jibs.ac.uk AGM Keynote – Revisiting the 5 Laws…
I had the honour of being invited to talk at the JIBS User Group 20 Anniversary AGM yesterday, and as well as having a bit of a rant in the closing plenary about opening up and making internal reuse of data and making FOI requests about SCONUL data*, I also gave this sideways take on Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science for the current age (The Frictionless Library).
Amongst other things, the presentation sketches a possible project (that I think could make for a good workshop day) revisiting each of the laws in network context using the various techniques of constitutional interpretation and (briefly) revisits at least one of the notions of the Invisible Library (see also The Invisible Library (ILI, 2009), another meaningless set of slides…;-)
* Note to self: read up about the current HESA HE Information Landscape Project (Redesigning the higher education data and information landscape). Also check out the “KB+” JISC project (programme?) that will “develo[p] a shared community service that will improve the quality, accuracy, coverage and availability of data for the management, selection, licensing, negotiation, review and access of electronic resources for UK HE” (via @benshowers) and the Talis Aspire Community Edition (aggregated reading lists across several HEIs).
PS I’m working out how to make the slides a little bit more useful as a post hoc/legacy resource by posting them with a bit a context and commentary… But it may take a bit of time…
PPS on the way home, I listened to this Long Now Foundation seminar by Brewster Kahle on Universal Access to All Knowledge, which got me wondering about the extent to which University libraries are depositing resources into the Internet Archive..? There’s a nice piece at the end that makes the point that IPR is such that in terms of the digital record, there’s likely to be a gap in the timeline of archived content right around the 20th century…
PPPS as far as library futures go, here’s a loosely related Roadmapping TEL activity on “Ideas that influence the future of technology enhanced learning” that is currently running on Ideascale.
There were also several discussions during the day relating to information skills needs for 21st century librarians. Some of the ANCIL reports from the Arcadia project on a new information literacy curriculum may be of interest to JIBS members in this regard, I think? Arcadia Project Report
I think there’s a real need for librarians to help folk make sense of the wealth of data out there, and this in part requires a good understanding of network structures and organisations, not just a concentration on hierarchical models.
Hear (sic) also, for example, OU Vice Chancellor Martin Bean on ‘sensemaking’ and the role of the library from his 2010 ALT-C Keynote:
I think it’s also time to start seeing people as information and knowledge resources, as well as just texts…
