RFC: MediaCommons and libraries
Ben Vershbow - April 19th, 2007Hello MediaCommons community! This is a RFC (request for comments) — I have a few questions that I’m hoping might be illuminated by the wise crowd here.
On Monday I’m speaking on a panel at the Digital Library Federation’s Spring Forum in Pasadena. The topic I’ve been assigned to discuss (alongside Noah Wittman of Berkeley): “Public Libraries: Services in Online Scholarly Communities.”
The abstract:
Communities of scholars are constructing domain focused social spaces encouraging collaboration, shared production, annotation, editing, and authorship. They typically utilize increasingly easy to use open source content management systems such as django and wordpress that enable the sharing of a wide range of content including images, videos, and texts. Arguably, libraries could be valuable partners in these online spaces, providing both infrastructure as well as content production, discovery, and manipulation expertise. How can libraries explode their registries and services outward to provide both content and technical support?
My presentation will begin as a show and tell: a quick tour of several networked publishing experiments that the Institute for the Future of the Book has run over the past year (Gamer Theory, The Holy of Holies, the Iraq Study Group Report), each of which explored what happens when you place documents in critical social frameworks that allow readers to post feedback around the text. This will be the preamble to the bigger story, which is (you guessed it) MediaCommons. My aim is to discuss how these new publishing forms are being employed in a more rigorous, domain-specific knowledge community, and how this could impact areas like peer review and pedagogy, etc etc.
The weak link here is articulating how all of this connects to libraries (public libraries especially). How might a cutting-edge scholarly community like MediaCommons benefit from better integration with library services, and how, in turn, might it help to improve those services? This is a topic that we haven’t discussed much yet so this seemed as good an opportunity as any to begin a thread. Actually, I’m hoping to take comments posted here and build them into the presentation — to serve as a conduit for your ideas and concerns. Who better to answer these questions, after all, than the community itself?
So here’s a possible jumping-off point… For a while now I’ve been thinking about how the boundary between libraries and presses is likely to blur as scholarly practice moves ever further into the digital domain. Libraries have technical infrastructure, tools and expertise — not to mention vast collections! — that digital publishing communities desperately need, and which traditional presses are less able (and willing) to provide. At the same time, libraries are struggling to develop new forms of digital access that employ net-native social methodologies and draw upon the special knowledge of scholarly communities. My main question then is: is there the potential for collaboration?
Building on that, some more specific questions:
- Most of the discussion here has focused on how to make interactions among scholars more transparent. What would it mean for research — the methods and the materials — to become similarly transparent?
- What sorts of tools, infrastructure and support could MediaCommons seek from libraries?
- What are some experiences you’ve had (positive or negative) using digital library services and how might they inform the agenda here? Is anyone here already working closely with a particularly awesome library?
- Can you provide examples of how libraries in your experience are already edging into the role of publishers?
- How might the specific knowledge of the MediaCommons community improve or enhance access to library collections?
- How promising are practices like tagging, annotation and other collaborative discovery frameworks? Should these be built into specific library systems, or do we need a broader scholarly framework that can move across repositories?
- What are new publishing formats you can imagine that would be predicated on better integration with library and archive collections? What would it mean for libraries to be continuously “publishing” themselves through the lens of MediaCommons?
- In Media Res is a very informal layer on top of the vast, disorganized archive of video on the web. What have we learned so far from this practice that might be applied to more formal libraries and archives? How could we help libraries and archives to make sense of the broad chaotic media landscape beyond their walls?
- How might MediaCommons serve as a pedagogical connector between libraries and students?
- How could MediaCommons work with public libraries to foster critical media skills in non-scholarly communities? In disenfranchised communities?
Please point out any angles I’ve missed here (I’m sure there are many). I’d be most grateful for any feedback you can provide, small or large (and over the next 48 hours if possible!). I’d really like to bring your voices into this presentation.
Ben - have you hear of initiatives such as the Ohio Link Digital Resource Commons - http://info.drc.ohiolink.edu/ ?
You might be able to make a connection somehow.
r
I’ll take a few of these questions:
- Can you provide examples of how libraries in your experience are already edging into the role of publishers?
The University of Minnesota library has UThink, which is a university-wide blogging initiative. They published Into the Blogosphere, which is an online edited collection of essays. More libraries could sponsor the publication of such online edited collections.
- How promising are practices like tagging, annotation and other collaborative discovery frameworks? Should these be built into specific library systems, or do we need a broader scholarly framework that can move across repositories?
I am perhaps a little more conservative on this point than you might expect. I would love to see folksonomy brought in, but it shouldn’t replace current methods of taxonomy. I’d like to see both, but for the two to be technologically discrete.
- How might the specific knowledge of the MediaCommons community improve or enhance access to library collections?
Not sure if this is a direct answer, but I think that in general, it would be great for libraries to do more with indexing online open access scholarship. There are so many good online journals, but hardly any of them are in scholarly databases. Kairos is in the MLA International Bibliography; I’d like to see more of that.
- What are new publishing formats you can imagine that would be predicated on better integration with library and archive collections? What would it mean for libraries to be continuously “publishing” themselves through the lens of MediaCommons?
I’m not sure this would be predicated on integration with library collections, but I’m wondering what role print-on-demand services would play, or if they’d be something libraries have thought about.
I also think that libraries should do more with MMTORs (massive multi-thinker online reviews), also known as book events, in which a group of bloggers agrees to read a book and post about it. These, like book reviews, could be indexed. Perhaps they could be vetted through a submission process, but I could see how that would get unwieldy. Still, lots of academic bloggers with the appropriate credentials are doing this kind of work. See the ones at Crooked Timber:
Sheri Berman,The Primacy of Politics
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks
Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science.
Parlor Press version.
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
Doug Henwood, After the New Economy
China Miéville, Iron Council
and the ones at The Valve:
Past Valve Book Events
Event Archive
Event Archive
Event Archive
Event Archive
Event Archive
Event Archive
Each of the above links goes to an archive of posts about a specific book. You could instead go to The Valve and look in the left sidebar to browse the book events.
Finally, I gave a presentation at MLA 2005 that might address more of these issues:
and see also Publication, the Public University, and the Public Interest, a conference held in 2005 at the University of Minnesota.
Hi Ben,
Sounds like a really interesting panel. A few thoughts:
How promising are practices like tagging, annotation and other collaborative discovery frameworks? Should these be built into specific library systems, or do we need a broader scholarly framework that can move across repositories?
Students and faculty affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania are now able to tag items in the library’s online catalog–a good example of folksonomies peacefully co-existing with taxonomies. For a thoughtful post comparing the strengths and weaknesses of amateur and professional classification systems (e.g., tags versus LOC subject headings), see Dan Cohen’s blog.
More generally, I’d like to see libraries act as liaisons between online publishers and service providers or, put differently, between humans and machines. For example, libraries might partner with small publishers to help them embed semantic metadata, such as COinS and RDF, into their sites that can be read and processed by web crawlers, indexers, link resolvers, aggregators, and other software agents and tools. If MediaCommons wants to support authors in part by making it easy for readers to discover, access, cite, share, and build upon their works, then we need machine-readable metadata to help us do that; we need libraries to help us do that.
This sounds like a great presentation, Ben. I’ve been thinking a lot over the last couple of days (here at HASTAC) about the relationship between university presses and university libraries, and the ways that the library’s role as an information collector might put it in an ideal spot from which to become — or at minimum, to partner with — an information disseminator. Libraries already serve as filters for the enormous quantity of information in circulation, getting users to connect with the texts they require. As the role of the publisher, at least in the MediaCommons model, begins to shift from that of gatekeeper to that of filter, it seems like there’s an awful lot that we could learn from libraries. Not least, the work that’s being done in library and information science in thinking through issues of metadata — as Kari points out in the PennTag project, the relationship between taxonomy and folksonomy, between institutional and user-oriented metadata — but also, and crucially, issues of preservation, of ensuring that the texts that we create today remain usable into the future. Ideally, MediaCommons should find ways to partner with library programs (such as the California Digital Library initiative) before we get too far underway, to ensure that our data formats and tagging systems mesh with the standards that they’re establishing.
As to your first question — Most of the discussion here has focused on how to make interactions among scholars more transparent. What would it mean for research — the methods and the materials — to become similarly transparent? — this has been in the back of my head for some time now. By making the interactions among scholars more transparent, we’re moving at least part of the process of research out in front of the curtain, enabling students to see how we write and revise in conversation with one another. Ideally, I’d like the entire research process to be transformed by those interactions, as well as by the interactions of texts within the network. Clancy points to the issue of scholarly databases and the need to produce better indexing of electronic publications; what I’m hoping for MediaCommons is that, in conjunction with library partners, and by making good use of tagging and a (hopefully much more secure) version of trackbacks, we might merge the publications and the indexes, enabling the research to take place in the same virtual space as the texts themselves.
In the long run, what I’m imagining is a deeper merging of the roles of publishers and libraries, creating a multi-directional throughpoint in the information network, producing, collecting, tagging, filtering, and distributing new scholarship.
Some very interesting discussions and suggestions so far. Instead of treading on other folks ideas, let me shift gears and talk about public libraries as community centers; spaces that not only filter information, but also provide opportunities for the public to digest, explore, engage, and discuss information as it relates to their daily lives. MediaCommons’ social networking capabilities can function to bring different communities into dialogue with one another, but it is also customizable for particular communities. How can M/C serve as a kind of town hall for particular groups while still tapping into the larger network?
The public library that Avi is talking about comes from the Progressivist impulse of the late 19th and early 20th century. The names that come to mind are two Deweys: John Dewey who advocated “that politics is the work and duty of each individual in the course of his daily routine. The knowledge needed to be involved in politics, in this model, was to be generated by the interaction of citizens, elites, experts, through the mediation and facilitation of journalism. In this model, not just the government is held accountable, but the citizens, experts, other actors as well.” The other is ,a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvil_Dewey”>Melvil Dewey, who Dewey Decimal system was a breakthrough in means of organization. According to The Straight Dope, “Dewey’s innovation was to combine a numbering system (like at the British Museum) with classification by topic. However, the numbers didn’t indicate a shelf but rather a field of knowledge. Battles says, “Thus he joined the analytical simplicity of decimal numbers to an intuitive scheme of knowledge, one that would fluidly accommodate all the books ever written, and all the books that could be written as well.”" For me that is why librarians need to be more attuned to issues like MediaCommons: we are organizing fields of knowledge and we want and need their expertise.
Finally, one prominent site used by rhetoricians is americanrhetoric.com, a site that houses a number of famous oratorical moments for online access and dissemination.