Prepared as the keynote for the Georgia Knowledge Repository's annual meeting, this presentation discusses why repositories are important, the challenges they face, and solutions or opportunities for networking repositories and optimizing their impact for local, regional and global communities.
1. GEORGIA KNOWLEDGE
REPOSITORY MEETING
COMO2014, Augusta
Karen Calhoun
October 2, 2014
1
Networking repositories
Optimizing impact
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/
Link to Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/amarintha/networking-repositories-optimizing-impact-georgia-knowledge-repository-meeting
2. Topics today
Why repositories are important
o Value/positive impact up to now
oWhat is or could be in them
o Reasons to get excited about repositories going forward
Challenges of repositories
o Content
o Visibility and reach
o Little to no “social life”
Solutions / opportunities for repositories (optimizing
impact)
o “Networking” – recruiting content, enhancing visibility, interaction
2
3. WHY REPOSITORIES ARE IMPORTANT
3
arXiv.org
Source of traffic analysis: http://compete.com (US data only)
4. A lightning introduction to
repositories
Dictionary definition:
◦ A place or container where things can be deposited for storage or
safekeeping
A key outcome of the first decade of digital library research
and practice (1991-2001)
Most are open access (online, free of charge, free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions)
Three kinds of repos:
Subject-based (centered on a subject, discipline or a group of these)
Institutionally-based (centered on the intellectual output of an
institution)
Meta-repositories (repository of repositories, like GKR)
4
5. How Many Repositories
Worldwide?
We don’t know,
but …
Repository66.org
(shown) tracks
3,045 repos …
containing
12.3 million items
ROAR.org tracks
3,787
OpenDOAR.org
tracks 2,760
5
40% or more of registered repos use the DSpace repository platform
6. The Value of Repositories Up
to Now
Improved discoverability and public accessibility of scholarly
information (broad access for more people)
◦ Repos are routinely crawled and indexed by search engines (Google and Google
Scholar) – Items reach a broad audience; downloaded often
◦ Growing number of open access versions of articles
◦ In a sample of 2500+ articles from subscription-based journals, 38% had open access versions – and
Google/Google Scholar located over ¾ of them (Norris, Oppenheim, Rowland 2008)
Open exchange between systems – interoperability, remixing, re-use,
disclosure, dissemination (“networking”)
Centralized, easier access to hard-to-find content
◦ Repos contain not only pre-prints and post-prints of articles, but reports and working papers, teaching
and learning materials, presentations, conference proceedings, media, student work …
Long-term access to materials (preservation)
6
8. Getting Attention on the Web
8
“You Are What You Link”
Source: Adamic and Adar 2001
9. Discoverability: Integrated and
Decentralized
Integrated discoverability
“The Libraries will need a [pre-indexed] system or service layer that
integrates metadata from internal, external, owned, licensed, and
freely-available data sources selected by library staff” (Hanson et al.
2011)
Decentralized discoverability
“The Libraries should generate … metadata for local collections and
data sources that can be exported, harvested, or made available for
crawling by external systems.” (Hanson et al. 2011)
9
10. An Example of Best Practice (you
are what you link)!
10
12. Integrated
Discovery
12
Content
from
Creators
and Their
Agents
Local Catalog
Local
Repositories
Locally
managed
resources
Feeds from
other sources
(fee or free)
Local
discovery
layer
Decentralized Discoverability
Uploaded/harvested/crawled
/indexed metadata & links
Library
cooperative
commons
services and
registries
GALILEO
Search engines
(Google, Google
Scholar)
National,
National,
international, and
domain-specific
collections and
international, and
domain-specific
collections and
National,
international,
and domain-specific
services
services
collections and
services
GKR
Georgia DL
DPLA
13. What’s in repositories today?
Source: Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. p. 95. 13
14. Some additional reasons to get excited
about repositories (and what they might
contain)
Support particular teaching and learning environments
◦ Example: Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College (http://serc.carleton.edu)
◦ Example: Seaside Research Portal at Notre Dame University (https://seaside.library.nd.edu/)
Collect and showcase faculty, student or other local work or events
◦ Example: Bucknell University institutional repository, e.g., Faculty Colloquia speaker series
(http://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/fac_coll/)
◦ Example: Franklin & Marshall College student honors theses (https://dspace.fandm.edu/ Select
“college library”)
◦ Example: Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (http://hurricanearchive.org)
Expose special collections of institutional significance to a larger
audience
◦ Example: Franklin & Marshall College yearbooks (https://dspace.fandm.edu/ Select “college
library”)
Expose and preserve Georgia local and family history
◦ Georgia HomePLACE and the Digital Library of Georgia (http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/; see also
http://dp.la/info/hubs/)
14
15. THE CHALLENGES OF REPOSITORIES
15
“If a network-based service’s
intended communities do
not actively engage and
participate, the service will
die.”*
*Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. p. 180.
16. A repository should not be a
solution looking for a problem
to solve
16
Source: Cf. Rieger 2008, under section 2
17. Problems of institutional
repositories
Visibility and reach (low awareness and
recognition)
Weak understanding of community needs and
attitudes, work practices, motivators
Difficulty articulating the value
Difficulty recruiting content
Read-only (“web 1.0”)
Often conceived of as “destination sites” only
(rather than as assets to be networked)
17
18. Low awareness of institutional
repository
92.7%
75.8%
57.2%
100.0%
80.0%
60.0%
40.0%
20.0%
0.0%
D-Scholarship@Pitt
Unaware undergrads Unaware grad/PhD Unaware faculty
18
Source: Calhoun and Fudrow 2014, detail of slide 16; see also Moore 2011
19. Subject-Based Repositories
In general, subject-based repositories have been more
successful at attracting submissions and use
World ranking of
1,746 web
repositories, January
2014
Source:
repositories.webometrics.info
19
20. Successful Subject
Repositories:
Are woven into the way their disciplines
communicate:
Readers/researchers: where they look for information,
see what’s been or will be published, look for
collaborators
Writers/contributors: where they “register” their work
(and establish claims to discoveries), where they first
share their work with colleagues for comment/review
Had a strong community orientation at inception and
have a high degree of trust and participation at
maturity
20
Cf. Erway 2012
21. Needs Assessment: the exception
rather than the rule
WHY DO IT
Understand the context of potential
use
Understand workflows and work
practices, preferences, beliefs of
potential depositors
Identify use cases
Generate awareness
Understand how to talk about
repositories to those who will
contribute content
◦ (how does the repository solve their
problems?)
WHO HAS DONE IT
Almost no one
Exceptions:
◦ St Jean et al. 2011 (the IR as a local
resource)
◦ Maness, Miaskiewicz and Sumner
2008 (IR “personas”)
◦ Moore 2011 (faculty attitudes and
practices)
◦ Palmer, Teffeau and Newton 2008
(problems an IR might solve for
faculty)
21
22. Content recruitment: A critical measure of
engagement and participation
22
Ratio of
amount of content in
the repository
content that could
reasonably be expected
to be there
23. How big are they vs. how big
should they be?
“If all of the tenured academic research active staff at
a UK university deposited all of their annual output
(papers, presentations, learning materials, etc.) in the
institutional repository, deposits would be in the
range of 10,000 items per year” (Carr and Brody
2007)
23
24. Some Size Comparisons
Name of Repository No. of items (year reported) World
Ranking*
arXiv.org 971,292 (2014) 1
Research Papers in
400,000 (2014) 4
Economics (RePEc)
University of California
eScholarship
74,678 (2014) 6
AgEcon Search 78,467 (2014) 9
DSpace@MIT 74,986 (2014) 18
SMARTech (Georgia
46,520 (2014) 67
Tech)
Athenaeum (U. of Ga.) 14,204 (2014) 587
24
Sources: Cybermetrics Lab, OpenDOAR
http://repositories.webometrics.info/en/World; data as of July 2014; 1,983
repositories tracked
25. “Social” repositories?
People used to social sites bring their expectations with
them when they approach repositories, but …
Most repositories continue to operate from a traditional,
collections-centered, “siloed” service model
The social nature and roles of a library are typically lost –
repositories and other digital libraries are mostly read-only
(“web 1.0”)
“Social” platforms are active, open, gregarious and “chatty”
with people, organizations, other software, servers, apps …
A repository that incorporates social web approaches
continues to be the exception rather than the rule
25
26. An Experiment at Teachers
College, Columbia University
26
“Institutional repositories may garner greater community
participation by shifting the focus from library goals …
to one that focuses on building localized teaching and
learning communities …” (Cocciolo 2010)
27. Networking
Repositories - Some Bad News
Low Indexing Ratios (Google Scholar)
A large proportion of repository traffic comes from
Google Scholar
AND
“Search engine optimization (SEO) research
conducted at the University of Utah has revealed that
many institutional repositories have a low indexing
ratio [average 30%] in Google Scholar.” (Arlitsch and
O’Brien 2012)
EEK!
27
28. Networking
Repositories - Some Good News
GALILEO attracts a good deal of attention on the Web
AND
The inclusion of the Georgia Knowledge Repository in the
GALILEO discovery environment should be A GOOD THING!
28
galileo.usg.edu
Source: compete.com,
9/24/2014
Unique visitors per month
Range from ~75K to ~200K
30. The starting point: Working with a
“mess” … holistically
30
“Repositories and services often exist in this sort of mess. Not as a
result of any failing or sloppiness on the part of the managers or
developers, but because … repositories exist in the midst of an
extremely complex set of interactions and influences (only a small
percentage of which are technical).” (Robertson, Mahey, and Barker
2008)
31. Positive interdependence
An element of cooperative and
collaborative learning
where members of a group who share
common goals perceive
that working together is individually and
collectively beneficial
and success depends on the participation of
all members
31
32. Solutions and Opportunities to
Consider
1. A strategy based on community engagement to…
2. Recruit or aggregate content
3. Visibility and reach (discoverability)
All need to be understood
at 3 levels simultaneously:
32
(Remember slide 14?
Integrated AND
decentralized discoverability)
34. What to do?
INVENTORY REPOSITORIES
ASSESS NEEDS - UNDERSTAND
AUDIENCES
34
Name
Size
Usage (stats, web analytics)
Rankings
Similar/related/competitor sites
Last needs assessment?
Benefits to target audiences
Communications/outreach
activities
Potential for social features?
What else?
Audience segmentation
Size
Needs assessments
Work practice studies
Discipline-specific norms
Funders, funding policies
Value propositions (by audience
segment)
What else?
35. Improving value propositions to stakeholders
and target audiences
Hosting Library • Fostering open access to scholarship
• Raising profile of library’s curatorial role in
scholarly communication
Parent Institution • Showcasing institution’s intellectual
output/prestige
• Source of institution-level metrics
Institution’s End-Users • Discovering research conducted locally
• Engaging with learners and teachers
• Networking, finding collaborators
Institution’s Faculty &
Researchers
• Increasing exposure to work
• Solving visibility, management, or access
problems
Selected communities
statewide, regionally,
nationally, globally?
• Demonstrating societal benefits of research
and education
• Supporting knowledge transfer and economic
growth
Adapted from: Calhoun, K. (2014). Exploring Digital Libraries. Table 8.1, p. 183 35
37. Things to think about:
recruiting content
More “social,” interactive interface
Understanding and articulating the
value from THEIR perspectives
Making it easy to get started
Crowdsourcing
Talking about open access …
carefully and strategically
Additional services (mediated
deposit, automated deposit,
copyright, author fees, altmetrics
e.g. tracking downloads)
Many more ideas: Exploring Digital
Libraries, p. 197 (Table 8.2, “Barriers
and Service Responses for IRs:”)
Involving intended audiences in
setting strategy/objectives
Finding and working with
“champions”
New kinds of content
Validating assumptions about
intended audiences, needs, content,
expectations
Branding (or re-branding) and
communications programs
(including ones using liaison
librarians to build relationships/get
the word out)
Raising awareness and recognition
of value
37
39. Positive Interdependence:
Integrated and Decentralized
Discoverability
Shared Values:
Data
Sharing,
Syndication,
Synchronization,
Linking
Local
Authentication,
Discovery/ Delivery
Services
Group
Discovery/
Delivery
Services
(like
GALILEO)
Outward
Integration, Exposure,
and Linking
(e.g., Search engines,
other global aggregators)
39
40. Things to think about:
discoverability
Web traffic analysis (at local and GKR/GALILEO level)
Define and implement best practices for SEO/ASEO
Provide stable identifiers and URLs
Establish links from high traffic sites (e.g., learning management systems?)
For certain types of collections, working with Wikipedia
Participate in registries and interoperability frameworks (other repositories
of repositories)
New institutional repositories for local collections whose metadata can be
exported, harvested, made available for crawling
Discovery system indexing for GKR and/or for GALILEO as a whole (selected
external repositories and outside sources like HathiTrust, Internet Archive,
top-ranked subject repositories, other sources that are or could be indexed
by EBSCO Discovery Service)
40
41. Thank You!
No man is an Island,
entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the main.
Meditation XVII, John Donne
karencal129@gmail.com
41
42. References -1/3-
Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. “You Are What You Link.” In 10th Annual
International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong. 2001.
http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm
Arlitsch, Kenning, and Patrick S. O’Brien. “Invisible Institutional Repositories:
Addressing the Low Indexing Ratios of IRs in Google Scholar.” Library Hi Tech 30, no.
1 (February 3, 2012): 60–81. doi:10.1108/07378831211213210
Arlitsch, Kenning, and Patrick S. OBrien. 2013. Improving the Visibility and Use of
Digital Repositories through SEO. LITA Guides. Chicago IL: ALA Editions.
Calhoun, Karen. Exploring Digital Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects. Chicago:
ALA Neal-Schuman, An imprint of the American Library Association, 2014.
http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Digital-Libraries-Karen-Calhoun/dp/1555709850
Calhoun, Karen, and John Fudrow. Highlights of ULS FY14 General Survey. University
of Pittsburgh. University Library System, January 31, 2014.
http://www.library.pitt.edu/other/files/pdf/assessment/ULS%20FY14%20General%2
0Survey.pdf
42
43. References -2/3-
Carr, Leslie, and Tim Brody. “Size Isn’t Everything.” D-Lib Magazine 13, no. 7/8 (July 2007).
doi:10.1045/july2007-carr. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july07/carr/07carr.html
Cocciolo, Anthony. “Can Web 2.0 Enhance Community Participation in an Institutional
Repository? The Case of PocketKnowledge at Teachers College, Columbia University.” The
Journal of Academic Librarianship 36, no. 4 (July 2010): 304–12.
doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2010.05.004
Erway, Ricky. Lasting Impact Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC
Research, 2012. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-03.pdf
Hanson, Cody, Heather Hessel, Deborah Boudewyns, et al. Discoverability Phase 2 Final
Report. Report, February 4, 2011. http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/99734
Maness, J. M., T. Miaskiewicz, and T. Sumner. “Using Personas to Understand the Needs
and Goals of Institutional Repository Users.” D-Lib Magazine 14, no. 9/10 (2008).
http://dlib.org/dlib/september08/maness/09maness.html
Moore, Gale. “Survey of University of Toronto Faculty Awareness, Attitudes, and Practices
Regarding Scholarly Communication: A Preliminary Report,” March 3, 2011.
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/26446
43
44. References -3/3-
Norris, M., C. Oppenheim, and F. Rowland. “Finding Open Access Articles Using Google,
Google Scholar, OAIster and OpenDOAR.” Online Information Review 32, no. 6 (2008):
709–15.
Palmer, C. L., L. C. Teffeau, and M. P. Newton. Identifying Factors of Success in CIC
Institutional Repository Development-Final Report. Urbana, IL: Center for Informatics
Research in Science and Scholarship, August 2008.
http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/8981
Rieger, O. Y. “Opening up Institutional Repositories: Social Construction of Innovation in
Scholarly Communication.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 11, no. 3 (2008).
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0011.301?rgn=main;view=fulltext
Robertson, R. John, Maendra Mahey, and Phil Barker. “A Bug’s Life?: How Metaphors from
Ecology Can Articulate the Messy Details of Repository Interactions.” Ariadne, no. 57
(2008): 5. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/robertson-et-al#19
St. Jean, Beth, S. Y. Rieh, E. Yakel, and K. Markey. “Unheard Voices: Institutional Repository
End-Users.” College & Research Libraries 72, no. 1 (2011): 21–42.
44
Hinweis der Redaktion
And speaking a bit more about collection-building – even as libraries are now decades into digital library activity, in many cases we are still tremendously influenced, sometimes without realizing it, by a collections-based library worldview. To put it simply, we like to build things, and we often think that, having built something, its value is self-evident!
However, despite our inclinations to build new digital library sites, collections, and repositories, doing so may not always be the right decision. Following from what we’ve already discussed about success factors and challenges, it is a risky and perhaps foolish approach to build a digital library first, and then hope that its value propositions to potential communities simply reveal themselves, much less be understood by those communities! We can summarize this by saying that a repository should not be a solution looking for a problem to solve!
Next I will talk in a little more detail about how viewing digital libraries using a community-based lifecycle model can help in this sort of decision making and evaluation of digital library services,
But before I do,
Although this workshop focuses on community engagement, it is also focused on a particular segment of digital libraries: those that directly support the practice of scholarship and scholarly communication. So while digital libraries of cultural heritage are extremely significant when talking about community engagement broadly, we won’t be focusing on those repositories today. As already mentioned, Karen and I will be presenting a separate TechSource workshop in the fall that will examine community engagement specifically from the perspective of cultural heritage digital libraries.
So, looking at digital libraries or repositories that contain primarily scholarly, often peer-reviewed content, let’s begin by considering the prospects of repositories, and different repository types.
For several years, a division of the Spanish National Research Council, the largest public research body in Spain, has produced a ranking of worldwide repositories. The methodology used considers four factors: the raw size of the indexed pages in repository, its visibility, the amount of “rich” (e.g. full text) content, and the number of repository objects included in Google scholar.
The ranking confirms what we also see in the literature about repositories and which is widely felt anecdotally: that is, subject-based repositories tend to have more visibility and impact when compared to institutional repositories. Looking at the top ten, we see it is led by Arxiv.org, followed by SSRN, the Social Science Research Network, and then the SmithsonianNASA Astrophysics data system in the third position. There are a few insitutional repositories included, the first of which is the University of California eScholarship repository at number 8, but if you go on to view the entire list, which is made up of over 1700 repositories, you will see a similar pattern of subject-based repositories clustered near the top. This begs the question of why this is so – why is that subject-based repositories tend to be bigger, hold more rich content, and have more visibility and impact?
To begin to answer that question we can look to research that has been done investigating the characteristics of successful disciplinary repositories. This research has found some common success factors – however, and this is a point worth emphasizing, these factors are not the sort of things that many of us who build digital libraries have historically invested our time in. They have little to do with what technology stack is employed, the technical functionality of the site, or the elegance of the interfaces. Instead, these factors have to do with the central role the repository plays within the communication practices of one or more communities.
To be more specific, these success factors show successful repositories function as a sort of community hub, where those seeking information – the readers and researchers – go to discover information, to see newly published content, and to identify collaborators or like-minded sub-communities of practice. Likewise, those who have information to publish or share also view the repository as an essential place to “register”, or establish their findings, in part specifically with the expectation or hope that colleagues will review, react, comment, and discuss the work.
This topic is covered in Chapter 4 of Karen’s book, but for more detail about these findings, and for examples of how these practices play out in specific repositories, a good reference is Ricky Erway’s 2012 report called “Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories”. In that report she covers several of the top repositories shown on the previous slide, including arxiv.org and SSRN. Her report, along with other works cited in this presentation is included in a list of references at the end of the presentation.
Looking at how successful repositories develop over time, it’s also important to observe that there are some time-based, or lifecycle aspects to some of these success factors. I’ll pick back up on that soon, but for now let’s note that two of the success factors are a strong community orientation at the inception of the repository, and a high degree of trust and participation in its mature phase.
If we’re looking for meaningful measures of participation in a community-deposit repository, we can’t just measure size alone; absolute numbers don’t reflect the differences in the communities that participate in repositories.
We need a bit of a more nuanced measurement, and here is one: consider the ratio of the amount of content that is in a repository against the amount of content that could reasonably be expected to be there. The answer will be some kind of fraction.
You may immediately say to yourself, “what’s a good number”? Of course a one-to-one ratio is the perfect ideal, but for most communities it isn’t very realistic. In practice, this ratio needs to be taken in context with the specifics of the community and the objectives of the repository. For example, a repository supporting students might have different objectives from one supporting faculty, and a repository supporting edge-case content in a discipline may have different objectives from one attempting to be a mainstream disciplinary hub.
That said, it may be that the process of discovering this number, the number for “the content that could reasonably be expected to be there” is itself a very illuminating process that will teach you things about your community that you did not already know.
For an example of the investigating the “how big should they be” question, Leslie Carr and Tim Brody looked to quantify the total annual research output at an average UK university, and found that it would number around 10,000 items per year. When you have a sense of the scale of the potential deposits that you can compare to the actual practice, it can be very powerful in helping to design strategies in response.
To continue with this example, as institutional repository managers contrast the rather large number of 10,000 outputs a year against what may be a small fraction of these actually deposited, they can conclude that more sophisticated toolset supporting multiple deposit scenarios is needed. And indeed, many repository managers are now looking into automated deposit scenarios that make use of a developing scholarly infrastructure that includes researcher IDs like ORCID or ISNI, researcher profiling systems, and services offering researcher activity data feeds.
Karen will continue the discussion of this emerging infrastructure around digital scholarship in a few minutes, but we’d like to pause now, thank you for your attention so far, and give you an opportunity to ask questions or make comments.
All other repos with “Georgia” in the name are in the bottom two-thirds of the list.
So, repositories have many challenges in the present environment. Time permits discussion of only a couple them today – those centered around a lack of engagement by the community or communities for whom they’re intended.
What can be done to overcome these challenges? A large portion of chapter 8 is devoted to listing and discussing possible service responses to the challenges of repositories, and this slide provides a thumbnail guide to uncovering solutions.
The slide illustrates a two-fold approach. On the one hand, it is possible to start by looking at the repositories themselves – doing an audit of what you have, how much it is being used, how discoverable it is on the network, how it stacks up against other resources of value to scholars in various disciplines, what repository managers have done over time in terms of communications and outreach, how, when and where they have articulated the value of the repository, and so on. This kind of audit can be extended by examining the potential for a larger social life (on the web, that is) for the repository’s content.
An inventory or audit that starts with the repository will yield only partial solutions. More important, perhaps, is an simultaneous exploration of the needs, work practices, and if relevant, discipline-specific norms of the audience or audiences for whom the repository or repositories are intended.
One of the people I interviewed when writing the book remarked “libraries have not put forward adequate value propositions for the repositories they host.” Numerous studies have confirmed this sentiment, and they go on to provide ideas for what do about it.
This is a partial view of a table from the book that collects and synthesizes evidence-based results suggesting the value of institutional repositories to different stakeholders and target audiences.
Many institutional repository managers can articulate the value of repositories to their own libraries. Many can also articulate the value to the parent institution.
But value propositions need to be multi-threaded; one size does not fit all audiences. In this table you can see significantly abbreviated versions of possible value propositions that can be developed and articulated to an institution’s end users, its faculty and researchers, and for government agencies at state and federal levels.
Before moving on, just a word or two about the value proposition centered on open access and the value of self-archiving. In preparing the book I examined many studies of faculty attitudes and behaviors and became more convinced than ever of the complexity of these issues. Repository managers need to be keenly aware that a single, simple message about open access is not going to be effective across all disciplines. I can only say, tread carefully there.
What is happening here becomes possible through collective, light weight but deliberate cooperative metadata management involving thousands of loosely coupled systems.
The key pieces are data sharing, sychronization, syndication, and linking protocols.
At the global level, the collective collections of OCLC members become more visible on the WorldCat partner sites, for example Google Book Search, and WorldCat operates as a kind of giant metadata switch or bridge from where information seekers find things leading back to group and local collections.
Strong independent national library collaboratives at the group level, like Libraries Australia and Te Puna, as well as other regional hubs, also play a role.
I challenge you again, what would such large scale metadata management look like in the United States? What would we have to commit to in order to realize it?
Many kinds of library partners, library service organizations, vendors, can also play important roles, if they are willing to collaborate and help libraries get more attention on the web in this way.
Finally, the searcher making his way along these paths traverses the last mile and is connected to a local library.
Now if this graphic doesn’t make you love and deeply appreciate library metadata, you are a hopeless case.