Tom Morris

LeWeb08 setup pictures are live. For those who haven't been following on Twitter, I arrived in Paris yesterday. My hotel has wifi in the room, and I'm enjoying myself a lot. Today I'm going to go and explore Paris - probably going to go to the Pompidou Centre, maybe the Panthéon (got to pay my respects to Voltaire and Rousseau). I was amazed yesterday. After having some pizza, I took a walk along the nearby canal and took some photos. On the canal is a very modern cinema and, with it being a Sunday evening, there were quite a few people queueing to go into watch films. Attached to the cinema was a big shop selling DVDs and books and it was packed to the brim. Can you imagine going to some shitty multiplex in Britain, in some bloody industrial estate car-park, and finding a big shop filled half with books and half with DVDs, and with so many people inside that it's almost impossible to move. Very impressed.

My hotel is very close to the LeWeb venue, has free (although ad-supported - every 45 minutes I have to look at an advert in French) wifi and is costing me virtually nothing thanks to a very cheap deal by my travel agent. I don't even bother with looking at the travel websites any more: it's always been cheaper and easier to call my local, independent travel agent and get them to book me flights and hotels.

I have been listening to Nicole Simon's podcast - she has interviews with a number of the speakers at LeWeb including David Recordon,Joi Ito, Ewan Spence and a group of the bloggers (including me waffling about Plato on love). There's a list of the interviews with links here. As I haven't brought my frail old MacBook Pro with me, I'm now manually downloading the podcasts and transferring them onto my Sony-Ericsson W890i. This process is working rather well: the W890i is actually a good podcast playing device, although it does take some work to figure out how one does this. I will be writing up how this works and publishing it. I'm also using it to hopefully record audio. This may be the spark for me to get back into podcasting.

From library_mofo comes another library reformist screed from the futurist 'da Vinci Institute' (named by someone presumably so forward-thinking not to notice that 'da Vinci' is not the surname of Leonardo da Vinci). Said futurist re-envisioning of library services include the provision of treadmills and exercise bikes, mini-theaters (for video), studios for podcasting, video casting, art, drama and band practice. Sounds like the New Labour 'Communities! Communities! Communities!' plan I discussed in How to destroy a library.

The author of the above-linked piece seems to think libraries need to become to information what Starbucks is to coffee: an experience provider rather than just a commodity provider. Here's the thing though: not all information is equivalent. Not everything is 'content' - as Derek Powazek describes of the lamentable phrase user-generated content.

Libraries have, because of the limitations of books, to be a bit choosy. Not everything gets into a library. What is in there ought to be pretty good. My chief complaints about libraries are where this balance fails and there's too much rubbish. If I walk into the philosophy section of my university library and find nothing but a YouTube linkup with a bunch of creationist cultists blathering away, I'm going to be slightly peeved. You keep your YouTube out of my Quine and Rorty and I'll do likewise.

Here is my vision of the ultimate future library: open to anyone old enough to be able to read at a secondary school level. Operates a super low cost loan and return by mail service. Free, fast and plentiful wireless and wired Internet, as well as plug sockets bloody well everywhere. To reduce the noise of the enquiries desk, have an IRC channel. A sane cataloguing system with a RESTful OPAC that is part of the Linked Open Data cloud rather than be part of the evil WorldCat empire of fail (and, of course, it would use Library of Congress cataloguing whose failings are far less plentiful than the Dewey Decimal System). What else? Oh, quiet throughout - including the returns and check-out desk with their thousands of bleeping gizmos which tend to penetrate the whole library. Temperature at a reasonable setting: many libraries I use tend to get very warm which tends to encourage people like myself to sleep: proper, sceptical, critical and questioning knowledge is like the bracing night air, and the reverse is probably not far from the truth. Change the late fee structure - if a book is up to a week late, the fines are not charged, but if they are over a week late, the fines start building up exponentially - tie it to good notification. All the computers running Linux, and having Vim, LaTeX (and LyX etc.) - because [Microsoft|Open] Office is for losers. Cheap (youth hostel-esque) overnight accomodation available on-site for researchers. A strong rule of JFGI, RTFM and so on.

Book purchase at my ideal library would be based on two measures: commercial price/unavailability and scholarly/scientific/cultural merit. Admittedly, the latter is a lot more subjective than the former. If I want to read Harry Potter, I can go to almost any bookshop in the world and buy it for not very much money. If I want to read some obscure philosophy book that is long out-of-print, I can't. If we are spending money buying books to put in libraries, we should spend it on those books that are of high scholarly, scientific or cultural merit and which are commercially unavailable or so highly priced that the average reader could not easily access them. Of course, the availability requirement would change significantly if Lessig-style copyright reforms were introduced.

So, dear reader, do you want the 'da Vinci' library of YouTube-addled teenagers, the New Labour library of communities communing in community or my library of kickass research awesomeness?