Networked Learning and Sympathetic Spaces in Libraries

Business Insider has an interesting argument indicating that Craiglist is being slowly, but surely, disrupted.

Generally speaking, Craigslist has been “good enough” to not be disrupted head-on. Nevertheless, the world moves on, and the gaps in their product (due to a stubborn obstinate refusal to invest in technology) grow wider and wider. As tablets, smartphones, etc disrupt, and craigslist doesn’t invest in those platforms, the feature gap grows wider.

The disruption that has happened has occurred on a category-by-category bases, as this graphic by Andrew Parker (http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/po…) shows:

That graphical analysis of sources for disruption is really interesting. What would the same type of analysis look like for academic libraries? Here’s a lightning quick example using the library I work at as an guinea pig. This image is not meant to be comprehensive, just a proof of concept. This doesn’t prove that libraries are imminently doomed to be disrupted, only that many services external to the academy would like a slice of the action. Let me know in the comments what I’m missing.

Active Sources of Library Disruption:

I doubt this is the seminal instance, but I just heard an interesting On the Media podcast which talked to Cal Tech economics professor R. Preston McAfee about his textbook Introduction to Economic Analysis (ISBN 160049000X) which he has released using a creative commons license. This touches tangentially on a recent post I had on self-published fiction, but it makes me wonder about academic work. I do believe that this is the way to go (now and in the future) but there has to be a method somehow for this type of scholarly activity to be recognized in the tenure process.

On a side note, the ISBN is not represented in OCLC’s Worldcat under that number. The only way I could find it is via OCLC number 62280521. There are all kinds of problems involved in self-publishing.

Ithaka has released an interesting study it has been working with since 2000 on academic libraries and faculty perceptions. What I like most from this is a useful model of academic library services that they’ve broken into three aspects: purchaser, archive, and gateway. They describe these as:

The purchaser role was described in the survey by the statement “the library pays for resources I need, from academic journals to books to electronic databases,” the archive role by “the library serves as a repository of resources – in other words, it archives, preserves, and keeps track of resources,” and the gateway role by “the library is a starting point or ‘gateway’ for locating information for my research.”

It’s certainly not a surprise that the library as gateway is being disrupted by public search services in the minds of faculty. This is evident in the findings where faculty are decreasingly likely to rate gateway services as “very important”:

I’ll be honest, the first thing I think of regarding gateway services is federated searching. It’s not surprising that faculty are considering this service as decreasingly important. The fact that 60% still think it’s very important leads me to believe (hope) that there is still time to address the problem. Another facet is that the science grouping, followed by social science, is leading this trend:

It makes sense that everyone values the “buyer” aspects of libraries. But in terms of gateway services, the humanities may still be reliant on libraries because of a preference for monographs. If the Kindle, or something similar, starts to gain traction then the humanities may follow science’s lead in finding their own gateway services.

There is a lot more to the study and it is well worth a read. They recommend shoring up the visibility of library services, concentrating and customizing for different faculty user groups, and taking advantage of network solutions (especially for smaller libraries.)