Jason Griffey kicked off the session by introducing Dr. Vernor Vinge and talking about his many accolades as a science fiction writer and futurist. Dr. Vinge then talked about how humans are the best tool-creating animal and the only animal that has figured out how to outsource their cognition — how to spread their cognitive abilities into the outside world. As an example, he talked about how writing and speaking are an outsourcing of our thinking and money represents an outsourcing of our perceived value for things. As humans continue to outsource cognition more effectively by harnessing powerful machines and complex networks, we move closer to a point of technological singularity. At this point, where a superhuman intelligence can be achieved by machines or some combination of humans and machines, it will become too difficult for humans to fully grasp the present or to predict the future. As an example, he talked about how someone might be able to explain the…
Tag: ILL
2008 National Forum: Don't make me choose!
During the second concurrent session, Jean Rainwater and Bonnie Buzzell from Brown University talked about the challenges involved in borrowing materials not located in their own collections. In “Don’t Make Me Choose! (or, Just Get What I Need!),†they showed how it took 33 clicks to borrow an item from another library within the multiple consortia they belong to, which is 9-10 times the number of clicks the typical user will put up with. Rather than waiting for vendors to come up with a solution, they decided to develop one in-house, even if it was only a partial solution. When a new University Librarian (i.e., head of the library) was hired, this person made simplifying the borrowing process a priority, and put together a team with different, complementary skill sets to do the job. The “guiding principles†for this project were that the system they developed had to be: Simplicity…