A little here by way of introduction …Blake and Huxley …the doors of perception …that browsers really have become our ‘doors of perception’ in one sense …that they do provide us something to view the world through …in a world where we’re constantly at the edge of information overload, this does provide a focus or filter …

Information really is infinite in a sense…

We start off with the initial library …the human mind itself …the poet opening his ‘word horde’ … wordhord onléac: unlocked his word hord

This is an image of a sumerian library …look at how the library adapts itself to the physical makeup of the works that it holds …go into that whole thing about oral vs. written communication perhaps…

Again, the physical relationship between the type of shelving and what that shelving holds… also, it would appear that you could use the papyri to write down everything that came before it …

The scriptorium…another arrangement of space …look at how the shelves accommodate open books ….but monks could also copy ancient works into a new arrangement …

This is the card catalog from the Yale divinity school… something different is happening here …instead of just the stuff in the library itself, we are now starting to manipulate data about the stuff that is in the library …in answer to larger and larger amounts of information, we have to come up with new ways to catalog that information (and of course this should be of interest to technical services people …)

But now we really get to the heart of it …out libraries today contain information about all the libraries of the past as well as all the stuff that’s created today …and it can be manipulated in many more different ways than it ever could before …

The electronic beowulf not only has the texts, it can also work on a palimpsest …you can actually see layers of work under the original …so we can’t actually hear the earliest versions of this work (can’t actually get into the bard’s mind) …but we can see all the thought processes that built up over time …

The same with the the clay tablets

And papyri …maybe an anecdote about how well this is done …also that it was one of the first impressive uses of the web that I’ve ever seen …again the library of the present is holding all the libraries of the past and providing different tools to manipulate that  info…

Sforza Hours at the British Museum …these on-line presentations were created to perfectly image these different documents (other ones are a herbal, a haggadah, the lidisfarne gospels, etc.) …but also provide tools to manipulate the images on the screen and delve further into them…

This can be as intrusive or non-intrusive as you wish…

And this is all contained in a browser …or many browsers as the case might be…

This is the crux of it …

(and that is a beowulf cluster …so what goes around, comes around …)…

…this was the Internet when it was called arpanet, and this was the first (conceptual) link ever made on it …

This is a visualization from the Internet Mapping Project of major ISPs…notice the fractal-like quality about it (a few words on fractals, here?) …it’s a beautiful, almost organic image, but like the deadly beauty of the cobra, it can kill you when you’re trying to wade through this complexity …this image will come back in the slide about small worlds …shows the kind of hub clusters that barabasi talks about in ‘Links’… If time: mention that I started to get involved with this stuff when they did away with the Internet Traffic Report …and I started looking to see if there was anyone else doing traffic monitoring …and boy was I surprised …like often on the web I was awash in complexity for a good day and a half …not that I would spend my time in aimless searching …this was very aimful searching …

This is the set-up for a brief history of browsers …all this technology constantly evolves …just as we go from oral to written to digitized, so the browsers that we use to access all this information become more robust, capable of more refined analysis and better ways to find and display stuff…

The basic thrust here is from the non-graphic to the graphic …maybe an anecdote about the ‘good old days’ …about just how strange it felt to realize that I was on a gopher in Poland somewhere and accessing it from freenet

National Center for Supercomputing applications

But browsers just weren’t for web pages anymore …the idea of a browser evolved so that you could use a browser with all different kinds of things …here we have a browser specifically used for browsing bio-infomatic data …in this case a human protein …and … Transition: here is how the idea of the browser spread out into some other applications … National Center for Biotechnology Information …a gene browser …notice how it’s similar to any other kind of web-based browser …

The human genome itself … browsers within browsers …a browser type application used to navigate a set of information within an ‘internet’ browser….

Bringing the Browser to the Library and Bringing the Library to the Browser …this then becomes the content of much of the rest of the presentation …there are two types of flow here…browser ideas that come into the library, and how it affects the library, and just as importantly, how the library catalog is brought into the browser as what can be an integral part of the browsing experience…

Bringing the browser to the library… using a meta-search engine technique to enable a search inside the catalog…notice the ‘back to the catalog's button …

This is a screenshot from OPLIN’s One Search showing a similar type of metasearch technique …bringing the browser into the library…

Note how all the results are categorized as to where they come from …taking all that huge mass of info and whipping it into some kind of shape…

Don’t want to go too much into this since Jeff is here and will be better able to demo his own product, but this is another way in which a browser is brought into the library …the syndetics enhancements go out, retrieve information on a number of different levels then bring it back and serve it up in the catalog environment…

And this is just a further enhancement of the enhancements…

Also note that the Syndetics enhancements are just one part of the menu of available options now …you can shop for the books, you can link to a 24/7 reference service, search a bunch of different databases, all in one place, within the catalog …

These next slides show how the browser/information science world adapts to new technologies…but at the same time it also shows how dynamic information is handled …starting with the idea of word bursts …these are words that appear a lot in blogs or other dynamically created information sources …

These two slides form a dynamic whole …the one is searching on the word ‘sasser’ (as in the sasser worm) on the first day it hit, and then…

Make sure to mention the number of hits tripled over a day’s time with the Sasser worm …so this is a dynamic information flow …this will link to the news map thing later on … (also might want to mention that I was using two different browsers …so that’s not important for the most part in this instance …

Another example of mapping dynamic information flow …there is some kind of a movement here…from static to dynamic information and how browsers handle that …

This is a profile of jack ricchuot’s ‘gassho’ blog …you have information about the other blogs that it connects to, the blogs that connect to it, the RSS feed that it generates, and also the books that jack mentions on the blog…and the really interesting thing is that if you click on the books, you see what other blogs also mentioned that book in the last several weeks …so it’s an interesting way to track books through the blogsphere as well…

This is the first example of a hyperbolic tree browser …more about that in a bit, but go into the basic idea about it…

this has to do with some new ways of browsing …new possibilities for the OPAC …this is not directly metadata connected, although it is in a meta-meta sort of way …actually this first example is a use of metadata…it relies on something called ‘topic maps’ which is a kind of metadata …a kind of ontology and taxonomy …the way this works is that you start at a high-level topic and then you burrow down into it …it is a species of data mining I suppose, and that has become very trendy in business thinking …but here it is back in the card catalog … http://belmont.antarcti.ca/start?ap=0;ms=10

To sub-topic levels ..

We’re going to look at a number of different browsers from Touchgraph …hyperbolic trees …mention the Plumb Design web site …

Different kinds of information lend itself to this kind of browsing …

And here’s where you really begin to see an application for libraries …here it’s using the ‘those people who bought this, also bought that’ metadata from amazon and putting it into some kind of visual flow…and you can also get the information pop-up about the book …imagine if you could let your catalog track this kind of stuff for patrons ….

And this brings us to our end …I am Large/I contain Multitudes …it brings us back to another type of map …different from the ones we started with, but somehow the same…

Bringing the library to the browser … this is the second part of that two-way flow …now we have to see how the library becomes a part of the browser, getting more integrated into it…

Here’s another way to search the catalog from within a browser without having to go to the library web site or the catalog itself …this way, it becomes a much more natural way to use the library catalog …look at the company that it’s keeping here …all the google searches, etc.

This is the successor to the mozilla browser, which was the successor to netscape ….

And this really becomes a story of adding plugins/extensions and adding functionality as your needs change …

Macromolecular Structure Database

This last set of stuff brings everything full circle…now you’re not only able to view all the different kinds of content that came before in the history of library technology, but now you can use that same device to create new content ….once again pushing the bounderies of what’s possible….