David Walters (Merriman Award Winner 2014, King’s College London)
UKSG, NASIG and the John Merriman Award
As the lucky winner of the joint UKSG/NASIG 2014 John Merriman award I was invited to attend the annual NASIG conference, held this year in Fort Wort Texas. It goes without saying (but I will anyway) that I was extremely thankful to the UKSG panel and the Merriman Award sponsor, Taylor & Francis, for this exciting and rewarding opportunity. Published as an editorial in an earlier edition of eNews , you can read my submission here.http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/UKSG/317/Open-access-and-librarian-detectives/?n=121b8a3f-e721-4bc0-8354-7ad4d47f99de
The reason that NASIG and UKSG are closely affiliated is that John Merriman had a hand in setting them both up, going back well over 30 years ago. Clearly a very well respected chap, the Merriman Award honours his contribution and aims to promote this strong partnership.
The UKSG article (below) gave me a new appreciation of this award in this context. At the NASIG conference, I came across many people who remembered John. It really was quite fascinating to hear how these organisations have grown and matured since their inception in order to meet a rapid pace of change and changing direction in our profession. The idea of a coming together of key stakeholders to steer developments across the scholarly communications landscape continues to endure through significant times of change.
http://uksg.metapress.com/content/k302r0k32513m657/
Crossing the pond really helped highlight to me the global reach of our profession and the significance our skills bring to researchers around the world. The event really underlined the importance of librarianship as an international collaboration – sharing the same conversation - in the same way the other stakeholders like publishers and researchers do. Research itself is often a global enterprise.
Same song, different steps?
There were too many highlights to do justice with a short post! I’ll be adding more stuff to my blog in due course. Additionally, reports for each of the sessions of the conference will be published in the journal ‘The Serials Librarian’ (0361-526X) early next year. This year I recorded a talk by Richard Wallis (OCLC) on ‘The Power of Sharing Linked Data’.
The information sector was described as a ‘frontier’ - where anything is possible. It’s uncharted, empty space. Whilst in the arena of chance, choice and change, librarianship is poised to change our society for the better. Knowledge has never been easier to submit, transmit or access. There is public good in the mission of our services compared with the sometimes nefarious ideologies of private interests. We are radicals with transformative power and we are ambitious that our changes to the world leave a positive effect for the next generation.
Many are keen to see development surrounding the formalisation and growth of libraries as publishers of research output. There are many on-going initiatives that have a mission to create sustainable and innovative publishing models. University leaders need to facilitate the required investment to redevelop the library’s supporting roles. This means updating staff skills and infrastructure to serve the needs of their community, specialising around their top subject areas, just as the university presses did almost a century ago.
Some speakers argued passionately for internet archiving and preservation as the only way, going forward, to provide context to a piece of research. This is a key area where libraries are ideally suited to take the lead. This kind of service will enable internet time travel for users allowing them to accurately recreate the circumstances surrounding a piece of research in the same way neighbouring journals on the shelf in the library does. I likened this often overlooked service to my inbound, abstract flight path - having effectively travelled backward and then forward in time – only much faster and at the twist of a dial.
The vital importance of key stakeholders sharing these points across at events like NASIG is that sometimes the importance of a system like this is overlooked; whilst I am keenly interested in the transformation of research outputs in an unrestricted, scholarly dissemination system, the surrounding web ‘garden’ in which it grows is also in a constant state of change, flux and adaptation. The number of institutions that even archive their own institutional presence is quite low.
The changing structure of data on the internet and the dramatic implications this has for discovery of libraries on the web was also discussed. We are all familiar with the ‘internet of documents’ – the web of links. The transition to what’s known as the ‘internet of things’, or a ‘web of data’ is emerging. If we expose our resources to the web in the way that it wants it will cement the role of libraries today and transform our mission in providing public access to our collections. Our data must be consumable to the same services used by our students and researchers, and usable to the web at large. It will enable our resources to be signposted on the same virtual roads of discovery our users are walking.
Anyone can get up and join the line dance in-step, with the right knowledge and practice. Knowing the steps is important when no-one is exactly sure how the song will sound. Everyone from Texas seemed to know what they were doing anyway!
Time to take the bull by the horns
Another great aspect of an event like NASIG is the opportunity to network with a wide range of fellow professionals from a variety of different backgrounds. The global impact of these changes presents us all the same issues at the same, seemly enormous, scale. However, all I spoke to see this change as a groundbreaking opportunity to develop ourselves and our profession by enhancing the roles we can play. And in this interconnected world we have no better means to work together to meet these challenges. It’s an overwhelmingly positive message that will ultimately be of huge benefit to the needs of our researchers and students as our services shift to meet their requirements.
No comments:
Post a Comment