ALCTS Sym­po­sium, ALA Mid­win­ter Meet­ing, Jan­u­ary 14, 2010

John Pal­frey — Born Digital

noticed dur­ing the round robin dis­cus­sions how many hats librar­i­ans are hav­ing to wear
the idea that there’s no one dis­ci­pline that can answer a problem

bust­ing myths about dig­i­tal natives
not all kids relate to infor­ma­tion and tech­nol­ogy in the same way — there is no one dig­i­tal gen­er­a­tion
there are élite kids who go to schools like Har­vard who are tech­ni­cal, they use the tools, they can teach us lots of stuff, and do awe­some things
that’s who we think of as the dig­i­tal natives gen­er­a­tion
these are only a sub­set of the pop­u­la­tion, though
but it’s about what Henry Jenk­ins talks about — the par­tic­i­pa­tion gap

and of course, it’s not just the kids
lots of us use tech­nol­ogy in advanced ways
the cur­rent terms aren’t ade­quate — many of us are “dig­i­tal settlers”

the social life of kids today is chang­ing very quickly — how kids cre­ate dig­i­tal iden­tity
kids don’t dis­tin­guish between their online and offline iden­ti­ties
and they’re cre­at­ing all the time in this con­verged environment

most kids are look­ing down at their lap­tops
mul­ti­task­ing is part of their cul­ture
is there a dif­fer­ence between mul­ti­task­ing and switchtasking?

the way they relate to infor­ma­tion is a pre­sump­tion that the nature of media is dig­i­tal
–pic­tures, YouTube, and increas­ingly print
pre­sump­tion that they’re full text search­able, too

they also expect that they can do some­thing social with that media
these tech­nolo­gies were devel­oped by young peo­ple for young peo­ple
the cre­ativ­ity is not just in how the tools are used but in cre­at­ing the tools, too

issues:
– intel­lec­tual prop­erty
a large group of the techie kids are get­ting their music free online & they know it’s wrong
the power of social norms trumps the law
we can give them all these great ser­vices, lock things down, etc., but these kids are show­ing us that they’re going to do what they want to any­way
– cred­i­bil­ity
asked kids where they go for infor­ma­tion; if it’s for a course, they check the course books; oth­er­wise, they open a web browser, searched google, and scanned the results for the wikipedia entry
the most sophis­ti­cated kids knew not to trust the wikipedia entry and would tri­an­gu­late with other infor­ma­tion and links
on the other hand, other kids just copied and pasted it ver­ba­tim into the paper
– infor­ma­tion over­load
they’re get­ting their infor­ma­tion through osmo­sis online

the Google Book Set­tle­ment is a cru­cial piece of the future for libraries
libraries as pub­lish­ers — we’re not just cre­at­ing a space or infor­ma­tion
empha­size ways to col­lab­o­rate as pub­lish­ers in these infor­ma­tion zones for young peo­ple
they don’t start with our resources that we’re build­ing as pub­lish­ers — they get there through search engines
Google Scholar is a way through this zone
is that a good idea? should we think about our own forms of search engines and inter­faces? should we part­ner with one huge player? have to think about our role

there is enor­mous growth in print on demand
a lot of it is self-publishing and in the aca­d­e­mic space (course books), but there’s also a rea­son to believe machines (like Espresso) will be sup­planted by the kin­dle and ebook read­ers
in five years, these machines will have an enor­mous impact on libraries
it’s not just the young peo­ple who are born dig­i­tal — it’s the infor­ma­tion, too
they may still pre­fer a phys­i­cal object as a book

have to think not just like social sci­en­tists or librar­i­ans but also like archi­tects
one of the things we have not yet done is describe the dig­i­tal library in the same way we do the phys­i­cal one
you’d hire an archi­tect for a phys­i­cal build­ing and describe it in a vision­ary way
we don’t do that for the dig­i­tal library, even though half of users may come not come through the front door of the build­ing
need to come up with a design that’s inspir­ing and isn’t dig­i­tal only
we can be wildly suc­cess­ful at bring­ing peo­ple into libraries and pro­vid­ing ser­vices if we do this

ques­tion from audi­ence: ten­sion between libraries and pri­vacy with this gen­er­a­tion
answer: john was blown away by how strong the ethos of pri­vacy is in the library com­mu­nity; in young peo­ple, pri­vacy expec­ta­tions are chang­ing very quickly; they do care about pri­vacy, but it’s highly con­tex­tual; they care about it in cer­tain ways (keep info from their mom but fine with a mil­lion peo­ple see­ing it); because there’s such a strong ethos, this is a great teach­ing area for librarians

ques­tion: when social norms trump law, how do we define when that’s okay?
answer: just because every­body does it doesn’t make it okay; ana­log­i­cally, is file shar­ing like under­age drink­ing? we don’t have a good answer for this. we’ve come up with a lot of dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios, but we’re at a moment where copy­right gets more strin­gent while the social norms swing the other way

John Wilkin — Think­ing and Act­ing Glob­ally to Bet­ter Serve Local Needs: the Michi­gan Dig­i­tal Library

dig­i­tal libraries have just com­pleted an unre­mark­able decade
are we get­ting our resources into the right place to reach users?
70% of OAIs­ter con­tent was miss­ing from Google
our stub­born refusal to deny a dis­cov­ery resource

What Is Hathi Trust?

Jenny: sorry — this is where I had to deal with some­thing out­side of the sym­po­sium, so I don’t have notes after this point