Michael RidleyChief Information Officer (CIO) & Chief Librarian

University of Guelph

OCUL Fall Meeting 2008, Lakehead University

Scholarly Communications

1. Themes

& Trends2. Impacts

& Implicati

ons

3. Q &

A

Agenda

Impressionistic, not comprehensive.

Launching pad, not a recipe or blueprint.

Provocative, but not unrealistic.

“The way forward is paradoxically

to look not ahead, but to look around.”

CommunicationsReputation

Smart Information

CyberInfrastructurePreservation

Where Are We?

Navigating the Landscape

Collaboration

Innovation

Innovation

Collaboration

The New 16GB iPod nano

The Eventual 2PB iPod nano

The (In)visibility of the Library

The Importance of Disciplines …

… And of Science in Particular

Faculty Needs in

Service Development

System-wide Approaches

to System-wide IssuesAnother in a series

of wake-up calls regarding

the confluence of scholarship &

academic libraries

“When simple change becomes transformational change …

… the desire for continuity becomes a dysfunctional mirage.”

The Mirage of Continuity (Hawkins & Battin)

Communications

Communication is not publishing

Old School: (e)Books & (e)Journals.

New School: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Graduate Junction … and (e)Books & (e)Journals.

Websites, Multimedia, Blogs, Tweets, Simulations, Visualization, Commentary, Data, Data, Data.

Smart Information

Not people finding information but information finding people

Massively distributed & ubiquitous content; with intelligent, proactive metadata.

Interoperable objects/data/content: not references or links but semantically embedded dependences.

The scholarship is in the network not the content nodes; focus on the connections, the relationships, the glue.

Plastic objects: adjusted, played with, riffed on, sampled, repurposed (yet with integrity, authority, authenticity preserved).

An architecture of participation within a global environment.

Cyberscholarship: “Correlation is enough”

Reputation

Academic values persist but morph

Old School: peer review, P&T, citations, league tables.

New School: reputation management.

An integration of smart information, social networks, global reach, ubiquitous content, & participatory architecture.

Trust, reputation management, verification, validation: automated (e.g. digital money – Friedman’s Future Imperfect).

“Networked individualism” Barry Wellman

Academic research libraries as trusted agents in managing people (reputation) not just information.

Preservation

Integrity Management

Integrity management: the information ecology

Not as much the objects and more the interconnections & dependencies.

Libraries as coherence engines with sense making tools.

Preservation = accessPreservation = integrity

CyberInfrastructure

Platform, tools & environment

Virtual Research Organizations (VROs)

Disciplinary, trans-national, emergent, large scale, proven(?), powerful.

Not just big science, not even just science; transforming the humanities.

CI & VROs – the new research library?

“The number of PhDs the Chinese

plan to graduate with the next 10 years

is greater than the entire population

of Canada”

Mike Lazaridis

Co-CEO, RIM

Chancellor, University of Waterloo

Quoted in the Globe and Mail June 7, 2008

Where Are We?

Leadership roles, choices, & alternative futures

Collaboration: beyond OCUL, outside libraries.

Technology: we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Complexity: data curation; full scholarly communication lifecycle.

Leadership: the big picture “agency” (the academic research library consortium).

“Culture eats strategy for lunch

every day of the week.”

Elson Floyd, President

Washington State University

The demise of the Titanic

was brought about by the

As we consider the future of scholarly communications, are we thinking about airplanes or icebergs?

In the final analysis the Titanic was not sunk

by an iceberg.

rise of commercial air travel.

A Cautionary Tale...

Michael RidleyChief Information Officer (CIO) & Chief Librarian

University of Guelph

OCUL Fall Meeting 2008, Lakehead University

Scholarly Communications