 |
|
Source: http://jeannevb.com/on-the-edge |
The
slogan for the 17th ALIA Information Online
conference was At the Edge. As delegates
travelled up the escalator towards the opening plenary
session, they left behind a world in which the use of
technology has produced tensions.
Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were
holed up because they believed the world had become too
much like Nineteen Eighty Four. Social media that
four years ago had been used to inspire hope in Tunisia
and Egypt were now being used by Islamic State as
a black art to terrorise the rest of the world. How
close to the edge would the conference take those
assembled in the comfort of the Sydney Hilton Hotel? And
what sort of a difference would it make to what they do
tomorrow? [1]
THE TALK AT THE
CONFERENCE
The big opportunity
Siva Vaidhyanathan urged libraries to occupy land that
Google is now leaving. Drawing on his book
The Googlization of Everything and Why We Should Worry, the
Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia
said Google had begun to solve what used to be regarded
as a library problem. Their search engine invention had
sucked all the energy out of the room and forced
libraries to become defensive. But Google is no longer
the same company. It now wants to be the operating
system of our lives, to be responsive to the flows of
data controlling the operation of fridges and cars. Book
scanning and similar initiatives have been “parked on
the side.”
To help libraries seize the
day, he proposed a Human Knowledge Project, modelled on
the Human Genome Project, as a networked digital
collection of collections.[2] The dream of universal
access to comprehensive knowledge, he said, is not new.
But is what we have already done the best we can do?
We’ve long had the technology. What we have lacked is
the political will. The Human Knowledge Project is a
concept for investing in technology, people and
buildings to create national networks with local and
global impacts. Citing Diderot’s
Encyclopédie
as one of
the antecedents of such a project, he said the Digital
Public Library of America, the Internet Archive and
Trove are potential partners among a wider range of
stakeholders.
Remaking library spaces and
services
Erik Boekesteijn’s
message was that extreme library makeovers and mind
shifts are needed in order to survive. As director of Doklab
(http://www.doklab.nl/en/), a consulting service in
concept and product development located at the Delft
Public Library, he keeps his finger on the pulse through
the Shanachie Tour (http://www.shanachietour.com/),
highlighting the work of libraries around the world, and
a weekly online talk show, This Week in Libraries.
(http://www.thisweekinlibraries.com/). His slide show
offered a smorgasbord of mind shifts from his travels
and shows. These include digital signage, transit
screens, learning labs, makerspaces, rooms for hire, use
of social media, smart use of library cards, managing
user-generated content, e-publications and slippery dips
from one floor to another. Initiatives worthy of
attention include the Singapore Memory Portal (http://www.singaporememory.sg/)
and the digital library on the walls of a Bucharest
subway station.[3] Libraries, he said, need to become
the starting point for a conversation. In the end, it is
how libraries make people feel that is important.
Liz McGettigan gave a
lesson in attitude. The Director of Digital at SOLUS UK
called for radical transformation to deliver
customer-centric services in hi-tech libraries.
Libraries have responded well to emerging challenges,
she said, but they still feel threatened. Drawing on her
experience as Head of Libraries and Information Service
for the City of Edinburgh, she reeled off pragmatic ways
to manage and sell services. Librarians need to be
opportunistic, take the lead, demonstrate energy, know
their strengths and be prepared to make mistakes. They
need to make changes within existing budgets and do
something different every year. And, in a Scottish burr
worthy of Mel Gibson’s call to his kilted highlanders in
the film Braveheart, she urged those assembled on the
battlefield to “choose glory”.
Planning tools and
techniques were explored by a number of speakers. Sue
Hutley (Queensland University of Technology) homed in on
the value of trends as a starting point. After citing a
number of sources worthy of study, she focused on the
2014 Horizon library trends report and the blips on its
radar screen -- changing research environments, mobile
content and delivery, developments in standards and
infrastructure, electronic publishing, the Internet of
Things, the Semantic Web and linked data.[4] Two
presentations highlighted the value of design thinking
(Rebecca Goldsworthy and Kate Masters from the
University of Sydney Library and Justine Hyde, Ben
Conyers and Bridie Flynn from the State Library of
Victoria). Alison Pepper and Margie Janttl described the
development of the University of Woollongong’s ‘value
cube’ database, which has been used to learn more about
student borrowing and online resource usage patterns.
Jennifer Crosby and Kimberley Williams (University of
Technology Sydney) championed the creation of a 'sticky
campus' to encourage staff and students to become
involved in the planning process.
Government and business libraries are often the most
vulnerable in volatile times. Kim Sherwin (Arup) and Pia
Waugh (Australian Department of Finance) offered their
experience of going on the front foot. Two librarians
were generous enough to expose the raw side. Laura
Atkinson’s experience was leading restructuring of
Victorian Government libraries, where 55 libraries were
reduced to 19 services and 14 locations were reduced to
3. On the plus side, the changes have led to greater
consistency in service delivery and more direct online
access to resources. But her final comment - “Don’t
trust anyone”- exposed the emotional side of the
process. Cynthia Love was called upon to respond to
funding pressures by making extensive changes to
information services at the CSIRO. With full online
service delivery by 2016 as the goal, this has involved
consolidating collections, weeding duplicated and
obsolete material, establishing a single document supply
centre, adding data management responsibilities, and
assigning librarians to strategic research projects.
Being in step with the organisation is important. But
sometimes there is no rational explanation for what you
are asked to do.
Public library
developments of the kind highlighted by Erik Boekesteijn
were picked up in local case studies. Tania Barry’s work
at Hume Libraries in Victoria has involved the
establishment of a makerspace, equipped with
technologies for content creation, programming and 3D
printing. Lisa Miller gave us a picture of the new media
lab at City of Gold Coast Libraries’ Helensvale Branch,
which has attracted new users and forged links with
small businesses. Measuring the success of the venture,
she said, has been difficult, but success of ventures
like this, like the success of exposing children to
books, is surely best measured years down the track.
Discovery, digital creation and digitisation
Mitchell Whitelaw, from
the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the
University of Canberra, reprised and updated his keynote
address about generous digital interfaces at the 2013
ALIA Biennial conference. Further experiments are
exposing new ways to enrich collections, locate items,
and understand subjects. They are drawing attention to
the value of serendipity, challenging notions of
significance and posing questions about the allocation
of budgets on solutions for searching and browsing. The
work of the Internet Archives, for example, in adding
2.6 million tagged images with OCR text from scanned
books was achieved at minimal cost by one person using a
computer. An improved understanding of authors in the
Bloodaxe archive of contemporary poetry at Newcastle
University in the UK was engineered by using a
marginalia machine and linking data to the British
National Bibliography. Spotify’s Every Noise at Once, a
map of music genres, makes it possible to drill down on
recordings in specific genres and explore related genres
in the music streaming service. The tranScriptorum
project is developing solutions for indexing, searching
and transcribing historical handwritten document images.
As a takeaway article, he recommended Alexis Madrigal’s
article How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood, about
the creation of a new genre generator.[5]
Sarah Kenderdine, Deputy
Director of the National Institute for Experimental Arts
and Director of the Laboratory for Innovation in
Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums University of
NSW (iGLAM Lab), encouraged institutions to take on a
role as “applied laboratories and nodes of
experimentation for the cultural imaginary of our times”
by using new media art practice to create immersive
experiences, interactive cinema, augmented reality and
embodied narratives -- creating experiences for which
there has been no former demand. From her portfolio she
offered some enticing examples, undertaken mainly in
partnership with the museums and heritage sites:
mARChive (Museum Victoria’s data browser for 100,000
objects in 360-degree 3D); Look up Bombay (a gigapixel
dome work for the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai);
Pirates Scroll 360 and Pirates Scroll Navigator (two
treatments of a scroll painting, Hong Kong Maritime
Museum); Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at
Dunhuang and Pure Land Augmented Reality Edition (based
on interactive facsimiles of the World Heritage site, Dunhuang, China);
Kaladham (based on the World Heritage
Site, Hampi, India) and ECloud WW1 (a world touring
exhibition representing 70,000 objects in 3D from the Europeana website). Projects in the pipeline for major
museums in Australia are devoted to a hospital operating
theatre, Asia and Aboriginal culture. Her takeaway
citation was an article in The Atlantic which posed the
question: what is a thing?[6]
Three presentations about
Trove, tucked away in the concurrent sessions, deserved
greater prominence because of the important messages
they conveyed.
The first message was
that Trove, despite its success, is done on the cheap.
The National Library of Australia’s Marie-Louise Ayres
compared the Australian discovery services with similar
enterprises around the world – Europeana, DigitalNZ and
the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) – to
highlight progress and opportunities. Although they have
similar purposes, they have completely different
government mandates, governance frameworks and funding
dimensions. Trove’s content base is much more diverse
and complex than the others. Trove and DigitalNZ offer
workmanlike search interfaces compared with the more
arresting design features of Europeana and DPLA. All
services have an open access agenda, but Trove is
hindered in delivering this goal by complexities around
licensing, metadata, and other matters. Trove is also
hampered by the fact that it doesn’t have a clear
Government mandate and major funding outside the
National Library’s budget. It can only develop things
incrementally and its capacity to assist prospective
contributors is limited. Only time will tell whether the
next five years will bring further convergence or
further divergence and whether new players will change
the aggregator environment in ways not yet imaginable.
The second message was
that Trove is great, but it isn’t perfect. Trove
Manager, Tim Sherratt, challenged the notion that a
‘seamless’ world of information is possible. As we
imagine the future of a service such as Trove, how do we
balance the benefits of consistency, coordination and
centralisation against the reality of a fragmented,
unequal, and fundamentally broken world? Trove is an
aggregator and a community, a collection of metadata and
a platform for engagement. In exploring possibilities,
we need to acknowledge its limitations. It is not
perfect. It is not everything. It is not a machine.
Although library services cannot compete with Google’s
oracular power, they can strive to offer users a
comparable level of simplicity. And, by exposing
assumptions and imperfections, collection gaps and
strengths, data visualisation techniques can reveal ways
to educate the public, analyse data and repair what
appears to be broken.
The third message was
that Trove has paved the way for harvesting data from
types of contributors who were once excluded. Julia
Hickie and Mark Raadgever drilled down on the work of
the harvesting of content from the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National (RN) website
as a way of expanding Trove’s news coverage. This
involved devising non-standard systems and protocols to
capture 84 separate RN programs using Sitemaps, checking
RN RSS feeds and converting metadata to Dublin Core, a
workaround that, in partnership with the ABC, has
produced an alternative to the Open Archives Initiative
Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It has been
effort that has enabled the library to bring content in
from a number of other data sources, such as the
Australian Government Solicitor’s Legal Opinions
website, the Australian Parliamentary Library’s Press
Releases database and the AusStage events database. It
will make it possible to extend collaborations to owners
of content management system websites. The library is
“taking its blinkers off and thinking beyond
conventional data types and content partners.”
Maggie Patton shone a
spotlight on digitisation programs at the State Library
of New South Wales, which in 2012 was the beneficiary of
a commitment of $48.6 million by the NSW Government for
the initial five years of a ten year program. This has
enabled infrastructure and systems renewal, involving
the acquisition of Ex Libris products, Rosetta digital
asset management system, and Axiell Group’s Adlib
Archive among other systems. Over the past 2 years, 1.3
million pages or approximately 4,500 books from the
extensive David Scott Mitchell printed book collection
have been generated, over 2.6 million newspaper pages
have been released through Trove, and over 180,000 pages
from the Library’s extensive WWI diary collection have
been digitised. Other elements of the program include
contributions to Flickr Commons, Wikipedia and Google
Cultural Institute, the use of a transcription tool to
assist volunteer transcribers, geo-referencing its
cartographic collections, and open data initiatives. In
other papers, Adrian Bowen explored the digitisation of
the oral history collection at the State Library of
Western Australia, where protocols have been adopted to
deal with orphan works. Dianne Velasquez and Jennifer
Campbell-Meier touched on the digitisation in
information repositories and other forms of digital
collections in the the university sector.
Do libraries still need
to invest in the web-scale discovery services such like
Primo, Summon, EDS and WorldCat Discovery Services? This
was a question tackled from library and vendor
perspectives. Andrew Wells (University of New South
Wales) drew upon local and American surveys that reveal
changing user preferences for search engines, external
content providers and library systems in universities.
As the move from print to 24/7 online access replaces
the model based on ownership of physical resources, the
UNSW Library believes its investment on web-scale
discovery systems is currently worth the expenditure.
Bruce Heterick from JSTOR gave a vendor perspective.
There is an assumption that libraries, content
providers, and web-scale discover service providers have
goals that are aligned. Most content providers are
interested in getting content on their platform to as
many users as possible, but need to recover their
significant financial investment. Libraries, too, need
to increase their own level of investment to manage the
changing environment.
Specialised system developments were explored by Clare
McKenzie, Emma McLean, Kate Byrne and Susan Lafferty
from the University of NSW, where a new research output
system, based on Symplectic’s Elements software, has
involved a transfer of responsibilities to academic and
research staff. Katrina McAlpine and Lisa McIntosh gave
details of an eResearch framework at the University of
Wollongong Library to define support services for the
registration, storage, description and discoverability
of research datasets. Cathy Jilovsky and Michael
Robinson described CAVAL’s new D2D (Discovery to
Delivery) service, which streamlines the delivery of
requested resources with minimum mediation. A case study
offered by Maureen Sullivan and Suzanne Bailey was
devoted to Griffith University’s ePress library-based
electronic publishing service. Cecile Paris talked about
work at CSIRO on the development of systems for
searching, capturing, and analysing digital content.
Jane Angel gave a run-down on the delivery of electronic
resources using a rebadged EBSCO Discovery Services at
the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. Clare
Thorpe described how the Identity Management Project at
the State Library of Queensland was streamlining 19
client management systems to make it simpler for users
to gain state-wide access collections and services,
loans, online databases and newsletter subscriptions.
And two speakers -- Trish Hepworth and Thomas Joyce –
talked about fair use copyright reform and approaches
for staying out of trouble.
Connecting with users
The use of social media
is widespread. The State Library of NSW – in papers and
workshops by Mylee Joseph, Kirsten Thorpe, and Ellen
Forsyth – offered the benefit of their experience by
talking about the risks involved, use of the Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and
Resource Network protocols when engaging with Indigenous
communities, and ways of measuring the effectiveness and
impact of social media. Richard Gray and Amy Baker, from
UNSW Australia, and Jill Benn, Katie Mills and Roz
Howard from the University of Western Australia,
contributed to sessions on the value of social media in
a university setting. Two presentations -- one by Ozge
Sevindik-Alkan, the other by Alyson Dalby, Amy Barker,
Kate Byrne and Clare McKenzie -- explored the use of
social media and groupware for mentoring and
professional networking. Louise Prichard and Louise
Tegart described how the State Library of NSW was
connecting to exhibition visitors using the Curio mobile
app, which involved a partnership with Art Processors,
developers of the mobile guide for the Museum of Old and
New Art in Hobart.
Digital literacy programs
are being tweaked. Sharon Bryan, Helen Hooper and
Bronwyn Mathiesen focused on the use of games to create
a suite of reusable learning objects at James Cook
University Library. Two speakers -- Bronwen Forster
(Cook University) and Christine Oughtred (Deakin
University) – outlined ways in which library courses
have been developed in collaboration with teachers and
staff. Emily Rutherford, Dr Katharina Freund, Heather
Jenks, Inger Mewburn examined the use of badges to
provide verified credentials to students at the
Australian National University Library.
Collaboration
Troy Brown urged more
collaboration by galleries, libraries, archives and
museums. The GLAM sector currently spends approximately
$2.5 billion, around 80% of which is provided by
government. The GLAM Innovation Study, undertaken by
CSIRO with the Australian Centre for Broadband
Innovation and Smart Services Co-operative Research
Centre as part of its digital productivity flagship
research, reports that their combined collections
contain over 100 million objects, 25% of which is
digitised. Among other recommendations, it proposed a
national framework for collaboration, supported by a
leadership forum, involving “some minimal, cross-sector
governance arrangements beyond the existing professional
and industry associations."[7]
Rebecca Daly and Susan Jones gave an example of modest
cross-sectoral collaboration in their presentation on a
project involving the University of Wollongong Library,
Illawarra Historical Society & Illawarra Museum to pull
together local archival content for digitisation and
online access, including then-and-now streetscape
images, estate and subdivision plans, land title deeds,
historical publications and photographs. A workshop
presentation by Jane Cowell and Ian Wedlock on the State
Library of Queensland’s The Next Horizon: Vision 2017,
which aims to transform Queensland’s 340 public
libraries into physical and digital hubs to capture the
unique histories and contemporary stories in regional
Queensland libraries, museums and historical
societies.[8]
IMPRESSIONS AND REFLECTIONS
The conference left two impressions
that have prompted further reflection. The first was
that the attendance and the number of exhibitors had
declined markedly since the Information Online heyday.
The second was that the program felt more like an annual
version of the ALIA Biennial Conference. Was this year’s
conference really at the edge? And, at a time when most
libraries are wired up, is the conference facing its
use-by date?
Library directions
Technologically-driven change has
affected and continues to influence the development of
industries and those who work in them. Australia’s
collective know-how -- the knowledge and expertise of
its people – is now valued at $16.7 trillion, with
nearly $615 billion added to the total in 2014.[9]
On the other hand, Australia’s digital economy ranking
is slowly receding rather than advancing, as governments
help or hinder future directions.[10]
Commentators continue to depict the
future of libraries in terms of an evolving revolution.
CNI’s Clifford Lynch says the evolution is carried
forward under the enormous strain of a very complex
system. Many institutions are no longer economically
sustainable or stable. Transitions of stewardship
responsibility from one organisation to another will
become increasingly commonplace.[11]
It will be necessary to develop strategies and
infrastructure to deal with these demands effectively,
affordably, and at the requisite scale.[12].
Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC’s chief
strategist and manager of research, also pinpoints the
network as the main driver of the evolution. In The
Network Reshapes the Library, a compilation of his
blogs of the past 12 years, he reflects on the move by
libraries into an evolving ecosystem of information
services. Libraries need to structure their systems,
data, and access protocols to facilitate networked
access across regional collectives, countries and the
world. A lot of habits, systems, and functions will
necessarily change for this vision to take root.
Strategic attention to these areas, he writes, is often
emergent rather than deliberate and issues are
not always pulled together in a single planning
context.[13].
In his OCLC report
Collection Directions: Some Reflections on the Future of
Library Collections and Collecting,
written with Constance Malpas and Brian Lavoie, he
amplifies how the network is reconfiguring libraries
within institutions and across the sector. As libraries
become more engaged in research and learning workflows,
they need to rebalance investment in “commodity”
materials and increase operational efficiencies. An
“inside-out orientation” will become more important as
universities focus on distinctive institutional assets
and libraries direct increased curatorial attention
toward special collections, new scholarly products,
research preprints, and learning resources. Ultimately,
the degree to which these broad environmental changes
will affect academic libraries will depend upon the
availability of appropriate collaborative infrastructure
above the institution. Building shared services at scale
is necessary and a challenge.[14]
Meanwhile libraries and their
suppliers beaver away on systems and standards. Marshal
Breeding, in his annual review of the library systems
marketplace, writes about a relentless consolidation of
systems in the last 12 months, with among issues ongoing
interest in linked data and the development of BIBFRAME
as a replacement for MARC.[15]
Ted Fons, at the CNI December 2014 meeting,
sketched out efforts by OCLC to move away from
inventory-based discovery systems towards linked data
entities and relationships in diverse information
ecosystems.[16]
Dean Krafft and Tom Cramer, in the same meeting,
reported progress in a linked open data project of
Harvard, Cornell and Stanford universities libraries,
which aims to produce an ontology, architecture, and set
of tools that will work within and across individual
institutions in an extensible network.[17]
And Jerome McDonough, in Falling Though the Cracks,
expressed the hope that libraries, archives and
museums will use linked data and other standards to
capture intangible heritage information and overcome the
inertia around cooperative collection development.[18]
In March 2015, the National
Information Standards Organization launched three new
projects to develop new standards to better support
exchange and interoperability of bibliographic data'[19].
Library associations and conferences
Since the first library association
was launched at the Pennsylvania Historical Society
conference in 1876, their number and nature have
expanded globally around general and specialist
interests. Their conferences are usually pitched as
professional development and networking opportunities
rather than as forums for advancing big ideas in
concert.
The first Information Online
conference was presented in January 1986 under the
management of ALIA’s Information Online Group.[20].
The reins have now been transferred to the ALIA head
office and the number of delegates and exhibitors has
declined in recent years. Melbourne interests in
libraries and technology preceded those in Sydney. The
independent Victorian Association for Library Automation
(http://www.vala.org.au/), established
in 1978 and now rebadged as
Libraries,
Technology and the Future Inc, organised its
first conference in 1981. The roll-up to the biennial
Melbourne conferences matches the attendance at the
biennial Sydney conference.
The Australian Library and
Information Association, in addition to organising the
Information Online conference, also now hosts three
other national conferences -- the ALIA Biennial
Conference, the New Librarians Symposium, and a National
Library and Information Technicians’ Symposium.
Specialist conferences devoted to
online information and technology abound here and
overseas. Their papers, slides and videoed presentations
are generally made available via conference websites or
video channels.
Is this the best we can do?
The Information Online conferences
have resounded with the catch-cries of computing,
content, connectivity and customers since the
Information Online conferences began. This one was no
exception. Every conference needs an agent
provocateur and the one who stepped up to the plate
at Information Online was Siva Vaidhyanathan, who
challenged libraries to do better in the next phase of
the information revolution. Is it a question of
advocating value or of marshalling forces?
ALIA had used the conference to
launch its new advocacy campaign FAIR (Freedom of Access
to Information Resources) as a way of giving more
prominence to lobbying needed on library funding, legal
deposit, digitisation, evidence-based policy making,
copyright law reform and other matters.[21]
Liz McGettigan, in her
presentation, urged delegates to find a new language for
dealing with funders. Sue Hutley underscored the need to
adopt IT infrastructure and performance standards, an
issue now on the agenda of the Council of Australian
University Librarians. Five years ago,
Marie-Louise
Ayres in a discussion paper to National and State
Libraries Australia commented on the lack of
standardisation of practice and performance across the
libraries NSLA represents.[22]
And we can go as far back as 2001, when John
Houghton, in his report for CAUL, The Economics of
Scholarly Communication, wrote “the library
community does not have a particularly good handle on
its own costs or standard approaches to data collection
on holdings, expenditures, staffing. All too often
judgements are made, rather than decisions, because of a
lack of information.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan
had spoken about Google’s interest in
the Internet of Things, which may affect the future of
libraries but is currently at the outer reaches of their
interest and control.[23]
His call for a Human Knowledge Project
has antecedents in plans by Paul Otlet and Henri-Marie
La Fontaine to create a world index of literature in the
1890s. Knowledge management has lost its gloss in recent
years because of the inherent difficulties of creating
and maintaining trust in a cynical world of rapid
change.
The
GLAM Innovation Study is the latest attempt to
stimulate concerted local action by galleries,
libraries, archives and museums. Drawing people,
processes and technologies out of the GLAM sector silos
has been a major challenge. The experience of the
National Digitisation Information Infrastructure
Preservation Program in the United States highlighted
the difficulty of collaboration in diverse environments.
The closure in 2010 of the Collections Council of
Australia, on which the main GLAM sector bodies were
represented, put the brakes on a momentum that had built
up with the help of government money. Museums Australia,
in consultation with ALIA, has organised a meeting of
GLAM sector bodies in June to take stock of the
situation.
Funding from the three levels of
government funding will undoubtedly be needed to draw
mixed interests and capabilities into a more unified
digital space. But it is worth remembering that ALIA and
Museums Australia both owe their existence to the
substantial support of the Carnegie Corporation in the
1930s. In 2007 the Northern Territory Library received
an award of US$1 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation for its work to improve the lives of
Indigenous Australians. International forums such as
APEC and the G20 may provide lessons on ways of
conferring and resolving things that need to be done.
The under-funded Trove initiative is a solid platform
that calls for more imagination, specification and
commitment to build the rest of the house.
There is a case for letting things
evolve. In 2004, the former Deputy Director of the
National Library, Eric Wainwright, in noting the
Australian library sector was without a national body
through which libraries can pool resources to influence
government policy, develop strategy and encourage
cross-sectoral projects, wrote that “most of us have
less belief both in grand visions and the likelihood of
broad consensus.” He argued the need for summit-style
gatherings had changed and the information and
communication fields were so fast-moving that
institutions were having themselves to react more
quickly. It is less likely that national mechanisms
built on consensus can respond within the timescales
needed for decisions. [24]
But, as Clifford Lynch asserts, the era of letting a
thousand flowers bloom may be over and a new phase of
the information revolution may compel more effective
concerted action.[25]
Unless you're optimistic there are reasons to be
pessimistic. Maybe the intelligence that libraries are
seeking to foster is overrated? The public intellectual
Noam Chomsky, in a recent talk about the failure of
humans to deal with nuclear and environmental threats,
claimed that intelligence was a
lethal mutation: lower forms of life such as bacteria
and beetles will survive homo sapiens, whose use-by date
has almost arrived.]26]
The physicist Stephen Hawking has offered the view that
the full development of artificial intelligence
could spell the end of the human race.[27]
Will the robots have arrived by the
next ALIA Information Online in February 2017?
Endnotes
[1] ALIA information
Online Conference 2015 program and papers:
http://information-online.alia.org.au/
[2] Vaidhyanathan S, "The Human Knowledge Project"
paper presentedat the Cultural Policy Centre,
University of Chicago, 29 October 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtX6J31ZpC8
[3] MDG Advertising. “Bucharest
Subway Station Turned into Digital Library”, MDG
Advertising and Marketing Blog (10 February 2013).
http://www.mdgadvertising.com/blog/bucharest-subway-station-turned-into-digital-library/
[4] Johnson L, Adams Becker S, Estrada V, and
Freeman A, NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Library Edition.
(The New Media Consortium, 2014)
[5] Whitelaw M, "Collection Space" (paper presented at
Information Online Conference 2015, Sydney, 5
February 2015, with links to
experiments mentioned above https://t.co/YIoGrGvXMK);
Madrigal AC, “How Netflix Reverse Engineered
Hollywood”, The Atlantic 2 January 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/
[6] University of New South Wales National Institute
for Experimental Arts. Professor Sarah Kenderdine:
Biography http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au/people/professor-sarah-kenderdine;
University of New South Wales National Instittute of
Experimental Arts. Laboratory for Innovation in
Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (iGlam) http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au/research/organisations/laboratory-innovation-galleries-libraries-archives-and-museums-iglam;
and Meyer R, “The Museum of the Future Is Here”, The
Atlantic (20 January 2015),
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/how-to-build-the-museum-of-the-future/384646/
[7] Mansfield T, Winter C, Griffith C, Dockerty A,
Brown T. Innovation Study: Challenges and
Opportunities for Australia’s Galleries, Libraries,
Archives and Museums, (Centre for Broadband
Innovation, CSIRO and Smart Services Co-operative
Research Centre, August 2014)
[8] State Library of Queensland, The New Horizon
:Vision 2017 (2014)
http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/about-us/corporate/publications/planning/vision-2017
[9] Wade M, “Australia's Collective Know-how at an
All-time High”, Sydney Morning Herald (7 March 2015)
http://www.smh.com.au/national/-13x2wr.html
[10] Chakravorti B, Tunnard C, Chaturvedi RS, “Where
the Digital Economy is Moving the Fastest”, Harvard
Business Review (19 February 2015) https://hbr.org/2015/02/where-the-digital-economy-is-moving-the-fastest
[11] Lynch C, "An Evolving Environment: Privacy,
Security, Migration and Stewardship" (Paper
presented at Coalition of Networked Information
Membership Meeting, Washington DC, 8-9 December
2014
http://vimeo.com/114426257.
[12] Lynch C, "Sharing and Preserving Scholarship:
Challenges of Coherence and Scale". (Paper presented
at the Corporation for
Education Network Initiatives in California
Conference, 10 March 2014),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJBcX9--is
[13] Dempsey L, The Network Shapes the Library:
Loran Dempsey on Libraries, Services and Networks, (American Library Association, 2014).
[14] Dempsey L, Maplas C, Lavoie B, "Collection
Directions: Some Reflections on the Future of
Library Collections and Collecting" (2014) 14(3)
portal: Libraries and the Academy 393
http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2014/oclcresearch-collection-directions-preprint-2014.pdf
[15] Breeding M, "Library Technology Forecast for
2015 and Beyond" (2014) 34 Computers in Libraries
10 at 22ff. (http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/dec14/Breeding--Library-Technology-Forecast-for-2015-and-Beyond.shtml).
[16] Cole T, Sarol J, Fons T, and Arlitsch K, "Exposing Library Collections on the Web: Challenges
and Lessons Learned", (Paper presented at Coalition
for Networked Information Membership Meeting Fall,
Washington DC, 8-9 December
2014),
http://youtu.be/WEl0CJPI4DI
[17] Krafft D and Cramer T, "The Linked Data For
Libraries (LD4L) Project: A Progress Report", (Paper
presented at Coalition of Networked Information
Membership Meeting 8-9
December 2014)
http://youtu.be/QYd_OlenZ5U
[18] McDonough J, "Falling Though the Cracks: Digital
Preservation and Institutional Failures", (Paper
presented at Coalition of Networked Information
Membership Meeting 8-9 December 2014)
https://youtu.be/gZy2eC5y3MY
[19] National Information Standards Organisation. Bibliographic Roadmap Development Project,
www.niso.org/topics/tl/BibliographicRoadmap/
[20] Swan E, “Information Online 1985 +: a salute”
(2012) 33 Incite 3
[21] Australian Library and Information Association,
Fair Initiative
http://fair.alia.org.au
[22] Ayres ML, Faster Access to Archival Collection
in NSLA Libraries: Project Report, (National and State Libraries
Australia, 2010)
http://www.nsla.org.au/sites/www.nsla.org.au/files/publications/NSLA.Discussion-Paper-Faster.access.to_.archival.collections_201010.pdf
[23] Online Computer Library Center, “Libraries and the Internet of Things”, Nextspace
(15 February 2015)
http://www.oclc.org/publications/nextspace/articles/issue24/librariesandtheinternetofthings.en.html
[24] Wainright E, “Glory Days? Reflections on the
1988 Australian Libraries Summit and its
Aftermaths”, 2004 53 Australian Library Journal
1.
[25] Lynch C. "Sharing and Preserving Scholarship:
Challenges of Coherence and Scale". (Paper presented
at Corporation for
Education Network Initiatives in California
Conference, March 2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJBcX9--is
[26] Chomsky N, The Emerging World Order: Its Roots,
Our Legacy, (3 February 2015)
http://youtu.be/6ccNt4Dzyfg
[27] Balkam S, “What Will Happen When the Internet of
Things Becomes Artificially Intelligent?” The
Guardian (21 February 2015) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/internet-of-things-artificially-intelligent-stephen-hawking-spike-jonze
Non-commercial viewing,
copying, printing and/or distribution or reproduction of
this article or any copy or material portion of the
article is permitted on condition that any copy of
material portion thereof must contain copyright notice
referring "Copyright ©2013 Lawbook Co t/a Thomson Legal
& Regulatory Limited." Any commercial use of the article
or any copy or material portion of the article is
strictly prohibited. For commercial use, permission can
be obtained from Lawbook Co, Thomson Legal & Regulatory
Limited, PO Box 3502, Rozelle NSW 2039,
www.thomson.com.au
