{"id":7124,"date":"2013-03-07T13:09:08","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T18:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/?p=7124"},"modified":"2013-03-07T13:09:08","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T18:09:08","slug":"digital-library-digest-march-7-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/2013\/03\/07\/digital-library-digest-march-7-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Library Digest: March 7, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

With books only taking up 1\/9th of library space, the new North Carolina State University library\u00a0prioritizes\u00a0collaborative\u00a0space<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The James B. Hunt Library<\/a>\u00a0at North Carolina State University is a revolution in information storage.<\/p>\n

“At the Hunt, robots fetch the books. Two million volumes are folded into one ninth of the space they would have taken up in a conventional library because room for humans to walk through the aisles is unnecessary.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think in the last two decades we’ve realized how important space is, and in the last decade it has been the issue of collaborative space – space where people across disciplines can work together\u2026in much more non-traditional ways\u201d said\u00a0Susan Nutter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“She is credited as the key visionary behind the James B. Hunt Library. Nutter works as the vice provost and director of libraries at N.C. State. Under her leadership, N.C. State\u2019s libraries climbed from 101 in the nation to 27, according to the Association of Research Libraries.<\/p>\n

“Librarians, architects and educators everywhere are taking notice of the new state-of-the-art space. So much so that Hunt Library has had to create a new position – the visitor experience librarian – to handle the massive number of guests.<\/p>\n

“Clymer Cease, the managing principal at the architecture firm\u00a0Pearce, Brinkley, Cease, and Lee<\/a>, said that in many university libraries, most of the books don’t get checked out more often than once every few decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy putting the books in the vault, we\u2019re storing them in a dry, very quiet secure place, so that once every 30 years when somebody wants to look at that book, it\u2019s there and it\u2019s in great shape,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

“Barbara Moran<\/a>, the Louis Round Wilson Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, said that technology has completely changed libraries and the ways we use them.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoing up to the stacks and looking at books and serendipitously finding new material is a lot of fun,” she said. “But it\u2019s so very convenient to look it up in an online catalogue and sometimes even have the librarian to fetch the book for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

“Now, at N.C. State\u2019s Hunt Library, students can cut out the middleman and just have a robot do the job for them.”<\/p>\n

From an article written by Frank Stasio, Shawn Wen and Christina Blyde for<\/em> North Carolina Public Radio, What is a Library in Today’s Tech Age?<\/a><\/p>\n

As librarians see coding as an opportunity and necessity, a variety of projects and groups aim to make breaking the code easier<\/strong><\/p>\n

“For newcomers,\u00a0computer source code can look quite alien. Librarians might be reminded of the first time they saw a MARC record\u2014a mishmash of recognizable words and bits of information embedded in funky punctuation.<\/p>\n

“Even people who expressed an early interest in computers as children can initially find themselves discouraged from learning more as adults. Andromeda Yelton, for example, recently reflected on her experience taking a required computer science class as part of her bachelor\u2019s degree program in mathematics at California\u2019s Harvey Mudd College, telling\u00a0LJ\u00a0that \u201cI just felt like I was so far behind that there was no point in even trying.\u201d<\/p>\n

“But later, as an MLIS student, Yelton says she began to view coding knowledge as more of an opportunity and a necessity. \u201cThe parts of the field where there\u2019s a lot of change and innovation happening tend to be very technology oriented,\u201d she says. Comparing her programming proficiency to software engineers wasn\u2019t helpful, she realized. She had a much stronger foundation in programming than most librarians and wanted to build on that.<\/p>\n

“Yelton has since gone on to become a founding member and web developer for Gluejar Inc., the entity behind the much-watched Unglue.it crowdfunding project that encourages authors and publishers to release ebooks under Creative Commons licenses if specific pledge thresholds are met under a timed deadline. She has also become a leading advocate for improving coding knowledge within the library field.<\/p>\n

“Code Year:\u00a0In January 2012, she and Carli Spina, emerging technologies and research librarian at Harvard Law School Library, worked on behalf of ALA\u2019s Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) to launch the Library Code Year Interest Group at the American Library Association\u2019s (ALA) Midwinter Meeting, along with librarians Shana McDanold and Jen Young from ALA\u2019s Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS). The group encourages librarians to start learning JavaScript using online tutorials from online start-up Codecademy.”<\/span><\/p>\n

From Matt Enis’s article for<\/em> School Library Journal, Cracking the Code: Librarians Acquiring Essential Coding Skills<\/a><\/p>\n

Video:\u00a0Amateur Excels at Digitizing Newspapers from a Gazebo behind his house<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n