 Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, this is CNI Fall 2022 Live and Direct. Good to see some folks that I haven't seen in a while. Good to see some folks that I've seen recently but only on screen. I'll be the host and moderator this afternoon. My name is K. Matthew Dames. I am the 61st President of the Association of Research Libraries and the Edward H. Arnold Dean of Hesbrook Libraries and the University of Notre Dame Press. I am flanked by two esteemed illustrious colleagues. To my left is Dr. Meredith Evans, appointed director, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum and the 74th President of the Society of American Archives from 2018 to 2020. To my right, your left, Michael Meth is Dean of the University Library, San Jose State University and he is the author of the book, Blockchain in Libraries, published in 2019 on ALA Tech Source. A special shout out to Tony Zanders, the fourth member of this partnership. He couldn't join us today but he will join us later on as I tell you about something that we're going to do a little bit after on Tuesday. Couple of announcements and also then some framing points. I'm going to take presidential and moderator prerogative to announce that I'm hiring. No, your name's doing a group hire for three associate university librarians. If you want to know more about that, please see me. And then we're also, as I mentioned, Tony is convening the Lib NFT happy hour on Tuesday tomorrow, December 13th at 4.30 to 6.30 p.m. If you want to join us, please see one of us. So now let's get into a little bit of framing. We're presuming that folks in this room have a wide range of knowledge with respect to NFTs, crypto, the blockchain generally. And it'll range basically from advance to curious. And so we're going to try to make this as widely applicable as possible. Quick show of hands, who in this audience owns an NFT or a coin like Bitcoin or Ether? Okay, let's see, five, six. Another show of hands, who in this audience has actually minted their own NFT? Okay, got one over here. All right, that's good to know that helps us sort of figure out how we're going to go with this. We have no slides for this. I mean, when we say this is a crypto cipher, this literally is a conversation about a project that we are all very excited to be a part of. To that end, Meredith and I have been working on a white paper. If you had signed up for this session using SCED, we will send that to you. If you're interested in the white paper, which we'll finish at the conclusion of this conference, then please see, again, one of the three of us and we'll get that to you. The session is a follow-up to a January 2022 Twitter Spaces event that had all three of us, plus Tony, plus some other folks, talking about the role of blockchain and NFTs in the Academy January, and specifically with respect to libraries and when we open it up with Michael, we'll sort of bring that back into the conversation. This session is necessarily going to focus on digital assets rather than cryptocurrency. Clearly, you all have heard a lot about the cryptocurrency side of this. There is some slight applicability if you dig down into it, but for the most part, we are putting that to the side and we're looking at the digital asset portion of this blockchain problem. And ultimately, what we're doing here is premiering LibNFT to a broader audience. That's a live research project that involves the three of us and Tony's and we're focused on answering an empirical question. And that question is can blockchain technology generally and can NFTs specifically facilitate the economically sustainable use, storage, long-term preservation, accessibility of a library's special collections and archives? And so, to that end, one of the things that we talk about a lot because we talk about this a lot is, you know, how we actually got into this particular space. I got into it, I guess, relatively late. Only this year, I think Meredith also got into it relatively late. Michael literally has written the book on it and he and Tony Zanders were the ones that were sort of ping-ponging these ideas around early. And so, Michael, if you could start us off by sort of giving us, I guess, the origin story of how you and Tony got into the space in the first place. Sure. Thanks, Matthew. And maybe just one slight amendment which is, you know, at this point you're not late. You're just entering at this stage because I think, in general, when you look around the landscape, we're still fairly early days. But just by way of background, I've been interested in blockchain initially via crypto actually from probably like six or seven years ago. And then a few years ago, I realized I would like to know more about it and I started seeing some, as I saw some convergence because between conversations happening in the blockchain space and what I think we can do and do in libraries. And so, I figured the best way to learn something myself is to write a book about it. So, I approached ALA and they said, sure, go ahead and gave me a contract and then I ended up writing the book which is now available in open access. So, anybody who wants to catch up, just look up Blockchain in Libraries. You can read it. And that came out in 2019 towards the end of the year. As I continued on that thought, I started working and talking with several folks just always exploring like what can we do about Blockchain? One of the things is for a lot of people, there's still association with things like Silk Road or other nefarious entities. And then for others, they were seeing the promise. So, I tried to find the people who are interested in the promise of Blockchain. And I ended up in conversations with Tony who we've heard a few times now his name. And Tony is also the founder of SkillType. And so, we're talking from a training perspective about how does the training space apply to Libraries? And in there, somewhere the conversation popped up. You know, so, if Libraries should be engaged with the Blockchain, does SkillType have any content? And out of that came a conversation where we realized for both, I'll say Blockchain enthusiasts, whatever that may mean. But we found kinship. And so, we started having conversations about how does that apply to the Library space? And from there, we started focusing more on the distinctive special collections that Libraries hold. And we can talk a little bit more about why in a minute. But that's really where we went. And that's when we started engaging Matthew and Meredith for their expertise, respectively. Matthew for copyright, intellectual property and also legal perspective. And Meredith, of course, for our deep knowledge of archives and archival practice and special collections. And that's how we arrived here. But the underlying premise that we got to is if Libraries are already working on digital asset management and the Blockchain is a way to manage digital assets, is there not a connection? And if there is, how do we take what's in our collections that are items that are unique, they're distinctive, they have a lot of interest, not commercial interest, actually scholarly interest primarily, but also enthusiast interest. And how do we take these unique distinctive collections that we have committed to housing and preserving forever? And is there a way that we could maybe build around that models that allows, at the very least, engagement with the community? And again, there were some who raised their hands on the NFT space, so we can, I'm happy to answer some questions if you want to go down that pathway. And maybe in the best case scenario, is there a way that we can use these collections in a way that is driven by us from within the library to create policies, rules, et cetera, that allows to turn these unique collections that are already digitized in many cases or can be into the NFTs that we're talking about and then find a way to maybe even monetize them to actually fund future, either the special collection, most places that I know that I've worked at, certainly can use additional funds or maybe find other ways to monetize that as well. So that's a lot of the underlying premise and that brings us to today where we are chatting with all of you. Thanks, so Meredith, maybe we're not late, but we are certainly, this is the newer half of the room, Mike has experienced, so you and I talked about this late 2019 and then we were both on the Twitter Spaces event. I remember very specifically, because I was thinking about this strictly from the finance standpoint and not the blockchain standpoint, I literally said this territory just looks like the latest and greatest financial finesse, but I'm intrigued enough about the possibilities to sort of dig a little deeper into the technology and its applicability in this space. Now you've spent your entire career in archives, special collections. What intrigued you about this from a collection standpoint and intellectual standpoint or otherwise? Thanks, Matthew. So first let me say, these are my ideas. I'm a federal employee, so this is not representative of the federal government, anything I say. So just make sure my disclaimer is on record. What's intriguing about this project to me, specifically coming from a GLAM perspective, Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museum, is we are often challenged by financing preservation and maintaining the items in which we store and collect and continue to receive. And so this is just a great opportunity, I feel, to maintain our repositories in ways that we hadn't thought about. I also know that, you know, Libraries and Archives, sometimes we think we're at the cutting edge, but we don't put our whole body in, we put our toe in the water, and this is a real opportunity for us to consult and work with others to bring them on board before we miss it. We talked a lot about Web 2.0, and we're already now in Web 3.0, and we missed a lot in that transition. We don't want to miss this. This is an opportunity for us to do digital surrogates and so that we still maintain ownership of our items, but also engage a larger community, whether it's alumni or even broader globally, to bring attention to our repositories and support, whatever that support means to you, whether that's a number of likes, whether that's visitors or whether that's financial. We have an opportunity to take advantage of the new systems that are out there for us. So to me, that was the excitement of it all. And who better? I will toot our horns than archivists. I mean, that's what we do for a living, right? We look at things, we see the intrinsic value, we see the monetary value, we see the cultural heritage value of these items. We are really good at knowing what is not just popular, but what needs to be preserved for longevity, right? So that hundreds of years from now, somebody else can see it and know it and learn something new. That's what our expertise is. So why not combine the NFT, the new process, right? With our work so that we are remaining relevant and sustained in new ways. Thank you. So Michael, could you sort of give us sort of the frame this conversation? Could you sort of give us a nice, crisp sort of definition of what blockchain technology is, things that are associated with it like non-fungible tokens, again, which we're framing as digital assets and sort of help us distinguish this particular application and use from what we're hearing about with FTX and all the currency stuff. Because I think that's really important to separate those out. And your definitions can help us do that. All right, I'm gonna try to unpack that because there was a lot of different stuff in there. Right, so let's start just with the general, let's start with the general definition of what a blockchain is. Sure, so a blockchain, there are many definitions floating around. The one that I use is, and I'm gonna read this because I always forget to get all the words right, but blockchain is a logical concept that sequentially links verified transaction data together in an immutable record that lives in a distributed decentralized network. And what that means is you have basically the idea of computer readable program, so that's the logical piece in there. The sequential is the immutable record that we have that everything is lined up so you can see the provenance of items, you can see how everything is established, and depending on how the blockchain is set up is also auditable, and that's where the verified transaction comes in. So there's no question about who owns it, who doesn't own it. And the other part that's really important, certainly in the way blockchain is set up also, is that it lives in a distributed decentralized network. Meaning that we're going away from the one computer, from the server network, but we're really going through, if you imagine, sort of like a giant Google doc that gets life updated all over the place all the time. So that would be the first part of the blockchain. Let me see our next question, and we'll see where we go from there. All right, so the next question is, could you distinguish the blockchain from what we know as crypto or cryptocurrency? So, and I should make a couple, before I answer it, I'm just gonna say something else. So when we talk about blockchain, blockchain is a concept, but there are many blockchains that exist. So the most popular blockchain that people know about and the most well-known is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a single-purpose blockchain that was developed entirely for the benefit of the Bitcoin protocol. And when we think about blockchains, really it helps if you think of it almost like an operating system. And on that operating system, you can install different applications. And so the next largest protocol is the Ethereum protocol. Ethereum was born as a result of actually how single-purpose Bitcoin is. And so Ethereum was actually developed as a platform to develop other Bitcoin, I'm sorry, blockchain applications on top of that. You mentioned FTX. So it's really important then if you have that distinction to understand that blockchain does not equal crypto. Crypto is an application on the blockchain. Now FTX in particular is a particular DVS scam. I don't know how much you all care about financial research, but if you want to, we can get into it. But basically from what it looks like and what has been shared so far is that Sam Bankman-Freet, who's the founder of that company, came up with a way to arbitrage cryptocurrency prices between the US markets and Asian markets. He used that lag to make a lot of money. He realized there's an opportunity. Out of that, he built another business. The original business was called Alameda. Then he came up with the secondary, which was called FTX. And then he came up with a very devious plan to basically leverage the money he had at a ratio that is unfathomable because he basically got usually like when you borrow and again, I don't want to go to deep into that, but you borrow at a fraction of what the underlying asset is. In this case, the crypto. In this case, he actually went one-to-one, used that to make it look as if he had a lot of funding and used that to lever up even more. So thereby basically multiplying what he was doing. And so he came up with a Ponzi scheme in essence that broke apart once people started pulling at the threads. But at the core of this, you do have a blockchain and you have the applications including some sort of cryptocurrency on top of the blockchain. That's the fundamental. At the core, it was a financial finesse, as you called it, a financial scheme that defrauded people. But the problem was not the blockchain. The problem was that a nefarious actor found a way to leverage a technology like we've seen so many other cases. But the blockchain itself, one of the things that amazes me is so the first protocol was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, which is a person of unknown origin. It's just a nine-page white paper that was published that established what a blockchain is and then established Bitcoin as a digital payment infrastructure. It's open access to, I encourage you to look it up. It's in parts very easy to read and parts too mathematical for somebody like me, but it all worked out. What's amazing to me is that since the publication in 2009 and everything else that has happened since, the blockchain has never been hacked. So the blockchain itself has been proven to be resilient against any kinds of attacks. Whenever there is some kind of fraud committed, it's actually usually it's been human error. And that to me is pretty remarkable that with all the advances in technology that construct that he'd evolved still held up and holds up today. But that's partly why we're in this conversation, right? I mean, we scared you, we know. But the reality is if you have an NFT or you have something that's verifiable, right? And you get this really unique distinct number that nobody can take away from you that identifies this object, whatever it is. Whether it's a photograph or a painting or illuminated manuscript, whatever we've digitized that surrogate and you get into that and you buy that NFT, then you own a piece of that, right? And it's identifiable to just you. So there's a security in that, or I wouldn't be at the table. If I thought, oh, there'd be some crazy scheme, I'd be like, oh no. But there's ways to do this safely and authentically and legally, right? That will protect your assets, but also give you some, a broader audience, people that don't know your collection, which is very typical in archives, right? We're digitizing, we're digitizing, we're digitizing, and people still don't know our collections. They still don't know what we have. This is an opportunity to expand that to millions of other people around the globe, just to start. So Mary, let me come right back. Let me go to you, Michael, could you explain what an NFT is? And then I wanna come back to Meredith to talk about provenance, because it sounded like she was about to get into provenance. Yeah, which is exactly, I mean, that's the important thing that we're gonna talk about. Now, an NFT just for quick definition, the letters stand for non-fungible token, right? So meaning you have a unique item one-of-one that cannot be duplicated for something else. Now, when you look at NFTs themselves, there are many analogies that have been made. And when you start going into the areas where NFTs are being created, so you can look at different marketplaces like OpenSeas or whatever, you see there's actually many different types of NFTs that get developed. But just to maybe make that distinction, NFTs are an application on the blockchain, similar to how we talked about crypto. So just to help you out with that as well. Now, what happens is, when you hear about NFTs and you hear people either purchasing ridiculous amounts of them or money, I'm sure everybody here at some point or another heard about the board ABIAC club or something like that, that is the application that you're buying and you're buying a digital surrogate of something. In those cases, these were specifically designed to be sold as NFTs. And what people are buying is actually less the image that they're buying, which I know a lot of people are saying like, oh, that's just Photoshop or something like Image Maker from Who Knows When, that kind of stuff. But what people were buying when they were buying those NFTs and at the peak they were selling for half a million dollars plus, they were buying access to a network. They were buying access into, it's like their entry pass into something. And so that was an extreme example of a company that figured out how to really leverage that for marketing and then also generate the value for that. There are other type of NFTs that I think are maybe a little bit more akin to what we're looking to do and talk to you about, which is, and some of you might, let's see how many Justin Bieber fans we have in this room, but Justin Bieber created an NFT. And so there was an NFT project, they sold about 10,000 of those. The purpose of that NFT was to create engagement with the fan base. And the way it worked is that because if you own that NFT and there's something about public and private keys which we can talk about as well, sorry, there's like a lot of tangents in this and it's hard to force it into one track, but what it allowed the holders of the NFTs is to receive presents or gifts or perks that Justin Bieber or whoever's managing, I'm sure it's not himself, to them. So for example, if you were to go to a concert and you buy your regular ticket and you show that you have this NFT, you would have access to a special area that's closer to the stage. You might be invited to an album drop or a song drop, those kind of things. And so when we're talking about that, that's kind of where we see a lot of the application. It is this level of engagement that you can create. Now to also make this part clear, if you bought an NFT of Justin Bieber, you're not buying Justin Bieber. What you're doing is you're buying a digital surrogate. And this is why NFTs are so intriguing for us too as we're talking about it as a solution for some of our problems that we have for challenges is that if you are buying an NFT, you're buying that NFT. You're not buying what is behind that NFT. So if I say this was the most special iPhone in your special collection you've ever seen, if I turned this into an NFT, you would not be buying this iPhone. You'd be buying an image of it. So as the owner of this iPhone, I still maintain this. So whatever I have in my special collection still stays with me. I'm not selling commercial rights unless I specify that. I'm not selling any other rights to this other than an image. And so that then you might ask, well, why would I wanna buy that? And to that I say it's kind of like this affinity marketing that we do. How many people have bought pictures of the Mona Lisa, have bought the print, have bought the mug, have bought the t-shirt, or Da Vinci's first touch or anything like that. This is kind of the same idea. There's an opportunity to engage with a community and allow them access to something that otherwise they might never have any kind of ownership with any kind of feeling or are not able to connect with. Thank you for that. So I want to, with that basic foundation, I wanna engage Meredith in sort of a conversation about provenance and then sort of tie this back into the technology. So, and I'm gonna try not to chuckle here when I talk to Meredith because Meredith and I not only are friends, but we have worked together on projects. So some of the stuff that she's gonna say is gonna evoke memories of projects that we've been involved in, whereby let's just say there were issues. And we recognize the issues. One of the major issues when we talk about archives and distinctive collections is the issue of provenance, provenance of the actual item. But then there's a whole set of documentation, often legal documentation, that is supposed to attest to the provenance. And let's just say things can get a little sticky. So provenance is basically the origin of the item, right? You track the ownership and the multiple hands that this item goes through to get to your repository. That's in layman's term what it is. When you have that, there's a D to gift, right? There's always some legal document at your institution. And I think we learned from the web becoming the web and digitization that a lot of those old agreements don't work, right? But we also don't have any way to change them necessarily because we can't find the people who sign them. So we have a lot of stuff, fantastic stuff in our repositories that we're not sure what we can and cannot do. So actually, can I just, so there actually is a way because one of our, right. But one of the ways actually is to go into court and petition a court to actually change the intent or the language or the interpretation of the actual deed of gift, which can happen, not ideal. Or you can do due diligence and send some certified mail three times and make some decisions. There's multiple ways to change that. Although you have to deal with your general counsel so hopefully you've made good friends. But with that, we digitize things and we put things on the web and then we realize we can't put them on the web because somebody's granddaughter or great granddaughter says you can't do that so you take it down. If you make a surrogate, right, and then you do an NFT, it's a different type of ownership. You're owning this item in a separate way. So kind of avoids provenance in some respects. The challenge is that. But I think most importantly to me, this project helps us rethink how we do our donor gifts and donor deeds because we are collecting digital objects now, right? And so when you look at that, you got to see the authenticity of that. And when you do an NFT, there's this verification. There's other ways to stabilize that part of your collection that's meaningful and it'll be useful to you in the end. But I really like this project also because of what Mike was saying about the audience. It really is true. People get a print of the Mona Lisa all the time or they, you know, I used to get questions all the time about an object we had and people wanted to take a picture and make a T-shirt and we're like, no, you can't do that. But under this, you can have some ownership of it and you can be in a community that enjoys those same things with a lot less ease and less stress. So, yeah. Can I just add one thing? Just very quickly to add to that. From the library perspective also, you know, many of you are in roles, positions that fundraising is probably some portion of it. One of the most common things that we lament in libraries typically is that we run up against our advancement offices. We don't have the graduates from the library, right? So the colleges have claimed them all. We get to pick whoever has given to us, right? And then we get to work those a little bit more. Doing something like this allows us, if we structure it the right way to actually engage community that hasn't graduated from the library. But it could be affinity based on your university or your institution, wherever you are in the glam sector. But alternatively also what it does is, so I'm wearing, for example, today a vest that has Keith Herring designs in it. If I had the Keith Herring archive, I can now engage a community globally that is a Keith Herring enthusiast community. So actually it allows me as an organization to expand my outreach based on some interest affinity that extends far beyond the alumni base that the institution has. And that's the other opportunity that is tremendous if you think about that. And then around that, there's even more ideas that can evolve once you really start playing out the scenarios. So let's sort of stay with the whole community thing because one of the things that the three of us have talked about is the community aspects of this including sort of the importance of investigating this possibility in a way that is prioritizing the values and the ways of working within libraries, archives, museums and galleries. So Meredith, could you talk about this not only in sort of within this respect of this blockchain technology but generally because one of the things that occurs to me is that we have these different approaches to doing this. And yet what we have talked about is doing this project or at least investigating this project in a way that would be consistent with the glam sector sorts of value. So could you talk a little bit about that aspect of it and why you think that's important? Yeah, I think we have a lot of things in our collection that are undiscoverable, right? And so we have the one person that knows we have it and they come in to look at it or they wanna copy of it or they wanna touch it or whatever their challenge is. This gives us a different type of community. This gives us a community of basically a fan base. You use Justin Bieber as an example but there's an illuminated manuscript in somebody's collection that nobody knows anything about that can create that kind of fervor and camaraderie around it. Something that we've never publicized, we never hyped it up, what we store it. We preserve it, we take care of it and no one's ever seen it. So we can have a finding aid, we can send something on Twitter. It still doesn't mean that people really know that it exists, right? We still are in that very collection based mentality of if we can find that one faculty member that will teach this or use this in their class once a year they'll know about it. This gives us an opportunity to showcase something to a much broader audience and create some camaraderie around it and a fan base around it that puts us on a map in a different way. The perk is we could benefit financially from this activity but the other issue is that people just know who we exist and having argued for distinctive collections my entire career, what's the number one thing a provost or a dean always ask you? Well, how many visitors have you had, right? And now we're like, how many clicks have you had? How many likes have you had? As if that changes the value of the item in your collection that's worth half a million dollars. This is an opportunity to use what you've gotten appraised that you own and care for and make it much more marketable and much more seen. So to that end and I'll sort of put this out there to both of you because both of you have, you know, are literally today running these types of institutions. If you are in a position where you have to sort of, you know, bring this to a provost or to a lead, a government leader. What's how do you, how do you present the opportunity? How do you talk about, you know, Lib NFT? How do you talk about the blockchain? How do you talk about this in a way where they can sort of see the possibility and what do you emphasize when you talk to them about this? Well, I'll tell you, I have, I guess I'm very lucky in a sense that I'm somewhat in a privileged position. I work in Silicon Valley. So people generally know about the blockchain already quite a bit, but it's really trying to, and even with that, I will say though, there's still resistance in some quarters. But for us, it's fairly straightforward. I mean, the way I explained it over here, it's basically, it's an opportunity to find a way to turn the library and our special collections from what is purely a cost center and find something that we have committed to into perpetuity and find a way to support the campus by turning some of that collection into NFTs that can be used for alumni engagement, for donor engagement, for community engagement and possibly turn it into some kind of a revenue income source possibly, that gets everybody to perk up. Then you get into the next level conversations, which is where of course it gets complicated and depends on how sophisticated your organization is, whether, so if you've done all of that, how do you manage it? And of course, if you do get to the money conversation, then it's a, so can we get the crypto or how are we gonna flow the funds through from one direction to the next, which we're still working out quite frankly. So that stuff gets really complicated. But I found that the conversations I've had, generally there's fairly little resistance and a lot of curiosity, especially in the senior administrator, Franks, they get the idea. Meredith, just generally from the same question to you and you can take any of your varied experiences. I mean, I would say the same thing. I just think it's a little more oddities in it, right? You know, at one of my previous jobs, we had a group very enthusiastic about miniature books and some that were very, very high in value. People would come from all over the country to do just to see these miniature books. And I think if we had NFTs, we could do that in a way that's fundable. We could do symposiums. We could bring in this very enthusiastic group all over the world for miniature books, something that I've had to justify my entire career, specifically to provost who are like, why do people want this? So I think there's a, you know, a simpler example we were talking earlier about were athletic photos, athletic departments. Maryland athletic department maintains their own archive, LSUs. Athletic department maintains a lot of those archives, but now they have photographs. And when you have a famous athlete, you can have now NFTs where you're not giving them the original, but you're buying a piece of support or fan base that's gonna benefit that department and ultimately a special collections. So I think there's really interesting ways to utilize this without having to do an expensive event and trying to digitize and a huge map, just trying to get these things to people when there's already a base for it. And I think it also brings attention to things that only a few scholars really know and understand and utilize. So for me, it's a marketing piece. The fundraising or whatever money that's generated, revenue generates is sort of a bonus, but to archives and special collections that have to justify their existence based on the number of people that have seen an item or come through the building or touch their website, this is a new way to bring in a much broader audience to kind of keep those numbers up in a way that'll blow people's mind and maybe get you a staff person. What? I'm surprised. To give a concrete example, I'm just looking at the date. Last summer and summer 21 that is, Berkeley created an NFT of a Nobel Prize winning formula by Jim Allison and they were able to sell that for $50,000 as a singular item. So that's the kind of, I don't wanna promise anybody that's what you should expect, but it shows what's possible of a singular NFT. All right, so before we go to questions, let me sort of bring it back into the actual project. So we're involved with this Lib NFT project with Tony. And again, we're approaching this as a research project. So when we say a research project, we have empirical questions that we think are interesting to pursue that we believe might actually have some positive benefit economic or not to this community. But we also believe that if we find that there is no economic return or if we find that somehow the technology is not apt for what we're trying to do, the findings, finding that out also has some value, right? So that's sort of the nature of a research project. You may find, okay, we've got the next you know, sort of academic or glam sector Sotheby's or we may find that we're all bupkus. However, finding out that we're bupkus is actually a good thing because now people don't have to waste time. We've answered the question. We've answered the question. And so with that, again, let me sort of repeat the question and when we send out this white paper, the question will be in it. Again, LibNFT is an applied research project that asks and seeks to answer a fundamental empirical question. Can blockchain technology and NFTs specifically facilitate the economically sustainable use storage, long-term preservation and accessibility of the library's special collections and archives? And so that's what we are looking to put together. Is anybody from UCSB here? Hi, how are you? Okay, so we have partnered with UC Santa Barbara as a partner to help us start beginning to ferret out the answers to these questions. Great, we've not met, but great to meet you in person. Oh, we did meet. Okay, all right, sorry. Take that back, good to see you. One of the things that I'm also interested in, and this sort of goes, we talked about this, is there's so much in terms of generally applicable work that we already know about that applies to this. So for example, Meredith talked about deeds of gift, right? And the general inapplicability of deeds of gift to sort of a digital environment generally, and that's just the web, we're not even talking about sort of the blockchain. So how do we navigate that? So this is sort of some of the questions that we're working on with UCSB. Another question that comes to me pretty often is sort of what are the copyright implications or are there copyright implications involved? Quick answer is yes. Another piece of the puzzle is in terms of security, sort of the security of the actual, how secure is the actual blockchain? And so we're looking essentially for a handful more partners to sort of engage in this journey with us to answer these questions to again, see whether or not, where does this actually come out? And the reason this is important to all of us, and then we'll go to questions, is I'll tell a story based upon my time in D.C. So I was living in Washington, D.C. basically when things were really getting hot and heavy with the web and search. So the early days of Google, Google used to have this bright yellow blade, server blade that you would put in and it would sort of run the searches off of this server blade. And at the time, this is early, this is early odds, 0102. They were hiring every librarian they could find to go through and work on metadata and work on indexing for their search engine. And I know, because I was a sub, sub, sub contract on some of these projects. A lot of those librarians and a lot of people who were working on those projects are not working on those projects anymore for a variety of reasons. But one of the things that I noticed in that sort of transfer, in that sort of what we would call web 2.0 is we put a lot of we, this community, some of you may have been working on these projects, put a lot of time, effort, energy and expertise into helping build that community and that service so that it could be the best that it could be. And now we're in a position where we're kind of paying through the nose for a lot of these same services whether it be through cash, I'm a campus that uses the Google suite for email and all these other things. Or with your own personal data. And so one of the things that we're concerned about and part of the reason we're going through this project is to say we don't know exactly where this is going but if history repeats itself at all, we need to not only be in the room when these things happen but we need to shape not only the conversation but how any market actually manifests itself. And so our skin and the game collectively is let's find out what this is about and let's share the findings with this community. So with that, we will now be glad to answer your questions. There's a microphone right there. Hi, Matthew. I'm from the sound of it, it sounds like Joe Lucia from Temple. It is. You are right in the spotlight. I'm gonna admit profound skepticism about this idea. And the reason is NFTs are speculative assets, right? And so let's say you sell an NFT for a book in your special collections and you sell it on exchange for $100. The person buying that is buying it as a speculative object to accrue value so they can resell it, right? And the NFT market has collapsed 97% since January one of this year, right? It's parallel to collapse in crypto. So I'm really nervous about the idea that we would be selling what amounts to speculative assets into crypto space for our cultural heritage collections. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And the challenge is that when you look at the crypto world, in general, and including the NFT world, there aren't a whole lot of good actors there, period, period. So there's a real issue here around, if I could sell some tokens, that might get me some money for a short term, but the long-term viability of the NFT as a essentially bearer of value has already been fairly profoundly questioned by the market just this year. So this makes me very nervous on behalf of our community because it's entering into a speculative game, really. And unless you're gonna hold the NFTs and be the speculators, which it doesn't sound like, that's the plan. The plan is to put the things out on a market, right? And exchange of some kind, which is what's been collapsing around the world, FTX, Binance, there's a whole bunch of them that have collapsed in the last month, right? So there's a lot of weird stuff going on in this world right now. It's very troubling. So I mean, so the experiment is, can you mint NFTs and sell them and then get them out into like, in terms of the actual sale of NFTs for our objects, to see if there's a market for them to determine if we can make money off of them. I'm just curious what the experiment is. Okay, so you wanna start or you want me to start? Go ahead. As you can see, we're both like, I appreciate the comment, Joe. And I would say I'm gonna call it a provocation. And in the sense that it's a thoughtful provocation in that if we consider NFTs as speculative assets, you're right. But I don't think that's the framing that we're coming at with this conversation. And that's the reason why we kind of joke, I keep on saying, we're like the three musketeers where maybe blockchain and innovation, we got copyright and then we have archives and then we've also partnered up with somebody who's actually coming from the commercial side. But what we're trying to do is firstly, bring our library, our glam sector, our information sector values to it. So I think that is first of all, a big distinction between some of these projects that you see going down and failing. And that has really not been a big secret I would say. I mean, if you look at the, to start an ICO, which was an initial coin offering, like I could set something up in five clicks and it could have been mics, whatever coin. And if I found a market for it, that's great. But that's not what we're going for here. What we're going for here is, as you mentioned, it's about preservation, it's about engagement, it's about creating community. And if as a byproduct of that, you find a way to also find commercial value for that, commercial value is in the eye of the purchaser. So if somebody thinks it's worth something, it's worth something to them. That's not really our main objective here. So, but I get your point. The other thing that I would say is, when you look at the majority of NFT projects that are either failing or have dropped, and you're right, there is a correlation between the value of crypto, that asset, the class going down as well, of course, then NFTs go down, is this is a very different thing. If you're buying a digital surrogate of something, or digital creation, an NFT or something that has a community doesn't exist and has to be built, that's very different than actually working with an NFT of a community that already exists and has, in some cases, hundreds of years of background and history. So we're actually taking that, which is sort of like a lot of what's created in the wild, wild West. And what we're seeing is, in some cases, succeeding in more cases, most obviously failing, and saying, how do we take those lessons, leverage the underlying technology of the blockchain, and shift it to a space that we want to and can't operate in? So, to that end, I would say the speculative asset is a legit challenge for those who are positioning it as a speculative asset. That is not the purpose here. Yeah, I was gonna say the beginning. I feel like, for my perspective is, how do we get the world to see us? And this is one of those ways. If we benefit financially from it at some point, so be it, but the reality is, my small community on my campus only, and what maybe 5% of those people on that campus know we even exist. Here's an opportunity to have a global community recognize us for whatever item that we've put forth. And to me, that's a win. We spend a lot of time scanning documents, manuscripts, taking photographs, doing, you know, quaint exhibits, doing programming, you know, we spend a lot of time, a lot of time, you know, and we see five people, right? And so, if you balance the amount of labor that we are doing to make our things discoverable, and it's still not discoverable, or acknowledged that it's discoverable, you know, this is an opportunity to hit a whole nother community that's vibrant that'll say, hey, I know that place, and this is why. And I'm okay with that. Yeah, I alluded to this sort of in the opening. Again, and the, you know, in our Twitter spaces, I said this all looked like the latest and greatest financial finesse. I think that there is some truth to that in one aspect of this space, right? But one of the first things that we said was we wanted to focus this conversation on digital assets, and everybody in this room is familiar with, has control over, is interested in, has the duty to preserve, conserve, distribute, make accessible digital assets. We wanted to have that conversation, which in the white paper we call sort of the group two conversation, and to distance ourselves or not get into the financialization aspect of it, right? And what I would argue, and actually, we do argue this in the white paper, is that because things have tanked on the financial side, that actually, now we got all the, you know, all the Matt Damon, Larry David, all that stuff, we can put that to the side, right? All the FOMO have, you know, have funds staying poor. We can put all of that to the side, and we can say, okay, what do we really have in terms of the technology that may, may advance what we're doing in the glam sector, right? So put all the finance, put Sam Bankman-free, put FTX, Binance, put all that stuff to the side. Everything that you see in Wall Street Journal Bloomberg, put that to the side, and let's talk about this, and this is what the project is about. Let's talk about this from a blockchain and digital asset perspective. What does this mean to us as a community and for the future of distinctive collections and archives? That's actually on, there it is, perfect. Sorry, I wrote my question down. So blockchain technology can have a pretty outsized carbon footprint, and I'm wondering how you reconcile the vast amount of computational power necessary to accomplish this work and its negative impact on the environment and whether or not this is something you all are considering. Mike, you wanna take that? Sure. So the straightforward answer is the blockchain itself, because it is computational, requires a lot of energy. So no denying that. I think most recently I saw some stat that estimated that blockchain, if it was a nation, would consume something like the 20, would be number 27 in terms of power consumption. So without a doubt. However, I don't wanna, while not wanting to minimize that, what I would suggest is that there's a bunch of other factors to consider, which is number one, innovation takes energy. And we are working in a space that is very computationally intensive. I have not seen anybody produce the same kind of data for how much big data calculations cost, how much the storage of special collections or other things cost. And we're not having those kind of same conversations necessarily when we're talking about other, also tools that we're using in our environment that are using a carbon footprint. So most of us either flew or drove over here, that kind of stuff. So in some ways, and again, this is not to belittle the environment impact, I would say there is a cost to doing business in quotation marks if you want. The other thing that that's happening is that there are innovations in blockchain that you're seeing right now that are also really like shifting the consumption itself. There are two points or two things that I want to, in particular I want to point to, which is one, there's innovation happening where there's thermal energy capture that is, so where you have oil fields, for example, usually you have a lot of burn off. So a lot of the miners that are used for blockchain transactions are now being collocated to those kind of locations or using hydropower, other sources of energy as well. So not all the consumption of energy and the creation is necessarily bad energy if you will in that sense. And energy also, if you know about the transfer of energy, there's loss. So by locating them closer, you're actually capturing some of those, that loss and turning into efficiency. The other thing that happens is, and Cliff made a comment this morning about how innovation and thinking can lead to improvements in energy consumption, is that, as I mentioned, not all blockchains are the same. So the Bitcoin blockchain is one that's gonna stay the way it is. It's built on a concept called proof of work. It takes a good size amount of computational power to basically transact on that blockchain. However, on the Ethereum blockchain, which I mentioned earlier, there was a change and the changes that they went from proof of work to something called proof of stake. And we can get in details of that if you would like, but the short version of that is by making a change in how the blockchain gets verified, the energy consumption was dropped by at least 99%. So what we now know in what I consider the really early days of still blockchain is something that we're going to be seeing changes in. One further comment, which is the blockchain itself, as I mentioned, there's not only a singular blockchain. And what we are typically talking about when we're talking about energy consumption, we're talking about what's called a public blockchain. The public blockchain is one where the entire data set of transactions is accessible. So if anybody here wants to become a Bitcoin miner, you can go download the entire data set of all Bitcoin transactions, at least the publicly available portions, of course. And you can start running a node right now and you can start mining. However, there's something also called a private blockchain or hybrid blockchains. And those ones allow you to completely reset the requirements for how you verify transactions differently. And in doing so, you can also massively, massively decrease the energy consumption. So I would say like there's a conversation to be had to make sure we're in the right spaces, but the reality is yes, there is power consumption. I would just add, don't we want to be at the table? Like energy is important, I get that, but for us not to participate at all to me, I'm challenged by that because we don't want to be, we don't want to miss it. We just need to be at the table so that as these things evolve, we can contribute to that. And we can contribute our ideas and make it better along the way. But to not participate, we can't make the improvements that are needed. All right, if you're an institution, oh, we got one more, because that looks like, that sounds like- So many, it's Levine. Okay, hi. I'm Melissa Levine at the University of Michigan Library and Matthew and I have been arguing for like a decade. So there's tons of things. My only sort of comment slash question is the assumption of your motivation is looking at this in terms of like elevating the visibility of our collections and what we can do with them and those kinds of things. We've been digitizing collections for the last 30 years. And if that ain't working, I think we also need to look at that underlying question of if we're digitizing and they're not coming to the party, are we doing the right thing? Because digitizing like wasn't a core activity of museums, libraries, archives 30 something years ago, not that long ago. In the 90s, we were looking at things like the museum education, and MESL was a museum education site licensing program, which is actually kind of an interesting jumping off point for like looking back at like what's new and how do we get on, participate appropriately. I just, this is, I'm like listening to this and thinking okay, there's no bad blockchain. There's only bad blockchain users or something. But there's like this underlying question. That's what I found myself thinking, but there is this underlying question about like not just the things that you're talking about, but are we putting our resources into the right things in the first place? So I think that's actually a great place to end because it really is, it sort of to me what it, what Melissa's sort of question statement sort of brings to me is all right, again, we came here to say we have this empirical question. We have additional empirical questions. Let's figure out the answers to these empirical questions and we can do it without necessarily relying on the financialization aspect of this. So if you are interested in having your institution be involved in Lib NFT project, you can see one of us or you can go to libnft.com. Meredith Evans, Michael Meth, K. Matthew Dames. Thank you very much. Thank y'all.