Twenty years after the creation of Mosaic, the first popular graphical web browser for the World Wide Web, the involvement of digital technology in our lives has changed drastically.
At Saturday morning’s all-conference program “All Things Digital,” sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), moderator Anthony Smith, a senior program officer at IMLS, reminded some 300 attendees that despite these advances, one-third of Americans still have no broadband access.
To help alleviate this problem, Connect2Compete (C2C) was born. The nonprofit organization—a joint venture between private companies and foundations—aims to bring low-cost computers to underserved communities, as well as discounted high-speed internet and free digital literacy training.
Panelist Jon Gant, a research associate professor at the iSchool of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, said digital inclusion is “is a very local issue. It’s embedded in the lives of people in their communities.” For example, he said, 8 out of 10 employers now post job openings exclusively online.
“We often talk about how it takes a village to raise a family,” said Gant. “The village needs to provide the infrastructure.”
As an example of C2C-style collaboration, Gant discussed a project he’s closely involved with between the University of Illinois and local government to create Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband (UC2B), a fiber-optic network that is planned to run throughout the two cities after first being established in underserved areas. UC2B will provide 1 GB of information per second at a low-cost price (starting at $20 per month for 20 Mbps).
He also cited the Google Fiber project, which involves a private-sector component to bring high-speed access to communities. The project is slated to run first in neighborhoods in Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas. Other municipalities working on increasing their communities’ broadband access are Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the Cleveland, Ohio, area.
Gant suggested that libraries and library professionals similarly “take an integrated approach with other stakeholders” by building ties with schools and churches, as well as with the private sector, universities, and community colleges, to reinforce the idea that libraries are community anchors.
Another panelist, Council on Library and Information Resources President Charles Henry, discussed the ongoing efforts to develop the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), an “all-inclusive repository” that would aggregate tens of thousands of collections from libraries across the country. Henry said the impetus for the project was a reaction to Google Books, which he said was not providing adequate quality in its scans or enough information about the books it was including.
DPLA, he said, would be creating a public good and help with making new discoveries. Its purpose would not only be for a professor to do more research, but it would, more importantly, be for the 15-year-old student who could pull together more comprehensive research for a school project.
“It would break down boundaries: economic, generational, and hierarchical,” Henry said. “It would cut through that.”
