Author Archives: James A Jacobs

Library of the 21st Century Symposium

Here you can read transcripts of and listen to presentations made at a symposium on the theme of the Library of the 21st Century, hosted by the State Library of Victoria in Australia.

There are some very interesting ideas floated here. I found particularly interesting the talk by UK-based author and corporate strategist Mr Charles Leadbeater on the topic of Libraries and the Creative Economy. Mr. Leadbeater is the author of a 2003 report on public libraries in the UK, called Overdue: how to create a modern public library service and is a leading authority on innovation and creativity in organizations. He has advised the BBC, Channel 4, Microsoft, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, among others.

Here are some excerpts to entice you:

• ...public libraries, at least in the UK, are institutions that are stuck and librarians as a profession are stuck. Now the good news is that you’re not alone because lots of public professions I think are stuck. I think social workers are stuck, I think teachers are stuck, I think a lot of public service managers are stuck and I think a lot of our public institutions are stuck.
• It’s not about technology.... [Google] is a culture which is incredibly flat, very egalitarian, very nimble, very informal and very entrepreneurial. So you’re not up against the technology, you’re up against that. And what you’ve got to imagine is that public libraries could be as entrepreneurial, creative, open, dynamic and exciting.
• ...libraries of course are, in many ways, of this open, communal world. The atmosphere [in a] library ... is ... open, very diverse, people using tools for their own ends, a common resource but used for very private purposes, a public platform; very peer-to-peer because you’re really using things that other people have used. And so in many ways libraries foreshadow and are part of, should be part of, this world that we’re seeing created except there’s something that seems to stop us getting into it...
• So the library is kind of posed with a foot in both camps. Part of its culture is open, democratic, participative and part, I think, quite closed, inward looking and defensive.... [People] do not just go [to libraries] for the wisdom of librarians.
• Well, how should libraries move forward? Well, I think you see quite a lot of the first ‘reform of the traditional’ model. Let’s create some new services, let’s go digital, put some computers in. Let’s add a cafes because people like that.... I think that can do a bit to stem decline but I’m not sure that it’s the kind of re-modeling, re-thinking that’s really required.
• So I think that you need some new models for public services which are radical and different.... And those models should enact very basic library principles about democratic rights to information, knowledge, sharing, common resources for private uses. But it’s going to require very, very different organisational models.
• I think that you would have to see the people who use your services not as users or consumers but as co-producers and co-designers, that it’s not a service you’re delivering to them. You’re giving them tools and a platform in which they can create things themselves.
• ...all of the evidence of Wikipedia, Linux, and even of MySpace, is that actually people like collaboration, participation, sharing knowledge, common platforms, ease of access: all the values that libraries stand for they like. And they like getting more of it through this technology and our task is to try and create a public culture which is as dynamic and open as these private cultures are being and exploiting it and applying it and using it with people to create new value.
• ..if we’re going to create a more integrated, genuinely equal society, actually access to knowledge becomes critical. And if we give up in the developed world on public platforms for knowledge embedded in libraries, if we let them wither, that idea will wither globally as well.

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The Communications Workers of America have a new and very informative web site called Speed Matters where they advocate a "comprehensive national high speed broadband policy to ensure that we all benefit from the telecommunications and information revolution."

One of the areas they highlight is government:

Governments increasingly rely on the internet as the means to provide information and forms for taxes, government programs, eligibility criteria, and other uses. People without access to such information are, in effect, penalized. Enrollment in the Medicare Part D drug plan, for example, relied on web-based communications. High speed interactive broadband should allow citizens to increase and improve their ability to participate in civic life.

The challenge they identify is that "The United States has failed to bring the benefits of this telecommunications revolution to most of our population. While more households are adopting broadband, our relative position in the world is worsening."

They note that there is very much still a digital divide:

There is an income digital divide: more than 62% of households with incomes over $100,000 subscribe to high speed broadband at home while just 11% of households with incomes below $30,000 subscribe. There is a rural/urban digital divide: only 17% of adults in rural areas subscribe to broadband compared to 31% in urban and 30% in suburban areas. And there is a farm/non-farm divide: only 15.8% of farm households have adopted broadband.

They further note that the FCC definition of "high speed" is tool slow and that "what Americans have come to expect from 'high speed Internet' is far slower than connections in other countries around the world." A typical DSL line has a speed of 200 kilobits per second (Kbps) (the FCC definition of high speed). Compare that to the fact that other countries have already established goals of 100 megabits per second (Mbps).

The site has lots of information, a document library, five key principles for improving the US's place in the high-speed Internet economy (U.S. is now 16th), a a blog, a speed test so you can find out how fast your own upload and download speeds are, and more.

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Amnesty International is launching a campaign to oppose censorship on the internet:

• Irrepressible

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression. Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.

The Irrepressible site has a pledge on internet freedom that you can sign online. You can also get a snippet of code that will "publish irrepressible fragments of censored material" on your own blog or other web site:

• Add irrepressible content to your site

(While our usual focus here at FGI is on U.S. government information, we are interested in issue of freedom on information world-wide.)

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Tech-ade blog (Federal Trade Commission)

Welcome to the Tech-ade blog, your gateway to continuous coverage of all aspects of the Federal Trade Commission’s upcoming hearings on Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade. This blog will explore new technologies and their impact on products and business practices, with emphasis on the implications such developments will have for the consumer over the next ten years.

A story about the blog: FTC creates blog to chronicle series on Internet tools by Aliya Sternstein. FCW (Oct. 25, 2006) Continue reading →

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Google seeks better access to government information By Daniel Pulliam, GovExec (October 25, 2006).

As much as 40 percent of the content on agency Web sites is invisible to Google's crawlers, [J.L.] Needham [a strategic partner development manager at Google] said, which means that for a majority of Internet users who do not know how to look beyond a search engine site, that information is effectively invisible. Needham said he is meeting with a variety of undisclosed agencies to discuss how the information housed in their databases can be made available in the search results from engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. One method would be to use Google Sitemaps..

Perhaps of even greater interest is this:

A Dec. 16, 2005, memorandum from Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, states that all agencies must set up their public information so that it is searchable by Sept. 1, 2006. It states that "increasingly sophisticated Internet search functions" can "greatly assist agencies in this area." Agencies also were required to provide all public data in an open format that allows the public to aggregate "or otherwise manipulate and analyze the data to meet their needs" by Dec. 31, 2005, according to a separate OMB memorandum signed by Johnson on Dec. 17, 2004.

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