More old stuff: Discord Over Dewey

(I love this discussion, too!)











Discord Over Dewey


A New Library in Arizona Fans a Heated Debate Over What Some Call the 'Googlization' of Libraries


By ANDREW LAVALLEE


By all accounts, patrons of the Perry Branch Library in Gilbert, Ariz., are happy with the new digs.

Since the doors opened last month, visitors have checked out about 900 items a day, far more than the 100 to 150 that typically circulate daily in nearby branches, said Harry Courtright, director of the Maricopa County library district. Part of the branch's appeal has come from the addition of bookstore-like features, including lower shelves, lounge furniture and displays of popular titles.

At the Perry Branch Library in Gilbert, Ariz., books are organized by plain-English subject headings, not the Dewey Decimal System.

But it's what's missing from the library that has drawn the most attention: Perry abandoned the Dewey Decimal Classification System for its books, whose spines instead carry labels with plain-English subjects such as "history" and "weddings." Instead of locating books by the traditional numerical system, patrons use a computerized catalog to find out which subject a book has been filed under, and then follow signs posted throughout the library. Many visitors skip the catalog altogether, and just head for the aisles that interest them.

The opening of a Dewey-free facility has sparked heated debate in the library world. "The day that the Maricopa news hit, I just had to steel myself," said Karen Schneider, a moderator for PubLib, an online discussion list where comments blasting the move have been running about even with those praising the new library.

In defending Dewey, some have decried what they call the "Barnes & Nobling" and "Googlization" of libraries. On blogs and newsgroups, more than one commenter fumed "Have you ever tried finding something at a bookstore?" Some pointed out that Dewey is already essentially a list of subject headings, whose call numbers specify exactly where each book should be placed on the shelves. Many libraries print those subject headings on shelves under books.

Others, however, praised Perry's decision, saying doing away with the inscrutable codes makes libraries easier to browse and more approachable.

A Broader Debate

But the debate, say many librarians, is about more than one branch's organizational system. It feeds into a broader, increasingly urgent discussion about libraries, where a growing number of patrons, used to Google and Yahoo, simply don't look for books and information the way they used to. Some are drawing on cues from the Internet in proposals for overhauls of cataloging systems, but others are more hesitant, saying that the Web's tendency to provide thousands of somewhat-relevant results flies in the face of the carefully tailored research libraries pride themselves on.

Although the divide isn't as simple as young versus old, both have passionate adherents. "It's a religious war at this point," said Ross Singer, an application developer at the Georgia Institute of Technology's library. He has been frustrated by some computerized library catalogs that aren't as "smart" as Internet search engines, where a query for "Ernest Hemingway" may not yield results when "Hemingway, Ernest" does.

Putting the Dewey debate aside, there is broad agreement among librarians that more can be done in the way of spiffing up catalogs. Such databases often include only three or four subject headings for each book -- a throwback to physical card catalogs, which had limited space -- making more complex subject searches, which users are accustomed to trying in search engines, fruitless. "We're not addressing the fact that the world is changing around us," he said. "Some people just want to find things, without doing a whole lot of work."

"We may want people to spend hours learning our arcane systems, but the reality is they're going to default to the path of least resistance," PubLib's Ms. Schneider said. "We need to be in that path."

Developed by Melvil Dewey in the 1870s, the Dewey Decimal Classification is used by more than 200,000 libraries world-wide. Translations have been completed or are in progress in more than 30 languages, including Arabic, Icelandic and Vietnamese, and it is regularly updated. Since 1988, the system has been owned by the Online Computer Library Center, a Dublin, Ohio, cataloging and research nonprofit group, and editors are based around the world, including within the Library of Congress, to discuss additions and changes. It remains very much the law of the land: Some 95% of U.S. public libraries use Dewey, and nearly all of the others, the OCLC says, use a closely related Library of Congress system.

Dewey has come under attack before. Its critics are quick to point out, for example, that the religion section (200-299) overrepresents Christianity, spanning 220 (Bible) to 289 (Other denominations & sects). Other faiths, such as Judaism (296), get just one division, while Islam is lumped with Babism and Bahai Faith at 297. The 600s, which are classified as technology, include everything from hydraulic engineering (627) to leather and fur processing (675), but not topics related to computer science (004-006).

Finding Your Way to France

But Dewey loyalists are far from extinct, even among younger librarians, who worry that simple subject headings aren't specific enough to keep a collection organized. For example, looking for books about traveling in France leads right to 914.4 in any library using Dewey, while those books might be scattered throughout a travel or European section in a less-specific system, said Sarah Houghton-Jan, a San Mateo, Calif., librarian.

Dewey's consistency across language and regional barriers is another advantage, said Joan Mitchell, the OCLC's editor in chief for the system (and in case there's any question about where her loyalties lie, a link off the official Dewey blog lists her interests as 641.5; 746.432; 782; 787.87; 796.935; 800 and 914-919). A German librarian launched that country's translation, she noted, after visiting U.S. libraries in metropolitan areas and an Indian reservation and finding the books were organized the same way in both.

The outcry over the Perry library didn't surprise the district's Mr. Courtright, who also introduced self-service checkout and check-in at the district branches. "We've done a number of 'innovations,' and every time we do something, there are those that think it's heresy," he said. The fast-growing area southeast of Phoenix is projected to open a new branch each year for the next 10 to 15 years, he said, and they will all use the Dewey-less system.

Last month, Michael Gorman, a past president of the American Library Association who recently retired as dean of library services at California State University, Fresno, penned an penned an essay on Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.'s blog that, among other things, criticized the Internet as a research tool. Search engines return too many irrelevant and disreputable sources, he said, and students have become dismissive of the idea that libraries provide information beyond what's online. "I honestly thought that these were not controversial ideas," he said.

Mr. Gorman, whose writing has provoked technophiles before, was roundly criticized in librarian blogs and other online communities. The responses he's read, including ones disagreeing with him, were "very solid," he said, adding that even raising these concerns can get a person marked as a Luddite.

But even tech-savvy librarians often have a complicated relationship with Google. "Google's great. Find me a librarian that doesn't use Google," said Jessamyn West, a Bethel, Vt., librarian who runs the blog Librarian.net. What bothers those in the profession, she said, is that increasingly, patrons only know about keyword searching, when catalogs provide several other ways of looking up entries. "There are other ways of slicing information that aren't the way Google decided to slice it," she said.

"I think older patrons, they believe you have to kind of rassle with the online catalog a little bit, and it's OK to spend a little bit of time to get exactly what you want," she added. Young people are more likely to stop after a "good-enough" search. "It's the difference between scholarship and 'I just wanna kinda know about something,'" she said.

Millions of Results

Anthony McMullen, a librarian at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Penn., said he's heard colleagues scoff at searches that result in millions of pages, which they think bewilder users, as well as searches that direct users to illegitimate sources of information.

But Mr. McMullen encourages keeping an open mind, noting that most users focus on the first 10 to 20 results and don't get overwhelmed. And the Internet doesn't have exclusive rights on inaccuracy, he added. "I could compile a lengthy bibliography of published books that support the notion that the Holocaust never occurred. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't use books."

The discussions over Dewey and Google are similar, said Michael Casey, in that they both relate to serving people who don't want to learn a complicated system. Mr. Casey, a librarian and information-technology director in Gwinnett, Ga., who writes a blog called LibraryCrunch, said that during a new branch's recent construction, he began asking plumbers, inspectors and other construction workers whether they used libraries. Most said they couldn't figure out how to find a book, he said. Although it didn't give up Dewey classifications, the branch incorporated more subject signs as a result.

"Librarians like to think that we're indispensable," he said. "While I think that is true to a point, I don't think we should continue to propagate the idea that we're indispensable by keeping a complicated cataloging system."

Write to Andrew LaVallee at andrew.lavallee@wsj.com

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

From the WSJ Opinion Archives

LEISURE & ARTS
Checked Out

A Washington-area library tosses out the classics.

BY JOHN J. MILLER
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 12:01 a.m.

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" may be one of Ernest Hemingway's best-known books, but it isn't exactly flying off the shelves in northern Virginia these days. Precisely nobody has checked out a copy from the Fairfax County Public Library system in the past two years, according to a front-page story in yesterday's Washington Post.

And now the bell may toll for Hemingway. A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded--permanently. "We're being very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay.

As it happens, the ruthlessness may not ultimately extend to Hemingway's classic. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" could win a special reprieve, and, in the future, copies might remain available at certain branches. Yet lots of other volumes may not fare as well. Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been pulled.

Library officials explain, not unreasonably, that their shelf space is limited and that they want to satisfy the demands of the public. Every unpopular book that's removed from circulation, after all, creates room for a new page-turner by John Grisham, David Baldacci, or James Patterson--the authors of the three most checked-out books in Fairfax County last month.

***

But this raises a fundamental question: What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?

If the answer is the latter, then why must we have government-run libraries at all? There's a fine line between an institution that aims to edify the public and one that merely uses tax dollars to subsidize the recreational habits of bookworms.

Fairfax County may think that condemning a few dusty old tomes allows it to keep up with the times. But perhaps it's inadvertently highlighting the fact that libraries themselves are becoming outmoded.

There was a time when virtually every library was a cultural repository holding priceless volumes. Imagine how much richer our historical and literary record would be if a single library full of unique volumes--the fabled Royal Library of Alexandria, in Egypt--had survived to the present day.

As recently as a century ago, when Andrew Carnegie was opening thousands of libraries throughout the English-speaking world, books were considerably more expensive and harder to obtain than they are right now. Carnegie always credited his success in business to the fact that he could borrow books from private libraries while he was growing up. His philanthropy meant to provide similar opportunities to later generations.

Today, however, large bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders bombard readers with an enormous range of inexpensive choices. An even greater selection is available online: Before it started selling mouthwash and power tools, Amazon.com used to advertise itself as "the world's biggest bookstore." It still probably deserves the label, even though there are now a wide variety of competing retailers. (Full disclosure: Years ago, I was a paid reviewer for Amazon.com.)

The reality is that readers have never enjoyed a bigger market for books. Shoppers can buy everything from hot-off-the-press titles in mint condition to out-of-print rarities from secondhand dealers. They can even download audiobooks to their MP3 players and listen to them while jogging or driving to work. Companies such as Google and Microsoft are promising to make enormous amounts of out-of-copyright material available to anyone with a computer and a browser.

The bottom line is that it has never been easier or cheaper to read a book, and the costs of reading probably will do nothing but drop further.

If public libraries attempt to compete in this environment, they will increasingly be seen for what Fairfax County apparently envisions them to be: welfare programs for middle-class readers who would rather borrow Nelson DeMille's newest potboiler than spend a few dollars for it at their local Wal-Mart.

Instead of embracing this doomed model, libraries might seek to differentiate themselves among the many options readers now have, using a good dictionary as the model. Such a dictionary doesn't merely describe the words of a language--it provides proper spelling, pronunciation and usage. New words come in and old ones go out, but a reliable lexicon becomes a foundation of linguistic stability and coherence.

Likewise, libraries should seek to shore up the culture against the eroding force of trends.

The particulars of this task will fall upon the shoulders of individual librarians, who should welcome the opportunity to discriminate between the good and the bad, the timeless and the ephemeral, as librarians traditionally have done. They ought to regard themselves as not just experts in the arcane ways of the Dewey Decimal System, but as teachers, advisers and guardians of an intellectual inheritance.

The alternative is for them to morph into clerks who fill their shelves with whatever their "customers" want, much as stock boys at grocery stores do. Both libraries and the public, however, would be ill-served by such a Faustian bargain.

That's a reference, by the way, to one of literature's great antiheroes. Good luck finding Christopher Marlowe's play about him in a Fairfax County library: "Doctor Faustus" has survived for more than four centuries, but it apparently hasn't been checked out in the past 24 months.

Mr. Miller writes for National Review and is the author of "A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America" (Encounter Books).

Copyright © 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The Days of Perky Pat ...

The Days of Perky Pat is a fabulous story written by Philip K Dick.

Perky Pat details a post-apocalyptic world in which adults are obsessed with Perky Pat, a doll.

They project themselves into the playworld of Perky Pat, obtaining Perky Pat's material wants much like we provided stuff for our Barbies. Getting her new stuff provides pleasure to adults who have been placed in hideous conditions on another world: "For settlers on a howling, gale-swept moon, huddled at the bottom of a hovel against frozen methane crystals and things, it was something else again; Perky Pat and her layout were an entree back to the world they had been born to."

FROM THE STORY:

"Your parents playing Perky Pat?"

"Yeah."

Norman Schein gazed down at their combined layout, the swanky shops, the well-lit streets with the parked new-model cars, all of them shiny, the split-level house itself, where Perky Pat lived and where she entertained Leonard, her boy friend. It was the house that he perpetually yearned for; the house was the real focus of the layout -- of all the Perky Pat layouts, however much they might otherwise differ ...

We lived then, Norm Schein said to himself, like Perky Pat and Leonard do now. This is how it actually was ...

Playing this game ... it's like being back there, back in the world before the war. That's why we play it, I suppose. He felt shame, but only fleetingly; the same, almost at once, was replaced by the desire to play a little longer.


Some thoughts on the story from a blog called The Readaholic:

"In many ways [Perky Pat] is a low-tech version of Second Life, created 40 years later.

"It is sometimes hard to believe that Dick died in 1982. Many of his best works, written in the 1950s and 60s have been almost prophetic in nature, with aspects scarily familiar to those of us living in 2007.

"Another great science fiction writer Robert Silverberg last year wrote an article reflecting on how the world is becoming more 'Phildidickian' every year, with the 21st century now producing a high-tech version of Perky Pat, a virtual girlfriend Vivienne interacting on a mobile phone near you."

See: http://thereadaholic.blogspot.com/2007/07/days-of-perky-pat-philip-k-dick.html

See also “Virtual Worlds Research: Consumer Behavior in Virtual Worlds” in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, November 2008.

More on that 'cause I know you're interested ...

This is kind of interesting on that same subject (see original post below on avatar-creation technology). I'll preface it with info from the University of Southern California Interactive Media Lab, but you can skip down to the conversation on avatars from a USC Interactive Media Seminar.

Speakers: Jonathan Strietzel and John Snoddy, Big Stage Entertainment
Time: Wednesday, April 2, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Big Stage is a media company whose breakthrough technology allows users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3-D avatar of themselves into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, e-mails, social networks and more – instantly. All Big Stage content can then be shared across social networks,mobile phones, and more.

The privately held, Pasadena, Calif.-based company was founded by three tech entrepreneurs who shared a vision for a new media paradigm in which users themselves inhabited the very content which they consumed, and in which the digital fidelity of 3-D animated people -- created and controlled by average consumers -- would soon render virtual performances almost indistinguishable from original performances captured in high-resolution media.

Big Stage’s life-like avatar creation system stems from advanced stereo reconstruction technology funded by multiple government grants, including the CIA, as part of a nineyear cumulative research project at USC. Company Co-Founder Jonathan Strietzel first saw the potential for this technology while meeting with the project’s chief scientist, Doug Fidaleo, Ph.D., at USC. He then assembled Co-Founders Jon Kraft and Jon Snoddy, who each brought unique skills and perspectives to the table, and were able to craft a powerful business vision, secure funding, obtain the core technology license from USC, and hire Fidaleo to officially help bring their vision to life.

Building on the USC research, Chief Technology Officer Snoddy, Chief Scientist Fidaleo and their team were able to take the quality and accuracy of complex, expensive 3-D scanning technology previously only available to production houses and animation companies and offer it to any consumer with a digital camera through a free, fun and easy to use Internet-based platform, for wide-spread entertainment immersion.

Here's the Backchannel log -- I took out the comings and goings and changed the names to Commenters:

Commenter 1 (6:16:33 PM): hello

Commenter 2 (6:26:07 PM): that's real talent right there!

Commenter 1 (6:26:49 PM): Ala - what's it like to see your self up there? does it feel like you?

Commenter 2 (6:27:27 PM): it's an interesting simulacrum!

Commenter 3 (6:27:58 PM): here

Commenter 4 (6:27:58 PM): Thought the last Pirates clip compositing looked really nice.

Commenter 1 (6:28:38 PM): I would like to see Ala and Perry Hoberman's models side by side, to see how nuanced it can get

Commenter 5 (6:29:15 PM): exactly what are you implying?

Commenter 4 (6:29:21 PM): Hahaha.

Commenter 2 (6:29:23 PM): :)

Commenter 5 (6:30:53 PM): they'll make us smarter & more attractive!!!

Commenter 2 (6:31:05 PM): looking forward to it

Commenter 4 (6:32:39 PM): I think I am not totally convinced ... I thought part of the appeal of the internet was, maybe not the anonymity, but being something you can't be in real life.

Commenter 2 (6:34:23 PM): Exactly. I'm not an undead pirate!

Commenter 6 (6:34:34 PM): That is just what I was thinking.

Commenter 4 (6:34:45 PM): Are you sure?

Commenter 7 (6:34:47 PM): I would argue that being able to be something else and relative anonymity are very well-connected concepts

Commenter 2 (6:35:35 PM): something interesting was happening to me when I was watching a not so accurate copy of myself

Commenter 5 (6:36:11 PM): your slightly defective clone...

Commenter 2 (6:36:24 PM): It's like when the 'villagers' saw themselves in photos for the first time

Commenter 2 (6:36:36 PM): Give me my soul back!

Commenter 4 (6:36:37 PM): Well I just think of a simpler version, like avatars. I never use real photos of myself for avatars or userpics or what have you... would rather use something ridiculous.

Commenter 6 (6:37:11 PM): what if someone who doesn't like you and has a picture of you does bad things online with an avatar having your face ?

Commenter 4 (6:37:35 PM): That too.

Commenter 2 (6:37:43 PM): define bad

Commenter 2 (6:37:59 PM): there ethical issues of course

Commenter 6 (6:38:01 PM): true

Commenter 6 (6:38:28 PM): you could star in a ben afleck movie

Commenter 5 (6:38:55 PM): and improve the movie

Commenter 3 (6:39:53 PM): so paparazzi will have a new assignment, not just a flashy photo, but three accurate photos

Commenter 2 (6:40:09 PM): indeed!

Commenter 3 (6:41:04 PM): not just the gov

Commenter 2 (6:41:34 PM): but Britney in a Ben Afleck movie is something the world can do without

Commenter 4 (6:44:09 PM): Which game is that? >_>

Commenter 8 (6:47:13 PM): Another approach:

Commenter 8 (6:47:15 PM): http://www.pulse3d.com/

Commenter 4 (6:47:33 PM): I see a puppy. I'm sold.

Commenter 8 (6:48:42 PM): and another:

Commenter 8 (6:48:43 PM): http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=358

Commenter 8 (6:52:22 PM): http://www.bigstage.com/

Commenter 8 (7:02:11 PM): http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=358

Commenter 1 (7:07:41 PM): everyone's ten pounds thinner and three inches taller online

Commenter 4 (7:08:06 PM): Ten sounds conservative.

Commenter 2 (7:08:07 PM): not in second life

Commenter 4 (7:11:21 PM): That's pretty much the only application I can safely see myself using my own image for, seriously.

Commenter 1 (7:11:43 PM): an internment camp?

Commenter 4 (7:12:00 PM): Um, not necessarily. :X Just like, me retelling life stories.

Commenter 4 (7:12:46 PM): But just like... using your real life image for real life things, and using a non-real image for non-real things. I don't want to see myself running around in World of Warcraft, healing people or getting the stuffing kicked out of

Commenter 4 (7:12:48 PM): me. :(

Commenter 8 (7:14:58 PM): isn't videoconferenceing an obvious app?

Commenter 4 (7:15:10 PM): I don't actually like video conferencing. Haha.

Commenter 3 (7:15:33 PM): there are a lot of (not always successful) conferences in SL

Commenter 3 (7:15:49 PM): but small meetings (3-5 people) are extremely effective with avatars

Commenter 6 (7:16:13 PM): I think in a 2nd life virtual conference (like the virtual guantonamo stuff) this would be great.

Commenter 4 (7:16:19 PM): But do you think those small meetings would be even more enhanced by people using avatars that looked like themselves?

Commenter 3 (7:16:30 PM): what about the media mainstays of gambling and porn

Commenter 6 (7:16:46 PM): then you wouldn't want your avatar to look like you.

Commenter 6 (7:17:41 PM): i guess it's if you want to be recognized. In SL at a conference you would want to be recognized, otherwise probably no.

Commenter 3 (7:18:17 PM): buying and selling

Commenter 4 (7:18:18 PM): Usernames seem like they would work just as well for recognition, most of the time. I have an easier time remembering a person's username than someone's face for the first time.

Commenter 6 (7:19:01 PM): I am absolutely opposite. If I didn't have everyone's AIM name translate to their real names, i'd have no idea who I was talking to.

Commenter 3 (7:20:38 PM): won't people want to make more than one self?

Commenter 4 (7:20:41 PM): I went through a Sims 2 phase where I got all my girlfriends to make Sims of themselves and I put them all in a house and let them go.

Commenter 6 (7:22:53 PM): http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/

Commenter 1 (7:39:56 PM): like 'simpsonize me' or the south park character thing

Commenter 1 (7:40:34 PM): a stylized, but faithful representation can be just as compelling as a photo-real one

Commenter 2 (7:40:53 PM): my face would be easy to 'Simpsonize'

Commenter 6 (7:41:09 PM): My Mii is great, looks just like a cartoon version of me.

Commenter 3 (7:41:37 PM): put another face on it

Commenter 1 (7:41:38 PM): mine too! and how fun is that...

Commenter 6 (7:44:31 PM): I think we need a digital face version of all the Professors in the IMD for the interactive main page :)

News I love ...

I had to search and search to find this info for a work project -- I remembered reading about this CIA-funded avatar project in another article. What is more interesting that the CIA giving a university funding to develop technology for creating avatars from photos that is later spun out into a venture-funded company targeting the consumer market?

Thanks for this interview goes to ...

socalTECH

High Tech News and Information for Southern California

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Interview with Phil Ressler, BigStage Entertainment

Pasadena-based BigStage (www.bigstage.com) is one of those rare companies that has taken technology developed from university research, and is now bringing that technology to the commercial market. The firm's technology--which creates a 3D, virtual avatar from digital photos--was originally developed at the University of Southern California for the CIA, and was spun out into a venture funded company targeting the consumer market. We spoke with Phil Ressler--a former venture capitalist from Clearstone Ventures--who is now CEO of BigStage.

For those not familiar with BigStage, tell us what the company is doing with your avatar technology?

Phil Ressler: Big Stage's mission in life is to create a standard way to project yourself into the digital realm. What we've done, is we've taken technology originally developed at USC, a CIA funded project, and gained global commercial rights for the non-security sector. We've developed this technology at the consumer level, further developing it to allow stereo reconstruction of a facial model from a series of monocular images. In simple terms, that means that a consumer can use any old digital camera with at least 2 megapixels of resolution, take three photos--one full face-on, one turn of the face 5 degrees, and a third photo the other way--upload them, and in ninety seconds have a fully skin textured, photorealistic, 3D animated version of yourself staring back at you. In effect, you can have a digital you that can be accessorized to make a little version of yourself, or many different egos for projection into essentially living a digital life.

We see a future, where we have two generations of people who are spending the bulk of their non-working time, and a lot of their working time, in a digital environment. We see this as a way to let them represent themselves in the digital realm. They want a means of representing themselves that is animated, and changeable, and actively communicates in places like MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They might make themselves a combatant in a video game or multi-player online game, or they might want to take on the role of the primary actor in a video, TV clip, or movie. It doesn't matter if someone is narcissistically motivated, or they just have a social affinity. They can put themselves and their friends into the media and the digital experience. What we do know, is there is an unbroken line of aggressive projection of self into the digital or online life, and we're going to facilitate that.

Talk about how this works with TV clips and video?

Phil Ressler: If you go to BigStage.com today, you can put yourself into a collection of movie clips, TV clips, still photographs, and also into animatics--which are essentially a series of still images with movement--electronic versions of movies that we have developed. You can put yourself into the replaceable actor, and you can put yourself seamlessly into a movie clip where your avatar will take on the facial expression and vocalization of the actors in the movie. The other thing you can do with BigStage, is you can save your avatar--or what we call and @ctor, into animated form on your MySpace or Facebook profile.

Will we be seeing this soon in virtual worlds?

Phil Ressler: Yes, I certainly see virtual worlds as a primary adoption area. The issue with the game world is that to proliferate this it's all proprietary. When we do a deal with a game developer to do integration, and then do another deal, we have to do more integration, etc. As that world opens up to standards, it will be easier to do that integration, so that if you have a game environment, you can grab our stuff, and have it become part of the environment.

We often hear that it's difficult to get technology spun out successfully from a university. How has the experience for you?

Phil Ressler: There was nothing particularly hard here because it came of a university. There has been nine years of university R&D, serious Computer Science work, that we have been able to capitalize on. Lots of work has also been done to take what was a face technology, and make it into a representation of a full head--and also to make it a consumer-grade experience. One problem with other avatar technology, is that in most competitive cases what people are doing is using a standard head model and trying to apply a face to that model. We were able to make a unique head model, based on a unique face model. We also had to be able to accommodate the chaos of the consumer realm--that is to say, it's much easier to do this if you know what camera you're using, the resolution of that camera, where the exposure are, and you can control the angel for photography. Going into the consumer area, you've got to be able to deal with any old digital camera, which someone is holding up them self or having a friend take three photos roughly consistent with our guidelines, and provide an easy way to upload and automate it. There's been an unusually complex amount of engineering, compared to a web media startup, but that's a good thing. Unlike most web media firms, we've got a real, protectable IP, based on serious computer science, three patents, and five more pending. The effort to bring all this to market has taken longer than originally thought when the company was founded and organized, but it's been a steady march of progress.

As a former VC, why'd you decide to get involved with BigStage and back to the operating side?

Phil Ressler: I was on a panel last night at an event, and I was introduced as a former venture capitalist now on the operating side. However, I've only spent 5 and a half years of the last thirty in venture capital. The bulk of my work experience in my adult life has been on the operational side, so it's not unusual to go back. I had a specific interest in 2001/2002 when I came to the area to live and work, instead of splitting my time between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. That was an interest in the ecosystem level. Two-thirds of my operating career has been in turnaround situations. I saw the same mistakes, over and over again in turnaround situations, and I was interested in taking all I knew and had applied sequentially, and seeing if there was an opportunity to work that at a platform level--to transfer that knowledge to multiple companies at once. Venture capital seemed the obvious way to do that. I had gone into Clearstone at their invitiation, and had a really exciting time, and the experiment lasted longer than expected. However, after 5 years there I started to feel like I'd accomplished as much as I could, and became interested in finding an operating company. I had seen BigStage at Clearstone, and wanted to fund it two and a half years ago, but there wasn't support in the rest of the partnership for the deal. In venture capital, there are no unilateral decisions. But, I continued to follow the company, and developed a relationship with the founders. Around that time, I began to think about what I might do on the operating side, and had a conversation with the founders and they asked me if I would consider helping them build the business. BigStage was one of the two or three most interesting technologies I thought had a large, scalable market that I'd seen in 5 1/2 years at Clearstone, and had potential to win a mass consumer audience. It took six weeks, and we made a deal.

Where's the technology now, and what do you see on the horizon?

Phil Ressler: The last year has been spent focused on getting the consumer interface to a point where it's ready for prime time. We launched to the public on November 5th, after we had an open beta in August. The beta was confined to BigStage.com, but with the launch on November 5th it's the first instance where you can get off the island. That means you can use your @ctor other than on BigStage.com. So that's what you can do now. Where we go next, is we are beginning to turn our attention, for at least a part of our team, towards nonstop, continuous improvement of the fidelity of our face/head model--something we'll never stop doing. The brain is a hungry beast, and it always wants things to look better. We'll continue to refine this. We're monetizing the business through a series of B to B deals, where our technology will be used to make other people's media, messaging, and marketing more engaging, through personalization via BigStage @ctors. We're going to use the marketing presence and penetration of major brands, and their willingness to pay us for more engaging media, to popularize this. We'll be exposing BigStage.com and its avatar technology to 10 million or so people in the next year or two. In the meantime, we have lots of engineering associated with customizing things in a B2B environment, and we are working and developing our methodology to create more openness--making it easier for developers to grab and build and integrate this into their own web media projects. We are also going to work on user generated content tools, which will allow users who are not looking to make money to enable their own media, receive actors, and do their own customization.

http://www.socaltech.com/interview_with_phil_ressler_bigstage_entertainment/s-0018750.html