The 21st Century Digital Library: More Questions than Answers
Patrick J. Wilkinson
The 21st Century Digital Library: More Questions than Answers
"The Digital Library:Architecture for Learning in the 21st Century" was a full-day preconference seminar that raised myriad difficult questions and intriguing issues regarding the development of digital libraries. The preconference used a mixture of presentations, panel discussions, and small group guided exercises to consider what the digital library is now and where it is going in the future. The facilitators and speakers at the preconference were librarians, scholars, and technologists who are all leaders in building or studying digital libraries. They were Barbara McMullen, director of e-commerce initiatives at Marist College; David Woolner, director of the Marist College/Franklin D. Roosevelt(FDR) Digital Library Project for the FDR Digital Library; Miriam Masullo,research staff member at IBM; Claire Dougherty, head of digital media services at Northwestern University; Kent Portney, project director of the digital library of multimedia-based instructional simulations for social sciences at Tufts University; and Linda May, associate at the Center for Applied Research.
The presenters discussed and small groups explored many difficult issues facing digital library projects. Some of these questions included:
Is "library" the proper metaphor for something that will be "a fundamental feature of the teaching, learning, and research environments of colleges,universities, and pre-K-12 institutions in the twenty-first century?"
How can effective governance structure be developed for long-term success?
What needs should projects address and how can projects succeed unless they meet real-life needs?
How can workable funding models be developed?
What are the elements of a funding model that will have real incentives for the creation of digital libraries?
Will the content of digital libraries be available on a free or fee basis?
What are the technical issues that need to be addressed?
How do you handle the issues of ownership and intellectual property in this new digital world?
The presenters and the approximately 30 participants also exchanged ideas about many intriguing issues. A major issue was the different expectations that people had for the twenty-first-century digital library. Some participants saw it in fairly traditional library terms as a "place" where information was housed and students and researchers could access it as they wished. Others saw it as something that was less passive and more active. It was a virtual place that was integrated into the teaching and learning curriculum that would be the foundation for future distributed and distance learning. These participants and presenter saw it more in the terms of a "digital laboratory" where information was not only used but also worked with, creating new information. In addition, most participants and presenters saw the digital library moving beyond its current series of scattered projects. They saw it moving toward more focus and coordination.
Several presenters deserve special mention. Woolner of the FDR Digital Library described a good example of a successful early digital library project at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/. The simple but well-designed site provides "scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public . . . access to a portion of the rich collection of documents, photographs, sound and video recordings, finding aids, and other primary materials found at the" library. The site, which is under scholarly editorship, follows sound archival practices in the arrangement of information. Portney, who deals with instructional simulations in the social sciences, gave an interesting description of how the digital library can be used as a place where social science experiments can take place for a clearly defined educational purpose. His demonstration of an online experiment regarding how race impacts sentencing done in the criminal justice system was fascinating. From his presentation, it was easy to understand how this "active" use of the digital library can make issues clearer to students than just reading a journal article about it. Lastly, Masullo of IBM talked passionately about and made a convincing case for the potential of the digital library to improve the quality of life on the planet. She described how the imaginative and humane use of the digital library in the Third World could bring education and health care information to people who desperately needed it.
The precise architecture for the twenty-first-century digital library may not be clear. Moreover, there may be more questions than answers about its future. Yet this should be expected. From the preconference, it is clear that information and education itself is standing on the edge of a learning revolution. How the world creates,stores, retrieves, processes, and distributes information is fundamentally changing. The real unknown about the digital library is not if it will fundamentally change teaching and learning in the twenty-first century. It is how this will happen and how libraries will play a constructive role in this new age.
Patrick J. Wilkinsonis Associate Director and Chief Operations Officer of the Forrest R. Polk Library, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, Wisconsin. E-mail: wilkinso@uwosh.edu..
