I am here on the shores of Lake Michigan visiting my friend and colleague Ed Valauskas.
Ed is a Librarian and Information Scientist, and he is the founder of the online journal
First Monday which he created in 1996 at a time when we didn’t have any online journals.
Very few.
Or very few, so it’s really a great pleasure to be here talking to Ed.
I thought I would just ask him some general questions about the future of libraries and
information and where we might be under conditions of disruption.
So, Ed, what do you think?
Well, libraries are an interesting position relative to technology because technology
has actually helped libraries flourish over the last 10, 20 years.
There has actually been a huge boom in the use of libraries and how people interact with
those institutions in part because the availability of the Internet has made individuals and organizations
more aware how important libraries happen to be in finding information quickly, and
finding accurate information quickly.
You can find all sorts of information on the Internet, but some of it is of not great utility
to be diplomatic.
Libraries have become in a sense organizations that help you find verifiable, accurate, good
information quickly, and I think in the future that dependency on libraries will grow especially
if there are issues in accessing technology and power in the future.
If we want to use some of the digital materials in the future that we access over the Internet
some of those items, some of those documents might not be available because say of a disruption
of some sort.
Well, libraries have things in paper so I can read Nature which I love reading every
week.
You can find the paper issue of that.
Back to the future.
Back to the future of reading something on paper.
Or, they have digital works stored on media like compact discs.
These are versions of the Gutenberg Bible on a compact disc, and I have multiple copies
of this.
I once upon a time would give my students the Gutenberg Bible overnight to look at and
play with.
Not too many places where you could do that, but libraries have copies of these objects
in this format and you can check them out and use them.
So, libraries will become even more so centers for finding good information.
Do you think the physical library will continue to be important given what you’re saying
about paper and so on?
Yes.
I think the physical library will continue to be important, if not even more important,
because it will become this local center for information retrieval.
The staff will have, and already have, but will even have more ability in being able
to use those local resources in genius ways to help people solve different problems that
they need to resolve.
We will still have librarians in these libraries?
Absolutely, and in fact libraries are, and librarians are actually doing quite well in
this information economy.
There has been a growing demand for libraries and librarians.
Back when the Internet first appeared on the scene, in fact when the World Wide Web first
appeared on the scene in the early 1990s there was much wringing of hands.
I remember it, yes.
And people saying oh, this is the death of libraries and the death of librarians.
I did quite well going onto my colleagues saying that’s not the case.
People with the Internet are going to realize how important libraries and librarians are,
and we just have to understand how this technology works.
Many of the librarians perhaps they didn’t embrace my words but caught onto that idea,
and libraries and librarians have become quite important in this digital economy.
Librarians wind up working in libraries, but they also wind up working for technology companies
like Yahoo or Google because those companies recognize the importance of the skills that
librarians have in finding and organizing information.
How about copyright, Ed?
What do you think that will be like under conditions of disruption?
Copyright is an interesting concept because it’s a relatively new concept.
It’s one that was invented in response to technology.
The first notions of copyright legally appeared in the 18th century.
Before copyright was formalized into say British law there were different kinds of agencies
that governed the publication of books to prevent them from threatening the Church or
the State.
These sorts of notions of copyright that we know today were emerged in the 18th and 19th
centuries and over time have grown to be more protective of corporate interests rather than
individual interests.
One of the interesting things that I see emerging for instance is that libraries now provide
access say to the digital version of this journal, but they don’t own the digital
content.
With some changes in copyright law or in actually contractual law a library could have this
content in its collection digitally, and that I think would be very important because if
there were sort of cosmic events that disrupted power and disrupted technologies you are going
to need these institutions to have this local information available.
You can’t depend on the network to access the content of Nature, and copyright the way
it was originally conceived was a temporary protection to intellectual property to allow
that person who created that work to enjoy some short-term economic benefits.
The original notion was that those benefits would occur over a short period of time, say
a decade, and then the work would fall into public demand.
When you think about it, a healthy democracy depends on lots of information being in the
public domain, but over time the term of copyright has grown to the point where it’s now on
a geologic timescale, life of the author plus 70 years, and there are ways of manipulating
that time table so works are protected under copyright for what seems to be forever.
We need to address these notions of copyright, the term of copyright, and we need to make
it easier for institutions like libraries to have more digital content that they can
have on hand and to make it accessible locally, and to make it available for any individual
to deal with without worrying about Macmillan who owns Nature saying how you can access
this.
That’s encouraging because we’re seeing the growth of open access journals growing
at a much faster rate than traditional scholarly publishing.
I’m heartened that this model is being adopted by more and more scholars and institutions,
and this is a place again where libraries are playing an important role because libraries
have become publishers of these sorts of journals.
First Monday is published essentially by the University of Illinois at Chicago, but also
the University of Illinois at Chicago library so this institution has decided to support
this model.
This is another way in which libraries will continue to gain importance?
And become not only distributors of information, but creators of information and producers,
and working with scholars to create more open information and make it more widely available
both on a global scale but also on a local scale, and that’s very important.
Yes.
We had talked about the solar storms scenario.
Do you want to talk about that?
Yes.
One has to think about what would be the sort of catastrophic event that would disrupt power
and would disrupt computing.
There was a paper that was published in Nature Communications not long ago this year about
a solar event that occurred in which a large mass of charged particles erupted from the
sun and went into space essentially towards earth, but luckily earth dogged that storm,
dogged that bullet.
This was in 2012.
The storms can essentially overrun the protection that the earth has.
It has a magnetic field that essentially absorbs the impact and deflects these charged particles
that are coming from the sun.
This 2012 storm was traveling at a rate of speed that in 18-1/2 hours it would have traveled
the 150 million kilometers from the sun to the earth.
So, in 18-1/2 hours.
There’s not much you can do in 18-1/2 hours to get ready for one of these storms.
We can't put up like some science fiction defense field.
That’s not going to work.
Earth doesn’t have like a Star Trek field to prevent this from happening.
What would have happened had that storm actually hit the earth because of its intensity?
First of all, radio would have been disrupted.
GPS devices would have been disrupted.
Think about all the things that are dependent on GPS.
Airplanes, ships, automobiles, trains.
Transportation would have been disrupted, radio communications would have been disrupted.
The second thing that would have been disrupted by this storm would have been all the various
satellites that circle the earth because essentially their mechanisms would have been fried from
these highly charged particles.
Then the third thing that would have happened is that this storm was so powerful that it
would have disrupted all the power supply in the world.
There was an event like this that occurred in Canada in 1989, and it disrupted power
supplies in Quebec for up to 9 hours before they were able to restore power.
This event in 1989 was not on the scale like the one we just dogged.
Scientists predict there is a very strong likelihood that one of these events could
occur in the next few decades, and if that occurs we have no way of dealing with the
disruption to telecommunications, to information technologies, and to power supplies.
My home is dependant on electricity to help keep the furnaces going so if that storm struck
in winter I would lose power, and the pipes would freeze, and I would have to be dependant
on the fireplace to keep myself warm.
It would be very disruptive.
Food would be spoiled depending on the time of the year.
You couldn’t communicate because all the ways of communication would be broken down.
That would cause everyone to fall back to a very local kind of dependency.
You couldn’t really think about driving anyplace.
You would have to get around by walking or using a bicycle.
You would have to forage for food.
I would have to go to the lake and go catch my protein so I would have something to eat.
I would have to forage for berries and nuts in the forest around me which may not be a
bad thing.
We would also become very dependent on local sources of information.
My library which is little over a mile away would become a very important institution
to me to go to to find things in paper or things in the sorts of technologies that I
might be able to use, but I might not have access to the Internet on sort of scale that
I know.
We might have a different kind of Internet.
We might have a local kind of an Internet.
If we were going to be prudent we should definitely invest in libraries for many of the reasons
that you’ve mentioned it seems like to me.
Yes.
Libraries I think have always been a good investment, but I think if we are concerned
about what might happen in the future they will become even more important institutions
as expositories for local information, local knowledge, and we need to maintain them, keep
them strong and keep them supplied with the kinds of people that can take advantage of
these technologies.
We need the people and the information.
Yes.
They can’t run by themselves.
You need the kinds of trained people to help them work.
If we were thinking ahead to the future we would probably want to think even more about
how to design libraries for the future.
Alright, well good.
I would like thank you very much Ed.
This has been really interesting, and students I want to encourage you to go to First Monday.org.
Please.
There are a lot of great articles about the Internet.
That is what the topic of the journal is, and I’m sure you will find much of interest
there.
Okay.
Thanks again Ed.
Thank you.