Preface

"We learn from history that we've learned nothing from history."

- George Bernard Shaw, playwright

Fast Forward

Mountain View, California is a mid-sized town near San Jose that is just oozing with good Karma. In four blocks of Castro Street you will find independent book stores, an Asian store to take care of all of your Buddha needs, about 20 restaurants serving some form of oriental food, a few Mexican restaurants, and a shop that sells specialty beads. On a warm late September day we took our time to choose a restaurant. It was hard to think of food. Tomorrow we would be going to the Googleplex, Google's headquarters.

I had tried filling out a form that went to Google's press office, describing this book. There was no response. One of my colleagues at New York Law School is James Grimmelmann, one of the world's leading authorities on the Google Book Settlement. I asked him if he could give me a contact name at Google. Minutes later, somebody from Google wrote back to me, and forwarded my message to Karen Wickre in their press relations department. She asked me if I had any plans to travel to California to visit Google. I had not, but it didn't take long to make plans. My wife said that this is the librarians' equivalent of finding the Golden Wonka Ticket.

I had already spent a day with Sean Carlson in the company's massive New York office. Sean had very carefully listened to my plans for the book and made a list of the type of people I should be meeting. He assured me that I would have plenty to do in my day at the Googleplex. The week before the visit, I was exchanging emails with Rachel Durfee in Communications. She wrote out a plan for a general tour, followed by five interviews with product managers.

On 20 September 2011, we drove into the Googleplex parking lot (plenty of spaces - Googlers are usually not morning people). Rachel met us at the door and got us our name tags. Then we crossed the street from the Communications building to the main campus. There is no one giant building there, but a number of four-story structures. Smiling, energetic young people are dashing from place to place. Many of them have smiling, energetic dogs in tow (Golden Retrievers are the canine of choice). What followed was likely the most intense five hours of my life.

In hour-long sessions, I talked to product managers in relation to Google Books, Custom Search, Scholar, Blogger, and Analytics. Each one of these sessions resulted in exciting revelations that ended up in the pages of this book. There was intense synergy as Google Power User interacted with Google Product Manager. The word "wow" was heard frequently. My wife Donna came along to take notes for me, so I wouldn't have to look up and down. This turned out to be a fabulous idea. After our last interview at the Googleplex, we drove south to San Bruno to meet the educational projects manager of YouTube.

That day was the culmination of a long quest to use technology to bring information to the people who needed it.

A witness to the revolution

You may think it odd to even mention the pre-automation past in a book about the furiously changing world of online tools, but I have my reasons. Students who graduate in the 2012 class of library school have lived their entire lives with computers constantly enhancing their information needs. Unless they studied it in a library history class, they probably couldn't imagine a library where the most important information tool was a 3 × 5 inch card. You can't know where you are going if you don't know where you have been.

My first day working in a library was in early September of 1966. I was hired by the Phoenix Public Library as a part-time clerk, and then as a paraprofessional. At that time, the most advanced technology in the building was the photocopy machine. By the 1980s, libraries were starting to think about moving away from card catalogs and towards an electronic solution. The library signed on with OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) in Dublin, Ohio, who used its giant computers to keep track of our library's holdings. In 1988, I developed an interest in the use of personal computers for library work, and I went to the University of Arizona to get my master's degree in library science. I then moved to New York to begin work as a university systems librarian - just in time for things to change dramatically.

What is inside

The Internet was coming into view in the late 1980s just as I was finishing my library degree and lining up a systems librarian position on Long Island; however, many of us look back to the early 1960s when Theodor Holm Nelson invented the term hypertext, to describe how data can be stored in a way that is not hierarchical, but more attuned to the way people think. He envisioned an operation called Xanadu, which would store all of the world's information and make it available through hypertext. (Does this sound familiar?) At the time, however, there were no computers that could fulfill his vision, so he went on to be an independent thinker who was so disappointed with the World Wide Web that he did not want to claim paternity. In the early to mid 1990s we were slow to realize that we were in the beginning of the ultimate information revolution. By 2010, I had found that using a Google Custom Search that only indexed respected legal sources could be a popular addition to our web pages, in addition to attracting a large following outside the campus. I will tell the story of how we developed these specialized engines and, more importantly, give step-by-step directions for creating your own engine. Neither of the libraries I've worked for since 1997 has made a major commitment to Facebook or Twitter, so I set out to find the libraries who have made social media a well-supported part of their mission. This led me into conversations with the British Library, the New York Public Library and the Vancouver Public Library, among many others. In some cases, libraries have not just made these a convenient way to distribute information, but have seen their following develop a life of its own.

The Library of Congress started a major trend when it began putting images from its vast collection on Flickr and inviting users to add tags. After the creation of the Creative Commons, a number of the world's top cultural institutions joined suit and added to enriching the online culture. I will show how one public library in Wisconsin used its Flickr activity to gain recognition from the community - right up to the city council. Google has provided us with an option to create a personalized homepage that only we can see. To help populate these pages, Google has opened up its gates to developers and given us tools to devlop our own gadgets and themes without advanced knowledge of coding. As the veteran of more than 300 of these, I will explain how they are created, and demonstrate the extraordinary work that some libraries have done with them. I will also show how libraries can take advantage of a number of other free things such as the Internet Movie Database to enhance their marc records, and Google Analytics to track the ways that the community uses their services. Everyone knows YouTube's reputation for providing silly entertainment, but in our visit to Google's headquarters we were surprised at how seriously it is pursuing an initiative to make it a force for good, useful information in education.

Google Scholar is evolving from a search engine that targets scholarly citations to a provider of scholarly full text information. We interview one of the Google employees who devised this product to find out what is ahead. Blogs have been one of the most adopted forms of online communication by libraries. At Google headquarters, we learned how it is trying to redefine the concept of a blog, and were shown libraries that have done exceptional work with Google. To help promote library projects in Irish history, I learned how to add our material to Google Earth, using KML files. This book covers that process, and shows how to make elaborate multi-part maps in Google Maps. We will also see how one library created a multi-level map of its library using Google Maps. The age of online text began in 1971. I will report on the man who started it all, as well as the days after 2000 when universities began digitizing books and publishing them on the Internet and before Google Books, and what has happened since, including Internet Archive and the Kindle revolution.

In my two most recent positions, I helped set up the next generation of online catalogs. Encore is a discovery platform, an attempt to overlay a classically designed online catalog with a more web-intuitive display, with features such as tag clouds and facets to help users narrow down their searches. In this book, we will see how well that is working. Experts are looking at a near-term future where users are more likely to access the Internet from a handheld device than a full service computer. However, a check of the applications stores shows that just a handful of libraries are listed with their own application for checking the catalog, renewing a book and other library functions. Experts will have their say on how this is changing. As Yogi Berra said, "Predictions are hard. Especially about the future." Nonetheless,...