Into The Wild: Breathing New Life Into Collections

Hello.

Into The Wild: Breathing New Life into Collections
September 3, 2009
Bristol, England

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/baboon/405064021/
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

- Thank you for having me... and thank you to Martin for asking me to come. It’s been
interesting to hear from the archives side of the LAM equation.I’m completely in love with the
cultural heritage sector at large, so it’s only appropriate that I get to know some archivists
too.
- I am a web designer by trade, and was the lead designer of a big photosharing communitity
called Flickr, and now am Director of a project called Open Library, run out of San Francisco,
California.
- Most of my work experience is in front-end software design and virtual community
building. I’m always keen to reveal the humans behind any process or system, and hope that
this desire leads to more interesting and usable software.

“e enormous multiplication of books in
every branch of knowledge is one of the
greatest evils of this age, since it
represents one of the most serious obstacles to
the acquisition of correct information by
throwing in the reader’s way piles of lumber in
which he must painfully grope for the scraps
of useful matter, peradventure interspersed.”
- Edgar Allan Poe, c. 1844


I want to try to set the tone for my talk with a quote... about proliferation of information

“e enormous proliferation of data in
every branch of knowledge is one of the
greatest opportunities of this age, since it
represents one of the most serious obstacles to
the acquisition of correct information by
throwing in the reader’s way piles of lumber in
which he must painfully grope for the scraps
of useful matter, peradventure interspersed.”
- Edgar Allan Poe, c. 2009


I’m not sure that’s a problem. I see it as an opportunity.

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/beals/63404919/

- Gone are the days of solitary participation in the cultural heritage sector... The broadcast
model is being stretched into something else
- Your audience are now ACTORs. Creators and participants
- The audience can affect what is shown and how it is represented

3 Themes
1. It’s all about increasing access, isn’t it?

2. Learn to love (and exploit) networks

3. Institutional knowledge as substrate


There are hopefully 3 themes threaded through my presentation today...

2 Projects
1. The Commons on Flickr
An opportunity for public institutions to share their photography
archives in an existing photo-sharing community of some 30 million
people

2. Open Library
A project of the Internet Archive; an open, editable library
catalogue containing some 23 million records, providing access to
some 1.1 million scanned books


And I’d like to talk about 2 projects I’ve worked on, which hopefully reinforce the 3 themes I
just mentioned...

The Beginning
of The Commons on Flickr

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/marko_k/132719753/

http://loc.gov

- background to relationship
- started working with Michelle Springer and her team of 8 or so in July last year

- librarians, cataloguers, strategy group, web devs

- really helped to have a cross-functional team involved early

• Over 1 million digital records
• Looking for a “Web 2.0”
partner
http://loc.gov

- background to relationship
- started working with Michelle Springer and her team of 8 or so in July 2007

- librarians, cataloguers, strategy group, web devs

- really helped to have a cross-functional team involved early

Why Flickr?


Almost certainly
the best photo site
in the world


“A great place to be a photo.”
Bob Baxley

- arguably the world’s best photosharing site

• Designed speciﬁcally to browse and
search photographs
• An active, engaged community with a
deep connection to photography
• An infrastructure big enough to support
hosting 3 billion photos
• 50 million unique visits per month
• Available in 8 languages


- but, above all,

It’s made of people

http://flickr.com/photos/carthorse/340434797/
- people who socialise, argue, explore, participate, observe... all the things that regular people do
- they also happen to organize their photos, and without even necessarily realising it, contribute to a greater pool of knowledge and content, now in the billions of
photographs.
- for example...

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/george/190348207/

- These are my parents, Jeff & Margaret
- This is shameless exploitation of my parental bond, but...

• Taken on July 8, 2006, in Tofino,
British Columbia, where my brother
Andrew married Laurel.

• Tagged with holga, dad, mum, tofino,
family, myparents, oates

• Shot with a Holga camera

• In my “Fa mill lee” set, which is part of
my “Humans” collection.

• In “The Oates Family” group, which
contains 45 photos. The group has 5
members.

• In the “Andy & Laurel Get Married”
group, which contains 251 photos of the
wedding by 6 other photographers. The
group has 34 members.

http://flickr.com/photos/george/190348207/

- Apart from being a lovely photo of both of them, this is also an example of a “broad
context”
- You can see on the right that I’ve highlighted in blue all the links that this photo has into
other parts of Flickr: the date it was taken, etc
- All of these provide “support” for the photo’s position on Flickr, and also provides jumping
points to see more related pictures in a variety of different directions
- It’s almost as if all this metadata provides some sort of surface tension that prevents the
photo from sinking into the depths of obscurity amongst these billions of photos

Over the last week
eclissi, mondﬁnsternis, maansverduistering, wondercon,
mooneclipse, totaleclipse, lunarossa, eclipselunar,
beyondbroadcast, approm, shrove, losangelesmarathon,
kiwifoo, lunareclipse, womensday, totallunareclipse,
eclipse

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/rhys400d/409242012/

- In the broader Flickr context -- I mean the whole dataset -- tags emerge to represent news and events, and other things of a
certain scale...
- This is an example of our “hot tags” list, around the time of the last lunar eclipse...

Over the last week
eclissi, mondfinsternis, maansverduistering, wondercon,
mooneclipse, totaleclipse, lunarossa, eclipselunar,
beyondbroadcast, approm, shrove, losangelesmarathon,
kiwifoo, lunareclipse, womensday, totallunareclipse,
eclipse

http://flickr.com/photos/rhys400d/409242012/

- You can see that the eclipse has firstly emerged as an event of “photographic note”, and
- You can see that Flickr now holds information about what a lunar eclipse means in several languages
- This is not information that was ever overtly requested, or organized in any way, post creation... The information practically
flows together, accumulated by sheer volume

paris
france
2006
olympus
e500
color
demonstration
CPE
police
riot Events
protest
matraque
top-v1000
top-f25
photojournalism
top-v2000
stick
nightstick
top-v3000
f40
http://ﬂickr.com/photos/hughes_leglise/120006771/

To give you a sense of the sort of emergence that weʼve seen with information architecture... Hereʼs a photo from the riots in
Paris back in March ʼ06

paris
france
2006
olympus
e500
color
demonstration
CPE
police
riot Events
protest
matraque
top-v1000
top-f25
photojournalism
top-v2000
stick
nightstick
top-v3000
f40
http://ﬂickr.com/photos/hughes_leglise/120006771/

- These are tags that have to do with the number of views this photo has had
- And how many people have marked it as a favourite.
- Clicking on these photos would show you photos with the same attirubutes

Information Architecture?
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/blmurch/90083317/

- We’re dealing with a swirling tide of information that ebbs and flows.
- People don’t fit into tidy boxes, and nor do their photos or the language they use to describe
them.

- But, back to The Commons...

ﬂickr.com/commons


- Our pilot with the Library of Congress launched on January the 16th, just before 9:30am

What’s it for?
• To increase access to public
photography collections
• To gather information about
them
• To share this new data


- We’ve established the objectives of the program...

Launched January 16, 2008
27 members so far


- When we went live, we were immediately stunned by the response of the community
- We positioned the program as a way to see new content, but also to help describe it...
whether with tags or annotations on the photo or comments

My Flickr Tag Cloud

2 weeks old


- tags are just keywords, or phrases
- you can add tags to your own photos, and you can also choose to allow other Flickr
members to add tags to your photos. e.g. allow friends
- this page lists the 150 tags Iʼve used the most
-The size of the text equates to the number of photos tagged with each word
- interesting thing here is that you can infer things about my photos (and me) without looking at
any content

My Flickr Tag Cloud

2 weeks old

spends a lot of time here


- interesting thing here is that you can infer things about my photos (and me) without looking at
any content

My Flickr Tag Cloud

2 weeks old

and here

- interesting thing here is that you can infer things about my photos (and me) without looking at any content


- Here’s how the Library’s tag cloud began, when we went live at about 9:25 Paciﬁc Time, on
Wednesday January 16...

Monday
09:25


- I was thrilled that the Library team had decided to go with a blank slate, more or less...
- The impression it gave was one of openess, exploration and trust

Monday
09:30


Monday
09:37


Monday
09:46


Monday
10:00


Monday
10:10


Monday
10:18


Monday
10:36

- link to see All the Tags Iʼve ever added down below.

Monday
10:36
1
HOUR


Monday
10:36
1
HOUR

150
TAGS


Monday
10:45


Monday
10:56


Monday
11:16


Monday
11:47


Monday
12:00


Monday
12:20


Monday

312:20
HOURS


Monday

312:20
HOURS

767
TAGS


Monday
12:55


Monday
13:14


Monday
14:26


Monday
15:40


Wednesday
17:03


Thursday
10:49


Thursday
24 10:49
HOURS


Thursday
24 10:49
HOURS

11,000
TAGS


Thursday
14:43


Friday
17:07


- LAST ONE

2.5 Friday
17:07
DAYS

20,000
TAGS


- LAST ONE

Friday
17:07


So now, without even seeing any of the photos, I can get a sense of that’s in the collection.
- All without guidance or rules, just people describing what they see, using words they know.

UK Institutions


- I thought I could show you examples of the sort of interactions and creativity that’s
happening with UK content, just because, well, it’s local

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/nationalmediamuseum/3588772325/

National Media Museum recently celebrated its 1 year anniversary. Somewhere around
960,000 views across their account!
Henry Essenhigh Corke (1883-1919); Autochrome


- the collections are curated into 10 sets, around 177 photos in total
- odd coset of Spirit Photographs particularly interesting to people

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/nationalmaritimemuseum/3836396959/

- National Maritime Museum in Greenwich
- Joined last year, about 315 photos

- Fiona will tell you more when she talks in a moment, but I spotted a couple of good
examples about NMM reaching in to the Flickr community...


- 10 sets, including some photographs documenting life behind the scenes


- you can see a dialogue between an interested punter and the institution.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/groups/besidetheseaside/

- this is a Flickr group, which anyone can join to share their photos of the British seaside
- 400 members, 4300 photos


- group members were asked to add their submissions to the Flickr group map, a tool that
NMM didn’t have to build, but could make use of


- the NMM exhibition site now houses photos from the group pool displayed in a slideshow,
alongside the exhibition snapshots

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/nationalgalleries/3102709906/

- National Galleries of Scotland

http://www.ﬂickr.com/groups/ﬂickrcommons/discuss/72157613061097398

- there is a group on Flickr run by the Flickr community, where a chap who lives in Edinburgh
joined the group and created this thread...

“I thought it would be
interesting however (at least
to myself) to re-shoot some of
the old photos (as closely as
patience and access allowed)
to get a side by side comparison
and see exactly how much or
how little the city had changed.
Enjoy!”


- there is a group on Flickr run by the Flickr community, where a chap who lives in Edinburgh
joined the group and created this thread...


- this sort of Then and Now photography has been really popular, with absolutely no
encouragement!

http://www.paulhagon.com/thenandnow/nypl/

- There is a chap who works at the National Library of Australia called Paul Hagon, who
decided to write a mashup that shows Commons photos on a map, and Google street view
alongside, so you can see then and now. He’s integrated 4 Commons institutions into the
map, and the State Records of NSW too, who aren’t in the Commons, but presumably have
similar geodata

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/llgc/3746176208/

- and ﬁnally, the National Library of Wales


- All entries in both Welsh and English
- links back to records’ pages on the Library site (this is common practice)

Results?
http://ﬂickr.com/photos/ntang/21736793/

(Incidentally, this photo is called “20 yards, ﬁrst time”)

Generally...
• About 30 million views across
about 15,000 photos
• “Well-behaved”
• Emergent “collections”
• Growing interest
• Re-use, proliferation, useful
information (!)


http://www.ﬂickr.com/commons/tags/

http://ﬂickr.com/commons/tags/smile/
Emergent collec,ons...
79 photos of smiles

http://ﬂickr.com/commons/tags/moustache/
173 photos tagged with
moustache

Tagged with blimp, zeppelin, dirigible, airship etc

Mayanaut says:
“Unfortunately, many of the tags on this photo are
incorrect. it is neither a Zeppelin, nor a dirigible.
Barrage balloons were not manufactured by the
Zeppelin company, nor did they utilize helium as their
lifting gas.”

Someone pipes up to say...

Mayanaut says:
“I applaud the Library of Congress for allowing
individuals to add tags, but in this case, such incorrect
tags are merely contributing to historical inaccuracies.”

BEHAVE MORE LIKE AN INSTITUTION!

(But the eﬀect of that discussion is educa,on nonetheless. I mean, I’d never even heard of a “dirigible”!)

Azchael says:
“@mayanaut: But you wrote a corrective statement,
which means that a natural control mechanism is
taking place and those interested [will] ﬁnd the right
information.”

interes,ng self‐correc,on... without modera,on

Feedback
screenshot


- One of the other Commons members, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, has actually
begun re-ingesting tags added on Flickr into their own internal systems

Feedback Flickr
screenshot
Tags


- One of the other Commons members, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, has actually
begun re-ingesting tags added on Flickr into their own internal systems

The Library of Congress has
updated 3,266 records in the Prints
& Photographs Catalog, “based on
information provided by the Flickr
Commons project, 2008,” with more
to come.


- Almost the most exciting thing for me is that participating institutions are starting to take back
feedback that’s useful to their catalogues...
- Whether it’s a simple link to the photograph’s page on Flickr, or an actual catalogue update...

"Street in industrial town in Massachusetts."
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2178249475/

This was a photo LC added to the Commons, and it’s initial title was...


A speculative comment, suggests the location of the tea room.


Anty Diluvian conﬁrms that this is indeed the corner of School & Main streets in Brockton,
Massechusetts. And provides a bunch of other context for the photograph.


Josh Glenn pipes up with a ton of extra information about Sylvia’s Sweets Tea Room...


Perhaps best of all, THE Library of Congress responds to say thank you.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?fsaall:3:./temp/~pp_2WYG::@@@mdb=fsaall,brum,detr,swann,look,gottscho,pan,horyd,genthe,var,cai,cd,hh,yan,lomax,ils,prok,brhc,nclc,
matpc,iucpub,tgmi,lamb,hec,krb

Here’s the LC record on loc.gov

Current title devised by Library staff based on
information provided by the source: Flickr
Commons project, 2008. The FSA or OWI agency
caption was "Street in industrial town in
Massachusetts."

Additional information about this photograph
might be available through the Flickr Commons
project at http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/
library_of_congress/2178249475

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?fsaall:3:./temp/~pp_2WYG::@@@mdb=fsaall,brum,detr,swann,look,gottscho,pan,horyd,genthe,var,cai,cd,hh,yan,lomax,ils,prok,brhc,nclc,
matpc,iucpub,tgmi,lamb,hec,krb

“The Flickr Commons project
provided Smithsonian staff an
excellent opportunity for
collaborations between our different
museums and researcher centers.”

http://smithsonianlibraries.si.edu/smithsonianlibraries/2008/06/smithsonian-lib.html

- The team assembled were all volunteers too, just by the way.

Personal Investment

Time, labour, thought,
even code


- This is probably just semantics, but using the word “access”, as in ‘we need to increase
access’ assumes some sort of barrier, or a right of entry

http://ﬂickr.com/groups/ﬂickrcommons/discuss/

- 1,025 members, 179 discussion threads in just over a month
- entirely community-driven (though staff now participate)

http://indicommons.org

“Indicommons.org isn’t just
about about blogging about
Flickr Commons–related news,
showcasing Commons-related
research and community-
generated ‘subcuration’. We’re
also active in creating new
tools to follow, search and sort
the Commons collections.”

http://indicommons.org

Greasemonkey + The Commons = “Greased Commons”

- A Flickr member, clickybd, has developed a couple of fantastic scripts to help people brose
the Commons more easily.

- And, here’s an interesting way to reward and thank the people who make the effort...

From Access to
Release

A different mindset; not an
adversarial position


- This is probably just semantics, but using the word “access”, as in ‘we need to increase
access’ assumes some sort of barrier, or a right of entry

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationallibrarynz_commons/3326203787/
http://flickr.com/photos/daveynin/560170975/

- Can institutions cultivate a genuine intent to release content to the web?
- Internal benefits may include:

- saving time

- attracting new

“The very ‘stuff’ of the Web is
profoundly social and meaningful.
It thus lets us see that our
traditional realism is not only
wrong but dreadfully alienating.”
- David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationallibrarynz_commons/3326203787/
http://flickr.com/photos/daveynin/560170975/

- Can institutions cultivate a genuine intent to release content to the web?
- Internal benefits may include:

- saving time

- attracting new

- Bran talked about affinity this morning... That’s basically what Flickr is - an “affinity engine” - a place where people share knowledge voluntarily, Commons or not !

• How might participating in something
like Flickr save you time & money?
• New, global audience
• Attract new information, new
curation, new insight
• Born-digital memory creation
• Potential to direct digitisation efforts
• Cross-institutional collaboration


- People have referred to Flickr as an “Affinity Engine” - a place where people of
!
like minds can “meet” and talk about what they’re interested in.
- When you’re talking about a virtual society of some 30 million people, there is
plenty of variation, and many affinities.
- Instead of seeing this as meaningless chatter, perhaps conceiving of it as a
resource to enhance your collection is the way to go.
- A lot of the interest may be mundane, yet amongst the rocks you’ll find the
occasional diamond. Just another, new channel to help you in your quest to
enhance your own data.

And now,
to the second project...


-

Open Library

http://ﬂic.kr/p/4Pg28f

http://www.flickr.com/photos/albaum/2220505187/

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/future15/2036935569/

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/george/3481337237/

web.archive.org

Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.

archive-it.org

Archive-It, a subscription service from the Internet Archive, allows institutions to build and preserve
collections of born digital content. Collections are hosted at the Internet Archive data center and are
accessible to the public with full-text search.

nasaimages.org

NASA Images was created through a partnership with NASA to bring public access to NASA's
image, video, and audio collections in a single, searchable resource.

archive.org/details/texts

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/internetarchive/330205088/

- Many of our scanned books are delivered on the One Laptop Per Child machines...

openlibrary.org

The overarching goal for Open Library is to have a page on the web for every book ever published. Not
just its editable catalogue record, but links to all sorts of resources on the broader web as well.

We have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now) from people
like the Library of Congress, University of Toronto, TALIS here in the UK and others, with more are on
the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of
book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.


- Every time I do a search, I ﬁnd amazing bits and pieces...

Culture Shock

http://ﬂic.kr/p/4yZfXd

- “Never give your sword to a chick!”

Not only coming from a corporate environment into a non-proﬁt where:
IA - Open, open, open - not just API, but bug system, mailing lists, Wiki
- Longevity by design

But also,
Open Library is built on top of 150 years of librarianship

- NOT messy

- Lots of clever people thinking about it

What does an armchair sociologist (ie, me) think about libraries?

http://ﬂic.kr/p/v5uNz

The act of adding a book to a library catalog is a bit like playing tetris.

http://ﬂic.kr/p/6pmtQL

Librarians are humans too. And everyone who’s responsible for putting books into a
catalogue must work within patterns. Patterns that have grown semantically remarkable and
deeply complex.

"But here’s a question for you, let’s say you
have an 856 URL to full text for a serial.
And you know what date ranges it covers.
What sub-ﬁeld would you put that in? $3 or
$z? I see it in both."
Jonathan Rochkind, Bibliographic Wilderness

http://ﬂic.kr/p/6pmtQL

Challenges
• Dense library metadata
• Designed for classic institutional
search/retrieve practice
• Data is very “dry”, often of poor
quality
• No insight into the community


Coming in cold... here were a few things that struck me...

What have we got?
• Loads of data 23 million records

• Small user base < 20,000

• Small team 6 people

• Small architecture 12 servers

• Good framework infogami, web.py


- But, there were also some good things!!

First steps...


- the temptation coming in to a new job (or a new archive) is simply to rearrange everything.
- I’m afraid I’ve succumbed to temptation in this particular case, but hopefully it’s not
completely unfounded :)

Understand relationships

http://ﬂic.kr/p/6xCJQS

So, what have we got, and how does it all inter-relate?

Any relationship can be made into a hyperlink.

Evaluate

This is the current form to add a book.

- Assumes library knowledge

Reach into the network

twitter.com/openlibrary

What if?

•Adjacent books...
How do you browse a library?

•Not efﬁciency, but effectiveness
(conversation broker, records improve over time) - Shirky

•Not a purchasing engine
Resist defaulting to the Amazon model


If you haven’t heard of Clay Shirky yet, please make sure you look into his work if you’re
interested to enter the Great Unknown. He has though a lot about what it means to open
yourself up to normal humans, and also about how ready they are to help you.

Small Collections,
Lovers of Books
http://ﬂic.kr/p/34WGhL

Catalogues from book lovers who may not be professional librarians
Effective & Personal
Inefficient & Charming, Detailed
Actually a lot more like archivists in behaviour, than librarians

Small Collections,
Lovers of Books
http://flic.kr/p/34WGhL

From my new favourite blog called “A Working Library” written by Mandy Brown. She’s written a
review of my new favourite book called “A Library at Night” by Alberto Manguel, A series of meandering essays on the
subject of the library.:

Aby Warburg’s library opened in Hamburg in 1926. In Manguel’s telling, Warburg incessantly arranged
and rearranged his books, moving titles from shelf to shelf in an attempt to map the paths among them.
Visitors spoke of books of literature shelved next to those on geography, art history leaning against
philosophy. At one point, unable to move the books at the speed of his mind, Warburg resorted to
tacking notecards to a cloth—each card relating a text or image, their placement on the cloth relating
them to other texts. The cards could be lifted and moved around at will—a visualization of the ongoing,
cacophonous conversation around them.
His was a library as creative act—it exchanged the rigor of a single taxonomy for one that was fluid,
eccentric, human. In so doing he delayed the act of finding a text indefinitely. You didn’t so much as
look for a book as look for the thread that linked it to its neighbor; you didn’t rest on a single title, but
instead travelled through them all, assured that wherever you were going, you would never arrive.

http://ﬂic.kr/p/6zyU3U
Tension?

- There is, of course, the divide between professional librarians and book lovers.

Substrate:
any surface on which a plant or animal lives or on
which a material sticks

http://ﬂic.kr/p/4itJcB

There’s also an alternate deﬁnition which suggests a substrate is catalytic; something that
facilitates a reaction.

What if we consider the library
records like that?

http://ﬂic.kr/p/4itJcB

- The trick is, these records are like a new language. To use them and operate within them
requires speciﬁc training. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, and experts are wonderful,
it means that people like me (reasonably clever, been to Uni) can’t make use of them.

Deconstruction

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/tupwanders/3356077817/

I’ve learned a wee bit about the history of library metadata... And museum metadata for that
matter.... It seems like the 1960s are a bit of a blight for human understanding, since that’s
the time when we got all excited about computers and their processing power, and seemingly
overwrote a lot of the crafty, poetic description and allusion that was done to describe cultural
works, in favour of the Tetris approach.

What happens if you blow it up?

600
13 $a Marie Antoinette $c Queen, Consort of Louis
XVI, King of France $d
1755-1793

650
2 $a Queens $z France $v Biography
1 $a Queens $z France $x Biography

651
2 $a France $x History $y Louis XVI, 1774-1793
1 $a France $x History $y Revolution, 1789-1799
1 $a France $x Queens $x Biography


- I don’t want Open Library to jettison librarianship, or neglect to acknowledge the brilliant
hard work of librarians over the years...
- You could argue that this sort of computer-y librarianship (or any type of “educated
classiﬁcation”) was (perhaps unintentionally) designed to obscure the personal... the
practical... the human

- How might we adapt or extend (or revert?) this librarians’ work to appeal to a broader
audience?
- Let’s see what happens when you explode Library of Congress Subject Headings. This data
isn’t even in Open Library - we borrowed it from loc.gov then pulled out the dynamite...

600 (people)
13 $a Marie Antoinette $c Queen, Consort of Louis
XVI, King of France $d
1755-1793

650 (subjects)
2 $a Queens $z France $v Biography
1 $a Queens $z France $x Biography

651 (places)
2 $a France $x History $y Louis XVI, 1774-1793
1 $a France $x History $y Revolution, 1789-1799
1 $a France $x Queens $x Biography


These numbers are subsections of a thing called a MARC record - MAchine-Readable
Cataloging
Since librarianship is “diabolically rational” of course, everything is in it’s place, whether it’s a
reference to a person, a place, a thing, an author or, whatever...

(people)
Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI

(subjects)
Queens, France, Biography

(places)
France, History, Louis XVI, 1774-1793, Revolution,
1789-1799, Queens, Biography


So, if we get rid of all that machine readable gumpf, we start to have things that humans can
parse as well...

Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, Queens, France,
Biography, History, 1774-1793, Revolution,
1789-1799


As Warburg imagined it, a library
was above all an accumulation of
associations, each association
breeding a new image or text to be
associated, until the associations
returned the reader to the ﬁrst
page. For Warburg, every library
was circular.
http://aworkinglibrary.com/library/archives/on_the_library/


Subject
Related subjects

Books about...

“Collections”

Publishing over
Related authors time

Information from If it’s a place,
the network show a map!


Subject
Related subjects

Books about...

“Collections”

Publishing over
Related authors time

openlibrary.org/subjects/places/bordeaux
Information from If it’s a place,
the network show a map!


Give it a URL

Release

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/swamibu/3191787234/

- launch with what we’ve got

- the records are still the same... just easier to skip around
- allow people to collect books around them, and then share or export that collection

“Build it so anyone can
contribute any amount.”
Clay Shirky


Connect


- exploring partnerships, connections
- reach into existing networks
- Library Thing, Good Reads, open source systems, etc
- open data, improve API

Observe

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/odreiuqzide/3195647925/

- see what people do
- provide tools to let people see what everyone else is doing
- monitor activity, like popular records, top editors, sign ups per day etc
- and ABOVE ALL, participate!!!

We’re planning to launch
a rough draft of the
redesign in late October.

We’ll polish it into the
future.


Thank You!
glo@archive.org
slideshare.net/george08
http://ﬂickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/244926428/

Into The Wild: Breathing New Life Into Collections

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