Peter Brantly over at O'Reilly Radar has another interesting post (The New Stacks) up this morning with respect to the changing face of libraries and the changing in their operating models - basically as brokers of licensed content - however and this is where it gets interesting, Peter states that we are in the middle of revolution...
"That is right. And by this, let us know that we do not refer to our physical, constructed caverns of electronics, racks, fiber, and cooling ducts, but rather, data that constitute within the clouds of our networks, and that permit us to reach out to embrace citizen science, new forms of expression, and foster new forms of creativity. Each encounter with our burgeoning network a new walk among the shelves, and a new fashion of browsing, no longer limited to what merely we see to the left, to the right; now also to further reaches of our imagination...."
This idea of new stacks for me continues the conversation about in-stream documents - libraries and the books they contain represent discrete bodies of information at the book and institution level, but as efforts like google book scanning and others become more mature, data will be freed from this physical and institutional bounds, available as packets across multiple reference points - building complex representations of ideas on the fly. Follow the link for the whole post.. lovely thinking
