Knight News Challenge: Library Starter Deck: a 21st-century game engine and design studio for libraries

The Library Starter Deck from FutureCoast on Vimeo.

Last week, Ken Eklund and myself submitted our proposal for the 2016 Knight News Challenge which asks,  How might libraries serve 21st century information needs?

Our answer is this: The Library Starter Deck: a 21st-century game engine and design studio for libraries. We also have shared a brief on some of the inspirations behind our proposal (pdf).

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Two years ago I reviewed the 680+ applications to the 2014 Knight News Challenge for Libraries entries and shared some of my favourites. It was, and it is still a very useful exercise because there are not many opportunities to read grant applications (if you are not the one handing out the grant) and this particular set offer applications from both professionals and those from the public.

You can also review the entries as an act of finding signals of the future, as the IFTF might put it. That's what I've chosen to do for this year's review. What this means is that I've chosen not to highlight here what I think are the best or most deserving to win applications (that's up to these good people) but instead, I made note of the applications that, for lack of a better word, surprised me:

• Digital Book Intellectual Property Rights that Make Sense for the 21st Century: By partnering with libraries, we are creating a collection of high-quality ebooks with the IP rights needed for a global digital world. 
  
   
•  Finding Hidden Histories in African American (Digital) Archives: Pairing artists, writers, and students with African American archives to inspire new works and find materials that may be shared online.
  
  
• Rap Research Lab: Mining the Archive: Using the Hip-hop Word Count database to re-contextualize the library collection for Hip Hop relevance.
  
  
• KCResearch: Educate, Inform, Engage: KCPL will curate a reference-based, online portal bringing all points of view, comparative info and studies to important community issues.
  
  
• Future-Proofing Civic Data: We'll explore ways libraries can support preservation & long-term access to Open Civic Data from community portals like OpenDataPhilly.
  
  
• Building DALE – the Data Analyzation Library Explorer: The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library will create a digital librarian as the first AI enabled search portal within a public library setting
  
  
• Councilmatic - action alerts for local library issues in city governments: Councilmatic and a national librarians network will demystify the process of funding and budget process for libraries in city governments.
  
  
• National Novel Writing Month and Come Write In: Building Hybrid Digital-Physical Creative Communities: Come Write In provides programmatic resources, promotional materials, and collaborative tools to help libraries build robust communities.
  
  
• Adaequatio: art and libraries to improve the capacity to know: By turning library spaces into art spaces, this project will increase the sensibility that promotes a library patron's capacity to learn.
  
  
• Evolving the Book in the Browser (Using Semantic Web technologies and HTML5): Reworking HTML to create indexable, archival book objects to establish the library as publisher and the library in the life of the reader.
  
  
• Read/Write Library: Open Source Tools for Libraries to Replace Community Outreach with Community Ownership: Adaptable digital and IRL tools that help libraries meet communities’ needs for collections that reflect their lived experience.
  
  
• Library-to-Jail Video Visitation: Connecting Children to Incarcerated Parents: Connect children and families with their incarcerated loved ones through free, easily accessible community-based video visitation services.
  
  
• Sharing Rare Materials: Building a Participatory Community Around Archival and Special Collections on Social Media and the Semantic Web: Give librarians, archivists, museum professionals, scholars, Web developers, and the public a platform to collaboratively expand access
  
  
• Collaborative Libraries: P2P knowledge sharing by allowing the public to take on various roles as librarians using Zotero to create reading playlists.
  
  
• Building community resilience: local libraries as online/offline crisis hubs: Demonstrating the potential of local libraries to provide critical information and digital access in times of crisis and disaster.
  
  
• The Phantom Databooth: The Phantom Databooth creates mobile data experiences for library users to empower a more data conscious citizenry.
  
  
• The Database: Big Data to Support Libraries: To develop a shareable, data enriched, and well-segmented national database of library supporters, allies, organizations and advocates.
  
  
• Archiving and Disseminating Scientific Maker Projects: We propose to develop and pilot documentation standards for curating and disseminating scientific projects using open-source “maker” tech.
  
  
• MUSICat: Open-Source Software for Libraries to Create Digital Collections of Local Music: We build software that empowers libraries to license local music and share it with their communities via streaming and downloads.
  
  
• The Reading List for Life: Reading List for Life is a simple online tool that will help adult library users create and customize reading lists for continued learning.
  
  
  
• Free Library of Philadelphia Cultureshare: Redefining the delivery of library content, one inbox at a time.
  
  
• One Book 2.0: We seek to upgrade our One Book program with mobile technologies that will fulfill the promise of stronger civic ties through culture.
  
  
• The Time Browser Project: The Time Browser Project enlivens our record of past events and interactions, turning them into immersive flexible compelling experiences.

I'd like to add there are many other deserving submissions that I have given a 'heart' to on the Knight News Challenge website and if you are able to, I'd encourage you to do the same.

New article in Partnership

Just a short note letting the world know that my talk at last year's Access 2015 conference has been formally written up as a contribution to the latest issue of Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

Thanks are extended again to those who made the Access Conference possible and much thanks also goes out to the Partnership Team who makes this valuable Open Access venue possible. Their editorial guidance and copy editing has made this work stronger.

Williams, Mita. “Library of Cards: Reconnecting the Scholar and the Library.” Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research 10, no. 2. https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/3571.

G H O S T S T O R I E S

G H O S T    S T O R Y    1

It’s funny that I ended up as a librarian because my earliest memories of libraries were not entirely positive.

While the children’s section of the central branch library and the school bookmobile regularly brought me joy (largely in the form of Peanuts Parade volumes), I have distinct memories of being filled with dread every time I had to move through the towering shelves of the grown-up section of the library.

Yes, the main library was largely devoid of the sound and colour and the furious activity of the children’s section, but that wasn’t the entire reason why it gave me the creeps. I distinctly remember that when I was younger I associated all the books on the shelves of the library with the work of dead people. Each book represented a person who was now gone and they had left their books behind and the terrible thing was that, by and large, it looked like most of the books stayed on the shelves, unread.

Now, I didn’t actually think that the library was haunted. And over time the whole library became  comfortable to me. Eventually I became a librarian and now I think the library is and can be many, many things to many people.

Some years ago, I wrote this

What if every person who worked at a library was obligated to create and leave one book that remained in the library as long as it remained. Imagine the sense of legacy and the sense of connection that could be established by the shelves of these books. Imagine the ways that those who made these books would choose to express themselves. Would they write a history? a biography? poetry? How could these books connect the people to the place to the time of the library?

 
I still think of the library as a memento mori.

 

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#53 In The Desert

February 4, 2016

“You know, there’s always that fear that an unreasonable person is going to show up.”
-- Michael Saba, on his house being The Bermuda Triangle of cell phones. 

Strangers keep coming to Mike and Christina’s house looking for their stolen cell phones. Nobody knows why. We travel to Atlanta to find out what’s going on, in our thorniest Super Tech Support yet.

G H O S T    S T O R Y    3 

Art and Math and Science, Oh My!
by sailor mercury

Technology can bring art to life.

One very literal example of art bringing technology to life is the experimental theatrical show Sleep No More: an interactive modern retelling of Macbeth where you walk around 4 floors of the set to watch and interact with the actors.

For future shows, they’re working together with the MIT media lab on making the set itself more interactive with embedded programming: mirrors that write messages to you in blood or typewriters that type out cryptic messages to you if you linger too long in front of them.

G H O S T    S T O R Y     4

In the Future, We'll All Be Harry Potter

by Jakob Nielsen on December 9, 2002

Topics:

• Human Computer Interaction
• Predictions & Milestones

Summary: The world of magic is a world where inanimate objects come alive; it's as if they had computational power, sensors, awareness, and connectivity.

By saying that we'll one day be like Harry Potter, I don't mean that we'll fly around on broomsticks or play three-dimensional ballgames (though virtual reality will let enthusiasts play Quidditch matches). What I do mean is that we're about to experience a world where spirit inhabits formerly inanimate objects.

Much of the Harry Potter books' charm comes from the quirky magic objects that surround Harry and his friends. Rather than being solid and static, these objects embody initiative and activity. This is precisely the shift we'll experience as computational power moves beyond the desktop into everyday objects....

 G H O S T    S T O R Y     5 
  
 

After reading a book of German ghost stories, somebody suggested they each write their own. Byron's physician, John Polidori, came up with the idea for The Vampyre, published in 1819,¹ which was the first of the "vampire-as-seducer" novels. Godwin's story came to her in a dream, during which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together."² Soon after that fateful summer, Godwin and Shelley married, and in 1818, Mary Shelley's horror story was published under the title, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus.³

Frankenstein lives on in the popular imagination as a cautionary tale against technology. We use the monster as an all-purpose modifier to denote technological crimes against nature. When we fear genetically modified foods we call them "frankenfoods" and "frankenfish." It is telling that even as we warn against such hybrids, we confuse the monster with its creator. We now mostly refer to Dr. Frankenstein's monster as Frankenstein. And just as we have forgotten that Frankenstein was the man, not the monster, we have also forgotten Frankenstein's real sin.

Dr. Frankenstein's crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself. When Dr. Frankenstein meets his creation on a glacier in the Alps, the monster claims that it was not born a monster, but that it became a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator, who fled the laboratory once the horrible thing twitched to life. "Remember, I am thy creature," the monster protests, "I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed... I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

Written at the dawn of the great technological revolutions that would define the 19th and 20th centuries, Frankenstein foresees that the gigantic sins that were to be committed would hide a much greater sin. It is not the case that we have failed to care for Creation, but that we have failed to care for our technological creations. We confuse the monster for its creator and blame our sins against Nature upon our creations. But our sin is not that we created technologies but that we failed to love and care for them. It is as if we decided that we were unable to follow through with the education of our children.⁴ - Bruno Latour

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[Confession: the whole point of this post is to encourage you to read this]

Our Gothic Future

The other day, after watching Crimson Peak for the first time, I woke up with a fully-fleshed idea for a Gothic horror story about experience design. And while the story would take place in the past, it would really be about the future. Why? Because the future itself is Gothic.


First, what is Gothic? Gothic (or “the Gothic” if you’re in academia) is a Romantic mode of literature and art. It’s a backlash against the Enlightenment obsession with order and taxonomy. It’s a radical imposition of mystery on an increasingly mundane landscape. It’s the anticipatory dread of irrational behaviour in a seemingly rational world. But it’s also a mode that places significant weight on secrets — which, in an era of diminished privacy and ubiquitous surveillance, resonates ever more strongly....

... Consider the disappearance of the interface. As our devices become smaller and more intuitive, our need to see how they work in order to work them goes away. Buttons have transformed into icons, and icons into gestures. Soon gestures will likely transform into thoughts, with brainwave-triggers and implants quietly automating certain functions in the background of our lives. Once upon a time, we valued big hulking chunks of technology: rockets, cars, huge brushed-steel hi-fis set in ornate wood cabinets, thrumming computers whose output could heat an office, even odd little single-purpose kitchen widgets. Now what we want is to be Beauty in the Beast’s castle: making our wishes known to the household gods, and watching as the “automagic” takes care of us. From Siri to Cortana to Alexa, we are allowing our lives and livelihoods to become haunted by ghosts without shells.


Now, I’m not at all the only person to notice this particular trend (or, more accurately, to read the trend through this particular lens). It’s central to David Rose’s book Enchanted Objects, which you all should read. This is also why FutureEverything’s Haunted Machines symposium exists....

 [you really should read the whole thing]



 G H O S T    S T O R Y    7

avocado's thoughts about ghosts and thoughts about libraries are very intertwingled rn

— Avocado (@RealAvocadoFact) February 27, 2016

@copystar maybe there are things we can leave behind that are even more alive than ghosts and libraries are more like gardens than tombs

— Avocado (@RealAvocadoFact) February 27, 2016