{"id":157,"date":"2005-07-08T03:35:51","date_gmt":"2005-07-08T07:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/metasj\/2005\/07\/08\/public-knowledge-repositories-alternat"},"modified":"2005-07-08T03:35:51","modified_gmt":"2005-07-08T07:35:51","slug":"public-knowledge-repositories-alternatives-to-agglomeration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2005\/07\/08\/public-knowledge-repositories-alternatives-to-agglomeration\/","title":{"rendered":"Public knowledge repositories : Alternatives to Agglomeration"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I hereby declare that I will give a talk by that name<\/span> sometime this
\ndecade, simply to hear myself say it in front of a live audience<\/span>.  Alternatives to
\nAgglomeration…<\/span> this is a subject that librarians
\n[should] have been considering for millennia.  And yet
\nprecious few have been found.<\/p>\n

Even
\nnew journal articles and research papers are supposed to becreated
\nentirely anew, not directly drawing more than a few paragraphsfrom one
\nanother, even when reproducing someone else’s experiment stepby
\nstep.  What does this say about our notions of
\ncreativity,information creation, individuality, sense of self?<\/p>\n

Wikipedia has recently become symbolic <\/span>ofa
\ngrowing variety of new trends; many of which have nothing to do
\nwithbeing either a wiki or an encyclopedia.  The most important
\nofthem are simply to do with the idea of offering an open public <\/span>knowledge repository,
\nwhich will never disappear
\n<\/span>[and so in some sense can never get ‘worse’ if you know
\nwhere to look], which accepts suggestions<\/span>, which tries to tackle each subject
\nit approaches broadly<\/span> and thoroughly<\/span>, not necessarily in that
\norder.<\/p>\n

I’llfinish
\nup on this thought later, in a proper story. For now, let meleave you
\nwith a comment from a Yahoo! blog post back in April, whentheir hosting
\ndonation to Wikimedia (two score Korean servers comingonline soon) was
\nannounced. <\/p>\n

The Library
\nof Alexandria<\/a>is
\nheld in very high regard. When it did exist it was neither reliablenor
\npublicly accessible. It was the personal property of one court. Itgrew
\nonly with the arrival of the next ship’s library. The project
\nofconfiscating books for copying actually made information
\nLESSavailable. It was absolutely riddled with errors, tall tales, ego
\ntripsand speculation. What it had going for it was that it was a
\nprojectthat no one had accomplished before. No one had done it before
\nbecausefew people saw the value in it.<\/p>\n

That’s
\nwhere
\nWikipedia is now -only it has every advantage that didn’t exist 2000,
\nor even 5 yearsago. Accessibility, reproducibility, and a vast ocean of
\ninformationflooding into it every day.<\/p>\n

Its potential for growth
\nis ultimately without limit. The fact that right now it has ten
\narticles about “American
\nIdol<\/a>” competitors for every one about a member of the Royal
\nAcademy<\/a> is a temporary condition. What Wikipedia is now is
\nNOT what it will be in a year<\/a>, five years<\/a>, a hundred
\nyears<\/a>. It’s not going to go away, and it’s already among the
\nmost important cultural resources ever created.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Originally posted by: Dystopos<\/a>,
\nhyperlinking mine<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hereby declare that I will give a talk by that name sometime this decade, simply to hear myself say it in front of a live audience.  Alternatives to Agglomeration… this is a subject that librarians [should] have been considering for millennia.  And yet precious few have been found. Even new journal articles and research […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-la-mod"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-2x","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}