“Reference in the Age of Wikipedia, Or Not…”

David W. Lewis of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis was the keynote speaker for the Reference Renaissance conference. His talk was good, but didn’t inspire me the way I was hoping. Perhaps it was the style of the address: mostly using a lot of quotes from other notable thinkers in the field. I was hoping for more synthesis… slides will appear at BCR later. Apologies, my notes are fairly jumbled and you’re probably better off waiting for the slides.

Introduction

  • defining renaissance…
    • from OED
    • all of the art created in Florence in 15c was not most important aspect of “the renaissance”
    • most important was work of Gutenberg, etc. for printing press and other technologies that created printing as we know it
  • alphabetical order
    • printing press was the factor that changed everything in non-phonetic printing
      became comfortable/familiar with the idea of alpha order
      previously things were thematically arranged
  • history: three revolutions
    • printing 15th c
    • industrialization of printing 19th c
      • steam driven presses and paper making machines– created wood pulp paper
      • created mass circ newspapers, dime novels, cheap schoolbooks
      • in western culture literacy became nearly universal
      • the library as we know it was one of the tools created to manage this increase in knowledge
        • Dewey
        • classification
        • card catalogs
        • reference assistance
    • current Internet/web printing
      • threatens us
      • makes amateur distribution easy
      • co-op creation and sharing
        • new tools developing
        • use of network level tools that track user behavior used  to organize and find information
        • Google and Yahoo!
    • in all three cases the capacity to reproduce knowledge increased by several orders of magnitude
    • new technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears [aka a new way to approach educational conferences], previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution. –clay shirky
  • Clay Christensen
    • Disruptive Innovation theory
      • “The disruptive innovation theory points to situations in which new organizations can use relatively simple, convenient, low-cost innovations to create growth and triumph over powerful incumbents. The theory holds that existing companies have a high probability of beating entrant attackers when the contest is about sustaining innovations. But established companies almost always lose to attackers armed with disruptive innovations. . . Disruptive innovations introduce a new value proposition. They either create new markets or reshape existing markets.”
      • the theory holds that existing comps have high prob of beating entrant attackers when the contest is about sustaining innovations, but almost always lose to those attackers with disruptive innovations
      • sustaining innovation (opac)
        • improves the performance of established products along dimensions of performance that mainstream customers in major markets have hsitorically valued.
      • disruptive innovation (open access journals)
        • brings a difference value proposition to the market. initially under performs established products in mainstream market, but the products improve at a rapid rate and are superior to
      • performance oversupply
        • companies innnovate faster than customer’s lives change. what people want to get done stays consistent but products keep imporving and eventually become too good whereas customers will otherwise pay for improvements in functionality
        • companies selling to undershot customers are vulnerable to disruptive attacks. they often move upmarket to sell to more demanding customers. high-end customers don’t value the disruptive innovation because it doesn’t meet their functional needs
        • “The disruptive innovation theory points to situations in which new organizations can use relatively simple, convenient, low-cost innovations to create growth and triumph over powerful incumbents. The theory holds that existing companies have a high probability of beating entrant attackers when the contest is about sustaining innovations. But established companies almost always lose to attackers armed with disruptive innovations. . . Disruptive innovations introduce a new value proposition. They either create new markets or reshape existing markets.”
      • “The disruptive innovation theory points to situations in which new organizations can use relatively simple, convenient, low-cost innovations to create growth and triumph over powerful incumbents. The theory holds that existing companies have a high probability of beating entrant attackers when the contest is about sustaining innovations. But established companies almost always lose to attackers armed with disruptive innovations. . . Disruptive innovations introduce a new value proposition. They either create new markets or reshape existing markets.”
      • markets that dont exist cant be analyzed. the experts, including you, will all be wrong.
      • dont ivnest all your respurces on the first effort.
      • discovery, not implementation, based planning — exploratory development
      • dont ask your customers what they want, rather watch what they do
      • be impatient for profits, but patient for growth– be impatient for success of the pilot, but patient in taking it campus-wide
    • resources , processes, and value theory
      • resources– things an org can buy or sell, build or destroy
        • flexible
      • processes established ways
        • not flexible
      • values
        • not flexible
      • an org cannot disrupt itself
      • innovation gets crammed into the existing values and processes and will lose its potential
      • the only way to innovate is to take a piece of the org and separate it from the org: separate skunkworks org sometimes required
  • chacha
    • different income stream…making money from cell phone people
    • wrapping buses with advertisements
  • clay shirky & the ‘cooperation revolution’
    • The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.
  • mass amateurization
  • large scale sharing
  • an individual with a camera or a keyboard is now a non-profit
  • publish then filter– mass amateurization of creating requires mass amateurization of filtering
  • when a profession has been created as a result of some scarity as with librarians or television programmers, the professionals are often the last to see it
  • encyclopedias used to be the kind of thing that appeared only when people
  • because wikipedia is a process and not a product…and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.
  • as with every fusion of group and tool…when most of the participants are committed to those outcomes
  • successful social tools
    • plausible promise
    • effective tool
  • acceptable bargain — creates community

wisdom

  • Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.
    It won’t all happen immediately. But in the long run, we are all the Grateful Dead.     Paul Krugman
  • wired.com/wired/issue/16-03 chris anderson– “Free” (the gift economy)
  1. What happens if information skills become a mass amateurization activity?
    • move upmarket, look for sophisticated users with hard questions
  2. can we survinve with one foot in the world of proprietary and one foot in open web?
    • not well and not for long
    • need to support open access and open scholarship. create the social tools to make this possible.
  3. what is the role of institutional level services in a world of networked tools?
    • users will gravitate to the network level
    • network level tools don’t scale down
    • create local content that can be used by network level tools
  4. do we focus our support of the user on their role as info consumers or as info creators?
    • Yes.
    • But the second will become more important going forward.

emblematic of the dilemmas created by group… working on a project that is literally free for all –shirky

failure is not less likely, it just has fewer consequences