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Title: Library+
Language: English
Authors: Merrill, Alex
Source: Public Services Quarterly. 2011 7(3-4):144-148.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 325 Chestnut Street Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Fax: 215-625-2940; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Physical Description: PDF
Page Count: 5
Publication Date: 2011
Intended Audience: Media Staff
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education
Postsecondary Education
Descriptors: Academic Libraries, Futures (of Society), Library Services, Data, Information Literacy, Humanities
DOI: 10.1080/15228959.2011.623598
ISSN: 1522-8959
Abstract: This article discusses possible future directions for academic libraries in the post Web/Library 2.0 world. These possible directions include areas such as data literacy, linked data sets, and opportunities for libraries in support of digital humanities. The author provides a brief sketch of the background information regarding the topics and describes how a convergence of technologies and policies has made these directions more evident than in the past.
Abstractor: As Provided
Number of References: 7
Entry Date: 2012
Accession Number: EJ949154
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0067458273;8br01jul.11;2019Feb15.06:10;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0067458273-1">Library+. </title> <p>This article discusses possible future directions for academic libraries in the post Web/Library 2.0 world. These possible directions include areas such as data literacy, linked data sets, and opportunities for libraries in support of digital humanities. The author provides a brief sketch of the background information regarding the topics and describes how a convergence of technologies and policies has made these directions more evident than in the past.</p> <p>Keywords: data literacy; future directions; open data; semantic web</p> <hd id="AN0067458273-2">INTRODUCTION</hd> <p>In this issue of <emph>Public Services Quarterly,</emph> we have seen innovative case studies of successful Library 2.0 public services and constructive critiques on some of the trends that we most commonly associate with Library 2.0 digital services. All of the articles within this issue are a true testament to the ways in which academic librarians across the country continue to think outside the stacks and push the conventional idea of library services. However, as we approach the end of 2011, it seems that Library 2.0 or Web 2.0, while still a valid descriptor for services built off the idea of the social web, does not adequately describe the rapid growth of burgeoning library services. As we look toward 2012 and beyond, I would like to discuss some technologies and services that represent territories that are open to libraries but that are, in some cases, outside the scope of traditional library services. This new generation of library services, for our purposes here, I will call Library+.</p> <p>Library+ services all have one thing in common, that is, data. These services are all predicated on the trend in government, research, and educational institutions to make available on the web the raw data upon which many academic papers and government reports are based. This relatively recent trend is not only beneficial for society in general but I believe also presents opportunities for libraries to widen their reach across their respective campus environments. These opportunities include but are not limited to linked open dataset hosting, data literacy programs, and library services in the digital humanities.</p> <p>The opportunities presented in this essay are not new ideas. These Library+ services utilize technologies and concepts that are most commonly associated with the Semantic Web and have been discussed for more than a decade. What is new about these opportunities, beyond a burgeoning critical mass and a maturation of certain semantic web and coordinated information and communication technologies, is the somewhat recent institution of the open government directive in the United States and analogous movements in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Since January 2009, the federal government has made a concerted effort to publish datasets on the open web (<ulink href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/open">http://www.whitehouse.gov/open</ulink>). These open government directives have not only raised the awareness of open data in general but also have significantly lowered the threshold for users to gain access to vast amounts of federal government data in one place.</p> <hd id="AN0067458273-3">LINKED OPEN DATASETS</hd> <p>The new opportunities for libraries to host and provide unique or novel services based on hosted datasets for researchers to utilize are a direct result of the maturation of a few key Semantic Web technologies. The Semantic Web, capitalized here to describe a finite set of technologies as set out by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), is an ambitious and at times confusing idea. The basis of the Semantic Web is to encode meaning into the web by using a set of agreed upon protocols to help web users intelligent agents find relationships that cannot be exploited by using syntactic mark-up languages. There are many excellent summaries of the technologies involved in the Semantic Web available, but I will touch only on a few key points.</p> <p>The Semantic Web has been looked to as the "next web" since Tim Berners-Lee introduced the concept in [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>] (Berners-Lee, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref2">1</reflink>]). Unfortunately, the concepts and applications associated with the Semantic Web had been critiqued by some (Doctorow, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref3">2</reflink>]) and were initially slow to come to market. The delay was such that Richard McManus, from the popular Web 2.0 website ReadWriteWeb, was prompted to write a piece entitled "Where are all the RDF-based Semantic Web apps?" (McManus, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref4">5</reflink>]). These critiques, coupled with the somewhat lengthy publication window of the official W3C recommendations and the development of corresponding applications, have led to the Semantic Web being "just around the corner" for years. Since the publication of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) recommendation in 2004 and the W3C's SPARQL (a recursive acronym that stand for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) recommendation in 2008, the Semantic Web has started to gain traction. These two planks of the Semantic Web platform are what most interest me for their potential implications for library services.</p> <p>One use case scenario for the RDF/SPARQL framework would be for a group of health sciences libraries using RDF and SPARQL to host their university researchers' published datasets so students and researchers around the world might utilize them in real time. Using the RDF to describe the hosted datasets will allow a SPARQL client or SPARQL-enabled web service to query these different datasets to combine discrete domains of knowledge and data.</p> <p>This move from building innovative services to ensure users find the information they require to providing a platform so users can find and use original and possibly local data at first glance may seem large, but in reality it is more evolutionary than revolutionary. There seems to be much traction and movement over the past few years in linked datasets in the health sciences in particular, as evidenced by the activity on the Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group's website (SWHCLSIG). There are other use cases for the Semantic Web on a subsection of the SWHCLSIGs' website (Prud'hommeaux, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref5">6</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0067458273-4">DATA LITERACY</hd> <p>It is time for academic libraries to invest in data literacy programs. The need for data literacy across disciplines is well established (Stephenson & Schifter Caravello, [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref6">7</reflink>]). Data literacy is becoming increasingly important as datasets are becoming easier to acquire, and the tools to manipulate and present the data are moving from the spreadsheet to the web browser. These developments have led many academic departments that have not traditionally used datasets in the classroom to do so. While there has been an uptick in interest in data services, there does not seem to be an active, vocal librarian movement to bring data literacy into the library.</p> <p>There are some good examples in the literature of institutions that have tried different approaches to data literacy. Karen Hunt describes the challenges she encountered when integrating data literacy into a geography assignment in [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref7">4</reflink>] (Hunt, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref8">4</reflink>]), colleagues at UCLA describe their collaborative effort to infuse a one credit course with data literacy as it pertains to undergraduate sociology students (Stephenson & Schifter Caravello, 2007), and librarians from Illinois describe the relatively recent creation of the Numeric and Spatial Data Services and their efforts to become a one-stop shop for datasets in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Libraries (Hogeboom, Hensley, & Phillips, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref9">3</reflink>]). These examples are good reminders that one size does not fit all. The message is that data literacy instruction needs a home (Hunt, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref10">4</reflink>]). Why can't that home be the library?</p> <hd id="AN0067458273-5">DIGITAL HUMANITIES</hd> <p>Another opportunity to build Library+ services can be found within the fields that comprise the digital humanities. Digital humanists, using funding from the new federal Digging into Data Challenge (<ulink href="http://www.diggingintodata.org/">http://www.diggingintodata.org/</ulink>), are using newly exposed data and data visualization techniques to complete some interesting projects. The projects from the first and second rounds of awards are completing projects that range from analyzing and visualizing the impact of railroads on society to using new methodologies to data mine hours of audio.</p> <p>The opportunities here are many and varied. The new teaching foci on the connection between the humanities and computer technology, with a special focus on finding, manipulating, and visualizing data, are all natural evolutions of the traditional data/informational literacy paradigm. I was reading a syllabus for a seminar in digital history on a western university's website recently, and I wondered why the class was not at least co-taught by a librarian. Replace "data" with "information" in the syllabus and it would have been an information literacy outcomes assessment.</p> <p>The opportunities to build Library+ services in collaboration with digital humanists on top of a library's digital collections are as varied and unique as the collections that fill the archives shelves. Building a web interface analyzes text for a libraries special collections in the same vein as the recently released Google Books Ngram viewer (<ulink href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/">http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/</ulink>) is just one of the many ways in which libraries could build services on top of their unique or rare special collections material.</p> <p>As we all look around the corner to see what is coming, I want to restate something my co-editor touched on in her introduction. Whenever an organization contemplates changing a service or discontinuing one service in favor of another, it is important to remember that there truly is not a one-size-fits-all solution or implementation. Every implementation or cancellation of service decision is predicated on having a good handle on the local environment and available resources and being able to make decisions that will ensure a vibrant, sustainable ecosystem of library systems that makes your constituents want to step in your library's space and stay to explore, whether through a glass and metal door or a click of the mouse.</p> <ref id="AN0067458273-6"> <title> REFERENCES </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Berners-Lee, T. (1998, September). Semantic web roadmap. Retrieved from <ulink href="http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.htm">http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.htm</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref3" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Doctorow, C. (2001, August 26, April). Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. Retrieved from <ulink href="http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm">http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref9" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Hogeboom, K., Hensley, M., & Phillips, C. (2011, April). Show me the data!: Partnering with instructors to teach data literacy. Paper presented at ACRL 2011 conference, Philadelphia, PA. Retrieved from https://<ulink href="http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/18809">www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/18809</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref7" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Hunt, K. (2004, April). The challenges of integrating data literacy into the curriculum in an undergraduate institution. Paper presented at Iassist conference, Madison, WI. Retrieved from <ulink href="http://www.iassistdata.org/downloads/iqvol282%5f3hunt.pdf">http://www.iassistdata.org/downloads/iqvol282%5f3hunt.pdf</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref4" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> McManus, R. (2008, October 1). Where are all the rdf-based semantic web apps?Retrieved from <ulink href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rdf%5fsemantic%5fweb%5fapps.php">http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rdf%5fsemantic%5fweb%5fapps.php</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref5" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Prud'hommeaux, E. (2011, September 9). Semantic web use cases in health care and life sciences. Retrieved from <ulink href="http://www.w3.org/2011/05/HCLSIGUseCases">http://www.w3.org/2011/05/HCLSIGUseCases</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref6" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Stephenson, E., & Schifter Caravello, P. (2007). Incorporating data literacy into undergraduate information literacy programs in the social sciences: A pilot project. Reference Services Review, 35(4), 525–549.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Alex Merrill</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> </aug>
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