If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.
In other words, the Library is seeking to enhance its metadata and is turning to the wisdom of the crowd for help.
The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.
Flickr hopes this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions will pick up, thereby increasing the sharing and redistribution of the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.
Doris Lessing, who published her first book in 1950, won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Her acceptance speech addressed the value of books, or rather their diminshed value in our internet-obsessed modern culture. While certain members of the technorati have poked fun at her for being old-fashioned, I think we ought to listen to her warnings, or find ourselves dumbed down.
The Guardian has her speech in its entirety, but here are a few key portions:
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
Ouch. As a writer who has moved from producing poems, stories and essays to producing blog posts, this hits home. Of course, there is another side to the argument. The side where the internet is a place to share ideas. Many would argue the internet makes us smarter for that instanteous, worldwide sharing. I suppose it depends on how one utilizes the internet. If one’s time is absorbed in cultivating “friends” on MySpace and Facebook, one’s mind is likely not being enriched. On the other hand, if one uses the internet to seek out stories in The New Yorker or other more obscure but equally heady sites, then writers and intellectuals have every right to celebrate this new communications medium.
But what about the computer as composition tool? It’s a great word processor, but to think large and lovely thoughts, email, IM, iTunes and all other “distractions” must be disabled. I write blog posts with these apps running in the background, but the production of literature requires a deeper space.
Lessing has some thoughts on this too.
Writers are often asked: “How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?” But the essential question is: “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.” If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. “Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?”
I dream of that space. And wonder where it might be hiding. Is it inside my own house at five in the morning, before mundane but economically necessary work calls? Perhaps. But it doesn’t look like that in my dreams. In my dreams it looks like a cabin in the woods, or a repurposed guesthouse in the mountains. Wherever it is, I know where it’s not. It’s not inside the web of interlinked items, fascinating and otherwise.
In all seriousness, I’d love to see a candidate grow a pair and run a creative ad campaign. Leave the empty promises to the stump speeches. TV viewers don’t want vacant rhetoric. We want entertainment.
My real concerns with file-sharing are primarily aesthetic.
There’s a story by Jorge LuÃs Borges called “The Library of Babel.†It describes a fantastical library composed of an apparently infinite number of identical rooms. Each room contains 1,050 books. Printed on the pages are words whose lettering and order are apparently random. Because the library is complete, among the gibberish it also contains every book that is possible, every book that could ever be written. It also contains every imaginable variation of every book possible, whether that variation is off by thousands of letters or by a single comma. Borges adds that it must contain, somewhere, a book that explains the meaning and origin of the library itself – just as it contains thousands of variations of that book, true and false. He writes, “When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure…As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression.â€
The Internet – with its glut not only of information but of misinformation, and of information that is only slightly correct, or only slightly incorrect – fills me with this same weird mixture of happiness and depression. I sometimes feel drowned in information, deadened by it. How many hundreds of bored hours have you spent mechanically poring through web pages not knowing what you’re looking for, or knowing what you’re looking for but not feeling satisfied when you find it? You hunger but you’re not filled. Everything is freely available on the Internet, and is accordingly made inestimably valuable and utterly value-less.
Damn, a rock star made from brains. Who knew?
According to Wikipedia, Sheff was an English major at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota (which explains a lot).
To read more of his writings, visit this Jound.com page.
10 Zen Monkeys has a compelling piece on the interwebs and whether advances in communications technology is any good for writers. RU Sirius asks 10 writers to consider the question. Here are some bits of wisdom from one of the 10 writers, Mark Drey.
On writing as a commodity:
As someone who once survived (albeit barely) as a freelancer, I can say with some authority that the freelance writer is going the way of the Quagga. Well, at least one species of freelance writer: the public intellectual who writes for a well-educated, culturally literate reader whose historical memory doesn’t begin with Dawson’s Landing. A professor friend of mine, well-known for his/her incisive cultural criticism, just landed a column for PopMatters.com. Now, a column is yeoman’s work and it doesn’t pay squat. But s/he was happy to get the gig because she wanted to burnish her brand, presumably, and besides, as she noted, “Who does, these days?” (Pay, that is.)
On breaking through the clutter:
We’re drowning in yak, and it’s getting harder and harder to hear the insightful voices through all the media cacophony. Oscar Wilde would be just another forlorn blogger out on the media asteroid belt in our day, constantly checking his SiteMeter’s Average Hits Per Day and Average Visit Length.
I have become as much in awe of Technology as I am of Nature. And although I blog for free, occasional paid assignments have fallen into my lap as a result.
Chicago-based humorist Tom Sherman and The Internet are now seeing other people.
She used to impress me. She really did. I loved how she could always tell me something new. Our relationship was so exciting, so invigorating. She constantly introduced me to new people. She knew all the cool places, all the right people.
But let’s face it: she’s overrated. I overestimated her.
I’d jumped into the social-networking site after a fellow author told me I absolutely had to use MySpace to promote my forthcoming book. “I’d try it myself, but I feel too old to be on that thing,†she said. So here I was navigating though pages of Hello Kitty wallpaper and frat brothers wearing chicken heads. Supposedly, thousands of writers had migrated onto MySpace, but where were they? Eventually, through trial and error, I discovered the best way to find them: if you type the right word into the site’s search engine — say, “Foucault†or “Kafka†— you will tumble through the rabbit hole into MySpace’s literary scene.
Imagine a version of Studio 54 where Jane Austen, wearing nothing but gold panties, vomits all over Harold Bloom’s shoes while infomercials for debut novels flash on the walls. In literary MySpace, most people are cruising: they’re hoping to find cute nerds, to hype a memoir or to indulge some bookworm fetish. Pranksters pretending to be Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein and Ovid rub elbows with authors masquerading as their own characters. Of course, many of the profiles are just glorified advertising pages. And yet, amid all the craziness, readers have formed dozens of groups — for instance, Ladies and Lads of Library Land — to engage in serious bibliophilic conversation.
Mules are noble creatures. This is especially true for the inhabitants of Trujillo, one of Venezuela’s three Andean states.
According to a BBC report, mules are four-legged libraries in these parts, thanks to an innovative service from University of Momboy, a small institution that prides itself on its community-based initiatives.
We reached Calembe, the first village on this path.
Anyone who was not out working the fields – tending the celery that is the main crop here – was waiting for our arrival. The 23 children at the little school were very excited.
“Bibilomu-u-u-u-las,” they shouted as the bags of books were unstrapped. They dived in eagerly, keen to grab the best titles and within minutes were being read to by Christina and Juana, two of the project leaders.
“Spreading the joy of reading is our main aim,” Christina Vieras told me.
Not content to stop at books, Robert Ramirez, the co-ordinator of the university’s Network of Enterprising Rural Schools, also wants to hook the remote villagers up to the Web.
“We want to install wireless modems under the banana plants so the villagers can use the internet,” says Ramirez. “Imagine if people in the poor towns in the valley can e-mail saying how many tomatoes they’ll need next week, or how much celery. The farmers can reply telling them how much they can produce. It’s blending localisation and globalisation.”
As a new media intra/entrepreneur, I spend a great deal of time exploring the bleeding edges of communications technology–social networks, mobile platforms, consumer generated content, etc. Yet, I was an English major in college and I maintain a fondness for books and other printed matter — a fact which helps make the following academic discourse meaningful to me.
Sven Birkerts, editor of the journal Agni, defends print and the critical culture that analyzes it for the common good. Here’s a passage from his piece in The Boston Globe:
I am in every way a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises. My impulse is to argue that if the Web at large is the old Freudian “polymorphous perverse,” that libidinally undifferentiated miasma of yearnings and gratifications, unbounded and free, then culture itself — what we have been calling “culture” at least since the Enlightenment — is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.
But this “mattering” requires the existence of a common ground, a shared set of traditions — a center which is the collectively known picture of private and public life as set out by artists and thinkers, and discussed and debated not just by everyone with an opinion, but also most effectively by the self-constituted group of those who have made it their purpose to do so. Arbiters, critics . . . reviewers.
The blogosphere, I would argue, works in the opposite direction. There are arbiters aplenty — some of the smartest print writers are active on blogs as well — but the very nature of the blogosphere is proliferation and dispersal; it is centrifugal and represents a fundamental reversal of the norms of print culture.
Academics and critics LOVE authority. Their very existence depends upon it. Hence, the trouble they have adopting blogs, believing in Wikipedia and the like. The thing is there’s no going back. The question is therefore, “How best to extract value from new media?” It seems to me the formal set might do well to establish their own corner of the Web where standards matter. The Web is enormous. There’s room for amateurs and pros.
“Writers differ from all other creative types in that they suffer the illusion that the world really needs to hear what they have to say.” –Rollo May Ph.D.
Jackie Danicki recently came across the above quote from America’s best known existential psychologist. But she ain’t buying it.
As soon as I read that quotation, I knew it was the misguided sentiment of a socialist. When you no longer view “the world†as a faceless, voiceless collective and instead see it for what it is – made up of distinct, wonderful, flawed individuals – losing self-consciousness in the doing of good is no longer a problem.
Danicki believes that social media services like Twitter, blogs, Flickr and Facebook expands her world, making it “more special and more populated with valued people.” Amen to that, sister.
