Librarians should consider how they might contribute to Wikipedia and cooperate in other ways, says Peter Brantley, recently appointed executive director of the Digital Library Foundation. That sounds like a yawner, but isn’t—given the skepticism that many top librarians have shown. Peter believes, correctly, that librarians could “significantly enhance” Wikipedia’s value to library users on and off the campus. In the other direction, as I see it, Wikipedia people should be more respectful of the views of credentialed experts who have proven themselves in ways that go beyond CVs. Some librarians even now are involved with Wikipedia, which, among other benefits, can drive users to authoritative library sites, as noted by librarian.net. See a D-Lib article by Ann Lally and Carolyn Dunford and OCLC VP and Chief Strategist’s Lorcan Dempsey’s comments.
Covering a wide variety of topics, the audio interview with Peter was provided by the Coalition for Networked Information and is available via Educause.
The T word
From a TeleRead perspective, I was glad to see Peter say he wanted more focus on interlibrary cooperation. In many ways that’s the essence of what well-stocked national digital library systems should be about, as opposed, say, to a Washington-bossed approach. E-book standards would be one good place to start in the cooperation area. I’d love to see librarians do a friendly takeover of OpenReader. Every e-book-related company, from Microsoft to Adobe, should adhere to the IPDF’s format standards, including this capability in reader software at the very least as an option. What’s more the standards should be responsive to library needs in such crucial areas as reliable interbook linking and extensibility.
Recently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the DLF an $816,000 interoperability grant toward virtual integration of scholarly collections (PDF alert), and perhaps Mellon could fund the Foundation to work on e-book standards (the existing grant doesn’t involve e-books). The idea wouldn’t be to replace the IDPF but increase librarians’ influence within it, which actually would help publishers, who currently lack the technical resources to vet the IDPF’s work to the extent they should.
Back to Wikipedia
Why I love Wikipedia despite its flaws: It’s more inclusive and timely than alternatives and is a richer source of links to in-depth material—the reason I so often link to it when I have time. A link from the TeleBlog to Company X’s site can be useful, for example, but I prefer to link to a Wikipedia item with pointers to both the company’s friends and enemies, for a more balanced picture. Wikipedia is far from the most authoritative of sources, but no serious researcher should take any encyclopedia as the last word.
