8 Deadly Words

There is a phrase that I have heard over the last few years, and every time I hear it my brow furrows, and my mouth gapes.  I stand there dumbstruck and incredulous, not believing that someone in my field, who I respect, would say such a thing.

It goes like this:

What does this have to do with libraries?

My God, I think to myself.  Do you really have so little imagination that you can’t envision how this could benefit our customers?  Do you not see where we are going as a profession that this is something that we should be exploring?

What this phrase says to me, every time I hear it, is that this individual has a preconceived notion about what libraries should and should not do.  Where she has drawn that line means that anything that crosses that line needs to be justified within the context of her preconceived notion.

This is the same sort of argument that people use when “working to rule.”  The parameters have been set to a low standard, and only that standard is required.  There is no need or desire to move beyond it, for to do so means you are doing more work then you need to do.  You meet your requirements and you go home.  The service is solely “at par,” nothing more, nothing less.

Maybe I’m just an overachiever by nature, but this smacks me too hard.  When I hear the 8 deadly words I know that someone’s mind has closed off.  That the ability to convince that person of this vision of the future is an uphill struggle.  That the person is living in a vision of the institution that is in the past, and only getting further and further behind.

As part of the information profession we have a duty to stay on top of how innovation is changing the way people interact with information.  How they access it is only a fraction of that.  The bigger piece of the pie is how this change, changes us all.  How does this shift change social structures.  How does it change culture, and how can we adapt to this new environment.

The future isn’t about eBooks.  It’s about how eBooks are created, distributed, and consumed.  It’s about how this will change the entire paradigm of publishing, and what that in turn will mean for Mega Corporations who own everything we read.  What would happen if the big six (now five, I guess, with Random Penguins) were to just crumble and a thousand little online distributors took their place?  How would we cope with that?  How is having access to 3D printers going to change the way we interact with mass produced goods?  How is localized print on demand books going to affect book stores?  How are albums that are being funded through Kickstarter and Indiegogo going to affect standard music distribution channels? What happens when cable companies dissolve and internet only services take off?  What happens when smart phones and tablets are so cheap that everyone can have one for next to nothing?  What about all of these contributions to free online resources like Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, and the countless Open Source Software projects that people are working on every day.

This is a global paradigm shift we are living in.

It is touching every facet of our lives, and all of these things have implications not only in how libraries will operate, but what we will actually be in the 21st century.  If you’re not thinking about how to work through these issues, and how that’s going to change our culture, you’re not going to stay ahead of the game.  When your idea of the library is solely as a place where people read books, then you’ve already been left behind.

What we require going forward is a tremendous force of innovation, to overcome the inertia of “the way we’ve always done this.”  I would highly recommend reading Brian Mathews article “Facing the Future” about how libraries can think more like start-ups.  This isn’t just change for the sake of change. This adaptation for the sake of survival.

The Politics of Copyright

I’ve been wanting to write this all week.  Last Friday, the Republican Study Committee released a phenomenal white paper pushing for some pretty broad reforms in the copyright law. While I myself am not a terribly conservative person, this paper blew me away.  It’s amazing how progressive a statement you can make within the framework of conservative principles, and that’s exactly what they did.  While the RSC rescinded that report within about 24 hours due to “proper review” concerns,* the Electronic Frontier Foundation has the document in full preserved on their website. And you should definitely read it.

I don’t normally write about politics here, but I want to bullet point some of the necessary methods just to illustrate how this document worked.

Strict Constructionism: The first point that they address has to do with the myth of compensating the creator.  Instead the author turns to the language directly in the constitution that copyright is to “promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”  They use that exact language to highlight the fact that the purpose of copyright not solely to compensate the author, but to provide the author a limited time to profit from his creation, so that we, as a nation could promote progress in Science and useful Arts.  Further in the document they talk about how the perpetual extension of copyright hinders innovation.

Laissez Faire Capitalism: The second point has to do with the breadth of the market.  Because copyright is for all intents and purposes indefinite, this creates state sanctioned monopolies on content.  What we see when works go into the public domain is a vast proliferation on that content.  We don’t have to look very far to see that in action.  From The Wizard of Oz we get Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” (and the subsequent musical) the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Tin Man” and innumerable costumes and toys.  From Alice in Wonderland we have dozens of movies, cartoons, miniseries, songs, toys, and reprint after reprint with critical editions and leather bindings and all sorts of things.  If you need a visual then you should look at this chart of new books in the Amazon warehouse by decade from the Laissez Faire Blog.  That 1920 line is where Copyright reforms swept in due to Disney trying to protect Steamboat Willey, and it never came back.

From the Laissez Faire blog. We have a huge blindspot, and it’s copyright’s fault.

 

Tort Reform: On Page 7 when the author starts into the potential policy solutions one of the first things that he looked at was statutory damages reform.  Right now damage for copyright violations and infringement are orders of magnitude beyond the value of the original work.  This disconnect between penalty and reality is what gives us the ludicrous world of the 8 Billion Dollar iPod.  From the paper:

Further, this system creates a serious clogging of the ourts, because copyright holders now recognize that they can accuse anyone of infringemen, and include the threat of $150,000 awards per violation. But in reality, most people then settle for less than that sum, say $3,000.  Scaring a large number of potentially innocent people into settling should not be an effect of copyright law.

Limited Government: As stated above,the perpetual extension of copyright secures the rights of one individual or one company to be the sole entity to profit from a work.  This means that the government is determining who is allowed to profit, and who not, and the resources of government (i.e. the court system) can be used to enforce this regime.  By limiting copyright we limit the government’s role in enforcing copyright.

While the arguments that lead to these conclusions and proposals are definitely conservative base targets, the conclusions and solutions were really the best part.  And Libraries were not left out. Though they reference Project Gutenberg as a digital library initiative, and it is, with the expansion of the public domain there are entire universes of activities that could spring up among public libraries both on their own, through vendors like Overdrive, or coordinated efforts like the Hathi Trust or the Digital Public Library of America.  Expanding the potential for eBook development on a grand coordinated scale can lead the entire world into a new era of research, development, and entertainment.

As we start to look at the future, we’re going to see more disruption in content, and how people engage with it.  It started with music, moved to video, and surprisingly text has been slow to crack.  But with the growing ubiquity of eReading devices, and some fairly well settled ePub standards based on HTML5 this is going to be blowing up, and fast.  And copyright law will either adapt, or be thrown to the wolves on the internet.  Adaptation, and innovation in the sources of funding for limited times will do everyone a service.  The music industry is finally starting to find out how to make this work and it’s taken some pretty bold experimentation among established musicians to do this.  But today the Future of Music group released a pretty amazing checklist of 42 ways you can gain revenue from your work.  This is the kind of exploratory thinking that needs to be happening in the Big Content world, because maintaining perpetual copyright is only going to last so long as you can’t rip the content from a book the way you can rip a CD.  Oh wait, you can now.

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*Secretly in my heart of hearts I’m kind of hoping that Derek Khanna, the RSC Staff Contact and Paul Teller posted the document for just long enough, and rescinded it fast enough for the Streisand Effect to take hold and drive the conversation forward. A little too Machiavellian?  Maybe.  But it has certainly been the topic of conversation across the entirety of the tech sector.

Distributed Structures in Libraries

Anarchist Librarian tee shirt from TopatoCo.

My brain has been kind of reeling with stuff since last week.  I’ve been on a kind of personal philosophical rampage about the future of library science and it’s been bubbling inside of me until I get to the point of trying to push this into something that at least sounds coherent.  Compound this with the fact that I’ve been spending the last several weeks writing original music, reconnecting with friends, traveling the country, and going through end of the year performance evaluations and well, needless to say, blogging just took a backseat.

So, what I want to talk about today is about library anarchy.  Please don’t panic.

One of the things that I try to keep a pulse on is how business and government are changing.  I take a lot of cues from the tech sector where I see the most innovation especially in terms of redesigning the work model.  Google goes a hell of a long way to redefining work with their 20% time model.  This allows an employee time to pursue other ideas and things that intrigue and interest them, keeping them motivated within the work space by giving them an entire work day to explore and play.  I thought that was pretty radical.  And then I saw the Valve employee manual.  This is a radically different workplace, one that has zero boundaries between an employee and the CEO.  Let’s add to this picture Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s theory of Anti-Fragile economies as being part of a distributed system.

Libraries by their nature as government service agencies are inevitably bound up in bureaucratic muckety muck.  We are built on hierarchies and structures and layers of protocols, policies, procedures, and rules.

But what if we explored doing things entirely differently?  And I’m not talking just about dropping Dewey and using BISAC categories or roving librarianship.  But I mean, what about a radical overhaul of public library work and meaning for our staff?  I’m going to throw out some insane and probably dangerous library ideas now.

• Dissolve and distribute central libraries into local collections that have unique and deep research pockets around a city.
• Expand staff categories to cover emerging literacies in areas like engineering, ecology, biology, and design.  The MLIS is awesome, but it’s not the same as being able to show someone how to fabricate their own shoes and coathangers on local equipment.
• Eradicate hierarchical barriers between staff members on all levels.  You will always discover unknown talents in everyone that adds to the overall value of the system, and they should all have a voice.
• Move from centralized activities to networked activities designed at a local level.  There is value in centralized organization and development of activities in that it certainly saves time, but the fewer voices in the mix, the more homogenous the product.
• Actively invest in distributed public educational and productive endeavors

Why?  Why am I advocating at this exact moment for a total overhaul in the way we do things?

Because this is the way the world is changing right now.  There is now an entire generation of people who have grown up in the internet age who have an entirely different worldview, an entirely different perspective on work, and we are quickly moving into a place in the future where society and culture are radically redefined.

We have already begun the process of transforming the library from a place of media consumption and engagement to a place of media creation and interaction.  But media is expanding beyond the printed word, the recorded sound and video.  We are slowly becoming a culture of shared, distributed manufacture, locally grown products, and crowdsourced brainpower.

Where libraries have been in the past, as a repository for those who could not on their own access information, we are going to be serving as the place for those who on their own cannot access this new world.  For those who can’t print their own book, or to replicate their new shoes, or upload their new locally produced television show, let us be that place.  In order for us to be flexible enough to do these things let us explore how we can appeal to generation who can make it happen.  Let’s look at how we can change the work environment to accommodate the kinds of radical new thinking needed to transform us into the true 21st century library.

We are what we have always been.  Let us look to being that and so much more.

Signal to Noise

One of these days, we'll figure out where we're going.

I’m just going to free associate on some ideas that have been bumping around in my head lately.

I had a conversation with my husband the other day about the increasing irrelevance of the Recording Industry to the lives of artists*.  It used to be that the big labels were the ones who had access to the incredibly expensive recording equipment that made the manufacture of albums, then casettes, then CDs.  Studio time was expensive and the labels could afford to front the costs for studios to lay down hours and hours of tracks to produce an album.

However, over time, that recording equipment became less expensive and professionals and hobbyists alike would be able to acquire multi-channel mixers and multi-track recording equipment.  My dad had a four-track tape recording system in the barn where his band practiced. It was one of the most awesome things I had seen with four tapes rolling in sync with each other.  Nowadays, with a few thousand dollars you could have a studio rig to rival the semi-professional studio spaces you can find in droves in every major city.

Pressing records is another thing that has also turned into a boutique niche for record companies.  In 2008 digital downloads surpassed record sales, and it never turned back.  And I’m using “record” here loosely to mean a physical object that you put into a listening device.  More people download their music through iTunes or AmazonMP3 than go to record stores.

But now we have people who through the use of their home recording studios and the ubiquity of digital download services are increasing the volume of music that’s being produced and the volume of music that end user sees just increases and increases.

So, the one valuable thing that the Recording Industry has a hold of is the Filter that says “This is hot. This is not.”  But even that is changing.  Spotify this week announced that they were opening their API to allow for app development.  Now, some people, like myself, said “an app for your app?”  But think about this for a moment.  By opening their API to outside development, individual users, like you and I, could create our own filter for the music that we appreciate and like and want to share with our friends, and the world.

And that’s a valuable development, that kind of mirrors where the internet is taking society, moving content curation out of the hands of “experts” and people who have a financial interest in the product, and putting it in the hands of users who enjoy that content.

But what does this mean for the library?

As an institution we have always been a place that has had a certain level of cache that we have maintained for centuries: the place to find what you’re looking for.  While the library has never been a place that has been able to hold the entire spectrum of human knowledge, it has always been a place that one could expect a level of expertise in selecting works that would be of value to a community.  Whether that be a community of scholars or a village of farmers.  Out of all of the mass of human literature, the library has selected, cataloged and made available a particular collection.  Every library is unique, and their collection policies help develop that vision of each unique place.

So, as we move into a digital future, where printed books become luxury items (like vinyl is for music afficionados today), and eBooks explode into stratospheric proportions (which we’re already seeing via Amazon and Barnes & Noble circumventing traditional publishing models), the question of what becomes of the library still stands.  And I believe that content curation is going to remain extremely valuable.  However, as we see with Spotify, user driven filters to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio will also start to arise.

Then the primary concern becomes one of access to resources.  If the eBook market still prices works at an inaccessible rate for the average consumer, and especially the poor consumer, then providing access to users via a shared system, such as the library is the only way to make that happen.

Among the people on the Digital Public Library of America initiative there has been a lot of back and forth about being able to acquire current works and make them available via DPLA.  In our current state of publishing, this is extremely challenging.  Publishers barely want to provide access to their works to libraries at all.  Many of the major publishers have been pulling out of consortium vendors like Overdrive, even though there are very rigid DRM practices in place.  However, if through a service like DPLA, libraries would be able to provide access to a very broad body of freely available contemporary works, or at least eBook editions of works that are available via their physical collections, then we’re talking about a future for digital libraries.  By participating in a national level consortium effort for eBooks libraries could reap an extremely high benefit. The library then becomes an API, enhancing user experiences in navigating the world’s aggregated content.  The Library as a space becomes useful in other ways, as a collaboration zone, content creation space, a place to explore new technologies in a hands-on way, and a place to read when you don’t have access to read on your own, or get a physical copy on demand if you need one.

I guess the road that I’ve been walking down here is one that we cover as librarians all the time, i.e. what is the difference between a collection and an aggregation.  If you think about The Internet, all of it, it’s incomprehensible to imagine that anyone would ever be able to cull out of its vastness an island of reliable sources and valuable sites.  But search engines have developed massive algorithms to analyze this major body of work and help items float to the top.  The Internet is an aggregation of content.  The top 10 hits you get from a search engine (provided you phrased your query well) are the collection that the algorithm has selected for you.  Out of all of the body of literature in the world, the aggregate body of human works, a Library makes a careful selection based on a number of factors, to craft a collection.  The recording industry is in the business of boosting the signal against the noise, promoting those artists who they believed to be a cut above the rest to give them national or global exposure.  The Library is also in the business of boosting signal against the noise, promoting those books that they believe to be more relevant to a community than others.  As we think about the future of the library we’re going to have to ask bigger questions about content curation, participation across cities, states and national boundaries, and about what libraries as physical spaces mean to local communities in the context of these much bigger endeavors.

Edited to Add:

I’m just going to go ahead and update this as I woke up thinking about it.  Nearly the entirety of the piece above ignores the entire lesson learned from the Recording Industry.  That innovations that respect the consumers and the creators will continue to flatten out the hierarchical systems that we’ve built over time.  If we’ve learned anything from Wikipedia it’s that with a few simple rules everyone in the world can create an up-to-date, encyclopedia.  Though experts participate, this product is one that is curated by everyone collectively.  Different people, with different bodies of knowledge contribute collectively and it all gets sorted out by everyone together.

I’ve been drinking my own Kool-Aid.

In continuing this exploration though I want to consider the possibility that not everyone is as web savvy as everyone else.  That children who grow up in poverty, may not be versed in the ways of the Internet.  That educators and intercessors to help people will always be necessary.  Innovations keep coming rapidly and we should be able to respond to them in the moment of need.  Adults, who are no longer in school, may need a venue to explore and learn new things from other human beings.  Exploration space, as I mentioned in the preceding article, is more than likely what we’ll need to be.  Attempting to boost signal against noise is a noble goal, but may not be our primary selling point.  Service and human interaction may be the rule of tomorrow.

 

 

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* Yes, this is the kind of conversation that I have with my husband.  We didn’t get married for nothing!  Okay, it was the insurance, but excellent conversations are really high up there in the reasons.

World Wide Mind

I’ve only just begun reading Michael Chorost’s new book World Wide Mind: The coming integration of humanity, machines and the Internet, but I’m already struck by something wonderful that gave me chills.  From page 27:

A brain-to-brain communications technology would change all that. It would reveal some of a person’s “interior” to the collective…And if one saw groups moving in perfect synchrony to accomplish an object, unrehearsed, without orders, one might begin to believe that they have a consciousness independent of each individual’s objectives. If you knew where your friends were by using the same parts of your brain that track where your arms and legs are, and if you could coordinate your motion with them when needed, then your friends would feel like a part of your body.  You would remain an individual, but you would have a new status as an integral part of a group.

I had to put the book down right there and think for a minute because it was giving me chills, in a good way.

A lot of people have been discussing the differences between left and right brain lately, but most all of it in a very superficial way, i.e. left brain people are methodical, right brain people are artistic, etc.  But the real distinction between left and right brain functionality is how the different hemispheres either create boundaries between individual objects, or dissolve boundaries into a sea of existence.  In Jill Bolte Taylor’s incredibly famous speech at TED, she discusses the experiences that she has since she experience a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain.  Near the end of that video she delves into the immersive experience of the right brain, becoming one with everything.  Though, the Symphony of Science version of her speech has been stuck in my head for days, particularly when Jill says “and it explodes into this enormous collage.”

If this process of developing a technologically induced group mind does come to fruition, I see the potential for having massive amounts of reconnection with the right brain.  In our current state of mind, we are all individuals, we are all separate.  This is a product of our left brain putting everything and everyone into their own little boxes, with their own little labels.  The right brain puts all those labels and divisions aside, and unifies everything.

This could be wonderful, or absolutely horrifying.  It’ll probably be somewhere in between.  Though most science fiction tends to lean on the side of horrifying.  I could easily name several examples, though the most glaring one is from the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion.  Throughout the course of the series about giant robots powered by children who fight angels, you start to discover that there is a deeper purpose to these fights.  NERV was created to further the Human Instrumentality Project, which ultimately sought to break down the Absolute Terror field that keeps all life separate from each other.  (Trust me, I’m not really giving anything away here).  The incredibly surreal finale End of Evangelion shows everyone’s individual physical bodies bursting into a golden primordial ooze, and flowing out across the world.  While this would not be the physical experience, it could be the mental experience.  Especially if this neurological tech has a deepening effect on the right brain experience of life.

Eric Riley, Librarian Of Mars

Space Marine Librarian from Games Workshop. I intend to look like this as I conquer the universe.

I will admit right now that I have an obsession with space.  I have had it for years.  I mean, come on, every little kid dreams of being an astronaut at least once.  Fueled by movies like Close Encounters, ET and Explorers, I was ready to fly off to space and see some aliens.  Maybe not the Aliens aliens, but something cool.  In my college years I read Parable of the Sower and listened to The Martian Chronicles.  Star Trek, Farscape…

This is a huge part of my mental landscape.

So, why am I thinking about Starship Libraries?

Duh, So I can be a Starship Librarian!

I mean, surely there are going to be information control needs relevant to interplanetary travel.  Especially long term journeys like going to Mars.  Going to Mars is going to be a trip of years at a stretch, and that’s going to require all sorts of skills.  I think I may be able to help provide something useful to a mission.

Plus, I’ve been thinking about how I could get myself in shape, and having a big goal is a great way to do that.  I know, that’s shallow and kind of insane.  But seriously.  People can just apply to become an astronaut on USA Jobs like any government job.  I never imagined it could be so close.  Having useful skills, being intelligent, and having the physical conditioning are surely all part of the package.

So, that’s my dream.  Being a librarian in space.

Let’s see if I can make that happen.

Steve Jobs & Bardo

Lots of people have been pondering Steve Jobs final words, which are reported to be “Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.”  I have a theory, and it relates directly to two very important elements that have not really been combined as far as I’ve seen.

1) In the Steve Jobs biography it’s revealed that he dropped acid and that he believed it made him more creative.

2) He was deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism.

There is a very powerful combination of things working here.  Let’s start with the science.  Upon death the brain releases a flood of Dimethyltriptamine, which is a very powerful hallucinogen.  Amazonian shamans ingest it through a drink called Ayahuasca, and they experience things like alternate lives, time distortion and most importantly light.  It’s supposed that “the light” that people see is part of the DMT experience that hits the brain at the time of death.

The second part of this is the Buddhist component.  Surely someone who has been deeply influenced by Buddhism knows about the Bardo Thodol, known in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  This book describes the elements surrounding the different liminal states that one experiences in life and death, particularly in death.  There are three phases of the bardo of dying, the moment of death, the space of visions, and then the moment of rebirth.  This process is best understood if you watch the absolutely amazing film by Gaspar Noe called Enter the Void.

It’s my hypothesis that Steve, who had a passing familiarity with drug experiences, and more than likely understood the experiences described in the Bardo Thodol was able to put two and two together in his final moments and find a place of understanding and beauty.  His “Oh Wow” moment was confirmation, reverence and joy.

Oh to have a moment like that.

My Day at DPLA – Part 2

Digital Public Library of America sticker

The second half of the day was dedicated to the beta sprint presentations, which laid out several component pieces that could be reviewed for incorporation into the DPLA project, whatever it may become.  The Beta Sprint is a technique used in software development to develop working models of software to demonstrate operability.  The sprinters work ruthlessly to push out a piece of working code as fast as possible.  The DPLA Secretariat got 39 models and they selected six major ones for a long presentation and three shorter ones for a “lightning round” presentation.  All of this work, unpaid volunteer work by major institutions and college students.  Yeah.

The first presentation was Library of Congress, National Archives and Smithsonian.  Smithsonian created an intermediary metadata layer that sat over the digital collections of all three institutions and mapped common fields into a unified search function.  MAJOR.  Second presentation was was the Digital Library Federation, IMLS and DCC.  They created an actual live model that integrated data sets from a few hundred small cultural heritage institutions around the entire country.  This led to a question about curation of the content and who can be included and who gets excluded.  No clear answer to that at this stage.  The third presentation was for a product called ExtraMuros.  OMG, it is mind poppingly cool. This allows you to not only search across multiple document types including full text book searching, photo and video collections in partner institutions but also on the web via sites like Flickr and YouTube, BUT ALSO allows you to play with the content and create new collections, new documents, and enhance existing documents by overlaying and integrating multimedia resources into a text.  I was blown away.  The next presentation was a consolidated government documents interface from University of Minnesota, Hathi Trust and CIC.  It was primarily a mapping and data scrubbing layer that would create greater access to historical government documents, which are notoriously difficult to navigate.  Interestingly the GPO was not involved, nor were they interested.  As a former GPO employee I was a little surprised, because they have an army of catalogers pumping out records every day.  Who knows.  Then the folks from Athens, the one in Greece, presented a product called MINT.  MINT is a metadata mapping product that allows you to create the connections between the products in your data sets and everyone else’s data sets.  They also discussed a minimum viable record standard that they apply for data to be discoverable using their system.  Looked easy.  Finally were two coordinated products called LibraryCloud and Shelf Life.  Library Cloud is exactly what it sounds like, a data cloud server for library content that backs up local data and serves it up for you.  Shelf-Life was much like an OPAC interface that allows you to interact with all the different types of virtual objects in the DPLA catalog through visual shelf arrangements, and incorporated a lot of social media elements such as public reviews, comments, tagging and ranking of data.  I wasn’t totally sold on the look of it, but that’s obviously something that can be changed.

Then there was the lightning round.  First up was Bookworm, which combined the N-Gram viewer and the library’s metadata to create a more powerful search result system.  There was a hilarious moment in here where the undergraduate math student was explaining how to use the product and said “Social Sciences is ‘H’ for some reason” and the entire room burst into laughter.  Silly undergraduates not understanding the Library of Congress Classification System.  It was good, and made great use of variable data visualization techniques.  Next was a method for creating profiles for the cultural institutions and the content that they share with the DPLA.  Meh.  The final one was a project called WikiCite, which would create a citation index of digital information, as well as caching links that are referenced and cited as sources for Wiki articles.

After this we broke for the afternoon tea and had a chance to go and explore some of the poster sessions.  I primarily just hung around looking to see if I knew anyone else. I didn’t really see anyone that I hadn’t already run into.  It was a conference of maybe 300 people so you got to see a lot of the same people over and over again.

The final panel of the day was the report back and mission statements from the six work streams to see where they were headed.  I’m just going to identify the work streams and their mission statements, so I can move on to future thoughts.

• Audience: Create a digital public Library of America that is a trusted first platform for knowledge online and is universally accessible, participatory, and compelling for all.
• Content and Scope: Facilitate the discovery and exposure of digital heritage content for permanent, open, public access for the enhancement of knowledge and community.
• Financial: Explore and develop mechanisms to generate ongoing support for the DPLA. Generating recurring demand is implicit in this statement.
• Governance: Develop a system of decision making and management for the DPLA.
• Legal: Illuminate legal issues and, where feasible, provide information and options for addressing legal issues for America’s libraries as they go digital
• Information Technology: Establish the technical and normative principles of the technological framework that will best support the DPLA’s aims.

As you can see from this, it’s all a little vague, and that’s good at this stage, because they’re still defining the future of the project.  But they’ve also got a very aggressive schedule and a deadline of 18 months to a deliverable product.

Yeah.

So, that kind of wrapped it up there at the end and I was left with a ton of questions, all of which will have to wait for answers.

What kind of product is this going to be?

Who’s going to be using it and what are their needs?

How can the public library use this resource and promote its use with their user base?

How can libraries and cultural institutions become contributors to this project as well as users?

Will the general public be able to create content, share it with the DPLA and be able to expect longevity and access?

Will the DPLA advocate for copyright reform to increase digital access, and actually be able to compete with the stakeholders?

Can the federal government or local governments or public/private partnerships create an internet corps of engineers to enhance access?

Will this product start to change average people’s minds about copyrights and accessibility of content?

Would the DPLA start to challenge the publishing industry to end EULAs and DRM on eBooks to increase digital adoption?

Are we just going to stop with the United States or will we push this toward a global digital culture revolution?  With the U.S. and Europe on board this digital train, South American, Africa and Asia ought to be close behind.

I’m going to end with the vision of the starship library that I wrote about last month.  This is how we get there. By partnering together to make the entire cultural heritage of the world universally accessible, downloadable, remixable, and free.  With this level of access and collective urge to make things available we will get to that point.  And when we finally reach another world, we can start building a new collection, with the unified wisdom of our entire planet behind us.

I am so ready to take that big step.

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I’m going to edit this to add one very important thing.  This project is going to revolutionize the web for one very simple reason.  Metadata.  We have been living in a world where blunt force, raw searching yields millions of useless hits.  The value of a service like the DPLA is that it is in fact curated by librarians, archivists, museum curators, as well as the public who volunteer their efforts to make it relevant.  This is the hybrid of the old school library catalog and the new school wiki pages, where we have expert metadata people working round the clock to make things accessible, and average people dedicating their personal knowledge and time to make that metadata even more relevant.  This is going to fundamentally change how we use the web, because I will guarantee you that website owners are going to want to get in on this somehow.  And that means that they are going to have to generate metadata for their work to make it accessible and relevant to the collection, and then the users of those sites are going to curate the hell out of them.  Is that Web 3.0?  2.5?  I don’t know, but it’s a radical shift in an excitingly old/new way.

My Day at DPLA – Part 1

Today I had the pleasure of attending the Digital Public Library of America plenary session at the National Archives and Records Administration.  It was one of those moments where you see something and you instantly know that this is going to be huge.  The heaviest hitters in library science and digital access were there in full force, all of them throwing their support at this new coordinated initiative that, if successful, will revolutionize digital access to not only the United States, but to the world.  And I’m not just saying that, I really, really believe that this is going to be an utterly transformative movement in the world of internet culture.

Let me get all the name dropping out of the way.  Harvard, Stanford, The Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Public Knowledge, The National Archives and Records Administration, The Library of Congress, The Smithsonian, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Institute for Museum and Library Services, The American Library Association, State Library of Texas, The Sloan Foundation, The Arcadia Foundation, The Gates Foundation… Carl Malamud, Brewster Kahle, Bob Darnton, Susan Hildreth, Maureen Sullivan… This thing was HUGE.  The scale of it, never before attempted, and never before possible, and they brought everyone to the table, including interested parties from a similar project called Europeana, and the director of the British Library just happened to stop by.  The other fascinating aspect of this was the participation of rank and file librarians (like myself) and library school students.  They are really making an effort to spread the word and reach out to get the kind of feedback that they need to really develop a service that’s going to transform society.

And on one small, and interesting, detail: the entire conference was illustrated simultaneously by two different live artists.  It was like watching RSA Animate live!  All I could see of them was their pixie-like heads and their colored pens zooming along, but these ladies were incredible.  They were able to summarize hours and hours of presentations into cool wall sized graphics.  I’ve never seen anything like it done before my eyes.  I want these ladies at every meeting I ever have.

I’m going to try and reconstruct the day from my tweets.  Hopefully it won’t be too mangled.

Up first there was a welcoming prologue from the National Archivist David Ferreiro who turned it over to James Leach from the NEH.  Leach talked about C.P. Snow’s concept of the Two Cultures: Sciences and Humanities, and how today’s culture is merging those two fields via projects like this.  His driving note was that we need to develop an “infrastructure of ideas.” This was immediately followed by a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of $2.5 million dollars toward the project, which was then followed by an equally generous matching $2.5 million from the Arcadia Foundation.  Yeah.  That just was announced almost randomly in front of everyone there.  The speaker from Arcadia talked about how digitization projects to date have been haphazard boutique kinds of projects with a little money here and a little money there to make a small thing accessible online.  His call to action was to develop the big box version of that, going from the boutique to the Wal-Mart phase.  Everyone kind of gasped and chuckled.

The money bomb was followed by a report from some big players in the digitization movement here in Washington.  Library of Congress has scanned and made available 28 million of their 148 million items in their collections, and are itching to get the rest out there, much of it public domain books with priority scanning for American History titles.  IMLS was looking for projects that they could directly fund to help increase the DPLA movement.  The resounding statement here was collaborate and conquer.  NARA spoke about their mandate to make available a trove of some 400 million declassified documents by 2013.  All of which are pending review by relevant agencies.  The National Archivist wants to digitize absolutely every piece of paper in the archive and make it freely available.  BOLD.  In the follow up questions it was asked if they were considering the difference between making something accessible versus making something discoverable. Ferreiro made the statement that “if it’s not online it doesn’t exist.”  I’ll come back to that in a minute.  This was followed up by a lot of talk about massive amounts of metadata as well as accessibility for the blind and others as well.  Lynne Brindley, the director of the British Library stood up and mentioned that they have opened up all of their metadata under a Creative Commons 0 license.  A director from the Smithsonian also chimed in stating that they have 137 million items that they want to make available as well, most of them natural history specimens.

Now let me take a moment to just talk about metadata.  Many of you who read this blog already know what that is, but for those of you who don’t let me try and explain it in plain English. When you go to the library and you use their online catalog to search for a book, that catalog is created from a database containing about 80-100 fields of information about that book from the title, author, and subject to really obscure things like the height of the book, its language, illustrators (if it has one), I could go on and on and on.  Anyhow, that data, is data about the properties of that book.  We call that metadata.  Now, books aren’t the only things that have metadata.  Everything does!  Pictures online have metadata, items in museums have metadata, archives are loaded with metadata.  The crazy thing is that wildly different standards have arisen for different industries, and all of that unique information is often only readable by systems specifically designed to read that database code.  That’s one of the major hurdles in a project like this that wants to combine the forces of libraries, museums, archives and user generated content.  It’s a metadata nightmare!  But they are thinking about this and in a major way.  More on metadata in the beta sprints.

Bob Darnton from Harvard wrapped up that session with a very inspirational vision that this is not just a project for America, but a project that is international in scope via partnerships with similar cultural heritage projects like Europeana.  It’s easy to see that coming via open metadata standards between DPLA and Europeana.  In fact they plan to do a digital exhibit on the history of European migration to the United States as one of their earliest partnership projects.

The next panel consisted of many of the visionary people behind the DPLA movement.  The first was John Palfrey from Harvard.  His vision of this system was not one unique repository, but rather an access point that coordinated online access to the digital treasures that are the purview of local institutions.  He reinforced that the metadata itself needed to be open to everyone, and that the code that powers the DPLA be made available for local customization projects, like a Sourceforge for Libraries. He concluded with a hilarious idea about creating “scannebagos” to go out to different little towns and scan their documents and get them online.  Peggy Rudd from State Library of Texas pushed the idea of making the DPLA so resourceful that it would itself spawn a verb, ala Googling, viz. DPLAing.  Doesn’t have the same ring, but I like this vision of saying “I’m going to check The Library for it.”  Brewster Kahle spoke about three simple ideas to build a digital America.  The thing is we already are living in the digital America, and the services that we create today are what is going to drive the future of digital access online.  His three points were to make everything in the public domain freely available, make orphaned works available to lend, and to buy digital copies of new works and lend them.  Straightforward, and covers everything.  Amanda French from the Center for History and New Media had what was the most poetic speech about the vision of the DPLA.  She began by reading an aubade by John Donne, and talking about how we are clinging to our love of books as the sun is rising on a digital era.  Her conclusion was to find the balance between the digital products that we absolutely need, as well as the necessity of the physical space of the library and that would lead us to the gleeful rendez-vous with the soul of the library.  Carl Malamud was the final speaker and his was a call to action.  He sounded a rallying cry to create a new public works program of digitizing our nation’s heritage. “Deploy the Internet Corps of Engineers!”   It was astounding.

It was in this last panel’s question and answer session that we revisited the sentiment “if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist.”  Several other people, Kahle and Malamud I believe, echoed that sentiment.  When an audience member questioned this, asking “doesn’t this denigrate the physical work? Won’t people decide to not go to that museum, if they’ve already seen the entire collection online?”  Amanda French chimed in and restated it.  “If it’s not online people don’t know it exists.”  Making content freely available increases it’s value by exposing and promoting it.  How would anyone know if a museum in Iowa has a Caravaggio painting?  Perhaps in the knowing of that information a person may plan a trip to Des Moines, thus increasing tourism through open access.

It was at this point that we went to lunch.  I had a great conversation with some lawyers from Public Knowledge and Berkeley about the Hathi Trust / Author’s Guild lawsuit and the ridiculousness of it.  It was great and the food was awesome.

I’m going to take a break in the narrative here and post the second half of the day with all of the technical details and visionary work as well as my questions and dreams in the next post.

Early Literacy: Print vs. iPad

Watch this video.

The author of this video implies that his daughter has been coded by Steve Jobs and that she has already ditched print media.  The child attempts to interact with the magazine in a way that is reminiscent of the iPad and that she gives up because “print doesn’t work.”

The child in this video is about one year old, at least that’s what is assumed by the folks over at NY Daily News where I saw this piece.  I agree that the child looks about less than a year old, and that’s really the important piece of this story.

The folks over at Early Stages, a childhood developmental testing center here in DC, have developed a really fantastic handout about the milestones that all children should be reaching by different ages.  Around 7 months to 1 year old children are learning how to interact with and manipulate objects properly in their surroundings.  That’s what I believe we’re seeing here.

In that developmental phase children are trying to understand how different objects work.  We as adults know that iPads and Magazines work differently, and we manipulate them differently with our hands. But we have grown up in a world where those things were also taught to us.  Many of us don’t remember how we learned to read a book, because that educational experience happens at about this age of 6 months and on. So, it’s not that the magazine is “broken.”  Rather, it is that no one has shown the child how to manipulate the pages of a magazine to see all the pictures inside.

A child at this age doesn’t understand the difference between an square icon on a piece of glass and a square on a piece of paper.  They don’t know that they might not act differently, and their very limited experience in life has not given them any reason to suggest that they would.  That’s why we see the child attempting to “click” on the boxes on the page, or trying to “pinch” and blow up an image.  She just hasn’t developed the subtlety to make that distinction between paper and digital.

I do think this says something, however, about the future of reading.  Interactivity is a huge part of contemporary reading.  All of the heaviest hitting places on the web are interactive.  The enhanced eBook movement is an attempt to incorporate that into the process of reading.  It’s so much more than just sitting down with a book, it’s sitting down with a book, a collection of movies, a dictionary/encyclopedia and some critical works just in case you don’t quite follow along.  Not to mention that you can fiddle with the look and feel of the reading experience until it fits your own personalized style, provided they’ve given you the option to do that.  The printed book just can’t compare to that, and that’s okay.  It doesn’t have to.

There is no reason why we cannot fully embrace both print literacy and digital literacy with children.  The world they are going to grow into is probably going to slowly migrate into a digital playground, but not without a lot of stumbling blocks.  Print isn’t going away tomorrow, and magazines aren’t useless.  Well, maybe a few of them are useless…  But the point is, if you are raising a child in today’s world, it’s a mistake to think that their inability to manipulate a magazine is a sign that they are now wired for iPads.  No, it’s a sign that you need to show that child how you open a book, turn a page, and read along the line.  Books, magazines and newspapers are still a part of our world, and they probably will be a for a long time.  Make sure that child learns how they are different and how they are the same, because that’s what builds up all those skills she’s going to need when she starts school.

And I’ll bet she’ll probably need to read a book or two in school.