[Web4lib] Re: Bitten by the Portable Apps bug!

[Frank Wales]

On 05/07/2006 06:44 PM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> Carrying around applications is one thing, but just imagine carrying
> around all of your data on device the same size. Go a bit further.
> Imagine carrying around the full text of entire libraries on such a
> device. 

I think that's a long way off (as in, probably not in my lifetime,
and there are a few decades left in the old carcass yet, I hope).

Why do I say that?  Because as we get more storage, we become laxer
about what we throw away even as what we keep gets "richer", so that
our gadgets become stuffed to the gills with streaming, megapixel goodness.

This is a trend I see no end of, either technically or commercially;
I'm already struck by the fact that I've bought more storage capacity
for my business this year than in the previous fifteen put together,
and everytime I visit a gadget shop, the number of little storage devices
seems to have doubled in quantity, storage capacity and gaudiness.

I swear, by 2012, sandwiches and socks and individual screws will
all store a gigabyte of stuff each, and we'll have a
hundred mildly different versions of every book we want to
have watched or read or listened to all over the house, and
in the car, and in the dog (curse you, miniaturization!), but we
still won't know where to find our receipts at tax time.

Nevertheless, assuming that the capacities of our memory devices
somehow manage to exceed our ability to fill them up with stuff
we never again look at, I'll imagine along with you anyway.

> What would the role of a library be in such an environment?
> In such an environment I posit that libraries will be less about
> collections and more about services applied the collections. 

I agree, but replace 'collections' with 'collected data', and
I think you've effectively summarized Google's long-term ambition.

> Borrow. Download. Edit. Review. Annotate. Share. Delete. Index. Search. Find
> More Like This One. Discuss. Find author and email them. Create
> citation. Write paper. Trace idea backwards. Trace idea forwards. Print.
> Email. Collaborate. Save. Archive. Translate. Show definition. Show
> synonym. Graph. Chart. Prioritize. Evaluate. Rate. Rank. Illustrate. Etc.

To this fairly impressive list, I would strongly suggest that you
put 'Verify' and 'Get authentic update' near the head of the list.

The more information we carry around that we didn't create, but that
we come to rely on, the more it becomes necessary to be sure that we
have an untampered-with, up-to-date version.  The real McCoy, so
to speak, rather that expired hooch or deceptively labelled moonshine.

Fledgling attempts at this, such as cryptographic webs of trust,
only dance around the problems inherent in having widely dispersed,
mutable books in everyone's pocket, especially for large values of
'book' and 'pocket'.

So perhaps a future role for libraries will be as a touchstone of
reliability for the Libraries of Congress and Alexandria we'll
all carry around, in amongst the daily podcasts from Grandma and
the notarized videos of our last five hundred meetings.
-- 
Frank Wales [frank at limov.com]