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March 16, 2005
Keynote: All kinds of love for the 20th anniversary
Computers in Libraries started out as "Small Computers in Libraries" (as opposed to, you know, large mainframe computers) 20 years ago. There are people in attendance today who were here at the very first meeting of the conference. This year, 2,100 pre-registered this year. Too cool.
Last year, Tom Hogan, our first speaker, threatened to boycott potatoes if no one from Idaho came this year because it was one of the states with no representation last year. Luckily, attendance is up from Idaho, so this Irish man will be able to continue his love of the ultimate starch.
This this the kind of fun this conference is. :)
After Jane Dysart offered her formal welcome and a few official notes, Clifford Lynch stepped up for the keynote. I've seen him speak several times in the past year, and I never get tired of hearing him. He's complex, brilliant, and thought-provoking.
In discussing the theme of the keynote, CIL & the Digital Decades, he notes how he finds it hard to keep perspective when so much has been, and still is, changing so quickly, and that being able to do so is key to making predictions and offering reflections. All the same, he's working on it, and presented some of the interesting changes he's seen in the past 20 years, and what might be coming next.
[I got to sit next to the stenographer at the keynote. Yes, a real live stenographer with a stenograph and everything.]
Trip memory lane: what have we seen in the past 20 years?
- Internet boom and bust: Signifying the cyclical nature of technology, and how libraries have weathered it.
- What's in a name? The original title of the conference, "Small Computers in Libraries" reflected the introduction of the microcomputer (so retro!), and that this introduction was going to be significant in the future of libraries.
- Network history: The weird notion of the public that the internet came into being in the mid-90s, because that's when it hit the public consciousness. So silly is the public, but librarians know better. Remember ARPAnet? The internet was around before Computers in Libraries, and the history of the net is definitely paralleled in the history of the conference.
- 1985: It was the beginning of the OPAC era, with emphasis on the P. Clifford says, "I confess to being one of the early sneakers of online catalogs onto the internet," for everyone to see. Not too many people in 1985 had experience with computers at that time, and many people (outside of the geek population) were introduced to computers through two mechanisms: ATMs and the online catalog.
- The Great Re-education: Computers prompted the bulk of the working population to relearn how to work. But libraries stepped up to aid in that education, in everything from introducing patrons to library computer applications to running workshops and classes.
Where are we going?
- "Unimaginable Abundance": 20 years back, the abundance of information, and access to that information, we have right now would be science fiction, and the evolution has been fierce and amazing. In the next 10 years or so, Clifford says, we'll probably see a massive public domain content publishing to the web. While everything that libraries have been about in the past revolved around scarcity, the future is all about abundance.
(I can see how this abundance can also be a bad thing. With so many people turning to Google to wrangle that abundance, it's a bit crazy. But really, we as librarians should see that as a challenge, and rise to the occasion.)
Clifford mentioned an article from Wired about a year ago titled "The Long Tail" and the corresponding site that speaks to this trend. We've gone from the hit-oriented browsing from the past towards an internet where every subject imaginable has a constituency.
- Surrogates to The Real Deal: The net isn't about digital as a substitution anymore, it's now moving towards digital representations that stand on their own. He used the example of the move from the acceptance of bibliographic records (pointers, pieces) as the way to a world that assumes the full text (wholes) is available. The role and economics of metadata are changing, beyong substituting full text for bib info. It's becoming a world of pictures, 3D representations, making physical things more available, survivable, accessable. Digital libraries, anyone?
- The power of the individual: Computers and broadband were once the sole resources of large organizations. Now individuals have the same opportunities, and it's really empowering. What this empowerment grow.
- Age of broader authorship: Is the future of popular authorship now? Blogs and online communities and wikis, oh my! We might just be on the cusp of seeing information becoming conversation, telling a story as part of a dynamic, instead of just being items, "passive documents".
- More structured data: We'll see a greater mix of content for humans and content for machines. For instance, a map isn't a flat thing anymore. A map consists of a database that can dynamically generate the content for you, the human reader. Awesome!
- My *first* computer was a... Consumers are on their second or third computer these days, so data migration (and storage) tools have been identified by vendors as a viable market.
- Digital preservation will become "a lot more in the general public interest." What if you're 5th gen iPod can't read your 1st gen files? These are becoming real consumer issues reaching outside of the library/archival sphere.
- Intellectual prop, security, privacy: What have we learned about what happens with the passage of time? If you want to hold on to something, it leaves or hides where you can't find it, and if you don't want anything to do with it, it won't go away. As our personal lives become more and more tangled in the web, with security web cams, photo blogs, moblogs, plain old blog blogs, web archives of listservs, we may come across content that we wish never got out there. It's a "fundamental social trend" to contend with. And, well, in some instances, getting rid of it isn't an option, or just isn't a good idea from an archival perspective.
Time to try to hit some sessions. :)
March 16, 2005 8:31 AM