On January 17, 2012, Gregory Crane (Harvard BA 79, Phd 85), Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics, Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship, Tufts University, and Editor in Chief of the Perseus Project, spoke on “Libraries, Humanists, and Intellectual Life in the 21st Century” at Harvard University to a mixed group of librarians, technologists and faculty. He described a number of opportunities for libraries in a world of “ubiquitous information,” where the number of books a library owns is no longer the only important metric – and may not be that important at all.
During a fascinating presentation, Dr. Crane offered thoughts on many directions libraries could take to enhance their value to public and academic communities. While pertinent to all libraries, his remarks provide rich food for thought for MHL and other newly initiated digital libraries. Some of my takeaways:
Through digitization of unique and rare sources, the library can help turn students into professionals – the point where access to “the evidence” is expected and routinely achieved. The library can direct users to external tools and services necessary to fully exploit digital content (– he showed a number of services, including Parallel Text Analysis, particularly useful for linguists using digital content) and, as the tools move from single site innovations to broadly used, the library can rebuild those tools and services so that they are stable and maintainable for the long run. The library can prioritize interoperability and export its metadata. The library can contribute to global learning by treating its library as a global resource, not knowledge that can be locked up to benefit a few. And the library can build new metrics, where the source of pride is how much the resource is used, how long it is preserved, and how it contributes to knowledge generation.