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@bryjbrown
Created July 22, 2016 14:58
Notes from Micah's keynote

Digital, Data, Documentation? We're not in ScholComm Kansas Anymore

Mississippi State University Scholarly Communication Summit
Friday, July 22 @ 9:15AM

What is Scholcomm Kansas?

  • Kansas has a strong history in Scholarly Communication
  • "ScholComm Kansas" = traditional scholarly Communication
    • Authors Rights
    • OA
    • IRs
  • That was 7 years ago, we're in a new era (data)

What is "Data Services?" Where does it fit?

  • Somewhere between public services and technology services
  • Lives near Digital Humanities & ScholComm
  • "Data Services is supradepartmental."
    • It has to have support across departments in order to survive
    • Work occurs in different layers in organization

Is it a "service?"

  • Micah hates the term "service" (we know)
    • Trevor Munroz and Bethany Nowviskie agree with him, library has to be partners in order for this stuff to work
  • Partnerships, programs & initiatives, not services
  • "services" can't say no, but collegial partnership can. Thats important to scalability
  • DaaSBOOT: Data as a Service, But On Our Terms
  • We need to assert OUR agenda as well as focus on researcher needs
  • Whether or not its a fad depends on whether the infrastructure is given the resources to flourish or not

Who are we becoming?

  • Data is creating the possibility for libraries to take on a new role in the research world, to provide value in a new way
  • What does it mean to be a library in this environment?
  • What if the future of libraries is nothing like how libraries have been in the past?
  • Nancy Fried Foster: libraries could be smaller in the future, but with the same size staff doing much more data oriented stuff
  • Would data services work better outside of the/a library? Perhaps as an external unit?

Compass metaphor

  • Micah sees north as traditional library services and south as OA, scholcomm, digischol, etc (opposite ends on a scale, lots of tension)
  • What if they were actually east to west, and "true north" was the set of all things that libraries should be doing?
  • Are we heading in the right direction? (ties the metaphor together)
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