A debate to raise the current issues facing librarians and data management professionals is being organised by JISC, bringing together an international expert panel to speak at the University of Oxford’s iconic Bodleian Library on 2 April 2009. In his blog2, Professor Peter Murray-Rust, a speaker at this upcoming ‘Libraries of the Future3’ debate, expresses serious concern at the apathy he senses amongst university librarians in their failure to engage with the issues that will seriously affect them as we advance into the digital age. In his pre-event discussions concerning this forthcoming debate, using avenues such as blog posts, Twitter and FriendFeed, Murray-Rust concludes: ‘I’m left with the overwhelming impression that the community is now past caring about the future of the library’. - Duncan Hull

@Richard looks like this could be good, @Peter Murray-Rust is speaking. Its a bit of a long way to come from Canada, unless you're in Europe already? - Duncan Hull

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. How about librarians are past navel gazing, don't follow PMR's blog, and are working at full tilt to address issues, make new tools and partnerships, and experimenting with various models of the future? - Christina Pikas

hee hee hee - Richard Akerman

@Duncan Too far for me to come just for this, unless someone wants to give me a job in England... - Richard Akerman

and in fairness to the event, JISC has been running this project for 9 months, including their blog http://librariesofthefuture.jiscinvolve.org/ which has been up since April 11, 2008 so it's not like people didn't have a chance to provide their input through various channels - Richard Akerman

@Christina Peter Murray-Rust often winds people up and plays devils advocate, without necessarily believing *everything* he says, just to provoke debate and generate publicity. So don't take it too personally when he says "librarians are failing to engage..." - Duncan Hull

let me revise: we are delighted to get the attention from the scientific community and we look forward to working *with* you to better support scientific work... let us tell you what we've been doing for the past 100 years... - Christina Pikas

Oh, yeah, and don't forget all the time we spend with your students teaching them about scholarly communications and helping them with their course work. - John Dupuis

@Christina I'm curious, what *have* librarians been doing for the last 20 years since the invention of the interweb? I confess, I don't really understand what librarians do anymore, especially the digital ones. I've never met any of the bods in my local University library (though I'm looking forward to meeting them all soon) - Duncan Hull

Hi Duncan, I think the best thing would be to visit your locals. Ask the librarian that looks after your area what's new in terms of journals, etc and especially if you're doing any teaching, ask what s/he can do to help you in that area. - John Dupuis

this is sort of what John and I talked about at Science Online '09 - i need lots more space than what i can do here, i'll put something on my blog this weekend and link to it from ff. Best thing you could possibly do, though, is to call up or e-mail your liaison librarian and meet with them - Christina Pikas

@John I already know what the leading journals in my field are, I don't need a librarian to tell me :) its part of my job to know this stuff. I suspect many other scientists (and academics) feel the same way too. Anyway, I'm looking forward to meeting some librarians to find out what it is they do...(and have been doing) - Duncan Hull

I never know how to respond when someone says, in effect, "You're a librarian, you can't help me, you can't possibly know anything about my subject that I don't." - John Dupuis

bunfight? - Richard Akerman

@John sorry thats not quite what I meant, I'm just curious as to what it is digital librarians do...please pardon my ignorance I think @Christina will fill me in via her blog. - Duncan Hull

Hopefully a cinnamon bun fight, as I'm feeling a bit hungry at the moment. Seriously, scientists and librarians I think have always suffered from a bit of mutual incomprehension and at least on FF we can air it out in non-flaming way. - John Dupuis

ok, it's done; http://christinaslibraryrant.b... - Christina Pikas

Great list, Christina! One thing that I would add is campus outreach to students, faculty and administrators. This includes presenting on social media tools, going to faculty council meetings, hosting events on campus (poetry readings, etc), organizing speakers series on OA and other scholcomm issues, organizing events to showcase institutional scholarly output. - John Dupuis

Also we build, maintain and advocate for student study space, both quiet and collaborative. We build and maintain computer labs, which are often prefered to others because they are supervised. We build learning commons, partnering with other campus constituencies like academic advising, campus IT, writing centres and career centres. - John Dupuis

We're getting over the food and drink thing, if slowly. - John Dupuis

And for scientists and other scholars who want to exploit social networking and media tools, to curate their data, to promote open access, to advance open science, we strive and hope to be your best allies on campus. - John Dupuis

Of course, before I got distracted adding to Christina's excellent list, I wanted to tell a little story about what I do. Every year there's this CS prof here that gives a grad course on Concurrent OO Programming and a few years ago he got tired of the students finding and implementing the same algorithms from the same first page of google hits. So, he asked me if his students (usually 10-12) could come to our lab and we could all spend an hour together. I talk about schol comm issues to start then I ... - John Dupuis

get into some nitty-gritty stuff about finding algorithms using library tools. We find books (paper and e-), use Inspec, use the ACM & IEEE databases and some other tools. Since it's a lab, students are looking for their stuff at the same time and asking questions. The prof is very happy with how it all goes and he says he sees much better results. Remember: computer science graduate students. - John Dupuis

Final cool thing I want to mention. Every year, the prof mentions to me at the end that he really appreciates the sessions in part because every year he learns something too. Makes me feel good to know I'm helping. My notes: http://www.yorku.ca/yul... - John Dupuis

In re digital librarians (since I am one of that breed): We scan images and scan-and-OCR texts. We encode texts in various flavors of XML. We photograph artifacts. We build and manage technology platforms on which to house, curate, index, browse, and display these widely-disparate materials. We cope with format obsolescence as best we can to keep our materials usable, and we decide upon standards to avoid such obsolescence in the future. We DESCRIBE all this so that those who will value it can find it. - D0r0th34

We do information design and data curation, taking a collection of data and making it usable to more than its original owners/creators. We advocate for open access, open data, and open notebook science, often in the teeth of scientists who wish we'd just shut up and go away. We offer advice on rights management, when appropriate, and we try to keep scientists from getting into difficulties as scholarship moves digital. (Not that they often listen, usually to their own detriment.) - D0r0th34

(bleh, FF comments are too short!) We collaborate on the data-management aspects of grant applications and grant management. We keep our faculty apprised of happenings in the wider world that affect how they do business and help them comply with requirements, e.g. the NIH Public Access Policy in the States, or the RAE in the UK. Er, there's more; shall I go on? - D0r0th34

The phrase ‘I’m left with the overwhelming impression that the community is now past caring about the future of the library’ relates to what science colleagues actually feel. My remarks are mild compared with what a senior bioscientist friend (who runs an important journal and who's been a dean) said. I'm writing from the point of view of scientists and trying to paint a real picture - peter murray-rust

Well, Peter, the experience scientists have with their libraries will vary a lot from institution to institution. Also, in my experience, younger faculty tend to be much more receptive to collaboration with librarians than older ones. Your senior colleague may think we're dinosaurs, but some of the younger ones may actually be more engaged, particularly with their teaching. - John Dupuis

should I try to capture some what you J and D said? sorry I slept in this a.m., just approved comments - I also forgot - break up kissing kids in the stacks, un-stop the toilets, create disaster recovery plans and support the community through disasters...@peter - many of my customers care about me and my library deeply, and they've told me so now that we are downsizing. others could care less and google everything, but funny thing is that the googlers don't seem to be the ones who publish a lot - Christina Pikas

Apologies in advance for stepping in late & starting off bitchy. One of the biggest jobs of the university librarian is getting the rest of the university faculty over their antiquated (decade ago?) dissertation-born ideas of research & using the enormous wealth of resources the Library provides for their research. If only so that they might pass along accurate information to their students. We also have to convince the profs that they have been passing along incorrect information about resources. - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

We also have to persuade professors, while massaging their precious egos, that their research behaviors are learned and deeply ingrained in their knowledge of their own fields (and out of date to boot), and are completely opaque to all of their their pre-dissertating students. And we do this while being faced with dismissive attitudes and completely ignorant disrespect for the knowledge that we bring to the table. - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

A couple of nice additions to the list: Stephanie Willen Brown on eres librarians: http://cogscilibrarian.blogspot.com/2009... - John Dupuis

And Jen Holman on being an embedded librarian: http://uwlaxperiodicals.wordpress.com/2009... - John Dupuis

There are few scientists who take a broad view of things. Particularly in the earlier part of their career they have to focus 100% on their own research and frankly care little about anyone else. Librarians have to balance the needs of different areas of science, and needs of students vs researchers vs management. We see these needs and as John said, we argue for appropriate resources. - Frank Norman