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Ok, so maybe I exaggerated a little yesterday when I was whining that there was nothing interesting to blog about regarding school at the moment. There is actually quite a lot of interesting things, so many in fact that my poor brain is on overdrive. I’m trying to figure out what I want to write my term paper on and am having difficulty narrowing it down because there is just so much that I would love to pursue learning more about. I suppose that is a good thing. I am currently leaning toward the topic of personal digital libraries but I haven’t been able to figure out an approach that would give it focus for a paper. While I struggle with that the topic of digital preservation and all its problems is jumping up an down in my peripheral vision, waving its arms and begging for attention. My goal is to have it all figured out by the end of the approaching weekend. Wish me luck.

This week’s class discussion, one thread of it anyway, zooms in on something an author in one of our readings for the week mentions, almost in an off hand way–What if books talked to each other? And my professor asks what this means. How would they do this and whether it is desirable. Then we are supposed to also talk about functions that we would want a digital library to be able to do.

It’s a big thing to think about and at the moment of this writing, no one has tossed out any ideas. I thought a blog post might be a nice place to think out loud and try to work out some ideas.

Books, of course, already do talk to each other. Everyone who is a reader knows that. How many books on your TBR list are there because you were reading along and something catches your interest and before you know it you are, for example, greedily requesting books from the library about letter writing and improving you handwriting? We know that one book often leads to another. But in a digital library, where the text is searchable and even hyperlinkable, what are the possibilities to turn up the volume of the books’ conversation?

How cool, and dangerous, would it be if, while reading, for instance, a digital version of Sword at Sunset that I can click a link and suddenly have a bibliography of all things Arthurian? It would list all fictional versions, all books that had Arthur echos or even mention the Arthur legend. Imagine I would also be able to access from my book, books about the history of Britain, about the Saxons and the Romans. Horses play a big part in the book I am reading, what if I want to know a history of the horse in Britain? I’d be able, with a few clicks, to access the information. And all these books I access are also connected to other books which could connect me to still other books, and so on. Imagine the size of the TBR list!

I think the how it could be done comes from lots of metadata created both by professionals and by readers. Readers like you and me who would add tags and annotations and links. And of course there would have to be a really good search engine that could crawl and index all this information and that was powerful enough to create bibliographies on the fly.

I think books talking to each other would be highly desirable, and it wouldn’t even have to be limited to digital books if we could create searchable metadata files that work as digital objects and libraries all in themselves. Though such a thing would be more difficult and time intensive and therefore costlier, but it is still doable.

As for functions I’d like to see in a digital library, if I am unable to download the item for whatever reason, I’d like to be able to save it to a personal file or something so when I came back I would have everything I found all in one place and wouldn’t have to go find it all over again. And it would be really cool if I were researching a topic and find information in several different libraries, if I could somehow save it all to one spot instead of at each different library. I think it would also be cool if I could make annotations either privately for myself or with the option to make them public.

My brain has run to the end of its thinking. And I need to go make a cake for my Bookman whose birthday is tomorrow. But, you reading this, what do you think? What about books talking to each other? And what would you like a digital library to be able to do?