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The keynote speeches began with David Rumsey talking about open content and how online digital libraries will provide access to cultural information in the 21st century. He discussed emerging technologies is opening up the collected content, and revealing "the source code of cultural systems". He drew analogies between the issues facing the open source movement and the growth of the online libraries, such as intellectual property and fair use rights.


David with sample data from davidrumsey.org
David has collated his collection of maps and made them available online at davidrumsey.org via a variety of methods, including a GIS. The first step with providing a GIS interface to historical maps is to georectify the maps, however they also found that they had to provide their own client software as the available software that could do what they wanted to be able to do was very expensive.

University libraries focus on preservation rather than distribution, in his view this is a bad thing. He makes his collection of historical maps available via geographynetwork.com amougst other access routes.

The second keynote speaker of the day was David Patrick a Novell VP talking about Novell's open source renaissance, and what they're doing to make open source software more mainstream. He talked, not so much about Novell, but about how open source is affecting big business.