I’d like to thank you for the work you’ve done putting the library catalog online. The ability to reserve books online (and then renew them online when I don’t finish them on time) has been invaluable. It has dramatically increased my use of the library. Now when I need a book I routinely check the library first rather than ordering it from Amazon. It’s cheaper, the book gets to me faster; and when I’m done, the book no longer takes up space in my apartment. Excellent! Kudos all around.

And now you have eBooks so I don’t even have to go to the library to pick up my reservations! Regrettably the selection of eBooks is somewhat thinner and more oversubscribed; and yes, I know this is partially the publishers’ fault. Still, for the books that are available, it’s wonderful knowing that even the thickest physics text or mathematical tome isn’t going to weigh more than a small eReader or tablet. It makes reviewing calculus on the subway so much more practical.

I’d like to make a friendly suggestion for ramping this up a notch, making the library even more useful, expanding the collection, and increasing monetary donations to the library at the same time. Your circulating collection is large, probably one of the largest in the country, and certainly the largest one I’ve ever had the pleasure to use. Probably 90% of the time the book I’m looking for is available at one of your branches, and you helpfully bring it from wherever it is to my local library where I can pick it up off the reserve shelf. But there’s still that 10% of the time when you happen not to have the book I’m looking for. (And for eBooks that’s more like 90% of the time.) Sometimes that’s because it’s a relatively obscure technical book; but sometimes it just looks like a fluke. For instance, it’s the second book in a trilogy for which you have the first and the third, but somehow missed the middle (or it went missing). Or it’s a novel by an author, most of whose works you already have. It’s something that clearly fits in your collection but just doesn’t happen to be there yet. So off I surf to Amazon where I buy a book I only really want to read once, and that then is going to sit on my shelf untouched for years.

Here’s my idea: I’d rather buy the book for the library and than buy it for myself.

What does this entail? Simple: an online form on your web site where I can request a book that’s not currently in your collection, and where I can simultaneously make a donation with my credit card earmarked for the purchase of that book. You’d receive the information, verify that the book is reasonably suitable for the collection, charge my credit card, and then make the purchase. When the book arrives, you’d add the usual bar codes and magnetic strips and insert it into the catalog. Then you’d put it on the reserve shelf for me, and send me the usual e-mail letting me know it’s arrived. I’d have the customary 10 days to go pick it up and check it out. Of course I’d have to return it in the usual time frame just like any other library book (maybe renewing it once or twice if nobody else had placed a hold on it). At this point you’d put it on the shelves for everybody to browse and read. For eBooks this could be even faster. There’s no technical reason I couldn’t buy the book for the library and be reading it in the time it takes to download.

I think this is a win-win for all concerned. The library gets more books (and more donations); and patrons get to read books without perpetually storing them in their apartments. (I’m sure you know how big a concern that is for New Yorkers.) If you asked for the retail cover price of the book in advance, you’d probably even make a little profit on the deal to cover overhead and other activities. Since I’d get a tax deduction, I could afford to pay a little more than the typical Amazon discount price. And as an added bonus, some of your patrons (me included) have employers who match charitable donations 1:1, so a $40 book purchase would garner you an extra $40 in unrestricted funds to be used for staff salary, computers, building maintenance, or other unsexy but necessary expenses.

What do you think? Sounds like a plan?

Bam! Up pops the complete address including zip code! Five or six more and I’m done. Easiest data cleaning I’ve ever done, and maybe a few more people can get their cards before New Years.

Search is continuing to improve. We’re gradually moving beyond searching for pages and moving into the realm of searching for answers. These days there are three sites I go to, depending on what I want to find:

Wikipedia

For basic information on any major or minor topic

Amazon

For anything I expect to find in a book, as well as many products I want to buy

Google

Maps, pictures, web pages, and products

However even when I’m searching for web pages, it’s shocking how often Google’s little snippet of the page gives me the one piece of information I need from the page. I don’t even have to go to the page they’re linking to.

I don’t think computers have ever been this good at answering questions before. It still seems to be improving. I’m not sure how much further this can go. Perhaps the artificial intelligence we actually need is just a really good search engine with a lot of indexed data to churn through and the right ranking algorithm.

Of course this is still just half of AI. Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia all work by indexing large amounts of data Only some of the map data (and not even the most useful part of that) was created mechanically by machines without human intervention. Everything else these sites work with was created or discovered by thinking, breathing humans. Even if a computer can answer any question we pose of it, that doesn’t mean it can gather new knowledge or decide what questions to ask. Perhaps that next step will require computers that can actually think.

• ARPAnet
• A lossy packet radio network (the lossiness of this network greatly influenced the design of TCP/IP)
• The Atlantic Packet Satellite Network (a.k.a. SATNET)

There were computer networks before this, but this was the first network of networks that deliberately attempted to connect heterogeneous systems without regard for platform. It was the thing which grew into today’s Internet. Except for one brief discontinuity in 1983 when the entire Internet was turned off to switch over to TCP/IP, there’s a continuous progression from then to now.

I doubt anyone back then had any idea of what they had created. The Apple II was only a few months old, 300 baud modems were state of the art, and most networks just connected dumb terminals to a mainframe or minicomputer. You could still find medium-sized businesses that didn’t even have any computers, much less a network. Letters were still typed on paper. People still talked about the phone company, because there was only one. Back then a graphical user interface meant a terminal with an interactive green screen instead of punch cards.

E-mail and file transfer were the major applications on the early net. (Some things never change even if the protocols do.) However Usenet and NNTP were still a couple of years away, as were gopher, archie, IRC, Gnutella, BitTorrent, MMPOGs, VOIP, and of course the Web. The Internet spoke NCP, not TCP/IP. Viruses, worms, and Trojan horses were imagined only by the most cutting edge science fiction.

The original Internet addresses were 32-bits, like IP4 today. However only the first byte was reserved for network identification. The assumption was that 256 networks would be plenty. Although other groups were busy inventing LANs and Ethernet at the same time, no one really thought of that.

Over the next 30 years the Internet continued to grow in directions no one imagined until they invented it. Arguably the Internet revolution is more important than the computer revolution that enabled it. Unconnected, computers just let us crunch numbers, process data, and and type a few letters. With the Internet computers let us communicate faster, better, and in more ways than ever before. Computers are for data and numbers. The Internet is for people.

What will the next 30 years bring? Will the Internet even last another 30 years or is some other unnoticed research project revving up to sweep away the Internet the way the Internet swept away most competing systems? The only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t know, but it should be fun to watch.