Recent Papers From CARL
The papers of two of the presenters at the recent CARL annual meeting in Ottawa are available from their public website:
Lynne Brindley, “The international dimensions of digital science and scholarship”. Lynne is the CEO of the British Library and the article is a description of the projects underway in the British Library in serving the international and scholarly communities.
The second paper was given by Peter Nicholson, President of t he Council of Canadian Academies, entitled “The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority“.
The premise of the paper is that people today are much less likely to trust experts; they want to get their information on the we, and they want to be able to manipulate and add to it. This goes contrary to the prevailing view of research libraries and cultural institutions in collection only the best information.
Both are worth reading, but I highly reccomend the Nicholoson article.
I, too, highly recommend the Nicholson article. It becomes relevant to ask how law, as a traditionally “expert” or “authoratative” discipline, will be affected by the changes Nicholson identifies (which, I think, are ones we’ve talked about a number of times here, but which Nicholson presents well and briefly). Libraries aren’t caught simply in the print vs. digital debate (though they are that) but must develop wholly new mechanisms and procedures for helping information seekers.