In the United States, over the past century, the practice of health care has transitioned from being a largely distributed and generalist profession to a much more corporatized and specialized one. It is a change that many greet with regret, despite the obvious advances in health care. One of our cultural touchstones is a romanticized image of the doctor or caregiver tending to patients in their homes, a leather satchel containing crucial instruments nearby. Still, we acknowledge a new reality - of health care as a consumer product: tranched and parsed into products designed for maximum efficiency. Home health care is considered a scarce and expensive resource. In other sectors, we see a similar trend. Local mechanics, hardware stores, and groceries are disappearing in favor of one-stop box stores. Geek Squad and Facebook are replacing specialists who used to fix computers in the home or provide websites for small businesses.

Academic libraries are different. They are, and have been for a long time, highly centralized institutions whose services and organizational structures are often designed to reflect a certain order that is perceived to exist within the broader institution. Departments have liaisons, collection development often falls along disciplinary lines, and the library is treated as a destination - a physical and virtual domain - out of which the tools for scholarship will be doled. Academic libraries are faced with a challenge that is the inverse in other sectors: we are faced with a digital scholarship environment that screams for decentralizing many library services. And in order to do so, we must overcome a static cultural momentum.

In 2002, the American Library Association launched the massive Campaign for America’s Libraries. The centerpiece of the campaign was a new marketing effort built around the slogan, “@ Your Library.” According to the ALA website, the purpose of the campaign is:

• Promote awareness of the unique role of academic and research libraries and their contributions to society;
• Increase visibility and support for academic and research libraries and librarians;
• Help librarians better market their services on-site and online;
• Position academic and research librarianship as a desirable career opportunity.[2]

While these are mostly admirable goals, they betray the extent to which the library profession, as represented by the ALA, is willing to respond to the challenges of the digital era by simply marketing traditional services more aggressively. This approach is flawed; not because patrons do not value traditional library services, but because the services no longer reflect the character of the institutions that they serve.

When the traditional disciplines engage more with digital technologies, the familiar practices become fragmented and less familiar – a phenomenon that Wendell Piez describes as akin to “a field where native plants and wildflowers are overtaking a tidy lawn.” [1] This unruliness disrupts the mappings that libraries have traditionally applied to the disciplines. Instead of designing liaison, cataloging, and collection development services that support a predictable mode of scholarly work, libraries need to support scholarship that emerges from a state of relative entropy. The new mapping, in other words, is not to make traditional library services more “digital,” but rather to explode them out into a complementary state of entropy.

The entropic library is one in which the library is not only a physical destination and an institutional cornerstone, but also is a gravitational force in the digital scholarly life of the campus. It is a force that is exerted by library staff acting as consultants, software developers, funders, PIs, data curators, and mad scientists. It acts as a resource for the university’s scholars by helping to shape and support new digital methodologies, which it channels into programmatic activities when there is a potential benefit to the wider university community. Its first concern is not to get digital things into the library as new collections, but to get the library to where the digital things are being used, and make them accessible and sustainable.

Embracing entropy is difficult for an institution whose identity has been defined by its advocacy of order. And it can be difficult for lovers of libraries to see entropy as anything but a threat to everything that we cherish in our libraries. Our romanticized image of the library tends to be of the library as a destination. In this image we might imagine the cloistered stacks, the hours spent ingesting the wisdom in the books, and of the boundless potential in the unread volumes. It is a powerful image, and it is made more poignant by the sensory associations we often have with the library: the smell of the bindings, the muted sounds in the stacks, the concentration evident on the faces of readers. It is understandable that libraries, faced with the emergence of digital technologies in the 1990s, would design services that attempt to preserve the appeal of that library. Reference areas crammed with tables, lamps, and books transformed into computer labs, but the space retained its purpose as a destination for study and work. Card-catalogs were replaced by Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs), which were largely digital renditions of the same tools that libraries had always offered. Print journal collections thinned as digital subscriptions became more cost-effective, although real challenges to the academic publishing paradigm would not gain traction for at least another decade. And the roles of librarians largely remained the same - as gatekeepers and guides for information resources housed within and, to a limited extent, outside of the library’s physical and digital bounds.

Creating digital surrogates for traditional services was a necessary, evolutionary step toward modernization. But, there remains a chasm between the notion of the modern library as a purveyor of traditional resources delivered digitally, and the entropic library, steeped in and defined by the new digital scholarship. The entropic library needs to cultivate physical spaces in which to do scholarly work using digital media. But it is no longer a font from which information flows. It is a kaleidoscope of data, knowledge, and interaction, brought together by the scholarly primitives and crystallized for moments in the physical spaces that the university contains.

 [1]Piez, Wendell.  ”Something Called Digital Humanities.”  Digital Humanities Quarterly.  Vol.  2, No. 1.  (Summer, 2008).http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/002/1/000020/000020.html

[2]http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/advocacy/publicawareness/campaign%40yourlibrary/academicresearch/academicresearch.cfm

There has been a lot of discussion among the participants about whether SEASR does anything that other pipeline languages/java/frameworks don’t already do.  And I think there is more to hear from the SEASR folks regarding why they developed yet another framework and language to support the real meat of the project: the repository of shared DH-centric code.  Some participants voiced concerns and/or hopes that Mellon will mutate SEASR into the as-of-yet unrealized software layer for the Bamboo Project.  Whether or not this happens, there is a solid sandbox here, and if the SEASR folks maintain some momentum with more forthcoming workshops, actively making their team available to practitioners, and making their support for an active user community paramount, there is a ton of potential here.

UIMA: Unstructured Information Management Applications

Example: Use UIMA to analyze Part-of-speech information.
•    Uses CAS (Common Analysis Structure) to serialize data and pass it from analytical structure to analytical structure.   Creates a chain of analytical components.
•    UIMA is accessed through Eclipse as a plugin:

o    XML description of the UIMA chain that will be run.
o    Choose document analyzer
o    Choose directory of files to analyze.

•    Result is original datasource (i.e. text) + annotated parameters (parts of speech/terms/names, etc.)
•

SEASR application:
•    Pattern analysis – discover how characters in a novel are mentioned in relation to commonly occurring nouns.
•    Problem: handling sparse data sets – many possible nouns, very few in a given sentence.
•    Result: create a matrix of characters and nouns, with confidence ranking.

Example: Use UIMA to analyze sentiment information.
•    Look at adjectives within body of text.
•    Use a thesaurus to chart path from an adjective to one of a predetermined set of emotional terms.
•    Rank the closeness (number of steps) of adjectives to a given emotional term.
•    Problems: different thesauri result in very different analyses.
•    SEASR visualization based on open source ActionScript library: Flare.

Integrating SEASR analytics with common scholarly tools

Examples: Zotero and SEASR:

•    Send collections to SEASR and get some analytics.
•    Examples: Authorship analysis

o    Author centrality analysis
o    Author Degree analysis
o    Author HITS analysis

•    Able to point the Zotero/SEASR plugin to your institutional SEASR services to get the kinds of analytics you want.
•    This is purely a service – no indexing to reuse previously analyzed data.

Example 1:
•    SEASR will only do the analysis.  Analytic results will be stored in the Zotero database as an attachment.
•    SEASR plug-in in context menu – Option to compute Flesch-Kincaid readability on a Zotero entry via Project Gutenberg.

Example 2:
•    Look for author centrality in a collection of articles saved in Zotero.  Returns centrality ranking and saves analysis as a Zotero attachment.

Example 3:
•    Export collections from Zotero to Fedora via SEASR.  (Is Fedora a useful way to share personal collections?).

The SEASR workshop began with some general introductions from NCSA,  Christopher Mackie from the Mellon Foundation, and Michael Welge from NCSA/SEASR Project.  A lot of people here came directly from the Bamboo workshop #3 in Tuscon (which is sort of cruel considering it is -25F with the windchill here).  I’m curious to hear about Bamboo - at first glance it seems that SEASR is an instatiation of some of Bamboo’s goals, but that may be a gross misrepresentation. About to see some examples of the SEASR software in action.  Raw notes from the introductions:

SEASR:
•    SEASR: Semantic Web driven SOA interoperability
•    Modular
•    Enable mashups
•    Rely heavily on RDF
•    Search & browse Fedora
•    Export from Zotero to Fedora
•    Simile Timeline interface

Model:
•    Meandre infrastructure (ZigZag scripting language)
•    Layered architecture with component repository service layer
•    Knowledge Discovery model: Data selection & cleaning -> Data prep (create an example) -> Transformation (munging) -> Data mining/pattern Discovery -> Interpretation/Knowledge.

Participant Project Plan Guide:
•    Research objective
•    Data sources
•    Transformations
•    Query/Descriptive/Analysis
•    Evaluation
•    Interaction
•    Outcome

My initial email:

The discussion of the value MLIS/MLS is interesting, and familiar. It is a discussion that always seems to go in one direction: namely, why do library technologists need MLS degrees? There are some pretty compelling arguments that they don’t, but I’m curious what that means for librarians going forward.

I went to library school during what I consider to be the Great Delusion of the Late Nineties. There was a palpable sense among MLS students and librarians that we were about to find our groove in the proto-Google web world. My intro MLS courses were chock full of readings about librarians being hired away by Fortune 500 companies to help them make sense of Information, and about these mystical skills that librarians possessed that allowed us some insight into Information that others could not possess without an MLS.

What happened, of course, was that things changed quicker than MLS programs could adapt, and whether we liked it or not, our culture had moved beyond the need for librarians as gatekeepers. In the meantime, these amazing things are happening with open repositories, web services, and resource-oriented systems - things that should be front-and-center for emerging librarians, but often are skimmed because of the technical knowledge required. The result is that a lot of smaller academic libraries need to choose between enacting a really ambitious and forward-looking technology strategy, and protecting their MLS faculty lines. It seems like a doomed strategy in the long-run, but for a library director, I don’t think there is an easy answer. So a lot of places try to have it both ways and fish for skilled technologists with MLS degrees.

In my case, I went the other direction, currently working in a non-Library (but closely affiliated) technology group that is under the IT umbrella, despite having an MLS. So go figure…

The most compelling new thing that I saw there was the Djatoka (not Djakota, as Birkin Diana pointed out) JPEG 2000 Image server.  Since I’m not really an image person, my simplistic impression of JPEG 2000 is that it is full of potential as a high-quality and scalable image format, but that it has lacked accessible and affordable software support.  The folks at Los Alamos have now released Djatoka, which seems to be … pardon me here … a game changer.

In practice, Djatoka shares some features with Google Maps - images can be delivered as AJAXy tilesets, which can be dynamically loaded in the browser as requested by the user.  But the really cool feature is URI addressibility of any region of an image.  So, you want to study Mona Lisa’s nosehairs? Here is a URL.  Not only that, but the API lets you pass a URI for any image, which the Djatoka server compresses on-the-fly, and then delivers in JPEG2000 format.

One of the controversial (in a nerdy way) features of Djatoka is its heavy use of OpenURL to reference & deliver parts of the image.  There has been some discussion on Code4Lib about whether there is a better way to do it.  I’d say there probably are better ways, but OpenURL is a way to get the server out there quickly and get people using it quickly.  Pretty much any transfer format would get somebody’s hackles up, so you might as well build some momentum early by using a nearly-universal format (nearly universal for academic institutions that is, the rest of you are on your own).  And hey, it is open source, so if you don’t like OpenURL, hack away.

The Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) spec is, in my opinion, an enormous development. Scholarly technologists, librarians, and researchers have been circling around this idea of a truly semantic, services-based environment for a long time. It is great to see an architectural model that people can begin to discuss, rather than seeing more ad hoc development and tepid experiments by technology vendors.

The ORE working group describes their results like this:

“ORE will develop specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories. “

The also recommend an Atom-based model for packaging and delivering these representations of digital objects via syndication:

“These specifications describe a data model to identify and describe aggregations of web resources, and the encoding of the data model in the XML-based Atom syndication format. ”

Incidentally, my forthcoming article, “Syndicating Rich Bibliographic Metadata Using MODS and RSS”, Journal of Web Librarianship, Vol. 2 Issue 1, 2008, explores some very similar ideas, but as a proof-of-concept exercise applied to objects in library collections. Either way, it is really exciting to see the same vein of investigation happening at a much more prominent level.

It is pretty clear to most everyone that the old model of digital repositories - silos of data waiting for serendipitous discovery - is played out. Dan Cohen says it much more eloquently than I can, but suffice it to say that technology is just beginning to allow digital scholarship to more closely model the actual process of scholarship, in all of its complexity, nuance, and imprecision. It is pretty awesome.