Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.3.10 |

Libraries have seen the future, and it is digital, writes Jonathan Shaw in the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine.

This in-depth article looks at how Harvard’s libraries are dealing with changes to content, preservation infrastructure and accessibility. At the heart of this discusion is the future role of librarians.

Peter Bol, Carswell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations, envisions librarians “as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”

The story also looks at the widespread impact of Google Book Search, which aims to put everything available within everyone’s reach. It already has 12 million books and will soon be the largest library in the world:

“Internet search engines like Google Books fundamentally challenge our understanding of where we add value to this process,” says Dan Hazen, associate librarian of collection development for Harvard College. Librarians have worked hard to assemble materials of all kinds so that it is “not a random bunch of stuff, but can actually support and sustain some kind of meaningful inquiry,” he explains. “The result was a collection that was a consciously created, carefully crafted, deliberately maintained, constrained body of material.”

Internet search explodes the notion of a curated collection in which the quality of the sources has been assured. “What we’re seeing now with Google Scholar and these mass digitization projects, and the Internet generally,” says Hazen, “is, ‘Everything’s out there.’ And everything has equal weight. If I do a search on Google, I can get a scholarly journal. I can get somebody’s blog posting….The notion of collection that’s implicit in ‘the universe is at my fingertips’ is diametrically opposed, really, to the notion of collection as ‘consciously curated and controlled artifact.’”

Even the act of reading for research is changed, he points out. Scholars poring through actual newspapers “could see how [an item] was presented on the page, and the prominence it had, and the flow of content throughout a series of articles that might have to do with the same thing—and then differentiate those from the books or other kinds of materials that talked about the same phenomenon. When you get into the Internet world, you tend to get a gazillion facts, mentions, snippets, and references that don’t organize themselves in that same framework of prominence, and typology, and how stuff came to be, and why it was created, and what the intrinsic logic of that category of materials is. How and whether that kind of structuring logic can apply to this wonderful chaos of information is something that we’re all trying to grapple with.”

You can view a selection of Harvard’s web-accessible collections at http://digitalcollections.harvard.edu.

Plus: Remember the bookmobile? It, too, has gone digital. The News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., recently previewed a visit by a Digital Bookmobile, operated by OverDrive Inc, that provides demos of digital downloads and gives readers the opportunity to sample eBooks, audiobooks, music and video.

The service was provided by Mid-Columbia Libraries. One of the biggest benefits of digital books, said library spokeswoman Kate Holloway: no late fees.