Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective

Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective 

An article in Inside Higher Ed just caught my eye, "Pooling Scholars' Digital Resources ". The article described something that is hopeful for social scholarship, ominous for libraries.

The brief article describes the advent of Zotero Commons, a collaboration of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive. The purpose is to create an archive of scholarly resources, contributed by working scholars, in the public domain. The archive will offer a free optical scanning service to make the documents searchable.

Scholars will upload documents to the archive with an enhanced version of the Zotero plugin for Firefox. Imagine scholars contributing documents that they've annotated with Zotero and you get one of the great ideas behind this initiative. This version of the plugin will also allow scholars to collaborate on materials on a shared server.

Score one for social scholarship. Score a big one. But where are libraries in all of this? Andy Guess, the author of the article, has an answer. Here is his opening paragraph:

The various and competing efforts to digitize university libraries’ vast holdings have no lack of ambition, but access to documents and copyright issues have been two factors slowing the development of online scholarly repositories. Now, an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely and delve into scholars’ file cabinets instead.

Bypass libraries entirely.

Apparently, we libraries are a) not innovative enough to solve the problem of access, and b) too caught up in copyright issues to be of much use in the age of social scholarship.

Is this a fair comment? On the face of it, not really. First of all, I'm not sure that access and copyright are the main things holding us back. And second, these are issues that concern us and rightly so.

I think the problem goes deeper. I see no evidence that academic libraries have it in them to band together to sponsor a project like Zotero Commons. We don't have the group vision. If we did, we'd be doing it.

There seems to be promise in the Open Content Alliance. The OCA is also associated with the Internet Archive and includes content from academic library collections. But here's the heart of the matter, the operative phrase "library collections". We need to be looking beyond the realm of our collections and figuring out our role in the process of scholarship. This is where our profession doesn't seem to get it. This is why an initiative such as Zotero Commons has no library involvement.

Our collections are our bedrock, but the notion - and reality - of collections are changing. The scholarship that makes use of these collections is changing. The Zotero Commons might contribute to that. " “I think it’s really going to have an impact on the way that scholarship is done.” So says the Center director. This may be overly optimistic, maybe not. But when two notable groups get together with this goal in mind, academic libraries should sit up and take notice. We should ask ourselves why we aren't involved. We should wonder why we didn't think of this ourselves. We should ponder what this says about us, and our role - and our concept of our role - on campus.

Bypass libraries entirely. It's so disheartening to read this.

Posted by Laura Cohen at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective