Getting it: Finding Hidden Data and Amassing Data

Now that the UF Digital Collections have worked through a bit more of the backlog–and gotten 2 million pages online!–I’ve started catching up on reading. Many great new (or maybe new-ish) ideas are being realized with sites like Foodsville, which repurposes digitized historical cookbooks to create a cookbook community and herald in innovations in printing, Interactive Relighting technologies that bring new information to life (which is amazing for so many historical documents!), Mscape keeps getting better, IBM and Linden Labs are moving toward virtual world interoperability (which is especially great with Google’s new 3D chat), and Google’s Map Maker has been out for awhile now but it’s also worth mentioning. Even with all of these and so many other new and improving technologies (I *heart* R&D!), the more exciting change, to me, is the shift where more and more people, companies, and entities are starting to “get” the information age.
“Getting it,” of course includes that more people have access, but it also means that more people understand the changes from that information and technology. A recent IBM news release explains it rather well in a single sentence “Data has become the new currency in today’s information economy.” For libraries and other non-profit information holders, this is critical. Too many areas of the commons–libraries, museums, education–have been trapped in a funding nightmare with limited public funds (and not wanting to tax the public they serve) and the lack of a “product” to sell.
The whole point of a “commons” is that it’s for everyone–it’s a public good, like a city park. The problem has always been how to support something that benefits everyone with the least cost to everyone and this is especially difficult when the work is invisible (which non-profits so often try to do–making their work hidden to better showcase their services and contents). In the information age, data has value as a public good and as a source to be mined, coallated, repurposed, and reconfigured into other services and products. As more people “get it”, funding should be available that doesn’t “buy” pubilc goods, but that pays to support it and to use it for other purposes. For instance, a library could digitize materials as funding permits, but then a company could cover the costs of digitizing materials and then return the materials to a library to be openly accessible on the library site and the company could recoup their costs by presenting the newly “acquired” data within an existing service, compiling the new materials within a larger analytical data set, or many other possibilities and then reselling that service as a new or improved service–made possible by improvements in finding, collecting, and using information. We’ve heard “Information Age” and “Internet Age” but the real information age is still gaining momentum and I’m anxiously awaiting what we can really do when we teach our information to dance.
(Of course, there’s a lot of work to go and that’s exciting as well, especially with items that don’t exist online–Googling finds zero results, Worldcat has nothing–from projects like the Digital Library of the Caribbean. There’s so much more to gather, and all the while we get to refine our methods. The real information age means more available to learn, new ways to learn, and an infinitely expanding horizon for playing with information!)