During the Ticer’07 summerschool ‘Digital Libraries à la Carte’ I First met Eric Lease Morgan. He was an excellent instructor, making the techie stuff more palatable.
With much interest I noted one of his recent lectures cited in Current Cites. His lecture “Today’s digital information landscape” has some thoughtful points on future libraries, librarianship and above all catalogs. Here are some interesting quotes selected from the various parts of his lecture
On MARC and XML “MARC is a Gordian Knot that needs to be cut, and XML put into it’s place.”
On databases and indexes “They are two sides of the same information retrieval coin.”
On exploiting the network “A rising tide floats all boats. The tide of network computing is certainly upon us. Let’s make sure our boats are in the water.”
On institutional repositories and open access “Acquisitions departments are not necessarily about buying content… An acquisitions department is responsible for bringing collections into the library.”
On the next generation catalogs “More importantly, a “next generation” library catalog will provide services against the things discovered. These services can be enumerated and described with action statements including but not limited to: get it, add it to my personal collection, tag & classify it, review it, buy it, delete it, edit it, share it, link it, compare & contrast it, search it, summarize it, extract all the images from it, cite it, trace it, delete it. Each of these tasks supplement the learning, teaching, and research process.” And “Collections without services are useless. Services without collections are empty. Library catalogs lie at the intersection of collections and services.”
Morgan concludes with “The principles of collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination are extraordinarily relevant in today’s digital landscape. The advent of the globally networked computers, Internet indexes, and mass digitization projects have not changed this fact.”
Worth reading as a whole.
Reference
Morgan, E. L. (2007). Today’s digital information landscape. Infomusings. http://infomotions.com/musings/digital-landscape/.
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