Following the keynote, I moved to the session on new roles. The first speaker is Birte Christensen-Salsgaard, Director of IT, StatsBiblioteket in Copenhagen. The dynamic catalogue involves changes in communication, differentiated search, moving the web from portals to services, and new types of roles. There are new forms of scholarly communication such as living reviews, databases with incremental results, and blogs, plus it’s integrated into production process (discussion fora, chat, gaming, holistic view on institutional repositories, Flickr). Our role is to make production of our community visible to outside world so they can use it. The looking glass is turned around. Make user visible to the world rather than make world visible to user. Google is very focused, maybe that’s not the best idea.

Google is not addressing quality. There are different types of search engines. Her examples are FAST and Grokker. She wants Google Scholar as Web services so her library can build things on top of it. Google can’t oblige. Now she’s showing the StatsBiblioteket catalog, which you can sort by relevance.

Dynamic library card, NetLibrary, is a project of 7 public libraries. There’s a
white paper looking at cost-benefit against the technological requirements. First version of NetLibrary had multiple portals, one for literature, music,etc. Now embedded in library portal. Web services is behind this (SOAP/HTTP), one machine talking to another. Trying to implement some personalization. There’s a recommender service. Libraries should aggregate services. Might introduce some taxonomies to return other relevant terms when user enters (or misspells) word.

Do we want the library to be everywhere?
We are in middle of paradigm shift. Going from scarcity to abundance, from owning to licensing, changing nature of content, democratic publishing opportunities, new forms of research, publication, teaching, and digital preservation.

The recommender service is still a prototype and only works with Danish language books.

The second speaker is Britta Woldering, Senior Librarian, Die Deutsche Bibliothek, talking on The European Library (TEL). She’s describing the background, mission, organization of TEL. National libraries pay to be part of TEL. Not just union catalog. Interoperability of catalogs. Future planning include scalability of the portal in the browser solution, a help desk (haven’t decided whether to have one or not), collection descriptions (need user-oriented descriptions), digitized content (too few materials in national libraries that are digitized, user want full object rather than bibliographic description), multilingual issues (always a problem, maybe have automated solutions, maintenance issues are daunting, there are 7 languages and could expand to 36), and character sets (Slovenian and Finnish were problems that have been solved, but Cyrillic script will be challenge).

Google digitization initiative caused great stir in Europe. EC won’t fund digitization. CENL Resolution on digitization of European Cultural Heritage, will develop a network of digitization activities. TEL is seen as ideal single point of entry to digitized material.

There are some discussions between TEL and Google.

Relationahip between TEL and EU? CENL (Council of European National Libraries) is connected to Council of Europe not EU. There’s big interest from European Commission, butthey won’t fund digitization but will fund networks, so they don’t reinvent wheel.