Dr. Gurjeet Uppal

Diffuse Libraries: The Emergence of eResearch and refining the role of Research Library

Gurjeet kaur

Research scholar

Gulbarga University

Kalaburgi, Karnataka

Email:geetuppal3@gmail.com

Abstract:

eResearch is a broader term that includes nonscientific research but that also refers to large-scale, distributed, national, or global collaboration in research. It typically “entails harnessing the capacity of information and communication technology (ICT) systems, particularly the power of high capacity distributed computing, and the vast distributed storage capacity fuelled by the reducing cost of memory, to study complex problems across the research landscape. E-research provides opportunities to develop whole new areas of valuable research and to see existing research in new ways. In this paper i will explain the work of libraries, emergence of e-Research in research communities, challenge faced by research libraries, trends and recommendation etc.

Keywords: Research libraries, Social, cultural and political trends, economical trends, eResearch, transformation, mechanism, peer institutions.

1.0 Introduction

The past two decades have been a time of tremendous social, economic, and institutional change for all sectors of higher education, including the research library community. While responding to the unprecedented development of technology, colleges and universities have also addressed issues of social relevance, accountability, diversity, and globalization. In this modern knowledge driven world libraries and librarians are of great importance. The Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have great role in all areas of libraries. Users are given as prime importance in the entire library activities. The use of any library depends upon the availability of right contact between the right user and the right book at the right time. The librarians have to adopt all modern tools of ICT based on their user’s expectation & future needs. This presents them with a challenge of unusual scale and complexity. In response, libraries have embraced new technologies and adjusted to the program priorities of their parent institutions. As the so-called information revolution has taken shape, libraries have also demonstrated broader leadership in bringing their intellectual and service missions to bear on the issues raised.

However, libraries face significant challenges in responding to change while sustaining their traditional functions. With the explosion of information technology have come powerful competitive forces that raise fundamental questions about the role of libraries and librarians

2.0 What are Research Libraries?

A Research Library is a library which contains an in-depth collection of material on one or several subjects. The library will generally include primary sources and related material. A research library can be contrasted with a lending library due to the difference in breadth of subjects and collections between the two, as lending libraries house books of all types.

3.0 Roles for Research Libraries

Research Libraries may not be able to lead in all the areas, but should at least be seeking to make contributions to addressing current and emerging opportunities and concerns in each issue area.

· Develop a deep understanding of content users’ and creators’ requirement to support the advancement and development of repository-related services.

· Apply a life-cycle management framework to support the development and evaluation of services and policies.

· Articulate a compelling value proposition for repository-related services to justify investing resources, promote partnerships, and address sustainability concerns.

· Integrate into emerging services the diverse content collections that have accumulated and will continue to arise outside of library-managed repositories.

· Participate actively in shaping the technology of repositories, particularly the mechanisms by which repositories make services possible.

· Negotiate the significant uncertainties existing in the current rights environment and build a broader consensus about the appropriate rights environment needed to support the research enterprise in a digital environment.

4.0 Trends in Research Libraries

There are two main kinds of digital trends in research libraries:

· Technological trends, meaning improvements and developments in underlying digital technology.

· Social, cultural and political trends which affect the demand for and uptake of digital technology.

Technological Trends:

The main driver of technological drift is the ongoing effect of Moore’s Law (which is a trend not a true physical law) – which predicts a doubling of achievable computer processing power every 18 months to two years and the impact this is having on related software and hardware. This trend has been observed over the last fifty years, and has been accompanied by a pattern of decreasing hardware costs. It has been widely suggested that Moore’s Law might finally reach some physical limits around 2020, but even if the physical density of chip transistors stops increasing according to Moore’s Law, significant improvements in speed will still be possible by improvements in programming. Therefore over the five to ten year timescale we are examining, the effect of Moore’s Law is likely to continue to bring about exponential improvement in digital technologies. In other words, in five years we would expect average ‘digital technology’ to be about 8 times better / faster / cheaper, and in ten years we could expect an average improvement of 64 times (three further doublings) if this trend were to continue.

This immense speed of improvement in core computing technologies, coupled with human innovation to exploit it, will be a major driver of change, and have far-reaching implications for consumer software and hardware. It is also relatively certain, at least over a period of the next five to ten years.

Social, cultural and political trends:

These trends depend on more complex interactions between individuals, groups and organizations. They are limited in their speed of change by the effects of inertia, investment times and other time lags. These kinds of trends are therefore harder to predict and, as a result, are subject to more uncertainty. An example might be the ongoing response of the publishing industry to the twin challenges of e-books and the power of Amazon as a purchaser. How this market dynamic plays out will depend upon whether publishers can maintain their gatekeeper role as arbiters of quality writing or whether new technologies and approaches will make their role here redundant.

5.0 A Growing Convergence: eResearch

eResearch refers to the development of, and the support for, advanced information and computational technologies to enhance all phases of research processes. A fundamental enabler of innovations and new discoveries, eResearch is becoming just as critical for the advancement of the social sciences and the humanities as it already is in the sciences.

Preserving knowledge is one of the most vital and rapidly changing fundamental roles of the research library. For libraries that are now positioning themselves to support eResearch, preserving knowledge entails at least four key challenges:

· ensuring the quality, integrity, and curation of digital research information;

· sustaining today’s evolving digital service environments;

· bridging and connecting different worlds, disciplines, and paradigms for knowing and understanding; and

· archiving research data in a data world.

eResearch environments has focused on the overwhelming volume of data produced, with attendant challenges of scaling up capture and preservation capabilities. The more significant challenge, however, is the changing paradigm for capturing and reflecting research communication in an eResearch environment. Instead of simply storing objects of assorted types, researchers need libraries that reflects combine web 3.0 and web 4.0 service environment in which communication is continuous and synchronous. This reality introduces significantly greater complexity to digital capture, curation, and preservation.

A shift is emerging in the different products of research. Increasingly, value is placed not on the publication(s) resulting from a research project but on the data-modeling and data-generation phases that occur earlier in the research life cycle. There is a need for workflow tools that capture emerging communication modalities, and libraries and appropriate partners have the opportunity to fill that critical gap. This new paradigm entails shifting library foci from managing specialized collections to emphasizing proactive outreach and engagement.

6.0 Challenges faced by libraries

v Setting up access to content so that it’s easier to find and use – Access routes and all the various vendor platforms are a really complex landscape for both readers and the librarians who need to make sense of it all.

v Understanding how that content is used in their institution, and by whom – Librarians want to understand usage beyond what the current COUNTER reports deliver, eg. they want to know which articles are being read, in what disciplines, by which type of patron, in which faculty.

v Understanding their institution’s usage vs peer institutions – Is the usage their content is getting ‘good’ or ‘bad’ versus other institutions with a similar profile? What should be done to make it better?

v Demonstrating how the content they’ve bought has impacted on the outcomes of the institution – How can the library prove that it helped to produce a better student, bring in grant funding, make a discovery, secure a patent? Demonstrating the value proposition to those that hold the purse strings is really critical.

v How they can best present the nuances of licensing models to their patrons and upper management – Digital licensing models are complex and explaining these can be difficult to those who are not steeped in them.

v Embedding their services fully in the researchers workflow – To do this successfully they also need to intimately understand the needs and behavior of their users and the point of interactions with the library service. How do you deliver relevant information at the point of need with a service which makes a real difference to people’s daily lives?

v Supporting author/researcher education, especially early career researchers – Librarians are increasingly acting as knowledge consultants within their organizations and are called upon to deliver training to early year researchers which goes beyond the normal research skills training. This might include training on understanding copyright, how to write a grant proposal, how to get OA funds and include them in grant applications, how to get published in the best journals, etc.

v Developing their role with research data management tools – Is the library best placed within the institution to support the data curation and research management behaviors of the departments and the labs they support? If not libraries, then who?

v Evolving their roles and capabilities as librarians – Supporting the mixed economy of subscriptions plus Open Access and delivering on the expanding knowledge consultancy needs of their organizations requires a reconfiguring of librarian roles in a time of tighter resource.

v How should they reconfigure library policies to accommodate the mixed economy and the new realities – If they buy ebooks should they also buy print? How much should be apportioned to demand driven acquisition? Should they be buying textbooks at all? Is it the library’s role to administer OA fees? All these new issues are still being worked out and there is plenty of experimentation still going on.

7.0 Recommendation

Transformations in scholarly communication and in the organization of higher education will demand new ways of doing business not only within the library but throughout the academy as well. Research libraries will need broad institutional support as they seek to meet the demands of this new environment. On the basis of these issues research libraries proposes the following recommendations.

I. In collaboration with library professionals, professors, and information technologists, administrators in higher education need to develop a rigorous research agenda that will explore the influences that are transforming education so that they may better respond to and manage change.

II. The research library should be redefined as a multi-institutional entity. The current model of the library as a stand-alone service provider to the university is obsolescent. Exploiting digital networks and emerging digital libraries and research environments, many libraries should deaccession duplicate copies of printed books, form coalitions that minimize costs for collection development, and consider sharing staff on a consortial, federated basis. Collaboration can generate savings that the library can allocate to other activities supporting teaching and research. Areas of immediate concern include macnisms of scholarly publishing, institutional repository development and sustainability, data curation broadly defined, and digital resource development. Any research project, digital resource, or tool that cannot be shared, is not interoperable, or otherwise cannot contribute to the wider academic and public good should not be funded.

III. Institutions need to support environments, within and external to libraries, that not only promote but demand change. More funds should be allocated for experimental projects and new approaches; staff with nontraditional or new areas of expertise must be hired.

IV. Higher education communities, working with research libraries, need to define what models of scholarly communication represent a valid cultural product. Currently, the printed book and journal article take precedence, but the digital environment entails a more nuanced understanding of scholarship as a process in social solidarity and sharing of information. Criteria for promotion and tenure need to be reassessed. Finally, peer review requires similar study. It may prove essential for all aspects of the scholarly process data sets, research background, Web commentaries ,links, and other manifestations of the digital age that are made available and sustained over time.

V. Instruction and delivery mechanisms should be designed according to what we know of human learning and discovery. The functions of libraries must be aligned with the core mission of research and education at the institutional level. We need to create professional and practice layers that enhance research and teaching across disciplines.

VI. University administrators and librarians should consider creating new training and career paths for professionals going into the area of scholarly communication. New leadership programs need to be developed that reflect the rise in collaborative research and that integrate support services such as those provided by research libraries into the process and methodologies of research.

VII. Institutions should use studio and design experiences as the basis of a new library school curriculum. Students of library and information sciences should learn to participate in the design and delivery of information resources that serve the scholarly community. Academic librarians should be engaged in the process through project provision and supervision.

VIII. Higher education needs to articulate not only the benefits it conveys to university and college students but also the value it provides to the public. The popular conception of higher education has been influenced by critics who dismiss its perceived high costs and the impracticality of its curriculum, by those who are intent on taxing the larger endowments, and by those who want federal intervention to lower tuition costs. The cultural, social, and technological advancements that higher education can foster are lost in this impassioned rhetoric.

References

· National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Council. (2007). Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery. Available at http:// www.nsf.gov/od/oci/CI_Vision_March07.pdf.

· Welshons, Marlo, ed. 2006. Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. New York, N.Y.: American Council of Learned Societies. Available at http://www.acls.org/programs/ Default.aspx?id=644

· Council on Library and Information Resources.(2008).No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century. Available at http://www.clir.org

· Self, Jim, and Steve Hiller. 2001. A Decade of User Surveys. Presented at the 4th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measures in Libraries and Information Services. Pittsburgh, Pa., August 2001. Available at www.arl.org/stats/north/powerpoints/ self-hiller-NorthumbriaSe5.ppt.

· G, Deshmukh (1983). User survey on soil conservation research institute library. Annals of library science and documentation. 30(1)31-34.

· Croft, B., Cook, R. and Wilder, D., "Providing Government Information on the Internet: Experiences with THOMAS," in Proceedings of the Digital Libraries Conference DL'95, Austin, TX. June 10-12, pp. 19-24.

· Deerwester, S., Dumais, T., Furnas, G., Landauer, T., & Harshman, R.. Indexing by latent semantic analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 41(6), 391-407.

· "Moore's Law to roll on for another decade" (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-984051.html). . Retrieved on 2015-05-27.

Websites refers

· BePress: http://www.bepress.com/

· Dartmouth College Collaborative Facilities: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~collab

· Open Archives Initiative: http://www.openarchives.org

· Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory: http://intel.si.umich.edu/sparc/

· University of Maryland Gemstone: http://www.gemstone.umd.edu

Pages

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Meria Kavitavan Da Kuj Sar-Ansh

1. ਦਿੱਲ ਦੀਆਂ ਖੁਹਾਹਿਸ਼ਾ

2. ਜੰਗਲ ਦੀ ਚਿੜੀ

3. ਮਿਲਣ ਦੀ ਤਮੰਨਾ

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Who i am

Friday 21 August 2015

what i am

“Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is within you.”

“The only way to move forward

is to focus on the good in your life and the good that you are doing for others and yourself.

My past has shown me things in life,

others and myself that I wouldn't wish upon anyone, but I can choose

to pick up the pieces

and build a beautiful life for myself and help others to do the same.”

Tuesday 18 August 2015