BLOCK-CHAIN REACTION

• Published in: American Libraries Vol. 50; no. 3/4; pp. 26 - 33
• Main Authors: Smith, Carrie, Coward, Caroline, Hess, M Ryan, Hofman, Darra L., Kim, Bohyun, Norman, Annie
• Format: Magazine Article Trade Publication Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago American Library Association 01-03-2019
• Subjects: Aerospace Education; Blockchain; Coding; College professors; Currency; Digital currencies; Group Discussion; Historic documents; Information literacy; Information Management; Information Needs; Information professionals; Information Scientists; Integrated library systems-ILS; Interlibrary loans; Librarians; Library Personnel; Library Services; Public libraries; Reading Materials; Records (Forms); Researchers; Scholarly publishing; User services; Workers; Palo Alto California; United States > US
• ISSN: 0002-9769; 2163-5129

Susan Alman and Sandra Hirsh--like many people--couldn't avoid news about blockchain in 2017. But it wasn't all about Bitcoin. There were interesting applications across numerous industries that piqued our interest, says Hirsh, director of the San Jose State University (SJSU) School of Information. That year, Alman, a lecturer at SJSU, and Hirsh secured an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to facilitate a national conversation on blockchain's potential in libraries. By the time they hosted a national forum in summer 2018, cryptocurrency markets had soared and then tumbled, and the news had shifted to crypto winter. Transactions that pass get hashed--in other words, assigned a digital fingerprint that identifies the transaction. Those validated transactions then get grouped together into a block, which is assigned its own hash. That hash becomes the first hash of the next block of transactions, linking them together in a chain.