Cliff Lynch always gives highly insightful comments on technology issues. In remarks from the recent Educause conference, Lynch comments about folksonomies. You can listen to the podcast yourself in which he also touches on a number of other topics, but I’m going to paraphrase his words on folksonomy:

Lynch is puzzled about the entire debate over folksonomies, which doesn’t look like anything new to him. It’s natural for groups of people to develop their own linguistic practices to describe things for retrieval, which is why people do it. There shouldn’t be any reason that folksonomies and traditional descriptive techniques cannot co-exist. Folksonomies are problematic across very large groups. Also, over time there this is the danger that language will drift, which is why a standardized vocabulary is needed in some instances. He provides the example of medical literature, which is highly complex and wouldn’t be well suited to an ad hoc folksonomy. Most importantly, Lynch points out that when we’re able to “combine full-text access with any kind of human added vocabulary then we can do computational statistics so that we can move between the two in order to give a navigational ability that enriches both.”

So, full-text retrieval, highly structured classification, and folksonomy are all useful tools and we need to leverage the tools together. Professional bias keeps people from seeing the common perspective. Lynch believes that we are now only touching the potential of statistical correlation among retrieval tools.

The University of Nebraska- Lincoln has refocused its Electronic Text Center towards digital scholarship. A very interesting document that outlines the goals of the Center is Creating the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln should serve as a model for other academic libraries that are trying to establish similar programs.

The University of Virginia has some of the most extensive experience with digital scholarship. Over the past years UVA has received a significant Mellon grant to research issues involved in supporting digital scholarship. See the final report for that project.

At the recent Free Culture & Digital Library conference in Atlanta, Bradley Daigle gave a paper on How to Sustain Digital Scholarship. I’ve not seen the actual paper yet but the abstract looks very interesting:

Conventional scholarship required faculty and students to use library materials in traditional methods (publishing in journals or books, using reference materials, to name a few). Now, digital scholarship has pushed libraries to revisit their strategies for meeting researchers’ needs and has introduced the new role of librarian cum technologist. Libraries are now expected to employ experts in emerging technologies, particularly with respect to the services they offer both in hardware and software. In order to support what they have always excelled at, namely organizing and preserving information, libraries now have research and development units, digital specialists, and legal counsel. With the integration of library services and digital scholarship, libraries now find themselves playing a leading role in how faculty research is developed and disseminated.

A major challenge for libraries in the face of these changes lies in developing, forecasting, and even imagining a consistent approach to digital scholarship. A single unit within a higher education institution is unlikely to be entirely successful in offering a comprehensive approach to digital scholarship. Collaboration among university units that are conducting digital scholarship seems to be the best solution. There is now a need to work closely with university presses, faculty-driven centers and institutes, technology units, and schools to explore the changing relationships among libraries and the university environment. The goal of this collaboration is to develop a flexible model for sustaining digital scholarship that can be applied to any level of research. At my library, I am now part of an assessment team whose mission is to explore three selected faculty research projects and their impact on the “model” for sustaining digital scholarship we are developing. This team’s responsibilities are to: clarify what will be collected; document the scope of the project; establish the basis for written agreements and intellectual property rights; and recommend a timetable for implementation, or successful integration into our digital library.

Building upon funding received from the Mellon Foundation to investigate the theoretical policy structure to the actual current implementation process, this paper will discuss the current approach the University of Virginia Library has undertaken to address its own strategies for supporting and sustaining digital scholarship.