Here is the podcast [17'34] and presentation [pdf] of my keynote at DLF.

It is an attempt to pull out some major themes for future direction in digital libraries.

One of the dialogues that resulted was with my colleague, Dale Flecker, who asked, paraphrasing, "Were you being extreme to better make the point, or because these are views that you hold?" We wound up having a slightly rambling conversation as a result (yes, over wine), in which Dale argued that the core function of libraries was to curate and collect content, and not to generate tools and services that would help consume that content: rather, that was the purview of the scholars and students working with the content. The value of libraries, as Dale represented, is the collection of the Old (even if old is not that old) and material at risk of being unwanted. It is the depth and breadth of the collection, in otherwords, that makes a great library, in both digital and analog.

I didn't disagree about the value of collections. In contrast to this argument, however, I do feel that the tools and services - up to a certain point - are what are vital for libraries in the future. I do not think it is the place of libraries to build applications that directly permit the sciences' domain consumption of content, but I do believe that libraries should develop services that allow our content riches to be discovered, manipulated, and recombined. I think, in otherwords, that we need to go up the stack, beyond the content, a bit more than we have in the past.

My analogy here is thus: when libraries were only and all about collecting books, they still had to build acquisition, circulation, and other systems to support the use of the books. Similarly, as we begin - and we must - engage ourselves in the curation and production of content in video formats, for devices that are mobile - we must build the tools and services which permit their use. And those are going to be vastly different types of engagements than we have had in the past.

[Footnote: In the presentation, I discuss shepherding (or quarantining) savings from necessary analyses of library staffing and workflow. I did not mean to imply that these savings should be hoarded; rather, I intended to suggest that they should be aggregated to enable collaborative action among libraries to achieve applications of scale that would not otherwise be possible. In other words, they would serve as a leveraging balance to spring forwards into a new way of forging services.]