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Suppose you want to learn more about the liberal arts. Perhaps you start by looking up the topic in Wikipedia, where you learn that there are, or used to be, only seven such arts. Eager to learn more, you consult a librarian, who suggests that a more appropriate encyclopedia might be the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Your curiosity now engaged, you study the article in that encyclopedia and find a reference to The Seven Liberal Arts, a Study in Mediaeval Culture, by Paul Abelson. You look up this book in the catalog, find it in the Library, and begin reading. In that book you come across a citation to H. Parker's article, "The Seven Liberal Arts" in The English Historical Review. You'd very much like to read the article, but because it is from the late nineteenth century, it might be difficult to find. Indeed, a quick search in the Library's catalog shows that although Drew has most volumes of this journal, our print holdings are missing the 1890 volume that contains Parker's article. However, the Library does have the 1890 volume in microfilm. We also have access to it electronically through JSTOR. Which would you prefer? ( Google Scholar also retrieves a link to this article - in JSTOR.)
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Some Current Offerings
What other wonders await you as you delve into your next topic, supported by the electronic resources that the Library provides on your behalf?
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Well, you don't need a trained eye to see the clunkiness of our current approaches. Take the Web interface to our library catalog. At the moment we're essentially using an out-of-the-box version from the vendor, with just a few local customizations. The catalog's Web interface clearly could be improved. For some ideas on how, have a look at the Bergen County Cooperative Library System catalog, for instance. Or, better still, look at the new front end to the catalog at North Carolina State University for an idea of what hard work-and some add-on software-can do.
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Also, why couldn't we search, in one fell swoop, across all the books and journals to which Drew provides access? Why do things have to be broken up into "searches for books," "searches for articles," and "searches for journal titles"? Again, software is available that can do this for libraries (11), though it's not software that we currently own. Short of having such software, though, I think we can reasonably hope to take advantage of at least one related capability in Google Scholar, namely, its ability to show a link to the Drew Library catalog for the book hits in its search results. Google Scholar also has the ability to post a link in its search results next to articles that Drew Library patrons have access to through the Library's subscriptions. Unfortunately, this capability is currently out of our reach, since it depends on having certain software that we don't currently have, namely, the link-resolving software referred to above.(12)
Complementing the desirability of some of the software capabilities described above are the far less glossy needs of the Library's back-office operations, which must be met in order to make decent electronic-resource offerings possible: e.g., ensuring accuracy in the coverage dates for all our electronic journal titles; managing vendors, subscriptions, and license agreements; ensuring that the A-Z list is both comprehensive and accurate; determining which e-journal titles should have catalog records, which shouldn't, and why; making access to our resources as simple as possible for off-campus users; etc. Some of this work is one-time remediation; some is ongoing; all of it needs to be done.
So it seems that the Library might be able to take advantage of some extremely useful new technologies, provided the financial wherewithal could be found. But even if it could be, what would an appropriate rationale for deploying these technologies? Progress towards the Library goal mentioned at the outset? I suggest that something more might be needed, something like a focused context that is clearly linked to the University's priority of providing excellence in liberal education. Otherwise, we run the risk of haphazardly accreting new technologies- searchable blogs here(13), folksonomies there(14), an ontology-in-process(15) on the horizon- because they happen to seem worthy and appropriate at the time.
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- http://depts.drew.edu/lib/docs/mission.php
- http://www.drew.edu/about/mission_statement.php
- Svenonius, Elaine. The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization. ( Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), p. ix.
- See, for example, http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/acrlinfolit/informationliteracy.htm.
- Flaspohler, Molly R. Information Literacy Program Assessment: One Small College Takes the Big Plunge. Reference Services Review; 2003, Vol. 31 Issue 2, pp. 129-140.
- McDonald, John, and Van de Velde, Eric F. "The Lure of Linking," Library Journal, April 1, 2004 http://www.libraryjournal.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleid=CA405398
- Burnell, D. P., "The Eighth Liberal Art," College and Undergraduate Libraries. 2:2, Spring, 1995. pp. 41-44.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface
- See, for example, http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2006/01/library-20-in-the-real-world.html and http://cites.boisestate.edu/v6i2a.htm.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_2.0
- See, for example, http://www.serialssolutions.com/promotion/centralsearch.asp.
- See, for example, http://www.serialssolutions.com/articlelinker.asp.
- http://technorati.com/search/"information+literacy"+"liberal+arts "
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/january2006-guy
- http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontology-of-folksonomy.htm
- Booth, Wayne C. Presidential Address: Arts and Scandals 1982. PMLA 98(3) May, 1983, p. 313.
Proustian Alchemy: Weeding the 200s
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