Lecture by Ed Valauskas

2015 press conference for “Harold Washington Homes” (converting the library) with storefronts on the first floor
NYPL gets converted into a museum of the book
Congress is confused about what to do with its library (Macy’s sign on the front)

how did this happen?
fact:
it started in 2003 when Google integrated Open WorldCat & Amazon announced search inside the book
in 2004, over 6 billion items are accessible through Google; 85% of all web searches go through Google software
in 2005, Google News becomes the internet’s favorite news source and Yahoo acquires Flickr and del.icio.us
Open Content Alliance announces it will work only with out-of-copyright works and offer them for free
(quotes Gorman a couple of times)
in 2006, Google admits to filtering in China

fiction:
2006:
federal court rules in favor of Google and against Agence France Press to allow Google harvesting of headlines, leads, and photos as factual and not subject to copyright
Google announces Gbrowser, Gdisk, Glink, Gmil/Gmille (micropayments), & Gporta-book (digital paper from Fujitsu)
2007: Microsoft and Yahoo concede search market to Google, Yahoo YouToo social networking program, Supreme Court supports Google against AFP
2008: European Community announces that the following libraries are totally online – France, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania
Google Book Search has 10 million books and journal articles
Oopen Content Alliance gives away content; iPod with software called “The Librarian”
2009: Second Life adds OCA and EC content; “Virtual Library Association” (aka Avatar Librarian Association)
– information mechanics, avatar reference, social networking, avatar creation offered at library schools
2010: 94% of all government information is born digital; all of it is available for free online or on government issued storage devices; last printed document appears on First Monday in July, 2010
2011: library school dean of closing school says study avatars instead
2012: newspapers go offline, journalism schools are closing, libraries are empty, Apple sells 50 million iNodes
2013: 80 million avatars, libraries are online only, users online 8.4 hours/day, print available to the wealthy
2014: Google acquires Amazon, OCLC, RLG, San Jose Mercury News, and US GPO = forming Ginfo
2015: Libraries close, print is sold on ebay; Michael Gorman reminds us from his blog that he warned librarianship of the dangers of digitization; “only the bloggers really cared about what I said”

but wait….

thinks Google is doing us a huge favor by decreasing costs of storage, increasing demand for online content, easier digitization
– why not digitize and have libraries, too!

the truth is that digitizing helps print titles

librarians can: bring back out-of-print works, organize to create our own large-scale digitization project
– in Chicago, more than 20 million items (regional centers to digitize local materials)

library schools must: train librarian-avatars of the future

Dominican GSLIS Projects: students transforms World Libraries & keep their skills up helping with First Monday

what about the library in the virtual world? (includes games in that definition! – specifically Second Life and how he wants to work with library students in it!)
showed a trailer for Second Life!

Google is clearing the air and taking all of the flak for digitizing books, taking that burden off of us

in the end, Godzilla Google is really on our side