The Network Reshapes the Library: Lorcan Dempsey on Libraries, Services, and Networks

Citation

Philip Calvert (2015), "The Network Reshapes the Library: Lorcan Dempsey on Libraries, Services, and Networks", The Electronic Library, Vol. 33 No. 4, pp. 867-868. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-03-2015-0045

Lorcan Dempsey is acknowledged around the world as an expert in the field of library technology. His work, initially with UKOLN and later with online computer library center (OCLC), is well-known, as are his frequent journal papers and conference presentations. He was an early adopter of blogs as a channel for professional communication; the earliest entries in his blog are from October 2003. It is his collected blog posts that constitute the greater part of this publication. The book consists of the original blog posts grouped into nine chapters on different themes, with each chapter arranged in the chronological order of posting.

Apart from Dempsey’s obvious knowledge and the clarity of his thinking about the future of library technology, it is also worth mentioning his simple and humorous writing style, so well-suited to a blog. He makes technology easy to approach, and as a result, we can think more clearly about the issues he presents. My own favourite piece, for what it is worth, is “Three challenges: engaging, rightscaling, and innovating” (pp. 245-253); a long post, to be sure, but one that clearly sets out the issues we need to be addressing right now.

This book though, at least when one first opens it, is rather hard to use. The key topics are clear enough: networked resources; network organisation; the research process and libraries’ evolving roles; resource discovery; library systems and tools (search indexes, OpenURL, etc.); data and metadata; publishing and communication; and libraries, archives, etc., as “memory institutions”. Within each chapter, though, it is sometimes hard to remember that the blog post one is reading might be more than 10 years old and so possibly not representative of Dempsey’s current thinking. Varnum has no doubt been careful with his selection of Dempsey’s writing, and indeed, the prescience of much that he says is quite remarkable (e.g. his comments from 2005 on the need for new interfaces), yet if I want to know Dempsey’s current thinking on a subject, it is not always apparent. The index is, as a result, even more than usually invaluable in this book.

Dempsey himself points out in the foreword that his interests have evolved with time, from service and technology matters to the organisational and institutional forms in which they get done (p. 10). That in itself is of interest to the reader. One element in the book that seems to serve little or no purpose is the addition of “reader’s comments”. It is good to know that a blog has readers and one of the few ways to assess that is through feedback, but very few of these comments add anything to the text. Despite that, this is a book I recommend to anyone interested in library technology.