradoxical magic of big effects
from ephemeral means.” Websites: http://www.vam.ac.uk and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124051401393149093.html
Collaborative tools strategy
The University of California Berkley Campus Collaborative Tools Strategy,
developed in 2008, lays the groundwork for the creation of an IT environment
to support collaborative research, teaching, learning, and administration
activities at the university.Web:
http://collab.berkeley.edu/projects/cctsd/
Digital preservation
Francine Berman, in Got Data?: a Guide to Data Preservation in the
Information Age (Communications of the ACM v51 n12, Dec 2008: 50-56),
explores trends and issues associated with preserving digital data and
what’s needed to keep it manageable, accessible, available and secure. Key
trends: (1) more digital data is being created than there is storage to host
it; (2) more and more policies and regulations require the access,
stewardship and/or preservation of digital data; (3) storage costs for
digital data are decreasing (but that’s not the whole story); (4) there is
increasing commercialisation of digital data storage and services. “In
aggregate, these four trends point to the need to take a comprehensive and
coordinated approach to data cyberinfrastructure and treat the problem of
sustainability holistically, creating strategies that make sense froma
technical, policy regulatory, economic, security and community perspective.”
The approach must be "useful, usable, cost-effective, and unremarkable". The
author suggests an adaption of the Branscomb Pyramid model where data is
tiered off according to its value, whether personal (eg photos, tax records)
or more widespread (eg government data or irreplaceable cultural artifacts).
Each level requires a different solution and different body in charge. Top
10 Guidelines for Data Stewardship are provided to promote effective
stewardship and preserivation. Web: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409360.1409376.
The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Digital Preservation and Access, funded by US
National Science Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and supported
by a number of other key organisations, has published two major reports, An
interim report, published December 2008 deals with issues and challenges of
economically sustainable digital preservation. Its final report, Sustainable
Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital
Information, published in February 2010, looks at four domains with diverse
preservation profiles: scholarly discourse, research data, commercially
owned cultural content, and collectively produced web content. It identifies
three imperatives for sustainable digital preservation: articulating a
compelling value proposition; providing clear incentives to preserve in the
public interest; and defining roles and responsibilities among stakeholders
to ensure an ongoing and efficient flow of resources to preservation
throughout the digital lifecycle. Priorities for immediate action include:
(1) organisational action, including developing public-private partnerships,
ensuring that organisations have access to skilled personnel, creating and
sustaining secure chains of stewardship between organisations over time,
achieving economies of scale and scope, addressing the free-rider problem;
(2) technical action, including building capacity to support stewardship in
all areas, lowering the cost of preservation overall, determining the
optimal level of technical curation needed to operationalise an option
strategy for all types of digital material; (3) public policy action,
including modifying copyright laws to enable digital preservation, creating
incentives and requirements for private entities to preserve on behalf of
the public, sponsoring public-private partnerships, clarifying rights issues
associated with web-based materials, empowering stewardship organisations to
protect digital orphans from unacceptable loss; and (4) education and public
outreach action, including promoting education and training for 21st century
digital preservation. Sustainable preservation strategies, the report says,
are not built all at once, nor are they static. Sustainable preservation is
a series of timely actions taken to anticipate the dynamic nature of digital
information. Decision makers will always face uncertainties. Changes in
technologies, policy environments, investment priorities, and societal
concerns will unfold over the course of the digital lifecycle. But we can
develop practices that resolve or anticipate uncertainties, that leverage
resources among stakeholders, and above all, that leave options open for
decision makers in the future. Web:
http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/.
Digital scholarly
communication
Nancy L. Maron and K. Kirby Smith, in The Current Models of Digital
Scholarly Communication: Results of an Investigation Conducted by Ithaka for
the Association of Research Libraries (Washington, DC: Association of
Research Libraries, 2008), discuss 8 types of digital resources (e-only
journals, reviews, preprints, reference sources, data resources, blogs,
discussion forums, and academic hubs) and provide a list of over 200 digital
scholarly resources. Among the findings: while some disciplines seem to lend
themselves to certain digital formats more than others, examples of
innovative resources can be found across the humanities, social sciences,
and scientific / technical / medical subject areas. Many digital
publications are directed at small, niche audiences. Some of the resources
with greatest impact are those that have been around a long while.
Innovations relating to multimedia content and Web 2.0 functionality appear
in some cases to blur the lines between resource types. Among other
recommendations, the report suggests several ways that university librarians
can play a central role in sharing information about these digital resources
with the campus community, and in guiding new projects toward success. Web:
http://www.arl.org/sc/models/model-pubs/pubstudy.
Digitisation Guidelines
Initiative
The US Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative is a
collaborative effort with two working groups to establish a common set of
guidelines for digitising historical materials. The Still Image Working
Group is focusing on books, manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints and
negatives. Its members include the Library of Congress, the National
Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the
National Gallery of Art, the National Library of Medicine, the National
Technical Information Service, the National Transportation Library, the
Smithsonian Institution, the US Geological Survey, and the US Government
Printing Office. The Audio-Visual Working Group is addressing standards and
practices for sound, video, and motion picture film. Its members include the
Defense Visual Information Directorate of the Department of Defense, the
Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National
Archives and Records Administration, the National Library of Medicine, the
Smithsonian Institution, the Government Printing Office and the Voice of
America. A gap analysis will identify and prioritise areas of digitisation
that fall within the scope of the Initiative, and are not currently defined
within existing agency guidelines or not adequately addressed by the
guidelines. Web:
http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov.
MarcXchange
The standard ISO 25577: 2008: Information and documentation – MarcXchange
specifies the requirements for a generalised XML-based exchange format for
bibliographic records as well as other types of metadata. It describes a
framework designed primarily for communication between data processing
systems, but may also be relevant for use as a processing format within
systems. MarcXchange could potentially be used: for representing a complete
MARC record or a set of MARC records in XML; for original resource
description in XML syntax; as an extension schema to METS (Metadata Encoding
and Transmission Standard); for exchange of MARC records in XML; for
transfer of MARC records in web services like SRU (search/retrieval via
URL); for publisher transmission of data; as a temporary format in all kinds
of data transformation or manipulation, eg conversion, publication, editing,
validation; and for metadata in XML that may be packaged with an electronic
resource. Web: http://www.iso.org/
Metadata for digital content
The Library of Congress web pages, Metadata for Digital Content, provide
guidelines based on its experience in developing institution-wide policies
and standards at the Library of Congress. They include: (1) a master
metadata element list with recommendations on best practices for populating
the elements to provide more consistency of new metadata creation throughout
the institution, support the Library of Congress metadata use cases, and
areas where metadata remediation of current metadata might be beneficial;
(2) profiles that draw from the master list for specific applications or
projects. Among the profile currently available are: American Memory,
Performing Arts Encyclopedia, and LC Web Archives. Web:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mdc/
Persistent identifiers
Nicholas Nick, Nigel Ward and Kerry Blinco, in A Policy Checklist for
Enabling Persistence of Identifiers (D-Lib Magazine v15, no 1/2, Jan/Feb
2009), report on a policy checklist arising from their work on global
persistent identifier infrastructure. A major finding from the project was
that policy is far more important in guaranteeing persistence of identifiers
than technology. Key policy questions for guaranteeing identifier
persistence include the following. What entities should be assigned
persistent identifiers? How should those identifiers be exposed to services?
What guarantees does the provider make on how long various facets of the
identifiers will persist? To make an informed decision about what to
identify, information modelling of the domain is critical. Identifier
managers need to know what can be identified discretely (including not only
concrete artefacts like files, but also abstractions such as works,
versions, presentations, and aggregations); and for which of those objects
it is a priority for users and managers to keep track. Without working out
what actually needs to be identified, the commitment to keep identifiers
persistent becomes meaningless.
Web:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january09/nicholas/01nicholas.html
User-generated metadata
Besiki Stvilia and Corinne Jorgensen, in User-generated Collection Level
Metadata in an Online Photo-sharing System (Library & Information Science
Research, 13 Jan 2009), examine metadata provided by users of Flickr. They
found that Flickr users focused primarily on identifying people, places and
activities in their photos. They also found many users who did not use tags
at all on their photos, and instead relied on photoset descriptions to
provide metadata. For those who did use tags, they were used both
individually (to identify a particular friend) and collectively (to identify
a public event or place, for example). They analyse their findings against a
previous photo sorting and identification study, and they briefly compare
Flickr's group categories and the guidelines for posting within those groups
to a handful of current metadata frameworks. Web: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/07408188.
Australian funding
The ABS study Australian National Accounts:
Non-Profit Institutions Satellite Account, 2006/07(cat no. 5256.0) reports
that non-profit institutions contributed close to $43 billion (or 4.1%) to
Australia's economy in 2006/07. They received income of $76.6 billion and
employed close to 890,000 people. The types of non-profit institution
activities that contributed to gross value added were education and research
(27%), health and hospitals (17%), culture and recreation (16%) and social
services (16%). Volunteers made an important contribution to non-profit
institutions. In 2006/07, volunteers contributed 623 million hours to
non-profit institutions, equating to 317,200 full-time equivalent jobs. The
economic value of these hours was estimated to be $14.6 billion. Web:
http://www.abs.gov.au
The ABS study Public Funding for Arts and
Cultural Activities, Facilities and Services Across the Three Tiers of
Government reports that total government funding for cultural activities was
$6.3 billion in 2007-08 ($6,311.4m). The Australian Government contributed
$2,358.9m (37.4%) to total cultural funding while the state and territory
governments contributed $2,952.2m (46.8%) and local governments provided
$1,000.3m (15.8%). Environmental heritage was the largest recipient of
funds, with funding of over $1.4 billion ($1,466.4m) or 27.6% of total
cultural funding from the Australian Government and state and territory
governments combined. The Australian Government allocates the majority of
its cultural funding (75.8%) to Arts activities. In 2007-08 the Australian
Government allocated $1,788.2m to arts activities and $570.7m to heritage
activities. Museums and cultural heritage, not including galleries, received
the majority of heritage funding at $232.3m (40.7%). State and territory
governments allocated $2,952.2m to funding heritage and arts in 2007-08. The
state and territory governments expended the majority of their funds on
Heritage with $2,266.3m (76.8%) of their total cultural funding in this
area. Arts activities received $685.8m or 23.2% of the total cultural
funding by the state and territory governments. Local government funding for
cultural activities was $1000.3m (15.8% of total cultural funding provided
by all levels of government). A majority of local government cultural
funding (65.3%) was allocated to libraries in 2007-08 ($653.4m). Most public
libraries are funded at the local government level, except in Tasmania, the
Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory where libraries are
mainly or solely funded by the state and territory governments. Per-person
cultural funding provided by all levels of government was $297.17 in
2007-08. The Australian Government per-person contribution to cultural
funding was $111.07 while the state and territory governments' contribution
was $139.01 per person. Local government cultural funding was $47.10 per
person in 2007-08. Web: http://www.abs.gov.au
Australian innovation
The Australian government’s report on the
review of the national innovation system - Venturous Australia, prepared by
Cutler and Company in 2008 – considers its long list of recommendations
under the following headings: (1) entrepreneurial firms and workplaces; (2)
human capital and social networks; (3) information flows, market design and
freedom to innovate; (4) research capability and platforms; (5)
transforming and rationalising tax incentives; (6) market facing programs;
and (7) innovation within government. Public serctor priorities are
identified as: agricultural and food security, climate change mitigation and
adaptation, population health, solutions in tropical environments and
applications to utilise broadband instructure (especially in health,
education and public data access). Priorities for stimulating private sector
innovation include resource industries, space and astronomy, finance and
risk management and marine industries. Web: http://www.innovation.gov.au/
Australian law for libraries, archives and museums
Collections Law: Legal Issues for Australian
Archives, Galleries, Libraries and Museums by Shane Simpson, developed by
the Collections Council of Australia, includes chapters on structures,
governance and finances, risk management and compliance, collection
management, exhibitions, reproduction and copyright, merchandising and
sponsorship, people, insurance and indemnification, and legislative
protection of cultural property. Web: http://legal-issues.collectionscouncil.com.au/.
Collections Council of Australia
The Cultural Ministers Council closed the
Collections Council of Australia in April 2010. The report commissioned
about the Collections Council in 2009 has not yet been released and the
Government’s reasons for closing CCA have not yet been publicised. The CCA’s
website continues to be available at http://www.collectionscouncil.com.au/
and has been archived in PANDORA.
Scholarly publishing
John Houghton, Bruce
Rasmussen, Peter Sheehan, and others, in Economic Implications of
Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits
(London: JISC, 2009), examine the costs and benefits of traditional
subscription publishing, open access publishing, and self-archiving for UK
higher education. They conclude that research and research communication
involve substantial costs. More open access to research findings could bring
substantial benefits. To support a move towards more open access they
recommend: (1) overcoming the barriers (eg funding author or producer side
fees, development of institutional and/or subject repositories; and
supporting advocacy initiatives); (2) realising the benefits (focusing on
areas where there are cost impacts, encouraging greater focus on the
operational effectiveness of repositories, supporting or conducting more
research into the academic book publishing value chain); (3) sharing the
gains (eg encouraging and supporting greater attention to the potential
benefits of more open access to research findings in international fora and
encouraging international cooperation between agencies and supporting the
activities of such cooperative efforts; and (4) further research (eg
collection of better data, more research into areas where there might be
potentional benefits). Web:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/rpteconomicoapublishing.pdf
British Library
digitisation strategy
The British Library’s Digitisation strategy 2008-2011 (British Library, Aug
2008), encapsulates its ten-year vision in terms of becoming a leading
player in digitisation, producing a critical mass of digitised content, and
providing “a compelling user experience that facilitates innovative methods
of research and meets 21st century requirements for interacting with
content.” Priorities including the digitisation of 20 million pages of 19th
century literature (about 80,000 books), 1 million pages of historic
newspapers in addition to the 3 million already digitised, 4,000 hours of
Archival Sound Recordings in addition to the 4,000 hours already digitised,
and 100,000 pages of Greek manuscripts. Guiding principles involve
satisfying users needs, developing a range of business models (including
open access, provided free of charge, limited open access (where funding
allows for free as well as fee-based models), and mediated access (provided
through a fee-paid service), protection of intellectual property rights,
storing and preserving digitised materials in its Digital Library System,
ensuring that all digitised items are readily discoverable, and applying
applying generally accepted standards for creating, managing and providing
access to digitised material. Web:
http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/digi/digitisation/digistrategy/
Challenges for
large public libraries
Vivienne Waller and Ian McShane, in Analysing the Challenges for Large
Public Libraries in the Twenty-first Century: a Case Study of the State
Library of Victoria in Australia (First Monday v13 no12, 1 December 2008),
argue that library planning should be informed by a sound understanding of
how the ecology and economy of information is changing. They describe some
of these changes and indicated the need for more research into them. They
note that while there are numerous fine–grained studies on how people
interact with search engines, there is a lack of research on the social
practices and values around information search. They urge libraries to
articulate their distinctive public good role, especially at a time when
they appear to be competing with online commercial enterprises. “Rather than
perceiving the digital era solely in terms of paradigmatic change, a focus
on the enduring values of libraries may, ultimately, assist libraries in
making the most beneficial use of digital technologies.” Web:
http://firstmonday.org/
Future libraries
Lorcan Dempsey, in Always On: Libraries in a World of Permanent Connectivity
(First Monday v4 no1, Jan 2009), discusses the impact of mobile
communication on research, learning and social activities. “A natural
accompaniment of this mesh of connection points is a move of many services
to the cloud, available on the network across these multiple devices and
environments. This means that an exclusive focus on the institutional Web
site as the primary delivery mechanism and the browser as the primary
consumption environment is increasingly partial.” He explores some of the
challenges, opportunities and possible responses by libraries in: (1)
dealing with an increasingly complex systems environment (eg reaching out
into the workflows its users are creating on the network, developing
different fulfillment options and different metadata models for integrated
library system, resolver, knowledge base, and repositories, establishing how
much work the library should do locally to address needs such as adding
tagging systems, mobilising sites, atomizing and remixing content,
personalisation), (2) managing continuous change rather than
transformational change, focusing effort where it will have most impact, not
needlessly duplicating work on solutions which may be overtaken by other
work, and how best to leverage the efforts of others; (3) developing the
library as a brand “which is meaningful and engaging, which communicates its
value, and which transcends the caricatural impression many have based
around the building and print collections” and (4) working out how libraries
will fit into the personalised environments of users. Web:
http://firstmonday.org/.
Library of
Congress Flickr project
Michelle Springer, Beth Dulabahn, and Phil Michel, and others, in For the
Common Good: The Library of Congress Flickr Pilot Project (October 30, 2008)
report on the Library of Congress’s experiment in publishing
out-of-copyright images for viewing and tagging on Flickr. During the
experiment, 4,000 images attracted 500,000 views a month. A wider Flickr
Commons site grew out of the pilot. Publication of images on Flickr project
involved a minimal amount of staff time. Additional value was created as a
result of tagging and comments by the general public. The collections
increased their Google rankings and website hits. They conclude that the
benefits of using Flickr far outweigh the costs and risks. Web:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final_summary.pdf
Library
systems
Marshall Breeding, in Open Source Integrated Library Systems (Library
Technology Reports v44 no 8, Dec 2008) provides a snapshot of the open
source ILS products and companies, Koha, Evergreen, OPALS, and NewGenLib and
their functions. Details: http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/.
Veronica Adamson, Paul Bacsich, Ken Chad and others, in JISC & SCONUL
Library Management Systems Study: An Evaluation and Horizon Scan of the
Current Library Management Systems and Related Systems Landscape for UK
Higher Education (March 2008), evaluate the supply and demand sides of the
library management system and electronic resource management systems market,
quantify systems market share, procurement patterns, costs, product
differentiation and value, conduct a horizon scan focused on the role of
library systems amidst the shift from ‘content to context’ and assess the
emerging use of SOA, open standards and Open Source. They found that that
the UK LMS market is mature, dominated by four vendors with relatively
little product differentiation. Movement in product replacement is slow and
customer loyalty to their LMS vendor is high. Many Libraries remain
unconvinced about electronic resource management systems and the take-up of
new developments such as vertical search is relatively low. Libraries are
not yet exploiting intelligence about user habits to enhance their position
in the information value chain. Libraries are however increasingly aware of
the need to 'liberate' their data for users to create new services and
applications. Consequently, services like the institutional OPAC will become
challenged and the traditional LMS could be reduced to back-of-house
functions. Key technological responses include development of open
interfaces within a Service Oriented Architecture and developing Web 2.0
models. However, the implementation of an open source LMS is not yet
regarded as beneficial. Whilst there is widespread use of Information
Environment services from JISC Data Centre’s such as EDINA and MIMAS,
further development of open interfaces is required. Web:
http://www.sconul.ac.uk/news/lms_report/lmsstudy/lmsstudy.pdf.
Open Library Environment Project
In January
2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided US$2.38 million to Indiana
University to develop open source software for the management of print and
electronic collections in academic and research libraries around the world.
The university will lead the Kuali OLE (Open Library Environment) project,
in partnership with other US universities, to develop the system as an
alternative to commercial integrated library systems and to influence the
design of future vendor products. Web: http://oleproject.org.
Art museum libraries and librarianship
Scarecrow Press has published a second, corrected printing of Occasional
Paper no. 6, Art Museum Libraries and Librarianship (originally co-published
by ARLIS/NA and Scarecrow Press in April 2007). Web: http://www.scarecrowpress.com.
More information
http://www.arlisna.org/resources/occpapers/occpapers_index.html
Discovering physical objects
The Research Information
Network report Discovering Physical Objects: Meeting Researchers’ Needs
investigates issues facing museums in providing the facilities researchers
need in four subject disciplines - archaeology, art history, earth sciences,
and social and economic history. The report found that many museums face
increasing difficulties in providing continued support for research and
scholarship, especially in the context of wider public engagement in their
collections. It gives a overview of the current situation in the UK and
provides a range of recommendations for museums and their supporting
organisations, such as the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council,
Collections Trust and the Museums Association. The traditional role of
museum, it says, centres on the acquisition, conservation, curation and
exhibition of objects and artefacts. Many museums have grown from private
collections built up by scholars, and therefore research and scholarship has
been fundamental to their mission. Academic researchers have been among the
primary users of museums and curators have often been scholars in their
chosen fields. For museums, in recent years, new elements have been added to
this role and, for many, their priorities have changed. The Department for
Culture, Media and Sport makes no reference to research or scholarship in
its four priority areas for museums. Widening participation and visitor
development have become increasingly important in recent years. There is a
renewed interest in object-based research within the academic community and
access to museum objects is extremely important. For many museums however,
academic researchers - who do not contribute significantly to visitor numbers
- are not now viewed as a key target audience. The report investigates these
issues in more detail and focuses on: the availability, scope and quality of
finding aids to enable researchers across a range of disciplines to discover
information about collections of physical objects and artefacts of relevance
to their research; barriers to the search process; and the use and
perceptions of existing finding aids and discovery services by researchers,
including any key gaps in coverage or scope. Web:
http://www.rin.ac.uk/
Government funding for museums in the US
The Institute of Museums and Library Services’ report Exhibiting Public
Value (December 2008) explores public support from federal, state, and local
government in the United States. It concludes there is a patchwork of
financial support, in part driven by the the diversity of budgets, staffing,
visitorship and geographic reach. At a federal level, there is a
concentration of funding by disciplines, aided by bodies such NEA, NEH, and
NSF. In contrast, IMLS supports museums as a sector, regardless of
discipline and a geographic concentration of direct support at the state
level. Much more information is needed to provide a full account of federal
support to the museum sector. The lack of a definitive list of museums in
the United States makes it difficult to assess how deeply federal-source
dollars penetrate into the sector. There is no federal-state partnership
with the goal of increasing the capacity for public service to the museum
sector as a whole. At state level, government support for museums flows
through a variety of different agencies and funding mechanisms, partly
because there are different financial conditions in each state. And, at the
local level, there are a variety of local government cultural funding
mechanisms, partly driven by targeted tax initiatives. More information is
needed to determine whether and how a new funding model, such as a
population-based state grant, could make a significant impact in addressing
any identified gaps in museum services. Web: http://www.imls.gov/
MaNexus
Museums Australia has launched MaNexus, a ning site to facilitate
communication and information distribution. Web: http://manexus.ning.com/
Smithsonian Institute
Smithsonian Libraries, Archives and Museums have
created the Collections Search Center for searching Smithsonian Institute
collections. The search engine provides access to the collections of the
Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, National Air and Space
Museum, National Museum of American Indians, National Museum of Natural
History, National Portrait Gallery, National Postal Museum, Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Archives at the National Museum of the American Indian,
Archives Center at National Museum of American History, Archives of American
Art, Archives of American Gardens, Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives,
Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Human Studies
Film Archives, National Air and Space Museum Archives Division, National
Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum Photo Archives,
Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, Smithsonian Center for
Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution Archives,
Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory -
Chandra X-ray Observatory and other collections. Web: http://collections.si.edu,
Spectrum
The Collections Trust has published the latest version of Spectrum, the UK
museum documentation standard. The new version includes procedures for
opening up and providing greater access to collections using the Revisiting
Collections methodology. The methodology seeks to break down barriers
between ‘people-focussed’ and ‘collections-focussed’ workers in museums and
archive services, ensure that cataloguing and documentation resources that
are accurate, insightful, relevant and accessible, assist in prioritising
documentation planning. Further info http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/increase_access/
and.
http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum/
Archival management software
With support from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation to address the challenge of
cataloguing “hidden collections”, the Council of Library and Information
Resources has published Archival Management Software (January 2009). Lisa
Spiro describes and analyses some of the major technologies available and
the implications of deploying these systems for existing workflows.She
considers the problem of hidden collections, the role of software in
addressing hidden collections, how to select archival management software,
criteria for choosing archival software, types of software and possible
approaches to federating archival description from multiple repositories.
Appendices include an archival workflow and archival management systems
features matrices. Web:
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/spiro2009.html
The Archivists’ Toolkit
The Archivists’ Toolkit is an open source archival data management system
designed for a wide range of archival repositories. Its main goals are to
support archival processing, promote data standardisation, promote
efficiency, and lower training costs. Currently the application supports
accessioning and describing archival materials; establishing names and
subjects associated with archival materials, managing locations for
materials; and exporting EAD finding aids, MARCXML records, and METS, MODS
and Dublin Core records. Version 2.0 was released in September 2009. Future
functionality will support repository user/resource use information,
appraisal for archival materials, managing rights information, and
interoperability with user authentication systems. The project is a
collaboration of the US university libraries and is funded by the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation. Web:
http://www.archiviststoolkit.org
Encoded Archival Context - CPF standard
The EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons, and
Families) schema and tags library is a standard for encoding contextual
information about persons, corporate bodies and families related to archival
materials using Extensible Markup Language (XML). It is maintained by the
Society of American Archivists in partnership with the Berlin State Library.
Web:
http://eac.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/
NZ Digital Continuity Strategy
Archives New Zealand has published Digital Continuity Action Plan: Managing
Public Sector Information Efficiently. Its goals are to prompte: (1) a good
understanding of the problems through effective communication; (2) good
management of all public sector digital information from the point of
creation using standards, audits and systems; (3) development of
infrastructure that supports interoperability; (4) future initiatives; (5)
preservation of high-value information; (6) puplic access to trusted
information; (7) good governance of information management across the public
sector. The plan includes implementation of the National Digital Heritage
Archive, developed by the National Library. The NDHA is a system of software
applications supporting a digital storehouse of websites, sound and vision
files, images and other born-digital and digitised items comprising New
Zealand’s growing digital heritage collections. Web:
http://continuum.archives.govt.nz/digital-continuity-strategy.html
Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts
The National Library of Australia has decommissioned the Register of
Australian Archives and Manuscripts and made the records accessible via
http://trove.nla.gov.au. The NLA says Trove will offer better options for
adding and editing archival metadata. Institutions that already contribute
bibliographic records for their archival collections to the Libraries
Australia database need do nothing further to ensure their archives are
discoverable in Trove. Institutions can also create records in a local
system and upload these records via the Record Import Service. These could
be MARC records in a Library Management System or formatted files from other
types of databases (eg DBTextworks). An 'archives friendly' simple web input
form has been devised to assist uploading of records. For further details,
use the 'Contact us' link in Trove.
This issue of Cross Currents compiled by Paul Bentley
The
Wolanski Foundation would be grateful for feedback
on the scope, format and content of this bulletin..
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