From Digital Libraries to Knowledge Commons
"Digital Libraries began as systems whose goal was to simulate the operation of traditional libraries for books and other text documents in digital form. Significant developments have been made since then, and Digital Libraries are now on their way to becoming 'Knowledge Commons'. These are pervasive systems at the centre of intellectual activity, facilitating communication and collaboration among scientists or the general public and synthesizing distributed multimedia documents, sensor data, and other information.
Digital Libraries represent the confluence of a variety of technical areas both within the field of informatics (eg data management and information retrieval), and outside it (eg library sciences and sociology). Early Digital Library efforts mostly focused on bridging some of the gaps between the constituent fields, defining `digital library functionality', and integrating solutions from each field into systems that support such functionality. These have resulted in several successful systems: researchers, educators, students and members of other communities now continuously search Digital Libraries for information as part of their daily routines, decision-making processes, or entertainment.
Most current Digital Library systems share certain characteristics. They are content-centric, motivated by the need to organize and provide access to data and information. They concentrate on storage-centric functionality, mainly offering static storage and retrieval of information. They are specialized systems, built from scratch and tailored to the particular needs and characteristics of the data and users of their target environment, with little provision for generalization. They tend to operate in isolation, limiting the opportunities for large-scale analysis and global-scale information availability. Finally, they concentrate on material that is traditionally found in libraries, mostly related to cultural heritage. Hence, despite the undisputed advantages that current Digital Library systems offer compared to the pre-1990s era, the above restrictions limit the role that Digital Libraries can play in Knowledge Societies, which will serve as important educational nuclei in the future.
Together with the general community, the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries has initiated a long journey from current Digital Libraries towards the vision of 'Knowledge Commons'. These will be environments that will impose no conceptual, logical, physical, temporal or personal borders or barriers on content. They will be the universal knowledge repositories and communication conduits of the future, common vehicles by which everyone will access, analyse, evaluate, enhance and exchange all forms of information. They will be indispensable tools in the daily personal and professional lives of people, allowing everyone to advance their knowledge, professions and roles in society. They will be accessible at any time and from anywhere, and will offer a user-friendly, multi-modal, efficient and effective interaction and exploration environment.
Achieving this requires significant changes to be made to past development strategies, which shaped the functionality, operational environment and other aspects of Digital Libraries. Knowledge Commons will have different characteristics. They will be person-centric, motivated by needs to provide novel, sophisticated, and personalized experiences to users. They will concentrate on communication and collaboration functionality, facilitating intellectual interactions on themes that are pertinent to their contents, with storage and retrieval being only a small part of such functionality. They will remain specialized systems that will nevertheless be built on top of widely-available, industrial-strength, generic management systems, offering all typically required functionality. In general, they will be managed by globally distributed systems, through which information sources across the world will exchange and integrate their contents. Finally, they will be characterized by universality of information and application, serving all applications and comprehensively managing all forms of content."
(Yannis Ioannidis)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Preserving the Knowledge Commons
"when scholars use systems of reference to link one work to another, they establish and exercise underlying fabrics of trust. These fabrics serve to tie researchers to other researchers, teachers to students, and creators to users over time and place into durable and productive scholarly communities. The linked works represent the common pools of knowledge - the knowledge commons - over which members of these communities labor to produce new knowledge. And the links work, the trust endures, and the commons nourishes the intellectual life if and only if cited material is preserved so that, when a link is made, the reader is able to check the reference at the other end."
(Donald J. Waters)
[1] Waters, D. J. (2006). Preserving the Knowledge Commons. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, MIT Press.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Digital Commons: a shared social-ecological system
"With the Internet nurturing the sharing spirit inherent in people, 'commons' has taken on a new meaning. Free software proved spectacularily that the commons is a viable alternative to commodification. The term 'Digital Commons' is widely used but only losely defined. Still, it has an obvious evocative power, and the potential to reconceptualize our knowledge environment and to unite those fighting for its freedom.
Charlotte Hess will give an overview of the historical and contemporary uses and meanings of the 'commons,' 'common-pool resources,' and 'common property' as they apply to both natural and digital resources. The challenge she takes up is to build shared understandings and definitions in this rapidly emerging area of scholarship which will give rise to appropriate collective action."
(Wizard of OS, 12 June 2004)
[2] Hess, C. and E. Ostrom (2006). Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, MIT Press.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
