This video details an ebook reader developed by researchers at Maryland and Berkeley Universities. It appears that they studied the habits of readers of paper books and attempted to integrate capabilities into this reader that address those habits. Take a look. It’s amazing.

The two leaves can be opened and closed to simulate turning pages, or even separated to pass round or compare documents. When the two leaves are folded back, the device shows one display on each side. Simply turning it over reveals a new page.

But will they ever be good enough?

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I have often said that the librarians were needed in previous decades in order to help researchers find information, but are needed today in order to help researchers skillfully navigate the glut of information available. We do this through a variety of means. Librarians are the janitorial engineers of the information world. We make sense of it all. We organize the information into nice neat little piles called subject headings, wayfinders, and databases. We sort laundry from the information hamper — deciding which information should go where and with what other information and then folding it nicely and placing it on a shelf (or in a database…) for you to find easily.

Sorry for that analogy. Something within me would not let me pass it up.

Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine has an interesting article about Google’s accomplishments and whether the new age of search will render our neat piles of information less relevant. He writes,

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
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At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later.
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This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
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The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

There’s no reason to cling to our old ways. It’s time to ask: What can science learn from Google?

The question remains, though, what happens after Google? Libraries (though not all) will indeed weather the storm, but what they will look like on the other side is yet to be determined.

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Nicholas Carr of the The Atlantic has an interesting article on what the internet is doing to our brains.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

True or not? How has instant access to vast stores of information changed your expectations? your way of life?

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Dr. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, commented today on Robert Darnton’s New York Times Book Review article, “The Library in the New Age”, which appears in the June 12, 2008, issue.

An excerpt from Robert Darnton, speaking of Google’s worthy but tip-of-the-iceberg book project:

Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don’t think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital re-positories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don’t count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns.

An excerpt from Dr. Mohler:

Professor Darnton’s approach is very helpful — especially for those of us who bear the stewardship of libraries and institutions of higher learning. The future will be digital (or whatever replaces digital media), but the future will also need the library. The library will remain as a citadel, where books need no batteries and reading requires no Bluetooth or wireless technology. The spirit of scholarship will always be most at home among books, and the soul committed to learning will always find nourishment in the library.

On a related note, Microsoft has suspended progress on it’s Live Search Academic counterpart to Google Books and Google Scholar. Read about it here. Has Microsoft given up on search? This would indeed explain why they attempted to buy Yahoo!, but would also leave Google as the only mass-digitizer of library content. Once again, libraries will no doubt need to pick up the pieces and bring order to the mess.

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I have been busy developing three other sites in recent weeks, thus the scarcity of information here. I have still been adding to the Dogeared Pages from the Web in the sidebar, but most of my energy has been directed at these three projects:

• Cub Scout Pack 918 — Louisville Christian Homeschoolers — We recently joined Pack 918, and I volunteered my services to develop a site for them. It has not officially launched either, and so does not have some vital information, but the basics of who and where are up and running. It has a great “cub scout” feel to it and will hopefully be a helpful place for all things cub scouts. I’ve had a bear of a time getting it to render properly in IE, but I think it is finally working. Live in the Louisville area? Homeschool? Come visit! Coming soon: tips on making the boat for next month’s Raingutter Regatta and photos from last week’s campout!
• Grace Fellowship Church of Louisville — I was upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 and overwrote the entire database for my church’s weblog. So, I created a new one and have enlisted the help of a couple of church members to contribute content such as sermon summaries and photos. The elders will be looking for engaging ways to use the site in the coming months. Maybe a discussion forum?
• Boyce Library Online Guide (B.L.O.G.) to Reference Works — a site which shall be public by next week. It is intended to be a one-stop-shop for information on theological reference works. Keyword searchable. I will link to this once we launch it publicly.

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