Libraries are in general a necessity in academic work but also for personal use. The main benefit they provide is to offer books and articles so you can either peek at them to consider buying your own copy, or you could take the book with you for a certain time and read it. In providing these services to the customers the library needs to have an extensive amount of different books – as well they need to have several copies of each book, especially popular books. The amount of books existing today is wast – and the library is restricted by both space and especially budgets. It is thus no surprise that not every book ever made is available in the library. This holds true especially for brand new books or books without a general interest field (i.e. not enough potential “customers”). This provides a problem with the easy solution being to buy a copy of the book even if you do not know for sure that it is a good book. Secondly the library face a problem with very popular books when they do not have sufficient copies to service all their customers. Figure 1 illustrates the essence of this.

Figure 1: Traditional library system

At universities the staff consists mostly of people that read a lot and in turn they own a lot of books. In some cases they even receive free copies of books as a medium for advertising. These books are of course located in shelves at the owners office. In general they are almost never read, at least not continuously – so it’s fair to say they have a lot of “downtime” in terms of the most efficient use of the book. Combined this forms an untapped resource. What if all these person-owned books were to be made available for the library customers? What if the library could integrate with this resource? Figure 2 illustrate the concept I propose in which the library is integrated with a peer2peer library.

Figure2: Peer2Peer Library

There are of course some issues which needs to be addressed in this idea. Firstly the book owners need to be willing to lend out their books to potentially complete strangers. I believe this is an issue of trust and security that your book will be treated well and returned. Overcoming this can be to integrate/adopt the library system in which you need a student card or similar to loan the book – and by which you are identified as the loaner. If the owners are willing, the books still need to be made available in a library database. This is a tedious task which needs to be as easy as possible. Solutions for this is to use the barcode/ISBN-code to look up the information on the book – this requires a barcode reader which is not common to have. However advances in mobile phone cameras enables software to interpret the image and “read” the barcode. Webcams found on almost every laptop provides also the possibilities of software “scanning”.  Although not always perfect this is one possibility of overcoming the problem of self managing the peers own library.

In a P2P library the books are scattered rather than gathered at one location. This is a problem when searching for a book. An essential requirement for the search results is often that it is nearby (i.e. at the local library and not in another city’s). Thus, some spatial consideration should also be included in a P2P library system. This could be as easy as taking the (work) address of the loaner/owner and assume the book is there – or at least not very far away. Search results should of course include and rank accordingly.

I believe this rather novel approach to the traditional library enable the use of the untapped resource of “shelf-books” as well it expands the books available to book-loaners dramatically without additional cost. However this should be awarded back to the book owners in some compensation (i.e. prizes for every 25 book made available or similar).

At NTNU the library is refurbishing the library system – this is one concept they should consider!

Is this a good idea? The main problem is the willingness of book-owners. Are book-owners willing to lend out their books? How could this willingness be supported/motivated? Will such systems work outside of an organization? For instance publicly available?

Maps are increasingly becoming more and more popular on web pages, either embedded in existing pages or as dedicated pages. Additionally new tools featuring advanced analytical functionality are also on the up and coming. This increase in web-maps has spawned a great need for geographical data, from basic information, such as administrative boundaries to more detailed information such as hiking trails and similar, in addition there is the information space which holds geo-referenced information, such as images, people and similar.

In a response to this need several large map sites offer the ability to add/change (and even delete) the geographical information seen in the map such as Open Street Map (OSM) and Google Map Maker to mention a few.  Google Map Maker base itself on commercial made information, either freely available or purchased in addition to the contributions from the users, Open Street Map on the other hand base itself solely on user contributions – both approaches has to deal with the accuracy of the data. For the commercial data the accuracy is believed (or guaranteed) to be of some level, often acceptable for the regular user, for the user contributed there are no accuracy provided, however it is believed that it is correct. This problem of accuracy is starting to emerge quite rapidly as the screenshots below indicates. Which map holds the correct information? Well probably it is the one with the most details and with the least jagged lines – and yes, the N50 map is the most semantically correct – not surprising since it is the Norwegian Mapping Authority which is responsible for it. However, how should one know this by just looking at, for instance, the Open Street Map? Or even worse the Yahoo Map?

Comparison between different web maps. From the left; Yahoo Maps, Open Street Map, Gulesider.no, N50 (Norwegian Mapping Authority)

Here is where the legacy of maps come in to play. Maps have an enormous trust among the users – people generally trust their lives with maps and strongly believe that what the map depict is the truth – however that may not be true, at least not always.  The example shown here is quite harmless, but what if it was a reef in the ocean that was slightly jagged in the map, but in real life stretched further? Such accuracy is not communicated with todays maps, at least not as explicitly as it should. Although I believe for the larger part the accuracy is known, probably not in centimetres or meters, but at least in the sense correct/medium/false or similar. The advent of participatory map making communities/tools is also posing in favour of this, as the community as such could rank the semantic validity of the information (this may already exist in for instance OSM?).

So, I suggest that more effort is put into the explicit communication of the accuracy of information communicated in maps.

Some solutions that could support this is either to avoid inaccuracy in the information. This is done at a large scale already by aggregating data (arithmetic average/weighted average etc), filtering from sources (user contributions vs. commercial data), or rating from users. However it is inevitable that inaccuracy occurs, so allowing it (or embracing it) is better than avoiding it. If one is to allow for maps with possibly large inaccuracies, then one must have a way of handling it and presenting it to the user in such way that the user benefits from it and not the opposite. I believe one such method lies in the presentation of data – if it is utmost clear that the data may be inaccurate, then the user can freely decide what he will do with it (trust it or just “keep it in mind” etc). Techniques for this may be;