11 Ways to the Library of 2012

Don't blink. It's only five years away. Inundated with the day-to-day duties working in a large academic library has sometimes removed me from the "larger" picture of what libraries look like not only to users, but ultimately how libraries will look like in the future. I've written a great deal about the Semantic Web and Web 2.0; but how do they fit libraries: physically and conceptually? Visions: The Academic Library in 2012 offers a meta-glimpse of how libraries might look like in 2012. As you'll notice, some of the features are suspiciously Web 2.0 and Library 2.0? Let's take a look, shall we?

(1) Integrated Library System - the system will recognize the patron and quickly adapt and respond to the patron's new questions and needs (A Semantic Web portal?)

(2) Information Available - collections will undergo dramatic transformations, as they will be largely patron-selected, featuring multi-media resources and databases, many provided collaboriatvely through extensive consortial arrangements with other libraries and information providers (Think longtail?)

(3) Access to Information - print-on-demand schemes will be developed utilizing the dissertation production experience of UMI but providing mechanisms by which the user can return the fresh, undamaged manuscript for credit, and for binding and future use (Kindle?)

(4) Study Space - Space for work and study will be adaptable, with easily reconfigured physical and virtual spaces (Information Commons? Learning commons?)

(5) Information Instruction - Training and learning support, delivered both in person and through appliance-delivered (desktop, hand-held, and small-group), videoconferencing, will characterize all this

(6) Information Printouts - Articles, videos, audios, an on-demand printing of various formats will not only be commonplace, but displays of titles will be coordinated with publishers and booksellers to enhance information currency, to market small-run monographs, and to generate revenues

(7) Organizational Aspects - Library staff will be engaged, networked, matrix-structured, and largely "transparent" unless the patron is standing inside the facility facing the individual

(8) Orientation - Library's perspective will be "global" - ubiquitous automatic translators will facilitate truly global information-accessing programs

(9) Computer Access - From OPACS to wireless access for collapsible laptops and personal appliances

(10) Financial - the viable library will have developed dependable revenue streams to facilitate ongoing innovation and advancement (Library as Bookstore model?)

(11) Consortia - Collaborating to create and publish academic journals and resources, particularly e-journals, e-books, and collections of visual resouces in various media (Open Access?)

Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings

Seasons Greetings to all. It is indeed a wonderful holidays as the Google Scholar has published an important piece to the Semantic Web literature. He's done it again, writing an concise and cogent piece on the key elements which differentiates Web 3.0 from Web 2.0. In other news, a reader recently made a comment from a previous entry which I found to be very interesting. Here's what he said:

I (as a librarian) found the article and the whole topic very important. I especially enjoyed the conclusion. You wrote that "Web 3.0 is about bringing the miscellaneous back together meaningfully after it's been fragmented into a billion pieces."I was wondering if in your opinion this means that the semantic web may turn a folksonomy into some kind of structured taxonomy. We all know the advantages and disadvantages of a folksonomy. Is it possible for web 3.0 to minimize those disadvantages and maybe even make good use out of them?

My response? It'll sound cliched and tired: it's really too early to tell. But although it's murky as to what the Semantic Web will look like, all directions point to the possibility that folksonomies will play a key role. Here's why:

(1) Underneath the messiness of the Web, is a fairly organized latent structure, whose backbones are web threads. A scale-free network is significantly dominated by few highly connected hubs.

(2) What this means is that folksonomies and tagging are in fact controlled vocabularies in their own right. Lots have been written about this. Recent studies have shown that the frequency distribution of tags in folksonomies tends to stabilize into power-law distributions. When a substantial number of users tag content for a long period of time, stable tags start appearing in the resulting folksonomy.

(3) Such a use of folksonomies could help overcome some of the inherent difficulties in ontology construction, thus potentially bridging Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. By using folksonomies' collective categorization scheme as an initial knowledge base for constructing ontologies, the ontology author could then use the tagging distribution's most common tags as concepts, relations, or instances. Folksonomies do not a Semantic Web make -- but it's a good start.

Information Science As Web 3.0?

In the early and mid-1950’s, scientists, engineers, librarians, and entrepreneurs started working enthusiastically on the problem and solution defined by Vannevar Bush. There were heated debates about the “best” solution, technique, or system. What ultimately ensued became information retrieval (IR), a major subfield of Information Science.

In his article Information Science, Tefko Saracevic makes a bold prediction:

fame awaits the researcher(s) who devises a formal theoretical work, bolstered by experimental evidence, that connects the two largely separated clusters i.e. connecting basic phenomena (information seeking behaviour) in the retrieval world (information retrieval). A best seller awaits the author that produces an integrative text in information science. Information Science will not become a full-fledged discipline until the two ends are connected successfully.

As Saracevic puts it, IR is one of the most widely spread applications of any information system worldwide. So how come Information Science has yet to produce a Nobel Prize winner?

But the World Wide Web changed everything, particularly IR. Because the Web is a mess, everybody is interested in some form of IR as a solution to fit it. A number of academic-based efforts were initiated to develop mechanisms, such as search engines, “intelligent” agents and crawlers. Some of those were IR scaled, and adapted to the problem; others were a variety of extensions of IR.

Out of all this emerged commercial ventures, such as Yahoo!, whose basic objective was to provide search mechanisms for finding something of relevance for users on demand. Not to mention making lots of money. Disconcertingly, the connection of the information science community is tenuous, and almost non-existent – the flow of knowledge is one sided, from IR research results into proprietary search engines . The reverse contribution to public knowledge is zero. A number of evaluations of these search engines have been undertaken simply by comparing some results between them or comparing their retrieval against some benchmarks.

As I've opined before, LIS will play a prominent role in the next stage of the Web. So who's it gonna be?