Massive Scale Librarianship
R.David Lankes IST 676
big picture=every mile of roadway will generate a gigabyte of information a day.
As soon as info exists people will want to use it
Geometric progression—gladwell tipping point.
Predictable change
In the near term we will no longer have to choose what to keep because there will be so much storage at our fingertips.
Storage rate is exceeding Moore’s Law
Issues
- privacy
- ethics of involvement
- commercialization and scarcity
- unintended consequences
- AOL
- security
- preservation –data sitting on tape drive on unsupported proprietary system that is broken.
- culture and control
- cognition and perceptual scarcity
- more and more information produced but no more time to read it all
- scalability and sustainability
- power required to cool storage machines
Options?
Cataloging the information doesn’t work
Not every bit of info at there deserves this kind of attention
Ignoring the info is not an option
Other areas are replicating librarianship to deal with data
Is role of library to be curated collection of high quality work? That doesn’t work when everything is freely accessible.
Only true option is too embrace the problem and for libraries to assert themselves to the situation.
Participatory Librarianship
Requires shift in thinking
Our job is knowledge
Gather/sort/create
Facilitate knowledge creation of community
-Socratic method
-book groups
-collection development
Hidden item focus on grand unified theory of libraries
Bibliofundamentalism –Karen Schneider
-Role of library as a haven of order and quality
Participatory Librarianship
Constant evolution
Taken catalog and user data to create catalogs similar to amazon
Bringing all the info together in a mashup kind of a situation.
=true catalog (metadata based)+ community library
Anyone can move add or delete data
Conversations
Local, network, web, institutional, massive—DATA
