In an online world of small pieces loosely joined, librarians are among the most well qualified and highly motivated joiners of those pieces. Library patrons, meanwhile, are in transition. Once mainly consumers of information, they are now, on the two-way web, becoming producers too. Can libraries function not only as centers of consumption, but also as centers of production?

Remixing the library, A talk given by Jon Udell at the Global Research Library summit, October 2007.

I've been a fan and reader of Jon Udell for a few years now. His LibraryLookup project -- a little bookmarklet that when run will scrape an ISBN off a page, from say Amazon, and perform a search in your local library catalog -- was revelatory in 2002 as one of the first cool examples of what one could do with browser based scripting and library services. The above quote comes from a recent speech given at the Global Research Library summit in Washington state where he talks about the benefits libraries gain when they have systems that are "open to lightweight, spontaneous, opportunistic integration." Countering the idea that a library's local activities will narrow as libraries become more global in scope, he offers an optimistic view that sees librarians as aggregators and organizers of combinations of locally and externally sourced information and as catalysts to patrons who are increasingly becoming active information producers on the web.