Wanted: Your Ideas on How to Build a Digital Public Library of America

Will all of you naysayers retract your negative comments when they are shown to be unfounded or will you continue to spew your unfounded accusations?

What a great conversation to have. I hope submissions will become part of a national conversation.

The title sounds grand, but I’m wondering why the planners think we need one, single, CENTRALIZED system?  The real strength and beauty of our public library system is that it’s LOCAL.  

If the only way for patrons to access this proposed library is through a single web site, the project will be an utter failure that hastens the demise of our public libraries.  

Instead, the “digital public library of America” should be nothing more than a central depository of electronic books that can be “borrowed,” combined with a set of rules and procedures for how other institutions access the books. Everything else should happen through a network of local sites.

Imagine, for instance, a brick and mortar “library” with millions of titles that are available only through interlibrary loan from your local library — patroons never set foot in the place. That, in essence, is what the project should look like, but with ebooks and servers rather than bound books and bricks.

I think this is a great idea. I can’t imagine that this will replace local libraries. It will give us just one more avenue to information gathering and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. Type your comment here.

The idea is great, by usage of RFID in physical libraries and using new technology of Sixth Sense and Augmented reality we can build a Digital Public Library that uses physical books of all nation’s libraries accessible for everyone online, since knowledge is good when it can be shared. All we have to do is building a huge database and its interfaces online that access the books that have RFID tags and locate them in its local library; by accessing each library’s book with the help of its RFID we can access online local libraries to read the book or journal which has been digitizing. Amazon warehouse model can be applied to these libraries. From an operations point of view, it makes a lot of sense to make local libraries digitizing. No more worrying that researcher / student has moved books around and placed them in the wrong place in the stacks. Time can be saved in restocking the volumes and making sure they are in the proper place. The robots in local libraries can serve that purpose. Every book can be more easily retrieve, as they no longer require finding the right floor, section, and call number. Also, the books are stored in much better conditions than an open library typically allows. In terms of space, the idea is wonderful. It also brings with it; a fundamentally different library experience for the researcher in particular. Any one with huge research experience knows the pain of searching for the right materials. The idea of letting library users add keywords and tags too is also helping as well as wiki-cataloging system. I think that’s the next evolution of the Libraries in general which can be implemented in this Public Library as well.Of course security is also another consideration so that we prevent that users deliberately add misleading tags/keywords to throw off other users — the digital equivalent of intentionally mis-shelving a book so that it is unavailable to other users is also concern. Which I have other strategies for it.Hope it helps new generation of researcher have a better quality of working environment and materials, and of course ultimately better outcome of their work.

 None of this will be of much use unless cataloging is accurate and complete within the traditional Library of Congress rules—and I emphasize traditional—and search engines are at least half-way decent. Many are not.

Catalogue schmatalogue. Search trumps organization. 

 Great point! Building on this comment. Digital books are a great convenience however, most e-book readers are not waterproof. So right now tub reading is out of the digital question. I have a tendency to doze off while reading in the tub and dropping the material in the water. I actually killed my first I-Pod this way. I have a shelf full of water destroyed books. They really swell up however, if one takes the time they can be dried and still readable.So, will e-book readers become waterproof in the future for cases like these?

less a comment; than a perspective / report  via New York Public Library /  John Palfrey [Harvard] [who has an agile sense of Digital Libraries].
http://thetechview.com/2011/07/palfreys-provenance.html

When working with three students on a project within my department, I had the leader of the pack who always answered questions or offered solutions, one that would chime in once in a while, and one who said NOTHING.  It took me and the professor turning to her and asking her point blank for her thoughts and opinions  before she would say anything.  However, when the project continued into the spring semester and Ms. Leader left, Ms. Quiet suddenly became the true leader of the group, not only offering her opinions but organizing meetings and summarizing the ideas of her classmates.  At times, some shy students might feel overshadowed by someone who talks all of the time, and it takes the departure of Ms. Leader or Mr. Chatterbox for the shy student to truly shine.

In Business Communication classes, 4 sections of 30+ students, when in any group activity, each group has to file a real-time memo that identifies who did what and who contributed what ideas by the end of the class or end of business day, depending on how complex the task.

While hating (kinda kidding) to contribute to Memo Culture, this gives the shy person who may want to contribute a “reason” that does not involve talking over the Talker.  Funnily enough, when casting about for who did what, some groups that tended to conform to each other had to really cast wide to come up with new ideas so that it “looked like” there were 3 distinct contributions, and voila, some of them turned out to be useful.

And it’s not a bad thing for them to practice having a method when they find themselves in the workplace with Shy, Slacker and Talker.  Not saying my workplace is like that ;)

“If he didn’t want share one topic then he should write on another.”

That a nice idea in principle, but what if  he’s already written the paper, and now the class has started, and the students are supposed to hand each other their papers right now?  He can’t write on another topic in the next 10 seconds.

Interesting Concept