Love the Wonder? Love the Building Blocks!
By Uche Ogbuji and Eric Miller at Zepheira
Jennifer Lohmann’s interview of Maureen McDonald, “It’s Your Data. Use it!” takes a close look at how The Public Libraries of Suffolk County (Suffolk) in New York have been taking advantage of new features available to libraries in the Library.Link Network. It’s clear that these features have been useful in helping Suffolk communicate with their community, but there is an even deeper story to be understood, beyond the immediate benefits.
Have you ever been to a LEGO® store or LEGOLAND or a LEGO display at Disney or elsewhere? Some of the large-scale creations just take your breath away. Now think back to the 1940s when the LEGO company was pioneering their plastic building bricks in Billund, Denmark. It’s very doubtful that many of their engineers and designers foresaw anything like these amazing creations you can now find all over the world, some sponsored by the company, and many, many more created independently by enthusiasts. Even a modern wonder of the world such as the Taj Mahal is fodder for plastic brick architects.
The magic that makes this all possible is the humble LEGO brick; you know, the one you’ve probably at least once tripped on barefoot and cursed roundly as you rubbed your sore toe (we know it’s not just us 😉). There doesn’t seem to be much magic in the individual brick, or at least you don’t often think about it, but going back to patents of the 1940s, the magic was always there in its subtle way. It turns out a system that allowed people to click one plastic block on another plastic block in many different ways according to their interests and imaginations is one that has led to the modern triumph of these toys, one that transcends play to the point of launching the careers of engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, artists, designers and more. It turns out that this humble plastic brick is designed to specifications as demanding as those typical of manufacturers of automobile engines.
What Suffolk is doing with their exploration of features made available through Linked Data is similar to what one does while trying out the magic of each LEGO brick. The first steps, snapping one piece on another, might provide only modest excitement and satisfaction, might even seem a bit of a distraction from other work (or play), but no model Taj Mahal, no ultimate wonder can ultimately emerge without these first steps.
Each different use of Library.Link resources on the Web teaches the Web a little bit more about library resources and their rigorous specifications. It took over a decade for LEGO to arrive at the studded-block design which still rules today, and it took many more decades for the company and enthusiast customers to learn all the varied and amazing things that could be done with the blocks. Similarly it will take some time and a great deal of usage to get the Web to learn all the varied and amazing things that can be done with Linked Data.
Luckily, everything on the Web has developed much faster than its brick and mortar equivalent, so it’s likely that library Linked Data can emerge as the force on the Web in much less time than it took LEGO to achieve dominance. You might remember that just a decade and a half ago it was rare to find information on the Web about local restaurants. The Web was thriving for everything from shopping to getting the news, yet you still had to read your local newspaper’s reviews to see where to try for a meal out, and you still had to call ahead for reservations, and hope your old GPS had the right downloaded map location to the place.
Then Yelp came along and started producing information about all sorts of restaurants, from large to small, all with a well-organized format that made it easy to build an ecosystem of contribution and use by people and automated systems. Among all that restaurants took serious agency over their Yelp profiles. Over time all other applications on the Web, from search engines to social media and beyond, learned how to consume information about restaurants. Before long you were seeing Yelp-inspired information snippets right in mainstream search results for restaurant, and the same information went into mobile agents such as Siri and Alexa as they emerged.
Each use of each Yelp resource, through simple linking, through social media sharing, etc. was a brick in building a facility we now take for granted: the ability to rapidly arrive at a decision on where and when to dine almost as soon as we’ve decided to dine out. Libraries build in the same way every time they link to, embed and share on social media their Library.Link resources. The activity of libraries such as Suffolk are brick by brick teaching the Web how to use libraries as an facility within everyone’s reach.
If each restaurant is a small box of a building in physical space as well as on the Web, each library is so much more. It is more like the wonder of the Taj Mahal. The process of building a wonder on the Web deserving of libraries means that each institution should, like Suffolk, take agency over its own data, as restaurants took their profiles seriously on Yelp. Over time more and more library resources will find themselves used online in ways that even librarians can’t foresee, just as, brilliant as LEGO’s early designers and engineers were, they could not foresee some of the amazing uses of their invention.
As Uche Ogbuji’s article “Libraries, Jet Fuel, and the Information Age” illustrates, the Web needs library data as much as libraries need the Web. The next generation of engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, artists and designers build their minds and careers online, as do the next doctors, poets, teachers, public servants, and everyone else. Libraries have beautiful physical buildings which were built brick by brick by the contributions of communities, led by the enthusiasm of librarians, and it’s time for them to build with the same magic on the Web. This starts with each library’s own effort, following Suffolk’s lead, using its own resources to teach the Web how to find and use the breathtaking wonders of libraries.
