june07b.indd


D. Scott Brandt 

Librarians
as
partners
in
e-research


Purdue University Libraries promote collaboration 

The Association for Research Libraries recently organized an e­Science Task 
Force to investigate new paradigms for library 
engagement. Among other things, it is looking 
at new roles for librarians in an e­research 
environment, as well as new types of col­
laborations that can form from them. Purdue 
University Libraries’ 2004 initiative to engage 
in multidisciplinary research has identifi ed 
and begun to engage similar issues. 

While the term e-science is sometimes 
used to refer specifically to the digitally 
enabled environments of science and engi­
neering research, it is also synonymous with 
e­research, a broader net that encompasses all 
domains of research that are also challenged 
with exploring new ways of doing research 
in computationally enhanced and networked 
environments. 

Long recognized as organizers, enrichers, 
and disseminators of information, librarians 
often have been pioneers in developing 
systems, process, and approaches to the 
delivery and use of information—from de­
veloping finding aids for archival materials, 
to cataloging and classifying print sources, 
to developing indexes and taxonomies for 
databases. 

Given the highly distributed on­demand 
nature of the global environment that defi nes 
the Information Age, Purdue Libraries’ initia­
tive seeks to apply library science knowledge 
and expertise to multidisciplinary research 
to provide organization, enrichment, and 
dissemination of e­research. The goal of 
this multidisciplinary research initiative is to 
align with the university’s strategic mission 
to develop preeminence in interdisciplinary 
research. 

A particular topic demanding attention 
in many universities is the so­called “data 
deluge” problem. Issues with research data 
have been greatly highlighted in a variety 
of forums—from 2005’s National Science 
Board report discussing the nature of long­
lived massive data sets to the Microsoft 2020 
report focusing, in part, on the need for a 
distributed environment of data. It is clear 
that as computationally assisted capabilities 
to create, process, and use data continue to 
grow, issues related to curating research data 
will likewise grow. 

Since the arrival of Dean James L. Mul­
lins in 2004, the Purdue Libraries have been 
actively promoting and seeking collaboration 
between librarians and disciplinary faculty 
in engineering, science, and technology on 
sponsored research projects. Through con­
versations, workshops, and seminars, it has 
become obvious that there is an urgent need 
for the knowledge that librarians have: the 
ability to collect, organize, describe, curate, 
archive, and disseminate data and informa­
tion. When researchers were asked if they had 
data discovery, management, and organiza­
tion needs, similar responses were repeated 
over and over again: 

• not sure how or whether to share data, 
• lack of time to organize data sets, 
• need help describing data for discovery, 
• want to find new ways to manage 

data, and 
• need help archiving data sets/collec­

tions. 

D. Scott Brandt is associate dean for research at Purdue 
University, e-mail: techman@purdue.edu 
© 2007 D. Scott Brandt 

June 2007  365 C&RL News 

mailto:techman@purdue.edu


The libraries are investing time to investi­
gate and engage in opportunities to collabo­
rate in e­research areas, where increasingly 
information­related needs have applications 
to library science. Purdue librarians are cur­
rently working on projects such as helping 
developing digital collections that link docu­
ments and data, enhancing distributed infor­
mation systems and repositories, designing 
access via middleware to Web­based systems, 
and integrating information and technology 
literacy for end user education. From 2005 to 
2006, 11 librarians participated in nine mul­
tidisciplinary proposals, including National 
Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science 
Foundation, and locally funded grants. It 
appears likely that more library science ex­
pertise can be leveraged to meet cross­, multi­
and interdisciplinary research needs. 

Purdue is not alone in investigating such 
problems—many libraries are engaged in 
related activities. From a library science per­
spective, curation is an aspect of organization 
that can help facilitate discovery, access, dis­
semination, and archiving of e­research. It is 
something that librarians or archivists have 
done for hundreds of years. In the Informa­
tion Age, curation can be defined as essential 
activities and systems that facilitate access, 
dissemination, and archiving of e­research. 
At a practical level it can include protocols 
and tools that provide descriptive analysis 
of digital collections and objects to augment 
discovery, management, use, reuse, and 
preservation. These protocols can take the 
form of schemas to describe digital objects, 
systems to facilitate discovery of collections of 
objects, and middleware to resolve problems 
of interaction between systems and applica­
tions. On the one hand, curation is about 
policies and consultation, and on the other 
it is about tools and systems. 

Purdue’s experience 
Purdue University is heavily weighted toward 
engineering, science, and technology, and so 
initial forays into multidisciplinary research 
have centered there. For instance, the librar­
ies are working with one collaborator in 

analyzing water quality data files straight off 
a sensor (a water logger that records fl ow, 
elements in the water, etc.) in the agronomy 
department. An NIH proposal for a biology 
resource required having a plan for archiving 
data, and librarians were asked to be part 
of the grant. An engineering project sought 
library science expertise in building metadata 
for an ontology that allows tracking of data 
through the workflow. Most recently, a re­
search group working on space exploration 
came to the libraries to ask if they could “park 
their research” with the repository until new 
funding becomes available. They all view the 
libraries as “trusted” partners. 

Several opportunities have resulted in 
technology­oriented projects, which are 
beginning to have an impact on how the 
Purdue Libraries operate. The first was 
conceptualization and proof of concept of 
a distributed institutional repository (DIR) 
framework that supports discovery and access 
to digital objects of e­research, including data 
and documents in various forms, formats and 
locations. The distributed framework inter­
operates with disparate information systems 
and repositories through an Open Archive 
Initiative (OAI) architecture, providing an 
institutional, regional, or disciplinary context 
for collecting, tracking, and disseminating 
e­research. The architect of this framework 
at Purdue, Michael Witt, is an example of a 
librarian who came out of the systems world 
and is a strong advocate for bridging technol­
ogy and user needs. 

The most visible result of the DIR so far 
is Purdue e­Scholar,1 an umbrella service 
that includes several repositories: e­Pubs (a 
document repository), e­Archives (special 
collections repository), and soon, e­Data (a 
federation of data repositories). The e­Scholar 
Web portal is only one of many applications 
that have been built upon the DIR frame­
work. Some applications include a metadata 
harvester and a Search and Retrieve via URL 
interface for searching across the e­Scholar 
repositories. 

Another example of an application is 
OAISRB, middleware that allows metadata 

366C&RL News June 2007



from objects residing on a Storage Resource 
Broker (SRB) data grid to be harvested us­
ing a standard protocol, the OAI­PMH.2 This 
enables metadata from research datasets from 
computational sciences to be included in 
more conventional digital library applications. 
The libraries are working with Purdue’s Rosen 
Center for Computing and the Cyber Center 
on similar collaborations. Next, the libraries 
will have to determine how to integrate the 
repository framework with the other infra­
structure of the library for uniform access 
and dependable sustainability. 

Getting started 
A common question is, “How do you get 
started in these collaborations?” It helps that 
Purdue librarians are tenure track faculty and 
are seen as peers on campus. But when the 
new dean started, he set out on a campaign 
to talk to all deans and department and 
center heads on campus to tell them what 
library science, and thus libraries faculty, 
could do. 

Generally the conversation started with the 
dean asking what goes on in the school, de­
partment, or center, and eventually the topic 
of data would come up. A simple inquiry into 
organization or archiving needs resulted in 
the understanding that librarians have been 
handling digital information and data for 
more than 20 years, and that library science 
had principles and practices that could help 
their needs. Since librarians started attending 
grant call­outs, workshops, and seminars and 
began mentioning some of the libraries’ inter­
actions and projects, they have been seen as 
potential collaborators on research. 

In addition to a new role in multidisci­
plinary research, the libraries are involved in 
looking at scholarly communication in new 
ways, as well. A variety of factors have led 
to a “deconstruction” of traditional scholarly 
communication, and it appears that the role 
of librarians (library science) can contribute in 
an active and positive way, not only different­
ly, but at different points in the process than 
previously understood or imagined. Whereas 
librarians once interacted with scholarly com­

munication at the final or published end of 
the spectrum, it appears that interaction with 
alternatives to traditional publication or with 
prepublication points along the spectrum fi nd 
librarians dealing not only with “born digital” 
material, but in some cases things that were 
not necessarily meant to be published, such 
as learning objects, departmental reports, 
and data. And even data has a spectrum in 
which librarians are investigating points of 
and levels of interaction—from working with 
raw to processed to analyzed to publish­
able data. Interestingly enough, if librarians 
can play a role in helping to organize and 
describe digital objects at the very early end 
of the e­research spectrum it will facilitate 
data mining in the future, which could truly 
facilitate new paradigms of research. Purdue 
Libraries are creating a data curation center 
to investigate and address such data needs 
and problems. 

Looking forward 
As libraries and librarians move forward in 
these areas, there are still many questions to 
investigate. What is the role for librarians in 
facilitating scholarly communication? Some 
libraries, like those at Cornell and Pennsyl­
vania State University, are using repositories 
and university presses to support and publish 
scholarly works. How involved should they 
be in the research process? Other libraries are 
partnering with research groups to explore 
this role, such as Johns Hopkins University. 
How do we train people to work in these 
realms? Library schools, such as the one at 
the University of Illinois, are engaged in and 
investigating the territory. 

Some of these roles address new prob­
lems, but in many ways they do so using time 
tested methods of organization and sound 
library science practices. Chris Miller, Geo­
graphic Information Systems (GIS) specialist 
to the Purdue Libraries (whose undergraduate 
degree is in English and History), notes, “Any 
time one begins throwing around terms like 
information and data and interdisciplinary 

(continues on page 396) 

June 2007  367 C&RL News 



in the Rye and To Kill A Mockingbird in high 
schools and universities. The novel, which 
earned accolades from Eudora Welty and 
Walker Percy, won the Sue Kaufman Prize 
for First Fiction of the American Academy 
and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Louis 
D. Rubin Writing Award. The book’s sequel, 
The Life All Around Me, by Ellen Foster, was 
released last year. 

Actor Harold “Hal” Gould’s papers have 
been acquired by the University at Albany’s 
Libraries. Gould has been recognized with 
five Emmy nominations, an Obie, a Los 
Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and 
an ACE Cable TV Award for his varied 
roles. Gould’s career includes Broadway 
roles in such plays as John Guare’s House 
of the Blue Leaves, Neil Simon’s Fools, and 
Jules Feiffer’s Grown Ups. He is most widely 
known for his roles on The Mary Tyler Moore 
Show, Rhoda, and The Golden Girls. He also 
had roles in films such as The Sting (1973) 
through Freaky Friday (2003), and English 
as a Second Language (2005). 

The architectural archive of Pierre Koenig, 
the internationally celebrated architect 
whose work helped to define modern ar-
chitecture, has been acquired by the Special 
Collections of the Research Library at the 
Getty Research Institute (GRI). This archive, 
containing more than 3,000 objects, includ-

ing drawings, models, photographs, slides, 
and documents, will enable scholars to study 
a significant chapter in post-war American 
domestic architecture. Among the architec-
tural gems documented in the collection are 
Koenig’s Case Study Houses #21 and #22, 
which were both executed as part of Case 
Study House Program of 1945–1963 for John 
Entenza’s Arts & Architecture magazine. 
Koenig was one of the youngest architects 
included in the program, which promoted 
modern, indoor-outdoor California living 
through innovative steel-frame design and 
construction. Born in San Francisco in 1925, 
Koenig became interested in the structural 
possibilities and advantages of steel resi-
dential construction, while a student at the 
University of Southern California’s School of 
Architecture in the 1950s. Confronted with 
the skepticism of his professors, who ques-
tioned the applicability of steel to residential 
architecture, Koenig proved them wrong by 
designing and building his own steel home 
at a cost lower than that of a traditional wood 
frame structure. This innovative structure 
earned him the American Institute of Ar-
chitects’ House and Home Award of Merit. 
Upon graduation, he opened his own archi-
tectural practice in Los Angeles. Throughout 
his career, which spanned five decades, he 
never relinquished his goal of producing 
prefabricated homes for the masses. Koenig 
died in 2004. 

(“Librarians as partners...,” continued from 
page 367) 

and access, one is more often than not talking 
about libraries. 

“GIS is necessarily, intrinsically interdis-
ciplinary, as are library systems. I’m proud 
of the fact that having a librarian’s universal, 
abstract perspective on the methods and 
modes and behaviors of information allows 
me to see much more clearly how GIS can 
act as a dumb (but very, very intelligent) 
meeting place for information and data from 
disparate sources.” 

As Purdue Libraries embark on this new 
initiative to investigate issues and problems 
of applying library science knowledge and 
expertise to multidisciplinary research, it in-
tends to share findings and insights with the 
library community so that others may benefi t 
from and build upon these projects. 

Notes 
1. Purdue e-Scholar, e-scholar.lib.purdue.edu. 
2. See OAI-PMH www.lib.purdue.edu 

/research/oaisrb/ for a description of this 
application. 

396C&RL News June 2007

http:www.lib.purdue.edu
http:e-scholar.lib.purdue.edu