Part 1 – Crash through or crash

1999 – Britannica went online, all
30+ volumes. The servers, network connections and all crashed because
of the amount of traffic hitting it at once – 50 million people.
Britannica had tapped into the need for high quality information. It
didnt need to advertise to bring traffic to its site, everyone just
came. Within a few weeks it was back in business and also became one
of the most trafficed sites on the internet. However, it lost money
and as a result several months later they introduced fees and the
traffic dropped to 1/100th of the original. Wikipedia
stepped into the place that Britannica vacated.

Wikipedia is an example of crowd
sourcing – user contributions, transparent editing, governance and
goals. High quality facts encourage high quality visitors who then
further edited and added to the quality of the site. It has long
since surpassed Britannica in size.

We dont think about Britannica anymore,
Wikipedia has eaten up its market – one which had been dominated by
Britannica for 200 years. Britannica began to die when they
introduced payment.

2 weeks ago, the EU launched Europeana,
a cultural showcase for Europe. Launched on 20th November
and immediately crashed. It will relaunch when additional servers and
broader internet connections are established.

The more something is shared, the more
valuable it becomes. Hopefully Europeana learns from the lessons of
Britannica and the success of Wikipedia.

Part 2 – the Universal Library

A few weeks ago, Google agreed to pay a
licence fee to publishers, even if they are out of copyright. The
Google Book search library now has millions of items, accessible by
the vast majority of the worlds population, through computers, phones
and other mobile devices.

Within a few years, every book within
the reach of Google, will be scanned and made available through book
search. What does this mean for the library as we know it. Has it
obsolesced the library stacks? The stacks have gone virtual, it is
now universal and we are all part of the library.

Part 3 – the necessary army. If this
is so, what happens to the librarians? The central task of the
librarian is to bring order to chaos – which happens differently
from situation to situation. Even if we are done with the library, we
are not done with library science. The skills that our profession are
based on are desperately needed in the online world.

We are rapidly becoming a data
generating species – ie, email, video, photos, text messages – it
all adds up. Our culture is going to be permanently recorded and it
all needs to be indexed, stored and retrieved. To enable us to deal
with this, we are all going to have to become library scientists.
Librarians will become life coaches for the digital lifestyle. We
need to help people to capture, store and index their creations.

Library scientists need to be wherever
data is created. The proof of our value will be obvious once its put
to the test – we will need to throw a life preserver to users, and
once they realise our worth, we will be indispensable and highly
valued in the management of content.

The transition to a digital
civilization will founder without the input of librarians. The more
we share what we know, the more valuable we become to our culture. If
we are to make sense of the digital era ahead of us, then librarians
will be needed and many more of them.

Question: librarian roles in the
political sphere? – need to be involved in the copyright, filtering
and censorship debates – something that we need to own.

Question: are we teaching new
librarians the necessary skills to be that army? – its not about a
particular system (Dewey), but how to create systems, including
public parts that enable it to be shared with others, and thats where
librarians are important

Question: should we be concerned that
Google owns all that content and could start charging ? – not real
concern, Google makes better money elsewhere, need to be more worried
about having a single source for anything.

Question: libraries still have a place
because of the feel and the romance of the physical book – Mark
agrees, but we are in a transition and we need to think about how the
online version may not be as supple but is more immediate.

Question: Google didnt take the path of
subject cataloguing because its full text searchable – decision
they made that this data had no value, but we should be providing as
many access points as possible.

Question: libraries in different
sectors have different purposes – the future of these libraries can
be very different due to this. Libraries will get more promiscuous
about what they do – school library will be where the rubber meets
the road when it comes to how the internet is used. Each institution
is dealing with the other world that is out there, the challenge is
to make their specialist collections as widely available as possible.
Libraries need to be everywhere and if they are not, they are doing
a disservice to their users and their collections.

Question: limitations of tagging versus
controlled vocabulary – strength of tagging is that the wisdom of
everyone is stronger than the small group. Its not an either or and
or, we need both. There are ways to do this, which are not abusive.

Question: commercialisation impacts
heavily on the results you get online – Its an arms race, we need
to keep pace with the noise that this thing generates.

Question: Will Google try to develop
their own operating system. No, they are already bigger than
Microsoft, they already won. Microsoft and Apple are only being used
as portals to getting people to Google.

Question: Librarians need to have an
alliance with Google but they seem reluctant. – Google holds an
entire copy of the entire internet, for searching. Now that Google is
holding on to the Book search content, they are changing the rules –
this will have an impact. Google wants the data, so this is giving us
something to negotiate with.

Question: library as a building is not
in danger of extinction, would it help to change the name to match
the new image? The fault is in people not knowing that they need a
librarian – we dont need rebranding.