I kept coming back to the librarians as I talked to people at SXSWi because this micro-track mirrored what I saw tweeted and written about the conference as a whole. Interactive didn’t feel blindly focused on discovering the killer app. Tech didn’t feel like an end unto itself — rather, it was about processing data with a purpose; data for a greater good. I met with Justin Grimes, a Ph.D. candidate at University of Maryland who has done significant work on open government standards, and works with the formidable Carl Malamud on digitizing federal archives. I told him about my theory that librarians were the lens through which to view SXSWi, and he started nodding. “Librarians are the boots on the ground,” Grimes told me. “We don’t care what the tech is, we care about what the user actually needs. That’s our mandate.
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Phoebe Connelly - The Atlantic | SXSW 2011: The Year of the Librarian
Phoebe Connelly offers a refreshing take on this year’s South By Southwest Interactive Festival.
