Podcast: Why is Google showing us the way forward in digitisation? asks senior UK librarian
The recent LIBER-EBLIDA workshop on digitisation of library material in Europe explored some important challenges facing national and university libraries across the continent as they attempt to join together to deliver a “European Digital Library”.
In this podcast interview Paul Ayris, librarian at University College London and a senior figure in these European developments, depicts a fragmented European digitisation landscape and calls for more strategic pan-European vision and leadership. He asks a number of challenging questions of the library community, including how the role of libraries has to be re-thought not just as custodians of collections but also as learning and social spaces.
Ayris points out how Google has changed the way people think of, access and use resources, and libraries can learn from more direct and innovative models of introducing change.
In the UK, JISC is providing an infrastructure and leadership in funding digitisation projects and encouraging collaborations.
A look through the currently funded JISC digitisation projects will reveal how these collections differ from the type of digitisation Google is doing, by focusing on special collections with a variety of different formats and types of material, spanning centuries, and with a high degree of curatorial input.
Digitisation Project Plans
A project plan might not be the most exciting document to read, but it can reveal in depth details about how a digitisation project aims to proceed.
Most of the sixteen projects in the programme have now published their plans on the JISC website. Click on the appropriate project name from the digitisation page on the JISC website.
Two particular examples, with details on data capture, metadata, IPR, sustainability, evaluation and QA and other digitisation issues are
- Archival Sound Recording (pdf file)
- A Digital Library of Core Resources on Ireland (pdf file)
Strategies for ensuring re-usable content
The JISC presenation at Educa Online focussed on strategies that funders can take to ensure material digitised in their digitisation programmes is available for re-use by a variety of different users (eg teachers, lecturers, postgrards, undergrads, interested members of public)
For JISC these five strategies are
- Ensure licensed usage for educational sector so that users can be confident IPR is cleared
- Use of open standards so that content does not become locked into particular technologies
- Establish links between content and the national curriculum so that educators can easily export content into their classes
- Develop strategic links with other relevant partners so that content gets exposed to particular user communities
- Support assisted take up programmes to provide context to content that can otherwise be overwhelming
The full slideshow is available from Slideshare
The importance of media literacy
Members of the JISC Digitisation Programme attended the Educa Online e-learning conference in Berlin at the end of November 2007.
Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was one of the key speakers at the conference. He made an impassioned attack on what he saw as the anarchic, non-professional nature of Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, My Space and other Web2.0 services.
To Keen, relying on computer algorithms or permitting any users instant ability to upload content was destroying years of accumulated wisdom garnered through peer-review, editorial control and authorial responsibility.
Many of the Keen’s statements were rather polemical, and suggested throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
However, discussion of the issues at the conference reinforced the idea that the important thing is not to try and ignore such Web2.0 services but put media literacy at the top of the Internet and e-learning agenda. This way users will be able to distinguish a trusted website from a second-rate one, and better manipulate services such as Google and Wikipedia.
A further point to consider was that this issues should not just revolve around information technology literacy but a broader media literacy. Knowledge arrives from many different media - newspapers, television as well as the Internet and plenty others – and so to gain a proper understanding of knowledge, these media need to be considered together rather than separately.
