Taiga Forum Holds Inaugural Meeting in Chicago
Academic librarians ponder competitive collaboration
By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 05/01/2006
The first annual Taiga Forum met in Chicago in March, bringing together associate university librarians and assistant directors from more than 50 of the top academic libraries. The forum, named for the changing arctic layer, gave librarians an opportunity to articulate challenges and solutions for competing with online ventures and effecting deeper collaboration among technical services, public services, collection development, and information technology.
Feral professional
The hottest topic was the “Feral Professional,” as James Neal, Columbia University librarian and VP of information services, dubbed the emerging trend of hiring new library staff with Ph.D.'s or degrees from related fields to help plug technology and other gaps in the library. Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC VP and chief strategist, urged academic librarians to develop a service layer for discovering, locating, requesting, and delivering. This layer, composed of a link resolver, institutional repository, federated search, and delivery services, would enable libraries to compete in an era when “the URL is the currency of the web.”Paul Duguid, coauthor of The Social Life of Information, discussed the trade-off between openness of information (à la Wikipedia) and quality of information. Using three examples from the open source world, he demonstrated how variations in user-contributed data affect accuracy and accessibility. For instance, in the music database Gracenote, multiple user entries for composer (e.g., Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) force users to make their own authority control decisions. In digitizing the novel Tristram Shandy, Project Gutenberg contributors deferred making choices about how to show intentional blank and black pages and footnotes. And, finally, in an entertaining look at Wikipedia, Duguid revealed the edit wars over the biographical entry on Daniel Defoe, with writers adding and deleting his role as a spy. These examples highlighted how the library's traditional role as an arbiter of quality is being challenged by Google and open source content projects.
“Provocative Statements”
Forum organizers presented attendees with a list of 15 “Provocative Statements,” essentially predictions that they assert will become fact “within the next five years.” Among the most far-reaching and most discussed predictions about academic libraries in the next five years related to staffing, early retirement, and the death of the OPAC.
- There will be no more librarians as we know them. Staff may have MBAs or be computer/data scientists. All library staff will need technical skills equivalent to today's systems and web services personnel. The ever-increasing technology curve will precipitate a high turnover among traditional librarians; the average age of library staff will have dropped to 28.
- Traditional library organizational structures will no longer be functional.
- All information discovery will begin at Google, including discovery of library resources. The continuing disaggregation of content from its original container will cause a revolution in resource discovery.
- A large number of libraries will no longer have OPACs. Instead, we will have entered into a new age of data consolidation both of our catalogs and our collections.
Go to www.taigaforum.org/docs/ProvocativeStatements.pdf for a complete list. The meeting supplements events like the American Library Association's Big Heads cataloging group, composed of technical services directors of large research libraries. It was initiated by Innovative Interfaces Inc.—Jay Datema
