The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2):

A Unique Perspective on Next Generation Information Challenges for the Library

Jerry Sheehan

Government Program Manager for UCSD Calit2

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A Perfect Storm: The Explosion of Electronic Information

The three technologies of the information.

Increased computational power with decreased cost.

Increased storage capacity with decreased cost.

Simple software for content creation.

Explosive geometric growth in information.

2000: 170 terabytes of new data created from print, film, magnetic and optical storage media.

2002: 5 exabytes of new data created from print, film, magnetic and optical storage media.

92% of new information being created was in magnetic media.

What a tangled Web we weave: Internet information.

Web: 170 terabytes, 17X the print holdings of the Library of Congress.

Instant Messaging: 5 billion messages a day, 274 terabytes.

Email: 400,00 terabytes a year.

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2000

250mb Per Person on Earth

2002

800mb Per Person on Earth

3 Where in the CDL is Calit2, an ORU Challenge?

Neither Calit2 nor any of the other institutes for science and innovation appear in the CDL or eScholarship Repository.

Exemplar problem for Organized Research Units, how do we: a) identify already published information by participants, b) aggregate that information easily, c) validate identified information, d) keep information up-to-date. The old ask and re-ask paradigm for information is DOA.

Need for realization of the opportunity for low-hanging fruit, collaboration between knowledge management and information technology professionals, commitment to rapid prototyping to understand cost and benefit.

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4 The Informal Information Challenge: Blogs and Real Simple Syndication

Within the last three years there has been an explosion in informal information production: 5% of all Internet users produce content on Web Logs.

Bloggers are creating rapid content (Tsunami example) that often is superior to “official news sources”. They have aggregated disparate data sources quickly (Rathergate example). However, they also produce information of questionable validity.

What role do libraries have in helping the public and students understand and evaluate the credibility of information resources?

Who teaches the new information retrieval skills that are necessary? Aggregation of even “current event” type data is not being done by major media sources.

Krabi, Thailand First Wave

Yahoo’s Tsunami Blog Portal Rathergate

5 Libraries and Intellectual Freedom: Challenges for the Future

The Library has an important advocacy and education role to play in protecting intellectual freedom

Patriot Act: PA I and its likely follow-ons have posed challenges to intellectual freedom and privacy. Libraries have always, and must continue to act, as advocates for independent and autonomous research

Radio Frequency Identification Tags (RFID): Increasingly being used by college libraries to allow for cost-effective loss/theft control poses interesting research and privacy questions.

Copyright: As copyright enforcement becomes more aggressive, and complicated, libraries have a critical role to play in: advocacy for fair use, education on appropriate use, new models for protecting intellectual property.

RFID

Patriot Act I, II, III, IV.....Copyright