David Weinberger on the future of libraries

CBC Books - December 20, 2011 

The days of the card catalogue are long over, but there are even more innovations ahead in how the information available at libraries is organized. In a recent interview on Spark, David Weinberger, author and co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, talked to host Nora Young about ShelfLife and LibraryCloud, two of the lab's ongoing projects that will transform how we use libraries.

ShelfLife is a new way to browse and discover library resources online that adds a contextual dimension, which is shown "by using a very traditional visual representation: a shelf. "
The image of the shelf is turned sideways so the book titles on the spines can be read, and users can scroll the shelf. "This is in some ways a very old-fashioned way of seeing a work in context. The idea is that works are always in a web of other works, they have meaning and significance because of the connections they have to other works," Weinberger said.
But ShelfLife also adds a couple of features that are not old fashioned in the least. "The first is that you can always pivot on any particular book," Weinberger said. "So you click on a book and it shows you all the categories under which it has been classified by librarians but also by users in various ways, by tags and the like. And you click on one of those classifications and it redraws so that you see all the works that are within that classification, including the original one that you're looking at."
Full piece.