Good morning. For those of you that are now joining us my name is Tamara. So, we have invited Karen to introduce our keynote

speaker. Karen is the director of library at Holy Names University in Oakland. You may

know her from blog "free range librarian."

Karen: Welcome. I am of course patting myself on the back for my excellent work as Nicole's

manager. Close race, it is really my great pleasure to introduce Lee Rainie, Founding

Director of Pew Internet & American Life Project founded in 1999. He is also coauthor for "up

for grabs" and before Pew project he was the managing editor of U.S. News & World Report

and after a period of covering politics he coauthored a book for MIT press about technology

and the title is "Networking." Here is a few more things I found out about him. There are

academic searches. There was 22 references, 385 Pew internet academic search. Sorry. Twitter

followers, 222 friends on facebook. If you Google Lee Rainie plus zombie you get 226

thousand entries. Vampire, 2 thousand. With librarian 19,600 surpassed by Lee Rainie kittens.

I found out also that his first name is Harrison. I found a 1986 article that showed he has

a lot in common with librarians. We are proud of our history of fighting for free speech

and the right to read and we have modeled, who went to Yale rather than turn over public

records during the Chicago trial. So, it is my great pleasure to introduce Lee and to

be able to sit and tweet through this session to what I know will be a wonderful entertaining

informative talk. Thanks very much.

Lee Rainie: I keep warning people about digital footprints and here I am. I remember the first

time I met Karen in 2002 on a snowy day. When a whole idea of blogging, actually 2003, and,

at Harvard assembled a bunch of really smart guys mostly, and, she kept saying such wonderful

smart things that I remember at least taking mental note if not written note, "radical",

which is a term of affection for me with a lot of common sense. And I have been a follower

of her blog ever since then. I was thrilled that she was here and going to be introducing

me and I learned things about me that I didn't even know.

One thing, my little gig at Pew Internet Project is described in our literature as being a

fact tank. It is not that Pew. My funding comes from the Pew trust based in Philadelphia

with a business presence in Washington. They fund us to do work that is primary research.

We do a bunch of national surveys asking people how they use technology and then we write

reports on our findings but we don't have any agenda. No 10 Pew fix-it plan or policy.

There is no Pew position on Comcast NBC merger. But we hope that by producing useful data

with an argument based on what we find in the data we will be interesting to folks like

you. This is the biggest stakeholder cohort for all of our work. It is a big win for us

and Pew Internet. Thank Karen for being nice to me. There is another thing that I got to

get out of the way at the beginning of every take I do west of the Mississippi. I am a

child of the two most challenging speaking cultures in the United States. I grew up in

New York so I speak really, really fast and moved halfway through my life to Washington

so I speak for long periods of time. I am sorry about that. I have been told about this

and tried to get coaching and I can't do it. A librarian came up to me after my talk in

Pennsylvania, "I know what your next job could be," I said I am the age of a baby boomer.

"You can be a disclaimer reader on drug adds." So, I'm sorry I can't help myself. Really,

cut me off if I am going too fast. I will advocate it, please don't twitter me. Transitive

verb covered by the conical of higher education warning academics who appear in conferences

that there was occurring that in the audience people were saying snotty things on twitter

to the speaker. These were some of the actual tweets covered in the article. "We need T-shirt."

"I survived keynote disaster." There was sales forms on the breakfast table the next day

for that, that T-shirt. Often I don't want to turn away from the scent because I might

see a severed head: Too bad they took my utensils away. My staff follows me and I never hear the end

of it. So be kind.

I will talk about libraries as social networks because it fits into a bigger social story,

but has been put on steroids in the era of the internet mobile conductivity and technological

social networks story of the rise of network individuals. I wish that I had been smart

enough to think of the concept myself. My coauthor is Barry. A long time network analyst

and he talks about people now moving into, from a world of small groups and bureaucracies,

into a world where networks matter both in personal and social sense but also in commercial

senses. And that is the world that we are writing about in our book and the world that

technology is implicated in. Big thing that is happening, bunch of things happening, first

thing is librarians are well served by thinking of institutions as networks and thinking of

them in the same capacity and friends in meta-works play in their lives. Librarians have always

played those roles but don't have that model of being a network. I encourage you to think

more that way because the word is a network word now. We still have our cluster of really

tight friends who are a lot of family members and close friends but a lot of our business

is done with more extensive and diverse ranging networks. They are more influential than they

have ever been because it is a coping mechanism for the stresses and strains that we are going

through as a culture. More and more information more and more casualty more and more material

is flying at us. So, one thing that people do in that environment is to turn to their

networks for cues about what is most important or interesting or relevant for assessments

about what is credible or not what is meaningful and what is not. Also just as an audience,

people have a sense that they are actors in networks and can broadcast or publish. They

think of networks as a forum for their own content creation that is important for them

as they participate in the world. They are differently composed now than they used to

be. Networks are bigger, more segmented and diverse than our parents and grandparents

had. We can access more people and you can maintain relationship. It is easier because

we have electronic means to publish without having to talk to them all one on one. We

have set of tools that allow us to have a wider expanse of people we interact with that

we know and call upon when we want to make a decision and have something we are going

through or just trying to navigate a communicated world. And social networks are more vivid.

This word is just coming into being, social networks have been studied for generations

but we have a much more vivid sense because they are displayed in front of us by their

technology. We are more conscious about how our friends fit together and who knows each

other and the big part of the story, biggest part that the internet introduced to light

is that we can create content for them. That information sharing content, creating media

creation is a very intimate and important part of network building. Librarians are already

in this world. You make contact and understand contact and make reference recommendations

but it is a networking activity that it didn't used to be. It felt like one on one. Now it

is networking activity that librarians are well served in honoring. Other thing that

has changed is communities themselves. They are very different now. I want to make sure

networks, in as many ways as you possibly can, a big part of the story is explosion

of niches. Many more kinds of groups, communities, bonds, and social capital that exist now.

There is you name it and there is a group for it or a group against it and it is narrowly

defined by passions, by demographics and sometimes by lifestyle. Host of things are now entering

that picture. It is exploding in this era. One of the fun things that we have all seen

is the rise of social posses. People who grab a cause or interest and pursue it. Sometimes

there is something wrong that has happened and people go out for a hunt on the wrong

door and what the evidence has done and bringing it to justice. You can think of anything related

to politics. Anything. People run down stuff in new and interesting ways because they can

call on their networks to help them and their networks propagate in ways that crowds will

help them solve problems and learn things. Another brand new group, but it is certainly

more powerful and abundant is what my friend calls, "just in time, just like me communities."

Particularly evident in the medical world where people look for others who have gone

through the exact same disease or care giving set of circumstances that they are in. Not

that they are interested in finding people at the same stage of life or disease or kind

of community they have been in the same kind of network. Easy now to assemble networks

on the fly of people who are very, very much mapping with you and your circumstances or

the person that you care about and their circumstances. Is it is a new way to think about the assembly

and contribution of networks. I cannot think of any other group that is so competent in

doing this. You know how to call on people to get help and resources and know how to

figure out and solve problems and plug into people's lives when they can for help. Content

creation piece is interesting because now-a-days they are of a different breed. They are content

creators in industrial media age. Remember back to the French. they are talking clergy,

nobility, and peasants. In the 19th century British and other developing countries talked

about a 4th estate which was mass media or newspapers who, they were called 4th estate

because they had a different relationship to space than those other 3 estates. They

had different mission and narrative form and different calling so they were a distinct

class of actors. Well, Bill, who is kind of like me but smarter and has a wonderful job

at Oxford Institute talked about this being a fitness state where people who create blogs

who do social networking who make youtube video or contribute to the online environment

they have different sensibilities and are more personal and partisan and passionate

and more particular in a way they see the world. They are not like mass media reporters

in the way they tell stories and react to things. This is bringing a new media culture

to the exhibits that you have seen out there. It is coming from a crazy bunch of amateurs

that are blogging. A New kind of group. Librarians, early on, were appreciative of what the value

of content creation was. You took it upon yourself probably to be the most abundant

for yourself in original forms but to be teachers of it. I saw lots of libraries around 2005

or 6 beginning to have programs built around social media to help patrons be bloggers or

set up facebook page and things like that so you understand that this is a new kind

of community form that is well suited to the things that you have already learned and understood

in your training. That is the world of network individualism at a grand level. Can we stop

right there? Again being conscious that I talk too fast and long. Let's do questions

and answers throughout. If you have questions arising from things that I have already said

or if you agree with something or think I need to elaborate raise your hand right away

and let's talk about it. This seems a particularly good moment for a filibuster break. Any questions

so far?

>>>>>: Would you be discussing social networks in teens?

LEE: Yes, I will now that you said so. It is a special case in a way from a research

perspective. The most interesting edge of the story isn't the teenager, it is over 50

age. Fastest growing class of social network arrives is people over age 50. From a research

perspective it is an absolutely hysterically great thing to see is the tension in families

when mom wants to friend junior to learn all about the parties they are posting pictures

on facebook. Awesome to watch these new norms being created with females on the fly. I will

make sure to talk about that.

>>>>>: I was interested in the fact you called librarians content creators. I see us as content

aggregators.

Lee: I don't see it either or. Librarians have been aggregators and there are interesting

ways to be thinking about that. How many people are tweeting? How people have a blog? How

many people have social network pages? Just in the way we think about it that are content

creators in the sense they are sharing their stuff with at least some other people. They

have set privacy settings. We still consider it to be content creation. You don't show

everybody in your network your diary. Like notes you are passing around in class. This

feels like a different quality of public engagement. That is what I mean by that. This is an important

distinction.

>>>>>: How, as well as the fact that people are engaged in these communities and finding

these very unique collections of people and so forth, it seems to me there is also frustration

created when you can't find those kinds of things too. Have you ever, have you researched

or would you comment about that? Those times when you are trying to find something and

you can't.

Lee: Yeah, there is that, two versions of that. I'm sorry, I should repeat the questions.

What about, have we looked at people who are frustrated by people not being able to find

things? We looked at one version of that. Which is a good news story if you are into

community building, which is, I am not going to remember the data right, but we asked people

what did you do when you couldn't find a community that fit the issue that you cared about? Whatever.

If you went out looking for friends and didn't find them what would you do? the vast majority

said, I set up a group and content page and started pinging people that I thought would

help me. Personal spontaneity that is possible in this age is a lot more readily accessible

when people had these tools. There is another version of not finding what you want which

is kissing cousin of information overload. People who kind of suspect that what they

want is out there but can't get to it. Research results are too great to wade through or not

clearly on point. Again, what I think happened in networks and I don't have hard data to