SXSW Panel: Why Do We Need Libraries Anyway 

“On June 25, 2007, Cal­i­for­nia rec­og­nized the Inter­net Archive as an offi­cial library. As dig­i­tal resources become a for­mal part of our civic struc­ture we ask: How are phys­i­cal and vir­tual libraries used, what are the emo­tional con­no­ta­tions of being a library, and what do we do with librarians?

Our per­cep­tions of libraries and librar­i­ans are often based in child­hood nos­tal­gia or media stereo­types (The Music Man’s Mar­ian the Librar­ian, Hogwart’s Madam Pince, Noah Wyle’s Flynn Carsen, ‘The Librar­ian’), but today’s library is as much about bytes as about books. If you would like to join us for a dis­cus­sion about the future of libraries and infor­ma­tion gen­er­ally in a net­worked world at the 2008 South by South­west Inter­ac­tive Con­fer­ence in Austin, TX, take a minute and vote for our panel at the SXSW Panel Picker, located at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/295.

We have ten­ta­tive com­mit­ments from speak­ers Aaron Schwartz (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/), tech­ni­cal lead for the Inter­net Archive’s Open Libraries project (http://demo.openlibrary.org/about) and Lor­can Dem­sey (http://orweblog.oclc.org/), Vice Pres­i­dent for Research and Chief Strate­gist for OCLC, the Online Com­puter Library Cen­ter (http://www.oclc.org/research), home of World­Cat (www.worldcat.org) to offer their thoughts on libraries, both phys­i­cal and vir­tual, and on the ser­vices that librar­i­ans pro­vide. The panel will be mod­er­ated by Danielle Cun­niff Plumer (http://darchivist.blogspot.com), coör­di­na­tor of the Texas Her­itage Dig­i­ti­za­tion Ini­tia­tive at the Texas State Library and Archives Com­mis­sion and project man­ager of Texas Her­itage Online (http://www.texasheritageonline.org).

The vot­ing process for the 2008 Panel Picker closes at 11:59 pm Cen­tral Stan­dard Time on Fri­day evening, Sep­tem­ber 21, so please vote soon (although per­haps not often!) at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/295.“[WEB4LIB]

First NY Times Restau­rant Review, Circa 1859?

“While pok­ing around in the newly opened archives of the New York Times yes­ter­day, I stum­bled upon an arti­cle called How We Dine (full text in PDF) from Jan­u­ary 1, 1859. I’m not well versed in the his­tory of food crit­i­cism, but I believe this is per­haps the first restau­rant review to appear in the Times and that the unnamed gen­tle­man who wrote it (the byline is ‘by the Strong-Minded Reporter of the Times’) is the prog­en­i­tor of the paper’s later review­ers like Ruth Reichl, Mimi Sher­a­ton, and Frank Bruni.…

The entire arti­cle is well worth the read…one of the most inter­est­ing things I’ve found online in awhile.” [Kottke.org]

I think it’s great the New York Times has opened up its archive, but sadly, Jason Kot­tke prob­a­bly could have found this arti­cle ages ago sim­ply by using his pub­lic library’s data­bases. But he wouldn’t have been able to eas­ily link to it or dis­cuss it with non­sub­scribers. This move by the Times cer­tainly illus­trates how pay­walls pre­vent find­abil­ity and brows­abil­ity of con­tent. And as Kot­tke notes in a pre­vi­ous post, thou­sands of old links to NYT arti­cles mag­i­cally started work­ing once this hap­pened. That last post also includes links to his­tor­i­cally inter­est­ing arti­cles, ones you wouldn’t have been able to just click to before this week, so they’ve already imbibed them­selves with a dis­cuss­abil­ity they’d lost.

From the email that went to Times­S­e­lect subscribers:

“Since we launched Times­S­e­lect, the Web has evolved into an increas­ingly open envi­ron­ment. Read­ers find more news in a greater num­ber of places and inter­act with it in more mean­ing­ful ways. This deci­sion enhances the free flow of New York Times report­ing and analy­sis around the world. It will enable every­one, every­where to read our news and opin­ion — as well as to share it, link to it and com­ment on it.”

It was brows­able and find­able behind the library login, but read­ers couldn’t inter­act with it on the open web in “mean­ing­ful ways.” Obvi­ously not every pub­li­ca­tion can or will want to do this I think the Times has made a good call here, because its archive will indeed be inter­acted with in more mean­ing­ful ways by every­one now. They’ve put them­selves back into peo­ples’ flows and are going where more users are in a more acces­si­ble way.