Reference Renaissance: Reference in the Age of Wikipedia

Hi All,

I recently attended the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver. I started blogging about this conference on my personal blog, but thought the information should be put here as well. So over the next week or so, I'll be blogging here about my experiences as well. I was fortunate enough to hang out with two Alaskans at the conference, so I hope they'll be chiming in from time to time since we saw different stuff.

Here goes ...

Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I'm looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

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The first session I attended at Reference Renaissance was the Keynote, Reference in the Age of Wikipedia, Or Not, offered by David Lewis, self described renaissance scholar and Dean of the University Library, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. I started out being impressed with Dean Lewis because his very first powerpoint slide stated that his presentation could be used by anyone under a Creative Commons attribution/non-commercial license 3.0. Not only is that a nice thing to do, but it showed his belief in the words he spoke to us.

Dean Lewis began by suggesting that the term renaissance wasn't really the proper term to describe our common vision for reference. The original Renaissance involved the rediscovery of Classical resources and techniques. He pointed out that we are not reviving classical models for reference, but are in fact reacting to the last of three major revolutions.

These three revolutions were:

• The invention of moveable type printing in the 15th Century
• The industrialization of printing in the 19th Century
• The continuing internet/web revolution of the late 20th Century

Each of these revolutions expanded the availability of information by orders of magnitude and created new ways of organizing information. They also led to the destruction of some trades and the rise of others.

For example, the invention of movable type printing destroyed the pre-existing scribal culture within 50 years of Gutenberg's invention. Dean Lewis also argued that the printing press led directly to the alphabetical arrangement of knowledge as found in encyclopedias and dictionaries.

The industrialization of printing in the 19th Century led to mass literacy through the large quantities of textbooks, newspapers and dime store novels that industrial printing made possible. The modern library and the Dewey Decimal System date from this era.

In our own era, the internet has made amateur content of all types easy to create and share. I share Dean Lewis' view in this and have over 3,000 photos on Flickr to prove it!

The next part of Dean Lewis' talk drew heavily on two books - Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solutions by Clayton Christensen. (Details on these and other books I heard about at RR 2008 can be found on my WorldCat list.) Dean Lewis talked about sustaining innovations (making productions better) vs disruptive innovations (creating new markets by targeting non-customers). He suggested that libraries are facing disruptive innovation and offered the phone service Cha-Cha as an example.

Dean Lewis then turned to the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. Mr. Shirky posits that we are in a "cooperation revolution" characterized by mass amateurization and where authority as institutional guarantee has been replaced by probabilities supported by process. Dean Lewis offered Wikipedia as an example of this new kind of authority.

For Wikipedia and like social tools to work and attract collaborators, Dean Lewis suggested three elements that must be present:

• A plausible promise
• An effective tool
• An acceptable bargain

He showed how Wikipedia fulfilled each of the above criteria, but I did not get that down in my notes. You'll have to wait for the conference proceedings to become available.

After showing us a Wired video featuring Chris Anderson explaining why $0.00 is the future of business, Dean Lwis quoted someone who said "When everything can be copied, the only things sold will be that which cannot be copied." What can't be copied? He offered us: trust, immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability.

Dean Lewis closed with four questions and a challenge. The questions were:

1. What happens when information skills become a mass amateur activity?
2. Can we survive with one foot in proprietary resources and one foot in the open web?
3. What is the role of the institution in a Network World?
4. Do we support users as information users or as information creators?

Dean Lewis gave what he himself said were tentative efforts at answers, but that it was more important for the rest of us to consider the questions. I agree. I think question 4 is particularly important for libraries. He concluded by challenging libraries to create the tools and communities for open scholarship.

Overall it was a great start to the conference. I had a few quibbles. The main one was about whether the cost of information would ever truly reach zero. Google and Yahoo were given as examples of companies that "gave away everything to users but made billions." Free to users, maybe, but Google and Yahoo charge companies for advertising and use the revenue to run the search engines. If the future of business is really $0.00, then people would stop buying and ad revenue would dry up, taking the search engines with them. I probably need to examine the premise more closer before making such a bold statement, but that's my initial take.

I actually believe in the "gift economy" as a valuable supplement to economic activity and as a venue for human creativity. This blog and the others I contribute to are testimony to that. But I can't buy Wired's argument that the gift economy will replace our current economic structure.

In the coming entries, I will blog about the 1/6 of the conference I attended and once I'm done with session blogging, offer some thoughts about the conference as a whole. As I'm writing this, one great day is behind me and I'm looking forward to another great day of good ideas that will either be thought-provoking or find implementation in my community. I am very glad I made it here to Denver.