The question was asked, “What is the future of digital collections and digital librarianship? ” Where will we be with this in the next ten years? Will we welcome it?”
If the recent past is any indication, we have no clue! Now, that is not as really as cynical as it sounds. Who woulda thought that we would be exchanging pictures and sounds and all, online? Those who are younger, don’t really understand how rapidly this has evolved. Like a snowball rolling downhill. But hang on to your hats, its been quite a ride. The best may be yet to come!
Digital collections are becoming truly awesome. Digital collections are being built to show what can be done. There is more and more “wow factor” being put into these. Much like early graphic webpages with too much going on. The best digital collections, have a wow-factor, but more is needed. It is the objects that are contained and explained, and how they all relate to one another that makes a collection. If it is a historical collection being built, it needs explanations. It needs to have artifacts and tell the story. It needs to explain how, and why. OK, it needs to say: who,what, when, where, why and how. And it needs to show it! As Dr. Martens has tried to get us to understand, it’s all about the metadata. The metadata puts it all together.
Now, to me the metadata is one of the problems. There is no real standard yet. Lots of folks are trying out stuff. But even worse, some objects are being digitized and then stuck in files with numbered labels. No metadata, except that unhelpful label. It may be in a folder with similar items, but that is all. Unfortunately some collections are being built with no policy at all, just someone’s idea of “valuable stuff!’ In the worst case scenario, it may be that once it is digitized it will all be pitched. (I can hear the “everythings online” voices mummering, “Been wanting to clean out that junk for years!”) With no organization, an unlabeled digital file is worse than a bad vertical file! To build a great collection, someone has to see the whole picture, start to finish. If the collection is worth being built, it is worth labels and finding aids. Metadata!
Who will build these collections? I think the “haves.” We had a brief discussion about haves and have-nots in one of 5990 discussion boards. The haves don’t always realize what they have, but they have the funds. The have-nots know that they don’t have it, and sometimes realize what they are missing. Will certain segments of society select the “best” items to put online? Will we leave out others because we don’t want those voices heard? Will we forget where we came from with all the hue and cry? I see the “haves–money and technology wise--” making digital collections that will wow us! The have-nots will want to make some collections, so they will get awesome grants. Who will be in charge and who will see the big picture? Now comes the cynicism, probably the people who need to be in charge won’t be. Sort of like the famous “Peter Principle.” Promote someone to the highest level of his/her incompetence.
What I do see is technology taking over more and more of the searching and delivery. I know it is very unlibrary of me. Yet the ones who know the technology are the ones who are really the haves. They are determining how searches will be made and what will be retrieved. Will history be rewritten because of the new ways of searching?
Creating tags, adding metadata, can be tedius. So how can tagging objects be done? Maybe like the group of church ladies I blogged about. Everybody came and added metadata for the day. Maybe it will be done by all the eager users online doing social tagging (The church ladies used social tagging, too!) What will the role of librarians be? Maybe to help organize all these tags into some sort of authorities or some such organization. The librarians can’t do it all by themselves. They will need technology and they will need the masses. I used to think social tagging was silly, but now I am not so sure but what it may be the next metadata. It will need to evolve and develop. Too many generalities makes everything one big Google search.
If my classes have taught me anything, it is that we are the information locators and providers. We are the ones who can build the vocabularies to make social tagging work. We are the ones who will help gather items into collections. They will probably overlap and intertwine. They will be tagged with things we never thought of by ourselves, but we will adapt.
Ranganthan said we need to save the time of the user. We should not frustrate the user. We need to help the user find what is in these digital collections. To adapt Ranganthan some more, every book has its reader, well maybe every digital object has its viewer, or its use.
Last point, all this data is growing by leaps and bounds R. P. Feynemen, the physicist, (see previous post) explained how so much data could be placed on the head of a pin. We do that now. We will have to get better at miniaturization to carry this information around. We are getting there with our smaller and smaller gadgets. The metadata will have to adapt to those devices, too. That should be easily accomplished in the next 10 years. Will we welcome it or will we run from it?
