I'll be posting more of my thoughts from Information Online 2009 over the next week, but some people have already done such a good job summarising and commenting on some of the keynotes that I encourage you to read their posts as well.
Anticipating the Future of Libraries (and many other things!): Andy Hines, futurist, adjunct professor of Future Studies at University of Houston Andy gave a fantastic presentation on the following trends/challenges: 1. Values 2. Demography 3. Lifestyle 4. Technology 5. Work 6. Education Strawberries of Integrity posted an excellent summary here, please read it!
Libraries as Happiness Engines - Liz Lawley, director of the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Liz had some very interesting thoughts on how taking a gaming/fun approach to libraries, work and more can increase happiness AND productivity (shock!). She identified the elements of happiness as:
satisfying work to do
the experience of being good at something
time spent with people we like
the chance to be part of something bigger than yourself
And points out that many of these are more accessible in the online gaming world than real life - no wonder people like games! More on how this applies to libraries etc here.
Liz also pointed out Ravelry as an example of an object-oriented network - where the network is not based just around people but a particular object (in this case yarn and knitting patterns etc). She suggests that the next step for libraries is to turn catalogues into this kind of social network. I think we (publishers) should turn our online research collections into them too! More on that from my previous post.
Anna Pearson has also been writing up some of her thoughts on Information Online...have a look at those too!
Dr Sherman Young was an excellent presenter, and the concepts and issues he discussed stayed with me right through the conference. The title of his book alone is enough to command attention - "The book is dead: Long live the book".
Dr Young's key point is that we need to disassociate the concept of the book - something that requires a significant investment of time and thought by the author, editor/publisher and reader - from the print, paper and glue that is its origin. The rest of this post is based on the notes I took throughout his presentation.
Dr Sherman Young by neerav bhatt
A History of the World and the Internet in 4 1/2 slides each. Dr Young started by giving an overview of the development of media and communication, from oral culture to the internet. He notes that upheaval that each development - written word, the printing press, the radio - caused, and the naysayers (starting with Plato!). He goes on to outline the development of the internet and the changes it is bringing to our research, reading and literacy culture. Then he played Apple's "Knowledge Navigator" vision from 1987 - which is the next step from Web 2.0 into the semantic web.
Where do books fit in a post Web 2.o world? Now on to the meat of Dr Young's talk: What of books in this new world? In the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock: "The Trouble with Harry" ....Harry's dead. So are books. Books don't seem to have a place. In the world of the Knowledge Navigator, books are props that line the dusty shelves of the academic's study.
In our world:
Content in books is hidden from the basic google search.
Iphone: millions of videos and music on your phone - but not many books!!! (Unless you like Harlequin Romance, which IS available on Iphone. Yeesh!)
Dr Young contends that book culture and print culture getting confused. And as Jeff Jarvis said, "Print is where books go to die".
A book's core attributes. But if it is not "a printed object", what is a book? Dr Young explains the core attributes of a "book":
Time. Books take time to write and time to read. It is a "premium of time" that must be committed by authors, publishers and readers
Deeper content - the result of all that time.
Not required to react to current events - more reflective, thorough approach.
And then the reader must create the world themselves by engaging with the book. Unlike a movie where everything is created and visualised for you, there is a space that must be negotiated by the reader to be meaningful.
Essentially, it's like cooking and eating a Casserole compared to a Big Mac.
But the book is not dead yet - it's just resting.
The future: Gam3r Th3ory - each chapter discussed and reviewed online before publishing Wikibooks at Yale - read AND contribute to free scholarly works from Yale. Yale Books unbound - read and add comments to published works which are now freely available online. This is based on "CommentPress" software that (I think) was developed by the Institute of the Future of the Book.
So how can we encourage "real books" - long form text?
ebooks. 68000 at MQ in 2007. Interstingly though, several of the papers from the conference focused on the difficulty in building awareness of e-books among academics and students. So this particular solution has a way to go.
Google books. Puts books back in the online conversation with higher, more effective result rankings.
Dr Youn'g final point was that we are experience a time of creative destruction. We need to navigate this time and ensure that books survive with the videos and blogs etc. But librarians need to support authors and publishers trying to work out new publishing, copyright and distribution models.
Books should be part of the online world, not separate. This is our challenge: to make sure that we continue to value books.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" - ALan Kay
My thoughts. This is an amazing vision which publishers really need to explore. In fact, we are already poking around the edges...one of the potential modifications of the new CCH Intelliconnect platform (coming this year) will be to allow comments and annotations to our online books and commentary. But thoroughly integrating our publications into the stream of the internet will be a much bigger challenge.
I finally managed to connect at the CCH stand at the conference. Huzzah! I'm planning to skip a couple of sessions so maybe I'll have time to add all the posts I was too tired to yesterday.
Lots of people have been coming past and picking up copies of our "Professionals and Web 2.0" whitepaper. I spent so much time working on it with the team, it's great to see it getting some interest. I'll be presenting on it and CCH's new research platform at 5.10 today in Theaterette 3. Please come - everybody else will be getting ready for the dinner! :(
This week I'm attending the Information Online conference hosted by the Australian Library and Information Association. It's going to be a pretty jam packed few days - here's the plan for tomorrow.
I think Enhancing e-resourcefulness will be very interesting - it's about how UWS librarians worked with academics and vendors to increase the profile of online resources. I've been on both sides of the librarian and vendor fence so it will be interesting to see how they worked together to improve awareness and use of resources.
I'm also intrigued by "One Search Many Options", on the State Library of QLD enriching content with input from patrons using social media and the guidelines they put in place. I believe this is the future for our content as well, so I'll be very interested in what they've done.
I wonder if universities and academics are experiencing the same struggle I am. Open access and distribution of information is a basic principle of education - but publishing is a necessary source of revenue for academics and universities. And what are the implications of replacing peer-reviewed articles with blogging and open access articles?
This topic is way, way bigger than the stray thoughts I had embarking on this post. But I will leave you with a model that just might become the middle ground - the publisher-provided academic network. Thomson Reuters is already experimenting with this in their new product Law School Exchange. Here's what Westblog had to say about it:
"For law faculty around the country, you might think of Law School Exchange as a combination of Facebook, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and Amazon.com. There’s really nothing like it generally or specifically out there in any market,” says Nickles [Wake Forest School of Law], who helped develop the ideas within Law School Exchange. “It creates an entirely new relationship between faculty, authors and publishers.”
Of course, to participate you must be subscribed to Westlaw. Which makes me wonder - if this is a platform for academics to publish and share information, is it a service for them - or are they providing the content for a new "publication" and should be rewarded accordingly? I would hope the latter (after all, Thomson will get the side-benefits of all members subscribing to Westlaw). In any case, it would be very interesting to see how the revenue model works - and whether academics will embrace this new opportunity to collaborate and distribute their work.
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