I was fortunate enough to give a talk today at the I-School, at UC Berkeley.  The talk is entitled "Architects of Collaboration" and it involves early thoughts on what I think libraries have been, and should be, in the coming years.  [Uploaded: 2007-03-05].

 I have been very appreciative of having the I-School close by.  They are deeply intertwined with Silicon Valley, are filled with deeply inquisitive and kind souls, and they have offered themselves in very generous ways as my second home.  One of the things I will be doing at the DLF is creating a series of Digital Contests that focus on difficult, perplexing, or critical pieces of infrastructure, tools, or services for digital libraries in information retrieval, and that are of a nature to serve as I-School MA projects.  "Contest" in the sense of challenge, wherein achieving either a solution or a hard fought defeat are rewarding of equally high stature.  I look forward to working with the Berkeley I-School, and its compatriot I-Schools across the country, to establish these Contests as a source of prove-your-mettle intellectual engagements.  

 Perhaps not surprisingly, although I sometimes feel dangerously out in front of more traditional librarians, I am rarely too radical for the reference and special collections librarians that come to my talks.  This is heartening; there is a range of opinions within our institutions.  With the impatient, I can say openly "I am very pessimistic for libraries: here are ways that we must radically re-shape ourselves, quickly, or the whirlwind will destroy us."   We may realize together that there may indeed be no place for libraries in the future, unless we craft something new and breathtaking, emboldened by the righteousness of our efforts,  taking risks worthy of the blessed.  Among my audience there was open talk of uneven support for new initiatives as mundane as blogs or wikis, discouraged by library or university management too fearful of consequences to embrace them.  How can we move forward when faced with a lack of complete understanding? 

In part, we must rally together with those who understand the priority change must have in our work.  And in part, we must all say together, "Change or be destroyed."  A chorus is after all louder than solitary voices.  As my host Michael Buckland observed, there is clarity in the counsel of our fundamentals: making information available, ensuring open access, assisting others in discovery, creating user-empowering tools and services.   

 These are some of the strengths of our discipline -- there are others -- and they form the center from which we must advance.  For this is no time for introspection or withdrawal, but rather the best time for advance and action.  We must speak with our voices in the cacophony based on our diverse skills, experience and intuition, raising our flags high and addressing ourselves not amongst our neighbors only, but also to fields with whom we may speak of shared troubles, change, and transformation.  We have things to speak to publishers, journalists, and scholars, and we have as many things to learn from them.  Advancement in our field is not about how many articles we write in Library Journal, but how much we have changed the world of publishing; how much we have understood and commented on participant journalism; contributed to new story-telling narratives in mobile gaming; built new visions of learning in Second Life.  These are the libraries of our future. 

Our world is bigger than we have ever imagined it to be, and we must lay claim to new territories unimagined, and these claimings will define us.  We must reward ourselves for our collaborations, for our wider understandings, and neglect our attention on what is merely trivial.  I care not for one metadata schema vs. another, faceted browse here or topic maps there: give me an opinion on the changing definitions of privacy; let me hear who speaks for enduring access to centuries of accumulated history digitized by online advertising firms; let us discuss the best engagement with publishers that will protect author rights but honor use, building economies from information flow, not guardianship. 

These are the issues for our time, and we will find ourselves amongst them!