Science Library Pad

CISTI seeks external feedback

<marketing-mode>

Your comments on CISTI needed - deadline extended to May 7, 2009

CISTI would like your feedback on the following questions via the CISTI Committee on Health Sciences Information.

Email feedback to vice-president@chla-absc.ca by May 7 on these questions:

Question 1 – What is the role of a Canadian national science and health library in the 21st century?

Question 2 – From your perspective:
 - Who would be the new CISTI's key clients?
 - What are the target services/offerings/solutions for these key clients?

Question 3 – What top 3 of your needs do you see a Canadian national science and health library filling?

via CHLA - Dianne Kharouba's blog
</marketing-mode>

Dean Guistini has already posted his responses in his blog.

Usual disclaimer: This blog is not an official communication channel for CISTI.  Please use the regular CISTI Enquires or Media Relations channels if you have any questions.

library and publishing contests to develop software and innovate

Current Contests:

* OCLC launched their third Research Software Contest on April 13, 2009.
* The second repository Developer Challenge will be at Open Repositories 2009 (May 18-21, 2009)

Past Contests:

* The Elsevier Grand Challenge just wrapped, reflect.ws was the winning entry
* CISTI's internal Innovation Challenge wrapped up on March 19, 2009.  The winner was "Research in the News" (you can read more on the site).

This is only a brief survey and I'm sure I have missed some, but I'm blogging on the tiny keyboard of my netbook, so I am only doing a short posting.  Please let me know of any others.

The OCLC (Dis)Integrated Library System

Andrew Pace writes

OCLC is extending the WorldCat Local platform to include circulation and delivery, print and electronic acquisitions, and license management components. A quick start version of WorldCat Local--available at no additional charge to FirstSearch WorldCat subscribers--is a first step to WorldCat Local and to a truly next-generation cooperative library management service.

...

Five years after I advocated dismantling library management systems, I am confident that using web-scale architectures and a cooperative service model are the right way to put things back together again. The OCLC cooperative is not only uniquely positioned to provide this solution, it is part of our obligation to libraries.

via Lorcan on Twitter

An interesting development. One wonders how it will fit in with OLE, Evergreen, DLF ILS API and other initiatives.  Also I would be interested to know if it will extend to true, article-level integration/linking for licensed content, which has been the barrier to true usefulness for the ILS in a modern academic library setting (right now we have the catalogue for books, separate article-level systems, and then federated search on top to combine the results).

Web 2.0 from a publisher perspective, using 2Collab as an example

One of the big challenges for all of us developing Web 2.0 is finding out what the users actually want.  That's part of why libraries and publishers are taking various lab, web development group, developer network and contest approaches.  Another big challenge is trying to build a community around your tools.

Just a quick review of some of the online activities:

There are lots of library labs, and a few publisher initiatives, including Elsevier Labs, Elsevier Scopus Labs (accessible only to Scopus subscribers), Ingenta Labs, and Nature's Web Publishing group (I don't think it has a home page, but you can see some of their work on Nature Launch Pad).  In the sort of library-vendor space OCLC and Talis have developer networks.  I think some of the other library catalogue vendors may have developer spaces, but they are usually closed.

Looking at a few more Elsevier things specifically:

Elsevier has SciTopics, which is also on Twitter.

Elsevier also just announced the winner of their Grand Challenge, the Reflect project (if you follow my FriendFeed, you may see some familiar names in the winning team, like Lars Juhl Jensen and Michael Kuhn).

Which brings us to Elsevier's 2Collab.  I had a chance for an advance preview of 2Collab in late 2007.  It takes a somewhat different tack to other academic bookmarking tools, focusing a lot on group collaboration.  I had a chance to see Camelia Csora present about 2Collab as a research collaboration tool (PDF) at NISO Discovery Tools forum in 2008.

There are lots of challenges with these kinds of tools.  Can we integrate them into user workflows?  Can they understand bibliographic metadata, do lookups on DOIs, read COINS from source and embed COINS into their bookmarking pages?  Can we build standard APIs for these services?

Camelia has moved on to ebooks, and I see in my FriendFeed today that the new Product Manager for 2Collab, Michael Habib, will be presenting about 2Collab as a publisher collaboration tool

http://www.slideshare.net/habibmi/engaging-a-new-generation-of-authors-reviewers-readers-through-web-20

You can read more in his posting Engaging a New Generation of Authors, Editors, and Reviewers - Presentation for Boston Editors' Conference.

One of the big challenges in this area is getting people into the new network in order to collaborate - this is the issue that most of the "scientist social networks" have - there's no one there.  Even using Google Docs to collaborate tends not to scale very well, as you end up having to invite and reinvite groups of people to each new document.  FriendFeed as a collaboration space I think has a lot of advantages, in that it brings an immediate, individual benefit (mindcasting/lifecasting unification of web activity) as well as a critical mass of people, as well as lightweight group and discussion tools.

That's not to say you couldn't use 2Collab along with FriendFeed - and it occurs to me that one immediate step all the publishers (and other service providers) could take would be to work with FriendFeed to add their academic bookmarking services added as top level "import" sites.  Right now, despite a strong scientific user community, FF only has the non-academic sites in its list: 

• delicious
• Diigo
• Furl (which is now gone, bought by Diigo)
• Ma.gnolia
• Mister Wong
• StumbleUpon
• Twine
• はてな

The key point is it can no longer be either/or. It's not my site OR your site, it's all of our sites, interconnected. It's also/and.  I have to be able to go seamlessly from LibX to Zotero to Mendeley to Connotea to EndNote to 2Collab to Papers to FriendFeed and back again.  If Zotero has a great tool, I should be able to call it using an API from LibX.  Data can't be trapped at point of creation, it has to be able to flow around the web to be useful.

CLA preconferences: Democracy and Emerging Technology

Just highlighting a couple of the many Canadian Library Association preconferences, before the main event in Montreal.

* Democracy & Technology (DemTech) - May 29, 2009 - Off-site: J.A. de Seve Cinema, J. W. McConnell Library Building, Concordia University (note this is NOT at the main event site)

DemTech 2009 will showcase cutting edge projects that use information technology to encourage citizen access and foster democratic participation. DemTech is a pre-conference of the 2009 Annual Conference and Trade Show of the Canadian Library Association, sponsored by Apathy is Boring, VisibleGovernment.ca and members of the CivicAccess.ca community.

You can see the DemTech.ca site, as well as some information on the CLA site.
I have been gathering some information related to this topic in my FriendFeed Open Government Canada room, and there will also be a local event, ChangeCamp Ottawa, on May 16, 2009.

* Emerging Technologies Interest Group (ETIG) Library Camp - May 29, 2009 - Palais des congrès

The morning sessions will include presentations by John Fink (McMaster University), Jason Hammond (Regina Public Library), and Jessamyn West (yes THE Jessamyn West of librarian.net) The afternoon will be an "unconference", where participants will share and learn on a variety of topics pre-determined by the group. (Note: this is not a "sage on the stage" afternoon – come armed with a curious nature and a will to participate.)

There is a FriendFeed room, a wiki, and a blog in addition to the CLA site.

Registration deadline for both these events is Friday, April 17, 2009.  You can register by faxing in the form, or by signing up on the CLA site and submitting your info online.

I will be attending DemTech.

ideas for book publishing innovation in Canada & an unconference

I have to admit, when I was scanning through Boing Boing and saw "Six good technological ideas for improving publishing", that word "publishing" started me off with the tyranny of low expectations.  However (and those of you who know me will know I don't go in for false praise) I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Michael Tamblyn's entertaining presentation which has six great ideas, some of which are relevant outside the specific world of book publishing.

(Sorry, initially published as a blocked link - have to unflashblock this content - hazard of browser-editor interaction.)

I have to admit, this is my first time hearing of (or at least my first time paying attention to hearing about) BookNet Canada and this particular event, BookNet Canada TechForum '09.

To be honest, I think it starts a bit slow - Michael Tamblyn starts off talking about the recession - I recommend you skip ahead to about the 3 minute mark where he gets into the meat of his talk.

He calls for a number of things, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but some highlights include:

* publishers getting smarter about how they share their data online - BookNet has an initiative called BiblioShare - "BiblioShare is a service that allows Publishers to store their most recent ONIX files at a central server that can then be picked up by any aggregator that needs them."

* publishers getting better at XML workflows - he indicates O'Reilly's Start with XML as one place to begin

* publishers opening their organisations up to innovation, and embracing ideas from creative technologists (I like this terminology of "creative technologist" a lot)

* publishers experimenting and connecting - BookNet is supporting an unconference called BookCampToronto on June 6, 2009

The one area of mobilizing data he didn't really talk about was connecting publishers to libraries (he focused on the connection to booksellers).  I think there are lots of opportunties in the library space, particularly for sharing data.

I know we often give publishers a hard time for being resistant to innovation - this is a great example of an individual and an organisation that are leading with their ideas.

I have to say I found their site a bit confusing.  There is a blog which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed.  There is an RSS feed, but it appears to be for news items.  There are supposed to be slides at There are slides from the TechForum at

http://slides.booknetcanada.ca/

but I could never get it to load.  You can also see Michael Tamblyn's slides directly on SlideShare.  There's also the blip.tv channel, which has a few other talks on it so far.  The blog slice that is about the TechForum is also useful.  The tag was bnc09 if you want to dig around further.

The Generation Ship - lessons for your library from Star Trek

A Generation Ship is a spaceship that will take many years to reach its destination (a not unreasonable idea, considering the vast distances between star systems, and the enormous energy needed to accelerate a ship to even a small fraction of the speed of light).  Because of the vast span of time that its voyage takes, entire generations of humanity grow, live, and die on the ship before it reaches its destination.

It is therefore more a means of transmitting a culture, than of transporting individual people; it is in some sense a memetic container.

The problem with generation ships, as explored in many science fiction stories, is that it is hard to retain cultural coherence over long spans of time.  If you launch the ship from Canada in 2009, the people who arrive at New Canada 1000 years later are going to be genetically very similar to those who left (evolution doesn't operate strongly over 1000 year time spans, particularly in a controlled environment) but their culture may have drifted as far from Canada 2009, as Canada is different from Europe 1009.

One of the common methods a generation ship uses to enforce cultural non-evolution is to use Authority.  This may take various forms: a computer which can last the lifespan of the ship may be the Authority whom all must obey, enforcing cultural norms century after century; the society itself may be reshaped into an authoritarian mode so as to remain conservative and stable across human lifespans; or in some cases, the original Creators are kept in suspended animation, awakening briefly every generation to realign the society back to its original design.

A generation ship is thus often a conservative cultural institution, transmitting knowledge across vast spans of time.  That is, basically a library.

Of course, one of the other issues with a generation ship is that after being in space for so long, the society onboard begins to forget their ultimate goal, and may forget that they're on a space ship at all (often helped by the fact that in order to be sustainable across centuries, a generation ship is often a world ship - a vast space large enough to hold an entire functioning ecosystem - a ship so big that most inhabitants may never see its boundaries).  In short, on a generation ship they begin to believe that the ship is the world.

This is what happened to the ship, the "world" of Yonada, a generation ship built by a people called the Fabrini, in a Star Trek (the original series) episode.

The ship has a rather complex design, a central sphere beneath the surface of which is an underground city, corridors and rooms filled with life, with what appears to be a somewhat barren and uninhabited surface above (it seems probable that travel to this surface is restricted).  The surface appears to have mountains and a sky above.  What the inhabitants don't know (in fact are forbidden to know) is that the "sky" is actually the inner surface of a second sphere, an asteroid shell that surrounds them (a similar idea of a dome showing a false sky is seen in The Truman Show).  They are a world within a world.

This leads to a striking line, a bit of classic SF, in which an old man describes how he disobeyed the authoritarian rules of the society, and once climbed a mountain: "for the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky".

The system that the Fabrini have chosen is one with religious overtones (religion is a good vehicle for preserving memes across generations), with an all-knowing computer, The Oracle, which monitors the proper behavior of the inhabitants, through a thought-detecting device implanted in every citizen.  While this device can impose punishment for incorrect thoughts, it appears that over time it has become mostly social sanction that retains conservatively the ideas of the society.

In the Oracle's room there is a Book, known only to the woman who is the head of the society.  It is not permitted to be opened until the ship has reached its destination.  Until then it is an object of worship for her.

So, is your library a generation ship?

Do you worship the container of the book, not its contents?

Do you enforce the rules handed down, generation after generation?

Have you lost sight of your destination, forgetting even the box you're in, unable any longer to see the walls that surround you?  Have you forgotten the goal of the library is sharing knowledge?

Have you become simply an engine for blindly replicating your existing processes, without ever questioning what the original purpose of those processes was?

Are you now actually actively preventing the sharing of knowledge, because your legacy processes have become more important than your original goal?

Do you believe the library way is the right way, that all must be trained in the proper techniques, that when people do not follow the correct approach they are wrong, they don't understand.  Do you believe that the library is enduring, unchanging, always good, always correct, it is others who must adapt themselves to the library?

Do you bow to authority of the ages, instead of reinventing yourself for today?

When someone tries to bring new ideas, when outsiders arrive, how are they treated?

Just some thoughts about libraries, from Star Trek.

Previously:

December 16, 2008  guilds in a time of rapid change

The Scholarly Communication Problem

I arrived late to the JISC Libraries of the Future online video stream, so this may not be a full picture of the discussion, but what I heard was mainly the Scholarly Communication Problem.  This problem is extremely well known and I have heard it talked about--forgive me--endlessly, without (m)any solutions proposed.  It goes like this:

Universities / research organisations pay researchers.
Funders grant money to researchers.
Universities / research organisations give money to libraries.

So far so good.  Then a strange dance:
researchers submit work to publishers who perform several functions:

• they assemble the various files together (text, charts, figures etc.)
• they select notable papers
• they send them out for peer review and manage the review (e.g. ensuring comments are in on time)
• they edit the copy itself for clarity and do QA
• they apply necessary metadata, get a DOI etc.
• they do layout on the copy so it looks nice

They don't actually perform the peer review, this is done by the reseachers.

Then libraries and funders pay publishers for this bundle of services, despite the fact that one chunk (peer review) is performed by the researchers.  Funders may also pay extra for OA, or sometimes journals have direct fees for publishing at all.

The impact factor of publications lends a certain authority, and is then used in determining both individual and institutional "worthiness".  This necessity of publication drives what I believe the gentleman from Harvard called a "cocaine marketplace" - once you're hooked by publishers, they can keep raising and raising the prices.

Then funders and libraries may pay AGAIN, to have the researcher submit the document to the repository followed by what is essentially a mini-publishing workflow run by librarians - again assembling the files together, again doing QA, applying necessary metadata and perhaps assigning a handle.

So: organisations effectively pay researchers to research, to peer review, and to submit to journals,
and then pay the publishers to get their own research back.  They maybe pay researchers and a bunch of other people to do this in a mini-version again, paying to get their own research back, in their own repository.  So paying for the same research two or three times.

THIS PROBLEM IS WELL KNOWN

Talking about these over and over and over again does nothing to solve this problem.  In fact I think talking about this any more without providing concrete (preferably implemented) solutions should be banned.

To fix it you:
1) identify what services researchers could self-organise (or be organised by libraries) to perform, like peer review
2) identify what, if any services from publishers are still needed, and pay only for those
3) go directly to public OA publishing of the peer-reviewed manuscript
4) find a new way to measure the "worthiness" of individual researcher and organisation output

There are lots of people who have identified this issue, I can submit my thoughts from three years ago - June 21, 2006 - my article on peer review for Nature.

There are a small number of groups taking a "just do it" approach to solving this problem.  There need to be many more.  There's also a whole set of related issues, like how to you manage versions in this environment, how do you manage discoverability when content may be all over the place, and how do you think about "notability" when a document may be an ongoing dynamic collaboration, rather than a static final publication with a fixed set of authors.  And this is not even touching the issues of "data as publication".  There's plenty of work to be done.

librarians - Peter Murray-Rust challenges you to share your vision of the future

PMR has been blogging and Twittering and FriendFeeding over the past week or so about "libraries of the future".  He wants feedback.  He wants vigorous debate.  He wants disagreement.  Can you tell he's a scientist?

It’s now 9 days since I started thinking about what I was going to say at the JISC LOTF09 meeting at Oxford next week. I’ve sent out 15 posts ion this blog. I’ve used the LOTF09 tag. I use twitter and FriendFeed...

I thought I was going to have a useful debate where ULibrarians criticized and critiqued what I had written. Nothing. If ULibraries wish to survive (at least more than book museums - which is important) they have to shout about it.

Now in fairness, I have to say it's not entirely reasonable to jump into the middle of a community (particularly with controversial posts) and expect immediate engagement.  But nevertheless, librarians, if you want Peter Murray-Rust to be able to reflect the richness of the discussion about libraries in the future when he speaks at Oxford next week, now's your chance.

plan your strategy first - select your library technologies later

A fantastic post from Meredith Farkas about why Web 2.0 initiatives succeed or fail at libraries - It’s not all about the tech - why 2.0 tech fails.

Whatever we’re doing should be tied to the library’s strategic goals and planning.

If it’s not tied to the library’s goals, then how will it be seen as a priority? Similarly, 2.0 technologies should be planned for in a strategic way, which I think has not happened at a lot of libraries. Some libraries jumped on the blogging bandwagon because they thought (or were told) that every library must have a blog. Other libraries started wikis because staff were really excited about the idea of having a wiki. Neither are good reasons to implement a technology. We first need to understand the needs of our population (be it patrons or staff) and then implement whatever technology and/or service will best meet those needs. We need to have clear goals in mind from the outset so that we can later assess if it’s successful or not. These technologies may be fun, but they’re simply tools.

The paragraphs above are as good a description of the need for a strategic planning function (which, being an enterprise architect, I naturally think of as an Enterprise Architecture function) at a library.  This is what I said on FriendFeed

It is absolutely not about the technology. In enterprise architecture terms, it's about determining the target (most commonly, a strategic plan) and then ensuring all activities are aligned with that plan. It can be hard for an org to understand that both working really hard, but on the wrong things AND indulging 'side' projects because the tech is trendy will get them nowhere. If it doesn't move you forward to your goals in a sustainable way, don't do it.

That's not to say you shouldn't allow "20% time" for experimentation, but draw a clear line between a blog experiment, and an official public blog presence. One can be tried and disappear, the other had better be sustainable.

Dorothea has quite rightly called me out for talking in my blog more about the technology than the people,  (The great thing about blogging is I get to test my ideas and their expression against an audience that thinks about these issues from many different angles.)  So I want to be very clear: the specific technology implementation does not matter, at a high level.  You must first decide, will creating this business function (e.g. "store organisational output") move me towards my strategic goals.  You must do this with a clear-eyed view of the ROI (that is, don't ascribe silver-bullet capabilities to a commodity technology - my joke at work is, to the extent that an IR is just a hard drive spinning in a corner, I could run an IR from home - I have 750GB of RAID 1 mirrored, networked storage).  The point being of course that an IR is not just a hard drive, it's a whole set of people and processes that make it valuable, sustainable, and worthwhile.

In summary - based on where you want to go (your strategic goals):
1. Chose the right set of aligned activities.
2. Ensure you have the right people and process to support those activities.
3. Only then concern yourself with the particular technology implementation details.

This is an echo of what I said in "librarians don't need to know SEO" - start at the high level first, don't just grab onto the latest buzzword.  I wish I could fit more about enterprise architecture into this blog, but it is a huge topic (I'd make a joke about "I have a wonderful solution, but sadly I've run out of space on the margin").  I have spent years trying to explain various aspects of it here, see the Enterprise Architecture category for my various attempts (including this one).

ICSTI 2009 - Managing Data for Science

The ICSTI 2009 conference has a great lineup of speakers on its programme.  (I can't claim any responsibility for this, since while my organisation has helped with planning the conference, my small personal contribution has just been a few suggestions about the web presence.)

Many of the names you may recognize from enthusiastic blog postings of mine, so as you can imagine, I'm looking forward to going.  Speakers mentioned in this blog (with a link to the relevant posting) include

• Francine Berman (ARL library escience theme presentations - October 9, 2006)
• Richard Boulderstone (BioMed Central OA event presentations, BMC blog - March 7, 2007)
• Jan Brase (system for easy access to sci info using DOIs - Jan Brase - June 11 - IATUL 2007 - June 11, 2007)
• Lee Dirks (data-driven science - Lee Dirks - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy - June 22, 2007)
• Liz Lyon (presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation - March 31, 2006)
• Paul Uhlir (the concepts of open science and information commons - September 8, 2006)

The event will be June 9-10, 2009 at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.  Early registration ends March 31.  I think it will be a great opportunity to discuss science data, e-science, and the roles that our libraries can play.  I am using tag icsti2009.  I hope to see many of you there.

View Larger Map

revisiting potential research-support roles for the library

Three years ago, I wrote this list of potential research-support roles for a library in the digital environment:

1. institutional repository for pre-prints and post-prints of the research organization's publications
2. data repository for the research conducted at the organization
3. providing advanced (data/publication/information/discovery/etc.) tools that integrate into the researcher's workflow

These are numbered for convenience, not importance.
What do I think, three years on.

Institutional Repositories

1. While institutional repositories are valuable, they currently benefit primarily organisations, not researchers.  They provide a unified view of an organisation's published output.  For individual researchers, their priority may be just on getting published, or if they do want to disseminate their work, they may just post it to their own website (and sad to say, may get more Google rank having it there than in their repository).

Because of this property, there is still a huge content recruitment challenge for IRs.  I saw this at SPARC Digital Repositories 2008 where, to be blunt, the tone seemed to be mostly "we built it and they didn't come".  And in fairness to individual organisations, even Wellcome with its billions and its mandatory policy isn't getting good compliance:

The Wellcome Trust have been monitoring compliance rates, and have been disappointed to find that these are currently very low. As a result of this, they intend to more actively monitor compliance, and in future will be contacting researchers who have not had articles published as Open Access papers.

Wellcome gets tough on Open Access depositions - Peter Murray-Rust's blog - March 7, 2009

Even if you just look at the language we use - "recruitment", "compliance" - it's clear that IRs have become about coercion, which should be making us seriously question their value.  The good news is that there is a lot of good thinking about this - for example Les Carr suggests the idea of making the repository a file system for researchers, and many have suggested making repositories more web-friendly (or eliminating this special container we call IRs altogether, and just using regular web tools).

If providing an institutional repository is your primary or core value to the organisation, you are putting yourself at tremendous risk, because a savvy administrator may notice that you can purchase hosted repository services from BePress and BMC Open Repository.  Any time a primary function (however valuable) has become commodity, you are at risk.

Data

2. Data is a strange thing.  Unlike the publisher resistance to article repositories, there is pretty much universal agreement amongst all parties that data should be openly shared.  There are many reasons it is mostly not being shared.  Data can have very complicated licensing.  By its very nature, it is complex to manage and interpret.  And researchers who are, to be blunt, somewhat indifferent to sharing their papers, may actively resist sharing their data as they may feel it is the foundation of their future research.  There's lots of good work being done - just today Peter Murray-Rust points to some practical developments in Open Data in Science - and John Wilbanks and his team have been doing deep and valuable work on data licensing as part of Science Commons (see e.g. Databases and Creative Commons), but we are a long ways away from massive, agreed-upon sharing and preservation of data.  Also a risky area in which to bet your organisation, but a good area to be doing small, practical experiments in data sharing and preservation with willing researchers.  Canada unfortunately lacks an equivalent of the UK's national Digital Curation Centre to help make this happen here.  There is an effort to gather information as part of Research Data Canada, but I don't know how widely known it is.

This is an activity that will have great value, once all the hugely complicated issues begin to be resolved.  Data is very different from journal articles - it lacks a standard format, and the resources it can consume - into the petabytes make it a daunting task for any organisation or set of organisations to take on.  I really admire the practical work that Amazon is doing with Public Datasets (thanks I suspect in large part to the vision of Deepak Singh).  The most practical things we can do right now is share what data we have, think about what open data will mean, and try to get more and more data openly shared.

Advanced Discovery and e-Science

3. This is an important area that I think offers enormous potential for libraries.  In Canada it is also hugely challenging because we have no national equivalent of the US NSF Cyberinfrastructure or the UK National e-Science Centre.  The best we can do is kind of grassroots e-science, which is kind of a contradiction in terms, since the common understanding of e-science is that it is about tackling large scale problems with large scale infrastructure.

Where I think things are possible is on the smaller scale, building and integrating advanced discovery and integration with researcher workflows piece-by-piece.  (This shouldn't be read as "build all" - integrating includes e.g. helping researchers integrate Connotea, Zotero, etc. into their workflows.)  Many researchers are not that web-aware beyond Google searching - there are all kinds of tools that they could use.  The library has a role in providing information about those tools.  In the near term, there are some very quick wins just providing better discovery and information management tools, most of which are already available for free on the web.  In the medium term, there are intriguing possibilities to support researchers with Virtual Research Environments.  And in the long term, true semantic discovery may be possible, with very advanced computational and visualisation tools supporting very sophisticated computer- and data-driven science.

Many pieces of this environment are being built.  The library has a key role in integrating them and educating researchers about them.  As indicated above, this is everything from

basic citation management - Connotea, Zotero and many others
to
Virtual Research Environments as being investigated by JISC and the British Library (PDF)
to
text mining on full-text, as planned by UKPMC
to
semantic discovery as is being pioneered by EMBL, Biogen Idec library, and many others in many fields (too many to list, but just in biomed see e.g. Semantic Mining in Biomedicine Symposiums and "Pharmas Nudge Semantic Web Technology Toward Practical Drug Discovery Applications")

As you can see this is an exciting space with many activities going on.  The (research) libraries that can have a meaningful presence in this space (which currently has some daunting technical and infrastructure requirements at the high end) will, I believe, be able to sustain themselves by providing truly relevant and valued services to their researchers.

An important point must be made here: if you don't have some point of connection with your researchers - some discovery tools on your site and in their browser that the library provides, then you have no point of contact or credibility upon which to base all the advanced capabilities you may want to bring to bear.

UPDATE: I wanted to add some closing thoughts about the focus of this post.  I'm a technology planner (that's a large part of the meaning of the rather grander "enterprise technology architect" job description I have).  That means my main focus is on the technologies the organisation uses.  Not the specific implementations (DSpace vs. Fedora) but the general classes of technology-enabled business functions in the organisation that are provided.  So what I'm working through above is what kinds of approaches will be sustainable technology differentiators.  That is, where can your library add technology-supported value that will be recognised by researchers.  This has some implications for the people roles, the jobs the librarians would do, but I'm not examining that aspect.  ENDUPDATE

Some of the topics about data and e-science that I have discussed above will be covered in the ICSTI 2009 conference in Ottawa this June (about which more in the following posting).

Clay Shirky on newspapers

Clay Shirky has a great post for any organisation trying to navigate the Digital Chasm (I know we usually say "digital transition" as if it was all going to be nice and smooth and continuous, but that's part of his point, it isn't).  Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

I want you to think about that.  Here's what I wrote as a FriendFeed comment on the item: "Fundamentally it's an issue of the mental models of the pre-digital world not transferring over. In the physical world you may steal something because you want it, but more likely, you steal it because you want to make some money. People who steal may have no interest in what they're stealing, other than money. When the digital Law of Infinite Perfect Copies applies, there is no money in copying. That means the people who copy your content most passionately are people who LOVE YOUR PRODUCT."

I don't think media in particular has gotten its head around this.  In the digital world, when people like your product, some will buy, but many will share.  Both of these are expressions of engagement with your content.  People may switch seamlessly between buying and sharing - they may buy the DVDs, but BitTorrent episodes that aren't available on DVD yet.  They may watch legal clips online, and carry ripped content around on their iPods.  They.  Don't.  Care.  The industry has been trying over and over and over again to convince us that the person who in one instant is buying the DVD is a noble upstanding citizen supporting industry, and the EXACT SAME PERSON who an instant later copies some music and gives it to a friend is an evil pirate who hates capitalism and is stealing food from artists' children.  This is insane.  This is not true.  Stop doing that, it doesn't work.  What part of Infinite Perfect Copies do you not understand?

More from Shirky

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times.

If digital blows up the library, the solution is not to say "the library is really really important, this can't be happening".  The solution is to provide real services in the real world that patrons actually use.  Not the services you think they should use, services that they actually want.

Three years ago, I wrote "is the research library obsolete?" and its followup "paved paradise: the future of (a particular type of) research library?".  The point of which is: if your main business is serving up digital content (PDFs of articles from licensed journals) remotely to researchers sitting at their desks -- which I realise is certainly not the case if you're a public library, but which is the case for my library -- then the entire enterprise you've built up, the big building designed for visitors who no longer come, the carefully protected stacks full of paper, that entire enterprise is dying and you'd better have a plan for what your library does next in the real world.  Trying to pretend that basic discovery and access to digital content are a differentiator (let alone ascribing value to stacks of print) in a world of Google Scholar and ScienceDirect is fantasy, not reality.  If you don't provide more than publisher sites + free search can offer, you're dead (a situation which now faces an organisation I am rather familiar with).

To conclude with some forceful words from Shirky

When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

via FriendFeed

SIDEBAR: It's important to mention that one of the reasons for the current newspaper crisis, beyond the macroeconomic downturn, is that many of them, whether directed by moguls or corporations, were highly leveraged.  Empires built upon debt.  This sort of financial manuevering looks brilliant when credit is cheap and the economy is growing and the classified ads look like a license to print money.  No doubt each buyout and takeover was lauded in its day.  And it was of course just part of an overall pattern that loaded almost every part of the economy down with debt.  But nevertheless, when credit is hard to get and the economy is shrinking and the ad-based newspaper model is under threat, it looks idiotic.

UPDATE: One of Canada's two national newspapers, the Globe and Mail had a major feature on this topic today - Is democracy written in disappearing ink?

My comment on FriendFeed was: I'm concerned that, just as in the words of Churchill "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." that it is possible that "the mainstream media are the worst form of journalism except all the others that have been tried". Unfortunately, just because blogging *may be* worse, that doesn't mean blogging won't replace MSM.

Libraries in Computers - March 31, 2009

I was thinking about the post title and it occurs to me - no offense to InfoToday - that "Computers in Libraries" is kind of an old way of thinking about things.  The reality today is Libraries in Computers.
This is not a new idea - Mark Weiser was writing about ubiquitous computing in Scientific American in 1991.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Is your library becoming a part of your patrons' everyday life?  All this to introduce CIL 2009 session

D203: Embedding Services: Go Where the Client Is

coming up on March 31, featuring my colleague Natalie Collins.  She'll talk about the process that got us to "allowing discovery to happen in the user’s regular work environment".  If you want more details, a previous post about a thousand words may give a hint.

Kindle 2 burns on the horizon

Front page news on Amazon.com and being promoted to Amazon Associates, the Kindle 2 has arrived.
Personally, I don't see why you would buy books you can only license, never own.  Books on a device that's available only in the United States.  Isn't technology amazing?  It can create arbitrary barriers that never existed before in the physical world.

But if you want one, here you go.  It's US$359 and will be released February 24, 2009.

pre-order Kindle 2 from Amazon.com

 

I do have to admire Amazon for understanding a deep truth of the digital world - in the end, you can only monetize physical things.  Apple understood this by making their money on the iPod, not the music.

UPDATE: Also the note at Amazon that "original Kindle owners are first in line to receive Kindle 2 [if they order one]" reminds me that this is new technology.  That means unlike paper, which is rather well-established, the Kindle will become obsolete.  Rapidly.  Those books that have been sitting on your bookshelf for 20 years - no problem, reach over and open them up.  In 20 years, how many generations of book-reading technology do you think you will have to go through, between upgrades and failures?  At hundreds of dollars for every replacement.  For content that you don't even own in any meaningful way.  I don't think that's progress.  ENDUPDATE

Personally I think a more interesting development is Google Book Search Mobile.  As well, the New York Times reports that Amazon is also working on delivering "Kindle books" to cellphones, presumably with the same DRM.  There is no sign of that being available from Amazon today (and I don't see what their incentive would be, since it breaks the "you only make money from physical things" model).

Full disclosure: The above are Amazon Affiliate links (price and everything are identical, I just get a percentage of your purchase).

NRC Personal Learning Environment project is hiring

via Stephen Downes
(NRC = National Research Council Canada)

The R&D activities will focus across two dimensions: how access to a wide variety of learning opportunities can best be managed in an online environment; and how technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services. In essence, the scientific problem is one of designing an educational infrastructure based on future best practices and then developing an educational application that will work within that infrastructure. The positions, which are for three years, include:

• Researcher specializing in education and pedagogy
• Researcher specializing in art, design and new media
• Researcher specializing in library and information management
• Technology specialist with an emphasis on database support
• Technology specialist with an emphasis on application development

Springer AuthorMapper

Springer has a site that displays a bunch of information for a search, including a map, a list of results, a keyword cloud, institutions and publication dates.  It also allows you to search for OA articles only, in the "show all options" search.

Shown is a screenshot of the top of the page for a search on 'akerman'.

http://authormapper.com/search.aspx?q=akerman

There's more information down the left hand side of the screen below the part I cut out.
The Download PDF link takes you to SpringerLink.
You'll probably have to click several layers down (several zoom levels) before clicking on a particular "pin" will give you a popup saying something like "x articles from y institutions" followed by an institution list.
The search results list doesn't change as you zoom in on the map.

Despite the name, you can also search by topic, or by combinations of criteria (an example given is Map migraine articles published by authors from the USA).  The default starting screen shows the locations of the last 100 articles published.

This is a great example of making your existing data work harder, as Lorcan says.
I don't know exactly how they're doing it (one could guess some reasonably straightforward term extraction).  There's not much info about how it works in their AuthorMapper blog.

via Twitter

guilds in a time of rapid change

I'm not going to name a particular profession, but...

All organisational structures have a purpose.  A guild is a structure to protect and preserve information and power in a challenging but relatively unchanging environment.  Guilds can endure when there are incredible outside stresses, which is why they were an organisational structure of choice in the Middle Ages.

Some characteristics of guilds:
* strongly hierarchical
* secretive
* exclusive
* conservative

In a guild, knowledge is held close, and solutions come from the top.

Now imagine the guild in a time of rapid change.  In such a time, the most junior members of the guild, as well as outsiders, may have the most understanding of what is going on.  But the guild is structured neither to reach outside itself, nor to reach to junior members, nor to even ask for help with solutions at all, because solutions must always be dictated from the top down, from the Keepers of the Secrets.

How can a profession break the barriers of the guild mindset?

1. Define problems and ask for help from both junior staff and experts external to your guild.
2. Instead of secrecy, strive for transparency
3. Be open to continuous experimentation

Why is this important?
Look at the Web 2.0 timeline.
We are in an era of transformative change.  We are 15 years into the web, a decade into the Google Search Era, and only 4 years into Web 2.0

If you're working on a traditional 5-year planning cycle, that means you're only three plans since the information environment transformed completely, and your last plan may have been fixed in print before Web 2.0 even existed.  These are challenging times.

I think this is some of the challenge that Tom Peters is trying to articulate in Barnacles on the Ship of Librarianship.

No single speciality can have all the information about how to deal with these times.  Decades of pre-Web experience may have limited applicability in the new environment.  You need a willingness to experiment, to learn, and to be wrong. 

Why do you need to experiment?  Because otherwise you will inevitably fall behind.

The non-experimenting management approach goes something like:
1. Dismiss a new technology (e.g. blogging)
2. A tipping point arrives and "suddenly" everyone is blogging
3. Panic and demand why your organisation isn't blogging
4. Listen with frustration as staff tell you it will take time to build the necessary infrastructure in order to support blogging
5. Fall farther and farther behind

I call this "build the attic before the foundations".  No resources are devoted to a moderate strategy of experimentation and infrastructure building, and then all of a sudden the organisation tries to leap ahead to the latest technology (the "attic") before they have put in place all the necessary underlying support structures of process, software, and hardware (the "foundations").

I think this underlies some of the ideas about whether librarians should be programmers, as covered in Caveat Lector's Proto-librarians and computers. 

But that idea is also to some extent missing the point.  Yes, in a Guild, you need to be Master of All Information.  But in a regular organisation, while being an expert in your specialty, you don't need to be an expert in all specialties, you just need to know how to ask the right questions, how to pose the right problems.

Now of course, there are huge constraints here that need to be recognised.  First many smaller libraries have no technical staff to call upon, or very few tech staff.  Second, even in a large academic library, you may be relying upon a central IT department that has many other demands on its resources.

So yes, librarians do need to understand a few key things, particularly library technology, like link resolvers and proxies.  But at a high level, not at a low level (as I mentioned previously).  Knowing the right questions is more important than being able to provide the entire solution.  There's a whole world of programmers out there, including your own superpatrons, who may be able to help you if you can just formulate the right problems for them.

You need to understand how to use technology, particularly search, which (I would hope) any university graduate today is going to have learned organically.  You need a high-level picture of how things fit together, an understanding that machines can talk to machines, something like "Introduction to Internet and Software Concepts".  And as I've said before, you may need to be a bit of a scripter, in order to glue useful pieces of existing technology together.

In summary, we do not need to replace the (I'm not going to say it) Guild with the Programmer's Guild.
That misses the point.  We need people with enough technology knowledge to be dangerous, and enough respect for other professions to ask them for help whenever external expertise applies.

Previously:
January 10, 2005  the fall of the temple of books

why librarians don't need to know about SEO

Lorcan writes about SEO.

Terminology sidebar:

First off I want to get some terminology out of the way.  SEO is problematic because:

SEO

1. Search Engine Optimisation. Ensuring that your website has proper keywords and content so as to be well indexed by search engines

SEO

2. Search Engine Optimisation. Using unethical means to pump up your site's PageRank, including link farms and link spamming

You can see why SEO is not a great term to use, because to some people it means an absolutely legitimate activity, and to others it means something bordering on fraud.

END SIDEBAR

My observation is that librarians (and people in general) tend to focus too much on details and terminology, and not enough on context and needs.

For example, in a typical presentation about link resolvers, a huge amount of time will be spent on the OpenURL syntax, despite the fact that no humans should need to know anything about the syntax, it's for machines to talk to machines.  From a computer science perspective, all I need to know is "web page uses (well-defined protocol) which is understood by (target application)".

Teaching people about OpenURL and expecting them to understanding a link resolving network is like teaching people about sparkplugs and expecting them to understand the National Highway System.

It's the wrong level of detail, about the wrong thing, without any context.

So instead of librarians knowing about (Web acronym du jour), isn't it about librarians understanding the International Internet System?  It's not about SEO, it's about understanding whether search is meeting your patrons' needs.

So first step back.  Step way back.  Separate your concerns.  Move way way up the technology stack.  Ask yourselves:

First, the patron view -

1. Are our patrons finding what they want?

(Note I didn't say "through the library".  I also didn't say "are they searching properly" or "are they finding the best resources".)

2. Do we have services or content that would add substantial value to them, that they are not finding?

The most obvious examples of these are the rich licensed content that users often don't (or can't) discover in an open web search.  For example, your library may license extensive access to newspapers for patrons, but they're out on the open web unable to access back issues or recent articles.  Or your library may license rich scientific databases that your patrons don't get search hits for.

3. Without having to provide some special education for the patrons (remember: the user isn't broken), how can we work better in their search workflows, in their discovery and working environments.

Notice I didn't say anything about microdetails of some Z39.50 feature of some specific screen of some federated search product.  That level of detail DOESN'T MATTER at this level.  Stop worrying about that level of detail.  Identify the problem you want to solve first.

Second, the library website view -

1. Why do you have a library website?
2. What unique value can you provide to your patrons through it?

Assuming you have answered 1 & 2 with some reasonable purpose and value, then

3. Do some analytics to find out how people are (or are not) finding your website.  Where are they coming from?  What searches are they using?  Are they finding the unique value you identified?  Are they finding some other value you didn't even know you had?

4. IF you're not reaching your patrons to meet THEIR goals, then you need to look at better ways to reach them.  This may include many different forms of outreach, including communications strategies, web browser tools, and oh yeah, maybe making sure your website shows up better in searches.

Third, the organisation content view -

Some libraries have a role to play in increasing the visibility of their organisation's own content.  The repository is one (notoriously unsuccessful) example of this.

1. What content does your organisation want to promote?
2. Is it showing up in searches?
3. If not, fix that.

In summary:

1. Find out what your patrons want
2. Determine if they're getting it
3. If they're not, look at a range of modern solutions to help them, based on their existing preferences and usage patterns

All of the above may involve different pieces of technology, but they're not ABOUT technology.  Stop worrying about micro technology details.

For example:

Example A:
Your library has great information about squid.
Your patrons search but they find another, adequate site about squid.
Success.

Example B:
You license a great chemistry database.
Your patrons search but they never find it or any chemistry information nearly as rich.
Using web stats, browser add-ons, a link resolver, OpenURLs, COINS, partnering, better keywords and page titles, a chemistry blog with rich content, and a communications strategy, they do find it.
Success.

Example C:
You have a repository of biology articles.
No one can find them because they're behind layers of repository mystery.
Using an understanding of the 21st century web, you make them visible to search engines.
(Or: you put them somewhere else on the web where they get better indexed.)
Success.

Notice how: 1. Your library doesn't have to be the destination for everything.  2. Your library doesn't have to intermediate everything.  3. The needs come first, the technology only comes way, way at the end.

That being said, I do recognize that as the library intermediates less (or is perceived to intermediate less) you do risk your brand, which in the long term risks your sustainability.  But that's a marketing issue, not a technology one.  If you want prominent branding on publisher sites, refuse to license their content unless they provide it.

In case it's not clear from the title, what I'm saying is, don't start with the technology thing (SEO, Web 2.0, Semantic Web, whatever).  If you do that, you just end up in an endless race after technology-driven solutions, buried in the ever-changing details of the technology of the day.  Start with the problem, then once you know what the problem is, see what the solutions are.  The solution may involve no technology whatsoever.

IF you've gone through the analysis of the problem and discovered that web ranking of your pages or your organisation's content is an issue, then a great place to start is... OUseful's Why Librarians Need to Know About SEO.

are your circulation stats a gold mine?

Chris Keene has an interesting posting about the ALT TILE meeting.

(TILE = Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 & the e-Framework)

(ALT TILE = Association for Learning Technology meeting 'Sitting on a gold mine' - improving provision and services for learners by aggregating and using 'learner behaviour data')

He says

This is one of those things that once you get discussing it you’re never quite sure why it already hasn’t been done before, especially with circulation data. There’s a wide scope, from local library services (book recommendation) to national systems which use data from VLEs, registry systems and library systems. A lot of potential functionality, both in terms of direct user services and informing HE (and others) to help them make decisions and tailor services for users.

Chris Keene - nostuff.org blog - sitting on a gold mine - December 12, 2008

via my FriendFeed and Twitter

I suggested to Chris that TILE should also have a look at all the information Johan Bollen is gathering in the MESUR project.

Web 2.0 history + lifestreaming

I completed a presentation about Web 2.0 at work, I would say overall it was about 60% successful.

First, here is a version I did at home, slides plus audio (SlideShare calls this SlideCasting).

Web 2.0 timeline and future

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 ib2)

You can click through the slides as usual, but if you press the green play button (arrow) in the centre, you will also get audio.  (I will have a follow-up post about how to make a slidecast.)

If you have some background in Web 2.0 you may want to start on slide #46, "Social Netwhat?"

UPDATE 2008-12-15: Thanks to some great work by CISTI Communications, the video of my presentation is available.  The camera is only on me, so you may also want to bring up the slides to get an idea of what I'm talking about.  The lighting is not great so it's a bit murky, but good I think for a first attempt, the audio is clear.  It's about 50 minutes of me presenting, plus an additional 5 minutes or so of information from our head of communications about how government employees can use Web 2.0 appropriately for work.

Google Video: Web 2.0 timeline

In case you're wondering why GVideo and not YouTube, GVideo allows unlimited size and length of video (I think YouTube limits are 1GB and 10 minutes).

Note: I would really consider the SlideCast audio to be the "full" presentation, in the video I ran out of time at the end to fully cover the social networking and lifestreaming parts.

END UPDATE

UPDATE 2008-12-19: If you want just the 1.5 hours of audio narration (I'm not sure how much sense it makes without the slides), it's available as an audio stream or in various formats for download at

http://www.archive.org/details/Web2_December2008

ENDUPDATE

(Not) Fitting 1.5 Hours into 45 Minutes

When I ran through the slides at home, even with a big section of organisation-internal stuff taken out, it took an hour and a half, this should have been a warning to me.  I only was supposed to present for 40 minutes (40 minutes for me, 5 minutes of material from our communications department, and 15 minutes for questions in a one hour slot).

As a presenter it's really my duty to make sure I fall in that time constraint.  I'm there for the audience (otherwise they could just look at the slides online) and an important part of that is leaving time for questions and comments, because as we know from the Wisdom of Crowds, the audience is going to have more information and ideas collectively than even the best-informed presenter.

When I told my supervisor that my test run went an hour and a half, and that I had cut out 2.5 slides, leaving me with 45 slides (or 43 slides plus opening and closing title slides), he suggested that I cut ruthlessly but there wasn't any part I was prepared to lose.  I guess one of the consequences of picking a large topic and then spending time over a period of months preparing it is you grow quite attached to the form and content of your presentation.  I really did think that I could "just say less" for each slide to get under the time limit.

More realistically for my speaking style (which tends to be a bit detailed and digressive) I should have had about 30 slides for 40 minutes.  I was thinking about it and it really is two presentations, the first piece is reasonably general and takes you through the history of Internet and Web at CISTI and NRC, through a timeline of Web and Web 2.0, to the current situation with these technologies at the Government of Canada and CISTI.  The second part moves into more advanced topics, explaining the nature of social networking and finishing with the very recent development of lifestreaming.  (If there had been time beyond that, I would have talked a bit about how mobile devices are shaping web use, and how we appear to be moving into a more personal and real-time web.)

The logical cutting points for the presentation would have been to end on the slide just before the social networking section (Social Netwhat?), or end on the first slide of that section, or end with the first "Zero Degrees of Separation" slide.  Lifestreaming is a topic that really needs another 45 minutes of presentation all on its own.  I really should have done more runthroughs until I could get the material under 40 minutes, as it was, what happened was that I was watching my time carefully and made it through the first section of the material ok, and then looked at my watch at the start of the social networking section and realised I had another 30-45 minutes worth of material to present in 5 or 10 minutes before the absolute end of my time at 15:00.  I should have just stopped then in order to allow some questions.  Instead I gave a very rushed and probably neither very comprehensible nor useful sweep through the remaining slides down to "Web 2.0 Warnings".  (I should have realised when I was telling people online to *start* at slide 46 for the social networking section, that there was no way I would be able to reach and cover it fully in my presentation - anyway in the online version you can start there and hear me very unhurriedly go through the material.)

The Venue, Presentation Technology and the Perfect Storm

I had a good venue and great support from the technical staff and presentation committee, who agreed to all of my unreasonable presentation diva demands, including a wireless clip-on mike and using my Mac to present using Keynote.  This was an additional complication for them because we use Adobe Acrobat Connect so that people in our offices across the country can see the slides, fortunately it installed and ran fine.  For audio we use a separate voiceconferencing service and a Polycom speakerphone.  To add to the tech mix, I was trying out Salling Clicker on my Nokia N82, it worked quite well, just a couple issues, one (that I was aware of in advance) is that the N82 has a sensitive position sensor, so if you're swinging it around in your hands while presenting, the screen tends to rotate, which also rotates which buttons move the presentation forward and back (I always used the "down" button to advance, since it works in either screen orientation).  It would probably be good to lock the screen from rotating before presenting.  Another issues was that for some reason a couple times it got out of slide-turning mode and into the general presentation selection mode.  It has a nice feature of displaying slide notes on-screen, but I found I didn't actually use the on-screen notes, I always present without notes anyway.  (As a sidebar, I didn't know Salling was an actual person, until with zero degrees of separation he contacted me to answer a Tweet about how to see more than one phone-screen of notes for a slide.)

The presentation was also video-ed, they were concerned about the video camera's audio though.  In retrospect, there are a bunch of other audio recording options we could have added, including:

• recording the audio from my mike directly somehow
• recording the voice conference either through the service itself, or through channeling it to some recording software/service
• both of my phones (K790 and N82) I'm sure can record an hour of audio easily
• I actually have a dedicated audio recorder that I never remember to bring.  It can also store over an hour of audio, has reasonably good pickup (I could have placed it next to the speakerphone) and is easy to work with since you can just plug it into USB when you're done and download the standard-format file it creates (I think it makes a Windows audio file).  It's an Olympus WS-320M.

The logistics side was quite complicated due to a series of unforeseen events.  First the number of RSVPs for the presentation exceeded the firecode limitations for our usual room, so in the weeks before the presentation they had to arrange for an auditorium in another building, which of course means different setup, (somewhat) different network, sending out a room change notice etc. etc. all of which the committee handled very ably.  Then, with everything arranged, on the day of my presentation the entire transit service (mostly buses) for Ottawa went on strike, plus there was a fairly big snowstorm (snowfall from 15-25 cm, later upped to 30cm, with risk of freezing rain).  How did the day go?  Well here's how the Ottawa Citizen put it: Strike, storm lead to commuter chaos.  (My workplace is about 35 minute bus ride from the downtown core where I live, and Ottawa is a very widely distributed city, so people come to my workplace from many different directions with often long commutes.)

I was grateful that anyone showed up at all, I was worried there would be about 5 people in the audience.  I (as usual) forgot to take an audience photo despite having both of my cameraphones, but I would guess around 25 people.

Part 1: History of Web 2.0 - Some Key Messages

The messages that I wanted to convey included:

• libraries were a little slow in some cases to embrace Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, but around 2006 there was a tipping point and I would consider that now e.g. library conferences are leaders in web-enabling (what Lorcan Dempsey calls amplified conferences, a concept which Brian Kelly has, well, amplified and extended).
• That being said, the academic sector, including academic libraries and some large research and technology organisations were early to the Internet and to the Web.  In fact it's not an exaggeration to say these groups were the Internet, in the pre-Web days.  USENET newsgroups were filled with scientists and students asking questions and having conversations.  The Web itself came out of CERN, and so it's not surprising that scientists were also early to the Web.  So when we say scientists aren't using Web 2.0, to some extent it's because they already have well-established communities online, and because science has always been about your peers, they already know their networks and connect to them online and offline.
• My organisation in particular was (based on my amateur USENET sleuthing), posting to newgroups in 1988, talking about xmosaic in 1993, and putting up websites in 1994.  That's about as early as you could possibly adopt - so I don't think we can say that (academic) libraries are necessarily always late adopters.
• Many libraries unfortunately got "stuck" in the mental model of the browse-based web that existed from (very roughly) 1995 to 1998, the pre-Google Web.  It was a very compelling analogy:
  • physical address-> web address (URL)
  • front desk -> front page (home page)
  • browse through stacks -> browse through web pages
  • library -> digital library
• Unfortunately this model of the web, where users type in specific URLs and then browse for content usually within a single site, the Yahoo model of locating information, the model that is even embedded in our terminology of "web browser", is completely false in the post-search world, the post-Google Web.  In the post-search world what matters, the only thing that matters really, is rich content that gives you PageRank.  The page that shows up may be many layers deep within your website, and people may stop there only briefly, before jumping to another site in order to satisfy their need for photos of rabbits with pancakes on their heads (err, or whatever particular topic you provide expertise on).
• Web 2.0 is about many things, including this rather awkward term of "user-created content".  (I kind of messed up my message here, I was trying to say, with the Communications team in the audience, that Web 2.0 is typically personally-identifiable, amateur content, whereas organisational communications are typically more anonymous and professional - I think I may have unintentially given the impression that Web 2.0 communications are "cool", when I just want to say that they're different modes of presenting information, they both have their pluses and minuses.)
• I also didn't have time to cover some interesting work that Alison Ball and others are doing with delicious bookmarks and the Federal Library Web 2.0 Interest Group

Part 2: Social Networking and Lifestreaming

Skipping towards the end of the presentation (as this posting is getting as over-long as my presentation itself) there are some trends that we can see.  One is that we have many new options for making social connections online - but you have to keep in mind that the solution you choose is going to depend on where your network already exists.  If, like is often the case with librarians, your colleagues, your social network is already in mailing lists, then it's going to be very difficult to get much benefit from new social tools.  I give a very simple example, which is that my generation (I finished my undergrad in 1990) is primarily email-based.  If I want to reach my friends, I send them an email.  I can send them messages in Facebook until I'm Faceblue, but they'll never get them, because they never check Facebook.  So this kind of "build it and they will come" idea ONLY works if either people don't have good ways to connect to their social network, or if somehow you convince enough of them to move over (which is tremendously difficult to do).

That being said, IF your connections (friends, work colleagues, whatever) are using social, Web 2.0 tools, you can see their lifestreams, their patterns of activity.  This may be in Facebook (which really was just intended for university students to tell each other where they were, what parties they were going to, and to share drunken pictures of themselves), in Twitter, which I think of as a kind of digital watercooler, and in FriendFeed, which is a sort of meta-site for aggregating all your activity in other Web 2.0 sites.

So your choice of social network online will be shaped by where your current (or desired) community already participates.  Additionally (and I'm grateful to Owen Stephens for this insight), your choice of tool may depend on how you consume the information, in particular, mobile device versus computer screen.  Facebook and in particular Twitter have mobile versions that work very well on a small smartphone screen, their "short snippets of stuff" design takes this environment into consideration (and Twitter can even be used entirely just through SMS).  FriendFeed, with its longer message fields, extensive comment threads, and more complex content, is not at all as well suited to this environment.

Additionally, as we move past Google at 10 Years, we're starting to see a change in search and information exchange.  In the Before Time, because looking up information was expensive/timeconsuming, we often turned first to friends or to reference experts like librarians when we had questions.  Then we had the era of keyword search.  But with the rise of Instant Messaging, SMS, and other more real-time social network interaction, people are again turning back to asking questions first.  That is, they will post a question to their social network, and use keyword search only as a supplement to the information they get from their peers.  This may seem like we've actually gone back to an old way of doing things, but as with all historical cycles, it's both similar and different.  People are asking others questions again, but now they can ask many more people at once than ever before (in theory, you can ask the entire Internet world - sometimes called "crowdsourcing").  There is, I think, an opportunity for librarians to re-introduce themselves into this new real-time question-driven environment.

Conclusion

If you're looking for an overall conclusion, for me it's that as someone who is web-based (rather than mobile), with a widely-dispersed web presence, and whose community is fairly intensive web users, FriendFeed is the best Web 2.0 tool for me.  Facebook I didn't like much at all, it mixes work and personal together and neither my work nor my personal community are particularly active users of it, so it doesn't make any sense for me to spend much time there.  So you can catch me Web 2.0 lifestreaming at

http://friendfeed.com/scilib

As a presenter, there's always a risk of putting yourself forward as the Expert, and I want to say that I very much don't consider myself a Web 2.0 Expert of any kind, I'm not even in the right generation to be talking about Web 2.0 (although perhaps being an outsider to this environment gives me a chance to see things that the Digital Generation may take for granted).  I invite your questions, comments and corrections (and I wish I'd made time to do so in my presentation yesterday).  You collectively know much more than I do.

NRCan uses Web 2.0 to improve collaboration

In his posting Canadian Government Launches Internal Wiki, Library Boy points to an interesting article in a magazine I had never heard of, Networked Government .ca

Challenges of change

Breaking down barriers to create an open and collaborative work environment comes with barriers of its own:

§         Fear of the unknown
§         Varying rates of acceptance
§         Trust
§         Reluctance to change
§         Indifference
§         Official languages
§         Inappropriate use. 

There is risk in each, but none as great as the risk of not proceeding.   

For employees reluctant to contribute their content on an open forum, the team encouraged them to use the Wiki to share non-sensitive information only. Allowing groups to create their own separate work spaces on the Wiki would only perpetuate the very barriers collaborative technologies were trying to break down – limited knowledge sharing at an enterprise level and lack of integrated content. Organizing information based on organizational hierarchy was purposely not replicated to allow subject classification structures based on content to emerge.

Collaborative Revolution - Networked Government .ca - October 2008

Italics in above article mine.

In strongly hierarchical organisations, such as some libraries, people often identify more with their group or organisational silo than with the entire enterprise.  Also these silos may represent areas in which specific control or budget is allocated, and it is traditional corporate culture not to want to share control or resources.

Enterprise Architecture and enterprise-wide collaboration can try to break through some of these silos, but as the above article states: "Changing the culture is much more difficult than implementing new technology."

bold new programming opportunities for... public libraries?

When I listened to this talk from Mark Ramsey about public radio, it made me think about the challenges that public libraries and libraries in general have in finding their audiences.

It works best if you (manually) combine listening to the audio with his slides on Slideshare, as he refers to a lot of the visuals.

Via CBC Radio Spark, specifically their Twitter feed, also thanks to Mark Ramsey for letting me know his slides were online.

Research Libraries - No Brief Candle

I want to highly recommend the CLIR Report

No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century

It's available for free PDF download.
It got quite a wide readership and positive reaction at my organisation.
It does a great job of discussing the challenges, particularly the ways in which scholarly communication is being transformed.

This brief entry doesn't really do it justice, but I am long overdue in mentioning it.

semantic library - planning the training

In the model of Five Weeks to a Social Library, I see in my FriendFeed today a posting from Fiona Bradley about putting together a Semantic Library training program online.  It's still in the initial planning stages, you can have a look at the program outline at

http://semanticlibrary.pbwiki.com/Learning-Program

The wiki is open for people to sign up, you just need to enter the password you'll see at the bottom of the login screen.

For those of us who deal more with academic content, I think semantic concepts and Semantic Web services may become even more important than social networking is right now.

(Whew, I got through all of that without saying "from Library 2.0 to Library 3.0".)

Describing the Semantic Web can be a bit complicated, I think of it as enriching our current text content on the web so that machines are able to do more processing for us - enabling us to build much more powerful scientific search and reasoning systems.

As I said in my presentation Building SkyNet for Science, invoking (and extending) Ranganathan and Noruzi: "every web resource its machine reader" (slide 13).

Previously:
September 08, 2008  semantic search thoughts