SIS Seminar Series: Guest Lecture - Libraries of People
Gary Marchionini, Dean and Cary C. Boshamer Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
Ìý
Libraries have long served to collect, share, and preserve the knowledge artifacts of humanity.Ìý Digital electronic representation of knowledge has strongly augmented physical artifacts and led to the creation of digital libraries.Ìý Most large libraries have both physical and digital components and the state of these hybrid as well as purely digital libraries continues to evolve.
This talk introduces another kind of fundamental augmentation to libraries as we know them: libraries of people. Individuals have always collected artifacts pertinent to their private lives and advances in digital electronics have led to substantial personal collections of music, photographs, videos, and texts that are in essence personal digital libraries.
Information educators and librarians have a responsibility to help individuals manage their personal digital libraries and they are beginning to actively embrace this responsibility.
The fact that many of our personal artifacts include representations of or from others, together with the underlying infrastructure of the Internet that scales connectivity have combined to introduce a completely new challenge to the traditional clear boundaries between public and private digital libraries.
Four kinds of personal information are defined that comprise what I call 'proflections of self'.Ìý These proflections are public representations of individual identities and challenge digital libraries to balance the needs of individuals with the shared needs of communities.
In essence, digital libraries will increasingly become collectors of or consultants to our digital lives.