Library Groupware for Bibliographic Lifecycle Management by Dan Chudnov, Yale’s Center For Medical Informatics. If you work in a library, and you are at all interested in the IT side of things, and you read only one thing today, then this should be it.
A very thought-provoking piece that is well researched and articulated. I haven’t read a lot of material that synthesizes the potential of tools like link resolvers with something as “everyday” as a weblog.
Dan’s vision is grand–no doubt about it–but I think he makes a strong case that the tools and our ability to develop services, such as those similar to what he is proposing, need not be light years away.
We (Dan’s library/my library/libraries in general) are already making progress on a number of the finer points, and I do think there is a growing recognition that to be in the practice of librarianship means that we must look beyond just the storage, retrieval and delivery mechanisms of the information itself, but also towards the development of services facilitating the users processing of the information in a meaningful way.
A colleague had passed on an email today relating to this: an analogy parallelling what would have happened had the railroad tycoons thought of themselves as being in the transportation business rather than just the railroad business. Who knows where they might be now?
In my mind, I’m clearly in the information transportation business, that is, helping customers at every stage of their “information journey.”
