RLG member representatives met this year at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA, from April 18 to 19. The program was an exploration of what characterizes innovation—and innovators—and how the cultural heritage community is developing new means to deliver information.

Agenda

Monday, 18 April

9:00	Welcome and Introductions —Mr. James Neal, Chair, RLG Board of Directors —Mr. Steven Koblik, President, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens —Mr. David Zeidberg, Avery Director of the Library, Huntington Library —Mr. James Michalko, President, RLG
9:35	"Long Overdue: Rethinking the Librarian's Role in a Post-Google World" [Notes in Word format] —Mr. Michael Schrage, co-director of the E-Markets Initiative, MIT Media Lab Schrage kicked off the program with a provocative criticism: He said that librarians were too focused on collaboration, and needed to be more competitive in order to stay relevant in the age of Google. Rather than aim for perfection, librarians should go with what's "good enough" and take more risks, he said. The subsidy culture distorts innovation; it's the market that determines what is real innovation, according to Schrage. "Innovation is not what inventors do. It's what consumers believe and embrace."
11:20	"Meeting the Digital Promise" [PowerPoint presentation] —Ms. Anne Murphy, Executive Director of the Digital Promise Project Murphy presented an ambitious idea for getting project funding. Her strategy is to tap into an existing plan for reallocating funds: the U.S. government's auction of broadcast spectrum. The Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, soon to be considered by Congress, would set aside some of the resulting billions of dollars to fund technological innovation in education.
2:00	"The New Sensemakers: The Next Thing Beyond Search Is Sensemaking" [PowerPoint presentation] —Mr. Mark Stefik, Research Fellow, Palo Alto Research Center Stefik works on envisioning what the next step beyond full-text search engines might be. He works on "sensemaking" tools—applications that combine and organize information. He showed an example of intelligence-gathering application, which drew out patterns of words and phrases in a book and e-mail, looking for terrorist activity. He also showed a sophisticated text editor, where snippets copied from other documents retain links back to their original sources, so the context is always preserved.
3:35	"SeaDragon: A new approach to storing and navigating very large visual collections" [PowerPoint presentation | Technology demos available at www.sandcodex.com] —Mr. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, President and CTO of Sand Codex LLC Agüera y Arcas showed a dramatic technical innovation, with highly practical applications. His invention, SeaDragon, is a client-server system that allows users to view giant images on a standard computer. Normally, it's difficult or nearly impossible to scroll through very large digital images. However, Agüera y Arcas was able to navigate large maps and manuscripts, zooming in on their minute details, as swiftly as moving a magnifying glass across paper. According to him, the application works well even over a slow dial-up connection. He also demonstrated how these large images could be viewed (and read, using an image of a New York Times page) on the tiny screens of mobile devices.
4:50	Wrap-up —Mr. James Michalko, RLG
5:30	Reception at the Munger Research Center Plaza

Tuesday, 19 April

9:30	RLG Report  [PowerPoint presentation] —Mr. James Neal, RLG
10:15	"Information Everywhere All The Time: The New World Librarians Face" [Word presentation] —Mr. Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project Rainie provided a window on the dramatic social changes caused by the Internet, giving compelling data on the sea change. Rainie sees four large trends in Internet use. (1) Building social capital and sustaining communities. (2) Increasing use for more "serious" activities such as spiritual development. (3) Empowered patients, with online support groups and the availability of wellness information. (4) More engaged citzenry, with the ability to mobilize rapidly into "smart mobs." Rainie ended by describing how librarians can be "heroes" of this new culture.
12:30	"Creating the New National Archives" [PowerPoint presentation] —Mrs. Sarah Tyacke, Keeper of Public Records for the United Kingdom Government, Historical Manuscripts Commissioner and Chief Executive of The National Archives of England and Wales Tyacke told the story of how the forbidding, fortress-like National Archives became an accessible public institution. Under her leadership, the National Archives developed several outreach programs targeting multiple communities. A Web site, "Moving Here," teaches the public how to use archival records to learn about their immigrant roots. Based on the site the BBC created a TV show spotlighting people researching their geneology called "Who Do You Think You Are?", which in turn generated more publicity for the site.
2:15	Presentation of RLG innovations [PowerPoint presentation] —Mr. James Michalko, RLG Michalko showed a range of some of the most innovative applications on the Web today, and how RLG services intersect with them. A couple of examples: In A9.com, the Amazon search engine, you can tailor your search to include results from targeted sites like RedLightGreen and Trove.net™; the image-sharing site Flickr can be used to share Trove.net images.
3:00	Tour of Munger Research Center, followed by time in the gardens

Speakers

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is the president and chief technology officer of Sand Codex LLC, and the principal inventor of SeaDragon. He has a broad background in computer science and applied math, and has been writing software for more than 20 years. From 1996 to 1997, as a senior software engineer at Real-Time Geometry, he authored patents on multiresolution 3D visualization and techniques for video compression and Internet transmission, and helped to develop streaming and multiresolution 2D and 3D technologies. He has received extensive press coverage for his computational studies of the printing technology used by Johann Gutenberg, and has published papers in theoretical biology, neuroscience, and history in leading journals, including The EMBO Journal, Neural Computation, and Nature. He graduated from Princeton University with a BA in Physics, and expects to receive a PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics, also from Princeton, in 2006.

Anne Murphy is executive director of the Digital Promise Project, and president of Linkages, a consulting firm specializing in public policy and the arts and humanities. In addition to the Digital Promise Project, Linkages clients have included OVATION, a cable network dedicated to the arts; and the National Cultural Alliance. From 1979 to 1991, Murphy was the director of the American Arts Alliance, where she served as a national spokesperson for the professional arts community and managed matters of public policy, legislation, and public relations. Earlier in her career she held senior positions at the Public Broadcasting Service and the National Endowment for the Arts. Murphy served on the Board of Overseers for the Corcoran Museum of Art, and is currently a member of their Acquisition and Exhibitions Committee.

Lee Rainie is the founding director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Since December 1999, the Washington DC research center has examined how people’s Internet use affects their families, communities, health care, education, civic and political life, and workplaces. The project has issued more than 90 reports on these social issues, as well as important public policy questions such as trust and privacy online, e-government, intellectual property, broadband adoption, and the digital divide. Prior to founding the project, he was managing editor of US News & World Report. He is a graduate of Harvard College and has a master’s degree in political science from Long Island University.

Michael Schrage is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's E-Markets Initiative and a senior adviser to MIT's Security Studies Program. He advises organizations ranging from Microsoft to BT to Procter & Gamble on the economics of innovation through rapid experimentation, simulation, prototyping, and digital design. The author of Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Schrage has written for the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, the Washington Post, and Wired on innovation management and policy. He also advises the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment and National Security on cyber-conflict issues.

Mark Stefik is a research fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and manager of its Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory. Stefik’s research is broadly about using computers to enhance human creativity and expression. His current interest is systems for "sensemaking"—using information to understand relevant parts of our world. His earlier research covered technology for digital property rights for digital publishing, collaborative electronic meetings, object-oriented programming systems, and expert systems. He helped create ContentGuard, a joint venture by Xerox and Microsoft. Stefik has authored four books, including the textbook Introduction to Knowledge Systems. His latest book, Breakthrough: Stories and Strategies of Radical Innovation, was published by MIT Press in 2004. Stefik received his doctoral degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1980. He is a Fellow in the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sarah Tyacke is keeper of public records for the United Kingdom Government and historical manuscripts commissioner and chief executive of The National Archives of England and Wales. She is responsible for the creation of the National Archives and its approach to records management and digital records. She also established its public online services program. Current services include "Learning Curve," an educational Web site for schools and colleges about history; "Documents Online," which includes wills from 1386 to 1856; "Moving Here," a Web site on immigration history; and Familyrecords.gov.uk, a genealogy Web site. In previous positions, she set up the new Public Record Office at Kew and the award-winning Family Records Centre in Central London. She is also an honorary fellow and visiting professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.