Cliff Lynch is giving talk this morning to the extended Harvard Library community on information stewardship. Cliff leads the Coalition for Networked Information, a project of the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, that is “concerned with the intelligent uses of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual life.” Cliff is helping the Harvard Library with the formulation of a set of information stewardship principles. Originally he was working with IT and the Harvard Library on principles, services, and initial projects related to digital information management. Given that his draft set of principles are broader than digital asset management, Cliff has been asked to address the larger community (says Mary Lee Kennedy).

Cliff begins by saying that the principles he’s drafted are for discussion; how they apply to any particular institution is always a policy issue, with resource implications, that needs to be discussed. He says he’ll walk us through these principles, beginning with some concepts that underpin them.

When it comes to information stewardship, “university community” should include grad students whose research materials the university supports and maintains. Undergrads, too, to some extent. The presence of a medical school here also extends and smudges the boundaries.

Cliff then raises the policy question of the relation of the alumni to the university. There are practical reasons to keep the alumni involved, but particularly for grads of the professional schools, access to materials can be crucial.

He says he uses “scholarly record” for human-created things that convey scholarly ideas across time and space: books, journals, audio, web sites, etc. “This is getting more complicated and more diverse as time goes on.” E.g., author’s software can be part of that record. And there is a growing set of data, experimental records, etc., that are becoming part of the scholarly record.

Research libraries need to be concerned about things that support scholarship but are not usually considered part of the historical record. E.g., newspapers, popular novels, movies. These give insight into the scholarly work. There are also datasets that are part of the evidentiary record, e.g., data about the Earth gathered from sensors. “It’s so hard to figure out when enough is enough.” But as more of it goes digital, it requires new strategies for acquisition, curation and access. “What are the analogs of historical newspapers for the 21st century?” he asks. They are likely to be databases from corporations that may merge and die and that have “variable and often haphazard policies about how they maintain those databases.” We need to be thinking about how to ensure that data’s continued availability.

Provision of access: Part of that is being able to discover things. This shouldn’t require knowing which Harvard-specific access mechanism to come to. “We need to take a broad view of access” so that things can be found through the “key discovery mechanisms of the day,” beyond the institution’s. (He namechecks the Digital Public Library of America.)

And access isn’t just for “the relatively low-bandwidth human reader.” [API’s, platforms and linked data, etc., I assume.]

Maintaining a record of the scholarly work that the community does is a core mission of the university. So, he says, in his report he’s used the vocabulary of obligation; that is for discussion.

The 5 principles

1. The scholarly output of the community should be captured, preserved, organized, and made accessible. This should include the evidence that underlies that output. E.g., the experimental data that underlies a paper should be preserved. This takes us beyond digital data to things like specimens and cell lines, and requires including museums and other partners. (Congress is beginning to delve into this, Cliff notes, especially with regard to preserving the evidence that enables experiments to be replicated.)

The university is not alone in addressing these needs.

2. A university has the obligation to provide its community with the best possible access to the overall scholarly record. This is something to be done in partnership with research libraries aaround the world. But Harvard has a “leadership role to play.”

Here we need to think about providing alumni with continued access to the scholarly record. We train students and then send them out into the world and cut off their access. “In many cases, they’re just out of luck. There seems to be something really wrong there.”

Beyond the scholarly record, there are issues about providing access to the cultural record and sources. No institution alone can do this. “There’s a rich set of partnerships” to be formed. It used to be easier to get that cultural record by buying it from book jobbers, DVD suppliers, etc. Now it’s data with differing license terms and subscription limitations. A lot out of it’s out on the public Web. “We’re all hoping that the Internet Archive will do a good job,” but most of our institutions of higher learning aren’t contributing to that effort. Some research libraries are creating interesting partnerships with faculty, collecting particular parts of the Web in support of particular research interests. “Those are signposts toward a future where the engagement to collect and preserve the cultural records scholar need is going to get much more complex” and require much more positive outreach by libraries, and much more discussion with the community (and the faculty in particular) about which elements are going to be important to preserve.

“Absolutely the desirable thing is share these collections broadly,” as broadly as possible.

3. “The time has come to recognize that good stewardship means creating digital records of physical objects” in order to preserve them and make them accessible. They should be stored away from the physical objects.

4. A lot goes on here in addition to faculty research. People come through putting on performances, talks, colloquia. “You need a strategy to preserve these and get them out there.”

“The stakes are getting much higher” when it comes to archives. The materials are not just papers and graphs. They include old computers and storage materials, “a microcosm of all of the horrible consumer recording technology of the 20th century,” e.g., 8mm film, Sony Betamax, etc.

We also need to think about what to archive of the classroom. We don’t have to capture every calculus discussion section, but you want to get enough to give a sense of what went on in the courses. The documentation of teaching and learning is undergoing a tremendous change. The new classroom tech and MOOCs are creating lots of data, much of it personally identifiable. “Most institutions have little or no policies around who gets to see it, how long they keep it, what sort of informed consent they need from students.” It’s important data and very sensitive data. Policy and stewardship discussions are need. There are also record management issues.

5. We know that scholarly communication is…being transformed (not as fast as some of us would like â?? online scientific journals often look like paper versions) by the affordances of digital technology. “Create an ongoing partnership with the community and with other institutions to extend and broaden the way scholarly communication happens. The institutional role is terribly important in this. We need to find the balances between innovation and sustainability.

Q&A

Q: Providing alumni with remote access is expensive. Harvard has about 100,000 living alumni, which includes people who spent one semester here. What sort of obligation does a university have to someone who, for example, spent a single semester here?

A: It’s something to be worked out. You can define alumnus as someone who has gotten a degree. You may ask for a co-payment. At some institutions, active members of the alumni association get some level of access. Also, grads of different schools may get access to different materials. Also, the most expensive items are typically those for which there are a commercial market. For example, professional grade resources for the financial industry probably won’t allow licensing to alumni because it would cannibalize their market. On the other hand, it’s probably not expensive to make JSTOR available to alumni.

Q: [robert darnton] Very helpful. We’re working on all 5 principles at Harvard. But there is a fundamental problem: we have to advance simultaneously on the digital and analog fronts. More printed books are published each year, and the output of the digital increases even faster. The pressures on our budget are enormous. What do you recommend as a strategy? And do you think Harvard has a special responsibility since our library is so much bigger, except for the Library of Congress? Smaller lilbraries can rely on Hathi etc. to acquire works.

A: “Those are really tough questions.” [audience laughs] It’s a large task but a finite one. Calculating how much money would take an institution how far “is a really good opportunity for fund raising.” Put in place measures that talk about the percentage of the collection that’s available, rather than a raw number of images. But, we are in a bad situation: continuing growth of traditional media (e.g., books), enormous expansion of digital resources. “My sense is…that for Harvard to be able to navigate this, it’s going to have to get more interdependent with other research libraries.” It’s ironic, because Harvard has been willing to shoulder enormous responsibility, and so has become a resource for other libraries. “It’s made life easier for a lot of the other research libraries” because they know Harvard will cover around the margins. “I’m afraid you may have to do that a little more for your scholars, and we are going to see more interdependence in the system. It’s unavoidable given the scope of the challenge.” “You need to be able to demonstrate that by becoming more interdependent, you’re getting more back than you’re giving up.” It’s a hard core problem, and “the institutional traditions make the challenge here unique.”

Categories: education, open access dw