The future of libraries

From Paul Anderson of Intelligent Content Ltd comes the announcement of the latest JISC report. Understanding metadata – the possibilities, purposes, and functioning in a Library 2.0 world, or even the information architecture world of any online information source, is crucial. If you want to keep up-to-date, or find out what this ‘metadata’ talk is all about, then now is as good a time as any to grab a coffee and start reading.

Metadata for digital libraries: state of the art and future directions

Paul Anderson says:

The Web is having a profound impact on the role and function of libraries. This goes way beyond ‘the demise of the book’, which is, quite frankly, a very simplistic way of looking at things. It’s actually more about having a vision for the future and how you realise that vision. For example, one of the problems facing librarians is how to create high quality ‘digital objects’, as they are called. If you think about a book, you might judge its quality in terms of the jacket design or the type of paper used or whether or not you can see guillotine marks on the edge of the pages. You probably wouldn’t think about some of the very obvious quality factors unless they were missing. If you opened a book and, say, the pictures were missing or all the pages were in the wrong order, you’d probably want your money back.

The problem for librarians is that when you are creating things like e-books, you have to think about a different set of ‘quality’ criteria because these digital objects will not be used in the same way that physical books are. They will need to designed so that they can be searched, for example, or delivered as separate pages. For the average library user, accessing information that spans multiple digital sources is increasingly a messy process and for those who are used to search tools such as Google and Yahoo this new and highly fluid environment can be a considerable barrier to accessing information from digital libraries and online collections. What is concerning about this is, unless we are careful, people will increasingly see the search results thrown up by Google, Yahoo etc. as the be-all and end-all of a particular area of interest or subject.