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Traditional versus nontraditional content

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”9 Perhaps none of the trends covered here fits this notion better than trends in content. All of the pressures inherent in the landscapes covered in the scan converge here. Social, economic, technological and learning issues make content management for libraries and allied organizations enormously challenging. The older pre-Internet world of content coexists with the new world. Print material must still be bought, circulated, reshelved, repaired, preserved and discarded. This material will persist, much of it will not be digitized and people will continue to use it. But, because libraries do not exist independently of their cultures, all artifacts of those cultures must be curated, preserved and made accessible. So, the challenges faced by the stewards of content will not diminish, and issues of description, use and preservation will be radically different than the issues related to the print content currently under stewardship.

Clifford Lynch makes this point unambiguously; “Rather than considering how to redesign or recreate or enhance libraries as digital libraries, we might usefully focus our attention on the human and social purposes and needs that libraries and allied cultural memory institutions have been intended to address. […] [W]e must be careful not to overly emphasize the parts of this knowledge ecosystem that are familiar, that we are comfortable with intellectually, socially and economically, to the exclusion of the new, the unfamiliar, the disturbing, the confusing.10

Here are some key points about content made by people OCLC interviewed:

• Being collection-centric is old-fashioned; content is no longer king—context is.
• Context means adding intellectual value to content.
• Maybe it would be cheaper to buy monographs as POD (print-on-demand) rather than buying in anticipation of need.
• Most libraries’ status is about what they own. How can we change this? It is the library equivalent of the tenure system.
• We need a way to bring together all content on a topic, not just what’s in the catalog.
• The library has no curatorial role for published material—it’s up to third parties to archive.
• Bibliographic information is a corporate asset and should be treated like other assets.
• Librarians are way too focused on published material: they should leave that to the Amazons and concentrate on the hard stuff.
• Special collections need to be liberated and desegregated.
• Access to published content is closing down as licensing restrictions increase.
• The idea of the balanced—but unread—collection is disappearing.
• The Web means public libraries can focus more on specific, local communities—we can be more specialized. There is no need for all branch libraries in a system to have a common core collection.
• Print-on-demand could be huge.
• Publishers and librarians need to work more closely together to identify consumer needs and content delivery systems.
• There is a lot of interest in deconstructing the publishing unit.
• We need to provide what the market wants but we haven’t established what that is.
• Librarians avoid talking about relationships among content and certainly have not done anything about this.
• Creation of copy cataloging is not a sustainable model—there is less and less need for human-generated cataloging and less ability to pay for it.
• The goal should be access to print material and stewardship of institutionally published material.
• Institutional repositories are important but we’re not doing anything. We’re waiting to see what others do.
• There is no consensus as to what institutional repositories are.
• Who has or will have the large-scale utilities for data migration of the content of institutional repositories?
• My library today is more like Harvard than it was 20 years ago because of the common aggregated material.
• There must be more linkages among content types—people should be able to find all relevant material regardless of what content quadrant it belongs in.
• Institutional content may never be “collected” but the library should have a curatorial role.
• Simple indexing and ranking are good enough for open Web resources—get over the cataloging issue!
• Collection-level records have to be the way to go for large, related collections.
• Much institutional repository work is bypassing the library.
• We definitely have no consensus or idea what to do about material on the open Web.
• The jury’s out on the sustainability of e-learning but publishers are looking at repurposing content for course packs.
• Publishers are slow to see the need for languages other than English.
• We need to get medical and engineering content to underdeveloped nations—this could be a big growth area.

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