Why do we digitize "cultural heritage"?

Huge efforts are today made in finding practical solutions and funding for digitization of cultural heritage.  Initiatives like the Europeana gather digital representations of artifacts such as paintings, photographs, manuscripts, films etc and display them universally.  In most countries memory institutions are driven to relocate funding into various digitization projects, many of quite poor quality. In the strive for world dominance Google initiates book digitization en masse together with large libraries around the world, who exclaims the prestige of being part in this global project.

As I am once again preparing a course in cultural heritage digitization at my university, there is one question that keeps nagging me that no-one seem to ask anymore, and that – as far as I can see – very seldom has been asked at any point in time: Why?

Derek Gillman discusses in his eminent book The idea of cultural heritage, two ways of looking at cultural heritage. The first views cultural heritage as something belonging to the whole of humanity. Thus the problems of colonial theft and war-trophies are easily solved – cultural artifacts have the same values wherever they are. The second states an increased value for artifacts and document when relating to the context in which they came into being.  Palawah rituals and artifacts simply make more sense in Tasmania than in London, Brussels or Gothenburg.

The tension between these two ways of looking of the intrinsic value of cultural artifacts, whether material or immaterial, is well known and has during the last decade given rise to discussions and several demands on colonially based collections in Europe to “give back” certain artifacts and documents. Because this is what cultural heritage is about:  documents and artifacts, what is left of historical events and traditions, crafts and customs, and which is sometimes forgot, individuals. They bear witness.  They matter because they are real. None are digital.

When skimming through policy documents of the EU, and digitization strategies in, for instance, Sweden, one is struck by a disturbing lack of interest for the value of these documents and artifacts.  “Cultural heritage” is reduced to just another term in lack of meaning. What has meaning, however, is the contribution cultural heritage digitization will make to the economic growth of the European Union. The digitization industry is in focus.  In order to achieve increased funding, memory institutions are driven into formulating digitization strategies – to become more “visible”.  When confronted with the myriad of tools, versions, metadata that are out there, and the obvious lack of long term preservation solutions, it is becoming increasingly apparent that cultural heritage digitization has very little to do with culture, or heritage, or any value that might lie in the actual documents and artifacts being subjected to digital treatment. Instead it has everything to do with supporting the European (and global) IT-sector and thus (finally) getting a way to legitimizing the very existence of memory institutions in a society that has lost every sense of memory and is exclusively focused on economic growth. 

 Is this a bad thing? Well, no, perhaps not, but when the social system built on the idea of economic growth starts to crumble, as it does today in Europe, and finally collapse (as it most likely will) there will be trouble. 

Digital representation cannot replace original documents and artifacts. There can be smart displays and attractive presentations and, on a very superficial level, increased “access”. But, the values are lost, and without values cultural heritage is nothing but “a shell full of memories”, as Bryan Ferry once crooned. 

   

Do these thoughts mean that I am “against” digitization efforts? No, but I believe that we must allow ourselves to raise the fundamental questions about why we do things. The digitization industry doesn’t want us to do it, politicians set to “lead” the development do not want us to do it – thus it is important to do it. Because, soon enough the day might come – and I believe it will – when the care and preservation of actual, value laden documents and artifacts will no longer be funded, since they are digitally "available". How will museums, libraries and archives then be able to uphold their legitimacy, which is in every sense founded in a pre-digital social order? 

  

The book referred is:

 Gillam, Derek (2010) The idea of cultural heritage. Cambridge University Press.

'As we may digitize' - new article on cultural heritage digitization

" 'As we may digitize' - institutions and documents reconfigured" is an article co-written by Mats Dahlström, Swedish School of Library and information Science, University of Borås, Ulrika Kjellman, Dept. of ALM, Uppsala University, and myself. It has now been published in European Open Access Journal Liber Quarterly.

The basic argumentation in the article was first presented a few years back at DOCAM'09 in Madison, WN, USA. It has since evolved, slowly rotating between the three of us, until we felt it ready for publication.

So - enjoy:

Abstract:

This article frames digitization as a knowledge organization practice in libraries and museums. The primarily discriminatory practices of museums are compared with the non-discriminatory practices of libraries when managing their respective cultural heritage collections. Digitization of cultural heritage brings new practices, tools and arenas that reconfigure and reinterpret not only the collections, but the memory institutions themselves as well as the roles they respectively play on a societal level. The development of digitization promises to bridge some gaps between libraries and museums, either by redefining their respective identity, or by forming new ground where the interests of the respective institutions naturally meet or even converge, or by neglecting particular tasks and roles that do not seem to find a natural home in the new territory. Two poles along a digitization strategy scale, mass digitization and critical digitization, are distinguished in the article. As memory institutions are redefined in their development
of digitized document collections, e.g., by increasingly emphasizing a common trans-national rather than national cultural heritage, mass digitization and critical digitization represent alternative avenues. Museums, libraries and archives (MLA) endeavour aiming for joint tools and practices in digitizing cultural heritage collections need a thorough understanding of such mechanisms. The article re-contextualizes current digitization discourse: a) historically, by suggesting that digitization brings ancient practices back to life rather than invents entirely new ones from scratch; b) conceptually, by presenting a new label (critical digitization) for a digitization strategy that has hitherto been downplayed in digitization discourse; and c) theoretically, by exploring the relations between the values of different digitization strategies, the reconfiguration of collections as they are digitized, and the redefinition of MLA institutions through those processes. The arguments in the article are drawn from examples of digitization in different library contexts on both a national (Swedish) level and a European level.

Key words:

knowledge organization; mass digitization; critical digitization; research libraries; national libraries; museums; cultural heritage


Full article in pdf format is here

Open Access, scholarly communication and the academic library

It has been about a decade now since the start of what is generally referred to as the Open Access Movement, starting off with the Budapest manifesto in 2001. The thought was to break the paradigm in scholarly communication dominated by commercial publishers and constrained copyright agreements. Emerging new, more communicative, ways of using the internet was paving the way for a more open way of disseminating scientific results. In this development academic libraries have come to play an important, but not uncomplicated, role. Open access is primarily directed at two kinds of output: academic journals and open institutional repositories. In the latter case, libraries in higher education institutions (HEI) have in many cases been (and are) responsible for the development.

During the last couple of years a number of studies in LIS research have focused on the actual development of open access, both from a library point of view, and a scholarly. Did it indeed change the patterns of scholarly communication as it was intended to? Has the role of academic libraries increased in relation to research processes and publication strategies of teaching faculty? Well, the situation is evidently quite complex and somewhat ambiguous. There seem to be a general agreement that open access is an amendable initiative, and that the possibilities really are there. But, when it comes down to real action, there seems to be a lot left to wish for.

In many countries today academic libraries work with the development of open institutional repositories. Sometimes these are shared between more than one HEI, as the Swedish DiVA. These repositories might be of value to the institutions they serve, they might provide an insight between faculty in individual universities, and the might be good for individuals that may publish their collected research output in one place, thus achieving a very dynamic list of references. The problem seems to be, that the scholars themselves do not see these advantages to a very high degree – if indeed they are aware of their existence. Instead there does not seem to be much that indicates any significant change in the patterns of scientific communication and publications of research results. The commercially based system of ranked academic journals still holds up against a more “free” way of publishing, and the question is whether academic libraries in any way can influence this. Libraries have, ever since the the “modern” scientific journal emerged in the mid 17^th century held a very strong position as the very institutions where scientific results are kept available. Even though it has not been without trouble (extraordinary raising costs etc), one can claim that they still hold this position today. An open access alternative does not perhaps constitute a threat to libraries, but they sure do not seem to know what to do with it. Without doubt the potential is there, especially with the development and hosting of institutional repositories. But if this is to work, if academic libraries will be able to meet their positive attitudes to open access and their contribution to it, they evidently need to bring communication with local scholars to a whole new label. There is no reason why they could not, but the initiative must come from the library side. Scholars still tend to rely on more traditional ways of publishing, where the award system is well known and stable.

The most significant agent now, meeting the increasing social demands for open access that we see today, are various forms of funding agencies and research councils, not least in Sweden. Many of them now demand some form of open access publishing if tax payers’ money should be spent on research projects. Perhaps it is through these agencies academic libraries should go to strengthen their position in relation to scientific publishing strategies among the scholars in their HEI’s. The perceived uncertainty of open access as a “threat” or not might just find its answer there and yet another distinct role for academic libraries emerge – to the benefit of open access to research results.

------------------

As mentioned, a number of studies on these issues have been published during the last couple of years. Here are a few examples:

Creaser, C (2010) “Open access to research outputs: institutional policies and researcher’s views: results from two complementary surveys”. New Review of Academic Librarianship, Vol. 16, 4-25.

Cullen, R. & Chawner, B. (2011) “Institutional repositories: open access and scholarly communication: a study of conflicting paradigms”. Journal of Academic Librarianship, Vol. 37(6), 460-470.

Haglund, L. & Olsson, P. (2008)”The impact on university libraries of changes in information behavior among academic researchers: a multiple case study. Journal of Academic Librarianship, Vol. 34(1), 52-59.

Palmer, K., Dill, E. & Christie, C. (2009) "Where there's a will there's a way?: survey of academic librarian attitudes about open access". College & Research Libraries, Vol. 70(4), 315-355.

Folkets bibliotek? - Pre-order new book by Joacim Hansson

It is now possible to pre-order my new book, written in Swedish:
Folkets bibliotek? Texter i urval 1994 - 2012.

The book is a compilation of articles and essays on public libraries and librarianship published in various anthologies and journals between 1994 and today. It also contains three previously unpublished essays.
It is published by BTJ Förlag.

It will be out in late march/ early april.
It can be ordered here:Adlibris - Bokus


Cover by Lotta Löthgren/1811 Ord&Bild

E-books, Users, Reading promotion - the SPLQ chronicles

In the beginning of this year, which soon now has to defend its place in history, I was asked by the Swedish Council of Cultural Affairs to provide three short chronicles to Nordic journal Scandinavian Public Library Quarterly. I was happy and intrigued to be asked as SPLQ for many years has been a cutting edge library journal - also by international standards. The task gave me a good opportunity to think and write in a very free form, far from the constraints of traditional scholarly writings, something which I found very refreshing. The three short texts became reflections on some current issues in librarianship and together they form, for me at least, some kind of unity. Looking at public librarianship it is clear that many of the current trends stems from the same social and technological delevopments - even to the point where individual technical services are taken for general social development. As they thus may be read together, I decided to gather them here - enjoy:

SPLQ chronicles


Soon these texts will also be published in their Swedish original forms in another very exciting context - something I will have reason to return to here in just a short while.

Bibliometrics and the Changing Role of the University Libraries

For the first time, NDL hosts an original publication of a full scale research article, together with Lund University Publications. Enjoy.

UPDATE: As this article has been officially published by the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, the link is now directed to the proper DOI.


How implementation of Bibliometric practice affects the Role of Academic Libraries

by

Dr. Fredrik Åström, Lund University, Sweden
Prof. Joacim Hansson, Linnaeus University, Sweden
 


Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the background and potential consequences of bibliometrics being incorporated as a part of librarianship tasks and competencies.

Approach: The discussion is based on previous literature as well as a questionnaire sent out to Swedish libraries with organized bibliometric activities.

Findings: Incorporating bibliometrics into academic librarianship is part of a redefinition and widening of the professional role. This is motivated by ambitions to provide more complete services in the scholarly communication process, as well as to increase the visibility and status of libraries, not the least in relation to central university management. Underlying reasons are professional competencies such as metadata and bibliographic database management; and bibliometrics being strong within library and information science.

Implications: Incorporating bibliometrics is a widening of the professional profile of librarianship, and may well increase the visibility of the libraries in relation to their wider academic environment, not the least in times when bibliometrics is getting increasingly important in terms of research evaluation. The new role should, however, also be considered from the viewpoint of potential changes in how libraries are perceived when incorporating a monitoring function through bibliometric analyses of research performance to the previous service oriented functions.

Originality/value of the paper: Bibliometrics as a complementary path for librarianship has been discussed previously; however, not in terms how the role may be changed and how libraries are perceived. There are limitations to be considered: the questionnaire is limited to Swedish libraries; and no efforts are made into investigating how this change is viewed upon by scholars and university management.

Keywords: Profession; Role of libraries/librarianship; Academic libraries; Bibliometrics; Research evaluation


The full paper is here

Librarians versus (real) users - comment on a new report.

I have on several occasions lately claimed that users have an unproportional influence on the thinking of librarians and the way in which libraries are discussed. Well, not perhaps the users themselves, but the perceptions of the “user” that flourishes among librarians and LIS researchers. Almost every new thing, from the introduction of social media in libraries to new management formulas are legitimized by the perceived will of the “user”. At the same time we have known for quite some time that there is no group surrounding the library that is more conservative than…the actual user. This picture has once again been corroborated by a new Swedish report published by the Swedish Library Association. 800 citizens and 300 librarians have answered questions about what they consider to be the most and least important aspects of libraries. The study exclusively focuses on public libraries.
Many of the issues that so concern contemporary librarianship and LIS research are just not that important to the users. Two examples are the web presence and the idea of public libraries as “meeting places”. When it comes to web presence, it is clear that this is mainly a concern for librarians. This goes well in line with other international studies that indicate that web presence and use of social media is of marginal interest to users, but a high priority for librarians. Taking into consideration the efforts and resources put into this by libraries, this is an interesting result. There seems to be little doubt that the fixation on technology found among large groups of librarians – and indeed – LIS researchers have little bearing on the world and library activity of those actually using the library.
Another clear result of the study is the fact that most users are not particularly interested in their local library as a “meeting place”. Librarians however believe that they are. Within the LIS research community the concept of the library as a social meeting place has been in centre for several years now. It has been problematic though in that it has proven very difficult to define what this idea actually means. The library users know better – they go to the library to do their thing and really do not care much about the other users being there at the same time.
Of course the report – which is in Swedish – shows a wide range of results, and mostly users and librarians are pretty much in line with each other. The two examples I have lifted here are where they differ the most, and one may argue that this is no strange thing, but in some ways it is. Both web presence and the idea of meeting places are today so central to both practical librarianship and LIS research that we really have to ask ourselves what is wrong here. To me it seems like we in both practice and research take our point of departure in a perception of the user as we want her/him to be. Both areas are politically correct, but if the users do not respond to the efforts laid down in promoting them, then what we have is nothing but words, and that is – honestly – not much. Still, as everyone has to legitimize themselves, the discussion now might just turn to the question of the “good” user and the “bad” or “ignorant”one, or – even worse – how users could be “won over” to the side of the social and the technological. Evidently, what the citizens using libraries want is what they always have wanted; to borrow books, read magazines and newspapers – in a calm and quiet environment. The one thing they appreciate the most is a good and knowledgeable reception by the librarians. Well, some do indeed wish for a more socially stimulating and exciting environment as well – those between 74 and 85 years of age.
This is a good and interesting report. Hopefully it will trigger discussions and self scrutiny both among librarians and LIS researchers because we all know, in the end, the users are always right. Aren’t they?

The report:
Olika syn på saken: Folkbiblioteket bland användare, icke-användare och personal (2011). Stockholm, Svensk biblioteksförening.