Perhaps malleable is just a more scholarly sounding word than remix but it’s interesting how certain academic types react more positively to it. Say that digital content needs to structured in a way that it can be remixed and some people will start sputtering about how remixing is only a passing trend among copyright ignorant music freaks. Say that digital scholarship needs to be malleable and the same audience will ponder the topic thoughtfully.

David Seaman, Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation, gives a talk with a set of PowerPoint slides titled Mass and Malleability: the Digital Humanities and the Library. He states that a major need is for “much more content, and much richer, domain-sensitive, finding systems are vital, as is the ability to enrich, re-shape, re-package, annotate, and contextualize the data once it has been found.” He closes the presentation with the comment that “Innovative users need malleable content with which to innovate; need to learn to re-shape content in a mutable library.”

I agree totally with these statements and also believe that the malleability of content is one of the most underdeveloped areas in the digital library. Furthermore, I believe that malleable content is one of the hallmarks of the traditional library.

Research libraries, in particular, exist to support scholarship through the acquisition, management, organization, and preservation of scholarly materials. Is scholarship not the scholar’s ability “to enrich, re-shape, re-package, annotate, and contextualize” the findings of other researchers?

One reason that libraries have not more actively pursued the development of tools that support the uses of malleable content in the digital library is that librarians traditionally have not been involved in the production end of scholarship. Libraries have tended to be consumers of printed scholarship, acquiring and preserving materials. Commercial publishers and university presses have historically focused on the production of scholarship. Researchers also could pursue the writing of printed scholarship in an independent manner.

Digital scholarship, however, forces the library into a closer partnership with researchers. Not only do libraries need to acquire, organize, and preserve information, libraries now need to develop new services and initiatives that facilitate the use of digital content by researchers. In some library circles, there’s a big question as to whether libraries should be taking on this role. More importantly, scholars need for libraries to take a more active role if digital scholarship is to flourish.