Service as creation

I found this fascinating quote today in Future of Digital Scholarship at Emory University:

David Germano presented an argument that we need to re-envision “the dark sheep” of academic life, “service,” as scholarship .  As editor of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library , his commitment is to a people and a place not to a field. He has worked to reconceive Tibetan Studies around a series of services, web services, that engage people around the world to feed information into a system that itself creates relationships among all the information bits.  For those people as well as for contributing academics, the dark PRIVATE archives of scholarly activity see the light of day, reconceived as an information service.  Scholars provide streams of information inviting others to engage in creating new interpretive configurations of it.  We have to, David claims, break out of the culture of individualism in the academy and begin operating in the participatory knowledge movement, a vision of information as globally distributed and shared.  Universities should not deliver knowledge in hierarchical fashion but rather should offer a space where people can contribute their knowledge to others; they should become a space for distributed knowledge production.aims.muohio.edu, Apr 2009

You should read the whole article.

Actually, it’s the most heavy annoying barricade we had encountered in working on Digital Archives in TELDAP, Taiwan. This kind of ignorance toward the creation of services as an unfair judgement turns a lot of good sharing practices into resource struggling debates.