Digital librarianship

BIALL / CLSIG / SLA Europe Open Day

Simon Barron

Project Analyst – British Library

@SimonXIX

1543: the Copernican Revolution

From Nicolaus Copernicus’ De

revolutionibus orbium

coelestium (1543)

1859: the Darwinian Revolution From Thomas Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863)

20th century:

the Freudian

Revolution

21st century: the Digital Revolution

1 exabyte

= 1018 bytes

= a 50,000 year

long DVD

= 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

12 exabytes of data

= 12,884,901,888 gigabytes

= 403 million microSD cards

From the dawn of humanity to the creation of

computers:

2002: 5 exabytes of data

= 37,000 libraries the

size of the British Library

From 2006 to 2010:

161 exabytes to

988 exabytes

Percentage increase of

514%

The digital

librarian

rises…

1986 – 2009

Keen amateur

(but unaware of it)

digital librarian

2009 – 2010

MA Library and Information

Management

Manchester Metropolitan University

“A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his

books, records, and communications, and which is

mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding

speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement

to his memory.”

From Vannevar Bush’s essay, As

We May Think (1945)

From Paul Otlet’s Traité de documentation (1934)

“[Consilience is] a “jumping together” of

knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based

theory across disciplines to create a common

groundwork of explanation.”

From: Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: the unity of

knowledge (1998).

2010 –2011

Assistant Librarian

Army Foundation College

Harrogate

2011 – 2012

E-resources

Co-ordinator

Durham University

Library

2012 – Present

Project Analyst

(Qatar)

British Library

The British Library /

Qatar Foundation Partnership

“…to provide long-term access to digital

copies of geographically-scattered

collections of archives and manuscripts

relating to the Arabic world through a

portal.”

“…more than 500,000 pages from the archives of

the East India Company and India Office….”

“…25,000 pages of

medieval Arabic

manuscripts…”

“As the great Argentinean author Jorge Luis

Borges put it, “everything touches

everything.””

From: Albert-Laszlo Barabási, Linked: the new

science of networks (2003).

Libraries are changing…

“…significant inter-section between the

skill sets of librarians and the skill sets of

IT professionals.”

From: Mathews & Pardue, 2009. The Presence of IT

Skill Sets in Librarian Position Announcements.

College & research libraries, 70 (3), p. 256.

72% of job ads (from ALA’s online JobList

over five months) contained at least one IT

skill.

Librarianship skills

Cataloguing

Metadata

Licensing

Technical library services

IT skills

Systems development

Web design

Coding

Hardware troubleshooting

Communication

Teamwork

Relationship management

Jargon

translation

Intellect

Curiosity

The spirit of adventure…

Questions?

“The really important kind of freedom involves

attention and awareness and discipline, and

being able truly to care about other people and

to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad

petty, unsexy ways every day.”

David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College commencement speech, 2005.

Miscellaneous photos by Simon Barron.

Qatar Programme image scans from British Library.