In a CNI podcast David Seaman, Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation, talks about the concept of malleable content and that in the next generation of library services: “the content itself needs to behave in slightly more flexible ways…simply visiting content online is not the way to drive innovative uses.”

(I’ve written before about Seaman and his thoughts on the malleability of content).

Seaman points out that the next generation of library services also is not all about technology. A lot of it depends upon changes in library policies and the behavior of users.

I do strongly agree that what Seaman calls malleable content is one of the most important issues facing academic and research libraries. Indeed, rather than continuing to massively digitize collections, as much effort needs to be put into making that digitized content more useful. As Seaman says, “while mass is good and necessary, making that content malleable when it hits our teachers and scholar is necessary.”

In the podcast Seaman also talks about DLF initiatives such as Aquifer, OAI, DOI, and electronic resource management.

In another interesting CNI podcast interview Charles Henry, Vice Provost & University Librarian at Rice University, talks about the humanities cyberinfrastructure and that it’s not all about the technology:

people with the requisite skills to work with faculty, to work with researchers, to create the kind of digital architecture where massive amounts of information, multimedia information, can be brought together and queried most effectively for the discovery of new knowledge, so it-s a pretty complex set of issues that converge on this term.

Henry points out the need for national coordination in cyberinfrastructure developments, particularly across disciplinary boundaries – even across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. “Needs of scientists, humanists overlap quite a bit…rather than have disaggregated activity going on, a more central approach on campus and nationally to these shared interests.”

While agreeing that there is a strong legacy of publishing printed books in the humanities, he states that “many disciplines will soon become completely dependent upon digital resources. These resources are creating different strategies, different questions posed.”

He points out that there’s the opportunity for libraries to continue working more collaboratively in order to develop national (I would say, international) digital libraries that can be federated.

Finally, Henry points out that a weakness of libraries is their isolation from scholarly societies and the isolation of librarians on campus as a separate group. Henry calls for more programmatic integration into scholarly societies. That’s an interesting approach. Librarians should certainly be attending the scholarly conferences in their disciplines rather than just attending library-related conferences.

Also, unfortunately, it seems that at some campuses the academic librarians are still so focused on integration simply through giving librarians faculty status and tenure, which definitely is not the solution.

In Combining the Old and the New history prof Mills Kelly writes about an interesting approach for introducing first-year college students to library resources: “for the rest of the semester, they proved much more willing to use the databases that our library spends so many hundreds of thousands of dollars to subscribe to.”

As most librarians know, information literacy only really comes about through being integrated into assignments like this, ones that focus on research and writing skills. What’s key to the assignment that Mills talks about is that it shows how digital media, along with personalized topics, can be a motivating factor in a student’s learning.