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-<markdown>
-# Constant Disruption
-## Date: Wed 23 Jan 2019
-The first listed reading we have this week is by Marshall Breeding.
-Astute observers will note that Breeding is one of the first people
-cited in the two additional readings we have this week. We'll read more
-from Breeding later in the semester, but I bring him up now because he
-also oversees a website titled [Library Technology Guides][1] at
-librarytechnology.org. If you would like to keep abreast of the recent
-news on the electronic resource industry, Breeding's website should be
-at the top of your list.
-Breeding's *What is ERM?* article is a good one to start off with this
-week. He provides not only a nice outline of the various components of
-electronic resources, but he also provides some historical context for
-those components. One caveat: Breeding, as well as the other two
-articles on our list this week, is focused on academic libraries. I'm
-afraid that there isn't much literature (that I have seen, at least)
-that provides the same kind of information from other library types. I
-think this is because librarians in other libraries publish less often
-than academic librarians, who are often required to publish to acquire
-tenure, and when they do publish, they generally publish on other
-topics. However, the same processes that our articles describe generally
-hold for other types of libraries. Differences in processes and in some
-details will arise, though, because of organizational or other
-contextual issues. For example, public libraries are often tightly
-connected to municipalities or county governments, as well as to their
-state libraries. Not only does that raises organizational challenges,
-but it also highlights the fact that municipal, county, or state laws
-will define how some processes must be handled and who must handle them.
-The same is true for public schools, and in such cases, school boards
-and school districts will likely be involved. Other issues may impact
-things a bit too. As some of you have noted, public libraries provide
-more ebooks and audiobooks and less ejournals than academic libraries.
-That will change the emphasis on some aspects of the ERM work flow.
-That said, I understand that some of the terms he uses and the
-technologies he describes might still be foreign to some of you. I'm not
-going to rehash or summarize these articles here -- we'll simply discuss
-them on the boards, but I do want to spend some time providing some
-additional background information -- and highlight some of the things to
-look for in these three articles.
-As I've previously mentioned, librarians have been migrating to some
-kind of electronic management since the 1970s. Breeding mentions this,
-too. It actually started well before this -- in fact, I published a
-paper a few years ago that provides a historical account of the first
-library automation project, which took place in the 1930s with punched
-cards. However, around the 1960s, the primary use of computers was to
-manage circulation, and then patron records. In the early 1970s, tools
-became available to manage and search bibliographic records. That is,
-computers were first used mostly to manage circulation of books, then to
-add patron records, which allowed patrons to check out works
-electronically, and finally to search for works. If a work of interest
-was located using these tools, then that work could be retrieved from
-the shelves or ordered via interlibrary loan by snail mail. Full text,
-by and large, came much later and is largely the result of the
-introduction of the web in the early 1990s, which at its heart is
-nothing more than a big document retrieval system, as well as with the
-introduction of bigger storage devices, such as CD-ROMs.
-In the process of migrating from print to electronic, all sorts of
-things had to change, but they all rest on the major premise of all
-librarianship -- *that we organize information in order to retrieve
-information*. Although you may have often heard that libraries are
-ancient things, libraries and librarianship didn't truly modernize until
-the 1920s and 1930s when some in the profession began to hone in on the
-major complexities and challenges involved in organizing and retrieving
-information. The challenges with organizing and retrieving information
-that they identified nearly 100 years ago were indeed major and
-problematic, but fortuitous, because it gave rise to what we know
-called *library science*.
-Yet consider that when those people laid the groundwork for a library
-science, librarians only managed print and the primary means of
-accessing print collections was through a physical building. With the
-introduction of the computers in the 1960s and with networking
-technologies in the 1990s, issues with organizing and retrieving
-information grew exponentially, and indeed, this exponential increase in
-complex issues launched an entire new field, what we now call
-*information science*.
-All right -- back to the ground level. Let me highlight some of the key
-terms in Breeding's article. They include:
-* Finding aids
-* Knowledge bases
-* OpenURL link resolvers
-* ERM systems
-* Library service platforms
-* Integrated library systems (ILS)
-Unless you already have some solid experience with these things, and
-even after reading Breeding's nice article, these terms may still be
-abstract for you all. So, this week, you have two major tasks:
-. Find real, practical examples. Pick one or two of the above terms and
-   see how they work in practice. Then come back here and tell us what
-   you found.
-. Locate how these terms appear in either the Cote & Ostergaard (2017)
-   article or the Fu & Carmen (2015). Note other terms that may appear
-   in those two articles and comment on the role they play in the ERM
-   work flow and the migration process.
-As you work on this, I ask that you pay attention to the emphasis on
-work flow. We're reading the Cote & Ostergaard article and the Fu &
-Carmen article not just because migrating to new systems is a big deal,
-but also because it's significant that there's a need to write and
-publish articles on migration topics. In the print era, there were some
-cases where librarians might migrate to a new system. For example, some
-research libraries in the U.S. started off by classifying their works
-using the Dewey Decimal Classification system, but then began to convert
-to the Library of Congress Classification system. This was no small
-task, but it was also not that common. Today, migration is big business,
-so to speak, in the library world because the technology changes so fast
-and because there are a number of competing electronic resource
-management products that librarians have to choose from, and do when
-those products provide advantages to their users, communities, and
-themselves.
-[1]:https://librarytechnology.org/
-</markdown>

C. Sean Burns: Notebook

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