Building Web 2.0

May 2007

Web Technologies

Building Web 2.0

Kwei-Jay Lin

University of California, Irvine

The global buildup of Internet connectivity and growing availability of inexpensive computing and communication devices have made the World Wide Web a virtual continent that is borderless. Anyone in the world with a computer and Internet access can now explore, join, build, or abandon any Web community at any time.

This new freedom is often attributed to the “Web 2.0 era” of services and applications that let webizens easily share opinions and resources. Consequently, users can collectively contribute to a Web presence and generate massive content behind their virtual collaboration.

“AN ATTITUDE NOT A TECHNOLOGY”

Tim O’Reilly was among the first to evangelize the concept of Web 2.0, coining the phrase in 2004. He reflected a year later that “One of the key lessons of the Web 2.0 era is this: Users add value…. Therefore, Web 2.0 companies set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data and building value as a side-effect of ordinary use of the application” ( www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html).

Following O’Reilly’s definition, Web 2.0 technologies provide rich and lightweight online tools that let users contribute new data they can aggregate to harness a community’s “collective intelligence.” However, Web 2.0 should not be equated with such technologies.

In his Internet Alchemy blog, Ian Davis asserts that “Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology” (http://iandavis.com/blog/2005/07/talis-web-20-and-all-that). “It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services,” he adds. “By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts.”

Web 2.0 thus represents a paradigm shift in how people use the Web. While most users were once limited to passively viewing Web sites created by a small number of providers with markup and programming skills, now nearly everyone can actively contribute content online. Technologies are important tools, but they are secondary to achieving the greater goal of promoting free and open access to knowledge.

Toward that end, Web 2.0 systems should be simple, scalable, and sensible.

Not all users are technically savvy. A Web 2.0 system should provide a simple interface so that even the least sophisticated webizen can contribute input. Simplicity is important so that common people, not just experts, can build and use the Web.

All webizens should have an equal opportunity to participate in Web 2.0 systems. Popular systems must employ fair and widely accepted protocols to accommodate numerous users without discrimination. Scalability is especially important on the Web given its global reach.

A Web 2.0 system should be able to digest all legible input, regardless of the source, and produce sensible conclusions. This could be as simple as using visitor counts to identify the most popular pages or materials, or as sophisticated as doing trend analysis similar to that used by program trading in stock markets.

FACILITATING USER PARTICIPATION

There is no one set of technologies that every Web 2.0 system uses. Any Web-based software that lets users create and update content is arguably a Web 2.0 technology. However, several families of technologies that encourage user participation and social networking are associated with the Web 2.0 era.

Many new technologies make the Web interface smooth and intuitive. Ajax, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Document Object Model (DOM), Extensible HTML (XHTML), XSL Transformations (XSLT)/XML, and Adobe Flash provide users with a rich and fun interactive experience without the drawbacks of most old Web applications. These technologies display and deliver Web services just like desktop software, making distributed processing difficulties invisible.

Other new technologies make it easy for Web services to connect to multiple data and information sources. XML-RPC, Representational State Transfer (REST), RSS, Atom, mashups, and similar technologies facilitate the subscription, propagation, reuse, and intermixing of Web content.

Perhaps the most important resource for Web 2.0 is the user. Providing friendly tools for user participation in content creation, consumption, and distribution has been the key to success (and failure) for many startups in the Web 2.0 era. Technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and vod-casts foster the growth of new Web communities.

Technologies are also in place to make Web sites more scalable. For example, Google and Yahoo! process most requests in less than a second, and connections to popular user-based Web sites such as YouTube and Flickr are nearly effortless.

COLLECTING INTELLIGENCE

Compared to technologies that make Web sites simpler to use and more scalable, those designed to produce and manage collective intelligence are relatively immature. Imple- menting scalability can indeed be challenging, but sensibility comes at variable sophistication levels.

User feedback

Hit counters roughly indicate Web sites’ relative popularity, while the volume of user comments provides a measure of user participation. However, these and other such simple metrics do not necessarily communicate the value of online content.

Some Web sites drill further down by asking users to indicate whether certain information is helpful or even to rate it on, say, a scale of 1 to 10 and then indexing the results. Nevertheless, the widespread reluctance of many people to provide feedback severely limits the effectiveness of such mechanisms.

Recommender systems

Most current Web 2.0 sites were originally designed to be either user data repositories (such as YouTube and Flickr) or social networks (like MySpace and Xanga). They thus lack structured intelligence and present popular results in an ad hoc manner. Finding meaningful information can be almost impossible; most of the time, bumping into something interesting is pure luck.

To address this problem, some Web sites feature recommender systems that employ filtering technologies to point users to objects of interest. Collaborative filtering provides personalized recommendations based on individual user preferences as well as those of other users with similar interests, while content-based filtering analyzes and rates the content of infor- mation sources to create profiles of users’ interests.

Search engines

Most Web 2.0 sites include search engines to help users locate content others have created. These systems retrieve information by inspecting keyword metatags embedded by the author. However, such tags might be created randomly and not correlate with the actual content.

Newer versions of search engines use a combination of data content (term frequency and density), data context (file name and domain name), and the number of incoming links (PageRank data). Web 2.0 site developers must continue developing better techniques to provide more effective search capability, especially for multimedia content.

Mashups

Mashups are a simple and powerful Web 2.0 content creation/reuse technology that lets users integrate information from multiple sources to provide an enriched experience. For example, it’s possible to build a Web site that shows application-specific data next to photos selected from Flickr at run time or atop locations displayed on a Google map. The content origins of newly created pages can be explicitly acknowledged or embedded in the production process.

The quality of service in mashups depends on its composite services—low-quality output from one service can degrade the quality of its successors. Thus, when a mashup contains many service providers, determining individual services’ accountability is necessary to properly attribute credit, identify the root of a problem, or improve the complete process (Y. Zhang, K-J. Lin, and Jane Y.J. Hsu, “Accountability Monitoring and Reasoning in Service-Oriented Architectures,” Service-Oriented Computing and Applications, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 35-50).

Web 2.0 has the democratic goal of allowing—in fact, encouraging—all webizens to create, share, distribute, and enjoy ideas and information. To reach this goal, Web-based systems must be simple to use, highly scalable, and rich in sensible content. Among these qualities, sensibility is the hardest to master and will experience the most technological breakthroughs.

Only when this goal is accomplished will it be possible to identify the common set of Web 2.0 capabilities requiring support in all “webfront” devices, much as PC desktops now offer standard Web connection and browser features.

Kwei-Jay Lin is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Contact him at klin@uci.edu.

Web 3.0: Chicken Farms on the Semantic Web

January 2008

Web Technologies

Web 3.0: Chicken Farms on the Semantic Web

Jim Hendler

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The explosive growth of blogs, wikis, social networking sites, and other online communities has transformed the Web in recent years. The mainstream media has taken notice of the so-called Web 2.0 revolution—stories abound about events such as Facebook’s huge valuation and trends like the growing Hulu-YouTube rivalry and Flickr’s role in the current digital camera sales boom.

However, a new set of technologies is emerging in the background, and even the Web 2.0 crowd is starting to take notice.

The Semantic Edge

One of the best-attended sessions at the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit (www.web2summit.com) was called “The Semantic Edge.” Its theme was the use of semantic technologies to bring new functionality to such Web staples as search, social networking, and multimedia file sharing.

The session included beta demos by Metaweb Technologies (www.metaweb.com), which bills itself as “an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge”; Powerset (www.powerset.com), a company building intelligent search tools with natural-language technology; and Radar Networks (www.radarnetworks.com), whose Twine tool, shown in Figure 1, aims to “leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your friends, colleagues, groups and teams.”

Figure 1. Twine, a beta tool released by Web 3.0 start-up Radar Networks, uses Semantic Web technologies to help users organize, find, and share online information.

Not included in the panel but working in the same space are other newcomers such as Garlik (www.garlik.com), a UK company creating tools to control personal information on the Web; online TV provider Joost (www.joost.com); Talis (www.talis.com), a vendor of software that makes data “available to share, remix and reuse”; and TopQuadrant (www.topquadrant.com), which offers consulting, teaching, and tool development in this space.

More established companies exploring semantic technologies for the Web include Mondeca (www.mondeca.com), a European enterprise information integration company, and Ontoprise (www.ontoprise.de), a German vendor of ontology-related tools. Big industry players like Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM are also getting into the game.

The WEB and Web 2.0

All of this activity suggests that a new set of Web technologies is transitioning from toys and demos to tools and applications. Of course, this isn’t the first time this has happened.

In the mid-1990s, the Web seemed to bloom overnight: Companies started putting Web addresses on their products, personal home pages began springing up, and Mark Andreesen’s Mosaic browser got millions of downloads as more people discovered the World Wide Web.

The technology had actually been around for some time—Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1989—but it wasn’t until this later time that it turned a knee in the growth curve and became one of the most important applications in history.

Another wave of technologies, dubbed Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly, began to emerge a few years later. Newspapers began losing subscribers to news blogs, encyclopedia companies woke up to discover Wikipedia was forcing them to change the way they work, and “google” became a verb on everybody’s lips. Even those who weren’t computer geeks began to talk about Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook.

Again, these technologies required time to mature, catch on virally, and turn that knee in the curve before they enjoyed widespread adoption.

Toward Web 3.0

A new generation of Web applications, which technology journalist John Markoff called “Web 3.0″ (“Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense,” The New York Times, 12 Nov. 2006), is now starting to come to the public’s attention. Companies like those showcased at the Web 2.0 Summit’s “Semantic Edge” session are exploiting years of behind-the-scenes development, and there is growing excitement in the commercialization of what, until now, has been a slowly expanding wave of activity.

Although semantic technologies have been around for a while, activity under the name “Semantic Web” really began to take off around 2000. Development of the Resource Description Framework was under way at the World Wide Web Consortium, which produced a first specification in 1999. However, the W3C metadata activity that had spawned it was inactive, and some original RDF supporters were shifting investment to other areas, such as XML and Web services, making it hard for the RDF adherents to find resources for further development.

The change came with an investment in the technology by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which saw extending RDF as a way to deal with numerous interoperability problems plaguing the US Department of Defense, particularly with respect to sharing information across organizational boundaries. DARPA joined with the European Union’s Information Society Technologies project, interested in similar issues, to form an ad hoc research group to explore how to apply some ideas from the field of AI to meet these needs.

This research investment brought together a curious mixture of Web gurus looking to bring data to the Web, AI practitioners starting to appreciate the power that scaling small amounts of semantics to Web size could provide, and visionary government data providers with interoperability problems that increasingly demanded solutions. These funds also supported development of early Semantic Web demos and tools that came to the attention of industrial researchers.

In 2001, the W3C renewed work in this area under the banner of the Semantic Web Activity (www.w3.org/2001/sw), and within a couple of years, new working groups were looking at improving the RDF standard; completing the standardization of RDF Schema (RDFS), a vocabulary definition language on top of RDF; and beginning work on OWL, an ontology language for the Web. In February 2004, new versions of RDF and RDFS, and the first version of OWL, became W3C Recommendations—standards for the Web.

Chicken-and-egg problems

With any new technology, the transition from research to practice and from standards to deployment imposes a time delay. This delay can sometimes be quite long, as a real chicken-and-egg problem arises: Tool vendors and manufacturers are reluctant to implement products until they see a market forming, but the market doesn’t tend to form until the tools are available. The length of the delay thus typically depends on how soon vendors hear the demand from users and can get prototypes and tools to them.

However, the Semantic Web involves several other chicken-and-egg problems.

First, these applications require, in part or whole, data that is available for sharing either within or across an enterprise. Represented in RDF, this data can be generated from a standard database, mined from existing Web sources, or produced as markup of document content.

Machine-readable vocabularies for describing these data sets or documents are likewise required. The core of many Semantic Web applications is an ontology, a machine-readable domain description, defined in RDFS or OWL. These vocabularies can range from a simple “thesaurus of terms” to an elaborate expression of the complex relationships among the terms or rule sets for recognizing patterns within the data.

(While the Semantic Web community has long recognized that these different vocabulary levels fill different niches in the Web ecology, some critics mistakenly assume all Web ontologies are of the latter type. Overcoming this misunderstanding continues to be a challenge to the community.)

Finally, Web 3.0 applications require extensions to browsers, or other Web tools, enhanced by Semantic Web data. As in the early days of the Web when we were creating HTML pages without being quite sure what to do with them, for a long time people have been creating and exchanging Semantic Web documents and data sets without knowing exactly how Web applications would access and use them.

The advent of RDF query languages, particularly SPARQL (currently a W3C Candidate Recommendation), made it possible to create three-tiered Semantic Web applications similar to standard Web applications. These in turn can present Semantic Web data in a usable form to end users or to other applications, eliciting more obvious value from the emerging Web of data and documents.

However, motivating companies or governments to release data, ontology designers to build and share domain descriptions, and Web application developers to explore Semantic-Web-based applications all hinge on one another. Accomplishing this has sometimes been a daunting proposition.

Recent trends

Despite these challenges, the pace of semantic technology development has accelerated recently. In the early days of the technology, small companies tried—sometimes unsuccessfully—to create Semantic Web tools. During the past couple of years, however, larger companies have begun providing tools and technologies, both in product sets and open source offerings, and some of the biggest names in the data and software sectors have been testing the water.

Government data sets are being shared, small Semantic Web domain descriptions like the Friend of a Friend ontology are seeing great uptake (FOAF files currently number in the tens of millions), and SPARQL end points have motivated many Web application developers to seriously look at this technology. This in turn has led new start-ups to focus less on the tool market and more on user-facing applications.

Emerging Web 3.0 companies are combining the Web data resources, standard languages, ever-better tools, and (mostly simple) ontologies into applications that take advantage of the power of this new breed of semantic technologies. The entrepreneurs behind these efforts are exploiting the convergence of Semantic Web capabilities to embed small amounts of reasoning into large-scale Web applications, with tremendous potential.

It’s an exciting time for those of us who have been evangelists, early adopters, and language designers for Semantic Web technology. What we see in Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web community moving from arguing over chickens and eggs to creating its first real chicken farms. The technology might not yet be mature, but we’ve come a long way, and the progress promises to continue for a long time to come.

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Contact him at hendler@cs.rpi.edu.

Bibliography

Corpus-based language studies : an advanced resource book

By Tony McEnery; Richard Xiao; Yukio Tono

Corpus-based language studies : an advanced resource book
by Tony McEnery; Richard Xiao; Yukio Tono
Type: bks
Publisher: London ; New York : Routledge, 2006.
_________________________________________________
Analyzing linguistic data : a practical introduction to statistics using R

By Harald Baayen

Analyzing linguistic data : a practical introduction to statistics using R
by Harald Baayen
Type: bks
Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007.
My notes: none

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Corpus linguistics : critical concepts in linguistics

By Wolfgang Teubert; Ramesh Krishnamurthy

Corpus linguistics : critical concepts in linguistics
by Wolfgang Teubert; Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Type: bks
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Computational linguistics and intelligent text processing : 8th international conference, CICLing 2007, Mexico City, Mexico, February 18-24, 2007 : proceedings

By Alexander Gelbukh

Computational linguistics and intelligent text processing : 8th international conference, CICLing 2007, Mexico City, Mexico, February 18-24, 2007 : proceedings
by Alexander Gelbukh
Type: bks
Publisher: Berlin ; New York : Springer, ©2007.
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New media in politics : a comparison of attitudes in liberal and conservative Web logs

By Caitlin Clark Fahey

New media in politics : a comparison of attitudes in liberal and conservative Web logs
by Caitlin Clark Fahey
Type: bks
Publisher: Norton, MA : Wheaton College, 2007.
My notes: none

Blogs from the liberal standpoint : 2004-2005

By Lawrence R Velvel

Blogs from the liberal standpoint : 2004-2005
by Lawrence R Velvel
Type: bks
Publisher: Andover, Mass. : Doukathsan Press, ©2006.

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Author               European Semantic Web Conference (4th : 2007 :
Innsbruck, Austria)

Title                The Semantic Web : research and applications : 4th
European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2007, Innsbruck,
Austria, June 3-7, 2007 : proceedings / Enrico
Franconi, Michael Kifer, Wolfgang May (eds.).

Published            Berlin ; New York : Springer, c2007.

Electronic Resource  http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=issue&iss
n=0302-9743&volume=4519 [ Restricted to Springer LINK
subscribers ]

Electronic Resource  Table of contents only:
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0715/2007927308.html

Location/Request     Library Service Center | 001.64 L471, v. 4519 LSC

Description          xviii, 830 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Series               Lecture notes in computer science, ISSN 0302-9743 ;
4519

Contents             Invited talks — Best papers — Semantic Web services
– Ontology learning, inference and mapping — Case
studies — Social Semantic Web — Ontologies :
requirements and analysis — Personalization –
Foundations of the Semantic Web — Natural languages
and ontologies — Applications — Querying and Web data
models — System descriptions.

Surfing the Library 2.0 Wave

CAN YOU TRANSFORM PHYSICAL SPACE THAT IS LYING FALLOW INTO A MORE VIBRANT, 2.0 SORT OF ZONE THAT INVITES INTERACTION?

There’s an ocean full of metaphors we can use to help us grasp the opportunities arising from “everything 2.0,” but I have a favorite–surfing. Surfing sounds great, but requires skills that “hodads” may not have thought about. There are wipe outs galore, courage is required, and most of all, staying in synch with a moving target requires the ability to focus. So in thinking about 2.0 stuff, I’ll stick with my surfing metaphor, knowing that all of us have plenty of career experience ending up in the white water.

Coining “Library 2.0″ out of the ubiquitous “Web 2.0″ was a marketing stroke of genius: Not only is it true, but “unbelievers” can really “get” what you’re trying to say with a few terse and well-chosen words. Most of our great thinkers have adopted Library 2.0 rhetoric in outreach, marketing strategies, and budgetary ploys, and you know, I think we’re on top of the rhetoric. But when it comes to actually implementing a bold new Library 2.0 step, where to begin, and what to do? I’m going to offer some starting points in this column, knowing many of us have already started paddling into the “2.0″ break, and are well past the point of taking 2.0 surfing lessons at a virtual Waikiki.

The Old Library 1.0 Hot Doggers Are Hanging 10

Personally, I think there are a few things that need to be said up front, even at the risk of repeating myself. What we’ve always done–the Library 1.0 part–is not atavistic, but cutting-edge. I wrote at length about how to use core library skills to break into new organizational roles in a recent article that appeared in ONLINE (September/October 2006, p. 21), so I won’t restate everything here. I’ll just leave it at this: Those of us who can provide strategic reference services, articulate a meaningful digital preservation policy, and collect the knowledge our users need, are right on track. That’s Library 1.0, pure and simple, but it’s a terrific tidal chart for surfing into the 2.0 point break. There’s an added benefit: 1.0 strategies work best if we take an activist stance. Library 1.0 services must be pushed forward (via blogs, podcasts, wilds, and more); marketed (one-on-one, to the media, to our users); broadcast (relentlessly, using the deep and powerful rhetoric about knowledge management at our disposal); and sustained (in other words, get out of your office and go talk to people).

Info pros who can analyze their career situations using Library 1.0 principles are very well positioned to make bold moves with new technology. Simple, right? No, not really–like real surfing, it takes focus, a certain degree of courage, and a plan. Here are two zones of opportunity I’ve identified recently, while avoiding wipeouts.

Know Your ‘E-Roles’

One way of analyzing the new flexibility we enjoy is to identify our “e-roles,” as Marydee Ojala does in her editorial remarks in the September/ October issue of ONLINE. Nowadays, we can take multiple roles within organizations, as well as in helping our users. The key analytical task we must employ is to evaluate 2.0 technologies. such as social networking software, and determine where we can add value. Here again, a little 1.0 savvy has its benefits. Even as social networking software (think Facebook and MySpace) is flourishing, the mainstream media is already beginning to report on burnout with it. College students are “rediscovering” the value of a small circle of friendships with people they see often. Facebook, meet face time. The successful 2.0 librarian is a trend spotter, and there’s one that was a no-brainer for tech-watchers.

Our e-roles, both the known and the yet-to-emerge, have never been more diverse. One reason for this is the growing awareness among management thinkers that “cross functional” work roles can boost creativity and productivity. So info pros who can combine library skill, IT know-how, even tutoring and teaching, can add substantial value to organizations. The new zones of collaboration help to reposition our collections and services, and present us with daily opportunities to innovate, For example, what would you do if you worked in an organization where IT staff did not address any content issues, yet the CIO had de facto control over networked content? Such places are not bard to find. Strategies abound, and here’s one: Talk to IT staff, talk to management, talk to everyone–and take over the content management role. Likewise, if you work in a community of practice where communications aren’t moderated or shepherded, would you sense an opportunity? The 2.0 info pro definitely would. It could be a fertile space for a wiki, a multiuser blog, or archived podcasting.

Grasping all of your potential e-roles can unlock doors which seemed forever shut, but in these times, the new flexibility is infectious, memetic, and pervasive. It used to be that “marketing the library” was a daring, guerilla sort of thing to do, best performed by the natural extroverts among us. But Library 2.0 mainstreams marketing, socializing, networking, jumping in without permission, finding links and connections others can’t see, and so on. Library 2.0, with its emphasis on empowering communication in all directions, has handed us a golden opportunity to help management sort out the “E” in the “E-Organization,”

Library 2.0 Boldly Faces Space Usage

Remember, digital libraries are a collection of both services and media. Hence my second 2.0 field of opportunity–our legacy of large amounts of physical space. It’s difficult to generalize about library space, because a public library system’s needs differ from research university needs, and special libraries tend to be unique. But there is a unifying reality that spans most types of physical space: We can now accomplish much more with digital resources than ever before, and we have a chance to reconfigure our space. And we are not the only ones who know it.

It can be a little scary to reassess real estate, since it’s “location, location, location,” and if library collections disappear from immediate sight and go into remote locations, they may be at risk. But society at large now accepts digital media, even as it continues to love buying and borrowing books; we can’t hide from that. Instead, we should embrace the moment.

My view is that it’s better to be bold and address things directly. In corporate firms, virtual libraries with remote staff are pretty common, and many info pros are thriving in this environment. Other organizations, like historical societies, need print–but often back up their treasures with dark archives. Universities face space demands of every sort. Where does Library 2.0 end up in the equation?

The answer comes in two parts, and the first is more important. Library 2.0, as I argue above, is about people communicating. Think first of functional space for staff, and how it interfaces with the public. Are people mixing enough? Second, think of print collections, with a cold and objective heart. It’s time to take a hard look at the balance between high-use print material housed locally and off-site print or dark archives ~running in the background.” It’s a good idea to have a daring space plan ready at all times. It should fully preserve the local print collection that is most needed, yet also allow for storing other material off-site. A bold approach might define you, the information professional, as an avatar for 21st-century information management.

I never recommend action I wouldn’t try myself. In 2004, faced with a faculty boss who wanted to either update or close my library, I presented my ready-made plan in detail. It included weeding more than 10,000 items and moving staff, and I knew it would cause pain to our senior emeriti, who had lovingly supported our library since 1945. But opportunity abounded: My faculty boss had only general ideas of what he wanted, so I was able to drive the design process, advancing the principles of the “learning commons.” It was like launching into a 30-foot wave in Waimea Bay, because it could’ve all gone down in white water (i.e., I’d be running a conference room, not a library). But it didn’t: My collection plan saved our unique materials, extended Wi-Fi service into a full Information Gateway, and added digital projection capabilities. Now we are custodians of a truly beautiful Library Commons in a historic landmark building. In fact, we’ve grown in net space if you count the new downstairs storage area we gained. It won’t work in every environment, but the question Fm asking is, “What are we holding onto, and why?” If you can answer that in your own situation, you may already hold the keys to transforming physical space that is lying fallow into a more vibrant zone for interaction.

Going from the Known to the Unknown

My forecast for Library 2.0 is that it will be a moving target, just like successive “sets” of waves that come from the open ocean. Here are some examples of why I believe that.

Just 2 years ago, social bookmarking was a new animal; today, it’s “folksonomy” and it’s studied in graduate school. Also, during the 2005-2006 academic year, the single most popular platform for viewing faculty lectures at UC Berkeley was by podcast–and viewing can be verifiably linked to downloads to Apple iPods. Webcasting is a distant second by downloads. Just this week, Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s creator, called for the academic study of “Web Science.”

It’s a fast world these days. Happily, really big research library systems, like the one I work in, have given up on seeing themselves as static institutions with eternal charges writ in stone. Instead, survival depends on “continuous planning.”

What holds true for august institutions also holds true for individuals. We are all continuous planners now, and have been for some time. Hardly a month goes by when I fail to see a new device or application reviewed in The New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle that has a direct, immediate impact on how I perform reference and Web administration right now. Sometimes the lapse between news and implementation drops to mere days. But my Library 1.0 skills have been a great preparation for fast change. Just last week, I assisted a professor with an op-ed piece he was writing while he was away in Washington, D.C. The answers he needed lay in more than one place–books, reference databases, and in Wikipedia. He got his verified answers by email, and the end product appeared on the editorial page of The Sacramento Bee.

Hey, it’s great catching the Library 2.0 wave–even with my 1.0 longboard.

~~~~~~~~

By Terence K. Huwe

 

Terence K. Huwe is director of library and information resources at the University of California-Berkeley’s Institute of Industrial Relations. His responsibilities include library administration, reference, and overseeing Web services for several departments at campuses throughout the University of California. His email address is thuwe@library.berkeley.edu.