Glittering future for... librarians

Posted by: Stephen Baker on February 06

If one profession appeared endangered by the digital age, it was the librarian. But only at first glance. In the age we’re entering, as Steve Rubel notes, the challenge will not be finding limited information in finite realms, but instead in unearthing relevant info in near limitless mountains of data. Google, of course, does this with algorithms.

But humans—call them librarians, or curators—will have plenty of work too. They’ll not only help find info, but also oversee the machines overseeing the flow, security and complex layers of access to certain data. This will become especially important as scientific research moves into giant shared computing centers known as clouds.

I talked to Microsoft's Tony Hey about this while researching my cloud story. He heads up Microsoft's digital science efforts, after doing the same for the British govt. "In Britain, we set up a digital curation center," he told me, "to bring together scientists, computer scientists and librarians. They all have relevant skills here."

When scientists from different fields (and living in different continents) work on common projects, the flow and reliability of information becomes crucial. "You do a work flow," Hey said. "You give it to a colleague and they may get a different result, because the data has changed. You need the provenance. You also need the metadata up to date. All these curation issues are extremely interesting, and extremely challenging."

Issues such as taxonomy, for example, grow ever more important. If researchers in Australia use one term and those in California another, they struggle to share data. Machines can handle some of this work, but not all by any stretch.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/