Augmenting Library Services: Toward the Sharium
INLS 235
Spring 2003

Outline
Motivation: Why augment when there is so much to do already?
DL research and development trajectory
Focus on:
Search and discovery
Reference
Contributions

First Principles: Libraries
Libraries assess, collect, preserve, organize, provide access to information and promote its use to improve the human condition.
Libraries are highly burdened to accommodate physical and electronic materials and increasing needs for information by larger and more diverse populations.
Internet and WWW offer universal communication and publishing and challenge libraries to reconsider fundamental missions--DLs
Leverage the DL challenge to develop a broader vision of information services for the common good: Sharium is a metaphor for this

First Principles: Information Seekers
Information seeking is embedded in real life tasks
People want/like to share
altruism
egocentrism
investment (quid pro quo)
peer pressure
Innovation adoption is not a linear process

Digital Library Design Space

DL Missions
DLs clearly must aim to collect, manage, and preserve electronic expressions of knowledge (this is a well-established mission).
Knowledge is in people’s heads--DLs should aim to facilitate the use and development of the collective knowledge in human consciousness
Human attention is a fundamental natural resource--DLs should provide tools and resources (material and expertise) to help optimize this resource

Sharium
A virtual workspace with rich content and powerful tools where people can work independently or collaborate with each other to learn and solve information problems.  A collaborative problem solving environment.
Organized around resources and tools
Encourages contributions and participation
Is sustainable

Sharium Workspace

Query & Selection
Interfaces
Natural language queries
Dynamic queries
Alternative interfaces
Help/support
Consortia/portals/channels
Interoperation
Selection and merging

Reference & Question Answering
Help people help themselves
Elicitation
Layered services
Quality control
Economic model
Privacy
Shared views/clients

Cascading Assistance

Slide 12

Agileviews

Key Technical Challenges
fostering and insuring quality control;
transitioning information seekers from self-directed search to reference and community assistance when people do not succeed with self-directed approaches;
developing layers of assistance from fully automated (e.g., FAQs), through community assistance (e.g., posting a question to a newsgroup), to professional assistance (e.g., online with a reference librarian), including hybrid solutions; and
creating interfaces that do not overwhelm or frustrate information seekers as they transition through the various service layers.

Contributions
Time (attention)
Materials
physical transfer (digitization, copy)
rights agreements
classification (metadata)
validation/authentication

Key Technical Challenges
Developing contribution mechanisms that allow people to easily digitize and/or transport objects;
Managing content authority and quality;
Insuring access (metadata formats; preservation and persistence; provenance).

Key Social Challenges
Why do people share?
Models?
open source?
Creation-ownership relationship
Creating and maintaining trust
Quality assurance
Sustaining participation

Slide 18

Slide 19

Pointers