quarta-feira, 28 de janeiro de 2009

Position Paper for Global Research Libraries 2020


Fui de novo convidado para participar no Workshop Global Research Libraries 2020, cuja terceira edição se realiza de 23 a 25 de Fevereiro. Enviei hoje o meu position paper, que mais uma vez redigi apressadamente. Apesar disso, aqui fica esse texto:

Building on (and referring to) my previous position paper for GRL2020 in 2008, which main points I still consider valid and up-to-date, I will focus here in some issues and challenges for the library world, in the coming years, from the perspective of a research university library.

Libraries and librarians are facing the effects of the digitization of contents and the growing number of “digital natives” in their user base. Two of the most important consequences from this are the reducing importance of the library collections and mainly of the collection management activities (selection, acquiring, describing, etc.) and, secondly, the increasing user “independence” and the disintermediation on information access and use from research libraries patrons.

So, as I stated previously, libraries need to move from the “traditional” role of intermediating and facilitating the access and use of external information sources, to focus increasingly on facilitating research and adding value to the information and data produced by the members of the community(ies) they serve. In this sense, the curation (including the dissemination and preservation) of the information and data produced by their user communities, through the management of repositories of research outputs (publications, research data in various stages of processing, etc.) is one of the most relevant missions of research libraries in the next decade.

As stated before, local research libraries can be nodes of a global network of research information providers. This global network will be composed of different types of repositories upon which several value-added services may be built and made available. But to achieve this vision, there are some necessary conditions. Firstly, research output must be openly accessible, and so libraries need to go on with supporting, promoting and advocating Open Access to research outputs.

Secondly, repositories, and their contents and services, must be robustly and easily interoperable and exchanged in the distributed repository environment. Libraries and librarians must actively contribute to the development of the new protocols, standards and tools needed to achieve that goal.

Thirdly, repositories and other tools managed/offered by the libraries, to help research, collaboration between users, production of information, and dissemination of results, must be strongly integrated with the other systems and tools used by researchers and embedded in their workflows. This is a big challenge that is still far from being conveniently answered, and that must be strongly addressed by the library community.

Another challenging, but on my opinion promising, road for adding value to the activities of the communities libraries serve, and promote the collaboration and interaction between their members, is utilizing usage information for developing new services. Mining, analyzing and using the billions of clicks (and other events), with other relevant contextual information, registered on the information systems managed by research libraries can allow the development of new value added services (personalization, recommendation, etc.) and the emergence of collaborative and social networking tools and platforms based on libraries.

The importance of the social and collaborative dimension of the library will also remain (or even increase) on the physical space of the university campus. Academic libraries are already answering to the growing request of flexible and reconfigurable spaces, able to accommodate team work and individual study, equipped with the latest technologies for information access, production and sharing, open 24x7 and offering a comfortable, informal and friendly setting for social interaction, meeting colleagues and friends. But a lot more needs to be done in this respect.

2 comentários:

Unknown disse...

Então quer dizer que, ao contrário do ano passado, este ano não se realiza no mesmo dia da caminhada de bloguistas bad&lis - dia 28 de Março.

Eloy Rodrigues disse...

É verdade! E sendo assim, talvez eu me possa juntar aos caminheiros bloguistas bad&lis

 
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Cibertecário 0.2 by Eloy Rodrigues is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Partilha nos termos da mesma Licença 2.5 Portugal License.