What if instead of just taking dorky pictures of your friends you could use your camera phone as an image swab, culling visual samples of the world around you and plugging them into a global database? Every transmitted picture would then be cross referenced with the global image bank and come back with information about what you just shot. A kind of “visual Google.”
This may not be so far away. Take a look at this interview in TheFeature with computer vision researcher Hartmut Neven. Neven talks about “hyperlinking the world” through image-recognition software he has developed for handheld devices such as camera phones. If it were to actually expand to the scale Neven envisions (we’re talking billions of images), could it really work? Hard to say, but it’s quite a thought – sort of a global brain of Babel. Think of the brain as a library where information is accessed by sense (in this case vision) queries. Then make it earth-sized.
Here, in Neven’s words, is how it would work:
“You take a picture of something, send it to our servers, and we either provide you with more information or link you to the place that will. Let’s say you’re standing in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. You take a snapshot with your cameraphone and instantly receive an audio-visual narrative about the painting. Then you step out of the Louvre and see a cafe. Should you go in? Take a shot from the other side of the street and a restaurant guide will appear on your phone. You sit down inside, but perhaps your French is a little rusty. You take a picture of the menu and a dictionary comes up to translate. There is a huge variety of people in these kinds of situations, from stamp collectors, to people who want to check their skin melanoma, to police officers who need to identify the person in front of them.”
But the technology has some very frightening implications as well, chief among them its potential for biometric human identification through “iris scanning and skin texture analysis.” This could have some fairly sensible uses, like an added security layer for banking and credit, but we’re dreaming if we think that will be the extent of it. Already, the Los Angeles Police Department is testing facial recognition programs based on Neven’s work – a library of “digital mugshots” that can be cross referenced with newly captured images from the street. Add this to a second Patriot Act and you’ve got a pretty nasty cocktail.

In a recent discussion in these pages, Gary Frost has suggested that the Google library model would be premised on an inter-library loan system, “extending” the preeminence of print. Sure, enabling “inside the book” browsing of library collections will allow people to engage remotely with print volumes on distant shelves, and will help them track down physical copies if they so desire. But do we really expect this to be the primary function of such a powerful resource?
We have to ask what this Google library intitiative is really aiming to do. What is the point? Is it simply a search tool for accessing physical collections, or is it truly a library in its own right? A library encompasses architecture, other people, temptations, distractions, whispers, touch. If the Google library is nothing more than a dynamic book locator, then it will have fallen terribly short of its immense potential to bring these afore-mentioned qualities into virtual space. Inside-the-book browsing is a sad echo of actual tactile browsing in a brick-and-mortar library. It’s a tease, or more likely, a sales hook. I think that’s far more likely to be the way people would use Google to track down print copies – consistent with Google’s current ad-based revenue structure.
But a library is not a retail space – it is an open door to knowledge, a highway with no tolls. How can we reinvent this in networked digital space?

Instead of becoming obsolete or extinct, local libraries should become portals to the global catalogue – a place where every conceivable text is directly obtainable. Instead of a library card, I might have a portable PC tablet that I use for all my e-texts, and I could plug into the stacks to download or search material. In this way, each library is every library.
But community libraries shouldn’t simply be a node on the larger network. They should cultivate their unique geographical and cultural situation and build themselves into repositories of local knowledge. By being freed, literally, of the weight of general print collections, local branches could really focus on cultivating rich, site-specific resources and multimedia archives of the surrounding environment.
In Salinas, for example, there are two bookshelves of Chicano literature at the Cesar Chavez Library – a precious, unique resource that will soon be inaccessible as libraries close to solve the city’s budget crisis. With all library collections digitized, you wouldn’t have to physically be in Salinas to access the Chicano shelves, but Salinas would remain the place where the major archival work is conducted, and where the storehouse of material artifacts is located.
It would be a shame for libraries to lose their local character, or for knowledge to become standardized because of big equalizers like Google. But when federal and municipal money is so tight that libraries are actually closing down, can we really expect the digitization of libraries to be achieved by anyone but the big commercial entities (like Google)? And if they’re the ones in charge, can we really count on getting the kind of access to books that libraries once provided? (image: Cesar Chavez Library, Salinas)