An article published recently in the Journal of Library Administration caught my attention.  The article’s title is “It’s Not Your Parents’ Library Anymore: Challenges and Opportunities in the New Webs of Complexity”.  I have done a lot of reading this semester about the changes in libraries as they become more and more digital.  The changes present challenges and yet present us with opportunities to approach some things differently than in the past.  I think the title caught my attention because of the periodic emails I have received with comparisons of “then” and “now”–always interesting for me to read because I am old enough to have experienced both the “then” and “now”.

In my opinion, this article by Paula Kaufman, is well worth reading.  Ms. Kaufman gives an overview of the transition from a “carbon-based world to one that is increasingly silicon-based” (Kaufman, 2007, 7).   She describes the libraries’ tangible symbols and what they have represented to universities.  She also discusses accomplishments of the library profession in more recent times.  Finally, the author identifies several societal trends she believes will have a big impact on the future of libraries. 

The impact of the Internet on users includes a trend for wanting information “on-demand” and interactive activity.  Users will demand options and control.  Technology has opened the door to new and different types of communication and education.  The library and roles of librarians is shifting “…from keepers of materials to managers of access to materials and providers of a wide range of value-added services, such as publishing or technology development…” (Kaufman, 2007, 19).  Providing research assistance has always been a role, but the venues are changing.  Change in the array of services may impact the need for space.  The author advises that thoughtful but quicker change is needed to keep adjust services in relation to technological changes.  Finally, she predicts that future libraries will become unique based on their institutional culture, specialized collections and the decisions they make to adjust to their environments. 

 

Kaufman, Paula.  “It’s Not Your Parents’ Library Anymore: Challenges and Opportunities in the New Webs of Complexity.” Journal of Library Administration 46 (2007): 5-26.

There has been online discussion among class members about the need to consider the development of information storage harware and software and to keep in mind that, to be usable, information may need to be moved from one media to another.  There is a big investment in time and resources, but moving information may be necessary or desirable to keep pace with technological improvements.  I found an article about strategies that might be used by companies to move their corporate collections to a new content management software product.

Moving a company’s entire digital collection is a huge undertaking, but as companies need or want to move digital collections to more advanced content managment systems (such as those with Web 2.0 functionality), they need to spend time planning how to approach the process. 

A key step is to know your data.  The more you know about the type of data, how much exists, hot is is used, how long is it keps, how is it secured and who has access, etc., the better the decisions you can make.  Vamosa, a software product discussed in the article by Jessica Dye has a repository analysis tool.  The analysis tool is run in advance of a migration and can give feedback about the amount and type of information in the repository.

Clear goals and objectives for the migration also help focus on the best steps.  Depending on the objectives, information may be cut and pasted to a new system, or data may be reorganized to support business strategies.  In any case, an organized, step-by-step approach can help keep the repository operational with little downtime for customers. 

Determining what information is important to keep is another key factor to consider.  Information needs to have metadata in order to be useful and retrievable by users.  Some migration products automatically add basic metadata to make search faster, according to Dye.

Overall, the process of moving information is a big endeavor, but may be necessary due to the evolvement of software products and may have a payoff in terms of functionality.

 

Dye, Jessica.  “Move It or Lose It: Content Migration Strategies.” eContent 30(2), 2007.

One of the dilemmas for evidence-based practice (EBP) is that the information/studies are spread out among many publications.  In addition, some studies are more robust than others; without close review of the studies, you do not know the quality of the study or the degree to which the findings of the study contribute to changes in patient condition. 

 

The Cochrane Collaboration is a non-profit organization whose goal is to make up-to-date and accurate clinical information available to help healthcare providers make good decisions about evidence-based treatments.  Evidence-based health care is an approach in which providers use the best available scientific information upon which to base their recommendations for patient care.  The Cochrane Collaboration was established in 1993 http://www.cochrane.org/.

 

One of the major products of the organization is the Cochrane Library, a database of systematic reviews of clinical research literature.  Professional volunteers write reviews of clinical research using a systematic approach.  The purpose of the review is to determine which forms of health care interventions work and which do not.  There is an internal review process employed prior to a review being placed in the Library collection.

 

The effort of The Cochrane Collaboration to create a collection of reviewed clinical research is admirable.  Many hours are being contributed by educated professionals to evaluate the strength of clinical research.  This collection is a tool that contributes to improving patient care and outcomes.  I did not locate any information on the website about information use, however, the Cochrane Collaboration has published an Impact Factor (IF)—a measure of frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a year.  The Cochrane database has been cited more than the average in 2007.

The role of information professionals is changing as collections become more digital, but it is still unclear as to what the evolving role might look like.  One proposal I found in the Annals of Internal Medicine was for a role called the “informationist”.  

Authors Frank Davidoff and Valerie Florance cites the facts that physicians (and all other professional clinicians) are obligated to base their clinical decisions on the best published scientific evidence, but published information is not available in one place.  Time and skills for searching for the best are required, and yet time is limited and skills of professionals are lacking.  Many professional now in practice were educated prior to the development of digital collections and do not have the skills to retrieve needed information.  The authors propose clinical librarian positions called “informationists” who would be positioned in the health system at the point of care.  These individuals would be an integral part of the health team and serve to help identify searchable questions and retrieve the best information they could to benefit patient care.  As part of the staff, they would develop relationships with health care providers; familiarity would perhaps decrease the ambivalence about needing help.  The “informationist” role would also be helpful to librarians in that it would allow them to learn what kinds of clinical information is needed most often.

This type of role may be more possible in academic or larger institutions rather than smaller ones; however, the concept described in the article could be modified and still accomplish some of the described objectives.  One of the most important issues, in my opinion, is that the article describes a situation in which information professionals work side-by-side with those to whom they are trying to provide service.  When this occurs, interpersonal dynamics change, and people often develop a greater understanding and appreciation for the contributions each can make.

 

Daividoff, Frank and Valerie Florance, “The Informationist:  A New Health Profession?” Annals of Internal Medicine 243 (20 June 2000) 12: 996-998.

An article that I have been thinking about on and off all semester is one called ,”The impact of knowledge repositories on power and control in the workplace” by Peter Gray.  The article argues that knowledge repositories allow managers to have more control over employees and may decrease employee power.  I like to think on the positive side about how knowledge repositories can be useful to organization, so the author’s negative position is sobering to me.  Knowledge repositories promote information sharing.  They are intended to improve organizational efficiency by making information available to others in the organization, yet employees may feel vulnerable in their positions if the goals for the knowledge repository are not clear or are not believable.

Perhaps, as the author says, the impact of knowledge repositories may be different depending on the type of business setting; manufacturing industries may be negatively impacted, however, knowledge industries may be positively impacted.  I would classify health care as a knowledge industry.

Here we are in a crisis time in health care; the cost and quality of health care are under scrutiny.  Hospitals are focusing on improving the quality and safety of health care; emphases on these areas has come about due to a national report, “To Err is Human” published in 1999.  Improving health outcomes for patients is an on-going focus of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) and The Joint Commission, a national agency that accredits hospitals.   As a result of these national efforts, I have seen increased cooperation within hospitals belonging to a health care system as well as participation by hospitals of differing background (management) who participate in contributing best practice information, ideas and results to national sites established for that purpose.  The author talks about the fact that repositories separate author from his/her work, but if the information was not available, how would I know to look into it?  The author talks about the fact that with expert information, there is not as much need for highly-skilled employees and there is a loss of analytical experience due to the fact that employees did not participate in the development.  My experience leads me to disagree with this statement.  What works in one institution cannot always be applied in another.  Even though an idea is available, it takes employees with experitise in the content area and with knowledge of their institution to be able to implement the changes that will bring forth the desired response.

Gray, Peter H. “The impact of knowledge repositories on power and control in the workplace.” Information Technology & People 14 (2001): 368-384.

Reading about metadata–information about information–didn’t have too much meaning for me until I started having some pertinent examples.  At that point, I realized I knew about metadata; however, I did not have the label to apply.

What is metadata?  An online article by Dr. Kim, “Metadata in Medicine”, describes the three types of metadata I have read in several publications.  Descriptive metadata may be bibliographic information or a coded diagnosis (e.g., ICD-9 code) or procedure for a patient. It “describes the content of a resource for identification, searching, and retrieval” (Kim, 2004).  Structural metadata includes things such as table of content or other description of the artichitecture of the information object.  Administrative metadata, for a journal might be publishing information, and describe technical characteristics of an information object.

In healthcare, a number of defined metadata schemas are already in use; here are several examples.  The International Classification of Diseases, ICD-9, is used to code and classify data for patient records.  It aids in research, quality improvement and is used extensively for billing.  The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is in use for documentation of clinical medicine.  Healthcare is striving for interoperability of information in order to achieve President Bush’s goal of electronic health records by the year 2014.  HL7, Health Level 7, is a standard used to allow different health care systems to share information.  Metadata schemas will continue to be developed and refined in order to contribute to a higher level of health care.

 

 

Kim, George. 2004.  ”Metadata in Medicine”, MedBiquitous E-Learning Discourse (MELD),  http://meld.medbiq.org/primers/metadata_in_medicine_kim.htm (accessed October 2, 2008).

Our assigned reading, “The Social Life of Documents”, was a fun article to challenge my thinking about the many documents I have handled over the years and the purpose and impact they may have had.  I have not thought about documents in quite this way.  The authors, Brown and Duguid, discussed the various ways documents may affect institutions or society as a whole.  Some of the ways include:  linking people with like interests, linking meaning with or for a community, provide a means for negotiating beliefs, and engaging people.  I’m thinking back to the various collections I have observed on-line and can visualize how the collections can affect the users they serve.

In my first post (9/7/08), I discussed three collections of interest I found on-line.  The Africa Focus: Signs and Sounds of a Continent collection cited in my first blog had the purpose of being available for individuals interested in studying Africa – linking people with like interests.  The National Park Service Collection could link people with like interests, but it also had the express purpose (as stated on the NPS website) of re-engaging Americans with their national parks.

I can see that, in fact, the information posted on these sites can extend the usefulness and the purpose of the information.  The concept Brown & Duguid present adds a new dimension for me.

 

 

Brown, John Seely., & Duguid, Paul. 1996. The social life of documents. First Monday 1(1).

I have been a user of collections for a long time, but not a builder of them.  I have been known to collect lots of specialized documents in one place, but they are for my personal use and not what I think of as formal collections–they are also not very well organized.  In this course, we will complete an assignment in which we develop a collection or make a proposal for a collection, so I thought it would be useful to study the characteristics of collections.

I came across an article by Kenneth Thibodeau in the Journal of Digital Information entitled, “If you build it, will it fly?  Criteria for success in a digital repository”.  The article describes a basic framework for evaluating digital repositories whether they are public libraries, corporate or government repositories.  The author emphasizes the overall goal of a repository is to fulfill its purpose and meet the needs of its intended customer groups.  The framework for evaluation includes the following five areas:  customer service, orientation, coverage, collaboration, and state.

Service refers to the provision of customer service to those who use the repository.  Customers need to be correctly identified and services should be relevant to the groups being served.  Services should be available, easy-to-use, reliable, and efficient.

Orientation refers to whether the goal of the digital collection is to capture retrospective, e.g., historical information, or prospective information.  The goal should be part of the definition and scope of the collection.  Whatever the orientation, the question is how well the repository satisfy the needs of its user community.

Coverage is how thoroughly the collection covers the information in the selected topic of interest.  If coverage is representative of the topic, there may be a growing number of repeat users.

Collaboration is one end of the continuum; isolation is at the other end.  Sometimes collections operate in isolation due to constraints placed on them, but in general, collaboration, or the degree to which the repository shares information with others is seen as positive.  Collaboration can enhance the performance of the collection.

State refers to the state of maturity of the collection.  A new repository may not have a representative coverage or extensive collaboration, but as it matures, it becomes more comprehensive.

I think Thibodeau’s framework is a good one with which to start.  It could be applied by a user as he or she is deciding if the repository might be useful; it could also be used as a self-evaluation by someone who is building or managing a collection.  I think it will give me a perspective as I am visiting and using collections.

 

Thibodeau, Kenneth. 2007. If you build it, will it fly? Criteria for success in  a digital repository.  Journal of Digital Information 8(2).

Our assignment last week was to select three interesting collections.  I selected Africa Focus:  Sights and Sounds of a Continent, the National Park Service and Oklahoma Crossroads.  Since we are learning about collections, I decided to use some of the definitions provided in the article “What is a Collection” by Lee (2000) and compare and contrast the criteria with the three collections I chose.

Africa Focus: Sights and Sounds of a Continent Collection

The purpose of the Africa Focus collection is to provide convenience to the scholarship, study and teaching of African studies.  The site makes copies of rare books available to many individuals.  Numerous images and sounds are also available.  Two subcollections are identified:  Image and Sounds and the African Digitization Project.

The material in the collections is not solely owned by the University of Wisconsin (the sponsor of the collection).  The University does have an overall copyright on information on the site independent of the copyright on specific items within the collection.  There is a content provider for the collections who is responsible for material selection, the development and implementation of the collection including contextual and other information. 

The collection has a unified retrieval system.  From the growth of the usage statistics, it is believed the site is proving useful to the its community.  In FY2003, the collection was accessed approximately 73,000 times; in FY2008, it was accessed 188,696 times.

National Park Service (NPS) Collection

The purpose of the NPS collection is not defined specifically, however, one of the goals of the NPS overall is to re-engage Americans with their national parks.  The collection likely contributes to this overall goal.  The NPS collections is comprised of images, maps and drawings, and test.  The collection is de-centralized.  Each individual park or program has the capacity to develop its own on-line information, then the National Park Service provides an over-arching framework so the site appears as one to the user.  The NPS does not have ownership of all the information on the site.  Agencies that are not part of the NPS, e.g., the Library of Congress, several university libraries, and the Getty Center for Arts/Humanities, have agreed to participate in this and share additional information.  United States citizens of the are the targeted users, however, no information was found to be able to determine if the site meets the needs of its users.

Oklahoma Crossroads Collection

The Oklahoma Crossroads collection was developed by the Oklahoma Department of Libraries (ODL) to capture the history of Oklahoma from the late 1800’s to present days.  The user community is believed to be the people of Oklahoma or others interested in the historic events of the State.  Decisions to include information in the collection is based on the rarity of the information, its interdisciplinary application, and the how at-risk the information is from a preservation point of view.  Oklahoma Crossroads includes documents, photographs, newspapers, reports, pamphlets, posters, maps and a database, as well as several virtual tours. There is a unified retrieval system. The ODL coordinates the collection, but not all of it is owned by Oklahoma libraries.  No usage statistics were located on the site, so the usefulness of the collection to the user community is uncertain.

Observations: (based solely on published information)

Since there is not uniformity among developers of collections, each site contained different information concerning the collection.  The NPS site appears to be better established and information more complete at this point in time.  The structure of the University of Wisconsin Africa Focus site describes a well-defined structure as to the policies concerning collection development.  

The purpose and intended user community was not always clear.  I made some educated guesses based on the information provided.  User statistics is a common statistic to keep on websites; the statitics may very well be available but just not published on the site. 

 

Lee, Hur-Li. 2000. What is a collection? Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 51(12): 1106-1113.

This blog is being devoted to the understanding of digital collections.  What exactly are they?  Where are they found?  What topics are covered? 

What is a digital collection?

A digital collection is an accumulation of information or resources developed for the purpose of meeting the information needs of users.  Information may be formatted in many ways, but is organized in a way that allows for immediate and user-friendly retrieval.

Where are digital collections found?

A search on the Web led to the identification of digital collections at many sites.  Universities and libraries are home to many collections as a way to share specialized information as well as highlight areas of research.  Several aggregate lists or registries of collections provide an avenue for interested persons to locate topics of interest. 

What topics do digital collections cover?

There are digital collections about almost any topic–art, history, music, culture, education, leisure activities, hobbies, and many more.  Think about areas of interest, and you will most likely find one or more collections that fit your interests.

Collections that interest me

I found the following three established digital collections of interest:

1. The National Park Service has a digital site that contains images, documents, drawings and maps of the natural resources maintained by the National Park Service.  The site is very comprehensive.  Users can browse by subject or park or they can search for particular details.  The information is logically divided into topical areas including sections such as American history, biographies, nature, science, culture, recreation and fun.  If you are interested in National Parks as I am, you may want to visit this site. 
2. The University of Wisconsin is home to a digital collection called “Africa Focus–Sights and Sounds of a Continent”.  This site contains faculty research and teaching material, slides and photographs, texts, and sounds.  Information about 45 African countries is available.  I found this site to be intriguing.  Growing up I lived in Africa.  My childhood memories are very out-dated, and I believe this site will help me become current again.
3. Oklahoma Crossroads:  Documents and Images is a site based on collections of the Oklahoma Department of Libraries and focuses on over one hundred years of Oklahoma history.  The collection includes documents, photographs, newspapers, reports, pamphlets, posters and maps.  There are also five virtual exhibits.  I have never been a history buff; however, it was a highlight to me when my husband decided to join in the centennial celebrations.  I have gained appreciation for the cultures and individuals who have contributed to the development of our state.

Perhaps you share some of my interests and will want to visit these sites.

Donna