“David Weinberger is senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and has been instrumental in the development of ideas about the impact of the web. Shortly before his recent keynote presentation at OCLC’s EMEA Regional Council Meeting in Florence, he spoke with Sarah Bartlett about the library-sized hole in the Internet and how a ‘library graph’ might help librarians to fill it.
You rose to prominence as an internet thought leader, with pioneering texts such as The Cluetrain Manifesto and Everything is Miscellaneous. What led you into the world of libraries?
In Everything is Miscellaneous I explored the way the Internet is redefining our ideas about how we organise things and ideas, and the move from physical to digital and networked library resources is a prime example of that. As a result of Everything is Miscellaneous, I was offered a position as co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. This turned out to be an amazing learning experience in the heart of one of the world’s great libraries.
Besides format changes, what is the most significant impact of the web on libraries today?
Library knowledge – the content; the metadata; what librarians and the community know about items held – is being lost to the web. This represents an immense amount of culture. The most basic components of the web are links, but if you want to talk about a book, what do you link to? There is no clear answer. They might turn to Wikipedia, but only around 70,000 books actually have a page on Wikipedia, so people rely on commercial sites like Amazon. We aren’t even meeting the most basic requirement, linking, much less having a way to refer to the history of the work, how it’s affected people and culture.”
“Close to six in ten adult internet users in Canada have a Facebook profile, with almost half accessing the platform more often than once per day, reveals a new study.
A January 2015 survey from Forum Research found that 59 percent of Canadians have a Facebook account, compared to 30 percent who use LinkedIn, 25 percent who have a Twitter profile and 16 percent on Instagram.
While Facebook dominates all age demographics, Twitter also beats Instagram across all ages, including the key 18-34 group, in Canada.
47 percent of respondents use Facebook more than once each day, compared to 27 percent for Instagram, 23 percent for Twitter and 6 percent for LinkedIn.
eMarketer estimates that almost twenty million people across all age groups will use social networks in Canada by the end of this year – 18.5 million on Facebook and 6.8 million on Twitter.”
Stephen
Posted on: February 25, 2015, 6:44 amCategory: Uncategorized
The growing role of the digital economy in daily life has heightened demand for new data and measurement tools. Internationally comparable and timely statistics combined with robust cross-country analyses are crucial to strengthen the evidence base for digital economy policy making, particularly in a context of rapid change. This report presents indicators traditionally used to monitor the information society and complements them with experimental indicators that provide insight into areas of policy interest. The key objectives of this publication are to highlight measurement gaps and propose actions to advance the measurement agenda.
Stephen Abram is a librarian and principal with Lighthouse Consulting Inc., and executive director of the Federation of Ontario Public Libraries. He blogs on library strategies for direction, marketing, technology and user alignment.
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