From the Edito

Everything Newby David KohlAvailable online 16 June 2010

<david.kohl@uc.edu>.

The Journal of Academic Lib

r…

is Old Again…or Not!

Nope, I did not get the phrase wrong; I know how it issupposed to go. But I have just been watching selections ofthe IMLS Webcast of their 2010 WebWise Conference on

Libraries and Museums in the Digital World. (1) Although the onlineviewing did lack the camaraderie and social interaction of the eventitself, there were advantages to virtual attendance, such as passingover the preliminary welcomes and throat clearing and being able toskip the boring parts of talks. And that is not even mentioning thebest part, i.e. sitting in my room dressed in my most comfortableblue jeans and a t-shirt. Not a bad tradeoff. (Full disclosure: I'mpresently in Thessaloniki, Greece working with HEAL-Link, the Greeknational library consortium, trying to figure out with my Greekcolleagues how to move forward with a program of digital collectionbuilding given the present difficulties with EU and Greek govern-ment funding for new academic library initiatives. And you think USacademic librarians have problems!)

In any case I was particularly taken with the third session of thefirst day which highlighted the development background andprogress of three significant emerging digital collections. Two pointsin particular stood out for me. The first was the large amount of timeand energy devoted to what we would have called in an earlier time“special collections.” In the past although special collections werealways treasured by academic librarians, indeed often considered thecrown jewels of the collection, the percentage of staff time and budgetdevoted to this area in most libraries has always been rather modestin comparison to the support devoted to the more “daily bread” partsof the collection such as books, journals and government documents.Could it be that in the digital world the most significant value addedcontribution of librarians is shifting away from these traditionalmainstay elements of the collection? After all, housing and mainte-nance of ejournals, ebooks and edocs is increasingly taken care ofoutside of the local library by non-for-profit groups, commercialvendors, consortia or governmental agencies. While traditionalistshave for years continued to assert the importance of collectionbuilding title by title (rather than in Big Deal chunks) and providingcustomized access through local cataloging, the reality is that subjectbibliographers as a separate job description has all but disappearedfrom academic libraries and the cataloging units are not far behind asan endangered species. And, of course, digital collections require little

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277–2

in the way of circulation, shelving, binding and marking units. A lot offood for thought here.

The second point which struck home for me has to dowith the titleof this editorial. Our professional language has changed; at least itseems to me that it has. Clearly the terminology of the presentationshas lots of new words, words that would have been Greek to most ofus just a few years ago. (Sorry, couldn't resist!) If you view thesepresentations and I think they are well worth the time, you will findthat among other terms not only has “metadata” replaced “catalog-ing”, but that “TEI” has replaced “Dublin Core” and that “contextua-lization” has replaced “classification”. My first impulse was to dismissthis new vocabulary with the thought that they were just new,somewhat pretentious ways of referring to traditional and timehonored library concepts. In the print world we describe bibliographicitems with cataloging; in the digital world we describe them withmetadata. In the print world we put related physical items togethervia classification; in the digital world we associate related materialstogether by contextualization. New words describing old functions.And yet, as I continued to listen to the presentations and reflect on thenew world of digital collection building they were describing, I beganto realize that maybe we really did need these newwords and not justbecause they are more technically precise. True, as a long ago Historymajor, it is hard for me not to see important connections to and valuein the past. But I also think such an impulse can limit our ability to seethe future and its possibilities clearly. And believe me, these days wewant that windshield as clear as we can possibly make it—we areexceeding the speed limit and the road is littered with potholes. Somaybe the value of the new words is not just that they define a newreality in a slightly more appropriate way, but that the very fact ofusing them requires us to focus our attention ahead, to a new realitywhich is our future home. Continuing to point out how similar in basicfunction the new words are with the old may be comforting andreassuring, but probably a little anxiety and clear headed attention tothe road ahead will serve us better. In short, I think maybe the newwords are the way to go after all.

In concluding I cannot resist pointing out the Sancho Panzaelement to the generally elevated Don Quixote tone of the IMLS webpresentations. As Cervantes was well aware, it is always useful to haveamodicum of reality to even themost noble aspirations. I am referringto the fact that as you watch the three presentations, you will noticethat each of them has significant problems with the presentationtechnology. I have considerable respect for IMLS that they did not editout these glitches. Such problems in this particular context represent

78 July 2010 277

an almost Zen reminder of the very real difficulties of creating the newinformation world. If you are going to pursue a noble dream it isalways good to remember to turn your attention to the realities of theroad once in a while just to make sure you are not in danger of fallingoff the cliff while enamored of the vision on the horizon.

As always, I welcome your comments and thoughts.

David

A Concluding Note From the EditorIt is with great regret but deep appreciation for her years of loyal

service to the Journal and the profession that we announce LauraReiner's decision to turn over her share of the column duties to her

278 The Journal of Academic Librarianship

friend and colleague Leslie Stebbins. For well over a decade Laura hasreliably kept JAL readers informed of important and useful publica-tions in the field of academic librarianship through the Guide to theProfessional Literature. Her high standards in selecting the best andmost useful of the professional literature was complemented by akeen sense of significant and topical issues for academic librarians.Weshall deeply miss both Laura's contributions to the Journal and herpresence as a colleague on the JAL editorial staff.

She departs with all our best wishes for her future.

NOTE AND REFERENCE

1. Access to the full program available at: http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/webwise/100303/ (Accessed 5/16/2020).