ELAG 2015 - Stockholm - Opening presentations

Opening note – Gunilla Herdenberg, KB National Librarian

Older collections and prints are stored in two buildings 40m underground. Legal deposit from 1661. 1979 audio-visual material was added (films, moving image etc.) and last year digital material. Want to unlock data to facilitate use and reuse.

Faith, hope and codification – Janis Kremlin, Senior librarian for academic affairs

Libraries dream of comprehensiveness. Best memo stick is [picture of] tree in a garden because the purpose of a garden is to create a whole world. We are seeking permanency. The new keyword is codification. Libraries are always concerned about objects. We’re missing the way we are communicating, faced with the challenge of losing memory, that’s why codification is so important. It concentrates on little objects, we’re not talking of collections any more but codes, like a garden that can create the entire world. At the end of the day it has to be relevant.

Keynote: Sometimes I feel sorry forthe data – Magnus Oman, Daniel Gillard

What big data really is is scalability, that’s the main point. At least for the techies. For the memory people it’s the fact it’s so big we can’t possibly work with it! Silly…

We throw away so much data and don’t have to. There’s a whole load we can know now, we have the data. But we’re not using it. For example we could use data from people’s movements for public transport planning. But there are moral issues even with anonymity and that’s why it’s not being exploited.

Another example is about how computers understand language. Taking data from Wikipedia for example, which is really not that much, we can analyse the proximity of words or similarity and make connections. This is a mechanistic view of course but is an example. Analytics is what can make sense or get things wrong…

One question was asked about data on text rather than numbers and can we do that? Answer is that it’s not that easy and reliable, even if some companies say they can do it but the algorithms are not straightforward.