Digital Incunabula

What is the future of the library? Does the library have a future? In the face of a rapidly changing technology landscape, the library finds itself increasingly having to justify its own existence. The good (or bad) news is that it is not alone in this. The educational landscape in general finds that the challenges and opportunities of new technologies, new business models, and new demographics are forcing a re-thinking of many of its core institutions and practices. This talk will place the question of the future of the library in this broader context, arguing that the entire system of teaching, learning, research, and scholarly communication must be understood as a complex, interdependent system, and that we can expect the changes in one area to impact all other areas.

What is the future of information? How will information be published? How will people create new information? How will they share it? How will others find it? Once they find it, how will they use that information in order to create new information?

Faculty: What (if anything!) do faculty need from librarians and technologists to do their work? As the world of scholarly communication evolves, how will faculty keep up with these changes?

Students: What (if anything!) do students need from librarians and technologists to do their work? Where does responsibility for educational outcomes for information literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy reside?

The Collection: What does it mean to do collection development in 2010? What will it mean in 2020?

Technology: What does it mean to provide infrastructure in 2010? What will it mean in 2020?

What is the future of the library? Does the library have a future? In the face of a rapidly changing technology landscape, the library finds itself increasingly having to justify its own existence. The good (or bad) news is that it is not alone in this. The educational landscape in general finds that the challenges and opportunities of new technologies, new business models, and new demographics are forcing a re-thinking of many of its core institutions and practices. This talk will place the question of the future of the library in this broader context, arguing that the entire system of teaching, learning, research, and scholarly communication must be understood as a complex, interdependent system, and that we can expect the changes in one area to impact all other areas.

What is the future of information? How will information be published? How will people create new information? How will they share it? How will others find it? Once they find it, how will they use that information in order to create new information?

Faculty: What (if anything!) do faculty need from librarians and technologists to do their work? As the world of scholarly communication evolves, how will faculty keep up with these changes?

Students: What (if anything!) do students need from librarians and technologists to do their work? Where does responsibility for educational outcomes for information literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy reside?

The Collection: What does it mean to do collection development in 2010? What will it mean in 2020?

Technology: What does it mean to provide infrastructure in 2010? What will it mean in 2020?

Another interesting report from the Chronicle on efforts to bring on-demand-printing to college libraries can be found at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i15/15a00103.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en . What’s most interesting to me is that the form factor is shrinking, and the manufacturer is starting to use commodity (or at least more standard) parts, suggesting that the price will begin to drop, and the reliability increase.

(This post might seem counter to the theme of this blog — meditations on the shift from atoms to bits — but in fact my latest interests are in the interesting interplay of the two.)

Warning: This post has little if anything to do with the main point of this blog, which is to capture thoughts, examples, and counter-examples of the strange transition to a post-print world. You may want to stop reading now. You were warned.

The last post was March 20th. That’s six months ago. Since then I quit my job, sold my house, moved me and my family 700 miles west to Ohio, started a new job, bought a new house. So I guess that would excuse my silence, although the reaiity of this blog is that it isn’t like it’s ever been the first thing I attend to when I wake up each morning.

Where do I spend my creative energy? Let’s make a list.
Academic Commons : that little beast still keep pulling at me. I can’t quite seem to find a way to convince myself to stop scratching that itch.
AlphaBeta : a community blog that seems to mostly be a community of one. Was it the dearth of contributors that moved me to move?
LBIS blog: a newly launched effort to allow my new colleagues to share with each other the interesting stuff that passes through their inboxes

What no longer commands my attention?
LoLa: it was a fine idea that nobody ever really took to. The plug isn’t pulled, but it probably should be soon.
Flickr image galleries: who has time to create all that metadata, anyway?

What’s on the fence?
Ethnography: it still feels like a good idea; I just need to commit to reading and doing.
Commenting in the blogosphere: once upon a time I was a good citizen, dutifully making notes on others’ posts.
Reading RSS: used to be a daily ritual; need to trim my list to make it possible to keep up

What never even made the list?
Jitter: if I can’t find time to read blogs, who has time to jitter?
2nd Life: my only hope there is to either give up sleep or leave my family in another zip code. i keep hoping for someone to write up a sensible critique.

If this is my information ecology right now, I am still convinced that there is a place in my life for keeping this particular niche going. In my new role of having to think about new forms of knowledge creation and dissemination, this blog makes even more sense than in my old role, where it was never clear to anyone but myself why I was asking the questions that I was asking about these emerging forms, conventions, and business models.

This then serves as a way of semi-publicly committing to poking away in this space at the various contours of the problems that I originally sought to catalog, describe, and by doing so, understand when I started this strange project.

What are some of the things that I might challenge myself to make time to reflect upon in my upcoming posts?

Here’s a list:

1. reflections on the new spate of ebook readers
2. further reflection/ riffing on the interesting stuff that the institute for the future of the book keeps churning out
3. reactions to the wonder that is OhioLINK and the strange constraints on its possibilities that our balkanized state-funding of education produces
4. why can’t campus portals be as compelling as webkinz?
5. more on just how completely broken our current copyright system is

In my renewed commitment to the David Allen/43 Folders religion of being able to focus intensely on exactly the right thing at the right moment, is it possible to imagine some set of moments on a regular basis where I am confronted with something that makes me ponder the long strange transition to a post-print world, and to actually be able to write something here , or note to myself enough that when the time is right, I write it down?

The challenge is to have the right number of places to record such thoughts, and to be able to easily decide what is the right place to write down whatever it is that is compelling me to want to write. Is this for the LBIS blog? Academic Commons? AlphaBeta? Some other thing space? Only time will tell. But at least here I am in Ohio, alive and well and not yet completely braindead from my promotion. Or so I think….

I’m trying to hunt down a higher-rez version of this photo. It’s a great photo that Larry Cuban used in his “Teachers and Machines” last century. It is of a geography class from 1927 in Los Angeles, where some smarty pants got the idea that with the advent of the new technology of the airplane, what could be better than to teach geography in an airplane? The problem: look at the picture. There is the traditional desk structure, the teacher in the front of the room. The Globe. Eyes on me, folks. I worry about the girl in the rear of the classroom. Surely she is risking punishment by not paying attention and looking out the window.

What are we doing that eighty years from now will be subject to similar cheap ridicule?

An alphabetical list of all of the briefings can be found at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006b.fall/project.html . This is an excellent list of important projects, each with a concise description and a link or two to relevant websites. CNI suffers from having too many good sessions that conflict with one another, so it is worth reading through the list to see what you can find. NITLE will also be posting summaries of each session, hopefull in someplace obvious. Note to others: it would be great if CNI were willing to do what other conferences are beginning to do and choose a TAG for the conference so that blogs, wikis, delicious links, flickr photos, etc. could all be shared by way of commons tags. The recent NMC regional conference did this (see http://www.nmc.net/events/2006fallregional/tag.php ) to good effect. It is also worth reviewing the recently published CNI program at http://www.cni.org/program/ which also provides a roadmap and framework for current issues in networked information management.

One: Building a Secure Media Network to Share Moving Images in Dance
http://danceheritage.org/

The Dance Heritage Coalition is working with Media Matters LLC ( http://www.media-matters.net/ ) to build a consortially shared collection that has ahighly-restrictive DRM implementation. The goal of the project is to make available to scholars of dance video of dance performances. It is unfortunate that the DRM scheme they are using is so deeply entwined with the network, as it makes it nearly impossible for people who want to broadly share their materials via this network. Nonetheless, it is a project that has good intentions, and is constrained largely by the demands of the people whose work they want to distirbute.

Two: Using Visual Resources
http://academiccommons.org/imageproject/
David Green, Rob Lancefield, and Eric Jansson presented the results of a large survey that Green did of how faculty at over 30 liberal arts colleges use digital images in their teaching.

Mellon Open Source Winners
The Mellon Foundation announced the winners of their first round of winners of their Technology Collaboration awards. Details about the awards are at http://rit.mellon.org/awards/ .

Three: Michigan State Project Builder
http://matrix.msu.edu/research/project_builder.php
http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006b.fall/abstracts/PB-project-kornbluh.html
This is another interesting authoring environment aimed at the non-technical. It is a t tool for building on-line multimedia projects with simple authoring environment. Supports multiple metadata standards. Works with ’skins’ that use CSS. Media Matrix tool that segments audio, video, and images integrated into this tool, and a design tool called PB tools for styles. New feature allows one to build complex objects out of individual objects in the system. Federated search across projects. LAMP implementation. Can get early copy. Heading for open source. Students use system to write multimedia papers. Example at http://explorepahistory.com .

How does this compare with Sophie? with Pachyderm?

Four: NEH Digital Humanities Intiative
http://www.neh.gov/grants/digitalhumanities.html

Officials from the NEH outlined five new grant programs designed to promote digital humanities projects.

Digital Humanities Start-up Grants
30K
Planning Grants. Get project off the ground. Try out new things. Cross-divisional.
Non-humanities project directors who are doing multi-disciplinary work that crosses into the humanities.
Can be use to build technology tools for use in the humanities.
Deadlines: November and April.
email: dhi@neh.gov Drafts are welcome.

Advancing Knowledge (w/ IMLS)
fostering large-scale digital humanities collaborations among libraries, museums, archives, university presses, and universities. Guidelines to be published by Dec. 7.
350K or more.

Digital Humanities Fellowship
Deadline: May 1, 2007
6-12 months
$4,200/month for up to a year, with other allowances

Digital Humanities Challenge Grants
Fund infrastructure to conduct programs, and raise funds from non-governmental sources. Capital expenditures. Endowments for capital expenses. Staff salaries, training, programmatic expenses. Three to one requirement. Allows in-kind gifts. Interested in applications from Centers. (should the mdl be a center?) Average 400-450 K. Max is 1 million.

Digital Humanities Workshops
Aimed at k-12 faculty designed and delivered by higher ed faculty. Introduce k-12 to use of new technology in the humanities.
http://edsitement.neh.gov , a reviewed guide to the best of the humanities on the web. 4 days of instruction to a minimum of 20 instructors. Can offer off-site instruction via distance learning. Up to 30K for a single institutions. Up to 100K for multiple institutions. Need to produce evidence that participants have actually learned something.

A major challenge in convincing faculty to spend their time doing digital humanities work is, of course, that the standards for evaluating this sort of work are not yet established, which means that it is a risky venture for the untenured. NEH is hoping that these programs will at some level help validate this type of work, although they are aware that it is a complex and slow-moving ecology that needs to change, and that this is only one part of the change that needs to happen.

Five: Zotero
http://www.zotero.org
includes 3 minute video introduction on home page.

Browser-based citation management that is RDF aware. Able to take advantage of semantic web embedded metadata. Import/export from endnote. Uses iTunes interface conventions (playlists, favorites, etc.) Translators for various information sources stored on server, which the client anonymously checks in to update on a regular basis.

Lots of ideas for the future:

• sync with other web services (delicious, citeulike, connotea, library thing).
• data mining, text mining, visualization tools (research map, timeline)
• Local shared libraries via zeroconf> ability to browse other people’s libraries.
  • Integration with writing tools: word, openoffice, googledocs, wordpress, mediawiki.
  • Drag and drop citations into written works.
  • Export/print bibliographies according to various styles. User community to complete creating more styles.
  • Moving data into other tools: VUE (tufts), literary analysis tool (nitle)
  • Server-based plan: backup, remote access, social tagging, permissions, groups, recommendation systems. public API: mashups, rss, rdf, etc. Syndicating research. Will provide local servers for campus installation for large files.

  As local producers of information, we need to begin to figure out how to embed RDF/metadata into our resources so that people can get this info automatically from services like these? This would seem to be an example of what some people are calling the semantic web, or web 3.0. (And we’re barely getting started on web 2.0!)

I work at a smallish college. We have roughly 300 faculty. We have roughly 2,700 undergraduates, and 300 graduate students. We spend roughly $2,000,000 every year to provide these 3,300 people with access to scholarly journals. A friend of mine has been asked to be a guest editor at a journal that has an interesting business model. They publish using the old-fashioned model where people have to pay to access their materials, but they also offer an open-access model. In the open access model, if the author gives the journal $2,000, they will publish the article and provide open access to anyone who wants to read it.

Let’s imagine that this arbitrary figure of $2,000 per article actually covers the editorial and curatorial costs of the publisher.

If ALL publishers offered this option, and if EVERYONE went for it, consider how the math at my workplace would change. If our 300 faculty each published one article per year, and it cost $2,000 to publish each article, then my college would have to come up with $600,000 per year to cover its faculty publication costs. If the entire universe of scholarly materials were published in this manner, and if every institution of higher education paid to allow its faculty’s scholarship to be published as open access, then we would actually SAVE money, since we would no longer need to pay $2 million/year to license access.

What’s wrong with this argument?

We make relatively nifty learning objects that we are happy to share with the rest of the planet. How would the rest of the planet ever find out that our stuff exists? Here’s a list of specific things we can do to improve our google ranks, and to otherwise promote the creation of links to our stuff.

Recipe

1. Prepare metadata for your site (title, author, date of publication, topics, one paragraph description, URL, technical requirements, etc. )
2. Prepare a boilerplate email that you can use to send to people you wish to
3. Create an entry in various learning object referatories
1. merlot
2. connexions
3. lola
4. …
4. Find and edit relevant entries in wikipedia
5. Ask your library to create an entry in its on-line catalog (and see if that feeds worldcat)
6. If tied to a book, alert the book publisher of the URL, and add a note to the entry in Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
7. Google for subject guides that link to your topic, and send email (see above) to the site owner suggesting that they link to your site.
8. Create links via social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, furl, etc.)
9. Add an image related to your topic to flickr and then create links to your site from flickr.
10. Create a myspace account and add links to your site from myspace.
11. Consider creating a blog and/or a Amazon connect site to accompany your site (if tied to a book)

The folks at NPR are now  hawking a wi fi radio that let’s you dial up internet radio from a special device. No computer needed.  Is this a step forward? or sideways? What other strange new devices are in the pipeline that will try to get us away from our computers? Maybe it’s that dryer that talks to my cell phone?  What a weird time to be alive.

In the spirit of using this space to log all of the interesting incunabular questions that I stumble across in my daily life, I want to call my readers’ attention (and that would be how many people? 3 that I know of, excluding of course blood relatives) to a great story on NPR last night about the Museum of Online Museums. My favorite part of course was the professor who taught people how to run museums mocking the online museums run by non-professionals, comparing their work to the work of the Wikipedia. It is always the most scared who come up with the best quotes!