Amerikaanse Best Practices

Vorige week vond in Lexington de Best Practices Exchange 2011 plaats. Bonnie Wedle, een van mijn Amerikaanse "goeroes", schrijft er enkele interessante dingen over:

Users do not use digital collections in the same way as they use paper collections, and we cannot guess how digital collections will be used. For example, LC assumed that researchers would want textual records, but a growing number of researchers want image files of textual records.

Dat laatste is een bijzondere constatering die een eigenlijk in gaat tegen de berichtgeving in de NRC over "het digitale drama"
Het volgende citaat lijkt dan weer in tegenspraak met het eerste:

We also need to start thinking in terms of “Big Data.” The definition of Big Data -- what can be easily manipulated with common tools and can be managed and stewarded by any one institutions -- is rather fluid, but we need to start thinking in these terms. We also need to be aware that Big Data may have commercial value, as evidenced by the increasing interest of firms such as Ancestry.com in the data found in our holdings. 

Het volgende citaat is niet alleen waar Christian eerder al over schreef en waar volgende maand een Speel-en-deel-sessie aan gewijd wordt, maar vooral de eerste paar zinnen zijn 100% Archief 2.0:

We have to switch to a self-serve model of reference services. Growing numbers of researchers do not want to come to us, ask questions of us, and then use our materials in our environment. They want to find the materials they need and then pull them out of our environment and into their own workspaces. We need to create systems and mechanisms that make it easy for them to do so. As a result, we need to figure out how to support real-time querying of billions of full-text items and the frequent downloading by researchers of collections that may be over 200 TB each. We also need to think about providing tools that support various forms of collection analysis (e.g., visualization).

De gebruiker heeft de archiefdienst alleen maar nodig om de "data" beschikbaar te stellen, daarna moet hij er mee kunnen doen wat hij helemaal zelf wil.
En tenslotte nog een citaat dat de digitale problemen van archiefdiensten, bibliotheken en overheden in het algemeen weergeeft: de enorme omvang van de digitale informatie die we moeten gaan beheren en beheersen:

The sheer volume of the electronic data cultural stewardship organizations need to keep is a challenge. LC has acquired the Twitter archive, which currently consists of 37 billion individual tweets and will expand to approximately 50 billion tweets by year’s end. The archive grows by 6 million tweets an hour. LC is struggling to figure out how best to manage, preserve, and provide comprehensive access to this mass of data, which researchers have already used to study the geographic spread of the dissemination of news, the spread of epidemics, and the transmission of new uses of language.

 De opzet van die Best Practices Exchange is ook wel interessant:

For the past few years, those of us who have attended the BPE have tried to adhere to the principle that “what happens at BPE, stays at BPE.” This doesn’t mean that we don’t share what we’ve learned at the BPE (hey, I’m blogging about it!), but it does mean that we’re sensitive to the fact that candor is both essential and risky. The BPE encourages people to speak honestly about how and why projects or programs went wrong and what they learned from the experience. Openness of this sort is encouraging; all too often, we think that we’re alone in making mistakes. It's also helpful: pointing out hidden shallows and lurking icebergs helps other people avoid them. However, sometimes lack of senior manager commitment, conflicts with IT personnel, and other internal problems contribute to failure, and colleagues and supervisors occasionally regard discussion of internal problems as a betrayal. As a result, BPE attendees should exercise some discretion, and those of us who blog about the BPE should be particularly careful; our posts are a single Web search away.

Was er een paar weken geleden in Nederland niet ook een bijeenkomst die volledig ging over mislukte projecten?
En zou dat niet een interessante "lijn" zijn tijdens #KVAN12?

Plaatje: Geek & Poke