This discussion was led by Dave Carter of UofM. The main discussion point was what can libraries do with all the scanned works coming back from projects like Google Book Search. Copyright aside there were some interesting ideas.

  • Print-on-demand. With digitization of works then people can print what they need when they need it. Think the Internet Archive Bookmobile.
  • Custom e-reserves/Mashups. When everything is digital it will become easier to create custom coursepacks and e-reserves. Professors can choose the section of a book they want. Think SafariU.
  • E-books. As e-ink and other technologies become more mainstream some people may demand their books be in electronic form.
  • Self-filled ILL. Requesting library could have an account where they search for what they want and create a custom PDF of it without lending institution interaction
  • Problem: Search Results. How much to display? Can libraries use same snippet set-up as google? Limit to card holders? May have to wait to see how's google case ends and how it's worded. What formats should the Public Domain materials be presented in? The internet archive may again be a good place to look.
  • Problem: Findability. Digitization is needed to keep things findable. Lack of digitization can be adverse for research and impact factor. Example given was education. Rare to find any citation that is not included in ERIC. If you can't link to it was it written?
  • Personal Annotation. Having things in a digital form allows people to tag, annotate, organize, clip and reuse things in ways that are not possible in paper-only form. How long before library checkouts are influenced by who's linking to a work? Think PennTags.
  • Long Tail. Libraries suffer from this as much as anyone else. Many resources are unused either because they are unfindable or aren't popular. Digitization and search could help bring use up for low-circ books. The O'reilly Keynote on Digitization gives a good overview of why this is all important.
  • Keep an eye on Amazon and Google to see what they do with their digitized works.

There were no concrete conclusions in this discussion, just ideas for the future.