Peter Murray-Rust Lecture Notes

PETER MURRAY-RUST LECTURE
LIBRARY SCIENCE AND INFORMATION FOUNDATION
19/10/09

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Murray-Rust
http://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/staff/pm.html
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/

What is a librarian?
• Looks after information
• Information and knowledge steward
• Gives access to information
• Organised
• Adds value

5 Laws of Library Science
1) For every reader, his or her book.
Corey Doctorov – Science Fiction writer, publishes on web, writes for guardian, open access on web, how do you get income – advertising, subscriptions
AND
Sell electronic books
Business model to make money out of free material – THIS IS KEY TO OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING
Corey talks about copyright in order to protect the creator solely
Leaders of Library Science today are probably Google
Copyright records ownership
Protects the economics and moral rights of the creator

Requires license or fee for reproduction and dissemination

They do not have to register it
EVERYTHING I WRITE IS MY COPYRIGHT

Rangunathan owns the 5 Laws of Library Science:
He is dead so it depends on have long he has been dead and afterwards it depends on jurisdiction
(THE BOOK) is a key cultural artefact
E.g. Fahrenheit 451

Peter has an aspiration towards defining what makes a great librarian
Academic Library Sector is in crisis, especially in the Sciences
Index of chemical abstracts
Scientists no longer use academic libraries

What do you see as the growing points in the library sciences in this information age?
• Google
• Wikipedia
• Amazon
• IMDB
• YouTube
• Apple (iTunes)
• US Military
• Tim Berners-Lee

The semantic web changed Peter’s life
‘Everything decays rapidly’

Movement of documents drives the real world
Causes people to move goods and currencies, etc.
VERY COMPELLING in terms of the future of information
To help conceptualise the power of information, read/watch some seminal works in science fiction:
• Gibson: Neuromancer, Burning Chrome
• Twelveoaks: Shockwave Rider
• EM Forrester: The Machine Stopped – written in response to Wells
• 1984 – 'The information controlled dystopia'
• Gattica
• The Terminator
• The Matrix
Military, healthcare, entertainment will be the first sectors to start chipping people
Universal connectivity
You will be able to interact with devices outside of you
http://www.rfidbuzz.com/news/2004/chip_the_vip.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/Pages/210504_clubbers_chipped.html
Events/conferences/publication
Voice recognition
BE PROACTIVE ABOUT THESE SORTS OF DEVELOPMENTS – this was we will have more control over its applications

Rangunathan – his job was to set up a library - The 5 Laws of Library Science
1) Books are for use.
(A library is not a museum)
2) For every reader, his or her book.
(uses book as the epitome of what he/she wants) (it is a reciprocal arrangement)
3) For every book there is a reader
(A book with no use has no place in the library)
4) Save the time of the reader.
5) A library is a growing organism.
Sarah is fired up in creating the library of the future.
Based on public library concept. She taught peter about Rangunathan.

Carnegie set up library system in the USA
What are the artefacts of today? Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, The British Library, UK Pub Med Central

MUCH INFORMATION EXISTS IN ‘WALLED GARDENS’
Particularly in the fields of health, environment, and climate change
‘Commoners’ can’t get a hold of that information, and isn’t available to even purchase
How do we get the internet to become a HUMAN RIGHT, as it is in Finland?
My Society
Gets people involved in causes, you get easier access to your MPs, congressmen
It is a democracy website
HADOPI – particularly true as far as government goes
EXAMPLE: Paying Disney for Mickey Mouse
He will never be free for the public to use
Yet he belongs to us
He is about 70 years old and they just extended copyright
3 Strikes Law – if you are accused of copyright infringement 3 times you can be disconnected from the WWW forever

Serials Review – Peter’s work, once they published it, no longer belongs to him, it belongs to them
Many publishers have page charges – the publishers don’t pay for a thing!

£5-£10 Billion is the value of the academic publishing market worldwide
Can try and change it catastrophically or it will automatically change itself


Publishers are not facing up to this
And academics are not doing any better
Scholarly publishing is 1-2% of budget for academic institutions
CASE STUDY:
The Wellcome Trust - Aggressive takeover by GlaxoSmithKline - But still all of their research has to be public - Not just available to people that can afford it, like Lancet, etc.
This could not have been done before the internet
The only thing stopping us from doing the same are social aspects

ANOTHER CASE STUDY:
Google wants to digitise Nigeria
The librarian negotiating on behalf of Nigeria has to do a good deal
Don’t underestimate the value of your information. Library of Congress – who digitised it for them?

Under Thatcher, the ordinance survey system was structured, it was structured to generate an income as the department is expensive to run – they generate £100M per annum for their maps alone, but is you make it digital and free the government would actually be SAVING £500M by revolutionising the system.

Why don’t we all just use Googlemaps instead?
Because they are licensed and we would have to pay them.
They are free to use but they are not OPEN SOURCE
Stallman
GNU

Its ‘free beer’ VS ‘free speech’
High cost of entry to make maps
Until Steve Coast (one of Peter’s heroes)
Got all of the couriers to input their GPS tracking data (which they have anyway, this costs them nothing extra) free of charge and they were able to generate a perfectly accurate map of London! Without ‘Easter eggs’ (A to Z puts non-existent streets in their maps for copyright purposes)
OpenStreetMap (free of Easter eggs)
Uses crowd sourcing and have achieved a significant amount of organised information for free and even have achieved very accurate metadata, in fact more accurate that A-Z!
As Internet Librarians, we create metadata
How well do we index things ourselves?
When two separate librarians read the same document/book they come up with a 50% match in tags at best
Human domain metadata is too expensive. This era must come to an end.
Text reading through Google is better/more efficient.
Indexing by machine is clearly the way forward.

Speech recognition is also having a huge impact on publishing
Microsoft funds Peter’s research
They are funding Opensource in part because it is in their best business interests. Opensource allows the meetings of minds and the easy sharing of information
Opensource Chemistry – we are starting to have a new understanding of chemical language
Chem4word 2D Editor
Needed librarians to create it
How can we read chemistry texts better/faster? How can we assess them, organise them better/faster?
Software now exists to ‘decode’ chemistry abstracts/research for us
OSCAR TEXT EXTRACTION
You tip the chemistry code into JavaScript and it ‘spell checks’ it!
Then it automatically puts the text into a table, and reconstructs the chemical spectrum

Anybody can do this as it is run on the Royal Society of Chemistry’s website.
You can easily find out is a document is correctly stated formulaically

Easy to do this exact same thing in most disciplines that have ‘named entities’
Machines can do as good of a job as humans
OSCAR can understand 90% of names – it is a very smart chemistry parsing language with noun phrases and verb phrases
Can mark up as a ‘dissolve’ phrase, a ‘heat’ phrase, and ‘wait’ phrase

Graph of experiment is part of thesis
Annotate & hides it away
PPT finding the journey of the chemical reaction
So it becomes a graphic illustrating the story of the molecule.

We can now communicate without a single word – the document no longer must be written in English or any other language

OPENSOURCE EXAMPLE:
Galaxy Zoo
Indexing by trained astronomers would take years to classify
Also a machine can’t identify a spiralled galaxy
Humans are very good at recognising patterns
Galaxy Zoo spells out the guidelines, and you help classify!
Democratising of information
The ‘Blue Thing’ was discovered by non-astronomers, papers by non-trained astronomers are published – traditional barriers are breaking down.
So much information is now digital

LIBRARIANS ARE THE CUSTODIUANS OF OUR CULTURE
LIBRARIANS ARE THE GUARDIANS OF SCHOLARSHIP
We are in danger because we worry too much about copyright and subscription rates
Take the old ideas/principles and bring them into the information age!
Ideas that librarians can put into practice:
-citizen Librarian
-post all academic output publically – IGNORE COPYRIGHT
-text-menu everything
-put 2nd year students in charge of developing educational technology and resources
-actively participate in obtaining science grants
-actively participate in the scientific publication process
-close the science library building and move into departments
-hand over all purchasing to ‘National Rotweiller Purchasing Officer’
-set up a new type of University Press
-develop own metrics system
-publicly campaign for openness
-make the library an addictive game