No meta data. No way of knowing who’s read a journal or paper before. Of knowing what they thought of it. At least unless you’re the librarian or have one of those special CIA computers that track books on particular subject matter like “The Idiots Guide to making Nuclear Fission in your living room”.

Ok, it’s too late on a Sunday night to go into this in depth, but the last post has me thinking of how we use libraries, or rather why I don’t. Why can’t I go down to Whitechapel public library and have the same experience I can have looking up a book on Amazon. Why can’t I have a better experience, after all, the public library doesn’t have the same commercial agenda as a publicly listed company. And an academic library is actually there to promote and encourage the transformation of information stored in books, to useable knowledge in someone’s head.

So why isn’t there a way to capture a reader’s thoughts as they’re reading or browsing. And of displaying this to the next 12 year old looking for Deathly Hallows. Or computational chemist looking for some shit hot molecular vibration modeling information. Libraries have to start organizing information differently. Turn the card files into networks. Two way networks and allow us to rank and annotate them. And communicate through them.

There was a time music was accessed by artist name, album name or song title only. Didn’t matter if that was online or in Virgin Megastore. MySpace changed that. Now we find new music through networks. There’s a lesson and a model there for our libraries.

David Weinberger’s “Everything Is Miscellaneous” dealt well with why this information is needed. Now we need an altruistic version of Mark Zuckerberg to build an Open Source network for Libraries worldwide to hook up to.

First off a full disclosure: I read John Naughton’s “The Networker” column in today’s Observer on printed news sheet version I bought from Hackney Road’s best minimarket, Ince. I’m sure Gutenberg would be delighted by that, as no doubt Mr. Ince was when I handed over my £1.90. A lot of money for something I’ve gone and re-read online for free. I think by admitting that I’m removing myself from the demographic this post is all about but such is life.

A couple of thoughts on Naughtons words, or more to the point, the study by the British Library and UCL on the information-seeking habits of young people he refers to. The report says amongst lots of other interesting things that we are spending as much time searching for information as consuming it. It also states that we’re not spending much time on the media once we find it. We read, then move on to the next object on the same horizontal plane.

What does this mean? It means two things: first Google, Amazon and iTunes have a ways to go in terms of getting us media easier and quicker. There’s a debate swirling at the moment about human search and what it has to offer a world in which Google are paying all the best engineers to make sure their algorithm stays in first place. Of course that assumes that finding the information is the end goal. Sometimes the search is as entertaining as the media at the end.

Take Twitter, it could be said that the micro blogging application/universe is really a passive search tool. I connect/follow all those I think will point me to useful data and hey presto, I get pointed to media I invariably find interesting. This is a form of human search. And because of the social nature of the search I enjoy the process as much, if not more than the end result. Marshall would be proud, in this case the medium really can be the message.

Second, isn’t this method of consumption very much like the way we use some social networks, and I’m thinking MySpace in particular. We connect, consume media that our new friend has posted, then move on. All the time we’re at the same rung of the hierarchical ladder.

Over the past 12 months many have looked at News Corps purchase of MySpace and wondered if maybe Rupert Murdoch in his senior years had shot his wad on Tom co. Facebook was the cool new thing led by a twenty-something year old with the best PR since Mother Theresa. But the Facebook fanboys have been quiet of late. MySpace has been getting some spring cleaning and the media-model it’s build on is looking sound enough.

So what does that add up to? Well at the end of their report the British Library team come to some conclusions. They say the days of paid-for library searches, additional pins and passwords to get into bespoke cataloguing software, and separate, non-connected databases for online and offline information are over. Users just couldn’t be bothered. Users want a one stop shop. Users want to use their Google toolbar. If libraries want to remain relevant they’re going to have to open up and let Google, MySpace or whoever it may be in.