SPEAKER NOTES

Presentation by Dylan Tweney to the RLG Programs Group of OCLC, June 4, 2007
Washington DC

1.	title slide

2.	Thanks to Jim Michalko for inviting me to speak here, and to Merrilee Proffitt and Nancy Elkington for helping me refine this presentation and for making it easy for me to attend.

When Jim Michalko asked me to speak about the state of the information universe, my first thought was, “What could I possibly tell a bunch of librarians about information that they don’t already know?”

As a journalist, it’s my job to vacuum up information as rapidly as possible, to boil it down, and to emit carefully crafted, accessible, accurate, and much smaller bits of information.

But that’s a job I do without any particular attention to organizing information, except in the context of a story or series of stories, or the home page of Wired.com.

Partly because of my omnivorous information diet, and partly because I grew up spending a lot of time in libraries, I have enormous respect and envy for the work that librarians do. So much so that I was seriously considering becoming one myself, a few years ago, until the lure of shiny new gadgets drew me back to tech journalism. Also, while library work seemed fascinating, I wasn't so sure about library school.

But, from my perspective as a tech journalist, one who has been covering the internet for 10 years, I can see a number of ways in which libraries and the net have failed to sync up fully with one another. Online sources of culture and information would greatly benefit from the organizational schemas and capabilities libraries offer. In some cases the lack of this kind of organizational intelligence is quite glaring. Also, the internet is missing all of the knowledge that is currently locked away in print collections.

In fact, I’ve got a message for you from the internet…

3.	The internet needs librarians. In some cases, desperately.

And, on the other side, libraries need to engage the internet more fully, in order to avoid being made totally irrelevant in the new online information universe. There is a window of opportunity for libraries to engage with this world, but it won’t stay open forever. I would like to persuade you of the opportunity, but also to warn you that you don’t have much time. As Google expands its reach, and as users become increasingly impatient with non-Google-like information retrieval tools, the sphere of public-domain, noncommercial information is shrinking.

In the next half hour, I’ll survey the state of the information universe as I see it, as a tech journalist. Throughout the talk, I’ll also be making some modest predictions about what the next 5 years will bring. And at the end, I’ll have a couple of outrageous proposals for you.

4.	For me, the electronic information age begins here.
This is a World War II era radar scope.
During the war, a young Navy radar technician was inspired by the design of the radar scope and began imagining how something similar could be used to manipulate symbolic information on an electronic screen.

5.	That radar tech was Doug Engelbart, one of the great pioneers of human computer interaction.

He’s often called the “father of the mouse,” but that would be sort of like calling Thomas Edison the “father of the light switch.”

In addition to the mouse, he also invented 2-dimensional on-screen editing, computer outlining, hypertext, split-screen conferencing, multiple windows, document version control, distributed client-server computing, and context sensitive help, among many other things.

Engelbart demonstrated his system, called NLS (for oN Line System), in 1968 in San Francisco.

It was an admittedly difficult system to use, and that’s part of the reason it didn’t catch on. Another reason is that Engelbart’s vision was so vast and so ambitious that many people failed to grasp its full potential – and Engelbart himself has not been exactly a model of lucidity in communicating his vision.

Engelbart’s user interface insights were further developed by Xerox PARC in the 1970s, and then the Apple Macintosh in 1984.

But throughout the PC revolution of the 1980s, most computers remained disconnected from any kind of global information or collaboration networks.

6.	It took Tim Berners-Lee to make the dream of easy, global networking a reality.

Tim Berners-Lee began developing the World Wide Web in 1990 at CERN, releasing it to the internet in the summer of 1991.

It’s the web’s simplicity that made the internet accessible – and made people want it enough to demand it.

7.	April 30, 1995: 
This is when the internet went from being a research project dominated by educational institutions to a space for full-fledged commercial activity. That’s when the National Science Foundation announced that it would no longer allow direct access to the NSF backbone. 

The National Science Foundation contracted with four companies that would be providers of access to the NSF backbone (Merit). These companies would then sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies. This was effectively the beginning of the commercial internet, since technically commerical activity was prohibited under NSF regulations prior to that. 

(However, that didn’t stop Pizza Hut from taking pizza orders online starting in 1994.)

8.	I checked the Internet Archive, at archive.org, to see what a few of those early web sites looked like.  This is Yahoo, October 1996

9.	Hotwired.com, December 1997

10.	www.si.edu, January 1999

11.	It took ten years of the web, from 1995 to 2005, to reach the first billion users.

12.	It’s not clear how long it will take to get the “next billion” users, because there are a different set of technical hurdles.

It seems clear, however, that for these next billion users, the internet will be the primary – or perhaps even the only – source of up-to-date information and global cultural information that they have access to.

Image: One Laptop Per Child project’s XO Computer

13.	[The amount of information available online is growing exponentially.] … Meanwhile, the billion of us who are already online are busy creating MySpace pages, blogs, YouTube videos, and more.

14.	Amount of data in 2002
136 terabytes = Library of Congress collection, if digitized with full formatting
2 terabytes = an academic research library, according to the Berkeley researchers

Interesting fact: In 2002, the Internet Archive donated a full copy of its archives to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. That collection was about 1,500 terabytes, and represented most of the web from 1996 until 2002.
Source: School of Information Management, University of California, Berkeley

15.	Netcraft web server survey: 118,023,363 sites in May 2007

16.	YouTube shows how rapidly video data has grown on the web.
How do we access all that rich variety of information? For the most part, through a single text input field.

17.	Justin Kan of Justin.tv. He’s a lifecaster, which means he’s got a camera, a microphone, and a wireless data link, and he streams video to his web site 24/7. This is not just a stunt: Justin.tv is a business, and just added another lifecaster,  Justine Ezarik, and will undoubtedly be adding more. 

It may sound freakish, but expect many other people to try this in the coming year:  Ustream.tv 

18.	What $15 gets you: 1GB today, 10GB next year, 100GB in 2010, and 1TB in 2012. These predictions could be off by a few years as we bump up against the limits of current microchip production processes (45nm process currently), but new technologies, such as HP's Atomic Resolution Storage project, aims to provide higher storage density than NAND, the current flash memory technology.

Confidently: In less than ten years, $15 will buy you 1TB or so, and $150 will buy you 10TB of flash memory.
Right now, you can buy a 1TB hard drive for about $500.

30TB is enough for 1Mbit/sec for the entire year (31.5 million seconds in a year) -- about equal to a highly compressed video stream -- higher quality than YouTube video. Once 10TB of storage becomes affordable enough, people will start lifelogging – recording everything they do and storing it for later retrieval.

How to retrieve those masses of information will be a real challenge for the coming decade.

19.	Vocabulary for retrieving information has diminished. For the most part, we access all this information through a single text field:

20.	Google. The success of Google is not just in its excellent indexing algorithms or the comprehensiveness of its index, because other search engines, such as Alta Vista, had pretty sophisticated indexing long before Google did.

Google’s success has to do with its simplicity and its ability to deliver relevant results without demanding much of the user ahead of time.

21.	By contrast, here’s how it works in the library world. Screenshot of Worldcat query screen.

While this may offer more subtle ways of searching through complicated information, it is increasingly foreign to the way people are used to accessing online information.

22.	The problem with most libaries’ online interfaces is that you have to make a bunch of decisions before you can even start searching. In that respect, these interfaces are like the card catalogs they’re modeled on.

23.	There is some hope: WorldCat.org has a single-box search, grouping results and letting you choose among them, after you’ve entered your initial query-- instead of making you decide ahead of time what buckets you want to search in.

24.	Technorati recently (May 22) made a similar change, switching to single-box search with clustered results (blogs, videos, photos, music, etc), rather than making users search each of these collections separately. Critical response and user reaction have been pretty good.

25.	Prediction: By 2012, almost all information will have migrated online, and what hasn't will be increasingly marginal for the vast majority of users. 

And, we'll still be using one-box, one-click search tools.

How will we organize all this information? Collectively, via social media sites, collaborative tagging, and voting. 

26.	Example: Flickr users upload two million photos to the site every day. At last count the site held 225 million photos (according to David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous, so that’s already out of date). All this is done with zero central organization and no catalog. The users come up with their own ways of organizing via tags and groups, and Flickr parses those tags for interesting relationships to make the site more browsable. Example: this search for “banana” reveals photos tagged with the “banana” tag but also related images and tags.

Flickr users have added over 10 million unique tags to photos on the site.

27.	Images tagged with “urban,” “rust,” and “abandoned” tags. This cluster auto-generated by examining tag relationships on Flickr – what tags tend to appear together on the same photos?

28.	Flickr also lets groups of people form spontaneous organizational categories of their own. For instance, here’s the “Squared Circle” pool on Flickr: A group of people who post square photos of circular objects. You might be wondering what the purpose of this is. It's fun -- a form of creativity, and can lead to new forms of artistic expression.

29.	Poster created by Jim Bumgartner from photos in the “Squared Circle” pool on Flickr. If you go to his web site, each one of these tiny circles links to a different photo in the pool. 
http://www.krazydad.com/squaredcircle/

30.	Another way information is organized online is by collective nomination and voting. Digg.com is a leading example of this approach. On Digg, story selection is done entirely by the users. Users submit stories they think are interesting, and others vote on the stories by clicking “digg it.” Stories that get a lot of diggs wind up on the home page.

31.	When the users are in control, this can sometimes lead to unpredictable and unsettling results – as in the user revolt of May 1, when Digg users responded to perceived censorship (the deletion of a post containing a code for unlocking HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disc copy protection) by posting the banned code over and over, in a variety of creative formats.

Eventually, Digg had to give in to its users and allow them to post the code. The users were unstoppable anyway.

32.	Collective editing works for creating content as well as organizing it. For instance, here are some statistics on a leading content website.

Wikipedia’s reach and its large pool of editors means that it can respond quickly and organically to new information.

33.	This is a timelapse video showing the first 12 hours of the Wikipedia entry on the Virginia Tech shootings.

34.	Data collection and social organization of culture and content works best when it’s effortless: eg one click to edit, single-field tag editing, one-click voting, or my favorite, EXIF image data collected automatically from the camera.

35.	Prediction: By 2012, Wikipedia will be the dominant reference point for the organization of online knowledge. Tagging and voting will be the primary means of sorting that knowledge.

Wikia: Wikipedia driven search engine. Jason Calacanis’ startup, Mahalo: Wikipedia driven search engine, maybe.

Wikipedia is useful to augment other reference works (Answer.com) and also as a starting point for mapping topics (Boxxet).
BUT: Imagine a search engine that used categories & organization derived from Britannica, or WorldCat! 

36.	Another big trend is the fragmentation of the desktop computer. The tools for accessing and managing information are getting atomized and are increasingly modular. For instance, Apple’s “Dashboard” consists of a framework for tiny applications that you can access with a single button push. These applications – and there are hundreds to choose from – include such simple things as a clock showing the current time or a widget showing you the weather. But they also include more sophisticated apps, such as a tool for looking up dictionary definitions or a map showing you the current location of an airplane flight you’re interested in.
37.	Modular desktops are also available online, as in Google’s new iGoogle custom homepage. You can add or remove modules and move them around by dragging and dropping.
38.	The iGoogle desktop is “skinnable” – which means you can replace the look and feel of its interface with a simple point and click selection. This points to the increasing separation between presentation (interface) and content.
39.	In this modular world, the keys to the kingdom are news feeds and XML-based web services, which enable applications and widgets to talk to one another. 

For example, Yahoo Pipes lets you create new mashups from various websites’ information feeds – such as this one, which takes cycling news from L’Equipe and Le Monde, translates them into English using BabelFish, and pipes the output into a brand-new news feed.

News feeds started with RSS – aka “Really Simple Syndication” – and now include related standards called RDF and Atom. These are simple, standard ways for sites to pass new information to applications, like news feed readers. But news feeds also let applications talk to each other, so people can more easily create new applications. News feeds are the lingua franca of the new web applications.

Many of these applications are built with a suite of technologies loosely referred to as “Ajax,” for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Ajax usually refers to the way in which user interfaces are built (so they look more like desktop apps, instead of browser pages) but the same technologies – JavaScript and XML – are widely used for exchanging data between servers and between applications.
40.	Children, immersed in the internet and computer technology, will be far more comfortable with new interfaces than grownups are.

My daughter, at age 3, using the mouse to navigate SesameStreet.com, long before she knew how to read. She could also log on to her own desktop on the Mac, by clicking in the correct field, typing her password, and clicking the OK button. On the preschool computer, she was able to navigate complicated multi-level computer menus by using visual icons and the mouse.

Zachary: at age 5, recommended to his mom that they look something up on Wikipedia. What’s Wikipedia, his mom asked. “It’s like an encyclopedia, except it's not a book, and you can learn about all kinds of things in it."
41.	Nokia N95 and Apple iPhone
These phones are powerful communications devices and are also capable of running a wide range of applications – and of accessing online information. This will increasingly be the paradigm for mobile information access.
42.	Flexible organic LEDs, like this prototype from Sony, mean that it will be possible to put displays on a wide variety of objects and surfaces, like bracelets, clothing, water bottles, and walls.
43.	Electronic ink displays, like the one used on the Sony Reader, are promising because they are extremely readable and have low power consumption, making it easy to load them up with reading material and take them on the road. If this device cost half its current price of $350, and included a web browser, it would probably be a hit. As it is, it's a flop!
44.	Prediction: By 2012, online desktops will be primary, and we'll access them via a variety of devices. Interoperability with these desktops will be crucial for every application.

Online desktops will become more important than PC/Mac desktops. And interoperability will rule.
45.	Speed is important, both for publishers of information and for searchers.

For publishers, getting a story early is critically important to traffic. Why? If you post early, you get linked. First story on a given topic has a much greater (though not exclusive) chance of getting on Digg, Slashdot, Drudge Report

Frequency of posting also critical: The key to getting your blog noticed is to post a lot -- And to post on topics other people are talking about

Not necessarily to be right, though that helps

As a result, there's an even greater volume of redundant and un-vetted info

Accuracy and originality are not unimportant, but are definitely less valued than speed. If you're not accurate, your mistakes will become news in the next round of posts.

But readers, unfortunately, are less interested in mistakes than they are in new stories.
46.	For searchers, speed is even more important. This search delivered the first 10 of 487 million results in 0.08 seconds.

Because of users' need for speed, the top 5 search results attract far more clicks than results #6-10.

You Mon Tsang’s traffic analysis: Getting in the Top Five on Google is 5-6x better than Top Ten (6-10)

Top Ten is 10x better than Top Twenty (11-20)
47.	Prediction: By 2012, the demand for speed will have turned all publishers into de facto bloggers, and all search engines into Google. (actually already happening)

But eventually there will be a backlash against the inaccuracies and the “echo chamber” effect of the blogosphere.
48.	There are already some signs that people appreciate in-depth, accurate information

For instance, Wikipedia is undergoing a sitewide effort to add citations and references, since probably mid-2006.  Wales said that year: “Insist on sources” 
49.	growth of wikipedia reach: Alexa graph
50.	On one recent day, three of the hottest search trends on Google were Scarlatti, Hume’s “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” and Objectivism. Of course, they were mixed in with the usual suspects (Star Wars, Annika Sorenstam, Indy 500), but still!
51.	Prediction: The explosion of socially-organized culture is an opportunity for libraries. This culture needs libraries (and librarians). But the window of opportunity is closing.

There is an opportunity for libraries on the internet, but the window is closing.

As information moves online, and information users become increasingly comfortable with a wide variety of online sources for cultural content, libraries risk being left behind.
Also, as for-profit entities (like google, record labels, and movie studios) digitize and upload cultural content, the sphere of freely-accessible, the availability of public-domain content online is shrinking. We need libraries to keep the pool of publicly-available, public domain culture open.
52.	What the information universe wants: A hackable library database.

We want you to plug your libraries into the internet so that we can access them via our browsers, our web applications, our phones, and our e-ink bracelets.

Encourage entrepreneurship among young librarians. Give them budgets and encourage them to build new ways for your user populations to interact with the information you’ve got.

Train older librarians on free web tools: Flickr, YouTube, wikis, Technorati, Blogger. See “Learning 2.0” project at North Carolina's Charlotte & Mecklenburg County Library, on Wired.com

Hire student programmers and encourage them to build new interfaces to library information.
53.	Add RSS feeds and web services interfaces to everything you currently have, to enable integration with other web applications.

An early example: Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup project: Clicking the bookmarklet when you’re looking at a book page on Amazon…
54.	... Brings up that book in your local library catalog.
But: It doesn’t work very well, because neither Amazon nor public library catalogs are built to enable this kind of integration. Udell had to hack both of them a little bit – mostly by cleverly copying and pasting information from browser URLs.

You can make the process simpler, encourage innovation, and insert your libraries back into the information universe by adding news feeds and XML-based web services interfaces to everything you currently have, to enable integration with other web applications.

-RSS feed of new books
-RSS for books/articles matching a standing query
-Programmable web interface to library catalogs
-Google Desktop plugins for searching library information such as periodicals databases
55.	What the information universe wants: The books.

We want you to DIGITIZE YOUR BOOKS.

To hell with copyright concerns: Start scanning now, and sort out the copyright issues as they may come up.
56.	Some ways you might make scanning work:

Make scanning part of acquisitions budget. (Buy two copies, cut one up and run it through the sheetfed scanner)

Make scanning part of ILL and lending processes – ie Demand-based digitization

Cost of ILL: $30 per book ($20 borne by borrowing library, $10 by lender) (http://www.lib.iastate.edu/cfora/generic.cfm?cat=gen_libinfo_self&navid=11075&parent=3038)

Cost of scanning one book: $10, for Google (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/205092_googlelibrary24.html)

If whole books are too expensive, start scanning covers, tables of contents, bibliographies, and indices. 

Scanning now costs about 10 cents per page, if done locally, with cheap student labor 
57.	Advantages of digitizing books go far beyond allowing people to read those books in their browsers.

Google Book Search provides a glimpse of some of the other possibilities. Sure, you can read some books online, or browse selected pages.

(screenshot of a book summary in Google – part 1 of 3)
58.	A little further down the book summary page, Google also provides links to reviews of the book, references from other books and scholarly works, and a list of related books.
59.	And at the bottom of that page, you get a list of key terms found in the book and you can even see a map of places mentioned in the book.

Right now Google Book Search is mostly a proof of concept. But imagine the possibilities to researchers when you can do such things with many books: for instance, map all the places mentioned in all of the “Master and Commander” books by Patrick O’Brian.

It’s also important for libraries to create such projects as an alternative to Google’s for-profit library project. This is what I mean by the window of opportunity closing: If libraries don’t act now, Google will completely dominate printed information’s online manifestations.
60.	Page of the Venetus A, a 10th century manuscript of the Iliad. This manuscript is being digitized by the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies. 

This represents another virtue of digitization: It places printed or written documents in the public domain. Each page has not only been photographed (with a 39 megapixel Hasselblad), but an industrial laser scanner is used to create a 3D image of each page, reproducing every wrinkle and undulation of the parchment, so researchers can view the page as it is now, or digitally flattened.

In addition, researchers will add searchable and XML-tagged transcriptions of each page. And they’ll place everything online, with a Creative Commons license, so that anyone can search it.  (see upcoming Wired News story)
61.	You all know about the success of YouTube. In many ways, this site is responsible for ushering in the age of internet video. They did not do this by going to the major producers of video content and saying “How would you like us to help you bring your videos online to a worldwide audience of millions?” Instead, they built a tool that let people share videos with each other quickly and easily. Sorting out copyright issues happened later, not at the very start.

Similarly, you are not going to digitize your books by going to publishers first. Instead, why not get users to help you digitize your books?
62.	I want a YouTube clone, except people upload books instead of videos. 

The advantage of a project like this is that it puts the burden of digitization on the users, while giving them a tangible benefit – sharing information and cultural content, and commenting on it.

It doesn’t matter if the digitized versions are particularly complete or even very good, because as long as you’ve got something, you can start augmenting it with catalog data, links to related works, citation analysis, and other information that you already have in electronic form.

CONCLUSION

As I see it, the online information universe today is dominated by decentralized, ad-hoc, social media sites. Plus one very big search engine. The speed of publication is increasing, and the speed of information retrieval is critical to today’s information users.

This is, at long last the “radar screen” envisioned by Doug Engelbart fifty years ago, and it’s the screen on which people are already starting to collect information, do research, publish, and collaboratively work on solving the world’s most intractable problems.

In this universe, books – and the libraries that house them – barely exist. 
63.	Just like in a medieval library, your books are chained to the shelves, where most potential readers will never see them. They are, despite appearances, a non-circulating library.

Changing that will require a concerted effort to engage web technologies and to make library information systems work with web applications via RSS, web services, and programmatic interfaces.

It will also certainly require massive digitization of your print collections.

You don’t have to digitize everything. You don’t have to digitize books from cover to cover. But you cannot wait for the copyright issues to get sorted out. To serve your communities, you need to start digitizing today – by any means necessary.
64.	Only then can your libraries rejoin the information universe, and let your books take wing. 

(anselm kiefer sculpture)
65.	END

EXTRA SLIDES:
66.	Medieval chained library, Hereford Cathedral. 
67.	Hereford Cathedral Library, 
68.	Radar console, WWII era destroyer escort ship
69.	Engelbart with a mouse: Many years ago, I dreamed that digital technology could greatly augment our collective human capabilities for dealing with complex, urgent problems. 
70.	NLS control pad, keyboard, and mouse
71.	Amount of stored information in 2002: paper, film, magnetic, optical
72.	US Internet usage, by percent of US adults online
73.	Information flows in 2002: radio, TV, telephone, internet
74.	A few other trends summary slide