Yelton started her keynote asking "why did the web work?" Her answer was in two part: first that it was a resource with a determined agnosticism about what it was good for (i.e. it could hold all kinds of information), second that when it was designed by Tim Berners-Lee he gave all of the necessary code away so that anyone could run it.
Tim Berners-Lee had no idea that the WWW would be what it is now when he made it public, and Yelton used that as a jumping off point to look at how what evolves is frequently not what we would predict would happen at its outset.
To further illustrate this idea, Yelton told a story that when she was at a nerd camp 24 years ago a friend (who was later to become her husband) bought a stuffed mallard duck to play a part in a Monty Python skit the campers were going to put on. The skit got the kabosh because they wanted to do a Monty Python commentary on it as well that was to profane, but the duck lived on. On a whim Yelton made a sign-up list for the duck and a lot of her friends and acquaintances put their names on the list. Each year the duck has gotten passed onto someone else in the list, becoming something that has tied together this group of people who would likely have otherwise lost contact.
In this first part of her talk, the concept of wanderlust emerged. She described librarians who attend conferences as having a sense of wanderlust. She also described librarians as facilitators of wanderlust and libraries themselves are places that inspire wanderlust. They are places that lead to unexpected places and results. They introduce people to new ideas and different places and people and experiences without having any idea about how what kind of fruit will be born by these experiences.
Consequently, when we write code we are writing to facilitate wanderlust, or "architect for wanderlust" as Yelton put it in the title of her talk. Software that inspires an interest in different things and spurs this wanderlust is, by these terms, library software. Software that does not, is not.
Consequently, some software that is most associated with libraries, difficult to use catalogs that intimidate, is not library software in this sense. It does not belong in libraries and does not exemplify library ideals.
What is "library software" then? Yelton's answer covered a wide swath:
- Homebrew, a package manager for Macintosh that allows users to easily install the wide array of software available for Linux/Unix computers on the relatively closed Mac platform
- The world wide web itself
- A website that she and others hacked up in a hackathon at Harvard that compares the subject headings of resources with their Stackscore to see which of the highest rated items actually deal with underrepresented topics of women, African Americans, and LGBT
- The many interesting digital projects which have open APIs that the New York Public Library does make good examples of library software
- Congressbot that checks anonymous Wikipedia articles to determine if agencies with vested interests have edited articles is library software
- Code that lets us find stories that matter is library software
- The lovingly crafted Zoia bot for the Code4Lib IRC channel which has been a collaborative effort is library software
I found this talk particularly energizing. Being in a public library minority I also had to love her answer to a question afterwards from an academic librarian. The academic librarian wanted to know what might be done to encourage wanderlust in an audience (college students) who seem to mainly go to the library to accomplish specific goals and not to explore. Yelton didn't have an easy answer for this question, but said that maybe we should look to those in the library community that have the most experience instilling wanderlust in their clientele: youth services librarians.
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