The Inside Out Library

I've just been reading a recent post by Lorcan Dempsey that I wanted to share. Discovery and discoverability, go read it...

Two sections particularly resonated with me.

If I want to know if a particular book exists I may look in Google Book Search or in Amazon, or in a social reading site, in a library aggregation like Worldcat, and so on. My options have multiplied and the breadth of interest of the local gateway [ie. the catalogue] is diminished: it provides access only to a part of what I am potentially interested in.

Essentially, discovery increasingly happens outside the library, especially for public libraries for whom the stock in trade has been recreational reading. So where does that leave the future of public libraries?

The challenge is not now only to improve local systems, it is to make library resources discoverable in other venues and systems, in the places where their users are having their discovery experiences.These include Google Scholar or Google Books, for example, or Goodreads, or Mendeley, or Amazon. It is also to promote institutionally created and managed resources to others.

This is what Dempsey is calling the inside out challenge for libraries.

And this is where I see a real opportunity for libraries;  in unique local collections - material that is unavailable elsewhere and that has particular interest to people with connection to our location and community.

Don't get me wrong. Supporting recreational reading and learning needs as well as local groups and events will remain the major focus of public libraries for some time. But we need to be looking at making our local collections accessible to the network. This is our niche market. Something that we have that can't readily be satisfied elsewhere. 

This means digitisation programs and associated metadata creation.  I don't mean MARC records either. We need to look at making collections available on the web with high quality metadata that can be easily indexed by network discovery tools.  We need to embrace high quality web design, search engine optimisation and open data.  

Let's move away from entrusting the creation, indexing, hosting and discovery of our records to 3rd party commercial services simply so we don't have to do it ourselves.  Let's engage partners to help build these digital collections in ways that allow libraries retain control over the structural design, the quality control and the licensing of the content.

Let's build these collections with APIs and open feeds that allow the content to be harvested into our catalogues and discovery layers, and make it possible for them to be discoverable by Google. Let's encourage others to mash them with other data to create cool new things that we can't even imagine.

That's the future library I want to see.