Making a library a digital one
Mitar Milutinovic
PhD student at UC Berkeley
Working on a project called PeerLibrary
PeerLibrary is an online platform and community to facilitate the global conversation on academic literature
Available at https://peerlibrary.org
Interested in how to build user interfaces for collaboration
But main issues are elsewhere
Metadata – what is there?
Content - where is what?
How to do it legally?
Gross generalizations:
- Digitalization and archiving of books and other publications
- Publishers moved to sell online
- Readers and content creators embraced the web and bypassed publishers
It is different from the web
Lack of diversity
Public libraries
Reading clubs
Lending among friends
Leaving a book on a bench in the park
Public libraries are more than just archives, they are also a public space
Public space with various interpersonal interactions
Have they been mapped to virtual space, virtual libraries?
On the other hand, there are many thriving online communities
(We all know them)
One click ways to read, write, share, like, poke
This lack of diversity is bad
It was never about a book, but how the book was used, what were social interactions around the book
In schools, in libraries, among friends, in a bar
How many social interactions you see around digital books?
Getting just a short snippet to decide if this is what you are interested in?
Is this really the best we can do?
How can we innovate and try new things, new models?
It is not publishers job to facilitate all those interactions
People do it by themselves, things you cannot even imagine
And that's what is missing – how can people innovate on ways we interact with publications now found online?
How can they find them, how can they like them, how can they poke them?
APIs.
For a developer:
I register an app, I start using an API, I built something
Instead of taking few month to negotiate terms and a contract to use your content
When you do not even yet have a company to do that
How can we try new things to see if they work or not?
Publisher as a platform
To build upon
APIs to access the content
For free
For developers
(But under conditions)
And market apps
Do we really want that Amazon is the only market for books?
It is not about a book, but social interactions around the book
Thank you