Keynote Speaker: David Weinberger
Sunday, July 14 • 8:30-10:00 a.m.
Washington State Convention Center
sponsored by Bloomberg Law/Bloomberg BNA, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer Law and Business

This session will be webcast live from Seattle - click to view.

Libraries as Platforms

As we digitize the works on shelves in traditional libraries, the transformative change is not that bits are replacing paper, but that these works are becoming networked. This is enabling us to see that our traditional idea of knowledge has been silently shaped by the limitations of its paper medium. As knowledge becomes networked, it’s taking on the properties of the network itself: huge, unsettled, amazingly messy, and without boundaries. It’s even becoming funny. This is a tremendous opportunity for libraries, but one that requires thinking first and foremost not about how to make resources available to users (which will always be a requirement, of course), but how to create platforms for knowledge and discovery that enable networked communities to get at every drop of value in the library, to develop new value, and to feed that back into the library. In short, this requires restructuring libraries so that they are themselves more like networks, and engaging in a cultural shift that entails a restructuring of values, as well.

The Wall Street Journal called him a "marketing guru." David Weinberger has been a philosophy professor, a gag writer for Woody Allen's comic strip, a humor columnist, a dot-com entrepreneur (before most people knew what a homepage was), and a strategic marketing consultant to household-name multinationals and the most innovative startups. He is a senior researcher at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society and is co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and was a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department (2010-12). Weinberger is also a columnist for Knowledge Management World, and writes a well-known weblog, Joho the Blog. He's co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto, and authored Too Big to Know, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, explaining how the new rules for organizing ideas and information are transforming business and culture. He's been a frequent commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and has written for a variety of business and tech journals, including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Wired.