 Hi everyone. Can you hear me? Is it working? Great. So I'm here to this morning to mix together some history with some theoretical frameworks and to work through a practical example or two for how libraries, archives, and museums can connect with people and communities over the web. The talk is about the history of community and social interaction on the web and the role that libraries and archives and museums can play and should play in this area in the future. So to start with, libraries, archives, and museums are sites of community memory. They're repositories of knowledge. They're places where wisdom is organized and synthesized and made available. I think community memory is such a great word for the social function that libraries, archives, and museums play. And it turns out that it was also a really great name for something else. So here's a picture of a computer memory terminal. This one is on display as part of the Computer History Museum's collection in Mountain View, California, which is a name you might recognize as the headquarters for Google. Community memory is widely credited as one of the first computer bulletin board systems, or a BBS. For those unfamiliar, BBSs are the ancestors of most of the functionality for social networks and for web forums before them. The computer memory ran from 1973 to 1975. Terminals were set up in Berkeley, California, next to an analog bulletin board. And another terminal was set up in the Mission Street Library in San Francisco. So even at this point, libraries were involved. This is a bit from the brochure that came with the community memory that they had put together, that strong, free, non-hierarchical channels of communication, whether by computer modem, pen and ink, telephone or face-to-face, are the front line in reclaiming and revitalizing our communities. Here's a picture of one of the ones in the record store. I kind of like the cardboard box over it. This is around 1975. So I start here because I think there's something really significant about the fact that even before there was a worldwide web, there was already a sense that network computing technology could serve a potent role in facilitating community memory, a concept that I think resonates with the missions of our institutions as well. So more than 40 years ago, these terminals and cardboard boxes showed the idea about what sort of community and memory could be on the web, what online communities could be. And they sort of set the framework for what is a massive industry of social networks, of just the word social, right? You just say social next to things. And what's interesting with that is there's actually a ton of stuff out there, a ton of books, shelves and shelves filled with books about how to host, how to run, how to manage or otherwise operate online communities. Discussions, this is where discussions and creative works and all kinds of other information on the web are being created. It's really the basis of a global knowledge base that we all carry devices in our pockets and we can now access, or many of us do at least. So with the web growing into this online community memory role, where does that leave those of us who work in libraries, archives and museums? To what extent can our organizations or should our organizations become of the web? How should library places and spaces change and shift in the era of the web? What are the unique values that our organizations can and should bring to that process? And so what I'm looking at here is sort of all tied up in these questions and that's where we'll go and I'll share a bit of a roadmap. I'll sort of bring us back to this at various points because an hour is a good chunk of time. So I've sort of broken this into some chapters. This comes with a point of view. This is sort of from me and where I've been and so I'll share a bit of the back story that brought me to the way that I think about these things. I'll then work through a set of three different conceptual frameworks that I think are really important for grappling with and framing what has happened with the development of online communities and how we can think about that integrating with our own values. And then I'll attempt to apply some of that or no, then I'll talk about some stories from the history of designing online communities. So that's that stack of books. I'll pull some of those books out and we'll look through them together. And then I'll offer in number four a way that I think we can shift our mindset to a concept called One Big Library which I'll get into more when we get there. And then in five I'll work through what I think is a much more very down-to-earth and pragmatic example of how this can play out. So first off, some background on me. Ten years ago I started as the Technology Evangelist at the Center for History and New Media. And that was I have business cards that say Technology Evangelist. For those unfamiliar, I was working on Zotero which is a free open source tool for organizing research. I was really focused on trying to gather together and build a community of users and to some extent developers working on this open source tool. So on the right you can see the tool in action. You're looking at a library catalog, in that case the Library of Congress catalog and I'm saving the interpretation of cultures from Clifford Geertz into my little library and I can keep it around and drag and drop it and make bibliographies and all kinds of great stuff with it. Annotate it and work with it. And then on the left you can see my dedication to the open source software movement and my wife Margie's here who can attest to this. That's me on our honeymoon on a cruise wearing my Zotero t-shirt. And so I worked there for four years and then I moved to the Library of Congress. So I worked at the Library of Congress on a range of things over four years. Here I can be seen clearly I haven't forgotten to shave on the day that they took my photo for the newspaper but with the Jefferson building in the background. So demonstration that I was there. While I was there I worked on Viewshare which is a really neat service that we developed that allows product management. I sort of worked through the development process on this and oversaw the launch of this tool that lets people from libraries, archives and museums around the world upload collection data and create visual interfaces to them. I also helped establish the National Digital Stewardship Alliance network of orgs focused on long-term access to digital information. I co-chaired the infrastructure working group, the one with the two gears. I also picked out the icons which is a lot of fun but so the two gears that was what I was working on. We did a lot of work trying to make it easier for cultural heritage organizations across the country to ensure long-term access to digital information. And then there was one really exciting bit when I was at the Library of Congress where I was conscripted and spent half of my time for a year organizing the digital online exhibition of materials from the Carl Sagan papers and a range of other collections that had to do with the play font of the world or the history of astronomy. And so this is what will probably be a highlight of my career. Me showing Bill Nye the Science Guy. So I'm showing Bill Nye the Science Guy Carl Sagan's papers which was pretty fun. So that's what I was doing at the Library of Congress and then in January of this year I took a new job as the senior program officer at the Institute of Museum and Library Services responsible for a portfolio of grants around an idea we call the National Digital Platform. So they put up this press release when I took the job which I thought was really neat. My mom framed it which I think is pretty cute. And so as for those unfamiliar the Institute of Museum and Library Services has mentioned my Andy in the beginning serves the 120,000 libraries and 35,000 museums in the museums in the United States. So big, small, public, academic tribal, college, you name it, all kinds of libraries, all kinds of museums. We do a lot of things but the main thing we do is support them through grant funding projects and programs. I work in the Office of Library Services most directly focused on a program that focuses on education and training grants so 21st century librarianship and then our National Leadership Grants program which is sort of competitive grants that further the field of library services. So it's my job to try and leverage the grants we make in this area to encourage libraries across the country to better team up by the nature of our legislation these programs have a national focus but it's worth underscoring that the nature of the Web is such that most of the content and the interoperable systems, the things that we're sort of supporting through these in one country are everything that we do and work on there sort of better supports their function and use internationally. I was talking with someone from the National Library yesterday who was really excited about one project EPAD that we funded which they're using here as well. So it's definitely an international ecosystem of software. I'll talk about this National Digital Platform concept more later but at this point I'll just touch on it to say that we're trying to encourage libraries, archives and museums to invest in and then leverage and benefit from the work of other libraries, archives and museums and the development of shared digital services systems and infrastructure. All of this is in many ways very possible because of the Web and as such it's a big part of the story I'll explore today. So that's a run through of where I've been and what I'm working on. I started at a very small digital humanities center which created tools for historians, libraries, archives and museums and because of the Web was able to have a really large international impact and then I moved on and worked at what is arguably the largest library in the world where I worked on tools to try and make collections easier to share and visualize and now I work at a U.S. government agency working to catalyze activity across libraries, archives and museums in the United States so with all that I've still had a research trajectory that I've been working on and this talk is in some sense part of trying to bring those two pieces together. So back when I was at the University of Wisconsin before I worked at the Center for History and New Media I was interested in what people learned from playing video games. It turned out as I got more and more into that the most interesting parts of where people were learning in video games weren't in the flashy games they were actually in discussion forums like this so, you know, the discussion forums where people hashed out how things work or how things could work better, how you might make the history of science work more coherently in the video game or more accurately here you can see one player of the game Civilization from Australia, right, he's got his country, his location in there is Australia arguing about the importance of windmills and nationalism and feudalism was a small sample of the vast pools of argumentation that's happening in online communities so I was exploring these sorts of things and then I became really interested in the software that runs these sorts of things and so I told my dissertation committee that I was really interested in writing my dissertation about the history of software that's used to run online communities and two of my three committee members said that's really boring, you shouldn't do that and I thought about it and I said okay maybe no, you're gone, new committee, we're doing this and that resulted in my book which is also my dissertation, this is designing online communities and I apologize for the long title but it's very complicated, right so designing online communities, how designers, developers, community managers, and software, structure, discourse and knowledge production on the web, this is the name of my book and my dissertation which are very similar, seriously though you don't have to buy the book you can get the copy of this either from my website or my university published the dissertation in its institutional repository and that is functionally part of this global network of scholarship through institutional repositories which is one of those things that I think has very dramatically, I liked Andy sharing the things that we still have all the same big problems but you think about something like how since 2002 almost all the universities have these repositories that they provide access to the publications of researchers and things like that and I think that's a huge accomplishment and it's part of the challenges that it's like so what, yeah we did that, what's next, right, and so you can get this online for free and read it, a lot of the talk today we'll draw from that as well but that book and the dissertation are really again, this is the stack of books again, it's functionally a study of these books actually so books about how to set up and run a BBS or forums or social networks how to add social functionality to websites but these books are about more than that, that's the sort of surface level of what the books are about they're actually about how we design relationships, right, because this is sort of the interfaces that we use to interact with each other, they're very much about what do we call the people that we connect with over the web, are they visiting us are we their host, are they our members is this community something that they own or do we own it, can you own community concepts or sort of rife in these spaces and so as the web browser increasingly becomes our point of entry into the town square as the designers of web forums increasingly design our primary public and civic forums, it's really important to start thinking critically about who controls them and how people are treated and sort of the ethics of all this and the way that I sort of worked my way into this started back when I was working on Zotero so to make this concrete, I'll work through this example, like many open source software projects, we had web forums and so this is a picture of Zotero's web forums today but it's an old post from 20 time, the forums serve a key role in helping users get involved in projects, they ask questions, they find answers, they search this knowledge base of information that's built up over time in the forums, it was sort of this platform where ideas were refined, new features were suggested and explored, it really served as this fulcrum for engagement around the software. So at one point I got really interested in this idea that we should get post-rank, so we should have, you should see next to someone's name how many times they've posted and then maybe we should have ranks, like you're intermediate and then you're a beginner or you're advanced, so based on the amount of time that you've worked in the community, so I went out to try and find that and I thought, what software projects, we didn't build our own forum software, we just used something, we used something called vanilla, which seems like it should be very bland, this would be a very bland system. So I wanted to find this post-rank plugin thing, I've seen it in all kinds of forums, I thought this must be something someone's made, we could just get it and use it and so I searched through the vanilla forums, so that's right, so this is the forums forums, because they're all recursive all the time, so I went in here and what I ended up finding was people who were really angry about this idea that I thought was really simple, so there were a bunch of people who said, oh this is pointless, people are just going to game that, so people will just post, this is a quote, people will post nothing but mindless drivel just to get their post counts up and earn the new rank, and then I kept reading and people said this is at odds with the revolutionary vision of vanilla. The vanilla movement is not about ranks, I was sort of like floored by this, because I thought I just wanted to add little numbers next to things, I thought this was a really small technical thing, but when I got into the forum forums these people were having it out about sort of what the implications were of where those buttons got placed, or how the social function of these systems worked, and it wasn't even that this was sort of tacit things, this is not just what they, it's not after thoughts, the sort of ideology was upfront and they had very passionate things, I think they were actually probably right, so I've come around to their way of thinking and seeing the world, but it opened my eyes a bit to think about all those other buttons that I see on websites, where's the post button, there's a like button, there's not a dislike button, all these sorts of things, so having arguments about how that should be done and why it should be done one way or another, how things get filtered and sorted, and I was interested in getting further into that. So that is that first one, that sort of point of view background for how I got here, I'm going to jump now into this conceptual framework space. So these three conceptual frameworks, and I'll briefly talk about them here and then work through each of them in more detail, were really useful for me for studying this online community forum software, but I think they're more generally useful to us in our sector for thinking about the designs that we're creating, how we're propagating them, what effects they have, it's not simply making tools, these tools have a lot of bigger sort of elements to them. So first off, software enacts ideology that is in many ways similar to how other tools in infrastructure work, but I'll work through that a bit more, second that tools actually extend cognition so we're really in this sense all cyborgs. When humans pick up new tools, they become part of our minds in ways that we often appreciate on some trivial level, but are actually far more profound and so that will be the second point I'll work through, and then the third is that collective intelligence is a neat sort of theoretical perspective that I think is really sort of becoming a part of how we live our lives and so the web, while it is problematic in a variety of ways, is becoming this global knowledge base and I think in much the same way Andy was mentioning in the opening this is sort of part of we can be in that and shape it or we, you know, it's our peril. So first off, software enacts ideology. So the point here is that infrastructure has politics and I don't mean in the like political party sense, I mean in the sort of shapes the way the world works it sort of has a point of view and a perspective and it's enacted. So if you think about this in the analog world, if you build a bunch of bridges that are too low for buses to get through, then, and that's the only way to get to the beach follow, this is going to take a couple hops, but so if those are the only good ways to get to the beach, then the people who ride buses can't get to the beach and that has social implications and it's built into the bridges, right? It's not just that someone had politics when they made the bridges, but then the bridges actually enact an ideology. The same sort of thing happens in the design of software. So ideology is baked into the objects we create. So this is a quote from the 2003 book behind the blip essays on culture and software from Matthew Fuller who explains that each piece of software constructs a way of seeing knowing and doing in the world that at once contains a model of part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and also shapes it every time it's used. That is every time a script is executed or a program runs, it acts out a set of rules based on a way of thinking about the world and those models that it's based on inevitably come with perspectives and values. So when we build tools and systems to organize and provide access to knowledge, but they're both intentional and unintentional ideologies that become fixed in those tools. So that's the first point. The second framework is something called cognitive extension and so in this case I'll work through an example with Tetris players and so hold with me for a minute. This is, I think, really interesting. So the best Tetris players in the world do something really strange. So the best Tetris players in the world rotate pieces way more than they should need to, which is really bizarre because you're thinking these guys are the best, right? So they would rotate pieces the optimal amount, but they turn them really, really fast and then they look at them turn. And what happens when they're doing that is that they are it actually takes a lot of time cognitively for you to rotate an object in your mind, but you can perceive an object fitting into something a lot quicker. So you externalize that object rotation thing, which is a really core cognitive concept, right? Like this is a core cognitive capability, but that gets externalized into the process of tapping and then you just watch it go. And so instead of using your brain to do the thinking, you actually use the world to do it. And this ends up being a generic thing about cognition in general. So when we're all kinds of parts of thought processes, of memory, of all these things that we think of in our mind are actually very much tied up in the tools we use and how we use them. So here's a quote from cognitive philosopher Andy Clark has this really great book which is called Super-Sizing the Mind, Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension from 2008. This is in the opening. It's actually the forward from one of his colleagues. He says, a month ago I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory. It is a tremendous resource in an argument with Google ever present to help settle disputes. So computing tools are not just something we use. It's actually far more intimate than that. So these new tools rapidly become part of our extended mind. And an example for this can be borrowed from XKCD. So a great comic if you're not already a fan. So here's the quote. When Wikipedia has a server outage, my apparent IQ drops by 30 points. And on the one side, someone's asked saying, oh, I replaced my spark plugs and it's not working really right. And so this guy starts responding and saying, oh, the spark plug gap might be off, but clearly he's reading the Wikipedia page about spark plugs at that moment and sort of working through it. And on the other side it's out and he's like, what's a spark plug? He has no idea, right? Because at any moment we can summon up all this information and wisdom and work from it. So that's part of this concept of cognitive extension. But it also bleeds into this idea of collective intelligence. So these devices on the web because of that sort of capability end up becoming part of this weird sort of hive mind experience that we have where we can tap into all of this information and Pierre Levy in the late 90s sort of worked out this framework for thinking about collective intelligence. And it's a bit dense, I'll work through it and we'll have fun with it. So what is collective intelligence? It's a form of universally distributed intelligence consistently enhanced, coordinated in real time, and then resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. And so this is 97, right? So this is still he's like looking forward thinking about some great neat ideas in the future. But a lot of this has really worked out. And so it's not just that we have access to knowledge, it's that the information and knowledge is being refined and coordinated and enhanced by people all over the world. And that system to really be effective needs to mobilize and coordinate people who are refining it. So I think in some ways Wikipedia enacts this, but you can see it's sort of happening in all kinds of sort of network culture. And web forums are themselves a great place for this. So again in XKCD this 2011 comic is titled Wisdom of the Ancients Never have I felt so close to another soul and yet so helplessly alone, as when I Google an error and there's one result. A thread by someone with the same problem and no answer posted to in 2003. And then the stick figures there shaking the screen saying, who were you Denver Coder 9? What did you see? So when we Google the right terms to try and find the answer, you know, you can find that moment where someone else was struggling with the same thing. Often it's really rewarding and you find that answer and you're good, but here's that moment where you're the shared moment ten years in the future or eight years in the future. What happened? Where did it go? So this connects to how many people are familiar with Let Me Google that for you? Okay, a couple hands. So Let Me Google that for you exemplifies how this has become what it even means to just be literate in sort of a digital sense. So this is a snarky way for you to respond to someone who answers or asks an obvious question. And it's created, quote, for all those people that find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than Google it for themselves end quote. So when someone asks you, you know, how do you pivot tables in Excel or how do you tie a bow hitch or some sort of factual thing, you go to this box and you type in the search term they should have typed in. And it gives you this little URL that plays an animation of it doing the search for you and then clicking on the first link. And so what happens is, so someone asks the question and you do this instead of sending them their answer, right? You don't send them the link. And you're supposed to shame them, right? This is a shaming experience. And that shame is itself predicated on the idea that everyone is supposed to know how to search for things and they're supposed to know what things you should just search for to find the answer for, which I think is actually pretty profound. So in some ways, I think Let Me Google that for you is the sort of demonstration of this collective intelligence concept coming to fruition. It's at that base level where we should be ashamed if we can't do it or at least people are going to try and make us feel ashamed for it. But obviously, we're all much more helpful and friendly than that. So we're probably not, you know, we're not at the reference desk sending people these things. We're here to help. So those are those frameworks. So that was software and axi theology. Cognition is extended by tools and software. And then this notion of collective intelligence, this weird sort of hive mind thing that all of this network technology is creating. So this brings us back to the books, my stack of books. And what I really like about working through something like this, these very technical books is hopefully we'll have some of the same kinds of experiences that I had when I sort of peeled back the curtain and saw what was going on, where people in the vanilla forum forums were all arguing with each other about how things should work. And they had a lot of values at play in that. The same thing happens here. And so the hope is that we take these things that we use every day, which are sort of that are basically present at hand. We're just using them and make them look into how they work and sort of come away with an understanding of some of the ideology at play. And so this is a big diagram that you don't have to walk through it. You don't have to like memorize it or anything. This is sort of the framework I came out with of how this history played out in this stack of technical books. And so the main points here is that as you move down, you're moving through time. So you've got the era of the bulletin board sites from the 70s to the early 90s and then the early web up to 2000. The development of community platforms, which is to term I'm using for things like PHPBB and VBulletin and all these sort of online discussion forum, web forum, bulletin board software tools. And then we move into this era where we get rid of community as a term and sort of using the word social for everything. And so that's the sort of historical bent there. And then I've got it sort of shifting over time away from in the beginning, much more of a focus on terms like enable that are this sort of communitarian and democratic bent to them. So this is very much there and we'll see that when we're working through some of the quotes. More and more to this control authoritarian and corporate kind of sensibility. And so in that we're moving away from you know hosting communities to managing them. We're moving away from we're increasingly talking about owning communities in these books and we're shifting more and more towards sort of commodifying users in some really sort of kind of jarring ways. I think what's nice about working through this historically is that if you just pull off one of these new books off the shelf and read it you might not have the same sense of sort of be jarred by how different the conversation has become over time. So long before the technology was even there there was a sense that something like a BBS could have this democratic potential. So this is from a 1988 book. The quote here is that bulletin boards are an encouraging example of electronic democracy. Everyone can have their soapbox in an audience with the nation. So back in 1988 we were already working towards our electronic democracy. In the late 90s there was this very sort of emotional language that would come to things. So the web was going to be this you know emotional place where we'd find personal connections and there was a lot of focus on how it could even be sort of a spiritual place. And place was a key word there because cyberspace was a very cool idea and we were going to be surfing the web which was cyberspace was a place. And so here's an example from one of those books at that point in time in the late 90s. So the quote here is beyond the bite and the bod passed the silicon further than the software code. On the other side of the screen there are humans. And humans want to live together and talk and laugh and cry and feel. And so what I like about this is this is a technical book about how to run and use online communities. But it's very sort of grabbing in this sort of humanity right. We're going to laugh and cry and field together and we're going to do it with the web. This is very jarring in contrast to what we'll get into the later books that are really dry and technical. So this is 98 sort of in the same point in time where the word hosting was getting used a lot more. So here is and it's worth underscoring that hosting sort of falls out in the late 90s for managing which I feel like is a very different term. And so here's why hosting was appropriate in 1998. It's an appropriate term for inviting users into a virtual location and treating them as guests. It's a service role with a purpose which is to make the guests feel comfortable and appreciated and in some cases empowered. And so what's worth underscoring here is these are still books about how you might make a profit right. So the book is building relationships, increasing customer loyalty, and maintaining a competitive edge. But it's still very much as treating the people who come to you as guests who are in a service role. It's a very different idea than where we end up. So as software packages like PHPBB, VBulletin, Envision Powerboard rolled out in the early 2000s, these are most of the common web forum tools people use. It sort of became a single set of features that people wanted to run with and use. It really changed a lot of the conversation. So this is a technical book about Envision Powerboard. Envision Powerboard allows your website owner to add a community to their existing site within minutes. And to unpack that for a second. So can you make a community in minutes? I don't think so, right? That doesn't make any sense at all. What he's saying is that you can add a bunch of buttons to your website where people can post comments and talk to each other. So that's what community means here. It's a technical set of features in 2005. It's very different than the earlier things. And this is from the same book. A community adds extra value to almost any website. So we're getting value out of the community. One of the main goals of website owners is to keep visitors returning for more content. So at this point we're owners and we're trying to keep them coming back. And all this leads to the stickiness of our website, which is sort of a marketing term. We're trying to get them to keep coming back because we get some value out of it. If you check out the book, I've got a whole chapter about this, believe it or not, where I'm trying to pick a part of the assumptions that are in this. But it becomes even more apparent as you keep moving forward because it becomes more and more about control and behavior modification. So you want to manipulate them into doing the things to keep them coming back at this point. So this is from a 2009 book called Designing Social Interfaces, Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving User Experience. So focus on the communities you're fostering in your application. The values you are trying to instill in the environment the behaviors you wish to encourage and the types of people you wish to engage ever more deeply in your social environment. So in this case we're really drilling into this, it's not just sort of inviting people over and having a good time with them. We're trying to get them to do very specific things. We're trying to modify their behaviors in the same vein. That line of thinking increasingly makes the users into something that are really sort of commodities because we're trying to sort of get the numbers up. I'm using we're here in this case not because we, us, but where this discourse has gone over time in these technical books. All these books I think in many ways illustrate sort of a corporate sensibility that is increasingly come to bear and it's important to be aware of it. So in this case the commodification of users I just grabbed a picture of this one because I think it's pretty grabbing. So get the most out of your members. You're going to use them up. You want the maximum mileage. Like there's some kind of fuel that you're driving on. You want to grab them while they're fresh because they might go bad on the shelf. All of the language here is about how you're going to soak out what you need from those people and get them to do what you want. So that's sort of where that whole trajectory goes through the books. And again it's sort of very dry and technical so you have to sort of poke out of it to get what's jarring about it in my mind. But what's exciting is there's an alternative view of this. There's one book that like kept me feeling good about somewhere where this could be going. And that is a 2009 book by Jono Bacon that's called The Art of Community Building the New Age of Participation. And so this book is actually anchored in the values of the open source software movement. And it suggests a very different focus that hangs around the word enable. So I'll go through a chunk from him in his book. I've tried to summarize what we community managers do in one sentence. The best I've come up with is I help to enable a worldwide collection of volunteers to work together to do something that makes a difference to them. So this is a very different concept than getting them to do what I want. I'm trying to do something that helps make a difference to them. 20 of those 21 words just filler around the word that I really think describes what we do. Enable. Our function as community leaders is to enable people to be the best they can be in the community that they have chosen to be a part of. And so in my mind this is a very different branch a very different trajectory. This is I think the vision that's ethical. This is the one I think we can run with. And I think it underscores how important it is for libraries, archives, and museums to get into the space in a serious way. Because it's telling that this sort of open source mindset is anchored in the world of nonprofits. Jonah was the community manager for Ubuntu, an open source operating system. And so the web that is a web of public good is the thing that we need to help create. It's critical that Silicon Valley makes more and more so as Silicon Valley makes more and more place to own our communities and their memories. We need to keep figuring out how to set up tools, systems, and networks that are going to enable people. We need to read up on these how-to books to see exactly the sort of playbooks that they're working from to commodify them while we work to sort of support them and enable them. So okay, that's the history lesson is done. Next up is an attempt to make something of those results to sort of offer what I think is a response that our sector can bring. And it's wrapped up in an idea called One Big Library. So I think this concept is how we can band together to make sure libraries, archives, and museums have a seat at the table in establishing the digital infrastructure of community memory. Because as noted, all the way back in 1973 the folks designing these systems in Mountain View, California and Berkeley at that point were making a play at community memory, which is something that I think we have a stake in, right? So I think we need to do what we can to create the ethical infrastructure of enable instead of the authoritarian and manipulative infrastructure of control. And there's a lot of work that we can do to make sure that community memory remains a public resource and a public good. So here's five things that I'll run through in this sort of response to where I think those books take us. First is I'll talk a little bit about the mindset of One Big Library. I'll talk a bit about staffing, which I think is one of the core things we need to be thinking about in terms of responding to the potential that's here. And then two reciprocal things, number three and number four, that the global knowledge base is a local resource that every one of our organizations can be benefiting from and that our local organizations can be facilitating contributions to that global knowledge base. Fifth one, I'll work through an example from when I was working with the Sagan papers that I think shows some of the very little things that we could be doing on a daily basis that might get us closer. So here's a blurb about One Big Library from a conference by that name I had participated back in 2009. As Wendy Newman says, it looks like there are many different kinds of libraries, public, academic, school, national, medical, special, but they're really, they're just one big library that has branches all over the world. The point here is that libraries, archives, and museums can and should be thought of as a global network and a global resource. There's really one collection that documents civilization and science and all sorts of parts of our culture and it's managed and organized by different people around the world serving different communities. Similarly, this global network of institution provides access not only to those collections but to things like job training or helps people manage their personal photo collections, all kinds of public goods around community memory, all kinds of collections, all kinds of services, all of which could be better knit together. So the trick is that you sort of have to squint when you look at this network of places to see that as their kind of emergent property. All too often libraries, archives, and museums think of their collections as what they have on site while all the books that are digitized by Internet Archive are functionally available to anyone who walks in the door. So there's a big mind shift to work through here around this concept. And I'll work through one of the first examples which is in staffing. So a recent blog post from David Lee King of the Topeka Shawnee County Public Library asked, do you staff the busiest parts of your library? And then he shares the statistics. This is 2015 from Topeka Shawnee County. Door count is about 800,000 people. There's 76,000 people who attended programs. There are 1.1 million visits to the website. And the question he's asking is, are we staffing the busiest part of our presence, which is the website. This is where we're directly connecting the most with people. It's apples and oranges so you can't compare all those things directly, but I think when you had made the comment in the beginning, it's 100 to one or something like that. This is I think the sort of shift we're seeing much more dramatically in a lot of places is that when I was at the Library of Congress, a similar thing happened. I would have conversations with people about exhibits and how we need to focus on the online versions of them because those will sort of last indefinitely. And they were really interested in arguing about where the colors on the wall in the physical exhibit space is going to be the same as the website. This was sort of the level of conversation in some of those things. And it was very much a focus on the physical over the enduring sort of global access component of this. Then I've got these two sort of reciprocal things, the idea that the global knowledge base is itself a local resource. So at this point I think we're close to having a billion Creative Commons licensed works, a billion with a B. So there's millions of digitized objects from libraries, museums and archives and a wealth of other knowledge available to every user of any library, archive or museum. And the question becomes, can we help them do something with those? Can we sort of facilitate their use of that? Our collections are actually all of this stuff that we have access to, not just what's physically on-site. And this works in the opposite direction, which is that each local institution can itself be an on-ramp and a point of entry for local knowledge and wisdom into this global collection. And I think in that space there are a lot of exciting projects like digital NZ, it's not Z. DPLA, Europeana, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, etc. These are all really exciting things. We have the ability to share our unique local knowledge and creative works and expertise back into that global knowledge base. But at the same time it's worth underscoring that these are still really just the tip of the iceberg of what's possible, because for the most part these are about shared collections. But obviously there's all these services and sort of other roles that we play and those are I think all similar things that could benefit from that kind of network effect. Which brings me to my curating in the open part, which is where I will try to be even more down to earth and practical about what someone working at their desk could do based on some experiences I had. So as I mentioned I spent, in 2013 I spent 60% of my time working on this online collection, exhibition, hypertext sort of presentation that was focused on textualizing the Carl Sagan papers and the history of astronomy and the implications of life in other worlds as you can find it across the Library of Congress's collection. So this is what that looks like on the LC website. Here's the URL if you want to go check it out. So I had a lot of fun thinking about how to make an online sort of exhibition or sort of catalog, kind of present thematic showcase and set of essays. And in the process I think I stumbled on something that has considerable potential impact for the way that we can do this kind of work, this sort of research and writing and ultimately as I think connected to a way that we can work through a lot of different, very small and individual processes. So the collection had 110 things that came from the Sagan papers and for that I sort of worked through clearing rights on things, got some things digitized, very straightforward. But the other part was that I took 190 other items from across LC's collection that were related and worked them into these sort of thematic essays. Many of these were already digitized and available online. One of the neatest sets of those was historical newspapers. So Chronically America is a fantastic and amazing resource that the Library of Congress in partnership with the National Endowment for Humanities and then a ton of institutions across the United States have been digitizing historical newspapers. I think they've now just hit 10 million newspapers or something like that. Many other nations have similar projects and they're amazing and captivating. And so what was great is that when I wanted to find some things about life on Mars, I knew I could find them in the newspapers because a big part of the interesting story about life on other worlds is that for a long time it was completely reasonable if not sort of assumed that there was life on the other planets. And the story about Martian canals is an interesting and fun thing that I knew was going to fit in between 1836 and 1922 which is where all these digitized newspapers are from. So I went and I did some searches for Martians and I found all kinds of great stuff. So I then said, well how do I organize all of this stuff I'm finding? It's really neat, it's interesting, but do I just keep it on a word doc? And instead I said, well there's this fun thing called Pinterest. And so I'll just pin the things that I find. So these are, I was just pinning things that I found from LC's sort of public digital collections. And a funny thing happened which was that I would tweet about things that I found and there's some historians of science that follow me and a few other folks. And all of a sudden there were 190 people following my boards about life on Mars. So we haven't announced that we're doing this exhibit or anything yet, right? This isn't, I'm just sharing these things and sort of connecting with some folks out there. I've sort of turned a lot of the research process inside out in this case because these are all publicly accessible materials and I figured I would just share them here because, or actually I was mostly interested in using this because it was a great way to visually sort things but the fact that it was public by default and easy for people to follow had these interesting side benefits. And one of the side benefits was that one day I was looking through my feed reader at blogs and all of a sudden I saw this Mars People by One Vast Thinking Vegetable which is awesome, right? This is a fantastic news story and it's from this great blog. So John Ptok has this fantastic blog if you're interested in sort of history of science stuff, he's got all these great stories. And I said that's really cool because I saw that a few days ago and then I looked down at the bottom and it said, source, via Chronicling America from the interesting Pinterest collection of Trevor Owens here. I was like, wow, that's really neat, right? And he wrote a whole bunch about it, right? He went in and did all this sort of explaining and thinking about things and then I said, well that was fun, that was great. And then the next day this comes up which is the best fake Martian story ever, Mars People by One Vast Thinking Vegetable. And I say Trevor beats little green men, right? That's the quote. So Alexis Madrigal follows John's blog because he's interested in awesome and obscure things as well. And so he followed John's blog and he cites that and then that goes back to me, right? And the craziest thing about this is someone who works on Chronicling America ended up emailing the list and like, there's this crazy traffic spike to this one article. What's up? And then like, oh, I see. So Trevor was doing this thing and he was using Pinterest and then here we are. So what I think is really great about this is this is how long the things they are, they wrote about it, right? It wasn't like, I just pinned the thing and then they went and did all this work to talk about why it's interesting, what it connects to, they're connecting it to other materials and works, right? And this is just the great thing about the web. You just put links in and it's all connected up. And so before I'd even gotten close to publishing my essays, simply sharing the way that I was organizing them and tweeting about that had prompted these sort of public pieces of scholarship to explore the very same issues I was interested in exploring. And so the takeaways here for me, and I'll just briefly mention them and then put a slide up about each one, was that defaulting to open on the web ended up serving the mission that we were trying to do in a really powerful way. There's often a ton of great material that ends up on the cutting room floor and this sort of open process of working through things brought a lot of that out. And then sharing the research during the process actually encouraged deeper use than would ultimately have been the case. So the first of those the objective of the whole, the whole reason to do the exhibit is to get people to explore these themes and issues. And so right before we had even launched, people were already doing that in a really significant way. So we were already sort of meeting our objectives before we even gotten out the door. In the same vein, I didn't actually end up using the great giant thinking vegetable in the online collection. It wasn't the right fit this whole process, but that found its own audience and its own space out there just by being sort of shared in that process. And then the last one is again that the way they used those, if they had just come and saw my finished essays where I had it blocked off and it had the quote and then it said what it means, they wouldn't have had the need to do their work to explain it, which is itself I think a really potent element. And I think it's one of the things that I often bring up when I'm talking to people about crowdsourcing projects is that when you give someone an opportunity to do some meaningful work and make a contribution, they'll often take that up and run with it in a way that they wouldn't if you sort of presented it as done. So that's that sort of little vignette or story. And I think if we back up and think about how this fits, there's there's some really exciting things here. And one of those is that imagine if all over the world, whenever curators were doing their research for an exhibit, they were sharing their stuff like this, right? And journalists were falling along with it and finding interesting things and then striking up conversations, right? There's just a tremendous amount of power, or even if you know 30% of them were right, like this would be a massive sort of space where people could follow along and find all this interesting stuff out. But now even better than that, imagine that I didn't use Pinterest, but I used some custom built piece of software that all those curators and researchers were using that really fit our needs and that likely wasn't just going to disappear, right? Because someday they'll just turn off Pinterest and then all that will be gone. Which is fine. It was just part of my process. But at the same time it's really interesting knowledge resources. And so imagine if instead we had a purpose built tool that did that. And when you start doing that, I think you're starting to think about the infrastructure that we could have for that sort of global knowledge base that we'd be participating in, right? So we're all participating in whatever parts of it we can find and work from, but we could have purpose built tools that support each and every one of these little parts of our work and our workflows. Obviously the perfect is the enemy of the good. So it's easy to run with things like this using whatever services are ready to hand and then think about how we could improve upon them. So take a couple minutes to connect this back to what I'm working on at IMLS and then we'll see. We might have a couple minutes for some conversation or discussion. Otherwise I'll be at that cafe or I'll be excited to chat with people about these ideas as well. I'll be here throughout the conference so we'll have plenty of time to talk. So as I mentioned up front, my new job is cultivating, managing, monitoring and promoting a portfolio of grants at the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services called the National Digital Platform. In my mind this work is a way of trying to encourage some of this shift in thinking and practice that I'm trying to make the case for in this talk. So I'll leave you with me walking through some of the points about what the National Digital Platform is and how I think it illustrates where we can work for. It's I'll underscore again that it's national digital platform, but in many ways the kinds of work we're doing I think can have an international global impact because the things that are going to scale and help better connect things within one country sort of I think help bridge and connect across others, particularly when it's open source software. So the first thing is that this platform that we're talking about isn't an individual thing. It isn't a piece of software or a website. It's what all of those individual things add up to. So we're not talking about building the like one system that everyone shoves their stuff into and then we hold on to it or something like that. It's actually a very different approach to this. And so in this case it's the combination of software, social and technical infrastructure and staff expertise. And the staff expertise is a really important part of that. It's not strictly a tool. It's all the knowledge that's required to make use of all of the tools. And these are the things that provide library content and services to all users in the United States and then in many cases around the world as well. And the key concept here and this I think comes through in a lot of the points I was trying to make earlier is that it's possible for every library in the world to leverage and benefit from the work of other libraries in shared digital services and infrastructure. And with that, that the foundations of this national digital platform already exist. So from this perspective it's not something that will be built. It's just something that we can continue to improve and enhance. So we've had 20, 30, 40 years in many cases of some collaborative projects, some shared standards and infrastructure. But that's really a diffuse set of largely disconnected components. And the challenge that we're putting out to our constituency is to really focus on how they can respond to this charge to have a connected set of services and tools. And those are the sorts of things that are becoming the most competitive in our grant review process. So last year we funded 14 projects through our National Leadership Grants for Libraries program. And in each of these cases we're seeing members of the library community in the US step up to the plate and say what they're willing to take the lead on developing, coordinating and promoting in sort of the open source infrastructure that makes this up. And right before I came out I was super busy because we just received the next huge batch of preliminary proposals which are going to work through their review process and then ultimately those are going to be another crop of folks who are working to connect and enhance this work as well. So that's sort of where we're going at IMLS. And to bring things back, so our institutions and their presence on the web are part of a global infrastructure for community memory. Much of the development of online communities and social networks presents a bleak future. A sort of casino driven design that tries to grab people while they're fresh and manipulate them and we have an opportunity to help make sure that we're creating a infrastructure that serves public good that helps to enable people that connects a global network of volunteers. If we can increasingly see every library archive and museum as a critical node in national and international networks of cultural memory we can better deploy our resources to work together on shared digital collections, services and infrastructure. If we look at our work flows like I did while doing that exhibit research we can find a million small opportunities to turn inside out some of our work and invite participation and help share as we go. So the promise of computer networking technology is and has long been to support an infrastructure of community memory. It's an opportunity that's ours to see. I'm so honored for this invitation and thank you for your time. A few minutes for questions? So we do have a few minutes for questions. There will be a microphone moving. Yep, there we go, up here. Kia ora. Just based on your emotional statement at the end there and during it this isn't strictly relevant to what you were talking about in regards to what we can do but if we're going to make a new system that's ethical and fight against a system that is unethical, does that require that we as a group in your eyes opt out of these unethical systems? It's a great question. I think part of the challenge with this is that it's mostly about the results that we're having and the way that we can do good work. So I think in a lot of cases, and I would say at the same time that those books that have this sort of manipulative sense, a lot of these tools can be used to do good work and sort of be helpful and sort of ethically used. I think it's just a point that the more we can take leadership role in this space, the more we can make sure that our values and our public good sensibilities are part of that work. So I think there's ways to work with a lot of these tools that I think have some problematic elements to them or some of these products. But at the same time it's an important question to be asking whenever we pick up and use something as if we're compromising say our users privacy or any number of these things that are very important to us. It's an important set of questions to ask when we pick up and use something. So in the same way it'll depend I think on the individual tool in the particular use case but it's a great set of questions to be looking at. I've got a question down in front. Thank you so much for that stimulating sort of opening to the conference. My question is about something you mentioned about halfway through around the changing of mindsets required to sort of cognitively think and act both globally and locally at the same time. And I wondered if you'd a bit more about some of the sort of some of the barriers or some of the ways in which we in our sort of various institutional sort of context can start to sort of understand some of those barriers and how we can contribute to that. Contribute to busting those barriers. Right. How we can contribute to busting them further building them up. So there's a couple of elements to that. I think one of them is seeing getting further and further into the possibilities that new technologies present I think is huge because if you take and part of that is getting rid of a lot of the assumptions we have about what we do, how we do it, and where we work and those sorts of things. So Michael Edson who I know had come and talked to this conference before has this great bit where he talks about he's at the Smithsonian Institution. He says you know take an extra terrestrial space auditor who comes down and he takes your mission statement and then he looks at what you actually do and they'll often probably be very disappointed because you have this really grand thing. Like I think Smithsonian's is something like or the Library of Congress was like have a universal collection of the human creativity or something like that. Right. And make it available for people to do work from and then a lot of the stuff is focused on stuff that happens in a very particular room or building and things like that. Right. And it's not and then you look at what the possibility is of this sort of infrastructure and I think that sort of starting back from first premises can be very useful. I think the other element in and it's great to see meetings like this where people are sort of pooling together and thinking about how to solve problems together is that there were a lot of assumptions that worked about how you set up an organization that are now significantly reduced because of the capabilities of the technology and so when you start working those through I think you get some really huge potential things. And I think the other interesting thing is that the grandiosness of the Silicon Valley folks is something that I think we can all actually learn from. Right. So think about the hubris of when Google said we will organize all of human knowledge. Right. Like this is not something that a lot of libraries were jumping up to say they were going to jump in and do that. Right. And so there's this crazy moment where Google somehow got all of these different libraries who wouldn't necessarily have worked together to work with them to digitize things because they could believe in sort of the magic juice of Silicon Valley in a way and so I think part of it is us recognizing that we can do these things together and I think something like us is actually a really great example of how that sort of mentality has come in to fill that sort of gap and so I think there's a lot of exciting sort of networked approaches to solving these problems that we can contribute to and learn from. I've got 20 seconds and that's probably not enough time for another question. Hi, we've got another question about ethical issues. I'm used to dealing with ethics committees in universities and they sort of vary quite a lot between institutions and across nations and much of what I do is now also involving getting large swathes of documents from New Zealand Defense Force or the police or whatever and they sort of release this under their ethical umbrella and now I'm wanting to use sort of global citizen science types to encode some of this and I'm really getting a bit scared about how other people are going to interpret ethical permission granted by someone who owns the document but not necessarily the knowledge that's in that document and that's particularly for military and police records and I just wonder where is this sort of going out there in terms of who's the custodians of this ethical issue? Yeah, I think I am wary of anyone who comes out with seemingly sort of scientific statements about ethics because it is something that is sort of grounded in a whole bunch of considerations that need to be taken together and I think one of the important elements there is that we all just click through these terms of service all the time and then suddenly someone says well now I have control of all this stuff and there I think are still vital ethical questions for us to ask with content that aren't just written away by legal requirements I think that it's in my mind an area that we need to keep having a lot of conversations about and we need to be in the United States there's a really neat project called Mukatu which is a content management system that is an open source piece of software that was created with a bunch of different Native American tribes to sort of try and work through their own conceptions of permission and access and things like that that are sort of within their traditions so it's not necessarily about what someone can legally do but much more about what the values are and how we can build systems to support that so I think that's an example of the sort of direction we can go but it's a space that I think there's a huge need to have a lot more dialogue and conversation about great so I'm out of time and thanks a ton