july2015 ecdl vienna_2005 personal digital libraries and collections
TRANSCRIPT
Plenty of Room at the Bottom?
Personal Digital Libraries and CollectionsNeil Beagrie
British Library/JISC
ECDL September 2005
Overview
• Technical and Social Trends
• Implications and definition
• Research projects
• Collective services
• Conclusions
“Generation C”
• Mass market consumer trend -refers to a perceptible emerging consumer shift, from consumption to personal creation, customization, and co-production of digital content
• www.trendwatching.com
• Next time you see a Microsoft or industry ad look for “unleash your creativity”
“Generation C”
Spectrum Consultants 2004 BBC online Review – module 2: Future UK Internet market trends. Final report for DCMS predicts:
• increased consumption of 'amateur' content and that amateurs will have better links to professional producers/publishers to send electronically content they have made themselves (e.g. text, photos and video clips
• growth in weblogging, personal online journals, personal journalism operating on a mass scale and interpersonal links such as picture, video and music sharing
Scholarly communication
• Self-archiving by academics• E-portfolios for student learning• Creative Commons licensing
• Personal collections are often the foundation and lifeblood of most museum, library, and archive collections.
• What about future digital collections?
Preservation of personal digital collections
• Impact on scholarly research and library special collections
Trends and Implications
• Individuals will soon be able to store the equivalent of texts in a large academic research library on a PC
• Digital material is often ephemeral – needs early capture
• Role of personal digital collections and their relationship to digital libraries?
Definition of personal digital collections
• Personal Digital Collections are composed of information and content assembled by individuals from their private activities, work and external communities. They can be intended for private or public consumption and reflect both private and public personas of individuals.
Personal Curation
• “ Within 5-10 years, personal stores of a terabyte will cost of a few hundred dollars – hence a person will can be immortal in terms of the media they’ve encountered. For “famous” people, one will be able to access their entire life.” (Bell & Gray, Microsoft 2000)
• Nokia life-blog mobile phone software -calendar filing + web publishing
• “1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.” (Gmail, Google 2003)
• Penn State Information Sciences and Technology Student e-portfolio
Microsoft MyLifeBits
• Microsoft Research Project “MyLifeBits” aiming for continuous lifetime storage and associated software research
• http://research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/MyLifeBits.aspx
“Memories for Life”
• Much of this information will be associated with particular people (e.g. emails, digital images, web browsing histories), which raises the question of how such ‘digital memories’ can be stored over periods of decades. Serious issues include: search, indexing and organisation; privacy; extracting knowledge from potentially vast and heterogeneous repositories…representation techniques that will be robust over periods of time …” (“Memories for Life” Grand Challenge Cognitive Systems Inter Action Conference 2003)
PARADIGM
•Project on digital papers of politicians•http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/
Internet Archive
• Internet Archive launched by Brewster Kahle in 1996:
• www.archive.org• Webpages, music,
lectures, open-source films, books
• Growing at 20 Tb a month
Bush’s memex 1945
A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Vannevar Bush1945.
In Conclusion• We are close to realising Vannevar Bush’s Memex• The growing abundance of personal data and collection
will present numerous challenges to individuals: – how to physically secure such material over decades; – how to protect privacy; – how to organize and extract information and to use it effectively; – how to effectively present and control access by different
users.
• We will see new types of shared services for them.• Personal Digital Collections will have major impacts on
collections, publishing and Libraries• May lead to mass market ICT applications• Plenty of room at the bottom for digital libraries
Further Information
Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections
Article in D-Lib June 2005:http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june05/beagrie/06beagrie.html