It is an all e-books edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads this week. The biggest news was the announcement of the policy change by HarperCollins for ebooks distributed through OverDrive. Beyond that, though, was an announcement of a new sharing model and program through the Internet Archive. Lastly is a slidecast recording of a presentation by David Lewis on the future of library collections.
At the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting, David Lewis (Dean of the IUPUI University Library) gave a talk entitled “Collections Futures”. I’ve followed David’s ideas since we crossed paths a few years ago; his ideas on applying Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theories to libraries ring true to me. This presentation is in part an update on his earlier work on this theme and an expansion to include new ideas from Clay Shirky and John Seely Brown.
With David Lewis’ permission and in keeping with the Creative Commons license he used to publish the work, I have synchronized his slides and the audio recording using Slideshare.net. That effort is embedded below and is available on the Slideshare site.
If it is Thursday it must mean it is time for another in this series of Thursday Threads posts. This week there are an abundance of things that could fall into the category of “disruptive innovation” in libraries and higher education. If you find these interesting, you might want to subscribe to my FriendFeed stream where these topics and more are posted and discussed throughout the week.
Waves of change are crashing on the shores of the library profession. New media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations collide to cause excitement, anxiety, confusion, and concern. It may be difficult to determine where we are and where we are going. At our present crossroads, it is useful to view the pressures and effects of change on our services as a matrix of commercial versus local on one axis and physical versus digital on the other. Interesting observations about the nature of content and our reaction to it can be made at the intersections of commercial and local with physical and digital. This essay uses these intersections to examine the waves of content coming to the library and our ways of managing it.
Roy Tennant is advocating the phrase “Descriptive Enrichment” over “Bibliographic Control” in response to draft report from the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, and I’m stepping up to say — I’m right there with you, Roy!1 Your analysis reminds me of statements made by David Weinberger in the Google Tech Talk in response to his book Everything is Miscellaneous. David offers new definitions to words that we use regularly: “metadata” is what we know and “data” is what we want to find out. In the talk, he gave an example (29 minutes and 25 seconds into the playback; this link will take you right there) of using something you know — like a quote from a book — to find something you don’t know — like the author — by putting the quote into a search engine. The “metadata” (the quote) was used to find the “data” (the author) that was being sought.
I’ve moved the bibliography of the theory of disruptive innovation as applied to libraries and higher education to a new location. If you are reading this posting directly from the DLTJ website, you’ll also find it linked under the “about” header as “bibliography”.
The bibliography has also been updated to include the new (to me) paper mentioned on Monday and David Lewis’ presentation to the OhioLINK directors last week.
In 2005 I started reading about Clayton Christensen’s theory of Disruptive Technology and became interested in how it explains events shaping academic libraries (and other types of libraries, for that matter) and higher education in general. This page offers a running bibliography of works by Christensen and others focused on this topic.
If you’re just starting in this area, I’d recommend first reading Lafferty’s and Lewis’ work as they both explore the underlying premise of the theories from an academia or academic library mindset. (To dive right in, you may want to start with the 2-hour audio book version of Christensen’s first work. That is how I started and I found it to be a remarkably gentle yet powerful introduction to his concepts.)
OhioLINK was pleased to host David Lewis, Director of the Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis Library, to talk about “Disruptive Innovation and the Academic Library”. The PowerPoint of his presentation is in IUPUI’s institutional repository, and I recommend it as a gentle visual introduction to the application of Clayton Christensen’s Theory of Disruptive Innovations to the field of academic libraries. (See his earlier works for a textual introduction or consult the Jester’s bibliography.)
The text was modfied to update a link from https://idea.iupui.edu/handle/1805/557 to https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/557.
The text was modified to update a link from https://idea.iupui.edu/items-by-author?author=Lewis%2C+David+W. to https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/browse?value=Lewis%2C+David+W.&type=author.
Over the course of 2005 I’ve become more attuned with Clayton Christensen’s model of Disruptive Technology and how it explains events shaping academic libraries (and other types of libraries, for that matter) and higher education in general. Below is the bibliography I’ve collected on this topic
to this point.
If you’re just starting in this area, I’d recommend a top-down reading. (Unless you want to start with the 2-hour audio book version of Christensen’s first work. That is how I started and I found it to be a remarkably gentle yet powerful introduction to his concepts.)