Scholarship and Libraries in Transiton : A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization (Shorthand Notes)

Most of this has already been covered here (first post, reverse chronological), here, and here.

Offical Symposium Weblog – the webcast should be available soon…I’ll post here when it is…

With the copious amounts of documentation available there, why should I even bother? Cause I’m pretty sure I have to write up a review of it anyways for the job – and this’ll probably bring my brain back around to it. These are notes I scratched down — and are not nearly as detailed as the above. A little personal flair, if you will.

To start with — a summary: Disruptive Technology > Change > Copyright. Those are probably the three biggest themes…with Collaboration just behind…and Library as Space…

There was also ample discussion concerning Wikipedia. It seemed nearly all speakers made a reference to it at some point.

I attended in person on Friday – but watched the webcast in my pj’s on Saturday — and the notes very much reflect that…

Panels: Library | Keynote | Research | Publishing | Adam Smith / Google | Economics

People: Barbara Allen | Suzanne BeDell | Paul Courant | Daniel Greenstein | Jean-Claude Guédon | Michael Keller | Tim O’Reilly | Karl Pohrt | Adam Smith | Ed Tenner | Hal Varian | Alicia Wise | Karin Wittenborg | Ann Wolpert |

Panel Session: Libraries

Josie Parker (moderator) Director, AADL -

• “first library director to blog.“
• Price of not changing: irrelevancy
• Proof of return on public investment

Audience QA: Audience member provides one of the best points of the conference — a matter of linguistics — we should speak about materials RISING into the public domain — not as FALLING.

Barbara Allen – Director, Committee on Institutional Cooperation

• Research Library Trends
• Changes in User Behavior
• Building Collections
• Actions

2003-2004 ARL Report
• Circulation / Reference Below 1991 levels – fewer people coming into the library
• Interlibrary loans are up 148% [wow!]
• Users demonstrating clear preference for digital format, even if available in print – for example – JSTOR – print items were used 692 times, in the same period – the digital format was accessed 12,000 times.
• Expenditures for collections up 4x while staffing per student is down, and 17% fewer products available.
• 1994 – 63 libraries – $11million dollars in electronic resources
• 2004 – 100 libraries – $270 million dollars in electronic resources — 14 libraries, 50% entire budget e-resources – mostly commercial publishers – journal literature
• OCLC database — 32 million records – NEARLY 40% UNIQUE PRINT BOOKS – 50% FROM BEFORE 1977
• Opportunity for collaboration in digitization.

Converging Trends
1. University Libaries must rethink their space — democratic OPEN space — bringing people together
2. Organizing principle: coherent ACCESS — partner with others – commercial and public collaboration to digitize unique records across organizational boundaries
3. Develop intelligence about our collections

A means to acheiving public happiness. We have the keys — without corrections – we are half monks — half beasts.

Michael Keller — University Librarian, Stanford University
Litigations…

1. Change terms of reference…
• The notion that the library is a building…
• The library of the mind
• The effect of the library on the scholar.
• The library is also an ethereal ideal
• Electronic card catalog — 50% increase in use
• Indexing by google increased hits on Highwire – from 10 – 15 million to a 1 – 1.5 billion
• Increasing ROI
2. Beyond Intellectual Access
• Sales of current books increase when you can search the books
3. Beyond Indexing
• Increase stock of knowledge – find new connections
• Not just about snippets, INTELLECTUAL ACCESS
4. INNOVATION
Taxonomical index:
• Informatics
• ***citation linking from footnotes in books***
• — Navigating information topographys —
• information in an explicit context
• A “who’s reading?” service — (AADL already has something going on with their HOT items).
• highlight names — direct link to biographies
5. Copyright and Fair Use
• Orphan works decision – amendment – 1923 – 1964 books not registered
• Section 108 – Copyright law — for archival reasons – to allow for reading online
• FAIR USE
• Intellectual Freedom
• Access to Information
• Alexandria library — Discussion of 500,000 books in the Arabic language waiting to be digitized revealing a more liberal history of the Middle East — Jenica pulled a nice quote so I’ll grab it as well — “If the people in these embattled lands can see the importance of preserving the universe of information in their culture, surely we can do the same.”

Karin Wittenborg – University Librarian, University of West Virginia

Google Project
• One of the most important projects — mass digitization will CHANGE everything
• Changing the status quo is a good thing
• Major redeployment of resources

Space
• Physical library – much depends on what we as librarians do in our reinventing
• “Libraries are sinkholes for space

Things we might do differently
• What are we going to do with our own space? Utilizing
• Libary as an Intellectual crossroads
• To discuss ideas
• Programming

Role of libarians

Intellectual Freedom

Access

rigorous stewards

Q&A

More group study spaces…fewer paraprofessional staff…more professional staff…digitization resulting in index to contents…democratization of information…digital repositories…

Most works go out of print w/in 5 years of publishing…Article I of the Constitution — Section 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Disaster Planning Question
• What needs to be redundant?
• Resource disruptions – great opportunity for collaboration
• Comment from Smithsonian Institute: Katrina is an argument for digitization…
• If information is in digital format – I can get it – by driving to the nearest network — or just getting to the network
• If information is in print — imagine trying to xerox a 342 page document

• ♥Putting a copy of the Fair Use statute next to every copy machine♥

Keynote

Tim O’Reilly

What Job Does a Book Do?
• If a book is immersion – World of Warcraft is a book

Hacks series
• Teach and appeal to entertainment
• Make Magazine

Britannica vs Wikipedia
• Showed several graphs of wikipedia trouncing britannica

• A device that has a lot of DRM will not take the world by storm
• 1988 – The Davenport Group
• — SOM links – self organizing maps — looks for material that is related
• Safari U

What Job does a Library do?
• The preservation of information
• Archive.org vs Library of Congress — shows graph of archive.org dwarfing LOC in hits…

Why the Google Project matters
• Free is replaced by commercial ecology only when you let it go
• Last.fm vs. Pandora — Both suggest new music — but last.fm has the plugin Audioscrobbler which listens to what you actually play when you’re not listening to the service to better gauge your listening habits.
The Orphaned Works problem
• Books:
  • 4% in print – [amazon search inside this book]
  • -75% or more – The Twilight Zone © Not for sale, rights reverted to author, may be in the public domain
  • -20% public domain – Open Content Alliance
  • 32 million unique titles in all U.S. libraries
• Fewer than 4% of books are commercially exploited
• ***DRM is a lot more like a cat than a dog — When you take a cat to the vet – you hold it loosely – whereas you take a dog to the vet — you hold him tight***
• The near term opportunity

The Long Tail
Does Online Search Drive Discovery?
• Compare sales of physical books versus e-books
• Print Books show 6% spike in sales with online library searches
• Safari tech books show 23% spike in sales
• Google Print v. Bookscan

Building a Digital Economy
• Incentives for turning books free
• Depending on the job a book does – Reference may eventually be entirely online

How will publishing itself change? Visions of the future
• Web 2.0 – The Internet as a platform – Information Businesses
• Software as a service, harnessing collective intelligence
• Once you’re on the network, how do you gain value from your users? COLLABORATION
• Amazon — 10,000,000 user reviews – on every page – amazon asks the user to add value
The Perpetual Beta – Ongoing Services
• Rough Cuts — giving access while the book is being written, watch it grow and comment while it is being published
• Asks how many people use linux? A few raise their hands. How many people use Google? Everybody raises their hands.Google is a linux application.
• Data is the next Intel Inside – applications are increasingly data driven
• Concern of the publisher — all of the data lying with one producer
• An internet of interoperability
• Platform beats an application every time
• Safari API – A Web Services Based Help System
• Bookster?

Panel Session: Research

Ed Tenner — Professor & Author, Princeton University

Unintended Consequences: The future of search; the future of libraries
• Literacy level controversy – several stories on the low levels of literacy amongst the incoming college freshmen
• Google searching and the “good enough” syndrome of relying on the first page of hits
• Comparison with Clusty
• World History: Wikipedia v Britannica (there is no entry
• Everything Bad is Good for You – but does this mean that everything good is bad for you?

Academics and Open Source
• Search Engine Optimization? – In the 21st Century – “Good Enough” isn’t

[It should be noted that Superpatron pressed Mr. Tenner on his remarks on Wikipedia's version of World History -- which Mr. Tenner found to be inadequate -- asking if Mr. Tenner then contributed to the page. Mr. Tenner said he hadn't - but that maybe now he would, and write a paper on it. Looks like he could be pursuing that avenue].

Jean-Claude Guédon – Professor, University of Montreal

Mass Printing v. Mass Digitization

shifts in nature/essence

documents are changing nature with media

Encycolopedia — A snapshot of the world at the moment

Wikipedia — a process

♥ Google as narcissism: Better than a mirror ♥

Digitization of our culture — Possibilities
• Dissertations and theses – citation metrics – reorganizing the map of knowledge…
• Concordances — finding the least used 100 words
• H.G. Wells – The World Brain
• Wittgenstein - language games — communities — the semantic web

Ann J Wolpert – Director of the Libraries, M.I.T.
Research / Teaching / Learning

Google Scholar — expectations for user interfaces are being driven by amazon

[There were lots of audio problems here -- and I found this to be the slowest part of the entire symposium - so not much noted...check the others]

BREAK

Publishing Panel

Suzanne BeDell – Vice President, ProQuest Information and Learning

mass quantities of information are meaningless when varied

evidence matters – Proquest 14,000,000 documents digitized

collaboration

Alicia Wise – Chief Executive, Publishers Licensing Society

Publishers and Google

The vision – to make the world’s information available to all — noble

Google print for libraries – placing the information into a single players hands

perceived cavalier attitude — misunderstanding of copyright

copyright laws are from the 17th century — they need to evolve

Vision
• Growth in digital markets
• value added services

Daniel Greenstein University Librarian and Executive Director, California Digital Library

Open Content Alliance
• Placing the information into a single player’s hands

The Publisher’s panel left me wondering — if you’re so concerned with one player having all the information – and you keep talking about collaboration and the expansion of the market – Why aren’t you contributing as well, and if you are – why aren’t you doing it better?

Adam Smith – Google – Funny how difficult it is to find a bio page for him…

Google Books
• Full Book View – Public Domain – 20%
• Sample Pages View – 5%
• Snippet View – 75%

Graph that showed that when it comes to Google Books — google is doing the digitization, hosting, indexing and authentication of the materials. In google scholar — google is only indexing.

Discovery
• Full-text search
• Serendipitous Discovery
• Comprehensiveness requires collaboration
• 67% of monographs known by OCLC not held by current partners
• 60% titles are unique
• Discovery metadata and Google — URL LCCN
• Examples of way people are using googlebooks to make lists

Here’s where I asked my question – and somewhat bungled it. Something to the effect of — You showed us the greasemonkey script that allows one to look up materials in the local library, and your books in the libary project have “find in a library” links in them — but ALL of your books – or at least most of them — have ISBN’s — and therefore should be able to have a “find in a library” link. I’m just wondering -why the discrepancy — and why are you letting your users write your programs for you?”

I SHOULD HAVE SAID: Why do your users HAVE to write your programs for you?

What I remember him saying: We love that our users write these programs…It is part of our agreement [the find in a libary links]…

Why I don’t remember anything else:
Everything went black except for the microphone — which pulsated in front of me…Stagefright? Adrenaline? I felt like I was in fight or flight mode…

Anyways — Saturday –
I woke up and logged on in my pjs and only took a few notes:

Panel Session: Economics

Paul Courant – Professor, University of Michigan

The services become more important in libraries

Who’s the trusted agent: librarians.

How are we going to organize business to support them

You can’t have a market that works well if you don’t have the rights well established [copyright]

Hal Varian Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Kelly v Arriba Soft

Disruptive technology — Whose behaviour is going to change?

Like I said — not many notes on Saturday…
I did, however, take Karl Pohrt up on his recommendation and checked out Accelerando from my library…

Panels: Library | Keynote | Research | Publishing | Adam Smith / Google | Economics

People: Barbara Allen | Suzanne BeDell | Paul Courant | Daniel Greenstein | Jean-Claude Guédon | Michael Keller | Tim O’Reilly | Karl Pohrt | Adam Smith | Ed Tenner | Hal Varian | Alicia Wise | Karin Wittenborg | Ann Wolpert |