Digital Librarian Quiz

For some reason, we love to take quizzes. In fact, if the email I receive from Facebook is any indication, we are flat out crazy about taking quizzes. So I decided to create a quiz to help you figure out if you have what it takes to be a digital librarian. May the best librarian score high.

1. You are an academic librarian and you are faced with the opportunity to either launch an institutional digital repository on your own or collaborate with your university press to launch a scholarly publishing effort over which you will have limited control. You decide to:
   1. Say "thanks but no thanks" and launch a digital repository that you can control.
   2. Say "let me start our repository first and get back to you on your idea later".
   3. Say "sure thing, let’s do it."
2. You are an archivist (yes, I said this was a "digital librarian" quiz — so sue me) faced with the opportunity to buy one very high-resolution scanner that is capable of making preservation-quality scans or instead buying half-a-dozen high quality scanners and paying student workers to keep them going. You choose to:
   1. Buy the very high-resolution scanner, so you can make preservation-quality scans.
   2. Buy the lower resolution scanners and paying students to operate them.
3. You are a public librarian and you’ve heard that tagging is the bees knees. When selecting a new integrated library system you choose:
   1. An open source solution that although it does not offer tagging it at least offers you the opportunity to write it yourself.
   2. An upgrade from your existing vendor that adds tagging.
   3. A hosted solution that does not offer user tagging but that will make you more efficient at less cost.

For every "a" answer, give yourself 0 points. That’s right, zero. For every "b" answer, give yourself two points. For every "c" answer give yourself three. If you scored 0-2, you haven’t been reading me enough. If you scored 3-5, you’ve caught a few columns and a couple blog posts — good for you. If you scored above 5, then you could write this thing — congratulations.

Here’s my thinking on each of these questions:

1. If you think you can make a compelling case to your faculty that they should go out of their way to give you their content so you can fill you’re "repository", then the best of luck to you. But from where I sit, if you can help them solve a problem they actually have (for example, getting published) and scoop up the resulting content for your repository, then you might have something. See eScholarship for how to do it right.
2. If you’re not going to throw away what you’re scanning after you’re done with it, why do you feel a need to create a preservation-quality scan? Meanwhile, you’ve squandered the opportunity to surface so much more of your rich collections to discovery online it makes me want to slap you. Yes, you heard me — slap you. Once you’ve recovered, go read this.
3. Tagging is basically over-rated. Unless it is tied to a real need your users have, then forget about it. Meanwhile, why pass up an opportunity for more efficiency at less cost? Plow your savings back into something much more meaningful than tagging. And although open source does indeed offer you the opportunity to write the enhancements you want, how many of you actually will? Better a bird in the hand than one in the bush. An upgrade from your existing vendor is likely better than jumping ship simply for the opportunity to take on yet more work.

Well, I suppose that was fun (more for me, I sense, then you), but now we should get back to work, and leave the quiz-taking to people with more time on their hands than us.