In front of me  sat 100 librarians from all over the world. And looked at me. Totally uninterested. Totally blank faces. With a hint of a superior ignorance in their eyes. I stumbled on my words, I desperately hoped to wake up. I tried to catch their interest with a challenge. A young women reads Bolanos The Wild Detectives and is enthusiastic about the style and content of the book. How could she find similar literary experiences!?

The same ignorant faces. Totally blank. No reaction. I realized that I was not dreaming. I was at conference in Prague with “Linked Data” as the main theme. Those in front of me weren’t interested in what I had to say about literary experiences, they wanted to hear Linked data evangelists and I did not fulfill that role.

Of course I am exaggerating in the above description of the event but I do hold on to that for now “Linked Data”  is still going upwards on the hype ladder. There was even a blog after the meeting that wrote that I had some “spurious” questioning of the possibilities of “Linked Data”. Not that I did not agree that Linked Data is a possible and good way to connect data and to give the end user a better experience than we can manage today. But that I asked for set standards, ideas for how to populate the internet with the metadata, good algorithms for interpretation and lastly ideas on how it will be possible for the end user to interact with the aggregated metadata. It is really too easy, as it often is,  to refer to isolated services of Linked Data  (somewhat contradicts the whole  idea) but, I agree, on the other hand it must start somewhere. And as I pointed out in the presentation; library catalogs and encyclopedias are good starting points. I could also say that the Bolano case above will not be saved by searches at Google, FB, Twitter or LibraryThing but that you may need library services which works with linked data to bring out the suggestion of the novels written by the Beat generation (Burroughs for example, or even better Kerouac).