Ok, so maybe I exaggerated a little yesterday when I was whining that there was nothing interesting to blog about regarding school at the moment. There is actually quite a lot of interesting things, so many in fact that my poor brain is on overdrive. I’m trying to figure out what I want to write my term paper on and am having difficulty narrowing it down because there is just so much that I would love to pursue learning more about. I suppose that is a good thing. I am currently leaning toward the topic of personal digital libraries but I haven’t been able to figure out an approach that would give it focus for a paper. While I struggle with that the topic of digital preservation and all its problems is jumping up an down in my peripheral vision, waving its arms and begging for attention. My goal is to have it all figured out by the end of the approaching weekend. Wish me luck.
This week’s class discussion, one thread of it anyway, zooms in on something an author in one of our readings for the week mentions, almost in an off hand way–What if books talked to each other? And my professor asks what this means. How would they do this and whether it is desirable. Then we are supposed to also talk about functions that we would want a digital library to be able to do.
It’s a big thing to think about and at the moment of this writing, no one has tossed out any ideas. I thought a blog post might be a nice place to think out loud and try to work out some ideas.
Books, of course, already do talk to each other. Everyone who is a reader knows that. How many books on your TBR list are there because you were reading along and something catches your interest and before you know it you are, for example, greedily requesting books from the library about letter writing and improving you handwriting? We know that one book often leads to another. But in a digital library, where the text is searchable and even hyperlinkable, what are the possibilities to turn up the volume of the books’ conversation?
How cool, and dangerous, would it be if, while reading, for instance, a digital version of Sword at Sunset that I can click a link and suddenly have a bibliography of all things Arthurian? It would list all fictional versions, all books that had Arthur echos or even mention the Arthur legend. Imagine I would also be able to access from my book, books about the history of Britain, about the Saxons and the Romans. Horses play a big part in the book I am reading, what if I want to know a history of the horse in Britain? I’d be able, with a few clicks, to access the information. And all these books I access are also connected to other books which could connect me to still other books, and so on. Imagine the size of the TBR list!
I think the how it could be done comes from lots of metadata created both by professionals and by readers. Readers like you and me who would add tags and annotations and links. And of course there would have to be a really good search engine that could crawl and index all this information and that was powerful enough to create bibliographies on the fly.
I think books talking to each other would be highly desirable, and it wouldn’t even have to be limited to digital books if we could create searchable metadata files that work as digital objects and libraries all in themselves. Though such a thing would be more difficult and time intensive and therefore costlier, but it is still doable.
As for functions I’d like to see in a digital library, if I am unable to download the item for whatever reason, I’d like to be able to save it to a personal file or something so when I came back I would have everything I found all in one place and wouldn’t have to go find it all over again. And it would be really cool if I were researching a topic and find information in several different libraries, if I could somehow save it all to one spot instead of at each different library. I think it would also be cool if I could make annotations either privately for myself or with the option to make them public.
My brain has run to the end of its thinking. And I need to go make a cake for my Bookman whose birthday is tomorrow. But, you reading this, what do you think? What about books talking to each other? And what would you like a digital library to be able to do?
I like this idea very much, and it should be easy to accomplish with an eReader or iPhone. Stanza on the iPhone already lets you look up words in the dictionary through the app, and I don’t see why it couldn’t link up to Wikipedia or Web articles to help readers do as you describe. Here’s a video you might enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkhpmEZWuRQ.
Wow, that is fascinating. I love the idea of leaping from one thing to another very easily. The one thing I wish that would be invented (or maybe it already exists) is some way to easily track all the things you find as you are chasing that topic/book/whatever. I would like to click on something and then have it archive to an easily-findable reference list that is linked to the library website. I always lose track of the stuff I want to request.
I would worry that I might never finish the book I was reading! So I’d find it cool if links to other data popped up once I’d got to the end (perhaps this is less important in non-fiction works). And I’d like to find out more about an author, usually, once I’ve enjoyed a piece of writing. So biographical and bibliographical information on the name would also be very welcome!
Just think of where this would take us? I love it when just reading one book leads you to another subject but when it’s even more readily available how much more likely would we pursue it – I can imagine I’d go off on tangents all the time!
Anyway, have fun baking the cake and happy bday to Mr. Bookman!
Oooh, the idea of being able to click on a name or a title and have a quick bio sounds FABULOUS.
Seems to me there are two types of information that could “talk with” a book: reference and original sources. The former is probably much easier and cheaper to implement, and is not too far from what we already have access to through our libraries or the web. It would just be a matter of lowering the number of clicks required. I can see the latter being much more difficult because the rights to the material would be owned by a huge number of entities, and it’s a huge amount of material to be indexed/tagged. But how wonderful it would be to have, say, quotations linked to their original sources. And imagine if that was all bundled with ebooks? That would really be something.
Happy birthday to the Bookman!
Your ideas of books talking to each other sound great. I’d love to be able to access books on topics I’m reading about at the moment. Perhaps also you could find books with the same “key phrases” like what Amazon has or books with similar themes or even writing styles? The key would be to have high-quality tagging. Amazon’s results for the “key phrases” aren’t particularly useful.
The idea of a digital library that would allow us to leap from topic to topic is extremely interesting. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve been reading and come across something that I want to find out more about or that has caused me to think of some other topic to persue. As a middle school English teacher I also see great academic value to this idea. How great would it be to be reading The Diary of Anne Frank and be able to link to things about WWII, Miep Geis, etc.
I admit to being a total Luddite when it comes to certain forms of technology, but if anyone could make me excited about digital books and their possibilities, it is definitely you, Stefanie! I do like the idea of books talking to each other–I like your Arthurian example and am imagining it in terms of my own interests…imagine what it would be like for students and researchers.
The only problem I foresee for this idea (which is amazing, by the way) is the overflow of things to be read. I could easily see myself buried several hundred deep in desired material in a matter of days. This might lead to a “quantity over quality” issue… though I suppose that is more a problem for the searcher than the program.