At the LAUNC-CH conference on the Future of (Academic) Libraries. John Price Wilkins is the keynote speaker. Future is defined as 2025.
(live blog)
Google guy from the G5. “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” John wants to establish himself as a collections guy. He was a UVa as a late Medievalist. (spelling).
In 10 years, libraries will cease to be organized around print. Research libraries now have large locally held collections, but not so much in the future. Small high use collections and special unique collections. Only a few coordinated centers. Print on demand as people need it. abandons his slides.
Local collections, shared repositories, handy medium (should be media i think).
Open Content Initiative and Google mentioned in passing.
what will a research library be:
collaborative spaces, conduits for licensed content (ouch), partners with faculty and students, an archive (curating the intellectual and creative record), publishers (libraries will be come publishers), advocates (for whom? for a new IP landscape. how to do rich collections whilst paying licensing that is rapidly rising and consuming library budgets?). shows chart of rising of prices for major journals consuming the entire library budget.
insuring access and connecting users with information. constantly asking what it means to be a librarians. sustain the record and to grow it.
now his digital activities. quotes ross atkinson’s reference to janus (the two faced god). institutional repository effort. go to scholarly publishing office at umich.edu props to ncsu and susan nutter for their work on publishing there.
now google partnership at UMich. 2002 talks with Larry Page (UMich alum). non-destructive conversion, high quality images (surrogates). a copy for UMich and UMich in a collaborative venture.
complex slide on file formats. benchmarking and standards. similar process to Google. what UMich gets:
600dpi ITU G4 for print
300 dpi jpeg2000 for illustration
naming conventions
OCR
checksums
production notes
barcode id
google has an ongoing improvement process
are these perfect images? they will serve in preservation (says UMich, but none of the other G5).
microfilm was no substitute, but he feels that scanning is pretty close.
collaboration with EU libraries. changing the terrain for their users. UMich is moving materials to Amazon and seeing sales, High use online does not mean high physical sales thru amazon. (booksurge and lightning source as instiprint examples). academic titles are really looooong. now a Uof Chicago Press book. restoring material to print. cheaper than printing on your home printer
opportunity to do more with this content. collaborative initiatives, added value, enhancements.
Why do this? To create a great public good (see AAP speech by Mary Sue Coleman — to a hostile audience).
libraries make it possible to discover knowledge.
clauses in the google contract. to have an to provide access and to place in third party repository in the digital library federation.
future is about doing this as a shared effort. a number of copies physically distributed with shared cost and shared curation.
historical literature in science has been much bigger than anticipated. JPW: we believed in this forever. (his presidentr

publish
digitize
preserve
reshape our spaces
reshape our services
and have the right staff to support them (retain individuals of distinction)
“building a bridge as you cross it”? riff on this.

revolution and not reform needed to do essential work.

concludes with ranganathan’s library rules:
books are for use
every reader has his book
every book has its reader
save the time of the reader
the library is a growing organism

questions:
thanked and asked to talk about UMich services that will be added
mike keller talked about 8 services that stanford will add
build out content in as open a way as possible
barcodes are for digital object identifier and resolving urls on the fly based on that. building a digital library with input from UMich staff. right now text is better than images. natural language for automatic summarization say.
are you only digitizing public domain? no everything. how do you get around copyright? they don’t. google is being sued. UMich is indemnified and google claims this is a transformative use. the mere act of copying is not a violation (says UMich) the use is the question. The use by UMich looks legal. Backfile purchases from Wiley and Elsevier allows UMich materials access.
Books from retiring faculty? Can that be used to expand content?
Oxford allowed open access but not reprint sales (for example).
natasha disagrees that we always believed in this forever has certainly been JPW’s career so don’t be so coy about it.
now the symposium on digitization. fear of mass digitization (or large scale). cliff lynch says we are all working on large scale digitization and are all facing unforseen problems.
the perfect is the enemy of the good notes JPW. when is compromise too great? doing it (digitizing) well now is important. poor capture will misrepresent information. incomplete digitization is not acceptable.
2 pt type as a std? too fine for reality.
questions winding down and me getting stuck on typing.
costs of special collections if they are the future? specials are usually paid for by gifts and grants instead of base budget. JPW: costs are outstripping budgets and we need to fund digital preservation and to stop doing some things. it will be awkward and tough. libraries say yes to too many things. there will be substitutions and something will be dropped. dropping duplicate subscriptions will happen.
unc librarian sarah malick: we will have to shift resources from print to electronic. cites cardcatalog shift as an example. librarians can recreate. but saying goodby to the card catalog was incremental but the next changes will be even faster.
JPW: university presses need to participate and to change.
duke monographic cataloging section head: how much time is spent in tech services that is now done by catalogers? catalogers are very busy now.
JPW: split public domain and owned to work. shift from just cataloging to working on rights. tech services are the read guard of the library profession.