Digital Libraries, Personalisation, and Network Effects - Unpicking the Paradoxes

The focus of this panel presentation is on personalisation (including adaptive personalisation) and the constructions of 'digital societies' around digital libraries and collections. Panelists will represent a variety of perspectives - NEH (USA) JISC (UK) & EU - ranging from developers of highly specialised academic digital libraries, to directors of national digital libraries that aim to achieve system-wide aims.

The 'Library 2.0' and emerging 'Archives 2.0' movements are understandably asking what library and archives can do to exploit 2.0 and adaptive technologies to potentially enhance catalogues, finding aids and repositories. User-generated content, especially from subject experts, has the potential to enrich catalogue entries and digital objects and aid the processes of learning, teaching and research. Collections thus become potential 'architectures of participation'; the bases for robust digital communities that support education and research. In addition, questions are being asked over the role of attention data in personalisation, which can be used to widen participation and strengthen those communities, as well as providing new pathways through resources, yielding 'long tails' of digital library content. Webscale systems such as Google and Amazon can leverage network effects in astoundingly efficient ways, aggregating individual and group data to enhance search and adaptive personalisation functions. How might national digital libraries adapt such a model to support learning and research?

This panel will discuss the technical and cultural challenges that emerge when the Amazon-like model for supporting adaptive personalisation is transferred to the digital library domain. Technical challenges concern the significant shift in approaches to application development and 'system-wide' initiatives, approaches which increasingly privilege a dispersed and fragmented data-model. The drive for centralised digital library systems is being questioned, as a growing trend emerges whereby web technologies are used to knit or mash data and systems together at the presentation level.

Topics:

• The ability of adaptive systems to deliver a precise enough user-model.
• The challenge of context - especially semantically rich contexts of learning and research.
• The challenge of balancing the support of specialist, niche, communities against the drive to establish the concentration of data required to support network effects.

Panelists:

Joy Palmer, PhD, Senior Manager for Library and Archival Services, Mimas (JISC National Data Centre) UK
Caroline Williams, MA MBA, Executive Director of Intute; Deputy Director, Mimas (JISC National Data Centre) UK
Paul Walk, Technical Innovation Manager, UKOLN, University of Bath, UK
David Kay, M.A. Strategic Development Director of Sero Consulting Ltd; Project Manager, Towards Implementing Library 2.0 and the eFramework (JISC) UK
Dean Rehberger PhD., Associate Director, MATRIX, Michigan State University (Digital Humanities Research Centre) USA
Bill Hart-Davidson, PhD, Co-Director, Writing in Digital Environments Research Center (WIDE) Michigan State University; Director of NEH project, "Archive 2.0: Imagining The Michigan State University Israelite Samaritan Scroll Collection as the Foundation for a Thriving Social Network" USA