One Big Library

Growing up, I thought of libraries as places you went to get books. That’s before I got a salary, and discovered amazon.com.

In the last few years, I’ve realized that idea of libraries is totally wrong. Libraries are where the librarians are, and librarians are people who understand information and how to organize it better than almost anybody. That makes libraries and librarians incredibly interesting. So it’s with much interest that I see the announcement for the “One Big Library” unconference, forwarded by John Dupuis:

Announcing the One Big Library Unconference

http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

E-mail: onebig@yorku.ca

When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Where: The Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

“It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there’s just One Big Library, with branches all over the world.”

The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists, and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries.

It’s organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and members of the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group: Stacy Allison-Cassin, William Denton, and John Dupuis.

In an interconnected world, all physical and virtual libraries can really be thought of as branches of One Big Library. We would like to get together and explore that concept. Areas of interest:

  • The future of libraries
  • Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
  • Uses of social software in libraries
  • Tools to support and extend the One Big Library

Our goals are:

  • Bringing people interested in the future of libraries together with the hope of sparking collaboration and cooperation
  • Starting conversations between people in different kinds of libraries, and people inside and outside libraries
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Categorized as Library

Biweekly links for 04/28/2008

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Interrupting Google search

How can Google search be beaten? Google’s edge is to do search better than other companies, i.e., they have access to knowledge about search those other companies don’t, in part because they place a high premium on developing such knowledge in-house.

What happens if Google’s understanding of search starts to saturate, and further research produces only small gains in user experience? The knowledge gap to their competitors will start to close. Other companies will be able to replicate the search experience Google offers. The advantage will then shift to whichever company can manage the operations side of search (e.g., maintaining large teams, large data centers and so on) better. Google’s culture – all those clever people improving search – will then become a liability, not an asset.

This is the classic path to commodization. A new industry opens up. In the early days, the race is to those who develop know-how quickly, providing an edge in service. As know-how saturates, everyone can provide the same service, and the edge moves to whoever can manage operations the best. The old innovators are actually at a disadvantage at this point, since they have a culture strongly invested in innovation.

In Google’s case, there’s another interesting possibility. Maybe search just keeps getting better and better. It’s certainly an interesting enough problem that that may well be posible. But if our knowledge of search ever starts to saturate, Google may find itself needing another source of support for its major business (advertising).

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How institutions change

Does anyone know of a good discussion of how institutions change? I’ve looked around a fair bit, online, in catalogues, and in bookstores. Nothing I’ve found has quite fit the bill.

Update: Shortly after posting this, I thought of Cosma’s notebooks, which do indeed contain several promising leads.

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Biweekly links for 04/25/2008

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

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Info, bio, nano, or thermo? Turing’s revenge

People sometimes claim that we’re moving from the information age into the biotech age, or the nanotech age, or the age of energy. Will we really see such a shift, or is this just hype?

My recent thinking about the idea that everything should be code convinces me that the people claiming that such shifts will occur are wrong, at least in the case of biotech and nanotech.

It’s not that biotech and nanotech won’t make enormous, world-changing strides in the near future. They will. But the effect of many of those strides will be to bring biotech and nanotech effectively into the realm of information technology. Expressing biology and nanotechnology in the language of information allows you to set loose all the powerful ideas of computation. This is too much to pass up. So what we’ll see is not a shift, but rather a gradual convergence between the info, bio and nano worlds. Which of the three will have the upper hand, commercially, seems to me to be difficult to predict.

What about energy? Here the situation is different. Like information, energy has a fundamental, irreducible quality. Because of this, I expect we’ll see a complementary relationship between information and energy technologies, but one will never subsume the other.

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Money, markets, and evolution

Aside from human beings, can anyone think of biological systems which have evolved money or a market?

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A moment of creative genius

I’ve been feeling quite pleased with myself for getting the weblogger emacs mode working, giving me a simple way to post directly from emacs, without logging into my blogging software (WordPress).

That is, I was feeling pleased until this morning, when a cut-and-paste error made in weblogger mode resulted in me posting my blog password to the front page of my blog. It was only online for a few seconds, and I changed the password immediately, but it’s not exactly a shining moment…

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