picton

I’m back home in Liverpool for the weekend as I’m speaking at a Public Libraries Conference tomorrow. The combination of it being in Liverpool and to a bunch of librarians was the attraction…along with seeing my family of course :)

A bunch of librarians eh? What am I going to tell them? The Internet ate their jobs?

I actually have a lot of interest in libraries. I used to spend a lot of time in them as a kid for a few reasons – I like books, you could borrow music there and you could meet girls there. Lets not dwell on the latter but things have changed a lot since I used to visit Bebington Civic Library. There is another reason though – my university course at Loughborough University was managed by the library department. Weird for an information and computing course but to be honest, the best stuff I learnt was from that department. They taught us how to research, catalogue and index information. It all sounds very boring I know but it prepared me well for the age of information – the Internet age. It was in truth a brilliant course taught out of a fantastic library and by some outstanding tutors. Hence my love of the library.

Back to the conference tomorrow then. I’ve been asked to give a sort of glimpse of the future of information so I’m planning to talk about how Wikipedia and Google (and Live Search) have changed the way people look for information. However, many people still struggle with search and it is going to evolve a great deal more – hopefully with the expertise of some librarians who know a thing or two about indexing and semantics. For example, if I asked my local library to help me find stuff on Jaguars they probably know I mean the car rather than the animal.

The other thing I want to talk about is not losing the experience and serendipity of the library and will show some technologies such as SeaDragon and Photosynth and how they could be used. When you visit a library like Liverpool’s Picton Library you realised that actually being in these spaces is magical. I recently visited Seattle and spent an entire afternoon in the Seattle Public Library. I also hope to show WorldWide Telescope with Benjamin’s tour to show how tools in the hands of children can teach us all.

I only have 30 minutes tomorrow and will leave ten for Q&A so hoping I can get my story across and a few quick demos in this time. We shall see!