Interesting that Microsoft announced its abandonment of its own “Large Scale Digitization Initiative” (LSDI) just as I’m writing this (though I guess only interesting to me). Their effort never had the kind of attention and cachet that Google’s had, though they did, apparently, manage to digitize 3/4 of a million books and some 80 million articles; they also developed one of the more intriguing user interfaces for their search and browse functions — so it’s sad to see them go.
Nevertheless, the Google juggernaut seems to be rolling on as before, and libraries are still struggling to catch up with the technical, organizational, social, and cultural implications. A recent White Paper (via Lorcan Dempsey again) by Oya Rieger, issued by CLIR, entitled “Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization“, goes some way toward getting a handle on these. I haven’t read the whole thing (it’s long), but I found the conclusions particularly interesting in the emphasis they give to two important ways in which these sorts of LSDIs are driving change in current library organization and culture: the need for much closer, more systematic collaboration among institutions to take advantage of the network, and the need for a more “agile”, risk-taking organization in general. Here’s an especially telling paragraph near the end:
One virtue of LSDIs is that the contributing libraries are gaining experience in interacting and negotiating with commercial information organizations, which function very differently than do academic institutions. As John Voloudakis has noted, today’s need for faster responsiveness has introduced the “adaptive organization” strategic planning model for IT.116 This model is characterized by an institutional focus on sensing and responding to the evolving environment as quickly as possible. In today’s fluid IT environment, traditional strategic planning and consensus models are unlikely to support the decision-making processes of research libraries. There will be increasing pressure for quick responses to opportunities and changes. It will also be essential that libraries develop scalable and flexible infrastructures that facilitate rapid execution. Equally important is learning to take calculated risks. The summary of discussions at Digital Preservation in State Government: Best Practices Exchange 2006 notes that there are no “best practices” for digital preservation.117 Instead, there are merely “good-enough” solutions. Holding out for an ideal solution is often not feasible; moreover, implementing less-than-perfect solutions can enable institutions to be flexible, modular, and nimble so that they can continue to refine their strategies as new options become available.
