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12/15/2005

Planning for the library of the future

The world of digital information is virtually making the traditional library obsolete.   What will the libraries of the 21 st century be like? What kinds of information should they save? How should they make information available to library users? The executive director of Rice University's Digital Library Initiative will spend 2006 researching such questions as the Digital Library Foundation's Distinguished Fellow.

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Drawing a "living blueprint" for libraries of the future as they morph in the rapidly changing world of digital information is the challenge Rice University's Geneva Henry will take on as the Digital Library Foundation (DLF) Distinguished Fellow during 2006.            

"A library is not just a warehouse for books," said Henry, executive director of the Digital Library Initiative at Rice. "It's a conduit for people who want to get their knowledge out into the world and for people who are looking for that knowledge. "

The traditional library has facilitated that exchange of scholarly communications, but advances made possible by the Internet and the World Wide Web have raised a number of issues that need to be addressed so that the emerging libraries of the 21 st century are headed in the same direction.

The DLF, a consortium of libraries and related agencies pioneering the use of electronic information technologies to extend collections and services, has taken the initiative to establish a service framework to understand and communicate the business processes of emerging libraries. The foundation selected Henry to be its Distinguished Fellow to oversee development of the framework.

Since coming to Rice in 2000, Geneva Henry has worked with faculty, staff and students to identify and understand electronic information usage and creation. Starting in January, Henry will devote a year to meeting with other DLF members to gather information about the many issues that libraries are dealing with and their trials and errors as well as successes.  

"It is a significant undertaking, yet a most important and timely one, as the library undergoes significant changes in the business model it has worked under for at least the past century," she said. "The emerging library of the 21 st century will be required to redefine its role with its constituents as new, complex information sources continue to present themselves.

"What is needed are shared vocabularies for discussing the changes, common grounds for identifying the services that the emerging library must provide and, most importantly, a road map for identifying the path to successfully migrating from what we now think of as the traditional library to providing the new information and knowledge resources that users need to continue growing their knowledge and contributing back to the advancement of the human record," Henry said.

She noted that as a result of the digital information age, more people have become self-sufficient about communicating without an intermediary like a library. They write their own newsletters and books and post them online. "Who's taking care of that information to make sure that five, 10, 30 years down the road, today's knowledge will be available to future generations?" Henry asked.   Libraries will continue to play a critical role in archiving information and in making decisions about which information needs to be kept.

She noted also that technological advances have made it easier for scientists to acquire enormous data sets, but some of these researchers do not know how to manage such large volumes of information. "Libraries are very good at managing data," said Henry.

As Internet-savvy scholars sidestep the publishing process, questions about copyright and institutional policies for digital works arise.

Figuring out what the library's role should be, regardless of the media in which scholarly communications are published, is the goal of the DFL service framework. "The landscape right now is not really clear when you go to the library," Henry said.   "My job as the DLF Distinguished Fellow is to spend 12 months fully dedicated to coming up with a 'living blueprint' that identifies all the pieces that will be needed to implement the service framework. " That blueprint will cite areas of inconsistencies that must be resolved, consistent successful practices that warrant emulation and missing services that need to be fulfilled.

She emphasized that the framework will not be cast in concrete; rather, it's meant to be updated and evolve over time. "Each institution will have to look at this and analyze what the best approach is for them. "

Because the DLF membership includes approximately 40 leading research institutions, mostly within the U.S. , Henry will be traveling extensively next year, and she is highly enthusiastic about the in-depth research on her enormous "to do" list. "As a nonlibrarian working in the library, I am very interested in the transformation currently under way with both libraries and the library profession as well as the transformations being experienced by the publishing industry and what these hold for the future of information and sharing of knowledge," she said.

For more information on the this research, contact Henry at ghenry@rice.edu or B.J. Almond in the Office of News and Media Relations at balmond@rice.edu .