Silos of the LAMS: A UKOLN Perspective
Posted by Brian Kelly on September 15th, 2009
Later on today I’ll be giving a talk at the CILIP Executive Briefing on “Beyond the Silos of the LAMS” which will address the challenges of “Unlocking the benefits of collaboration between libraries, archives and museums”.
In my 5 minute contribution I will look back at the approaches taken to national digital library development work, starting with my involvement in the standards documents for the eLib, DNER/IE and NOF-digitise programmes. I’ll point out that the producer-focussed approaches which we promoted (in which funding bodies mandated use of certain standards and best practices) were challenged by the rise of Web 2.0 and the Social Web. And rather than digital services being a scarce commodity the role of the Social Web and services such as Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. meant that users had a vast range of digital resources on offer.
The popularity of these services has challenged the traditional approaches the public sector has taken to the development of networked services. We are now seeing a call for lightweight development methodologies, based on simple and widely deployed standards such as RSS, as opposed to the development of more sophisticated standards and applications, especially if such approaches fail to be adopted in the wider market place or their use results in complex user interfaces.
We are also seeing renewed enthusiasm from the development community, with developers apparently now willing to give up their time (sometimes weekends) in order to attend ‘mashed library’ and ‘mashed museum’ events, barcamps, hackfests and related events.
But what are the implications of this changed environment for professionals in the libraries, archives and museums sectors? Over the past couple of years UKOLN has delivered a series of workshops for the community which provide an introduction to the Social Web and how various Social Web technologies and the Web 2.0 approaches of sharing and openness can be (and are being) used to enhance the services provided by cultural heritage organisations. These workshops also address the barriers to effective use of the Social Web, including the need to gain a better understanding of the technologies, the resource implications in setting up and sustaining such services, the concerns over issues such as sustainability, interoperability, accessibility, etc. and the organisational barriers, such as the firewall policies implemented by IT services departments.
These are issues which are faced across the libraries, archives and museums sectors. Addressing these issues should therefore benefit from collaboration across libraries, archives and museums. And how do we facilitate such collaborations? One approach is to make use of the Social Web technologies to facilitate discussions and sharing across the sectors as well as using these technologies to deliver services to the user communities?
In recent months we have already seen an increased take-up of Twitter, to illustrate one Social Web technology, across the library sector. Twitter, indeed, was the focus of the recent #CILIP 2 debate, which took place at the CILIP Headquarters. The interest on the discussions of the role of Web 2.0 for the library and information communities resulted in the “#cilip2″ tag ‘trending (and being more widely discussed on the dat than ‘swine flu’). And we have just seen a directory of 100 British Librarians on Twitter which has been established, which makes it easier for newcomers to find their peers and participate in the discussions.
My vision for how we can “unlock the benefits of collaboration between libraries, archives and museums” is to encourage the spirit of openness and sharing which professionals in the sector should have and to use a variety of Social Web services to encourage greater debate and discussions on the vision for our services in the networked environment we now work in.
September 15th, 2009 at 11:03 am
RSS was part of the “mandated use of certain standards and best practices” since the very early days of its adoption – so the fact it wasn’t widely adopted (enough) is probably down to something else.
I’d also argue that there has always been a spirit of sharing and collaboration – indeed one might argue that this was much stronger in the days of eLib than it is currently.
Openness is an interesting issue. I think libraries have traditionally been open with their catalogues in the sense that they would let you search them (if you adopted the right standard) but not in the sense that they’d give you a copy of all the records. Likewise, museums have been luke warm in their willingness to open their digital content up to the wider world. I wonder if these attitudes have really changed much over the years?
So I think any positive movement has to come from a distinct change in attitude towards the value of open content – and that this has to come from the top down and be reflected in the ways institutions are measured. I don’t think that ‘sharing and collaboration’ are (or have ever been) an issue.
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February 18th, 2010 at 11:45 am
[...] Blog posts have also provided an opportunity to report on talks given at a range of events throughout the country including the AIM 2009 conference, the CILIP-S and CILIP Wales conferences, the “Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists” conference, the MCG Spring Meeting and the Silos of the LAMS CILIP Executive briefing. [...]