Web-Wise 2002 - Building Digital Communities: A Delegate's Report

Citation

Seadle, M. (2002), "Web-Wise 2002 - Building Digital Communities: A Delegate's Report", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919fac.004

Web-Wise 2002 - Building Digital Communities: A Delegate's Report

Building Digital Communities: A Delegate's Report

Michael Seadle

This year's Web-Wise conference took place at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on 20-22 March, and the theme was "Building digital communities." The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Sheridan Libraries co-sponsored the conference, and Sayeed Choudhury (JHU) and Joyce Ray (IMLS) served as co-organizers. The agenda and other conference information is available online (http://webwise.mse.jhu.edu/agenda.html) .

Web-Wise has a tradition of long breaks for participants to interact, and of long question-and-answer sessions where the audience engages with the speakers. The role of the official speakers is to stimulate thought and arouse discussion. It has become a community itself with members returning year after year as the issues evolve.

In these sessions, interoperability, cooperation, collaboration, and collections recurred as leitmotivs throughout the discourse, as did interpretation, especially in the context of education. In his keynote address, Cliff Lynch (of the Coalition for Networked Information) said that digital collections do not equal digital libraries, and he went on to suggest that digital libraries are the systems that connect collections to communities. But what is a digital library and is "library" really the right name? We use it today in part because the National Science Foundation (NSF) picked it a decade ago to describe one of its funding initiatives. NSF might reasonably have used a neutral phrase such as "digital resource," or a different metaphor, such as digital museums (after all, the contents of most digital libraries predate 1923 for copyright reasons). The library metaphor has certainly influenced digital development. At this point, it is impossible to know what changes a different metaphor might have wrought.

The library world values cooperation and interoperability. Bill Arms (Cornell University), in his talk, quoted his wife Caroline (Library of Congress) as saying: "Interoperability is a state of mind." Yet it is a state of mind that can be hard to put into practice. Bill himself suggested a proverb for cooperative behavior: "Do as you would be done by." Max Evans used a blunter tone in quoting his boss: "Collaboration is an unnatural act engaged in by non-consenting adults." Liz Bishoff (Colorado Digitization Alliance) reminded participants of the need to have everyone at the table for discussions. In his closing remarks, Robert Martin (IMLS) quoted Beverly Shepherd (also from IMLS): "Collaboration is the strategy for the twenty-first century."

Cliff Lynch quoted Marvin Minsky about a time in the future when it would be hard to imagine a library where the books did not talk with one another. The idea of this kind of collaboration is attractive. One book interacts with another, and helps to develop a personal portable library that draws its own inferences. It sounds idyllic until the books start to talk not just to themselves, but also to publishers for commercial and copyright purposes.

David Levy (University of Washington) offered a New Yorker cartoon of a roughly drawn box that was apparently thinking of its own Platonic ideal: a mathematically drawn box with straight sides, exact angles, and every corner labeled. This led Jim Backaby (Mystic Seaport) to inverse the image for the digital world, where the digitally perfect box considers its flawed original, and where a catalog card might dream it is a book. Not all dreams work out. Jim presented a series of images of nineteenth century apple-peelers, each based on a different industrial metaphor, some less plausible than others. Eventually we have to accept that some things really do not work, he warned.

Not all things last either. Matt Nickerson (Southern Utah University) warned that the Flash 5 programming for the "Voices of the Colorado Plateau" is only expected to last five to ten years. It represents interpretation, and interpretations change every decade or so anyway. But the idea that the project did not intend to preserve the interpretation surprised and provoked some participants. Should interpretation be preserved? Can something as version- and operating-system dependent as Flash be preserved? And when does interpretation begin? Sometimes the original artifact itself (e.g. a photograph) is considered an original only after someone has interpreted an ur-original (e.g. a negative).

Contents are not the only reason for involving collaborators. Liz Bishoff reminded participants that some key collaborators bring skills instead of collections. "Great collections tell great stories," but they do not do it on their own. The skills that teachers bring in interpreting the collections and telling the stories has a continuum from the Web site to the classroom. The digital library of the future will grow not only from the infrastructure we build, but also from the minds we touch.

Web-Wise is an annual event. JHU will also co-sponsor the next one with IMLS, but the location will return to Washington, DC, where it has been in past years. Although registration is free, places are limited. It is well worth watching for.

Michael Seadle(seadle@msu.edu) is Digital Services and Copyright Librarian, Michigan State University Libraries, USA. He is also the Editor of Library Hi Tech published by MCB.