On 5/17/12 5:00 PM, Asaf Bartov wrote:
Following up on the observation already made above, that Sue's
well-received ALA talk has had little concrete impact (as far as we
can tell) on libraries vis-a-vis Wikipedia, I'd say one hint for our
new keynote would be this: we need to talk less about how Wikipedia
works and why it's reliable [1], and more about librarianship in the
21st century including a genuine value proposition for the profession
and their community. [2] Our prospective keynote should make concrete
offers for collaboration about problems they care about today. We
shouldn't expect them to snap to attention when we merely point out
the large extent to which our missions are shared.
I like these points. Of course, as someone from the archives world, I'm
still having a little trouble with the idea that libraries are being
neglected. ;-) I think there is room for us to improve our messaging
when it comes to libraries, though. Those libraries that we have worked
with tend to be alike; we are best at appealing to academic or
government libraries' special collections departments, but it is not
clear what our message is to the vast majority of libraries and
librarians. The main thing, broadly speaking, that archives and museums
share in common is that they mostly have collections of historically
significant, unique documents, while libraries mostly manage collections
of commercially available material which they circulate to patrons.
Sure, many libraries have special collections but these are typically
small departments and often staffed by people with archival or
preservation training.
What kinds of GLAM projects do we tend towards the most? Projects like
content contributions, backstage passes, and editathons are basically
predicated on unique collections, topic-area expertise on staff, or
closed stack or work areas (the latter to a lesser extent). It's odd,
because libraries are so ubiquitous, but we don't seem to be as
sophisticated at thinking about what we have to offer libraries and what
they have to offer us, and we are missing some opportunities to work
with libraries where they are most interested. I think the most glaring
areas are bibliographic records and programs. To take the first one: a
few years ago, you would have thought that library catalogs were
sacrosanct, but now in just about every online catalog you can tag,
rate, review, comment, like, and tweet about a record. We need to find
ways to integrate Wikipedia (and Wikisource and Commons) with library
catalogs in ways that add real value to them.
But really, what do we want out of libraries? How do we want them to be
working with us? How do we plan to benefit them? These are still open
questions.
[2] While you make a good point about the poor state
of articles on
library science, particular libraries, and notable librarians -- it
would mostly apply to library science students (as you say), but not
to active librarians and decision-makers in the library world
Just a note: speaking as someone who's attended a library science
graduate program in the US, I wouldn't even expect library science
students to be much better at this. There are a few library science
academics and PhD students, but most are getting professional degrees to
become librarians. Most LIS students do not spend much time learning
about library science history or even theory, except where it relates to
actual practice. Nobody really cares about museum studies either; we
care about the stuff in the museums.
Dominic