PhD student in Information Systems and Innovation
Research Interests
Thesis: 'Librarian Functionality in a Digitally Mediated Environment: The case of the Europeana Initiative'
Information is a key term of contemporary society and is in need of further elaboration especially in terms of its interplay with technological means of ordering, editing, and presenting. Our maps of the territory are increasingly drawn by technology and hence are constructed based on the inherent logic or rather function of technology, that is the trivialization of complexities through tightly coupled and contained cause-effect chains. However, information is not to be seen as a resource, a tool, or as a commodity but rather as an observer related occurrence. Information lies in the eye of the beholder, hence it is impossible to store, to quantify, or to sell information itself but rather the ingredients for something that might be informative for somebody. Consequently, information is based on mutual expectations; it is an occurrence between the observed and the observer. In this spirit, what is usually named (technological) information is in fact data technologically edited and ordered and expected to be informative for a more or less specific observer.
However, the increasing involvement of ICT and the rise of the Internet in connection with basically every aspect of society create a highly interlinked and dynamic environment beyond the control of any actor or institution – an information habitat where information self-referentially emerges out of information gaining its "informativeness" through technological reduction and recycling of data that in turn is again stored as data. The Europeana – a project funded by the EU and run by the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), digitalizing a vast amount of library items, providing online accessibility, and preserving digital content - can be seen as a coping strategy or rather as an expression of these systemic processes. In a sense, librarianship is stepping into the information habitat bringing standards of data editing, ordering, and presenting along. Libraries are, in a sense, changing to remain libraries as they have to consider alternative ways of societal communication, types of media, and user behaviour. Europeana - as a completely digitally mediated librarian service - is a case for the challenges librarianship faces without ceasing to be a library. Europeana needs to provide what every library provides but the how has changed tremendously interrelated with environmental developments. The research aims at documenting and analysing the changes of the how.
Supervisor