Lorcan Dempsey

Online Computer Library Center | OCLC

Resource Discovery for the Twenty-First Century Library - edited by Simon McLeish June 2020

We’re in a period of rapid transition. Libraries are focusing on decisions, strategies, and choices that are best for their home institutions, yet also driving change by collaborating in energetic new ways. This panel will review key new trends and challenges, including collaborative collections, transformative open access agreements, and consortia...

This is a discussion paper prepared in collaboration with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Library Initiatives. It presents a framework for operationalizing the BTAA collective collection. A collective collection is a collection managed collaboratively across a network of libraries. We have a very specific focus in this paper on the ”purchased”...

Dempsey and Malpas consider the future of the academic library in the context of a diversifying higher education system. The academic library is not fixed. It is changing as it adapts to the changing research and learning behaviors of its home institution, which are the principal drivers of the library service. Dempsey and Malpas explore ways in wh...

In their report, delegates of the Who Decides? workgroup of the OSI2016 conference put forth three proposals in which key stakeholders might convene to enact an economically viable and sustainable transformation of the current scholarly communications system to one of open access. The “Global Flip” workgroup of OSI2017 discussed the previous year’s...

Representatives of the OSI2017 Scholarly Libraries and Library Groups stakeholder group were tasked with (1) Summarizing the various perspectives involved in the library community with regard to open access, (2) Describing areas of general agreement and disagreement and the issues and questions that may be powering these different viewpoints, and (...

The paper considers how the changing nature of research in digital environments is reshaping the nature of library collections and services in academic and research libraries. It describes two central directions, each a response to the centrality of the user in a network environment. First, the library has an increasing role in managing the researc...

What are the usage-related challenges currently faced by open efforts? For instance, open data is intriguing in principle, but in reality, making underlying data open can be problematic, conflicting with the need for research secrecy (whether driven by the desire to be first to publish, or the desire of funders to hold onto data to protect future d...

The Usage Dimensions of Open workgroup came together and considered definitions and priorities around its topic. From priorities, themes were identified. One theme included the character of research outputs and the actual research workflow process. The second theme represented economic considerations. Stakeholders were identified, and solutions con...

abstract: This article takes a broad view of the evolution of collecting behaviors in a network environment and suggests some future directions based on various simple models. The authors look at the changing dynamics of print collections, at the greater engagement with research and learning behaviors, and at trends in scholarly communication. The...

Libraries provided catalogs, then metasearch, and now discovery layers. This article reviews current features and directions of these services. However, it also discusses the growing importance of discoverability. As 'discovery happens elsewhere' it is important for the library to put access to its resources in the user's workflow.

Lorcan Dempsey of Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, presents some notes about libraries and the informational future. Libraries represent resources to be managed, and strategic choices need to be made about how best to create value for the home institution and their users. Libraries need to be more enterprising than bureaucratic. Libraries an...

Information technology developments over the past 3 decades have profoundly influenced university scholarship, but the relationship has been characterized by aspects of both continuity and change. This panel of presentations and ensuing discussion consider ways in which these developments drive changes in scholarly practice and present challenges f...

Mobile communication has been more widely adopted more quickly than any other technology ever (Castells, et al., 2007). It represents a diffusion of communications and computational capacity into a growing part of our research, learning and social activities. It has resonated with emerging youth behavior, providing support for distinctive patterns...

Think of some of the ways in which the environment that library users operate in has changed in recent years. Behaviors and expectations have been reconfigured in a network environment as more of what people do enters a network space. These and other factors have radically changed the user and service environment in which libraries operate. Librari...

I wrote about the 'long tail' in terms of aggregation of supply and aggregation of demand. In this context, aggregation of supply is about improving discovery and reducing transaction costs. It is about making it much easier to allow a reader to find it and get it, whatever 'it' is. Or, in other words, 'every reader his or her book'. Aggregation of...

If librarians want to improve their visibility and value in the increasingly crowded digital information spaces, where users expect good results without expending much time or effort, they must learn to repurpose data to create added value. Since librarians already possess valuable data sources, like circulation statistics, reference transactions,...

The academic library is not an end in itself. It supports research, learning and scholarship, and it must adapt as research and learning behaviors change in a network environment. The papers in this volume give a good sense of the challenges posed by such developments and the manifold library response. This paper briefly considers some of these iss...

However, from another perspective, overlap across the Google 5 collections can be considered quite small. The redundancy rate is, of course, likely to be a function of the number of collections being combined – the more collections, the greater the overall redundancy rate. But if analysis of overlap is confined to bilateral comparisons, a different...

But digital materials generally do not afford the luxury of procrastination. The fragility of digital storage media, combined with a high degree of technology dependence, considerably shortens the "grace period" during which preservation decisions can be deferred. Issues of long-term persistence can arise as soon as the time digital materials are c...

A distinctive and legible environment not only offers security but also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience. Kevin Lynch (quoted by Joseph Rykwert 1) The words of things entangle and confuse, said the poet Wallace Stevens, and 'portal' is certainly one such word. This is in large part because we do not have a shared sens...

The description of collections is becoming increasingly important in the context of networked information services and is an important underpinning for developing a collective resource. This view has emerged clearly through the MODELS project [1], where it has influenced the course of the clumps and hybrid libraries [2] who are working with collect...

Outlines some of the features of the policy environment which led to the setting up of the influential 'subject gateways' as part of the Electronic Libraries Programme. It has the modest and partial ambition of putting some of the discussions of the time on record. This article has a particular focus: it looks at some aspects of the policy backgrou...

Lorcan Dempsey is the director of UKOLN at the University of Bath, and co‐Director of the Resource Discovery Network. UKOLN is supported by the Library and Information Commission, JISC, and the University of Bath. The RDN is funded by the JISC. Thanks are due to Derek Law for commenting on the section about the policy background to the eLib gateway...

The "Subject gateway" has become a part of the lexicon of network information use in the research, learning and cultural arena. For the moment, we can say that it typically refers to a network resource discovery service that provides database(s) of resource descriptions created according to specific selection and quality criteria. A recent review o...

Examines the nature of community networks and how they developed, in order to provide public librarians and decision makers with a view of emerging trends and of points of contact and comparison within the area of community information services. The research took the form of an extensive literature review, focusing on the period between 1992 and 19...

The British Library's Initiatives for Access programme aimed to ‘help the Library to come to terms with [digital] technology’. Libraries are institutions that have developed in a print world. They have become important public places, their use has become part of the normal behaviour of readers, and they have evolved a set of practices around the ma...

The management of autonomous, heterogeneous network resources and services provides new challenges which libraries are now addressing. This paper outlines an approach based on the construction of broker services which mediate access to resources. It outlines a framework – the MODELS Information Architecture – for thinking about the components of br...

Focuses on the development of libraries and other information institutions in a new network space created by flows of data. Discusses the active user; the need for integration; rising level of infrastructure; shared activity; new divisions of labor; managing data flows; and rights and sale. (AEF)

In his chapter on libraries and librarians in A history of reading, Alberto Manguel calls librarians ‘ordainers of the universe’, an epithet used, he tells us, by the Sumerians. He discusses the efforts of Callimachus to ordain the order of books at The Library of Alexandria and notes that ‘With Callimachus, the library became an organised reading‐...

A Distributed National Electronic Resource? was the sixth MODELS workshop and one of the largest to date. Around 50 invited participants gathered at the Stakis Hotel in Bath on 5–6 February 1998, to discuss management and access approaches to the growing mass of currently unconnected resources provided by libraries, data centres, archives, subject...

Recommendations for increased resource sharing between libraries have been emerging from a range of sources in recent years. However, the majority of local library management systems currently in use do not inter-operate, so resources are fragmented and there is no unified access. The situation is complicated by organisational and business issues....

This article discusses the emergence of distributed library services drawing on recent European initiatives to describe developments. It focuses on Z39.50-based services. It outlines a descriptive framework for such services and briefly introduces developments in other domains. Projects funded through the EU Telematics Application Programme are hig...

This paper describes emerging metadata practice and standards. It gives an overview of the environments in which metadata is used, before focusing on metadata for information resources. It outlines an approximate typology of approaches and explores different strands of metadata activity. It discusses trends in format development, metadata managemen...

This article discusses the emergence of distributed library services drawing on recent European initiatives to describe developments. It focuses on Z39.50-based services. It outlines a descriptive framework for such services and briefly introduces developments in other domains. Projects funded through the EU Telematics Application Programme are hig...

The MODELS (MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services) project is based around a series of five workshops. The third of these, “Organising access to printed scholarly material”, proposed a co-ordinated approach to providing access to a managed, distributed bibliographic resource. This article has two main ambitions: firstly it explore...

Materials for teaching, learning and research are moving into the digital sphere. This move is affecting scholarly communication, teaching and learning in the academic community in important ways. These are significant changes, operating at technical, service, organisational and cultural levels. In this paper we wish to examine some of these change...

Z39.50 is an information retrieval protocol. It has generated much interest but is so far little deployed in UK systems and services. This article gives a functional overview of the protocol itself and the standards background, describes some European initiatives which make use of it, and outlines various issues to do with its future use and accept...

Lorcan Dempsey describes some recent metadata and resource discovery initiatives in the UK's Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) and within the European Union's Fourth Framework Programme for research and technological development. A particular focus will be the quality controlled, subject-based, information gateways within eLib, the ROADS projec...

The Information Superhighway is at this stage a vision, and not a reality; conduit, content and connectedness are discussed as the prerequisites for a high speed network, which is still some years away. Possible service scenarios for future networked public libraries are outlined, together with some current issues to be be solved. The importance of...

The Internet is a worldwide network of electronic networks which is growing rapidly. Access to resources is facilitated by a number of ‘systems’, including Gopher and World Wide Web. Improvements in the organisation of and access to Internet resources are certain to be developed, and librarians may have a rok to play. Meanwhile libraries are involv...

With networking becoming ubiquitous amongst automated activities, the need for standards which ease the burden of accessing systems by end-users of widely differing abilities is paramount. The development of network systems, particularly in relation to library activity, is outlined and some of the search tools and standards, both current and emergi...

An abstract is not available.

The exchange of bibliographic records throughout the whole of the book world has raised new questions for the booktrade and librarians alike. This brief paper examines some of the features of concern to the three sectors, and the interaction between them. It falls into three parts: • Some aspects of the current situation as regards automation and t...

Pré-conférence au 34e congrès LIBER qui s'est tenu à le Bibliothèque universitaire de Groningue aux Pays-Bas du 5 au 9 juillet 2005. Réflexions sur le devenir les bibliothèques universitaires à l'âge des TIC et des grands vecteurs privés d'information (Google, Amazon, etc.).

Intervention à la pré-conférence "converging and dissolving the University Library" du 34e congrès LIBER (2005) qui s'est tenue à le Bibliothèque universitaire de Groningue aux Pays-Bas. Amazon et Google sont devenus des acteurs incontournables qui ont su imposer leurs « hubs » dans le secteur de l'information à l'image des « hubs » d'aéroport, qui...

Aquest article explora el disseny i l'ús dels portals en un entorn bibliotecari. Tracta les motivacions per construir portals, així com l'estructura i la tipologia d'aquests. A més, examina l'entorn de l'usuari en què es desenvolupen aquests portals. També argumenta que aporten serveis útils d'integració i presentació, però que s'han de considerar...

Conclusions of the report of the panel discussion about the future of the scholarly communication "Library roles"

La comunicació mòbil és la tecnologia que ha estat adoptada d'una forma més àmplia i ràpida que cap altra. (Castells et al., 2007). Representa la difusió de les comunicacions i de la capacitat computacional en una part cada cop més gran de les activitats socials, d'investigació i aprenentatge. Ha trobat eco en el comportament emergent de la joventu...