The technological advancements of the past twenty years have rendered the future of the library as a physical space, at least, as uncertain as it has ever been. The information that libraries were once built to house in the form of books and manuscripts can now be accessed in the purely digital realm, as evidenced by initiatives like the Digital Public Library of America, which convenes for the second time this Friday in San Francisco. But libraries still have profound cultural significance, indicating that even if they are no longer necessary for storing books they will continue to exist in some altered form. Radio Berkman host David Weinberger postulated in his book Too Big To Know that the book itself is no longer an appropriate knowledge container – it has been supplanted by the sprawling knowledge networks of the internet. The book’s subtitle is "Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room." Inspired by the work of Harvard Graduate School of Design students in Biblioteca 2: Library Test Kitchen – who spent the semester inventing and building library innovations ranging from nap carrels to curated collections displayed on book trucks to digital welcome mats – we turned the microphone around and had library expert Matthew Battles ask David, "When the smartest person in the room is the room, how do we design the room?" Matthew Battles is the Managing Editor and Curatorial Practice Fellow at the Harvard metaLAB. He wrote Library: an Unquiet History and a biography of Harvard’s Widener Library.
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RB 200: The Library Of The Future
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Sodajerker: Andy Partridge
Sodajerker is a songwriting team from Liverpool in the UK, founded by co-writers Simon Barber and Brian O’Connor.
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Your Library Website Stink and it’s Your Fault by Matthew Reidsma
Your library website is frustrating your users and sending them into the warm embrace of Google. Why? Because it’s not made for them, it’s made for librarians. As librarians, instead of adapting our websites to meet evolving user needs, we’ve dug in our heels and spent our energy making arguments about how much better our resources are than Google’s. And now our websites stink, and it’s our fault.
But all is not doom and gloom! I talk about how libraries can turn things around and build useful, usable websites that can adapt to user needs by learning to listen to your users, knowing what your website is for, and getting and using feedback.
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A Daguerrotype Captures One Day In 1848
CAPTIVE IN LIBYA - A REPORTER’S STORY A year ago, as the uprising in Libya got underway, Clare Morgana Gillis was covering the fighting and was captured by the Qaddafi forces. She was held captive with two colleagues and a fourth was killed. During the time, she was accused of being a spy and eventually was brought to Saadi Qaddafi, the third son of the then leader of Libya. Read Clare’s piece on her detention here. Read Clare’s blog. A DAGUERREOTYPE CAPTURES ONE DAY IN 1848 Get out your magnifying class for this conversation with a librarian from the Cincinnati Public Library. She tells the story of a daguerreotype of the Cincinnati river front that was examined, blown up and conserved by the George Eastman House. Once the work was done, details were revealed that no one could have imagined, giving us a glimpse of a moment in life from 1848. Explore the image here. Learn more about the project. Music in this episode: 1850 by Claude Bourbon; Haymaker’s Hoedown from Ashokan Farewell / Beautiful Dreamer - Songs of Stephen Foster.
http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_021712_full_show.mp3/view
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John Jeremiah Sullivan and Wells Tower In Conversation | The New York Public Library
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Christopher Hitchens in conversation with Paul Holdengraber | The New York Public Library
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Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge — The Long Now
Universal access to all knowledge, Kahle declared, will be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. We are already well on the way. "We’re building the Library of Alexandria, version 2. We can one-up the Greeks!"
Start with what the ancient library had—-books. The Internet Library already has 3 million books digitized. With its Scribe Book Scanner robots—-29 of them around the world—-they’re churning out a thousand books a day digitized into every handy ebook format, including robot-audio for the blind and dyslexic. Even modern heavily copyrighted books are being made available for free as lending-library ebooks you can borrow from physical libraries—-100,000 such books so far. (Kahle announced that every citizen of California is now eligible to borrow online from the Oakland Library’s "ePort.")
As for music, Kahle noted that the 2-3 million records ever made are intensely litigated, so the Internet Archive offered music makers free unlimited storage of their works forever, and the music poured in. The Archive audio collection has 100,000 concerts so far (including all the Grateful Dead) and a million recordings, with three new bands every day uploading.
Moving images. The 150,000 commercial movies ever made are tightly controlled, but 2 million other films are readily available and fascinating—-600,000 of them are accessible in the Archive already. In the year 2000, without asking anyone’s permission, the Internet Archive started recording 20 channels of TV all day, every day. When 9/11 happened, they were able to assemble an online archive of TV news coverage all that week from around the world ("TV comes with a point of view!") and make it available just a month after the event on Oct. 11, 2001.
The Web itself. When the Internet Archive began in 1996, there were just 30 million web pages. Now the Wayback Machine copies every page of every website every two months and makes them time-searchable from its 6-petabyte database of 150 billion pages. It has 500,000 users a day making 6,000 queries a second.
"What is the Library of Alexandria most famous for?" Kahle asked. "For burning! It’s all gone!" To maintain digital archives, they have to be used and loved, with every byte migrated forward into new media evey five years. For backup, the whole Internet Archive is mirrored at the new Bibliotheca Alexadrina in Egypt and in Amsterdam. ("So our earthquake zone archive is backed up in the turbulent Mideast and a flood zone. I won’t sleep well until there are five or six backup sites.")
Speaking of institutional longevity, Kahle noted during the Q & A that nonprofits demonstrably live much longer than businesses. It might be it’s because they have softer edges, he surmised, or that they’re free of the grow-or-die demands of commercial competition. Whatever the cause, they are proliferating.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/nov/30/universal-access-all-knowledge/
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NPR: Libraries Make Room For High-Tech Hackerspaces
As information becomes more digital, public libraries are striving to redefine their roles. A small number are working to create "hackerspaces," where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools and their expertise.
Huffduffed from http://www.npr.org/2011/12/10/143401182/libraries-make-room-for-high-tech-hackerspaces
Tagged with npr tech library hackerspace
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Jennifer Egan: 2011 National Book Festival (Podcast) (Library of Congress)
Guy Lamolinara from the Library of Congress speaks with Jennifer Egan, who appeared at the 2011 National Book Festival, which was held Saturday, September 24 and Sunday, September 25, 2011, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
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JAY-Z in conversation with Cornel West and Paul Holdengräber | The New York Public Library
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