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uh welcome ladies and gentlemen once again this is cni fall 2022 live and direct uh good to see some folks that I haven't seen in a while good to see some folks that I've seen uh recently but only on screen uh I'll be the host and moderator this afternoon my name is k Matthew Dames I am the 61st president of the association of research libraries and the Edward H Arnold dean of hesbrook
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libraries and the University of Notre Dame press I am flanked by two esteemed illustrious colleagues to my left is Dr Meredith Evans appointed director Jimmy Carter presidential library and Museum and the 74th president of the Society of American archives from 2018 to 2020. to my right your left
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Michael meth is Dean University library San Jose State University and he is the author of the book blockchain in libraries published in 2019 on ala Tech Source a special shout out to Tony Zanders uh the fourth member of this partnership he couldn't join us today but he will join us later on as I
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tell you about some uh something that we're going to do a little bit after uh on Tuesday couple of uh announcements and also then some framing points I'm going to take presidential uh and moderator prerogative to announce that I'm hiring uh Notre Dame's doing a a group hire for three associate University Librarians if you want
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to know more about that please see me and then we're also uh as I mentioned Tony is convening uh the lib nft happy hour on uh Tuesday tomorrow December 13th at uh 4 30 to 6 30 p.m if you want to join us please see one of us foreign so now let's get into a little bit of framing
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we're presuming that folks in this room have a wide range of knowledge with respect to nfts crypto uh the blockchain generally and it'll range basically from Advanced to curious and so we're going to try to make this as widely applicable as possible quick show of hands
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who in this audience owns an nft or a coin like Bitcoin or ether okay let's see five six uh another show of hands um who in this audience has actually minted their own nft okay got one over here all right um that's good to know that helps us uh it's helps us sort of
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figure out how we're gonna go with this we have no slides for this I mean when we say this is a crypto Cipher this literally is a conversation about a project that we are all very excited to be uh part of uh to that end uh Meredith and I have been working on a white paper uh if you had signed up for this session using sked uh we will send that to you if you're interested in the white
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paper uh which we'll finish uh at the conclusion of this conference then please see again one of the three of us and we'll get that to you uh the session is a follow-up to a January 2022 Twitter spaces event that had all three of us plus Tony plus some other folks talking about the role of blockchain and nfts in the academy generally and specifically with respect to uh libraries and
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when we open it up with with with Michael we'll sort of um bring that back into the conversation this session is necessarily going to focus on digital assets rather than cryptocurrency clearly you all have heard a lot about the cryptocurrency side of this there is some slight applicability if you dig down into it but for the most part we are putting that to the side and we're looking at
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the digital asset portion of uh of this blockchain problem and ultimately uh what we're doing here is premiering lib nft to a broader audience that's a live research project that involves the three of us and Tony Zanders and we're focused on answering an empirical question and that question is can Block Chain technology generally and can nfts specifically facilitate
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the economically sustainable use storage long-term preservation accessibility of a library's special Collections and archives and so and to that end one of the things that we talk about a lot because we talk about this a lot is you know how we actually got into this particular space I got into it I guess relatively late only this year I think
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Meredith also got into it relatively late uh Michael literally has written the book on it um and he and Tony Zanders were the ones that were sort of ping-ponging these ideas around early and so Michael if you could start us off by sort of giving us I guess the origin story of how you and Tony got into the space in the first place sure thanks Matthew and and uh maybe just one slight Amendment which is you know at this
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point you're not late you're just entering at this stage because I think in general when you look around the landscape we're still fairly early days uh but just by way of background um I've been interested in in blockchain initially via crypto actually from probably like six or seven years ago and then a few years ago I realized I would like to know more about it um and I I started seeing some as I saw some convergence because between conversations
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happening in the in the blockchain space and what I think we can do and do in libraries and so I figured the best way to learn something myself is to write a book about it so I approached ala and they said sure go ahead and gave me a contract and then I ended up writing uh the book which is now available in Open Access so anybody who wants to catch up just look up blockchain and libraries you can you can read it uh and that came out in 2019 towards the end of the year as I continued on that
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thought I started working and talking with several folks just always exploring like what can we do about blockchain one of the things is for a lot of people there's still association with things like Silk Road or other nefarious entities and then for others they were seeing the promise so I tried to find the people who are interested in the promise of blockchain and I ended up in conversations with Tony who we've heard a few times now his name and Tony is also the founder of skill type and so
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we're talking from a training perspective about how does the training space apply to libraries uh and in there somewhere the conversation popped up you know so if libraries should be engaged with the blockchain does skill type have any content and in the out of that came a conversation I realized for both I'll say blockchain enthusiasts uh whatever that may mean but we we found kinship and so we started having conversations about how does that apply to the library space
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and from there we started focusing more on the distinctive special collections that Library sold and we can talk a little bit more about why in a minute um but that's that's really where we went and that's when we started engaging uh Matthew and Meredith for their expertise respectively Matthew for copyright intellectual property and also legal perspective and Meredith of course for our deep knowledge of archives and archival practice and
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special Collections and that's how we arrived here but the underlying premise that we got to is if libraries already working on digital asset management and the blockchain is a way to manage digital assets is there not a connection and if there is how do we take what's in our collections that are items that are unique they're distinctive they have a lot of interest not
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commercial interest actually scholarly interest primarily but also in Enthusiast interest and how do we take these unique distinctive collections that we have committed to housing and preserving forever and how is there a way that we could maybe build around that models that allow us at the very least engagement uh with a community and again there were some who raised their hands on the nft space so we can I'm happy to answer some questions if you want to go down that pathway
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um and maybe in the best case scenario is there a way that we can use these collections in a way that is driven by us from within the library to create policies rules Etc that allow us to turn these unique collections that are already digitized in many cases or can be into the nfts that we're talking about and then find a way to maybe even monetize them to actually fund future either the special collection most places that I know that I've worked at certainly
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can use additional funds or maybe find other ways to to monetize that as well so that's a lot of the underlying premise and that brings us to today where we are chatting with all of you thanks so so Meredith um maybe we're not uh late but we are certainly this is the newer half of the room Mike has experienced um so you and I talked about this um late 2019 and then we were both
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on the Twitter spaces uh event I remember very specifically and because I was thinking about this strictly from the um Finance standpoint and not the blockchain standpoint I I literally said this territory just looks like the latest and greatest Financial finesse and uh but I'm intrigued enough about the possibilities to sort of dig a little deeper into the technology and its applicability
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in in this space now you've spent your entire career um in archives special collections what was what intrigued you about this from a collection standpoint an intellectual standpoint or otherwise thanks Matthew um so first let me say these are my ideas I'm a federal employee so this is not representative of the federal government anything I say um so just make sure my disclaimer
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is on record um what's intriguing about this project to me specifically coming from a Glam perspective galleries libraries archives and museum is we are often challenged by financing preservation and maintaining the items in which we store and collect and continue to receive and so this is just a great opportunity I feel to maintain our repositories in ways that we
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hadn't thought about I also know that um you know libraries and archives sometimes we think we're at The Cutting Edge but we don't put our whole body in we put our toe in the water and this is a real opportunity for us to consult and work with others to bring them on board before we miss um miss it we talked a lot about you know Web 2.0 and we're already now in web 3.0 and we've
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missed a lot in that transition we don't want to miss this this is an opportunity for us to do digital surrogates and so that we still maintain ownership of our items but also engage a larger Community whether it's alumni or even broader globally to bring attention to our repositories and support whatever that support means to you whether that's a number of likes whether that's visitors or whether that's Financial we have an opportunity to take advantage of the
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new systems that are out there for us so to me that was the excitement of it all and who better I will toot our horns than archivists I mean we that's what we do for a living right we look at things we see the intrinsic value we we see the monetary value we see the cultural heritage value of these items we are really good at knowing what is not just popular but what needs to be preserved for longevity right so that hundreds of years from now somebody else can see it and
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know it and learn something new that's what our expertise is so why not combine the nft um the new process right with our work so that we are remaining relevant and sustained in new ways thank you uh so Michael could you could you sort of give us um sort of the frame this conversation could you sort of give us a um nice crisp sort of definition of uh
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what blockchain technology is things that are associated with it like non-fungible tokens again which we're framing as digital assets and sort of help us distinguish this particular application and use from you know what we're hearing about with FTX and all the the currency stuff because
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I think that's really important to separate those out and your definitions can help us do that all right I'm going to try to unpack that because that was a lot of different stuff okay all right so let's let's start just the general uh let's start with the general definition of what a blockchain is sure so a blockchain there are many definitions floating around the one that I use is and I'm going to read this because I always forget to get all the words right but blockchain is a
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logical concept that sequentially links verified transaction data together in an immutable record that lives in a distributed decentralized Network and what that means is you have basically the idea of computer Pro computer readable program so that's the logical piece in there the sequential is the immutable record that we have that uh everything is lined up so you can see
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the provenance of items you can see how everything is established and depending on how the blockchain is set up is also auditable and that's where the verify transaction comes in so there's no question about who owns it who doesn't own it and the other part that's really important certainly in the way blockchain is set up also is that it lives in a distributed decentralized Network meaning that
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we're going away from the one computer from the server network but we're really going through if you imagine sort of like a giant Google doc that gets life updated all over the place all the time so that would be the first part of the blockchain let me see our next question and we'll see where we go from there all right so the next question is could you distinguish uh the blockchain from what we know as crypto or cryptocurrency so and and I should make a couple before I answer it I'm just going to say something else
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so when we talk about blockchain blockchain is a concept but there are many blockchains that exist so the most popular blockchain that people know about in the most well known is Bitcoin Bitcoin is a single person purpose blockchain that was developed entirely for the benefit of the Bitcoin protocol and when we think about blockchains really it helps if you think of it almost like an operating system an on that operating system you can install different applications and so
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the next largest protocol is the ethereum protocol ethereum was born as a result to um of actually how single purpose Bitcoin is and so ethereum was actually developed as a platform develop other Bitcoin not sorry blockchain applications on top of that um you mentioned you mentioned FTX so it's really important that if you have that distinction to
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understand that blockchain does not equal crypto crypto is an application on the blockchain now FTX in particular is a particular devious scam I don't know how much you all care about financial research but if you want to we can get into it but basically from what it looks like and what has been shared so far is that Sam bankmanfreet who's the founder of that company came up with a way to Arbitrage cryptocurrency prices between the U.S markets and Asian markets he used that
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lag to make a lot of money he realized there's an opportunity out of that he built another business the original business was called Alameda then he came up with the secondary which was called FTX and then he came up with a very um devious plan to basically leverage the money he had at a ratio that is unfathomable because he basically got usually like when you borrow and again I don't want to go to die but you borrow at a fraction of what the underlying asset is in this case the
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crypto in this case he actually went one-to-one used that to make it look as if he had a lot of funding and use that to leave her up even more so thereby basically multiplying uh what what he was doing and so he came up with a Ponzi scheme in essence that broke apart once people start pulling at the threads but but at the core of this you do have a blockchain and you have the applications including some sort of cryptocurrency on top of the blockchain that's the fundamental at the core
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it was a Financial finance as you called it a financial scheme that defrauded people but the problem was not the blockchain the problem was that a nefarious actor found a way to leverage a technology like we've seen so many other cases but the blockchain itself uh one of the things that amazes me is so the first protocol was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto which is uh is
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a person of Unknown Origin it's just a nine page white paper that was published that established what a blockchain is and then established Bitcoin as a digital payment infrastructure it's open access to I encourage you to look it up it's uh in Parts very easy to read in Parts too mathematical for somebody like me but it all worked out what's amazing to me is that since the publication in 2009 and everything else that has happened since the blockchain has never been hacked
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so the blockchain itself has been proven to be resilient against any kinds of attacks Whenever there is some kind of fraud committed is actually usually it's been human error and that to me is pretty remarkable that with all the advances in technology that construct that he developed still held up and holds up today but that's partly why we're in this conversation right I mean we scared you we know but the reality is if you have an nft or you have something that's verifiable right and
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you get this really unique distinct number that nobody can take away from you that identifies this object whatever it whatever it is whether it's a photograph or a painting or illuminated manuscript whatever we've digitized that surrogate and you get into that and you buy that nft then you own a piece of that right and it's identifiable to just you so there's a security in that um or I wouldn't
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be at the table if I thought oh there'd be some crazy scheme I'd be like oh no but there's ways to do this safely and authentically that and legally right that will protect your assets but also um give you some a broader audience people that don't know your collection which is very typical in archives right where digitizer we're digitized we're digitizing and people still don't know our
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collections they still don't know what we have this is an opportunity to expand that to millions of other people around the globe just to start so so Mary let me I'm gonna come right back let me go to you uh Michael and could you explain uh what an nft is and then I want to come back to Meredith to talk about provenance because she it sounded like she was about to get into provenance yeah which is
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but exactly I mean that's the important thing that we're going to talk about now an nft just for quick definition the letters stand for non-fungible token right so meaning you have a unique item one of one that cannot be duplicated for something else now when you look at nfts themselves there are many analogies that have been made and when you start going into the areas where nfts are being created so you know you can look at different
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marketplaces like Open Seas or whatever you see there's actually many different types of nfts that get developed but just to to maybe make that distinction nfts are an application on the blockchain similar to how we talked about crypto so just to to help you out with that as well now what happens is when you are when you hear about nfts and you hear people either purchasing ridiculous amounts of them or money I'm sure everybody here at some point another heard about
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the board ABR club or something like that that is the application that you're buying and you're buying a digital surrogate of something in those cases these were specifically designed to be sold as nfts and what people are buying is actually less the image that they're buying which I know a lot of people are saying like oh that's just you know Photoshop or something like Image Maker
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from who knows when that kind of stuff but what you what people were buying when they were buying those nfts and at the peak they were selling for a half a million dollars plus they were buying access to a network they were buying access into it's like their entry pass into something and so that was an extreme example of a company that figured out how to really leverage that for marketing and then also generate the value for that there are other type of nfts that I think are
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maybe a little bit more akin to what we're looking uh to do and talk to you about which is um and some of you might let's see how many Justin Bieber fans we have in this room but uh Justin Bieber created an nft and so there was an nft project they sold about 10 000 of those the purpose of that nft was to create engagement with the fan base and the way it worked is that because if you
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own that nft and there's something about public and private Keys which we can talk about as well um I sorry there's like a lot of tangents in this and it's hard to force it into one track but what it allowed uh the holders of the nfts is to receive presents or gifts or perks that Justin Bieber or whoever's managing I'm sure it's not himself to them so for example if you were to go to a concert and you buy your regular ticket and you show that you have this nft you would
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have access to a special area that's closer to the stage you might be invited to a album drop or a song drop those kind of things and so when we're talking about that that's kind of where we see a lot of the application it is this level of Engagement that you can create now to also make this part clear if you bought an nft of Justin Bieber you're not buying Justin Bieber what you're doing is you're buying a digital surrogate and this is why nfts are so intriguing for us too as
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we're talking about as a solution for our some of our problems that we have for challenges is that if you are buying an nft you're buying that nft you're not buying what is behind that nft so if I uh say this was the most special iPhone in your special collection you've ever seen if I admit turn this into nft you would not be buying this iPhone you'd be buying an image of it so as the
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owner of this iPhone I still maintain this so whatever I have in my special collection still stays with me I'm not selling commercial rights unless I specify that I'm not selling any other rights to this other than an image and so that then you might ask well why would I want to buy that and to that I say it's kind of like this Affinity marketing that we do how many people have bought pictures of the Mona Lisa have bought the print have bought the mug have bought the
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T-shirt or Da Vinci's first touch or anything like that this is kind of the same idea there's an opportunity to engage with a community and allow them access to something that otherwise they might never have any kind of ownership with any kind of feeling or are not able to connect with thank you for that so I want to um with that basic Foundation I want to engage uh Meredith
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in um sort of a conversation about uh provenance and then sort of tie this back into um the the technology so uh and I'm gonna try not to chuckle here when I talk to Meredith because Meredith not only Meredith and I not only are friends but we have worked together on projects so some of the
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stuff that she's going to say is going to evoke memories of projects that we've been involved in foreign let's just say there were issues and we recognize the issues one of the one of the major issues when we talk about archives and distinctive collections is the the issue of prone provenance right a provenance of the actual item but then there's a whole set of
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documentation often legal documentation that is supposed to attest to the provenance and let's just say things can get a little sticky so provenance is basically the origin of the item right you you track the ownership and that and then multiple hands at this item goes to to get to your repository that's in layman's term what it is when you have that there's Adida
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gift right there's always some legal document at your Institution and I think we learned from the web becoming the web and digitization that a lot of those old agreements don't work right but we also don't have any way to change them necessarily because we can't find the people who signed them so we have a lot of stuff fantastic stuff in our repositories that we're not sure what we can and
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cannot do so actually can I just so there actually is a way because because one of our right but one of the ways actually is to go into court and petition a court to actually change the uh the intent or the language or the interpretation of the actual deed of gift which can happen not ideal
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or you can do due diligence and send some certified mail three times and make decisions there's multiple ways to change that although you have to deal with your general counsel so hopefully you've made good friends um but with that we digitize things and we put things on the web and then we realize we can't put them on the web because somebody's granddaughter or great-granddaughter says you can't do that so you take it down if you make a surrogate right
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and then you do an nft it's a different type of ownership you're owning this item in a separate way so kind of kind of avoids provenance in some respects the challenge is that but I think most importantly to me this project helps us rethink how we do our donor gifts and donor Deeds because we are collecting digital objects now right and so when you look at that you got to see
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the authenticity of that and when you do an nft there's this verification there's other ways to stabilize that part of your collection that's meaningful and it'll be useful to you in the end but I really I really like this project also because of what Mike was saying about the audience it really is true people get a print of the Mona Lisa all the time or they you know I used to get
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questions all the time about an object we had and people wanted to take a picture and make a T-shirt and be like no you can't do that but under this you can't have some ownership of it and you can be in a community that enjoys those same things with a lot less ease and less stress so um yeah and that's just that one thing just very quickly to add to that from the library perspective also
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of you know many of you are enrolled positions that fundraising is probably some some portion of it uh one of the most common things that we lament to libraries typically is that we run up against our advancement offices we don't have the graduates from the library right so the colleges have claimed them all we get to pick whoever has given to us right and then we get to work those
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a little bit more doing something like this allows us if we structure it the right way to actually engage community that hasn't graduated from the library but is could be Affinity based on University or your institution wherever you are in the Glam sector but alternatively also what it does is so I'm wearing for example today a vest that has has Keith herring in designs in it if I
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had the Keith Herring archive I can now engage a community globally that is the Keith Herring Enthusiast community so actually it allows me as a as an organization to expand my Outreach based on some interest Affinity that extends far beyond the alumni base that the institution has and that's the other opportunity that is tremendous if you think about that and then around that there's even more ideas that can evolve once you really start playing out the scenarios
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so let's sort of stay with the this the whole Community thing because one of the things that one of the things that the three of us have talked about is um the community aspects of this including uh sort of the importance of investigating this possibility in a way that is uh
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prioritizing uh the values and the ways of working within libraries archives museums and galleries so Meredith could you could you talk about this um not only in sort of within this respect of um this blockchain technology but generally because one of the things that occurs to me is that we
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have these different approaches to doing this and yet what we have talked about is doing this project or at least investigating this project in a way that would be consistent with the the Glam sector sorts of value so could you talk a little bit about uh that aspect of it and why you think that's important yeah I think we have a lot of things in our collection that are undiscoverable
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right and so you know we have the one person that knows we have it and they come in to look at it or they want a copy of it or they want to touch it or whatever their challenge is this gives us a different type of community this gives us a community of basically a fan base you use Justin Bieber as a as a as an example but there's you know there's an illuminated manuscript in somebody's collection that nobody knows anything about that can create that kind of fervor and
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camaraderie around it something that we've never publicized we never hyped it up what we store it we keep we preserve it we take care of it and no one's ever seen it so we can have a finding Aid we can do it on we can send something on Twitter it still doesn't mean that people really know that it exists right we still are in that very collection based mentality of if we can find that one faculty
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member that will teach this or use this in their class once a year they'll know about it this gives us an opportunity to showcase something to a much broader audience and create some camaraderie around it and a fan base around it that puts us on a map in a different way the perk is we could benefit financially from this activity but the other issue is that people just know who we exist
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and having argued for distinctive collections my entire career what's the number one thing a Provost or a Dean always asks you well how many visitors have you had right and now we're like how many clicks have you had how many likes have you had as if that changes the value of the item in your collection that's worth half a million dollars this is an opportunity to use what you've
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gotten appraised that you own and care for and make it much more marketable and much more seen so so to that end and I'll sort of put this out there to both of you because both of you have you know are literally today running uh these types of Institutions if you are um if you are in a position uh where you have to uh sort of you know bring this to a Provost
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or to a a lead a government leader how what's how do you um how do you present the how do you present the opportunity how do you talk about you know lib nft how do you talk about the blockchain how do you talk about this in a way where they can sort of see the the possibility and what do you emphasize when you talk to them about this well um I'll tell you I I have uh I guess I'm
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I'm very lucky in a sense that I'm somewhat in a privileged position I've worked in Silicon Valley so people generally know about the blockchain already quite a bit but it's really trying to and even with that I will say though there's still resistance in some quarters um but for us it's fairly straightforward I mean the way I explained it over here it's basically it's an opportunity to find a way to turn the library and our special collections from what is purely a cost center
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and find something that we have committed to into perpetuity and find a way to support the campus by turning some of that collection into nfts that can be used for alumni engagement for donor engagement for Community engagement and possibly turn it into some kind of a Revenue income Source possibly that gets everybody to perk up then you get into the next level conversations which is where
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of course it gets complicated and depends on how sophisticated your organization is whether so if you've done all of that how do you manage it and of course if you do get to the money conversation then it's uh so can we get the crypto or how are we going to flow the funds through from one direction to the next which we're still working out quite frankly so that stuff gets really complicated but I I found that the conversations I've had generally there's fairly low resistance
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and a lot of curiosity especially in the senior administrative ranks um there they get the idea Meredith just generally from the same question to you uh and you can take any of your varied experiences I mean I would I would say the same thing I just think it's um a little more Oddities in it right um you know at one of my previous jobs we had a group
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very enthusiastic about miniature books and some that were very very high in value people would come from all over the country to do just to see these miniature books and I think if we had nfts we could do that in a way that's fundable we could do symposiums we could bring in this very enthusiastic group all over the world for miniature books something that
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I've had to justify my entire career specifically to Provost who are like why do people want this um so I think there's a you know a simpler example we were talking earlier about were athletic photo you know photos athletic departments Maryland athletic department maintains their own archive LSU's athletic department maintains a lot of those archives but now they're have they have
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photographs and when you have a famous athlete you you can have now nfts where you're not giving them the original but you're buying a piece of support or a fan base um that's going to benefit that department and ultimately a special collections so I think there's really interesting ways to utilize this without having to do an expensive event and trying to digitize and you know a huge map just
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trying to get these things to people when there's already a base for it and I think it also brings attention to things that only a few Scholars really know and understand and utilize so for me it's a marketing piece the fundraising or the whatever money that's generated Revenue generates is sort of a bonus but to archives and special collections that have to justify their existence
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based on the number of people that have seen an item or come through the building or touched their website this is a new way to bring in a much broader audience to kind of keep those numbers up in a in a way that'll blow people's mind and maybe get you a staff person what I'm surprised to give a concrete example I'm just looking at the date last summer and summer 21 that is Berkeley
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created an nft of a Nobel prize winning formula by Jim Allison and they were able to sell that for fifty thousand dollars as a singular item so you know that's the kind of I don't want to promise anybody that's what's you should expect but it shows what's possible of a singular nft all right so uh before we go to to questions let me sort of bring it back into
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um the actual project so um we're involved with this lib nft project with with Tony and again um we we're approaching this as a as a research project right and so when we say a research project we have empirical questions that we think are interesting to pursue that we believe might
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actually have some uh positive benefit economic or not to this community but we also believe that if we find that there is no economic return or if we find that somehow the technology is not apt for what we're trying to do the findings finding that out also has some value right so
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that's sort of the nature of a research project you may find okay you know we've got the next you know sort of academic or Glam sector Sotheby's or we may find that we're all buckets however finding out that where bobkus is actually a good thing because now people don't have to waste time we've answered the question we've answered the question and so with that again let me sort
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of repeat the question and when we send out this this white paper the question will be in it again um lib nft is an applied research project that asks and seeks to answer a fundamental empirical question can block tank blockchain technology and nft specifically facilitate the economically sustainable use storage long-term preservation and accessibility of a library's special Collections
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and archives and so that's what we are looking to put together is anybody from UCSB here Hi how are you okay so we we have partnered with uh UC Santa Barbara uh as a as a partner to help us start beginning to ferret out these the answers to these questions
00:40:50
um great we've not met but great to meet you in person uh oh we did mate okay all right sorry take that back good to see you um one of the things that is uh that I'm also interested in and this sort of goes we we talked about this is uh there's so much in terms of um generally applicable work
00:41:16
that we already know about that applies to this so for example uh Meredith talked about Deeds of gift right and the general inapplicable inapplicability of Deeds of gift to sort of a digital environment generally and that's just the web we're not even talking about sort of the blockchain so how do we navigate that so this is sort of the some of the questions that we're working on with with UCSB
00:41:43
um another question um that comes to me um pretty often is sort of what are the copyright implications or are there copyright implications involved quick answer is yes um another piece of the puzzle is uh in terms of security you know sort of the security of the actual how secure is the actual blockchain and so we're looking essentially for a handful
00:42:15
a handful more Partners to sort of engage in this journey with us to answer these questions to again see whether or not where does this actually come out and the reason this is important um to all of us and then we'll go to questions is um I'll tell a story based upon my time in DC so I was living in Washington DC basically at the
00:42:44
um when things were really getting hot and heavy uh with the web and search so the early days of Google Google used to have this bright yellow blade server blade that you would put in and it would sort of run the searches off of This Server blade and at the time this is early this is early Arts 0102 they were hiring every librarian they could find
00:43:16
to go through and work on metadata and work on indexing for their search engine engine and I know because I was a sub subcontractor on some of these projects a lot of those Librarians and a lot of people who were working on those projects are not working on those projects anymore um for a variety of reasons but one of the things that I noticed in that sort of transfer
00:43:47
in that sort of what we would call Web 2.0 is we put a lot of we this community you all some of you may have been working on these projects put a lot of time effort energy and expertise into helping build that community and that service so that it could be the best that it could be and now we're in a position where we're kind of paying through the nose for a lot of these
00:44:12
same Services whether it be through cash I'm you know I'm a campus that uses the Google suite for email and all these other things or uh with your own personal data and so one of the things that we're concerned about and part of the reason we're going through this project is to say we don't know exactly where this is going but if history repeats itself at all
00:44:40
we need to not only be in the room when these things happen but we need to shape not only the conversation but how any Market actually manifests itself and so our skin in the game collectively is let's find out what this is about and let's share the findings uh with this community so with that we will now be glad to answer your questions
00:45:16
hi Matthew [Music] um that from the sound of it it sounds like Joe Lucia from Temple it is um you are right in the spotlight I'm gonna knit profound skepticism about this idea and the reason is nfts are speculative assets right and and so let's say you sell an nft for a book in your
00:45:41
special Collections and you sell it on Exchange for a hundred dollars or the person buying that is buying it as a speculative object to accrue value so they can resell it right and the nft market has collapsed 97 since January 1 of this year right it's paralleled the collapse in crypto so I'm really nervous about the idea that we would be selling what amounts to
00:46:10
speculative assets into crypto space for our cultural heritage collections doesn't make a lot of sense to me and the challenge is that when you look at the crypto world in general and including the nft world there aren't a whole lot of good actors there period period so there's a real issue here around if I could sell some tokens
00:46:38
that might get me some money for a short term but the long-term viability of the nft as a essentially bearer of value has already been fairly profoundly questioned by the market just this year so I I just I this makes me very nervous on behalf of our community because it's entering into a speculative game really and you're not unless you're going to hold the
00:47:04
nfts and be the speculators which it doesn't sound like that's the plan the plan is to put the things out on a market right and exchange of some kind which is you know what's been collapsing around the world FTX binance there's a whole bunch of them that have collapsed in the last month right so there's a lot of weird stuff going on in this world right now it's very troubling
00:47:29
so I just I I mean so the the experiment is can you can you mint nfts and sell them and then get them out into you know like what's in terms of the actual sale of nfts for our objects what to see if there's a market for them to determine if we can make money off of them I'm just curious what the experiment is okay so do you want to you want to start or you want me to start
00:47:55
go ahead as you can see we're both like I appreciate the comment Joe and I I would say I want to call it a provocation and in the sense that it's a thoughtful provocation in that if we consider nfts a speculative assets you're right but I don't think that's the framing that we're coming at with this conversation and that's the reason why we kind of joke I keep
00:48:19
on saying we're like the Three Musketeers where you know maybe blockchain and Innovation we got copyright and then we have archives and then we've also partnered up with somebody who's actually coming from the commercial side but what we're trying to do is firstly bring our library our Glam sector our information sector values to it so I think that is first of all a big distinction between some of these projects that you see going down and failing and that has been
00:48:44
really not been a big secret I would say I mean if you look at the to start an Ico which was an initial coin offering like I could set something up in five clicks and it could have been Mike's whatever coin and if I found a market for it that's great but that's not what we're going for here what we're going for here is uh as we mentioned it's it's about preservation it's about
00:49:07
engagement it's about creating community and if as a byproduct of that we find a way to also find commercial value for that commercial value is in the eye of the purchaser so if somebody thinks it's worth something it's worth something to them that's not really our main objective here um so but I I get your point the other thing that I would say is when you look at the majority of nft
00:49:33
projects that are either failing or have dropped and you're right there is a correlation between the value of crypto that asset uh the class going down as well of course then nfts go down is this is a very different thing if you're buying a digital surrogate of something or digital creation an nft or something that has a community doesn't exist and has to be built that's very different than actually working with an nft of a community that already exists and has
00:50:00
in some cases hundreds of years of background and history so we're actually taking that which is sort of like a lot of what's created in the wild wild west and what we're seeing is in some cases succeeding in more cases most obviously failing and saying how do we take those lessons leverage the underlying technology of the blockchain and shift it to a space that we want to and can operate in so um to that end I would say the the speculative asset is a legit
00:50:30
challenge for those who are positioning it as a speculative asset that is not the purpose here yeah I feel like um for you know my perspective is how do we get the world to see us and this is one of those ways um if we benefit financially from it at some point so be it but the reality is my small community on my campus only you know and what maybe five percent of
00:50:56
those people on that campus know we even exist here's an opportunity to have a global community recognize us for Whatever item that we've put forth and to me that's a win we spend a lot of time scanning documents manuscripts taking photographs doing you know quaint exhibits doing programming you know we spend a lot of time a lot of time you know and we see five people right
00:51:29
um and so if you balance the amount of Labor that we are doing to make our things discoverable and it's still not discoverable or acknowledged that it's discoverable you know this is an opportunity to hit a whole nother Community that's vibrant that'll say hey I know that place and this is why and I'm okay with that yeah I alluded to this um sort of in the in the opening
00:51:59
um again in the you know the in our Twitter spaces I I said this all looked like the latest and greatest latest and greatest Financial finesse um I think that there is some truth to that in one aspect of this space right but the one of the first things that we said was we wanted to focus this conversation on digital assets
00:52:28
and everybody in this room is familiar with has control over is interested in has the duty to preserve conserve distribute make accessible digital assets we wanted to have that conversation which in the white paper we call sort of the group two conversation and to distance ourselves or not
00:52:52
get into the financial the financialization aspect of it right and what I would argue and actually we do argue this in the white paper is that because things have Tanked on the financial side that actually now we got all the you know all the Matt Damon Larry David all that stuff we can put that
00:53:15
to the side right all the fomo have you know have fun staying for we can put all of that to the side and we can say okay what do we really have in terms of the technology that may may Advance what we're doing in the Glam sector right so put put all the finance put Sam bankman free put FTX binance put all that stuff to the side everything that you see in Wall Street
00:53:43
Journal Bloomberg put that to the side and let's talk about this and this is what the project is about let's talk about this from a blockchain and digital asset perspective what does this mean to us as a community and for the future of distinctive Collections and archives that's actually on you're on now perfect um sorry I wrote my question down so blockchain
00:54:14
technology can have a pretty outsized carbon footprint and I'm wondering how you reconcile the vast amount of computational power necessary to accomplish this work and its negative impact on the environment and whether or not this is something you all are considering Mike you want to take that sure um so the end so the straightforward answer is the blockchain itself because it is computational requires a lot of energy so no denying that I
00:54:45
think most recently I saw some stat that estimated that blockchain if it was a nation would consume something like the 20s would be number 27 in terms of power consumption so without a doubt however I don't want to while not wanting to minimize that what I would suggest is that there's a bunch of other factors to consider which is number one Innovation takes energy and we are working in a space that is very computationally intensive I have not seen anybody produce the same kind of
00:55:12
data for how much big data calculations cost how much the storage of special collections or other things cost um and we're not having those kind of same conversations necessarily when we're talking about other also uh tools that we're using in our environment that are using a carbon footprint so most of us either flew or drove over here that kind of stuff so in some ways and again this is
00:55:37
not to belittle the environmental impact I would say there is a there's a cost to doing business in quotation marks if you want the other thing that's happening is that their Innovations in blockchain that you're seeing right now that are also really like Shifting the consumption itself there are two points or two things that I want to I particularly want to point to which is one there's Innovation happening where um there's thermal energy capture that is so where you have
00:56:04
oil fields for example usually have a lot of burnoff so a lot of the miners that are used for blockchain transactions are now being collocated to those kind of locations or using hydropower other sources of energy as well so not all the consumption of energy and the creation is necessarily bad energy if you will in that sense and energy also if you know about the transfer of energy there's loss so by locating them closer you're actually capturing some of those that loss
00:56:30
and turning into efficiency um the other thing that happens is and you know Cliff made a comment this morning about how Innovation and thinking can lead to improvements in energy consumption is that as I mentioned not all blockchains are the same so the Bitcoin blockchain is one that's going to stay the way it is it's built on a concept called proof of work it takes a good size amount of computational power to basically transact on that blockchain however on the ethereum blockchain
00:56:57
which I mentioned earlier there was a change and the changes that they went from proof of work to something called proof of stake and we can get details of that if you would like but the short version of that is by making a change in how the blockchain gets verified the energy consumption was dropped by at least 99 percent so what we now know in what I consider the really early days of still blockchain is something that we're going to be seeing changes in one one further comment which
00:57:27
is the blockchain itself as I mentioned there's not only a singular blockchain and what we are typically talking about when we're talking about energy consumption we're talking about what's called the public blockchain the public blockchain is one where the entire data set of transactions is accessible so if anybody here want to become a Bitcoin miner you can go download the entire data set of all Bitcoin transactions at least the public the available portions of course and
00:57:51
you can start running a node right now and you can start mining however there's something also called a private blockchain or hybrid blockchains and those ones allow you to completely set the requirements for how you verify transactions differently and in doing so you can also massively massively decrease the energy consumption so I would say like there's a conversation to be had to make sure we're in the right spaces but the reality is yes there is power consumption
00:58:20
I don't we want to be at the table like energy is important I get that but for us not to participate at all to me um I'm challenged by that because we don't want to be we don't want to miss it we just need to be at the table so that as these things evolve we can contribute to that and we can contribute our ideas and make it better along the way but to not participate we can't we can't make the improvements that are that are needed
00:58:46
all right um if your institution oh we got oh yeah one more because it looks like that sounds like it's Lavon okay I'm Melissa salon at the University of Michigan library and uh Matthew and I have been arguing for like a decade um so there's tons of things my only sort of comment slash question is the Assumption of your motivation is looking at this in terms of like um elevating visibility of our Collections
00:59:15
and what we can do with them and those kinds of things we've been digitizing collections for the last 30 years and if that ain't working I think we also need to look at that underlying question of if we're digitizing and they're not coming to the party are we doing the right thing because digitizing like wasn't a core activity of museums libraries archives 30 something years ago
00:59:39
not that long ago it in the 90s we were looking at things like the museum education what was it Museum education site licensing program which is actually kind of an interesting jumping off point for like looking back at like what's new and how do we get on be participate appropriately I I just there's this is you know I'm like listening to this and thinking okay there's no bad
01:00:04
blockchain there's only like bad blockchain users or something but I there's like this underlying question that's what I found myself thinking but uh there is this underlying question about like not just the things that you're talking about but are we putting our resources into the right things in the first place yeah so I think that's actually a great place to end because it really
01:00:33
is it sort of to me what it what Melissa's sort of question statement sort of brings to me is all right again we came here to say we have this empirical question we have additional empirical questions let's figure out the answers to these empirical questions and we can do it without necessarily relying on the financialization aspect of this so if you are interested uh in having your
01:01:00
institution be involved in lib nft project you can see one of us or you can go to libnft.com Meredith Evans Michael meth K Matthew James thank you very much thank you
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