[CAnet - news] Building the Universal Library

For more information on this item please visit the CANARIE CA*net 4 Optical
Internet program web site at http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/list.html
-------------------------------------------



[Excellent article on future of libraries, meta tagging, mashups, etc.
Excerpts from the New York Times article -- BSA]

http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2006/05/14/magazine/1125007960547.html?8tp
w&emc=tpw

>From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till 
now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 
million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million 
images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short 
films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is 
currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the 
world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed 
(at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. 

With tomorrow's technology, it 
will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of 
all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet  if it doesn't 
plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some 
people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such 
things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know 
what's taking so long. 

Corporations and libraries 
around the world are now scanning about a million books per 
year. Amazon has digitized several hundred thousand 
contemporary books. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford 
University (one of the five libraries collaborating with 
Google) is scanning its eight-million-book collection using a 
state-of-the art robot from the Swiss company 4DigitalBooks. 
This machine, the size of a small S.U.V., automatically turns 
the pages of each book as it scans it, at the rate of 1,000 
pages per hour. A human operator places a book in a flat 
carriage, and then pneumatic robot fingers flip the pages 
delicately enough to handle rare volumes  under the scanning 
eyes of digital cameras.

Raj Reddy, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, decided 
to move a fair-size English-language library to where the 
cheap subsidized scanners were. In 2004, he borrowed 30,000 
volumes from the storage rooms of the Carnegie Mellon library 
and the Carnegie Library and packed them off to China in a 
single shipping container to be scanned by an assembly line of 
workers paid by the Chinese. His project, which he calls the 
Million Book Project, is churning out 100,000 pages per day at 
20 scanning stations in India and China. Reddy hopes to reach 
a million digitized books in two years.


What Happens When Books Connect

But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of 
all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform 
the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that 
hold them. The universal library and its "books" will be 
unlike any library or books we have known.


The link and the tag may be two of the most important 
inventions of the last 50 years. They get their initial wave 
of power when we first code them into bits of text, but their 
real transformative energies fire up as ordinary users click 
on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware that 
each humdrum click "votes" on a link, elevating its rank of 
relevance. You may think you are just browsing, casually 
inspecting this paragraph or that page, but in fact you are 
anonymously marking up the Web with bread crumbs of attention. 
These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search 
engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the 
end points of every link and the connections suggested by each 
tag. This is a type of intelligence common on the Web, but 
previously foreign to the world of books.

Search engines are transforming our culture because they 
harness the power of relationships, which is all links really 
are. 

At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into 
single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. 
These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and 
virtual bookshelves. 

Indeed, 
some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets 
or to be remixed as pages. The ability to purchase, read and 
manipulate individual pages or sections is surely what will 
drive reference books (cookbooks, how-to manuals, travel 
guides) in the future. 

So what happens when all the books in the world become a 
single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four 
things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a 
small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually 
have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the distribution curve 
that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books 
in the world live  digital interlinking will lift the 
readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. 
Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of 
history, as every original document in the course of 
civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal 
library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. 
If you can truly incorporate all texts  past and present, 
multilingual  on a particular subject, then you can have a 
clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know 
and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance 
are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are 
drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only 
rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become 
routine.


In preindustrial times, exact copies of a work were rare for a 
simple reason: it was much easier to make your own version of 
a creation than to duplicate someone else's exactly. The 
amount of energy and attention needed to copy a scroll 
exactly, word for word, or to replicate a painting stroke by 
stroke exceeded the cost of paraphrasing it in your own style. 
So most works were altered, and often improved, by the 
borrower before they were passed on. 

That ancient economics of creation was overturned at the dawn 
of the industrial age by the technologies of mass production. 
Suddenly, the cost of duplication was lower than the cost of 
appropriation. 

Copy makers could profit more than 
creators. This imbalance led to the technology of copyright, 
which established a new order. 

But a new regime of digital technology has now disrupted all 
business models based on mass-produced copies, including 
individual livelihoods of artists. The contours of the 
electronic economy are still emerging, but while they do, the 
wealth derived from the old business model is being spent to 
try to protect that old model, through legislation and 
enforcement. 

As copies have been dethroned, the economic model built on 
them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, 
copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now 
relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has 
shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, 
annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, 
transfer and engage a work. 


Search opens up creations. It promotes the civic nature of 
publishing. Having searchable works is good for culture. It is 
so good, in fact, that we can now state a new covenant: 
Copyrights must be counterbalanced by copyduties. In exchange 
for public protection of a work's copies (what we call 
copyright), a creator has an obligation to allow that work to 
be searched. No search, no copyright. As a song, movie, novel 
or poem is searched, the potential connections it radiates 
seep into society in a much deeper way than the simple 
publication of a duplicated copy ever could.

We see this effect most clearly in science. Science is on a 
long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into 
one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of 
facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their 
own world, are of little value to science. 

No one argues that scientists should 
be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. 
Instead, we have devised other ways to compensate them for 
their vital work. They are rewarded for the degree that their 
work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their 
publications, which they do not own. They are financed with 
extremely short-term (20-year) patent monopolies for their 
ideas, short enough to truly inspire them to invent more, 
sooner. To a large degree, they make their living by giving 
away copies of their intellectual property in one fashion or 
another.

Kevin Kelly is the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine and 
author of "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social 
Systems and the Economic World" and other books. He last wrote 
for the magazine about digital music.



-------------------------------------
To SUBSCRIBE:
send a blank e-mail message to
[email protected]

To UNSUBSCRIBE:
send a blank email message to
[email protected]
-------------------------------------

These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.

-----------
[email protected]
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
SkypeIn: +1 614 441-9603


_______________________________________________
news mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.canarie.ca/mailman/listinfo/news