Hot off the Press!
Article Type: Hot off the Press! From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 29, Issue 3
Jean-Philippe Accart
Hot off the Press! is a column dedicated to new trends and tendencies in information technologies and social networking, with a note on the items’value to technologies in libraries. Also mentioned in the column are new books on topics such as mobile computing, social networking, and even novels with a focus on technology. Some technology blogs, web sites, archived webinars, and movies with a technology theme are also highlighted.
The PC Museum, the Mundaneum and Google!
The PC Museum
Everything moves fast and even the technology is aging. Do you remember your first PC or Apple MacIntosh? When did you begin to send SMS to your friends? Can you always open the documents you wrote in 1992? For some of these reasons, it could be of some interest to know that even the technologies now have their museums. All around the world people wish to preserve some of the human technological discoveries: this is the case at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose in California (www.thetech.org/), the Science Museum in London(UK) www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ and the City of Sciences and Industry in Paris (France) (www.cite-sciences.fr/en/cite-des-sciences/contenu/c/1248110426122/english/). One museum I have recently visited in the beautiful baroque small and historical city of Soleure in Switzerland (www.solothurn-city.ch/topic2477.html),the PC Museum, is also called (with a certain sense of humour), the ENTER Museum[…] (www.pcmuseum.ch/).
The ENTER is the only museum in Switzerland dedicated to computers and technology. It gathers together, on an approx. 2,000 m2 exhibition surface, a very unique collection:
Radio engineering and transistor radios from 1920 to 1980.
Sound recording machines from 1860 to 1990.
Televisions from the very beginning TVs to LCD.
Mechanical calculating machines starting from 1870.
Electronics and computers starting from 1950.
Telecommunications from of the telegraph and telex to the iPhone.
A database helps you to search for an old model computer or even a particular software. You can search by names and by dates from 1870 to 2000: the first catalogued machine is a telegraph for a train station invented in 1870 in Germany, and in 2000, it is a computer, Octane R14000SC, made by the American company Silicon Graphics.
The ENTER museum is to become a place in the information world for meeting and archiving. Belonging to the association of the Museum as an active member,you have the possibility to take over the sponsorship of a specific computer,and you are informed about the activities and novelties of the museum. It offers also services like data conversion from outdated to modern data media as well as repair of old computers, radios, and television sets (www.sokutec.ch).
“The Mundaneum” (Mons, Belgium): the Museum for Information and Google
As information specialist, archivist or librarian, you have probably heard of Paul Otlet and Henry La Fontaine, two visionary Belgian lawyers who began to develop documentation science in 1895. At the same period of time, Melvil Dewey installed the Dewey Classification (www.oclc.org/us/en/dewey/resources/biography/default.htm)and SR Ranganathan published his “Five Laws of Library Science” (http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/105454/5/fivelawsch2LR.pdf). Otlet and La Fontaine created in 1910 the Mundaneum and aimed to gather together all of the world’s knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). It became an archive of around 12 million index cards, allowing the possibility of locating documents in all kind of libraries around the world. Otlet’s dream was to make information accessible to people from their homes. Does it makes you think of something? It reminds one of the internet of course, or the experience of using Wikipedia or the search engine Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com/). The Mundaneum was conceived as the center of a new world city. It is now located in Mons (Belgium) and has been open since 1998. It is a true testimony to the history of data collection and management (www.mundaneum.be/).
Last but not least, on 13 March, the worldwide search engine Google recognized the works of Paul Otlet and Henry La Fontaine. The Belgium Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo announced a major partnership between the University of Ghent and the Mundaneum sponsored by Google. Conferences and exhibitions will be supported by Google. In recent years, Google helped to remember the 60th anniversary of LEO, the first business computer, and Colossus, the first electronic programmable computer. As Google said: “It is just as exciting to rediscover our own roots”.
Blog “Google and Policy Europe”: http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/
What is digitized information? A Memento
The readers of this column will forgive me for reporting about one of my own books, out very recently and presented at the Book Fair in Paris (France) on 19 March. This new book about digitized information was co-written by me and Alexis Rivier, librarian at the main public library in Geneva (Switzerland).
Nowadays information is mostly digital, and such is the very first postulate drawn up by this book. Digital information becomes a constant of both private and professional life, now closed together in particular through the social networks and used by all generations. The digital identity is built gradually,consciously or sometimes without our knowledge. But what is the “new digital world”? It looks like a continent to explore: of what does it consist, how should we approach it, understand it, integrate it? How do we seek the digital information and find the possible entry points on the internet? Once produced or provided, what becomes of this information? One cannot speak about digital information without mentioning law and the economics of information. This book develops these various points, gives lines of thinking, but also offers tools for comprehension of the current digital environment. Addressing the information professionals and librarians, it concerns a large audience, from confirmed professionals to students and teachers. Its concise and synthetic format makes it possible to approach all dimensions of digital information.
Can a librarian be digital?
“Mémento de l’information numérique”, Jean-Philippe Accart and Alexis Rivier, Paris, Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 2012, ISBN:978-2-7654-1332-5
A little story: somewhere in Manhattan, New York City, in the near future. It is Tuesday morning, the owner of “SME” decides to bring together some collaborators. He takes his telephone and gives his instructions: “Sophie?Thank you for organizing a meeting in 20 minutes with Clementine, David and Denis.” At once, Sophie warns the people concerned. For Denis, equipped with an ordinary mobile phone, she chooses the SMS. For Clementine, who does not leave her iPad anymore, she sends e-mail, and to join the young David, she posts a note on his Facebook page. Everyone answers “OK” to Sophie. At the same time, she consults the planning of the meeting rooms in the building. Apparently, they all are booked at this moment, but she checks: she activates in each room the sound and movement sensors, and notices that one is empty, and so in one millisecond, the room is booked and she informs everyone.
In the morning, Sophie will reserve a table at the restaurant for 1 p.m., and will send to the owner of SME the menu of the day, so that they may order in advance. On the other hand, tomorrow, she will not do it, because she knows that, on Wednesday, he always has lunch outside. In the near future, Sophie will learn to know him better by consulting his profiles on the social networks. When he leaves on a business trip, she takes care of the reservations by internet. In fact, she can track him everywhere, thanks to GPS on his mobile phone. When he has an appointment at 11 a.m. and at 10:45 he is still on the other side of the city, the system will calculate the run time on Google maps and will warn him.
What you have to know is that Sophie is a very efficient assistant, untiring,available 24 hours a day. She does not fall sick, does not take a vacation, does not make mistakes when she writes a letter, and remains calm in all circumstances. She speaks several languages and can make instantaneous translation. Once she was bought and installed in the computing system of the company, Sophie does not cost anything […] Sophie combines two applications: a vocal control system able to understand human voice – a well controlled technology now and an experimental artificial intelligence platform, which analyzes the questions and the instructions, then provides an answer in vocal mode, or starts an operation. In fact, Sophie is a virtual robot in the laboratories of the French company xBrainSoft, based in Lille (North of France). In addition, if one requests from Sophie the birth date of Barack Obama or the concerts list of techno music in NYC for the next month, Sophie will question Google, Wikipedia or a special database.
Is Sophie a possible avatar for a librarian, to be found on the web site of the library, for example, in order to welcome people? Could she correctly answer questions or give out accurate information and replace a true person? Virtual services given by librarians are not totally virtual; there is always a person behind the tool (a virtual reference service for example), which is now the best solution for giving good information to the customer. But what will the future look like? Can we conceive of being replaced by a machine, a robot built with virtual intelligence? I will say yes, probably.
(This paragraph is inspired and partially translated from an article published in Le Monde, 16 March 2012 by Yves Eudes: www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2012/03/16/les-prodiges-de-sophie_1666947_651865.html).
This issue of Hot off the Press for Spring 2012 is related to technology and information, museum and history, and the digital future of libraries. It is interesting to see, and to remember, how we are, as human beings and librarians,are linked to the past while at the same time anticipating the future. But that has always been one characteristic of our profession, and it may be even moreso now.
Jean-Philippe Accart(jpaccart@gmail.ch)is the Director of Studies, Programme Master of Advanced Studies in Archival,Library and Information Science (MAS ALIS), Universities of Bern and Lausanne,Bern, Switzerland.
