discovery systems need to do more

I think library "discovery systems" and/or catalogs need to do more, and here's why. [1]

The amount of full text content available to libraries has never been greater than it is today. Millions of books have been collectively digitized through Project Gutenberg, the Open Content Alliance, and the Google Books Project. There are thousands of open access journals with thousands upon thousands of freely available scholarly articles. There are an ever-growing number of institutional repositories both subject-based as well as institutional-based. These too are rich with full text content. None of this even considers the myriad of grey literature sites like blogs and mailing list archives.

Library "discovery systems" and/or catalogs are designed to organize and provide access to the materials outlined above, but they need to do more. First of all, the majority of the profession's acquisitions processes assume collections need to be paid for. With the increasing availability of truly free content on the Web, greater emphasis needs to be placed on harvesting content as opposed to purchasing or licensing it. Libraries are expected to build collections designed to stand the test of time. Brokering access to content through licensing agreements — one of the current trends in librarianship — will only last as long as the money lasts. Licensing content makes libraries look like cost centers and negates the definition of "collections".

Second, library "discovery systems" and/or catalogs assume an environment of sacristy. They assume the amount of accessible, relevant data and information needed by students, teachers, and researchers is relatively small. Thus, a great deal of the profession's efforts go into enabling people to find their particular needle in one particular haystack. In reality, current indexing technology makes the process of finding relavent materials trivial, almost intelligent. Implemented correctly, indexers return more content than most people need, and consequently they continue to drink from the proverbial fire hose.

Let's turn these lemons into lemonade. Let's redirect some of the time and money spent on purchasing licenses towards the creation of full text collections by systematic harvesting. Let's figure out how to apply "distant reading" techniques to the resulting collections thus making them, literally, more useful and more understandable. These redirections represent a subtle change in the current direction of librarianship. At the same time, they retain the core principles of the profession, namely: collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination. The result of such a shift will result in an increased expertise on our part, the ability to better control our own destiny, and contribute to the overall advancement of our profession

What can we do to make these things come to fruition?

[1] from the original blog posting - http://tinyurl.com/37nfc2o

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Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame