Renaissance Reboot

Last semester I needed resources for a paper on the Los Angeles Central Library fire of 1986. The paper was for a class in Preservation. I found my topic innocently enough via a Google search about library disasters.

Floods abounded in my initial search for a disaster to write about, but I wanted something different. When I saw the word “fire” I thought, “Aha!” and committed to the topic without doing too much searching to see exactly what resources were out there. I figured, it’s an unusual event in a library in a major U.S. city. How difficult could it be to find stuff on this?

Oh. Was I wrong.

I won’t take you through the painful details of my search. Suffice to say that ultimately, a search on Ebsco delivered some interesting newsletter and lecture-driven articles by a fellow named Randall Butler. I now know that Dr. Butler, at the time of the fire, was working as the Archivist at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. He was on the scene within 12 hours of the site being opened for cleanup, and had a first-hand experience of the aftermath and devastation.

I Googled Dr. Butler and the fire and found some PDFs of a couple of his articles. I also discovered that there was out there, somewhere, shining like the holy grail of research, a 32 page pamphlet he wrote titled, The Los Angeles Central Library Fire: A Review and Analysis of a Disaster. The only library I could find with a copy of this pamphlet, however, was the Toronto Public Library in Canada.

The people manning the online reference chat in the library were helpful, and ultimately I was able to obtain a photocopy of the pamphlet by tracking down Dr. Butler through serendipitous phone calls that put me in touch with one of his former colleagues who knew where he was now working. Dr. Butler emailed his permission for a friend of a friend of mine to copy the pamphlet and fax it to me. It took me over two weeks and up until four days before my paper was due to get my hands on this detailed gem.

If the folks in Canada had not retained Dr. Butler’s pamphlet, apparently not even he could have given it to me. He no longer had a copy in any format, and the folks at the Los Angeles Public Library do not have one in their archives about the fire. Which reminds me, he asked me to email him a copy!

Let this be a lesson that while with technology many things are possible, contrary to popular opinion not everything is available online or in electronic format. You never know when good research will involve old fashioned gumshoe techniques. Call me Sam Spade, but isn’t that part of the fun?

Whether desktop or server-based, information will always require a human component in a human world. We are social creatures, for one thing. For another thing, the fact that not everyone can be an expert in everything, necessitates interaction with others who are experts. The question becomes not so much where the information will be stored, but who will access it, how it will be shared, and how we will work together to use it.

I have done a lot of thinking over the years about where technology is going and what it means for us as consumers of information. In the past several months, however, things have begun to get very exciting. I know that librarians sometimes have controversy over offering computer games in the library, but here is what I think: gaming is leading the way into a whole new way of learning and disseminating information.

Learning will become, indeed, is already becoming a collaborative effort. Look at the origins of the Web, for instance, which are in academia and the need to share information efficiently. Look at what we are doing now with online education, and with Wikis. Then look at online gaming and how users of this technology are entering a whole new realm of interaction.

Gaming is graphical, visual, mobile, and is becoming independent of hand controllers as of the advent of Microsoft’s new gaming console, and to some extent with Nintendo’s Wii. Movement of the user’s hands and body controls the interaction with the game, and indeed with hundreds or even thousands of other players’ actions around the world.

Enter the age of the avatar. When you examine the need for human interaction in our society, avatars become the new method of real-time contact. As they become more and more human (dare I hope holographic real-time representations of ourselves?) the ability to interact with a reference librarian in real time with face-to-face-like qualities, to peruse the shelves of a virtual library and hold open a virtual representation of a book will become a reality as well.

It occurred to me last night, as I was lying awake thinking about the implications of technology for physical books, that the reason we do not yet see where digital content is headed vis-a-vis printed content, might be that we have not yet reached a tipping point, believe it or not, in our technological capabilities.

Imagine if you could use technology to not only digitize and search for information, but if that information were meshed with virtual reality in such a way that the printed book became a 3d holographic representation of a book that could be flipped through (which is useful in the extreme and the lack of which is something I regret about digital content), while also having a computer available to help you home in on the content that is most relevant to you? At the same time, you have at your disposal remotely, a reference librarian familiar with using the content you are searching. This reference librarian, even if she is hundreds of miles away, in this scenario, adds a human element both mentally and physically, enriching and helping direct your experience as needed.

There will always be a need for real human interaction, librarians in physical libraries, and a love for paper books in my view of the world; however, when I think about what we are capable of, and how far we have come in so short a span of human history, I can’t help believe that we will see the things I have written about here come to pass. When we stop to examine the technology we have today and its effects on our world, we need to consider that human minds can imagine the solutions to the problems we encounter with our inventions. As long as we have a need to communicate information, we will find more efficient and more comfortable ways to to do it.

Essentially, not much has changed about bare-bones HTML since I learned it in 1997. Admittedly, I haven’t hand coded anything since my first Web page and while I remembered the concepts, my knowledge of the tags was more than rusty until this week.

For my Introduction to Information Science and Technology class, we were asked to participate in what our professor calls a “menu exercise” where students pick and choose form a menu of applications and other technology-oriented items in order to construct a project.

I chose to learn a content management system (the one with which I constructed Renaissance Reboot), WordPress. While it was not on the list of items to choose from, I was thinking it would be “too easy” to construct a Web site from HTML and decided to inquire with the professor if I could learn something new. Over the course of the semester I constructed this site using WordPress and overcame quite a learning curve. However, I misunderstood my conversation with the professor and it turned out I still needed to choose something from the menu he had offered to receive full credit.

Feeling sheepish, I chose to construct a HTML-coded site to prove I could still do it, rather than choose an exercise with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or Access (all of which I have used extensively professionally). I used WebMonkey’s awesome HTML Tag page to help me remember the tags, thinking, “How hard could it be?” After all, they’re just tags.

Well, let me tell you, I had to relearn how tricky attributes can be in tables if you don’t put them in the right place, and just how wonky tables can look if you forget the colspan attribute. I hadn’t even remembered there was a colspan attribute! Or how to prevent borders from appearing around my graphics. Or how to perform a simple emailto:. In short, I was a head-banging disaster for about seventeen hours.

Graphically, this WordPress site is a lot more elegant than my project CV site; however, once I got around the re-learning curve, I realized that I could, if I chose, place all of the posts you see here in HTML and provide all of the pages I have here (outside the commentary options) for less effort than I put into learning and constructing ebrarian.com with WordPress. How powerful and elegant is that?

I wouldn’t have guessed it could happen, but it seems I’ve fallen in love with HTML all over again. If I had an eye for design I’d be all set, carving out the wilderness of the Web one tag at a time. Until that unlikely development occurs, however, I’ll spare you all and continue to provide my updates here, where it won’t hurt your eyes to look at them.

Mark Birbeck, proponent of the RDFa (Resource Description Framework-in-attributes) at the W3C wrote an Introduction to RDFa for A List Apart on June 23, 2009. It is a succinct and elegant document that I can only take a vague stab at explaining here, so if you are interested in the least, please see the original article.

Essentially, RDFa takes XHTML’s meta and link elements and allows them to be attributed with semantic annotation from vocabularies such as Dublin Core or Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) via the XML Namespace declaration. Markup of web documents in this way allows machines to understand nuances of human language.

For instance, when referring to an alternate source in a web page, using RDFa and the Dublin Core’s “source” tag allows a machine to parse the tagged data and, through a web browser, serve a searcher the web page as a derivative work from the tagged source.

Expert System claims to have created an engine, Cogito, that, among other things, can automatically mark up existing XHTML content with Dublin Core and FOAF tags with 90% accuracy.

I am still trying to figure out how RDFa and Dublin Core would work together in comparison to MARC, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. If you know, please comment. I will update with another post as I further uncover the mysteries of metadata.

I have been coming across the term “semantic web” frequently, so last night I decided to read up on the subject. What I discovered after reading Wikipedia’s verbose definition, and following a few links, is that the semantic web is the linchpin to the concept of Web 3.0.

Very simplistically, if you think of Web 2.0 as facilitating social networking, think of Web 3.0 as intelligently serving data to users. For example, as my friend Daniel Abraham pointed out:

Web 1.0: Here is my recipe for strawberry shortcake.
Web 2.0: Here is a FaceBook entry by Fred commenting on my strawberry shortcake recipe.
Web 3.0: Here are the search results for strawberry shortcake recipes of people living within a 30 mile radius of Fred along with links to the pick-your-own strawberry places.

Read Write Web offers a straightforward and eloquent entry point into understanding the concept in the blog post,

Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web.

As someone who enjoys HTML and the design aspect of creating web pages, but who has not until now put a toe into the deeper waters of linked data with RDFa (see the W3C RDFa Primer), the blog post was enlightening. If you want a clearer understanding of what that shadowy thing, Web 3.0, might be, you’ll get it there too.

The thing that came to mind while reading the article was that librarians will now have a whole new area of employment as those who classify web content for semantic readability. There are millions of web pages out there that will need to be retrofitted with RDFa and the Dublin Core’s metadata standards, which read like a web version of Dewey or the Library of Congress classification system.

It will take those experienced with containerizing data to sift the great amounts of the stuff on the web into its proper place before Web 3.0 can become a reality. I, for one, look forward to the challenge and its results.

I clicked on an ad in my gmail sidebar today for a company called WEbook and followed a link on their site to this article from the New York Times:

Is This the Future of the Digital Book?

When reading about the ways in which new and old publishing companies are looking to provide content (I can’t bring myself to call them books) I wondered how we are going to catalog this kind of information for later use. It’s so dynamic, and in the cases where it isn’t quite dynamic you can see how it’s headed that way.

If the continent were moving under our feet at this speed, rather than at an inch a year, everything would be crumbling around us. Don’t get me wrong. I’m excited about innovation, even if I will always love the paper book as well; however, I can’t even begin to think of how librarians are going to keep up with it all.

In writing my paper this week, formatting the references in APA style was a trick in and of itself. When I was doing my undergrad work fifteen years ago, while formatting the references wasn’t exactly easy, it had a certain rhythm and sense to it. Now, with all the different types of offerings that exist to be referenced, I found myself wondering whether something should be referenced as a blog entry (if it wasn’t clearly stated as a blog entry) from an online publication, or an unattributed article from that online journal. Talk about splitting hairs.

I bought the most recent APA style guide last week, and while it did help, there is nothing about blog entries in it, and I had to resort to some online resources to figure out how to reference my…online resources. (See here: Reference List: Electronic Sources.) For anyone who’s interested, the new version with all of these nuances is coming out July 1,
2009. I guess I’ll be dropping another $30+ to buy it.

The deluge has begun. Yesterday I started my summer class, ILS 501, covering the “principles and applications of computers and information technologies in libraries and information centers.” For our group project we are required to assemble and assess a bibliography of articles on a given topic. My group is covering computer hardware. Oh, where to begin and what to include?

At first I salivated over the prospect of being able to read and write about hardware innovations that will allow researchers to uncover, share, and preserve previously unavailable or hidden resources. Then I realized this had to be a survey of technology for libraries across the board: public, special, and school. This means covering monitors, cpu’s, servers from mid range to farms, peripheral devices from mice to modems, personal digital assistants, and the list goes on. Thank God I discovered Networks is a topic for another group or I might have felt compelled to go into CISCO routers.

The paper is limited to 2000 words, about four single spaced typed pages. Can you see my dilemma? We have to find a way to organize and limit the scope to present a bird’s eye overview of the world of information technology from a hardware perspective, while also finding something insightful to say (if I want the coveted “A”). Insight, in my experience, requires ample space of its own to develop. Where are we going to put it all?

My dilemma is very much like the one facing all of us today. There is too much information and not enough time or space to make sense of all of it. The problem is, in less than two years, it’s going to be my job to do exactly that. Adam Katz-Stone quotes Librarian-turned-entrepreneur, Mary Ellen Bates, in his article “Web overturning image of book-filing librarian” for The Washington Business Journal as saying, “You can’t drink water out of a fire hose, and the Internet in a sense is a fire hose. What librarians do is distill it down into the fine wine of knowledge.”

This, my first assignment, proposes to teach me to become, as Bates put it, a “[vinter] of the information age.” How to turn a ripe, plump grape from fruit to juice and allow it to ferment to a finer state all in four pages? My first lesson is a lesson in importance. Can we, as a group, effectively determine what our patrons (the other students in the class) should be learning from us as the “experts” in the hardware aspect of library technology?

Stay tuned. I’ll let you know how it all turns out and what I learned in the process.

The name of the blog portion of this site, Renaissance Reboot, is derived from a WSJ article titled The Next Age of Discovery by Alexandra Alter published on May 8, 2009. It is also a nod to the newest Star Trek movie, which many fans are calling a “reboot” of the original.

At once our fascination with technology is exemplified and encouraged in popular culture’s most recognized nod to technology, Star Trek. Digitizing scholarly texts and sharing the resulting data and resources electronically allows a new kind of globalization where the pursuit of knowledge is unfettered by access to a passport, visa, or the threat of a bigger carbon footprint. Information is the new frontier.

As Alter points out in her article, data that was once inaccessible for reasons of material degradation or dysfunction, that was too buried or too remote, can now be shared with anyone who has access to a computer. It can be preserved, cataloged, analyzed, expounded upon. Humans, in short, have found a way to democratize information in ways previously unimaginable.

We are entering a second Renaissance, as Alter says. It is an age of discovery, connections, learning, and wonder. What a heady time to be alive, when a monk can read a scroll that has never been unrolled, or a researcher can examine a layer of now-hidden text to reveal works of playwrights long thought to be lost, and then share that information with a world of eager scholars.

This blog charts my journey as a student of Library and Information Science where I can share the course of my ongoing education in the world of Digital Librarianship. I will make other resources available elsewhere on the site as I accumulate them during my travels. Welcome and thanks for coming along.