Sven Totté, Director for Business Area Public Library, Axiell:
“Everything connected” is driving a lot of development and looking at the forecasts we will have some 20-40 billion “things” connected by 2020 (up from 6 billion today). This will be of some convenience to us in our everyday lives and there will surely be a lot of economy in the “digitize anything and everything” endeavour.
At the same time the “Internet of Relations” will develop from the social media of today where everyone is connected to everyone and seeking the likes of the many we will see a trend towards searching for the love & caring of the devoted few.
A younger generation have started this by using social media directed to the chosen few rather than to all and anyone. Facebook or Instagram likes do not seem to mean as much to them as to the 35- 55 years old. Another angle of this is that people are doing what they can to form niche groups inside Facebook’s, Instagram’s and Snapchat’s message or story structures. An Internet of Relations on human scale.
Culture institutions can support this by initiating and establishing groups actively. Århus library has 200 book clubs, as an example.
Many individuals in the community would welcome Archive, Library and Museum (ALM) initiated interest based groups. People will feel positively comfortable under such an umbrella and would otherwise not enrol.
These groups may very well be both physical and digital or a mix thereof and areas of interest may be everything from local authors book circles, local feminism history, local industrial development, learning labs and so on. A combination of field studies, physical meetings and digital interaction and crowd sourcing could be mixed in the most exciting ways.
Supervised by the staff, ALM institutions collections and meta-data will form a, preferably interactive, base for the exciting excursions in the different themes.
