Keynote

Tuesday, June 16 9:00 - 10:30 am Plenary Session
 
Digital Libraries: Now Here or Nowhere?
Christine Borgman, Professor & Presidential Chair in Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.
 
Digital libraries have matured over the 15+ years since the term was coined.  Yet the term “digital libraries” has never come into general use outside of a select group of conferences and journals. Have digital libraries been subsumed under the rubric of cyberinfrastructure and eResearch? Have they fallen prey to the eternal debates between the (digital) library of the future and the future of (digital) libraries? Has a focus on technology obscured the larger questions of social practice that surround digital libraries? Or is digital library research at an inflection point, in a pivotal position to respond to the next wave of challenges for an information society?
 
Wednesday, June 17, 9:00 - 10:30 am Plenary Session
 
Cultures of Participation: Opportunities and Challenges for the Future of Digital Libraries [Slides]
Gerhard Fischer, Professor of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
 
The rise in social computing (based on social production and mass collaboration) has facilitated a shift from consumer cultures (specialized in producing finished goods to be consumed passively) to cultures of participation (in which all people are provided with the means to participate actively in personally meaningful problems). These developments represent unique and fundamental opportunities and challenges for the future of digital libraries.
Our research in the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design (L3D) explores theoretical foundations and designs, develops, and assesses socio-technical environments for this transformation. We have explored several major themes over the last decade including:

• meta-design, focused on “design for designers”, and aimed at defining and creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative learning and working can take place by allowing participants to become co-designers and co-developers; and
• social creativity, focused on transcending the individual human mind by exploiting transdisciplinary collaboration, and aimed at capturing, negotiating, and sharing  a significant portion of the knowledge generated by communities.

The presentation will illustrate these objectives and themes with specific examples and articulate their relevance for understanding and fostering cultures of participation.