Miscellaneous connections

Miscellaneous Connections

View more presentations from Mal Booth.

I gave this presentation late last week to the ANZ Society of Indexers for their annual conference. It was meant to stimulate some thought about recent developments on the web and also within institutions. Maybe the following guide will help to interpret some of these slides.

SLIDES 2 & 3 (Connection)

I used these slides to draw a connection between myself and Hazel Bell, the other plenary speaker (by video from the UK). She indexed the first publication of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1992 text) when it was first published by Jeremy Wilson in 1997. That text is over 80,000 words longer than the 1926 text that most people would be more familiar with and the index was invaluable to me when I curated a museum exhibition on Lawrence in 2006-08.

SLIDE 4 (Collaborators)

I am really grateful to those named on that slide as they raised my awareness and gave me new perspectives on a number of issues. We mostly used Google Docs to share comments and observations.

SLIDES 6-8 ("Indexing" the web)

Here you can see the influence of David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous) and Cory Doctorow regarding the application of non-web protocols, classifications and restrictions to the web. We cannot attempt to index or classify the web in the same way we would for a book or a collection of physical objects. It isn't going to work and it isn't necessary.

SLIDES 9-11 (Connect, share & collaborate!)

Yes, connect and integrate our existing taxonomies and indexes with those available on the web. I'm not suggesting that we throw the baby out with the bath water. Folksonomies work best with taxonomies. We need to realise that what works best in web systems like iTunes, Flickr, LibraryThing and Delicious is their ease of use. You are not forced to spend days laboriously adding metadata to fields that you don't even understand. LibraryThing and iTunes draw or harvest open metadata for us from other sources. We can then add our own tags, and in some cases even comments, links and reviews.

SLIDES 12-15 (The power of sharing)

Social media allows us to share everything quickly and easily. Gary Hayes' Social Media Count brilliantly displays the amazing dynamics of social media as you watch. In 2008 I was able to share images from a world championships being run in Hawaii to the world while the race was still being conducted. Our collection management systems in cultural institutions are not that adept. So maybe we use them in conjunction with image sharing platforms like Flickr or Picasa, or maybe we just chuck out these cottage industry systems and start again, realising the importance and scope of digital media, and going with systems that are intuitive, easy to use and much less cumbersome? Even software is now being shared and users are collaborating with each other to improve it. People are also still busy having their say in blogs and using clever RSS readers to help them to read what they choose to read and not what newspaper editors think they should read or what TV news rooms want to sell them.

SLIDE 16 (Authenticity)

The web is often criticised for being unreliable. But just because something is published in a magazine, a newspaper or in a book does not make it always reliable or authentic. Even peer review is not completely reliable. So we've come up with new ways to measure how much to trust each other and judge authenticity online. eBay and craigslist are great examples of this and they've been so popular that they've effectively robbed newspapers of much of their classifieds revenue.

SLIDES 17-25 (Institutions & sharing)

Cultural institutions are realising that they need to get out there and connect with their users on the web. They cannot wait for people to come to them. The clever institutions are making their web data easily findable and easily used. Mashups are growing. These are just a few examples.

SLIDES 26-27 (UTS Library - now)

Open everything seems to be the way of the future, so with UTSeScholarship we are heading in that direction. We are also using social media to connect with our clients where they might begin their searches and to engage with them.

SLIDES 28-35 (UTS Library of the Future)

These slides present a quick tour of some of the plans we have for our future Library. We are going to put approximately 66% of our physical collection in an underground Automated Storage & Retrieval System adjacent to our new Library building and that will allow us to do much more with our physical spaces in the Library itself. (The rough dates are only indicative.) Some of the elements we are looking at will be stimulated by developments well outside traditional library and academic environments.

Breathing new life into collections

George Oates is at it again. This presentation covers her brilliant work at Flickr Commons and her recent work on openlibrary.org. The themes that run through this presentation are: increasing access to collections; exploiting the power of (larger) networks; and institutional knowledge as substrate (through deconstruction, opening up and sharing).
Flickr Commons now boasts the shared collections of about 30 participating institutions, greatly increasing access to the shared photos (through the power and reach of Flickr) and perhaps more importantly, allowing the active participation of the viewing audience in adding to the institutional descriptions of those images. Now George has a similar vision for openlibrary.org.
She recognises that the catalogue records of libraries often do not make much sense to many intelligent people and in many cases they can actually be improved if we release our authoritative control over them and share them amongst our readers. A retired friend of mine has a massive personal library of well over 20,000 books. A while back we encouraged him to start cataloguing his books on Library Thing and he has already made a major contribution to the improvement of the descriptive records of those books in his collection, many of which he says were poorly catalogued by many great libraries or Amazon. His cataloguing is also less about the strictures of institutional taxonomies and more about the emotional and intellectual discoveries he has made through reading those books. Surely that helps if we think that our catalogues are primarily to be read by people and not machines?

Oh, you can follow her latest project on Twitter too @openlibrary

Into The Wild: Breathing New Life Into Collections

View more documents from George Oates.

The next 5,000 days of the WWW (Kevin Kelly)

I found this to be a very interesting video on the future of the web from Kevin Kelly on ted.com.
Kevin is a publisher, an editor at Wired Magazine and a writer. He is known for his fresh perspectives on technology and its consequences.

For those too busy to watch and listen here is my quick summary.
Kevin begins by throwing up some astounding numbers and statistics about the web that even he admits are too large for us to comprehend. He estimates that now the web matches the processing power and activity of one human brain, but by 2030 it will match six billion human brains (it is doubling every two years) and it will exceed humanity's processing power by 2040.
He postulates three major changes for the future web or its next 5,000 days:

1. embodiment,
2. re-structuring, and
3. co-dependency.

EMBODIMENT
All will be connected through the web and become web-based. Software and phones are already moving to be web-based and soon the same thing will happen for items (eg. "chips with heels and wheels"). There will soon be one media platform and media will be "free" in the sense of restrictions on its use (not necessarily cost). Humans will become extensions of the machine or the one web platform.

RE-STRUCTURING
He refers to the emergence of the semantic web. The web began with people sharing information on their web pages; then they linked to other web pages; and now we are linking to open data and ideas everywhere. So we will see more of XML; RSS; APIs; RDF; and OWL . All of this will assist in the linking of data from everywhere. Data must be open for it to be shared. It will become an Internet of "things" (physical things).

CO-DEPENDENCY
Here he refers to the total personalisation of the web IF your data is transparent. Google could serve as much of your own memory and Google is moving towards AI. WE are the web and become one "machine".

Kevin says the differences with the web will be that it is:

• smarter (anticipating more needs);
• personalised; and
• ubiquitous (for all devices become portals into it.

He refers to the emergence of ONE large organisation in unity with itself: ONE machine; the web is the operating system; all screens point to ONE; to share is to gain; let ONE read it; and ONE is us.

Even if we don't agree with everything he has to say I think there are a number of very important and strong messages in this talk.