NextGen: Your World, Tagged

By Woody Evans -- Library Journal, 9/15/2007

My wife and I recently hit an antiques-and-junk store, an enormous warehouse with individual dealers in rented booth spaces and a quirky little café in the back corner. As we sat slugging down rose tea and sharing a piece of Snickers® cheesecake, the conversation turned to the coin collection my granddad sent me a few weeks before: Israeli and Roman coins from 1600 years ago. My wife wondered how “arphids” (radio frequency identification tags) might one day play out in such a collection.

These days arphids don't do much. They just bark serial numbers to a database when hit with a radio wave. But as memory on the chips gets cheaper and bigger, as technologists predict will happen, arphids will come to contain the very databases they have in the past just referenced. That means everything gets smart. Or does it?

As my wife and I looked out at the dusty stalls of antiques dealers, we considered all those early 1990s Rob Liefeld comics, turn-of-the-last-century Swedish medical texts, and chintzy Hummel knockoffs and thought: What if everything were tagged?

In our information economy, the value of information can be volatile, but one thing librarians know is that information will never be scarce again. We call that a flooded market. And in a world full of tagged objects, people will need our skills as librarians more than ever to sort valuable information from the spam and misinformation. Make no mistake, when future arphids hit, they're going to hit hard because they'll be hitting a culture that's already gone gaga for Google.

You know the phrase: just google it, the subtext being that if it's on the web, it must be right. It's into such a world that new technologies come charging, a world where people are eager to embrace gadgetry but still largely unable to evaluate the information these gadgets will so faithfully feed them.

As librarians, we must start thinking about this future now, because one day we could stand like bodyguards between all that info and the users we serve—an opportunity close at hand, if we're ready to grab it.

Take a look around your library and consider what happens when all those objects and information sources become “blogjects,” constantly updating and appending themselves. Meanwhile, your patrons have come to rely a bit too heavily on the accuracy of the information they get, from cars that tell them when they need service and sneakers that tell them how far they've run. Remember those Britons who nearly drove into a river because their GPS devices told them to? Now consider your collection enabled with high-octane arphids pushing incorrect information or ads to other books, phones, and blogs.

When objects are riddled with bad info we get into trouble really quickly. In the future, this will be more than just annoying and will lead to more than just bad citations or points off that final paper. Info literacy in the world of info-objects can become a life-or-death game.

As librarians, we cannot afford to wait and see how this all plays out. We have to champion vocally things like good search technique and information evaluation skills until patrons know them in their bones. We have to make them sick of us if we're going to save them.

It may still be a mind-bending concept, but it's time for those out near the edges of user-centered services to start preparing for a whole new kind of debate about keeping the library “quiet.” Books and objects and people aren't so separate anymore, and when our books start barking ads at our patrons, we'll be shushing in a whole new kind of way.

Pay attention to the near-future bearing down on our children's critical thinking skills, this new wave of hyperlocal, personomic, contextual advertising. Fight back by preaching information accuracy, authority, currency, objectivity, and scope. That's our new duty. Cataloging collections is last century's game. From now on, we have to help protect our patrons' minds.

OK, maybe I've strayed a little far afield for one afternoon at the antiques market. But it's really not so hard to imagine the day when we squeeze centuries' of information, good and bad, into the objects we value the way granddad squeezed inky notes into those old plastic coin sleeves. But the stakes are higher now than they were 50 years ago.

Someday, when my wife and I stroll around antiques shops, bookstores, and libraries, we'll be surrounded by info-objects chattering ceaselessly to other info-objects. Maybe we'll sit, prop our canes on the table, sip warm Red Bull, and tune in. Maybe we'll choose not to. Perhaps we'll just smile at the tick-and-hum of the off-balance ceiling fan high above, spend another sestertius on a piece of genetically enhanced cheesecake, and let the young people figure it all out.