Computers in Libraries 2014 - Day 1 - Keynote

The first keynote for this year's Computers in Libraries conference was made by David Weinberger, co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and author of several books including The Cluetrain Manifesto, Everything is Miscellaneous, and Too Big to Know.

He started his talk with two questions:

• Why hacking now?
• Why isn't every knife a Swiss Army Knife?

He proceeded in his talk to endeavor to answer these questions and provided a thoughtful presentation on the position in which libraries find themselves today.

 

On the question of "why hacking now", Weinberger first clarified that we were talking about "white hat hacking", i.e. thinking about a problem in a new and fresh way, rather than "black hat hacking" (stealing credit card data) bozo hacking (thinking about a problem in a different, but ultimately doomed way).

Then came the answer to the "why... now" part of the question.  Weinberger identified four major factors that make now an unusual time:

• Everything is getting networked.  Weinberger made a point of classifying this as something quite different from everything going digital.  You can only go so far by changing something from an analog to digital format.  Changing the way people interact with one another through media changes the world.
• Everything is being opened.  There is a shift from the most prevalent kind of information being copyrighted information to the most prevalent form of information being information that is Creative Commons licensed and open access.  On this point I agree that this is a good and world-changing thing and is much more common than it used to be, although I'm less certain exactly how prevalent it is.  However I'm sure it is extremely prevalent in the world of academia, where Weinberger is coming from.
• There is engagement with communities at all points in the product lifecycle.  Authors can interact with readers while books are being written and companies can interact with consumers while products are being developed in a way that has never to this point been possible.
• There is a new, networked ecosystem.  It used to be the case that our users thought of the library early on if they needed a book or information.  Now we are a late thought after users first look at Amazon or Google.  We have an opportunity to turn this around by repositioning ourselves.

Then Weinberger tackled the question of Swiss Army knives.  He explained that although you can buy a massive Swiss Army knife that has nearly every tool you could possibly use, it's expensive, cumbersome and awkward.  In a world with Star Trek replicators that could make products you need on demand, you'd never ask for one of those, just the tool you needed at the time.  The reason we buy Swiss Army knives is because we anticipate needing other tools when we don't know that we will need them.  That anticipation is present in many industries and has modeled much about the world in which we have developed.

 

For instance publishers filter out materials they don't think will sell well so they spend their resources creating products that they anticipate will sell well.  This means there is an awful lot of stuff (some of it bad, some of it good) that doesn't get published.  The Internet has no such built in filter -- anything that people want to publish there gets published.  It is then the place for "curators" to filter-in the content that is good and relevant.  The bad stuff is still there for people to find if they really want it, as well as other good things.

 

After addressing these two questions, Weinberger pointed to three ways forward for libraries that get around the anticipation problem.

 

The first is the platform approach -- placing open data in a library portal.  There is a lot of open data and meta-data that is available through all kinds of APIs.  Libraries can collect and organize that data to create new resources.  Examples of this are the Digital Public Library of America and Harvard's StackLife.  StackLife is built on open data at Harvard's LibraryCloud and if a different library wanted to do something with it that isn't done with StackLife, they can take that data and use it.

 

Weinberger gave an example of a physical open platform in Harvard's "Labrary" where students can place their own projects and exhibits.  Another thing which Weinberger mentioned as an aside that will be a source of open data is the AwesomeBox.  The concept behind this is that libraries have two book return boxes -- the regular one and the AwesomeBox.  If something is returned in the "AwesomeBox" it gets additionally checked in as being "awesome" creating an anonymized, low-friction way of creating a list of loved materials.

 

Another way for libraries to move on is to take advantage of linked open data.  Linked data allows the creation of connections between sets of data that use different terms for the same facets.  For example, if one dataset uses the term "Author" and the other uses the term "Content_Creator", if an application pulling in the data can get information from the sources that those terms really mean the same thing, then the data can be combined into a single set.

 

Finally, Weinberger encouraged the creation of graphs along the line of Facebook's social graph.  Graphs allow the visualization and exploration of connections that are harder to see in raw data but that we know.  One example he gave were the various connections between Homer, The Odyssey, James Joyce, Ulysses, Dublin and the film O Brother, Where Art Thou.

 

These last two items in particular are variations on what libraries have always done, just updated to address new challenges.  We've always strived to create consistency among data so that items are easy to find and we've always focused on the ability of people to make connections between different kinds of things to help users find what they are looking for.

 

Weinberger closed summarizing that to hack libraries we need to hack the future, to enrich our existing assets, to create an infrastructure of knowledge, and to fight the trend prevalent on the Internet in particular for people with an opinion to only search for items that further confirm their opinions rather than search for the truth behind a matter.