Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+<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

User Tools

Site Tools

Differences

Page Tools