librarians of the future – part II

Continuing my very personal selection of “digital librarians” and “digital libraries”. I stress that these are people and organizations that make a real difference to me as a scientist. This could be directly by providing material I use, making major changes in digital scholastic infrastructure, or acting as inspiration in scientific information provision. They also have to be things that I can explain or market to my colleagues. And they are personal to me or the sciences with which I interact.

My list is not specifically aimed to exclude conventional Libraries and Librarians, it’s just that with one or two exceptions they have little impact on what I and my colleagues do. I acknowledge the important work done in building resources and that these are valuable. I could present LOCKSS, SHERPA, UKOLN, NSDL, OAI-ORE, … but I’d be unlikely to get much other than a polite ear from my scientific colleagues.

HoweverI can enthuse lyrical about DBPedia which for me has a real “wow” factor and which I feel has a real chance of coming to their attention. They are more likely to be motivated by the Protein Data Bank (PDB) than by project Gutenberg. Both were started in the early 1970’s, and could rightly occur in my list; but the bioscience digital libraries are so numerous that none gets a mention. I could, perhaps have chosen Gutenberg over Perseus – both were pioneers in different ways. So if you or your project is omitted it’s nothing special. Although I haven’t tried to create a deliberately diverse list, there are several places where one person or one project represents a genre. At least I hope they make you think “hmm” or “wow”.

• DBPedia This is a great concept – it takes the infoboxes in Wikipedia and turns them into RDF (?what – well RDF is another of TBL’s ideas – a protocol which creates a global semantic web by linking all information with triples. triples? a simple statement subject-verb-object. The infobox information “Sodium StandardAtomicWeight 22.98976928(2) g·mol−1” gets broken down into triples which relate values to ontologies to units. This is all very new and will change rapidly.From WP: “DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows users to ask expressive queries against Wikipedia and to interlink other datasets on the Web with DBpedia data.” “As of November 2008, the DBpedia dataset describes more than 2.6 million things, including at least 213,000 persons, 328,000 places, 57,000 music albums, 36,000 films, 20,000 companies.” The future of the web is Linked Data – DBPedia ia a marvellous start.
• Harvard University Harvard gets the accolade for being the first major academic institution to start to reclaim its lost scholarship. It says – our scholarly output belongs to us, not the publishers. And, effectively, it takes the burden of fighting uncooperative publishers away from individual authors and shoulders the responsibility. They’ve been followed by Stanford, and recently MIT (MIT adopts a university-wide OA mandate … the MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide OA mandate. … thanks to Hal Abelson, MIT professor of computer science and engineering, who chaired the committee to formulate it: ”

  [MIT] is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. … Each Faculty member grants to the [MIT] nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination.

  PMR: note yet another initiative from the Computer Scientists. Indeed much of the impetus for digital libraries comes not from Libraries, but from Computer Science departments. They often lead and they care deeply about the ownership of scholarship.

• Tony Hey Yet another computer scientist – at Southampton, which has an enviable record in the new digital libraries – Tony led the UK eScience program with great energy and charisma. I understand “eScience” as the infrastructure – and sometimes content – for the digital needs of the scientist, so in that sense a digital library. eScience stressed “Grids” – the power of distributed computing resources to provide on-demand compute power from anywhere in the world to anywhere. It was a time of experiments, some of which have lasting legacies and others not – which is as it should be. We were grateful to the eScience program for funding us – and we have repaid that by donating our work to the world though digital libraries (but not Libraries). Tony has now moved to Microsoft Research where he has developed a program specifically to promote Open Scholarship and is working with groups in academia, Libraries, etc. (including us).
• The JISC. This is the fuding body for digital libraries in the UK, and from which we receive funding. It’s not because of that, nor because they have sponsored the discussion in Oxford (LTOF09), that I include them but because there is a real sense of adventure in their program. They have funding for high-risk projects. They sponsor events like the “Developer Heaven” where all the geeks congregate and hack. Unfortunatelty I missed it – but Jim and Nico went from our group. The require collaboration. They go beyond the standard report which ends “this area needs much more research”. They are looking 10+ years into the future.
• Brian McMahon of the International Union of Crystallography. Scientists all have their own pet discipline or disciplines and this is one of mine. Science has evolved a series of bodies which oversee and coordinate activities, and the extent of this varies wildly. Crystallography has been a tight-knit, friendly discipline for nearly a century with many Nobel laureates who have had major input into how the discipline is organized and it’s truly International. Other disciplines, but not many, achieve this sense of common purpose through their national and international bodies (it does not happen in chemistry).

  The IUCr has Commissions, which include Data and Publications. They run a series of journals which make a surplus including some Open Access ones. They have always had a major concern about the quality of scientific experiments and how these are reported and were (I think) the first ISU to move towards effective mandating that experimental data must be included with publications. By doing this some of the journals are effecively semantic documents which in aggregate are effectively a digital library of crystallography.

  Many deserve credit but I have picked out Brian who has acted as amanuesis to this vision for two decades. He services the communal dictionaries (effectively an ontology), and much of the social and technical infrastructure of the projects. he and his colleagues have supported us at Cambridge through summer students.

There are about 8-9 not yet listed (including a Librarian), so this will be 1 or two posts. If you send suggestions I will consider them. [I have been asked to use LOTF09 as the tag for the Oxford event]