Abstracts
Making Scholarly Resources Accessible in a Google World
Wednesday 6 May 2009, 1200 - 1230
Presenter: Alison Dellit
National Library of Australia, ACT
Presenter Biography
Alison Dellit is a senior librarian at the National Library of Australia. She has worked on implementing new search features for online resource discovery systems, including Libraries Australia and the Arrow Discovery Service, as well as online tools to simplify cataloguing and metadata allocation.
Abstract
In the past decade, the publication of and access to scholarship has changed profoundly, and continues to change at a rapid rate. The most used scholarly search system is arguably now Google Scholar, not a library-run system. Wikipedia has all-butreplaced paper encyclopaedias for a new generation of students, and rss feeds are replacing the regular browse of a library’s shelves. These changes aren’t just cosmetic; they are changing the way that scholars work. The internet allows a faster exchange of ideas, and an easier cross-fertilisation of work between geographically dispersed scholars, and between scholars from different disciplines.
This environment offers rare opportunities for libraries, both public and academic, to increase access to scholarly material, provide easy pathways through related material, and facilitate stronger collaboration between scholars. This paper will discuss how to meet these challenges, with reference to recent initiatives at the National Library of Australia, as well as other libraries.
The development of open access repositories is opening up fast and free access to a range of international scholarship. By combining published articles with pre-prints; post-prints; theses and conference papers, university repositories provide a snapshot of emerging research, often available to all. Through building a portal aggregating these resources– the Arrow Discovery Service -, the National Library is experimenting with the effective ways of making this research available not only to independent scholars, but to a non-academic audience. Making original Australian research available to high-school students; interested amateurs and business people increases the profile of Australian academic output, and increases both understanding of, and contributions to, humanitarian and scientific endeavour. As science-based issues like climate change, drought and a global food shortage move to the centre of public attention such resources facilitate a more informed democratic discussion and may play a vital role in safeguarding our future.
Other initiatives by libraries seek to make some of the rich unique and primary materials held by libraries more accessible to researchers: for example, the Australian newspaper digitisation project is an experiment in providing keyword searching to early Australian newspapers from every Australian state and territory, available to historians, and the general public. This mirrors developments locally and internationally that seek to provide more open access to public data stores, both humanities data and scientific data. Initiatives such as the Australian National Data Service will seek to streamline and aggregate research data to facilitate collaboration.
The digitised newspaper project won’t simply allow historians to access data, but also to collaborate around it. This is done both by allowing people to tag and share resources within a group, and also by facilitating annotation of resources. It is anticipated that many of the annotations will themselves be of use to researchers, in providing context to articles. The power of Web 2.0 technology is in the early stages of take-up by the research community. Many issues remain to be resolved, including how, and whether, to distinguish between qualified academics and the general public, and whether to provide specific scholarly spaces, or social networking tools.
With more rich scholarly outputs, datasets, and unique materials becoming available, one of the core functions of libraries is to facilitate scholars exploring related material. This is the impetus behind initiatives from the National Library to move towards a “single business” approach to search, where it becomes easy for users to navigate between related articles; theses; pictures, newspaper articles, sound files and so on. Combined with the possibility of networking and collaboration around resources, this offers powerful tools for researchers and teaching academics, who could create “trails” of material to share, supplemented with annotations and notes.
Our understanding of how to take advantage of the new possibilities engendered by high-speed digital sharing of resources is still very new. But by drawing the lessons from our emerging experiences, we can start to plan the next steps for scholarly research discovery services.
