The Second Internet
and the Next Big Idea
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for November 2002
Once upon a time, many years ago, there was a magical world where people could communicate and share their ideas freely with anyone, in the blink of an eye, anywhere, anytime. This world, which was called the Internet, was a mysterious and exciting place, and could only be entered by those of the priesthood who built and maintained it. But slowly, gradually, others came along and found this place and messed it all up by their very presence. The Internet gurus decided they needed another sacred place, so they got great gobs of money and built Internet2, reserved solely for themselves, where no one else could play.
That’s not quite the way it went, but you could be forgiven for thinking so. Internet2 was introduced with great fanfare in 1998 as the massive networking pipeline for science and research, ultimately to benefit us all, and then not much more was heard of it, at least not popularly. The intent was good, but it has seemed like a superhighway got built and then there weren’t many cars.
But imagine what would happen if the people building the big pipeline realized that that kind of bandwidth could also be of benefit to libraries, and turned to us to tell them how we might be able to work together with networking and engineering types to make something truly significant and useful.
Shocking, I know, but apparently it’s true: People from the National Science Foundation held a workshop in August with ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy to “produce a research and action agenda to examine the technical and organizational aspects of delivering advanced digital services through libraries . . . and to suggest initial approaches to delivering these services.”
To which I say, it’s about damned time. So now the question is—to do what? What are those “advanced digital services”? What would be the big vision of how libraries could make a quantum leap forward in service based on a research and development enterprise funded, and conducted cooperatively with NSF?
The workshop was a good first step; I have a lot of respect for the people I know who were there, as well as for OITP, having served on their advisory committee. However, this is the opportunity of a lifetime—perhaps quite literally—that gives us the chance to finally come across with ideas instead of just whining about how much better things would be if only we were involved.
NSF doesn’t hurl itself at libraries very often, and we don’t get many invitations like this. Let’s also be honest here: The information world is getting bigger by the second yet our claim on people’s information consciousness isn’t. There are lots of options for people to find things, and even though library use is up during this recession, we’re not as central as we should be in their minds.
Strike up the bandwidth
Huge bandwidth means we could quickly and reliably send and receive massive amounts of stuff: humongous amounts of text, of course, but also images, video, audio, any kind of streaming dataflows. Not coincidentally, this is the kind of multimedia content we see AOL, MSN, and others emphasizing. The future of information work quite probably lies in the digital, multimedia realm, beyond but not to the exclusion of text. What would we do with that? How could we add value to an environment such as that, as we have done in the print world?
Libraries and librarians add value to information processes. We do this by evaluating and selecting good resources, developing ways of organizing those resources, building systems to store and retrieve them, developing services to help people find and use what they’re looking for, and educating them about as much of all this as they’re willing to learn—all to assist in access to the right information for each person. Our challenge now, made even more apparent by these Internet2 discussions, is how to reinterpret those value-adding functions in a world where speed is no longer a meaningful constraint.
In thinking about this, it occurs to me that we really haven’t had that one Big Idea to motivate and mobilize a large number of librarians for quite a while (maybe digital reference; the jury’s still out). I think of the twin goals in the 1960s and 1970s of digitizing our catalogs and sharing the fruits of cataloging labors (despite those who still miss the old card catalogs) and wonder if another big idea could be the catalyst that brings the skills and expertise of librarians and technologists together to create something truly wonderful and transforming.
What’s your big vision? How do you think “advanced digital services” could make libraries more indispensable to the information lives of their communities? Somewhere out there, I’ll bet, one of us has the germ. Send it to somebody involved with this initiative. Let’s demonstrate that we can think big and build something worthy of our long and distinguished professional heritage.
Worth Viewing
Read all about Internet2 at k20.internet2.edu, and see OITP’s site about the workshop at www.ala.org/oitp/Net2/.
Worth Reading
Value-Added Processes in Information Systems by Robert S. Taylor (Ablex, 1986). Forward-thinking and provocative, maybe even more now than when it was published.
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