Context: Below is the text of my virtual presentation to the LITA BIGWIG (it stands for blogs, wikis, interest group, and stuff) Social Software Showcase. The presentation is virtual, but the round table discussion is going on today, June 23rd, from 1:30-2:30 p.m. in the Renaissance Mayflower Cabinet Room. I won’t be there, though. My bad scheduling got me double-booked and I’m presenting in the Transforming Your Library With Technology track.

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We’re swimming in reports that tell us to reduce expenses while the costs of our systems continue to rise. Compare this to the trend outside libraries where commoditization of bandwidth, storage, and even servers as well as the maturing of our software and management practices has made possible large numbers of competing, free services in almost every category (among the most recognizable we find Gmail, YouTube, and flickr). And those who want more direct control over the network services they use can find open source software to match those offerings and service providers to help them use it.

Libraries are good at sharing data, but we’ve done a poor job of taking advantage of the network and new technologies to reduce the costs of sharing or build network-dependent features. One result is that it’s often cheaper to buy a book than to do an ILL transaction. The success of Linux, Apache, and every other open-source application has been the success of network-enabled efficiencies that allowed aggregation of improvements from a broad range of contributors.

In libraries, this applies equally well to both our systems and data. We recognize now that our data is living and evolving, but synchronizing available record enhancements with individual collections remains costly and laborious. Without efficient mechanisms to share improvements, the value to any one library of trying to share what local improvements or corrections they make is limited, preventing libraries from benefiting from the network in ways that open source software development has.

Extending some of the affordances of open source further, remixing and mashups have shown the power of open systems and common, easy to use protocols. Those mashups are pointing the way to new applications and features that the platform providers themselves often can’t foresee or afford to develop on their own. Libraries, struggling as we are with developing the features our users are demanding, need remixable platforms to support more rapid and sustainable development.

And we need platforms that are affordable to all libraries, including the nearly 30% that serve populations of 2,500 on an average annual budget of less than $50,000 (about 60% of America’s libraries serve communities of fewer than 10,000 people).

That’s some of the philosophy driving this IMLS grant proposal. The key features of what I hope to achieve are simple: We’ll need a lot of applications to do this, and all of them will share these characteristics:

• Open source and free in both the “free beer” and “free speech” senses of the term
• Remixable and open for others to innovate with
• Social

From there it’s really a matter of what we hope to achieve…what we build.

scriblio, internet archive, imls, bigwigshowcase07, open source, community informatics, presentation

The news is that Yahoo! announced they’ve formed the Open Content Alliance. Though that certainly fits the Google versus Yahoo! story that newsmen want to report on now, it’s somewhat disingenuous to the Internet Archive, which has been beating the Open Content drum for a while. But Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive doesn’t seem to care. He was talking about it on the Yahoo! Search Blog yesterday:

Is Open Content the next step in the traditions of Open Source and an Open Network? Many people seem to think so (and wouldn’t it be great?). Working with libraries, government institutions, archives, technology companies, web companies– and we all are saying the same thing– it is time to have more great material available on the Internet and to be able to have it be open and free.

The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further– Universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable. Then the question became– is it in the interest of enough people and institutions to get there? Some hang-ups have been around costs, rights, and guidelines for sharing. All of these things were worked out for their domains by Internet folks and open source folks in the last few decades. But how are we going build a system that has everything available to everyone?

I am jazzed to say that a group of organizations is starting an Open Content Alliance to try out answers by joining new and existing collections. We are looking for more contributors and helpers. We are starting with a set of principles.

Google, of course, made news a while ago when they announced a plan to scan the entire collections of a few libraries in the US and Britain. But they’ve run up against some copyright problems lately and the future of that plan is in doubt, at least according to Siva Vaidhyanathan in his interview in last week’s On The Media.

It will be interesting to watch these two internet titans do battle. The competition does them both good, so long as it doesn’t kill them (or leave either one vulnerable to a buyout by Microsoft).

tags: alliance, book scanning, brewster kahle, google print, internet archive, library, library digitization, library of alexandria, open content, open content alliance, yahoo, yahoo open content alliance

With all the talk about Google scanning or not scanning copyrighted books, I was happy to see Laura Quilter talking about Google as a library.

The Internet Archive is certainly a library. [...] Libraries may be private, semi-private, public; for- or not-for-profit; paper or digital. Why is Google not a library?

More interestingly, she casts a critical eye on the Texaco decision that everybody points to as the guiding law on fair use. This, and the rest of her blog are good reading.

tags: agu, agu v. texaco, american geophysical union, copyfight, copyright, fair use, fairuse, google, google print, internet archive, laura quilter, library, private/public, texaco