Every digitized book, no matter how old or new, can become captive to an internet publishing enterprise – with Google a clear front-runner – potentially accumulating millions, perhaps billions, for an online aggregator while doling out pennies to those who one by one wrote this wealth of knowledge, permanently commodifying, commercializing, and monetizing the out-of-print backlist. With this kind of corporate potential at play how will anymore copyright-free ever see the digital light of day?

Lynn Chu, a writer’s rep, describes the 385 page “mind-numbing” Google setlement as “a vast cumpulsory licensing scheme ….setting in amber” Google’s internet “publisher monopoly power” exploiting America’s entire publishing output through a copyright-replacing Book Rights Registry, even managing publishers’ and authors’ capitulation as Google “data-entry slaves.”  Strong words from a biased source in a WSJ.com opinion piece March 28.

A few years ago I heard an Associate University Librarian from the University of Michigan blandly express disinterest with what Google might do with the digitized copyies of that library’s treasure, freely given in exchange for a local digitized instance.  Chu points out that “PDF scanning (how Google and everyone else digitizes books) [is] cheap and easy.  Books will be digitized without Google” (see my comments from a year ago). Copyright-free? Dead as civic values. Is this the legacy some of America’s best libraries help leave in a drive to digitize on the cheap?

In his February 4, 2008 Boston Globe column Alex Beam quotes Louise Blalock, Hartford librarian who oversaw a $42 million renovation and expansion of that city’s public library, in turn quoting Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago:  “If a city takes care of its schools, parks, and libraries, everything else will follow.”  Ruminating a bit about the digital/print impact upon libraries, Beam notes the Pew study that says a young generation looks to libraries for answers, not just books, and Blalock’s observation that libraries are about connecting people with content, no matter the form.  Bernie Margolis tells Beam about the hundreds who have looked at Haiti’s Code Henry since it went online and how it is important to have “a beautiful place” to come look at the original.

Boston is buidling a new branch library in Mattapan, designed by William Rawn Associates, doubled the size of the Hyde Park branch, designed by Schwartz/Silver Architects, and Hartford’s downtown library renovation was designed by FCHM-S; Fletcher, Harkness, Cohen, Moneyhun-Stopfel.

“A library is thought in cold storage.”
Samuel, Lord 1870–1963, British Liberal politician
[A Book of Quotations (1947)]
How to cite this entry: “Samuel, Lord” The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles.
Oxford University Press, 2002. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Boston University. 24 July
2006 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t93.e1580>

“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 1896–1940
[The Great Gatsby (1925) ch. 3]
How to cite this entry: “Fitzgerald, F. Scott” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations . Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press, 2003. Oxford Reference Online . Oxford University Press. Boston University. 24 July 2006 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t91.e903>

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need”
Cicero
source: Anne H. Kenny, Interlibrary Loan Librarian, O’Neill Library, Boston College

A national online library? If its Google’s, it isn’t even a comprise of corporate America anymore, is it? Can we say proprietary? This AP article, “Scanning world’s every book means turning many, many pages” includes the phrase “books to be included in Google Inc.’s Book Search, a portal …to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.” That doesn’t sound theoretical to me; it’s the marriage of capitalism – that “Inc.” and the hubris are inescapable – with the world’s published history and the more I reflect on it and ideas I heard at a talk a year ago, the more I think it’s a civic shame of monumental proportions.

It’s not Google’s’ fault and it’s not libraries’ fault; it’s a failure of national civic leadership and imagination on every level in preserving for SOCIETY and presenting to the world our very heritage said Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan of New York University on February 22, 2007 in a talk entitled Libraries and Copyright: Hands Off, That’s Mine! Who Owns What, and for How Long?, part of the Boston Athenaeum’s bicentennial lecture series. Civic values got the Boston Public Library built – and filled – and then mimicked throughout America, including a splendid Italianate version in Providence, Rhode Island where I spent many hours during high school. And so what if the BPL’s location served the upper class more ideally than the working classes scattered elsewhere in the city. It was something for all of us to aspire to collectively. Corporate America’s robber barons idealized and then built CIVIC America.

That’s what we really need now in the online world. Civic, not corporate monuments. And it could be done on the cheap, too. Google’s exercise thumbs its nose at the thoroughgoing impoverishment of American society: see what a billion or two could have accomplished if only WE – all of us together – had had the vision. Reminds me of a line I’ve seen in the trailer for Charlie Wilson’s War that could be said of American society: “And you ain’t no Thomas Jefferson, so let’s call it even.” It’s been a long slide into the corporate ether.

A short piece in Boston’s April 9-16, 2008 freebie weekly dig entitled “80 percent of success is just showing up” cited high school dropout rates in large cities. No surprise, not showing up is a strong predictor for dropping out. Students with with high test scores yet high absence graduate at lower rates than those with low absence and low test scores. The Boston Plan for Excellence factors attendance in its newly developed Composite Learning Index (CLI), creating a risk profile for each student based upon academic and behavioral measures.

Showing up for the boring counts, too. The article included complaints about how teaching to the required MCAS test in Massachusetts has made high school more boring then ever, but the Boston Private Industry Council’s director does not think enough is being done to convince kids that a high school diploma is worth 2 million dollars over a lifetime of income. Interest helps: “’strong teacher-student trust made a difference of five days more of attendance over the year’” [there was no information on how trust was measured], the implication being improved graduation prospects.

So, unless you’ve got the talent to write a best-selling novel and strike it big, the ploddingly simple task of showing up pays off in the long run. We’re back to the hare and tortoise sculptures featured in Copley Square nearby the end of this weekend’s Boston Marathon.

Leading requires showing up! In fact, it’s one of the secrets to leading: being there, volunteering, following through.

Ann Wolpert, MIT Director of Libraries, did just that as she gave the keynote at Simmons College GSLIS (Graduate School of Library and Information Science) Alumni Day at 9am on a cold March 30 Saturday morning! I think we had all struggled in – at least the older half of us – see below. Based upon the multi-school event’s theme Educate, Empower, Transform: Preparing Leaders for the 21st Century, Ann focused most on leadership. She did not have any one thing to say, but touched upon a number of topics. Not least was showing up.

As for the 21st century: that’s a done deal. Wolpert noted two out of three librarians are over forty-five years of age, which means there’s a generational handover looming in library-land. It was evident in the room – a mix of over 45 professionals like myself and ever younger graduate students; a noticeably different mix from my own mid-career-changing graduate school days. Fifteen years in the profession and I am already an old dog!

Here are my notes and observations-

Leadership is a popular topic. But, Wolpert noted, leadership and non-profit yielded only 112 titles in Amazon among the 100,000 plus titles to be had: the theory of leading and managing the non-profit organization is just now being formulated. She pointed to Harvard Business School’s recent course addition, Effective Leadership of the Social Enterprise. Academy leadership and communication is very different from the commercial / private sector. Avoiding acrimony requires explanatory exposition and positioning. A decisive, bulleted, one-page, targeted memo would never do. It would insult the audience, Wolpert learned, as she tossed out many years honed communication style from her private sector experience.

Looking beyond the guild model of librarianship – a closed, self-contained tradition – is critical, Wolpert asserted. We must shake the mindset that we are the only folks who can exercise certain practices. As an example, she observed how biology is impacting many sciences directly, engineering and chemistry among them. [For me, explosive growth in interdisciplinary life sciences at Boston University and Brown University in the last twelve years demonstrates this - the one I know from working there, the second from reading the Providence Journal.] Likewise, librarians need to look to other skill sets that can be used to operate libraries well. Having worked in both the business and library worlds myself, Wolpert said what I have thought for years: cataloging and circulation equals inventory control. Apply business principles, processes, and techniques to collections, cataloging and other activities. Computer science partnerships can become critical to library leadership and success. Distribution and taxonomic models in the commercial world could benefit from librarian attention as well as help improve the library world. RFID comes to my mind as a current example.

This topic, summarized above, came up at least three different times during Wolpert’s keynote, including during Q & A. When asked about lagging salaries, Wolpert returned to this theme of advocating, specifically mentioning quantitative and qualitative measures, and that professionalizing the profession – not adopting an occupational stance – would lead to greater influence and authority. Listening to grumbling later that she had sidestepped the question suggested to me that some had not given careful consideration to one of Wolpert’s strongest points about leadership.

Wolpert had some fun with the letter C, as in chief executive officer and chief operating officer from the business world. In a nod to the unique library professional ethos she added community, citizenship, consistency (reliability), comraderie, customize, and children all based upon courage (e.g., Patriot Act stance) and conviction of values. To this I would add the word civic. Academic librarians in a private university and law librarians in prestigious firms cannot shake the civic foundation of the profession, so lacking elsewhere in American society and governance today. Wolpert substituted clarity of purpose to convey this aspect when talking about public libraries.

Two tremendous leadership opportunities to which Wolpert pointed loom in the academic realm today: implementing the National Institute of Health’s mandate to provide free and open access to government funded research in cooperation with the National Library of Medicine and participating in the National Science Foundation’s national cyberstructure effort – the RFP specifies librarians now in the second round of proposals – to support and manage large datasets currently lurking under desks and in labs everywhere in the academic world. These are opportunities in service to the academy, science, and the nation.

Librarians need to lead up. We report to people who know little about libraries. Here Wolpert told two funny stories about working with a businessman and an academic officer – “I don’t know what you do, but everyone tells me it’s important to them so keep doing it well.” Lead up with integrity. Lead by listening: the best leaders Wolpert knows have all said to her, “Sit down, how are you, tell me what I need to know.”

Folks from the Biodiversity Heritage Library gave a presentation to Boston Library Consortium (BLC) members today about how they are using books and serials scanned from their collections into the Internet Archive (as charter participants in the Open Content Alliance) to create a scholarly portal (geek’s haven) for accessing their content in a variety of interesting ways. The natural science collections they are scanning, some of the oldest yet still currently used scientific literature, lends itself to searching by species and other like names. The most intriguing tool they have developed is to cross-index all the content of the books and journals they have scanned (and are continuing to scan) against the NameBank taxonomic classification system (currently at 10,775,553 records) created by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, whose library, the MBLHWHOI Library, is also a member of the BLC. As they explained it, names of plants, animals, insects, etc. in scientific literature very much depend upon history and precedence – where does this fit in with what has been observed and classified before? – which sounds to me a lot like the ISI principle of citation history – who cites whom – tracking the growth and development of a scholarly body of literature.

There’s no reason these same principles could not be applied to other scholarly schemes. Someone mentioned, for example, tracking every instance of the words “Tom Sawyer” in fiction not written by Samuel Clemens utilizing a human “namebank” would yield some fascinating results. A multi-type library academic consortium such as the BLC could provide fascinating “windows” into its scanned collection(s) this way. It also strikes me that there are a lot of institutional repository-like lessons to be learned here as well as a striking example of creating a sophisticated web interface using a dazzling variety (“purposeful emerging technology”) of off-the-shelf web tools / software / applications, etc.

Hit more for my detailed notes on today’s meeting-

Boston Library Consortium
Boston Public Library , Mezzanine Meeting Room
Tuesday, March 18, 2008, 10am-Noon

Robert Miller, Internet Archive: Scanning Update

Over 300,000 books total; 10,308 scanned in Boston. Scanning approximately 1,000 books/day, anticipating capacity of 1,500 soon; 7 million pages/month going up to 10 million pages/month.

• 2006: 20 million pages scanned
• 2007: 50 million pages scanned
• 2008: shooting for 100 million pages scanned

Scanning locations: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston Public Library, New York Public Library, Library of Congress, Microfiche scanning at Univ. of Alberta, Microfilm scanning at Univ. of New Brunswick. Satellite scanning locations: Univ. of North Carolina, North Carolina State, Johns Hopkins, Getty LA, Smithsonian, Univ. of Illinois, Guatemala, London, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Sweden.

Technical improvements: near the end of developing effective procedures for handling foldouts of up to 18 X 24 inches (188dpi @ 18X24); can scan microfilm en masse at San Francisco and deploying at Univ. of Alberta. Migrated to Abbyy (FineReader) 8.0 OCR software from 6.0 (skipped 7.0). Surprising development has been need to repair 40-45 cameras monthly. Moved from Canon 1D (EOS-1D), which had a shelf life of 1,000,000 shots (advertised at 250,000) to Canon 5D (EOS 5D), which, with a published life of 100,000 shots, tends to fail at 150,000. Overhauled some scribes (scanning work stations); engineer working on project declared with proper maintenance, oiling joints, etc. scribes should have useful life of 100 years. Miller spoke about the web application that records downloads of IA text works. Archive folks are confident that this application does not record spiders and other automated inquiries, but is designed to record instances of people downloading a publication and viewing individual pages. The BLC Executive Director mentioned emailing information about this which I cannot find and I have placed a follow-up inquiry to learn more.

Staff: 30% of staff stay one year or longer; acceptable considering repetitive nature of work and modest pay; enthusiasm and commitment high. Expects current economic climate will yield better educated and more motivated work force.

Delivery issues: BLC Executive Director announced a need for feedback on the three available delivery options for transporting materials to the BPL for scanning and back. She will want one response per institution, and will probably use Doodle to record those responses.

Global Library for Life: Biodiversity Heritage Library

Martin Kalfatovic
Head, New Media Office and Preservation Services Department
Smithsonian Coordinator, Biodiversity Heritage Library
Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Slide show for Martin Kalfatovic and Chris Freelans presentations found at http://www.slideshare.net/Kalfatovic/global-library-of-life-the-biodiversity-heritage-library

BHL – Biodiversity Heritage Library is a collaborative content project. Cites Charles Darwin on how any study of natural science requires an extensive reference library. Libraries house 250 years of published records dating back to Carl Linnaeus and are the trusted resource of deposit for taxonomic literature. Among all the sciences, taxonomy has the longest half-life with much of this literature being continually consulted. The idea for the BHL found genesis in a 2003 Telluride meeting conceptually developing the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). The idea became concrete among natural history libraries at a 2005 London conference, including the MBLWHOI Library among its core members. There are also partner libraries.

BHL is first focused upon literature. Why? The NOW factor. Print can be scanned at a low cost of 10-19 cents/page. The time for mass digitizing has arrived and Internet Archive scanning project provides an effective vehicle. Natural history literature has a well-defined domain of pre-1923 literature with a core of 100 million pages. There is a convergence of interest now, too, as evidenced by the Global Diversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Darwin Declaration.

BHL Tools: Serial titles – there is a “bidding” (this is not the term used by the British for the process as that would be too commercial and competitive sounding) mechanism for institutions to select serial titles for scanning in order to avoid duplication; followed by a partial bidding to allow for needed fill-ins in the run. Monographs – there is a de-duping tool used to avoid unnecessary scanning. WonderFetch allows additional XML information alongside the MARC XML: intellectual property info, due diligence info, other IDs, enumeration and chronological information for serials, etc. OCLC Collections Analysis Tool has been used for gross collection analysis.

BHL’s connection to the Encyclopedia of Life is key. BHL content will underpin EOL entries and is a key vehicle entry into BHL content. Legacy literature is a critical part of the EOL.

BHL principals are utilizing IA’s divergent scanning centers to cope with libraries in multiple locations producing a single content enterprise. Have already added 3.5 million scans to a pre-IA base of 2 million from early projects.

Why not just leave it to Google? Libraries are depository of record!

• Will Google be here in 50 years? The long now – institutions persist thru time and provide more stability than the commercial world. Institutional libraries are more likely to still be here.
• Bibliographical accuracy; what editions exactly? Google has already combined multiple print copies into single online iterations without detailed bibliographic information demonstrating a re-use and re-purposing philosophy that does not respect congruence of original to digital.
• Quality! Shows a Google scan iwth fingers prominenetly displayed and the poor quality of the resulting image once the fingers have been “cleaned” out.
• Need for persisitent identifiers for scholarly use.
• Superior structural markup of the publication using CiteSeer from Penn State.
• Semantic markup classification of species mentioned in text, etc., using GoldenGATE and INOTAXA systems. Chris later noted that semantic markup is controversial and BHL goal is agnosticism using whatever tools are developed / available.
• BHL is using an opt-in approach with publishers and NOT Google’s opt-out approach. BHL hopes to work with publishers and scholarly societies, and cites Herpetological Review as an example of folks with whom they are working. This approach offers increased use of publishers and societies journal literature (higher citation rates) and effective long-term management of archived content.

What is the one most unanticipated thing in this whole project? More staff needed!

Chris Freeland
Director of Bioinformatics, Missouri Botanical Garden
Technical Director, Biodiversity Heritage Library

Describes himself as a technologist: not a librarian (although he has worked in libraries since middle school), not a programmer (gave that up to the more able), not strictly information technology. The BHL uses purposeful emerging technology, NOT playing around with technology. Goal is to unlock library collections literature upon what scientific assertions are based. Connect:

• scientist–>literature
• literature –> users
• users –> users (inspire and create community, web 2.0)

What does the BHL do? Ingests in weekly downloads from 1) the Internet Archive, 2) Botanicus (BHL predecessor model limited to plant life), and 3) other sources, utilizing a quality assurance process to identify only the best, information about newly scanned material. Takes Library of Congress subject headings for the materials, parses them, and creates a tag cloud interface for those headings reflecting the content within as an initial opening screen. At 3,500 titles now default limits to top 100 subject headings upon initial display (clicking to display all subject headings in a tag cloud just about choked my computer). Takes geographic subject headings and applies them to a Google Maps API – some anomalies, pointing out for example that Google Maps places the center of the United States in the Northwest taking Alaska and Hawaii into consideration. For display uses the jpeg 2000 at 85% original size (usually from RAW image file or TIFF). To accommodate variable browser and connection capability uses LizardTech decoder (see the Internet Archive listed as a public site utilizing LizardTech products) and loads jpeg 2000 in 256 tiled squares with the help of GSIV (tiles onscreen like Google maps; an AJAX-like product). Very effective paltform for distributing high quality images, especailly since BHL publications are full of paintings, illustrations, etc. The BHL portal interface was launched February 27, 2008. Integrates a blog, conference info, provides RSS feeds, stable urls (not yet officially “persistent”).

Text OCR is run through MBLWHOI taxon finder server. First removes known English, then crosses remaining text against the NameBank IDs looking to identify scientific names. So far 2.9 million pages have yielded 14 million scientific names, exhibiting the taxonomic strength of this literature with a heavy preponderance so far toward insects and the marine. False positives, of course, require context issues to identify. Earliest currently displayable publication from 1490. Demonstraties 39 titles tagged as “pictorial works” and shows an exquisite Album of Abyssinian Birds. BHL changes IA OCR for the book using CiteSeer to parse the book into individual pages. Identifies pages as to type: map, illustration, text cover, end plate, etc. Pages with figures may be “false drops” in that the figure may be embedded within text on the page and not solely a figure page. Does not download IA’s jpeg 2000 scanned images; leaves that on IA’s servers and retrieves them. Sees jpeg 2000 images as an excellent building block to move forward. Have not implemented RDF, Resource Description Framework (yet), but the goal is make it open and movement is towards Fedora Commons platform which is RDF based.

Developer Tools: Disambiguation required with with metadata coming in from multiple source catalogs (authority / consistency issues). What about user-supplied metadata to be added to illustrations, etc.? Many good ideas yet to incorporate. Some issues over counting by IA – what is it counting as use? Demos Scientific Name page – right now taxonomy is not linked to hierarchy, goal for near future. BHL is a Frankenportal – not a single algorithm has yet been written; everything is grabbed from available tools off-the-shelf. Moving to LMN DT (lost on me).

Driver is: Think how a scientist will search the collection –> a geek’s interface per Brewster Kahle. Reminds me of the ISI who cites whom principle – taxonomic literature as described today is driven by citation and precedence and BHL is providing access of that history to its roots. Another driver is provider integration, especially Encyclopedia of Life, so realted to BHL founding. Wikipedia also mentioned. Would love to take EOL development and repurpose, “classification banks.”

There is no done. There will always be standards to which to adhere and functionality to improve.

During the question and answer period several in attendance asserted that some BLC members asked / are de-duping against Google Scholar content. There was much puzzlement over this for all of the reasons listed by the BHL folks.

Serendipitous use; there is no predicting what will get used, how , and why. UMass Amherst has already been delighted to find the popularity of scanned copies of a local just this side of xeroxed publication called Fruit Notes.

Algorithms are the secret recipe rendering unmanageable amounts of data useful to the naked eye. In fact, according to the Economist, a recipe is an algorithm! A recent article, pages 85-7 in the September 15 issue and dated September 13 online, entitled “Business by numbers,” provides an excellent overview for the lay reader of the various purposes to which algorithms are put: verifying credit card numbers (the Luhn algorithm); projecting shipping logistics at UPS; rerouting delivery trucks out on the road, internet traffic across the globe, and airplanes on the runway using real time optimisation; or detecting fraudulent shopping behavior.

Algorithms are also used to make sense of folks’ daily activities – yours and mine – and provides opportunity “to respond to each customer in a personalised way.” My grocer can compare my inordinate love of orange juice with those of other juice purchasers and soon get a pretty good idea of what else I might like to buy that I am not yet already buying – and pitch me with a coupon. Amazon now tries to get us to buy two books instead of just the one we were looking for. Search engines, like Google, where algorithms underpin every results screen sent us, analyze our every browse and click. The bigger the pile of data the more precisely can be the response – as long as the algorithm sorting works. The author describes the fine art of discrimination required in creating effective and useful algorithms. Just like recipes, they require testing. This is how “they” hope to get ever closer to answering differently and well for each one of us that all important question: “what should I do on my day off tomorrow?” (See previous post.)

Loyalty cards and logins help peel back the curtain shielding us from corporate prying eyes. So while tailored offerings might delight us, one should not forget the title of this article, either. It is commercial consideration ultimately driving business by the numbers.

At last year’s Off-Campus Library Services Conference in Savannah, Georgia I heard Marshall Keys’ attempt to disabuse us librarians in attendance about the privacy concerns of young library patrons in the online world of today. He entertained us with pictures of students with bongs, in heightened states of revelry, and the like – all easily garnered from the web. Many newspaper articles have since appeared about the imprudence of such displays when college graduates job-search the next year.

But this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We give away a little with every search and online post. Carefully collected revelations about ourselves could feed the consumerist machine which will then ceaselessly throw back tailored just-for-us pitches. And who wants to lead the charge? Google seems a likely candidate:

“As CEO Eric Schmidt explained last May, ‘We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.’ He said that Google wants to be able to answer when users ask, for example, ‘the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?””

So Google wants to know enough about us to answer the kind of question we might ask our partner as we finish dinner or ask a friend what direction our life should take after we’ve settled in over a drink. What’s the likelihood, though, if it’s sailing we enjoy, that community sailing will be the top search engine response as to what to do tomorrow, instead of the Sailing Boat Show with a stiff entry fee? Madison Avenue is climbing on board and Google is luring them in – that’s the gist of Jeffrey Chester’s online article Will Google’s Greed Ruin the Internet? Chester is head of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Those dreamy fluid notions from a few years back of an alternative, democratically driven, and pure online world just seem to be slipping through our mouseclicks. A number of the posts commenting on this article suggested (pleaded?): don’t click on the ads! Well, somebody is – just look at Google’s balance sheets. Librarians safeguard the curiosities of folks from the questions asked to the books checked out. Need we, when everyone is already letting it all hang out and Google wants to be able to skip the reference interview entirely?

Attended the Boston Regional Library System workshop entitled “Libraries Designed for Social Sustainability” yesterday and found it to be exciting. The presenters, from Adaptive Environments, Inc., a non-profit soon to become the Institute for Human Centered Design, promote universal design or design-for-all. These folks pioneered many ideas about accessible design since their inception in 1978 and contend that design based upon universal principles can be dynamic, exciting and attractive. Accessible design need not equal dull. Inherent in the ideas expressed I found a civic base – a goal to serve all well. Valerie Fletcher, Executive Director, explained that “variation in human ability is ordinary,” not exceptional. The aging of the world population alone makes a compelling case for incorporating these ideas. There will soon be more people over 60 years of age than under thirty – which has probably never happened in human history before. Advances in neuroscience provide further evidence for, identification of, and understanding about the variability in human abilities.

In addition to an overview of these ideas about designing the built, communications, and information environments to accommodate the widest range of physical and intellectual human abilities, Valerie and the AE librarian presented many good and bad examples of design in public spaces, many within libraries. Simple ideas applied in advance and carefully thought out can greatly improve the usefulness of facilities and services for all users. As Valerie said at one point, the need to apply “caution tape,” as on the steps entering the atrium of a library, or signage noting hazards and obstacles present clear evidence of poor design choices. The folks at Adaptive Environments, while happy to help see that design meets ADA compliance standards, consider this the floor above which all good universal design should rise.

Were I applying such ideas to this post I would add some visuals and provide a spoken alternative to these written words!