NEXT-GEN AND MULTI-INSTITUTIONAL

TECHNICAL SERVICESARL Membership Meeting

Brian E. C. SchottlaenderThe Audrey Geisel University Librarian

21 May 2009

Community Thinking

• “Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California” (December 2005)

http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/Final.pdf

“We need to look seriously at opportunities to centralize and/or better coordinate services and data, while maintaining appropriate local control, as a way of reducing effort and complexity and of redirecting resources to focus on improving the user experience.”

• “A White Paper on the Future of Cataloging at Indiana University” (January 2006) http://www.iub.edu/~libtserv/pub/Future_of_Cataloging_White_Paper.pdf

“Better technological support for the cataloging process will assist catalogers in removing redundancies among and within institutions, allowing cataloging professionals to spend more time performing expert tasks.”

2

Community Thinking• “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other

Discovery Tools” a.k.a. “The Calhoun Report” prepared for LC (March 2006)http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf

“… implementation issues associated with … innovation and cost reduction … include some technical but mostly organizational hurdles. To succeed … research libraries will need to master organizational change management and achieve unprecedented levels of collaboration with peers and external partners.

• “On the Record: Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control” (January 2008)http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/lcwg-ontherecord-jan08-final.pdf

“Although cataloging will and must continue to play a key role in bibliographic control, today there are many other sources of data that can and must be used to organize and provide access to the information universe. To take advantage of these sources, it is necessary to view bibliographic control as a distributed activity, not a centralized one.”

Community Thinking• “No Brief Candle” (August 2008)

http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub142abst.html

“The current model of the library as a stand-alone service provider to the university is obsolescent.”

• “The Extended Library Enterprise: Collaborative Technical Services & Shared Staffing” (February 2009)

http://www.orbiscascade.org/index/cms-filesystem- action/collaborative_ts/extended_library_enterprise_final.pdf

“It is almost impossible to overstate the cultural shift that must occur for any of these ideas to really work.”

• “Next‐Generation Technical Services: Changing How We Provide Technical Services for the University of California Libraries—Scope Statement” (April 2009) http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/about/uls/ngts/docs/NGTS_

scope_10april2009.pdf

“Radically new approaches to these operations are now called for in order to ensure that they are not only maximally efficient, but also transformatively effective.”

Environmental Conditions

• Stored print/Shared print/Persistent print• Digitization• Digital preservation: Portico, CDL DPR, etc.• Mass digitization

– Internet Archive– Google

• HathiTrust• Repository auditing mechanisms

– TRAC: Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification

– DRAMBORA: Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment

Environmental Conditions

• Yin and Yang

• Trust and Formalized Trust

• Scale and Web-scale

• The Meltdown:

– Funding

– Space

The UC NGTS Initiative

GUIDING PRINCIPLES• Technical services support and provide

infrastructure for the development and management of the UC library collections.

• Technical services provide broad access to and facilitate discovery of collections in support of the mission of the University.

• UC Libraries will build a culture of continuous improvement of services applied to scholarly content.

• UC Libraries seek to organize technical services and develop standards of practice to achieve efficiencies and attend to a broader scope of content.

The UC NGTS Initiative

VALUES• Make content easy to find and use• Speed processing throughout all technical services

functions• Eliminate redundant work• Free up resources in order to focus cataloging and other

metadata description on unique resources• Start with existing basic metadata from all available

sources• Allow for continuous improvements to basic metadata

including from the world beyond the UC Libraries: i.e., our users, expert communities, vendors, and other libraries

• View technical services as a single system‐wide enterprise• Define success in terms of the user’s ability to easily find

and use relevant content

The UC NGTS Initiative

OBJECTIVES• “… from shared cataloging to integrated

cataloging: a vision in which the system adopts a single set of standards and policies, eliminates duplication of effort and local variation in practice, and leverages access to language and subject expertise in order to create a single copy of a bibliographic record for use by the entire system.”

• “… seek to articulate similarly broad visions that will engage and challenge the expertise of all of our libraries’ staffs in acquisitions, cataloging, metadata, digitization, and preservation.”

The UC NGTS Initiative

GOALS• Streamline the lifecycle management for

the four broad categories of information types and develop infrastructure to create a a virtual metadata resource that aggregates metadata generate as content is acquired

• Expose the aggregated, virtual metadata resource to the broadest number of discovery pathways so that users can find and use content easily

• Enable continuous enhancement of the virtual metadata resource by librarians, scholars, and third parties

The UC NGTS Initiative

INFORMATION TYPES

• Commonly‐held Content in Roman Scripts

• Commonly‐held Content in non‐Roman

Scripts

• UC Unique Collections

• 21st-Century Emerging Resources

The UC NGTS Initiative

NEXT STEPS• Appoint cross‐functional task forces for each

information resource type• Consulting with other experts as needed, each

task force will be charged to develop 1‐3 models for technical services for their respective resource type

• Each model must:– Address processes for selection, acquisition, cataloging,

and preservation or reformatting (as needed), including possibilities for outsourcing some or all to third parties

– Incorporate the guiding principles and values enumerated above

– Address options for systemwide organization of Technical Services

The UC NGTS Initiative

TIMEFRAME

• Task Force reports due October-December

2009

• Implementation: 2010+

QUESTIONS?