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]