Gordon Cook Editor Publisher The COOK Report on
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Why Archive? A presentation at APAN, X’ian China, August 27, 2007
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Why Archive? Because You Can? Individuals can and will build archives powerful tools in their hands s Gordon Bell’s Archive http: //www. newyorker. com/reporting/2007/05/28/070528 f a_fact_wilkinson But institutions can and will make huge difference s Public money and the Internet are beginning to enable paradigm shift from > 2500 years of physical archives to digital
The Internet Changes Everything You Do Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Originally archives were fortified silos preserved at monasteries from the destruction of war s Greek- Roman- Christian s Islamic s Budhist - Hindu • Keep Things Looked and Safe • 500 years ago printing press began to break down the silo walls as, in a more secular world, monasteries yielded to universities • Throughout 20 th century universities were judged on the size of their physical hoards s But that is changing oh so slowly
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 The Internet Turns Pre 21 st Century Equation Upside Down Drivers in Hardware s CPU, Storage, Integrated opto-elctronics are the new printing presses s Fiber the new highways s Advances in display technology makes the desktops of world into palates on which to display your work Drivers in Software s Open source yields open platforms s Built via web 2. 0 technologies - see: s http: //www. oreillynet. com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20. html Archives therefore will be judged by how well they tear down walls Collaboration is new imperative
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Display technology changes Will open virtual doorways into your archive. s Perceptive pixel with Jeff Hahn http: //www. 3 pointd. com/20060612/google-earth-on-touchscreentable/ verbal and visual s http: //www. ogleearth. com/2007/01/cant_touch_this. html visual only - more impressive s Stephen Lawler combines image manipulation with 3 d virtual earth http: //www. ted. com/index. php/talks/view/id/65 Walls separating you from rest of world will fall. If you do not assist in tearing down these walls, your archive might just as well be dead.
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Connectivity is King & Means You Will Be Connected to Your Publics How many of you are thinking of “network effect” applied to open archives? Yochai Benkler Wealth of Networks http: //benkler. org/ A detailed summary is at: http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks Two points: 1) Non-proprietary strategies have always been more important in information production than they were in the production of products. 1) Why do people participate? 2) Why now and where? 3) Is it efficient to have all of these people sharing their computers and donating all their time and creative effort? There is an Internet reachable group of people prepared to offer expert service and support on behalf of almost any archive-based activity or subject matter. Treat them as your friends.
Collaborate Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Find out who you users will be - treat them as allies - ask for their input Understand the value of open interfaces and web 2. 0 tools to bring your users into the immediate process of what you are doing. Consider the fate of Corbus http: //www. nytimes. com/2007/04/10/busin ess/10 corbis. html? ex=1183780800&en=db 549628248 c 0 caa&ei=5070 The Social Production of Flicker wins as shown in Photosynth
Why open interfaces? Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Watch and Listen to http: //video. google. com/videoplay? docid=7661663613180 520595 Lessig on copyright and innovation Also: http: //www. archive. org/details/eben-moglen-oct 2006 Software and Community in the Early 21 st Century (2006) Eben’s talk traced the connections between the free software movement, the One Laptop Per Child project, and the past three hundred years of modern industrial economic development
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Make Your Tools Public Facing Here’s why - Using photos of often-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation WATCH this demo! http: //www. ted. com/index. php/talks/view/id/129 Photosynth currently http: //labs. live. com/photosynth/ is the technology by which your efforts may be judged See also http: //labs. live. com/photosynth/blog s/Exploring+Ancient+Korea. aspx
Your Position Vis-à-vis the Web Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 I would argue that you do not need to try to make the web into a permanently retrievable archive. If you do your jobs well, your archives will become the sustenance from which the web is renewed. The web is ephemeral and likely for the most part should be. It is a record of the global conversation that the internet makes possible. If you do you design jobs well, you should be able to offer unparalleled facilitation for that global conversation.
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 The Most Revolutionary Approach - Index Everything in November 2005 I was fortunate enough to meet Simon Lin who is part of the team doing Taiwan’s National Digital Archive Program. They are entering this year into the second stage of an historic decade long effort Phase 1 http: //www. ndap. org. tw/1_intro_en/introduction. php - Goal: “To integrate the Digital Archives into the development of Taiwanese industry, economy, culture, and society. ” Phase 2 http: //www. ndap. org. tw/1_intro_en/background. php The Digital Archives Program is a long-term, multi-generational endeavor that will have lasting effects on our society They have done something historic and very profound that I have not seen else where. They are not making digital virtual silos and putting them on the web. They are taking some 17 different fields of knowledge and turning them into a living digital system. By crossing silos they enable Chinese culture to become - via the internet - explicable to all peoples as a living ecosystem.
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Common Metadata Enables Escape From Silos Here, through Dublin core metadata, we may make it possible for one to see a bird embroidered on the cape of a 18 th century official, to click on the bird and find out everything about the bird and its role in the bio -system. Metadata Development review at http: //www. pnclink. org/annual 2004/2004%20 Prroceeding/PDF/102012. pdf The same with other plants and animals. Common metadata tags make it possible for a single user to cross from the art archive to the zoology archive. User-based tagging systems could permit mashups that should provide a great deal more information about that bird and its place in the eco system. Placed there by users of the archive and fact-checked by other users.
The Silo Walls Are Disappearing Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 To give another example, a mouse click on the scroll being read by the official would take the user into parts of the overall archive that examine calligraphy and depict its change over time. Archives perhaps should become examples of a living system as praised by Freeman Dyson. http: //www. nybooks. com/articles/20370 • Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms. . Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow - patterns in an energy flow. . It is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as stable, complex, dynamic organizations. Is Dyson describing Wu Wei? Dyson continues: • The reductionist physics and the reductionist molecular biology of the twentieth century will continue to be important in the twenty-first century, but they will not be dominant. The big problems, the evolution of the universe as a whole, the origin of life, the nature of human consciousness, and the evolution of the earth's climate, cannot be understood by reducing them to elementary particles and molecules. New ways of thinking and new ways of organizing large databases will be needed. Should not the goal be to understand the knowledge embedded in the complex systems that are human cultures?
An Ecology for Cultures Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 You best friends strongest supporters and biggest audience is out there on the internet. With Web 2. 0 and its attendant services they will figure out how to use what you do in ways that you can never imagine Your network infrastructure is now the best in the world it can without any doubt fully support the kind of universal archive that Taiwan is building with NDAP.
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Virtual Worlds Are Closing the Gap to Real Worlds Storage is growing at a pace that Is even more rapid than Moore’s law. I have a 30 inch display with 100 pixels per inch the i-Phone screen is 160 per inch and the NEO 1973 from Open Moko at FIC is 240. http: //www. openmoko. com/ As LCDs come down in price, they are going up in quality. With photographic quality and three dimensional capability, they are becoming stunning windows into remote virtual worlds. The difference between sampling an archive via the Internet and being there in person is beginning to diminish. Not only can students use the archive remotely but researchers can collaborate from different locations in real time discussions of archived objects of interests.
Trans-silo Benefits Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Paths for Transmission of Value of Archives into Other Sectors of Economy Also Artistic Creativity Source: http: //www. ieeetcdl. org/Bulletin/current/chen. html Source: http: //www. npm. gov. tw/en /downloads. htm
Therefore Turn Your Silos Inside Out And join the new world of fractally interconnected networks. (Source for this illustration and the on slide 19 is Professor Nico Baken Delft University, The Netherlands talk at TCN Conference London May 16 2007) Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Transparent Open Collaboration This will move your activities into the new century. With the new tools and new infrastructure it is time to overthrow the 3 thousand year old tradition of physical objects to be stored and preserved behind monastery walls. The pity is there is little global cooperation and collaboration aimed at ensuring that the new technology incorporates the internet based community culture. We must see that it does not replicate the segmented 3 rd and 4 th party ownership of pre-internet technology dependent on the PSTN and depend on in-person visits to treasures bottled up behind the prison like walls of museums.
Gordon Cook, Editor & Publisher The COOK Report on Internet Protocol, Technology, Economics, Policy http: //cookreport. com PSTN (609) 882 -2572 Lingo (415) 651 -4147 Which Star in the Galaxy of Global Knowledge Will You Be? Thank you Questions?
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