 Hi, I'm Sue Kriegsman. I'm the associate director for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Thank you very much for coming to this Berkman Hub Week event. We have a series of things going on, and we also have there's a whole lot of Hub Week stuff happening this week in and around town. Out on the table outside, we do have some paper, remember people, remember newspapers? Newspaper inserts with all the Hub Week events, and they can all be found online. This session is being recorded, and it will be posted up on the website. So please be aware that your comments and presence will be contributing to that for now and into the future. So you may wonder, like Berkman Internet and Society, like what's our thing with why do we care about libraries? Some of it is because the Berkman Center into itself sort of has librarians creeping in the corners of everything that we do, which is fabulous. Also, a couple of years ago, Berkman helped incubate the Digital Public Library of America. So that was something that really engages us in libraries and wrapped up a year ago a program within Harvard called Harvard Library Lab, where the tech team at Berkman helped pair up with librarians to build cool widgets to improve libraries. And all of those are, all the widgets that got built for that are free and online, and you can connect to those at any point. So today, we have a fabulous panel here. Let me talk to you a little bit about our format. This is not going to be a moderated panel. These guys are going to self-moderate, and hopefully it will not turn into thunderdome. I think we're in pretty good shape, though. They're each going to sort of do a little bit of introduction about sort of the future of libraries and what they're seeing. They're going to have a little bit of conversation among themselves. They have some questions for all of you, and then you guys will have a chance to also ask questions back to them. And what we're sort of, as we were chatting ahead of time about what this is going to be, we were saying, well, this is going to be, turns out it's a little bit of a love and hate relationship with the changes that are coming in front of us for libraries. So let me introduce our panel briefly. On the far end down here, we have Dan Cohen, who's the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, and they're bringing together the riches of America's libraries, archives, museums, and making them freely available to the world. Prior to that, he was a professor of history in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, and director of the Rory Rosenwig Center for History and New Media, and as a side note, he loves to snowboard. If anybody wants to chat with him about that later. I said, I hope it's a good winner this year. Yeah, I hope it's a good winner, yeah. In the center, we have Andromeda Yelton. She's a self-employed library and software developer who's passionate about promoting coding, collaboration, and diversity in library technology. She's a freelance software developer, and she wrote code for bespoke knitting patterns and library space usage analytics, among lots of other things. I was looking over her website and came across a quote from her. It said, I'm on a panel tomorrow about the future of libraries. This is atypical for me, because I've said many a time I'm not a futurist. I'm a technologist, yes, but my interest in technology has always been primarily in its impact on society, which means all the predictive questions that interest me are second order, not merely what will the technology be, which is hard enough question, but who will we be when it has become technology boring enough to be socially interesting? Now, I wanna note that she didn't write that yesterday. She wrote that in March earlier this year. So, Andromeda, just to let you know, this is no longer atypical. You're now being thought of as a futurist of libraries. Jeffrey Schnauf, who's closest to me, is a professor of romance languages and literature and comparative literature at Harvard and on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He's faculty director of Metalab at Harvard and faculty co-director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Earlier this year in June, he assumed the position of chief executive officer and co-founder of Piaggio Fast Forward. He's also the author of Library Beyond the Book with Matthew Battles. And one last note on our speakers. I don't know if all of you can see and probably you can't see this on the live webcast, but our panel of speakers have fabulous shoes on today. And so, if anybody needs to get up and stretch for a moment, I'll see if you can sort of see what's happening over here. So at this point, I'm going to turn this over to our discussion today. And please welcome them. Thanks very much for that introduction, Sue. Now I'm looking at everyone's shoes. Jeffries are a lot nicer than mine as are Andromedas. I want to thank Sue. I want to thank the Berkman Center and Harvard really for hosting this. And really, I mean, Berkman was the fertile ground that the seed of DPLA grew in. And we're very lucky to have grown big, but we have a long way to go. So it's wonderful to sit here today and to share the stage with Andromeda and Jeffrey. I'm also looking around and realizing that we could probably randomly sample any three people from this audience and get some wonderful speakers up here to talk about the future of the library. So as Sue mentioned, we will talk relatively briefly and leave ample time for discussion. I suppose if I were the president of all libraries, and just to be clear at the start here, I am not the president of all libraries, and I were to give a sort of State of the Union address for where libraries are right now in the fall of 2015. I would say this. I think they are as beloved as ever, and they stand at the center of communities across the United States and across the world. I think of 16,000 branch libraries, public libraries in the United States that sit at the center of their communities. I think about libraries that are on thousands of campuses. Again, across the United States, they stand at the center of those academic communities. They really remain beloved. And you can look at, there was just a Pew research survey on perspectives on libraries in the United States. And you can see that libraries have the highest approval rating of any public institution in America. Now, of course, that's not hard to be the highest approved public institution, but still it's very, very high. It's something like 90% of Americans love their libraries. But I think we need to admit that really that position of being loved is fragile in the fall of 2015. There are a lot of currents and tensions, I think that threaten the role of libraries. And I think we'll be discussing some of them today. I'll also mention an ongoing threat, which is that they are chronically under resourced. And I've never quite understood this, but for institutions that are so beloved, they are always underfunded considering what they do for people from age five to 95. People use libraries throughout their entire life. There's a good reason for everyone to love them and yet we often don't give them the support they need. But I do think that we are in a moment of transition for libraries. And I will bring up just a couple of examples and I'm sure we'll talk more later on. Perhaps an obvious one is the transition from print to electronic formats, which has really been going on for decades. And is always a kind of topic of consternation, I think, for lots of people. The New York Times, in fact, just had an article recently. If you read that, there are always these articles about e-book adoption has stalled. And of course, if you really look behind the numbers, that's not what's going on. What's stalled has been the public's purchases of e-books from the big five publishers versus their print books. That's not about the adoption of e-books. There was a survey that came out last week that on the biggest e-book platform that public libraries in the US use, which is called Overdrive. Everyone probably knows and hates it. But Overdrive, on their platform, year over year, there was a 20% increase, up to 120 million books, e-books, planned on Overdrive in the last year. We only need to mention Amazon. Amazon now has 65% of the e-book market. Think about that. 65% of e-books are read or acquired through Amazon. A very, very scary number, I think, if you want to think about libraries. When you ask people about allocation of funding for e-books versus print books, as the Pew survey, in fact, did, this tension surfaces immediately. In that survey, which came out two weeks ago, 30% of the American survey surveyed said that public libraries should spend more money on e-books and get rid of shelving for physical books if need be in public libraries. And then 20% vociferously objected and said they would not at all abide by the removal of physical books and bookshelves from their public library. So I, you know, it's hard to imagine being a director of a public library where you have a third of the population saying one thing and a fifth, probably a very loud fifth, saying something entirely different. And of course, this is played out in academic settings as well as public library settings like at New York Public Library. Something else is going on in e-book adoption. If you actually look at the e-book market, there's more and more reading going on in places like Digital Public Library of America. We provide free e-books. People use those e-books. We have a very, in fact, thanks to David Weinberger, who's in the audience. They have a wonderful electronic bookshelf. It's one of the most trafficked parts of our site. Gives access to 2.5 million books. There's also another source for e-books, which is indie authors. Authors who are not going through the big five publishers have an increasing part of the market share. And I think this is really under the radar, especially for those in academia who realize that more and more, especially in certain areas like genre fiction, more and more that market is actually being driven on the e-book side by independent authors, most of whom are selling through the Kindle platform. Again, 65%. There are other trade-offs that we need to think about. I work in the Boston Public Library. Digital Public Library of America have our offices there. And we go in the morning. The crowd I go in with is our staffers at BPL and homeless people who use that building for shelter and for warmth. And they do job searches there. There are lots of roles for public libraries in the United States that are unrelated to books that I think people tend to forget about. And there are always trade-offs in thinking about things like shelving space, about how you want to use a physical space like a public library. I'm looking forward to Jeffrey elaborating on this. But again, I think we're in a moment of transition. Again, in that Pew survey, people threw out lots of ideas for maker spaces and community spaces and Lego building and all tricycle riding and everything you can imagine in the public library because it is this communal space. So what can we do in a world of transition and one that is, in fact, chronically under-resourced? And here, I think, although I do run a nonprofit that has the word digital in it, I don't want to go straight to that word and say that digital will solve everything. Obviously it can't. But I would emphasize first and foremost the importance of collaboration and working together which I think is always hard for institutions to do but I think is incredibly important in 2015 and beyond. I really like to say and some of you in the audience have heard me say this before that DPLA is as much a social or collaborative project as it is a technical project. We have a website, we have all kinds of technology but really what runs it is the fact that a community has gotten together and decided to share a common platform and a common digital infrastructure. And finally, I will say, I will get to the digital. I think digital is going to be important unless we want to leave the world to Jeff Bezos who, as we all know, wants to drop everything that you could possibly want by drone on your house in an hour. That is his stated goal, I don't know if that's a stated goal but it probably is his stated goal to do that. That is what we are competing with or to deliver it in a microsecond to your Kindle which is locked down where books can't be preserved, where they can't be passed on to others. That's the world we're going to be left with unless we pay more attention to the digital and work together in a stronger fashion. I'm going to be picking up a lot on some of the last things Dan said but for the last 20 minutes I've actually been realizing that Sue's opening remarks might as well cover what my talk should have been called because I think I will in fact be talking about libraries beyond Thunderdome. And the question is, are we going to build a cargo cult around derelicts or are we going to take all of these super cool airplane parts we have from our history lying around and build them into hovercrafts or rocket ships or something awesome? So my real concern is with the skills of the people surrounding our crashed Boeing. Library people are brilliant and creative and fun and interesting and of course widely read. But again, under resourced and don't necessarily or don't widely enough have the technical skills to build and to evaluate the software that libraries need. And as a result, it doesn't necessarily encode the sort of values that we profess and that should be underlying our service models. So my digital tension in libraries is between the hope of what we could be and the fear that we won't. So I will give you some examples of places that we see this tension between library values and what our code might actually support. Sudan touched on Amazon and eBooks and so forth. And one of the big issues in library technology is the tension between access and privacy. If you read a physical book, you have access to the information in it and no one needs to know that you read it, you leave no traces or you can avoid leaving easily recovered traces, I guess. Basically no one has to know you read it. With eBooks, generally that reading is tracked. Certainly if you're reading an eBook from Amazon it gets tracked. Overdrive, which serves many of the public library eBook markets did to deal with Amazon a while ago in which public library patrons who accessed Amazon eBooks through their public library discovered that when their borrowing period was nearly up, they were getting a marketing email from Amazon saying, hey, you wanna buy it? So you have this tracking and this commercialism that's working its way in. There was an issue with Adobe which does the digital rights management for eBooks a while ago where people were realizing that minute by minute data about what patrons were reading was going out across the internet unencrypted. Which again, if you claim to have a value of protecting people's privacy and not sharing your reading habits that technology is not exactly protecting that value. They did go back and patch that so that was great because we were all really upset about that. But you need to have a fair amount of technical knowledge to see that this is happening and to insist that it not be that way. Because there's no reason it has to be that way. eBooks can be totally private. I can go to DPLA on some public computer and not log into anything and look at their stuff or look at their partner's stuff and nobody has to track me. It's the DRM and the contracts that surround the technology of eBooks that have these privacy issues built in. Along those lines, there's a really interesting project out of the New York Public Library called Library Simplified. Whose idea is there's a million eBook platforms, it is a pain in the butt to check out a public library eBook. New York Public Library patrons need three different apps on their phones because New York Public Library works with a variety of vendors. This is really irritating. Particularly if you're serving people who maybe don't have fantastic computer literacy skills and then you're telling them you have to install three apps and go through 20 steps to read a book. That's a bad plan. So they're working on creating an app that pulls all of the data into one place to make it easier. And it can also pull in data from things like Project Gutenberg. eBooks from all over the place. You can have library technology that is very agnostic about what the patrons are doing with it because libraries have a very different set of incentives if they're able to build the technology themselves. They have incentives to build an open architecture and a privacy protecting architecture which are not by and large the incentives of our vendors. And when libraries have the resources to do that and to hire people who have the skills to do that, there's a great presentation about that by Leonard Richardson. I will tweet out when I can tweet. We can build really cool stuff and it's awesome but we don't always get to do that. There's also an interesting story recently that did anyone follow the Kilton library tour relay thing? So I get to tell most of you a new story. So the library freedom project, which is awesome. It's run by a local librarian named Alison Macrina who is a firebrand and she teaches librarians about anti-surveillance technologies and how to teach your patrons about anti-surveillance technologies. So it's a great example of library technologies and library values actually being aligned. She has a program, she's starting up as part of that to have libraries run tour nodes. So tour is an anonymous web browsing system basically. It lets you browse the internet in a way where you can't be identified or tracked and it relies on a system of relay nodes that bounce the traffic around to anonymize it. And so the speed and the throughput of the tour network really depends on how many nodes there are and in particular how many exit nodes there are which are the node that takes traffic out of tour and back to like the rest of the world to actually get to whatever web page you want to look at. So Alison is working with libraries to set up tour nodes because it's aligned with our value of privacy and with access, right? It's a way to provide anonymous access to information to your patrons and the people of the world. And they set up the first tour node in a library in Kilton Library up in Lebanon, Vermont recently. And that was great. And then Boston DHS literally called up New Hampshire, Vermont, whatever, law enforcement on the phone in New Hampshire, nevermind. And it was like, hey, I heard you're running a tour node. We just kind of don't like that, could you stop? And the law enforcement called the library and the library is like, we'll temporarily stop and we'll have a meeting of the board of trustees and we'll talk about it more. And they had this meeting and just tons of people showed up and are like picketing in favor of tour at a library. It was pretty great, actually. It turns out people care. So they turned it back on and yay, because if law enforcement has a reason to have suspicion about activities and they have a warrant, that's great. But you can't just call people up and be like, ah, we don't like privacy, stop it. So they didn't stop it and that makes me very happy and I'd like to see more like that. So access versus privacy, that's a thing that I care a lot about in terms of library technology. Another example of possible tensions between the values or technology and codes and our ability to serve all the patrons who show up has to do with metadata and what it talks about. So do me a favor, pull up your phone or tablet or whatever screen you may have on you, if you have it on you, and do like a Google image search for beautiful woman. And tell me how many different races of woman you find in that. You can probably guess, even if you haven't done the search, actually. Because metadata isn't neutral. And Google searches, they're based on sort of a popular consensus of the internet, which is not neutral. That encodes a lot of people's stereotypes about how the world works. And many of those stereotypes are incorrect and unfair and there are many patrons who are in fact beautiful people who will not see themselves in that Google search. Library metadata historically has this kind of problem as well and there have been scholars like Sandy Berman and Hope Olson who have talked a lot about this. But just as an example, the Dewey Decimal System, the 200s are religion. The 200s and 210s are sort of general religion stuff. The 220s are the Bible. The 230s through the 280s are all about Christianity. And the 290s are all other religions. You're a romance language professor. The 400s are language. And so the 410s are general language, 400s are general language, 410s are linguistics. 420s are English. The 430s are Germanic languages, but not English, which is also Germanic. So I guess the Germanic languages are the 420s and the 430s. The 440s through the 460s are various romance languages. The 470s are Latin, separate from all those romance languages. The 480s are Greek and the 490s are all the other languages on Earth. This isn't fair. This isn't actually representative of human knowledge. It represents what Milville Dewey thought was important about human knowledge, which again may or may not map to what matters to your patrons or what the entirety of human knowledge actually looks like. So we have a lot of issues in the metadata we have about books and other library objects. And they make certain viewpoints more computationally legible than others. Fundamentally, things like the DPLA let us write cooler software that interrogates library data in different ways we couldn't do before. But our ability to do that is only as good as the metadata we have under it, how clean it is, how fair it is. And I'm really worried that as we go on into a more computational library world, which is awesome, that we're going to fossilize all these old prejudices and make them harder even to notice. Because when things are computers, it's easy to be like, oh, well, they're infallible. Google is always right. And maybe not notice the things that aren't there. So my hope for libraries and librarians and library technologists is that we will have the support and the conviction and the empathy to write software and to demand software that make our values and our service better and more imaginative and more possible. And my fear is that we will not. I'm going to pick up on a number of threads that Dan and Dramada have touched upon. And my particular interest, even, I think, peculiar interest is really in how we think about our spatial physical institutions in relation to this exciting but daunting world of how we build architectures of information and knowledge, all of these really extraordinary possibilities that have opened up. And it maybe doesn't need to be said in this room, but maybe it's worth saying all the same that libraries are one of our most ancient institutions. I mean, the archaeological record takes us, as far back as it takes us, there have been institutions called libraries. And over the course of those many, many, many centuries, libraries have not been one thing. They have constantly undergone change. They have been mausoleia where bodies were buried alongside fundamental documents and artworks. They have also been cloisters, places where knowledge was activated and produced and reproduced and transmitted from the past to the future. They have also been, of course, warehouses. They have been places of curatorial practice where the historical record, historical materials have been expressed, narrated, transformed into stories, myths, collective beliefs. And they've also been places, civic spaces. And I think the legacy of that history that we associate when we say the word library has traces of all of those historical identities and the kind of enormous challenges as well as opportunities that we face in the current era is just one expression of this larger question, which has always been a core question at the heart of libraries, which is, what is a library? What kind of services does it deliver? Where, when, how? What kind of community occupies this space? And these are all, of course, questions not only for people engaged in the frontiers of development of information, infrastructures, and resources, but also architects and designers. What does a space look like under certain kinds of media conditions, assuming a certain set of social needs, ambitions, fantasies, opportunities? And what are the actual patterns by which the forums, by which knowledge is produced, activated, shared, exchanged? I mean, these are all abiding questions. They're not entirely new questions. I think we're at a particular frontier in terms of the history of libraries. And we see this question being confronted by contemporary architects and designers typically in the following way. When most architects are excited by the idea of a library as a design project, in part because it crystallizes the central design challenge that we face in every field of design and construction today, which is how do you weave together information and space? That is as pertinent a question for designing a showroom or a retail space as it is for a library or a classroom. And we know that even though there's a lot of bloody blah about smart cities and smart this and smart that and smart appliances, the world is generally pretty dumb. And even a lot of those experiments with smartness turn out to be strangely cludgy and friction full rather than frictionless. So when we come to a library, one of the answers, I mean, there are some beautiful examples, I think iterations answers to the question of what a library could be today under the kinds of conditions that we operate. But I think that the default option, the less imaginative and daring one has tended to be build a black box, build an empty box and see what goes into it and make it flexible so you can swap in and out all kinds of stuff, you know? And that's not a bad answer, by the way. I think it can actually be sometimes a better answer than looking backwards in time and trying to imitate certain features of libraries that have become normative during the course of the 19th and the 20th century. But what are some of these challenges? I mean, one of the challenges is one that was touched upon by Dan in his presentation, which is that we have tended to associate libraries with the notion of collection, that in a sense the answer to the question of what is a library, it's a collection. But the reality of libraries has always been as much about collections as about the making of connections, the way in which those collections were brought alive and how were they brought alive? Well, if we go back to ancient Alexandria, the Alexandria Library was actually a performance space. It was a place where people performed texts. Texts didn't have a kind of existence, a kind of atomized existence unto themselves. They basically lived through the live performance of them in communities of learning. And of course that's a model that we see iterations of in reading rooms in all kinds of spaces. So I think one of the fundamental questions is what does this connection space look like today? What are its specificities? And I think one of the things I would argue, but I put on the table in the room for a conversation, is one of the things that Matthew Battles, my colleague and I argue in the library beyond the book, is that one of the things that's distinctive about today is that we've tended to think that the library is this single institution. But I think one of the things we're facing increasingly today is the reality that there are libraries. There is no single type, that the needs are fundamentally bifurcated in different spaces. I see that in certain kinds of research communities, the library as we understand it, as like a set of information assets in a physical space is probably of the past. There are entire research fields where I think people basically can do their work and will do their work offsite. They don't need reading rooms. They don't need that kind of infrastructure. In public libraries, on the contrary, all those civic functions seem to be coming away reinforced in contemporary society. And in fact, expanded, I might even argue, expanded because we're increasingly thinking about a concept of the library that includes all kinds of areas of physical activity and practice that were not part of that 19th century idea of a storage vault for books. So I think the answer to the question of what is a library and what kind of spaces we wanna create as knowledge activation spaces depends hugely on what kind of environment, what kind of social context, what sorts of needs and expectations we're thinking about. So I think we need to move beyond the library as the concept to begin to talk about a plurality of institutional types. And I think this is a very pertinent question to the question of how we activate these resources, where we activate situationally, what kinds of spaces and devices and appliances and even cultures of use and access we wanna design into these physical spaces that make sense in that value and really energize and animate these kinds of forms that we're building. So my sort of the sort of moral of what I'm saying is I think that the library with a capital L as an institution is on the wane. And what we really need to start doing are designing new kinds of institutions that take that history of the library and proliferate it and multiply it in some ways that make some fundamental differentiations about the realm of need that these kinds of new opportunities and tools offer. And at some point in the conversation I'd really like to talk about how you learn and read and exchange information because I think we're all hybrid practitioners. And so I do profoundly believe that we need spaces for knowledge sharing and learning. I think the library in that sort of physical sense is part of the future for me, but it's not and it shouldn't necessarily look just like that single monolithic image we have of the stack that supports the roof that is whether it's Boston Public or it's the Widener Library. Thank you. So I think I'm tasked in making the transition and maybe asking some questions of my colleagues. I thought there were a lot of points of agreement and some tangents that we can go off on. But maybe just to build off of what you just said, Jeffrey, and talk about the sort of different modes of reading and what that means and also how that's encoded in software. I'd love to hear from Andromeda about this. My friend and fellow historian, Mike O'Malley once wrote about reading and the writing of history books that history faculty tend to write books as if they are always read by gentlemen of learning in their parlor after dinner while their servant brings them a glass of port. But that in graduate school, we are taught to read books like a sous chef guts a fish. And I always thought that was a really great notion that there are really different modes of reading. And in fact, another survey that came out recently was about academic reading that in different fields, for instance, there is complete electronic scanning and things like that, even in the humanities in history actually because of the tracking of page views that we can now get off of books. There's a recent study from last year that showed that about 75% of academic e-books, the scholars who read them read less than 50 pages of them so it is that gutting of the fish often times. How do the two of you imagine sort of accepting that fact and moving from the grand parlor, the wood paneled parlor of the collection, which is of course a fiction in itself and only was about certain kinds of libraries throughout history, but to maybe something new that has more variety, has different ways to read digitally and physically. And I suppose the larger question, I'm asking way too many questions for an opening question, but what is this interface now between the digital and the physical? And what roots forward can we take accepting the fact that in fact there will be this proliferation of forms? Do you wanna jump in first? I mean, do you have an instant answer on that? Yeah, I mean, it's a great set of questions and I think it's a really exciting set of questions because one of the answers, it's not the only answer, but at least at one level is, it's something I think about a lot as a cultural historian is that sort of, the sense of presuppositions about the nature of the genres that we work in, the way we package knowledge together, the way we deliver it are really all up for grabs right now in a way, I mean, there's lots of people clinging on to a certain delivery and distribution model, but the reality is there's a vast proliferation of channels and that's a design opportunity, is to really think about what are the exciting horizons for creating audiences that would never be part of the traditional sorts of knowledge distribution systems and we're seeing that in internet culture all over the place and that's one of the ways in which an institution like the DPLA really has this exciting sort of frontier relationship between all kinds of communities that otherwise would have been partitioned and segregated and I think from in terms of my own practice, I'm really excited by the idea of getting scholars engaged in short form knowledge, engaged, not just scholars, creative practitioners of all kinds, really thinking about a kind of spectrum of ways in which you can interconnect the ways in which we produce, generate, design the forms of practice that we're involved in for this multi-channel world and I think that includes, by the way, the reconceptualization of what print does in the picture. One of the things that really strikes me all the time, I go sometimes I'm in conversations with people in the publishing industry and you still hear a lot of people feeling like they're hanging by a nail over the edge of the abyss but then you go to the printed matter art book fair and you feel the extraordinary explosion of creativity around print and somewhere in between there, there's some really exciting opportunities where we're rethinking the meshing between these different sort of communications platforms and vectors and I think there's a lot of space for creativity there and for invention. Firstly, I would like someone to bring me port while I read. I just happen to have some here. So I think reading is a shorthand. I think libraries are really about transforming people through access to information and one another mediated by information and reading is the traditional means by which we've done that but it's not the only means and I think this is a lot of what's driving makerspaces these days is people realize they learn with their hands. They learn in other ways besides just reading. And so when I think about how can you support reading but as a mode of knowledge construction and transformation, the thing I kept thinking about was when I toured the Olin College Library maybe about a decade ago. I am an alumna of a different engineering school but it meant that I had an instant gigantic soft spot for all of Olin College. I have a huge nerd crush on the place. The library which was just starting at that point, it was full of chairs that you could easily reconfigure and whiteboards on casters and like little fidget toys and I looked at it and I felt instantly at home because this is how engineers think. When they're grappling with an idea, maybe they wanna work together in a group, maybe they wanna work by themselves, you need to reconfigure the seating but they wanna grab a whiteboard and start scribbling and their ideas are big, they don't fit in the brain, you need whiteboard space and I don't know, we're all ADD or something, we need to fidget while we think. So it was the space that had been set up in a way that was really empathetic about how its patrons engaged with texts and engaged with ideas and what they needed to construct that knowledge. And now that I have an eight year old, I've watched the development of literacy in this very full contact way, it's intense, it's hard to learn to read. And one of the things that's very true of her is if she's reading something hard or if you ask her a hard question about what she read, suddenly she can't use chairs anymore, she needs to be on five chairs at a time or upside down or like moving. And so I think there's, in terms of facilitating how people read, I think we need to think of reading as something that is broader than just the text you're with and it has to do with the relations you have with the people around you and with the space around you and how do we configure that to support people's knowledge construction needs? Dan, I was gonna ask you a question because I just came from a conversation last week in France that brings up this tension, which is that physical space is local and it has that really tight connection to an immediate institutional setting and has tentacles that extend out in various ways. And the DPLA is one of a number of really visionary ventures that has a location in the name, America, right? Just like the French National Library has French at the beginning of it. And in the latter case, one of their missions is to collect the French internet, you know, which I, and I was part of a round table discussion of this and it was a fascinating conversation. So what is the French internet? The word internet sort of seems to suggest that the notion of national nation state boundaries is a tenuous one. Well, if it's a francophone boundary line then of course it isn't just French national boundary lines. It includes a linguistic concept and there does seem to be this fundamental tension around library as a concept around this very issue of the local versus the universal. The internet seems to push us immediately into a conversation about networks, right? Networks seem to defy all of these boundaries. And I know you guys were part, had this conversation extensively because I was part of some of the early ones myself. Right, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, we think about this all the time at DPLA and we're in fact from the start, right? We had this great partner in Europe, Europe Piano, which includes a BNF and many national libraries and 28 member states and 3000 collections from those member states. We've always been tightly bound to them including through software, right? So this question of metadata, we actually reused Europe Piano's metadata standard, although it probably does still privilege Western culture at least within that we could share items very seamlessly. In fact, last year, Europe Piano launched a 100th anniversary of the Great War website and they were able to seamlessly fill in materials, not only from Europe, but from the United States, 75,000 items from DPLA, pulled in through our API so our application programming interface, the way that programmers can extract information across national boundaries, but also from New Zealand and Australia. So they were able to put together really what should be, of course, with a World War and international project and we are continuing to sort of pursue those things. I have regular conversations with national libraries. In fact, right after this panel, I'm going to Portugal to talk about a Portuguese international digital library that we very much hope will interact with DPLA. Actually, DPLA has materials in over 400 languages so it's crazy not to share those riches and what are the boundaries of America when you start realizing what some of these massive digital collections have. So for me, that word of permeability and constantly thinking about those things in DPLA is very important. I would also highlight space-wise something that Amy Ryan, who's here in the room, who's the chair of DPLA's board, set in motion at the Boston Public Library. I think if anyone wants to see what's going on right now with public libraries, looking at the re-architecting of the central library, the Philip Johnson building and the fact that now these very repulsive in the original meaning of that term, plinths that used to block all the windows on the ground floor so you couldn't see or get into the library except through certain portals, those have been taken down. Actually, just in the past few weeks, these beautiful glass walls have gone up and the permeability between the city, I think, will start to have this effect once the construction is done, where people can see into the library, see activities. And I think there's a lot to be said about those kinds of sight lines and what that effect has. The one floor that has been done and is complete is the second floor of the central library in Copley Square. And if you go in there, one of the really smart things that Amy and her crew did was they lowered some of the stacks from above your head, eight feet down to four feet. And especially in the central areas, you can actually see almost across the entire plate of the floor of the second floor was before, just like, I mean, go into Widener, right? It's just floor to ceiling stacks. It's a little creepy. You can only see one direction, right? But this allows you to see things that are going on and there are glass walls into activity spaces for teens, for kids. You can see a teen editing video, what's going on over there. So all these things, I think, really are becoming more permeable. And I think that's a very smart sort of architecture, both in physical space and also software architecture. Yeah, if I could add to that. I mean, I think that combination that you just alluded to is a really exciting one because one of the things that in the passage from analog modes of interacting with knowledge resources like in the form of books or other kinds of paper documents to screen-based work is, of course, the degree of visibility becomes very high to those who manage those information systems but very low to those who are in your immediate space. And the notion of rendering visible, a lot of the invisible stuff that people do in a community, a beehive-like community, like a library, I think is really super rich. And I think we can maintain our privacy standards and our values, but render, you know, put in the realm of experience, of immediate experience, the use of these powerful platforms that are being built. And I think that's a great frontier. And I think BPL is certainly a great example of an institution that's committed to doing so. Yes, I was curious in terms of DPLA. I know that you have had an absolutely heroic amount of work to do with metadata in jest, aside with some early versions of the API, which were dramatic. And I know that you're limited in terms of, you can only ingest what people have created. But I am curious what, if any, scope there is in the architecture of people want to enrich that metadata to represent points of view that your underlying data set doesn't have. So that's a great question. I'll just underline it. I hope you said dramatic and not traumatic, but it probably was both early on. So, you know, a big thing that DPLA does to create this permeability, since we've ingested digitized, openly available digitized content from over 1600 collections across the United States at this point. And probably all 1600 of them had different, slightly different metadata standards. So a lot of what DPLA does is this behind the scenes is very important work of normalizing data. And that's essential for any kind of modern, I think library system that wants to be able to interact or do things at scale. Going back to what I was saying about collaboration. We have updated that API and the data standard as we've gone along. And one of the things that we did recently in our metadata application profile, version four, which I'm sure you've all read thoroughly, the 39 page prospectus of our metadata profile. But we added into that actually in the last cycle a field for annotation, right? So that DPLA now has the potential to be annotated. Well, we haven't done because we are such a small crew. There's just a dozen of us in the headquarters doing this at national scale, which I think is quite remarkable. We haven't implemented any kind of crowd sourcing or changing, but of course, everything is open. All of our data is CC zero. That means you can do really anything you want with it. There are no restrictions on it at all. And you're free to redistribute our data as well. So we're sort of leaving it open in a sense, sort of that open node, the tour node for people to make use of it. There have been several dozen apps built upon the DPLA. But I think we haven't quite gotten there yet. And we're just in our third year here to where there's been some exciting movement, for instance, do external metadata enhancement. And to be honest, I think we'll be in a little bit of a bind if there is metadata enhancement in terms of whether we re-ingest that. I think it's a very complicated problem actually to think about how you might pull back in data. I think there are other projects that are a little bit more weeky-like that accept all comers. And I think for us to say that we are trying to knit together these collections also means that we have to at least build some parameters about what happens to that data because we are responsible for that normalization and for its continued sort of existence as an operable data set and platform. I'm curious, I mean, the question of the politics of metadata schemes, of course, is one that institutions like DPLA have had to deal with extensively. But the politics of taxonomical schemes is a long history as was evoked for us by your fantastic listing of how the Dewey Decimal System sliced up the world. The sort of Enlightenment fantasy would have been for a universal metadata scheme. And, you know, there's some evolution certainly in the direction of shared assumptions about what those schemes should look like. And those schemes are really fundamental to what we can do and the stories we can tell and the kinds of modes of access. I mean, what's your read as people operating in the space on what the future looks like in terms of this issue? Because it seems like a pretty foundational issue. I mean, I think we sort of have the best hope in so far as we're providing structures for data more than specific data that can be populated in a variety of ways, but I think there's also, you know, talking about tensions. You know, you can have the extremely crowdsourced thing where lots of people can tell lots of stories with the data, but then you're subject to both, you know, sort of astroturfing or popularity-based problems getting encoded in your data, but also it gets harder to share computationally, right? The more variability there is in your data, the harder it is to build things on top of it that are sweeping. And then, yeah, you have the other direction where you can very much standardize what you've got, but you're limited to what you've got. I don't think there's necessarily a great solution there, except in so far as you can provide frameworks for data that can represent a wide variety of points of view and that actively solicit people to express things through that. I don't have a good solution to that one, though. Yeah, I think what you said right at the beginning is exactly right of the structures for data rather than a specific specification. So DPLA, for instance, even actually from the start has had multiple ways of entering dates, and they're all acceptable within our realm so you can have a specific year, you can have a range of dates, 1929 to 1939, you can also specify it as the Great Depression, and theoretically we should be able to kind of move back and forth through this. So if you look at our metadata schema, there are definitely buckets for things, but there are also multiple ways that you can do it, and there is some hope that we can, at some high level, unify these things without forcing a metadata specification down everyone's throat. I think this is increasingly an interesting problem for libraries in the 21st century is the question of crowdsourced data versus more curatorial and professional data, and I think it's very instructive if you look at something like what the Indianapolis Museum of Art did when they launched their, they opened up their whole metadata platform to the public and you could actually go into the museum and tag paintings with whatever you wanted. It was just a free form field, and they did this for a while and compared the data sets between the museum curators and the public that came through and looked at all these paintings, and what was amazing, I mean it is really instructive to just look at, for instance, the word cloud of the two. The number one tag for paintings at IMA ended up being paintings of the sea, which is not a, you know, and then orange was the number two, like orange paintings, I don't know, maybe there was like a Rothko exhibit there at the time or something like that, but museum curators generally don't tag things by color, the predominant color in a painting, but it was, I think, very interesting, and I think what's interesting then is for an intermediary body, not us, DPLA will not do this, for IMA, but for some others to come in and say, what is in fact the mapping of these two things? Can we learn some things because after all, people do like paintings of the sea, not me personally, but I do know that they are popular. Many people have them on the wall, and so maybe there is a role there for that kind of tag, but also, again, married in some abstract way with the more curatorial things. Again, getting past this question of, you know, can collaboration happen and what do the curators think of the public and what do the public think of the curators and all their strange genres and controlled vocabularies, which sounds very grim, that whole phrase, the controlled vocabulary, but those things do exist, and I think it is, DPLA is one of the places where I think those things can start to interact in interesting ways, and hopefully with less friction than they had before. Yeah, and I think, you know, as you alluded to in your response, also, there are certain sectors in particular that would benefit from that kind of participatory dimension. I think when we're talking about archives of local history and those kinds of resources, there will never be a universe where we can process those along traditional lines. So, I mean, that becomes a kind of leverage point, I think that, you know, where there are particular opportunities and where the value added of expanding the community of, you know, taggers and processors and analyzers is tremendous. So we are gonna transition to an open discussion here I guess, and we've got some mics up here, Sue, do you wanna go around, or I guess we're gonna, we're gonna rove. Yeah. Hello? Okay, I'm Donahue now. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, we're gonna, oh, we already have a question, so I'm not gonna even plan a question, I'll just let them. That's not a discussion. I have a son who has severe HD, HDHD or ADD. He's very happy with a smartphone. I think he can do very little of what you have described, yet he uses intensely. I find it fascinating. Similarly, I was in the Peace Corps in Nepal, went back recently, and there are people who clearly don't think about our American English way of structuring knowledge. But I think it's very fascinating to figure out how are they utilizing what you're talking about? Wow, that's a really great point. I mean, I think this gets back to this point about different modes, and I think one of the great things about digital media and technology is that it can be reformatted on the fly, right? So, you know, DPLA works on a big screen, it works on a small screen, hopefully because it's essentially at heart, just a giant data store, it can be reformatted. And I think also in that way for sort of other cultural views and other ways of addressing these things. So I've always thought, right, that that is one of the miraculous things about the digital format. The bookshelf, you have to pick, you know, some Dewey decimal system number and you gotta put it right there and the book is gonna go back to that same spot. David's digital bookshelf reorders itself based upon different queries and sort of, in a sense, is having an interaction on the fly with the user. And to me, that's really unique and very special and hopefully in the right environment can lead to some serendipity in terms of what people find and in the way that they use these materials. Yeah, I would add to that. I mean, you know, one of the really distinctive features of digital, you know, digitally channeled knowledge is that it can exist on a lot of scales at the level of the device even. You know, if you look at in the developing world the access statistics on smartphones, which far exceed, you know, laptops or desktop machines, that's a kind of really distinctive affordance which means that that knowledge exists, circulates, is activated in places that only that phone in your pocket can take you or in community spaces. And that's a strength as well as a challenge, of course, but if you look at in the, I've been involved in a number of cultural projects, look at the access statistics of like based on device, based on location and so forth. It's really distinctive when you look at the map of the way people interact with certain kinds of learning or knowledge or cultural resources, they can be extraordinarily different from place to place as a function of the infrastructure that people are working with, the networks, bandwidth, but also just a set of social practices around like what kind of devices people use to share, you know. And to design for that is a real challenge, but I think it's also really exciting, you know. I don't actually know anything about how knowledge is constructed in Nepal, so I can't really comment on that, but I think it speaks to the importance of involving lots of different people in the design process and talking to the people who are using your libraries and your technology, because I have no way to evaluate whether the outputs of something like DPLA are, tell Nepali stories effectively if we were to put Nepali metadata in there, right? I have no way of telling if those stories are computationally legible there, if it supports the kind of use cases that people would have in Kathmandu. We should talk to them if we want to find out. All right, so this oddly follows on. In Tibet, apparently, one of the important fields is not just the author, but who the author is a reincarnation of. We dealt with this when actually trying to munge their bibliographic data into Mark, and you can do stuff in Mark and make a special field. So the metadata problem, I'm really so happy to hear the panel talking about it, as you know, it goes beyond simply what data goes into the fields, it's also what are the fields, which is my way of asking to what extent, it seems to me that link data helps resolve many of these problems because it doesn't necessarily fix you as tightly into determining ahead of time what the sort of data is that matters. Dan, I know DPLA has been looking at link data for a long time. What do you see as the trajectory for what is currently a very difficult technology but has some hope for getting past some of these really important issues? Right, that's a great point. So in 10 words or less, so link data provides a kind of standardized pointers for commonly agreed upon terms. So for instance, Goethe, his name and authorship is spelled in 100 different ways in multiple languages across the world, but the German National Library actually maintains a data service that you can point to that is sort of every instance of Goethe and all the different spellings and all the different languages. And if you use that idea, sort of serial number, you know that you're talking about that particular person that's especially helpful when you have an author named John Smith or something like that where it's hard to disambiguate it. So link data provides a kind of high level data pointer for, in a sense, harmonizing data into some common sort of again serial number for things. Library of Congress runs data services like this including for concepts like Plato's Allegory of the Cave has a serial ID at the Library of Congress that you can point to. So if you have a painting that makes an illusion to the Allegory of the Cave or if you have a philosophy article, you can include that data and I'll get back to DPLA now. We actually have a slot for that data within our metadata application profile. Again, great beach reading. If you wanna take a look at it, there is a slot for link data and we're not there yet, David. We haven't gotten everything into link data but I think that presents a great opportunity in a sense for that kind of harmonization because we know that we can't get every single small local history collection to have their librarians or archivists or museum curators to use some standardized vocabulary but we can in a sense upscale into those IDs as we go along and that should improve our search. It should also provide unity across the globe and I think it's back to Jeffrey's point about internationalism. It's a one way to not have Americanized spellings conflict with British spelling and all of that wonderful stuff. Metadata is fun. Got a question back here. I'm interested in how business and industry influences libraries and in turn libraries are influenced by them. It used to be Google was really dedicated to digitizing the world's knowledge and collecting books and they abandoned libraries a while back. Along the same time or along the same lines of that, there was the Second Life Libraries, group of librarians who were interested in the virtual reality of Second Life. They tried that, that kind of was before its time but that kind of the, maybe the time is ripe again for those two things to come together because of the amount of mapping that Google has collected. You know, it's literally mapped every place on the planet. Has images related to every place on the planet. And then bringing in the librarians and the books or the text with the images and the location. I mean, I see a triangulation happening and I'm wondering if that also influences the idea of it's a collection, yes, it's a space, yes. Is it a virtual, is it still a virtual reality? I mean, are we gonna have headsets that bring us into these places? Yeah, so in terms of how businesses and vendors influence libraries, I think there are three things that spring to mind immediately. One is that of course most library technology is written outside of libraries. So the technological face that libraries are able to present to the world depends on what vendors make available. And as I was saying before, basically the suitability and quality of that have a lot to do with what libraries demand of their vendors and what libraries are technologically equipped to demand. There are some libraries that do write their own things like the New York Public Library. But the number of libraries with the resources to do that is fairly small. And the collaboration and sharing infrastructure is getting better, but not quite where it could be. Another big impact is that the commercial technology set people's expectations for what their library technology experience should be like, and that's an experience that library interfaces may or may not actually be able to support. And the third thing, and the sort of play like dark and creepy music behind me for this one, is the number of times I've had conversations over the last few years where people, generally very well-dressed people, basically say, well what do I need libraries for? I have Google, I have Amazon. Everything is online and I can afford to buy it all. Which is great for them. But A, it's false, not everything is online, or if it's online it's not free. And B, not everyone can afford to buy it all. And of course there are lots of library experiences that aren't just about getting a book as we've been talking about. So I think commercial technology is gonna force libraries to up their tech game, which is awesome because I'm all about having to bring your A game to things. But I also think there's a certain existential threat there and that the people who are most affluent and most politically connected may just not have a great reason to care about libraries because they can just buy everything from Amazon and have it dropped in their house by a drone in an hour. And maybe I'll stick to the, at another edge of that same question, I mean we see a similar question being posed around the boundary lines of a library as a physical space and other kinds of spaces that people use, connected devices to access knowledge, which are coffee houses and all kinds of other social spaces and one of the developments that's increasingly widespread is of course the incorporation of coffee houses and eating and functions that used to be were thought at least during much of the modern history of libraries, certainly 19th and 20th century is extraneous to libraries. And there are those who are very anxious about that sort of loss of boundary. I'm not personally, I think being able to eat and drink and exchange knowledge and conversation around knowledge resources in a great space is a strong mission statement, but some would argue that that breaks down certain kinds of separations between the world of contemplative knowledge and the world of the Starbucks lounge. So to my knowledge, I have found the digital public library of America is kind of like the federal search of American libraries actually. I think it's a product actually is a little like the Episcopal and something else that combine all the libraries together. But I think that it's something very interesting me because that maybe 16th century is make up paper, maybe 17th century is make up paper, but the 21st century is make up electronic device. And actually a week ago in China, well, NSTO, the National Science and Technology Library have put an announcement with maybe 78 libraries they have say that I think we have the right to preserve all the digital resources we buy. Maybe you just buy the, you can buy them for one year, you can buy them for two year, but I think they think they have the right to put them in the local and maybe they can offer them to the user, but they have the right to preserve them because that's how we do with the book, right? And what made me interesting is that how do you think about this and how do you think the library in American that deal with the relationship with the database, with the commercial and how can we preserve, actually, how can we do that to preserve the 21st century that make up electronic device, yes. Well, that's a great point. I will say that this raises an important topic which we haven't discussed yet about libraries that they have been a site for preservation that has been one of the traditional roles. And I think in the 21st century, we're so focused on getting access immediately, everything is very now, and we lose sight of the fact that we may be buying into systems, commercial systems, where we may actually not be able to extract these things, right? I mean, this has always been, I think, the strongest case against digital rights management, which is that God bless Jeff Bezos, but Jeff, libraries are in the long run business, the forever business, and I don't know where Amazon will be in 10 or 50 or 100 years. And I don't know if any book will work on those devices or those devices will work. So I think we've sort of been dropped into a slowly heating pot here, and that's where I think you get this question of, I mean, actually just personally, I read a lot in both print and electronic format. I read open stuff. I also had a subscription to Oyster Books, which was a 10 buck a month, sort of all you can read service because I always want something to read, and they just went out of business. And so all my books on Oyster are gone, and it was nice in the here and now, but it wasn't really a pathway for preserved books. I can't give the books that I read or annotated on my iPad to my kids. And so I think China, like everywhere else, is gonna face this question of, we've increasingly relied on these commercial systems and databases, and yet we're gonna be left with very, very little unless we do something about it, and that's where I think open access advocacy is really gonna play a critical role along with libraries fighting for this kind of preservation road, because you just simply can't rely on big systems, even though they look, you know, Google. Sure, they're gonna, they're massive. They're a $300 billion company, they'll be around, but Google has dropped services time after time when they get tired of it. They had a note taking software, they dropped that. They had a second life clone that they dropped. Google Reader, my beloved RSS Reader, they dropped. So, you know, they just sorta, you know, that's what companies do. Like they don't have a commitment like libraries do, and nonprofits do, and universities do, to being in the forever business and making sure that the information we're producing today and the books and everything else we're producing today, the science that we're producing today will be accessible. So, I think it is important, for instance, for China to take some actions to say, we gotta kinda break this apart, and I think there's some really important things going on in open access here in the United States, also federally to ensure that we have that kind of access, not only again for access right when you need it, when you're caffeinated and you need to look at an article, but also in 10 and 50 and 100 years. Yeah, I mean it's a huge question, and it's really important to remind ourselves that the oldest digital artifacts that we have, the oldest documents are about 50 years old, which is not even a drop in the bucket by historical standards. And what are the preservation models for such artifacts? It's far from universal agreement about what that means. I've been involved in a bunch of experimental projects over the years, not only am I left with ghost websites that I have to manage, many of which date back to the CompuServe era, they're deeply painful to look at, but also entire chunks of knowledge that it disappeared, projects developing on virtual world platforms. And when the Library of Congress confronts these issues and there's a major project that's been underway for a long time, what is preservation of a virtual world? Is it the software? Is it the stuff people did inside that world? Is it the interactions? It's far from clear what the answers to those questions are. In my mind, this is an argument for open standards on the one side, and on the other side, it's also for hybrid practices, because if you can construct a kind of ecology where print has a place in a larger structure, and not just print, but other kinds of ways of preserving and documenting forms of practice that are meaningful to people, for one reason or another, that's a richer model than a one-track model. If you've got all your bets placed in one place, the very strengths of access, instantaneity, the richness of information, are always gonna be in an extremely fragile state. Digital stuff is fragile, it's inherently fragile. It's powerful, it's huge, it has this totally transformative potential, but it has its own fragilities. And I think we need to grapple with that, especially when we're having a conversation about libraries, where one of the things libraries have always done is be sort of deep memory repositories. So there are actually a few good things going on in the digital preservation space. I'm not gonna be entirely hopeless here. There's, of course, the Internet Archive, which is fantastic. There's lots of copies Keep Stuff Safe out of Stanford for preserving digital articles, scholarly materials. Some of my favorite stuff that's going on in the library and archives world is Ed Summers and Burgess Jules and Dan Chednok down in Maryland are doing this rapid response social media archiving. So for instance, they started archiving the Ferguson hashtag on Twitter, like, instantly. Cause that's some of the really important text that we're generating that the future is going to need to understand our era. And it's very ephemeral. So I think they're just great. But yeah, I mean, how many people in here have a program or a file from like 2005 that you can no longer run? Like, probably all of us. Software is hard because as you note, it's not just preserving the text like of a book. You have to preserve the whole dependencies, the development environment, the libraries that's using the hardware it runs on. I also have a background in classics and I look at things like Euripidae and manuscripts that maybe you have to get lucky that they didn't like disintegrate in the last 2000 years, but if you find one and you know some Greek and you know some paleography, like, you can still read it. You don't need any special technology, whereas computational stuff, you can't just find it 2000 years hence and read it. So that worries me. That's hard. I have a question about the role of curation. So when the internet sort of first came up and got big, people said like, oh, we can eliminate all these intermediaries. Anybody's a publisher, you know, you can have personalized newspapers, you don't need editors. In my mind, I think that's kind of gone way too far and we've lost a lot of value there from people who could help tell me about the world. I worry about a library where they only carry 50 shades of gray or the radio station that only plays Taylor Swift. So I wonder what your thoughts are on the future of curation and that role for libraries? Well, that's a big question that I'll give just a really quick answer because it's a question that gets asked in a different way frequently and conversations that I've been in, which is the high level of anxiety among the professional librarian community about what their roles will be in the shifting landscape. And my view, and it's not based on, being in a leadership position in a library system or anything like that is that the role of librarians comes away reinforced and more and more central in the kind of environment that you just described, which is one of the sort of ubiquitous, like the word curation that only a decade ago has had increasingly emerged as a professional figure linked to museum collections or whatever is now, everybody's curating everything from socks to underwear and underwear to data sets. But I think in the world of this extraordinarily exploding set of universal information channels, the role of librarians as experts, as people who mediate and negotiate seems to me expanded. Of course it's different because it requires new kinds of skills and new knowledge forms. And I think one of the big challenges in library schools right now is understanding what that new professional role is, but it seems to me underfunded or not, it's an increasingly central role. Well I think it's super great that the world is full of terrible writing. I read this article recently that I was talking about pottery classes in a college and they basically ran two different sections and in one class their assignment was you make like one pot and it's the best pot. And in one class the assignment was make 50 pots. Just do it. And at the end of the semester the people who were supposed to make 50 pots, their best work was better. I'm sure 45 of them sucked. But when you have authoring tools that are really easy that people can author lots of stuff and lots of people and people who don't make it through the traditional publication process, you know the New York Times review of books which is like all white men. Lots more people can write stuff and some of it will be super good. So I think it's great. I think it's great that my eight year old can write twine games and like all of the outcomes are oh you got killed by a zombie, ha ha. And there's no like plot or character or motivation but she can do it. That's fantastic. And yes that does make curation all the more critical because this is also like the world that gave us Gamergate. And a lot of the stuff people write will be terrible and you don't want it in your life. So curation becomes more important but widespread authorship is fantastic. Sorry. I'll just add that DPLA this summer added a curation core. I mean it actually has that name in the title and this is a group of librarians that's helping us organize our e-book collection for kids that we're about to launch with President Obama where we're providing thousands of titles for free contemporary e-books to kids in low income areas. And the feeling was we didn't want to just dump 3,000 books on them. We wanted to have some selections in different languages with different plot lines and I think as it was put early on we didn't want just like sexy vampires. Like that couldn't be the front page of the app. There had to be alternate options. The other point I'll make about the curation is that one of the things that public libraries are facing and I suspect soon academic libraries as well given the growth in authorship, the ability of so many people to publish independently. And yes, a lot of it is sexy vampires. That's probably the top 10 at Amazon's e-book store. But with the growth of that segment of the market eventually we will need librarians to sort of sort through that and what we've heard is that libraries actually would like to accession some of these indie produced e-books. I mean some of them are actually best sellers but they don't have someone curating them. They don't have all the processes in place that we have for traditional publishers who add all that metadata and tell you where it should be stored in your digital system. They're just kind of files that are floating out there and I think again here's a realm where professional librarians can really act as a bridge between those things because we won't want to accession all of it but we will want to accession some of it and it's hard to know which ones actually to pluck out. I think we had a question back there. Yeah. This is actually going to be the last question. Oh, okay. Well, I actually had two comments and a question so I guess I'll have to make just the question. In terms of digital rights management for these individual e-books that you said you're curating collection for, short of them specifically, I want to take it a step further and pose the question of whether or not and in what way will digital rights management and the kind of issues that are being talked about right now with copyright management of when things fall into the public domain or not. For all these e-books that are being published, whether they're being published by individual people or by publishing houses, how do individual licenses play in something as massive and accessible as a digital public library versus individual libraries? Because I know individual library systems, you can have five copies of a digital e-book being viewed at one time and that's the requirement sent for by publisher. So how do you negotiate that whether or not you kind of, instead of negotiating that on an individual basis are kind of pushing more for reform specific to libraries and clauses specific to libraries in legislation moving forward? Wow, that's a tough question to end with. What I think what it raises really is also it's not just the DRM, it's the copyright law and the problems that surround that. I mean, essentially it's really hard to sort of accession a lot of things at this point. A print book has this great thing. I mean, libraries can even buy them used and put them on the shelf. There's a first sale doctrine that allows us to do things with it and with the combination of DRM and for instance for indie produced books, most of which are sold on the Kindle store, there's no way to extract this thing and then of course, given the incredibly long copyright terms this item will not fall into the public domain for over 100 years, likely given the life of the author plus many decades. And so we end up with an environment where we're really in a tough area where you need to either break the law to sort of preserve something like this, right? And some scholars in fact have sort of petitioned the Library of Congress for DMCA exemptions to for instance film scholars to be able to break the files, break the DRM and get in there to be able to use film in the classroom because there's no way otherwise to extract the files. So I think this is like a, it's a real two prong problem of a very tight and long copyright along with very tight technology restrictions that together I think again going back to my opening statement really pose a pretty big threat to libraries and their way of operating. So we, I am gonna cut you off for one second because you thought DRM was gonna be your hard-ending question, I actually wanna throw out one thing and give you each like seconds to answer it. So who's not having the conversation about the future of libraries and how do we get them engaged? Ready, go. You have like a minute and a half between you and me. I mean I think who's not having a conversation, you can start by just looking around the room and thinking about who you don't see and many of them use libraries. Politicians. I would fall back to the point that most people do love libraries and wanna be engaged. It's a, I think that there needs to in a sense be marketing on the point, libraries. I was just at a meeting in Seattle last week and there was discussion on just the importance of evangelizing, something that libraries have been sheepish about doing. But I think promoting their values and what they provide to the community more forthrightly is very important. So everybody please, thank you very much Dan and Dramada and Jeffrey for joining us this morning. It was a great conversation.