Science Library Pad

Ontario and Alberta Digital Library plans

* Ontario

http://www.ourontario.ca/

The Ontario Digital Library (ODL) is a vision of how publicly assisted organizations in Ontario can collaborate to create and sustain a partnership that will provide seamless services and resources to all the citizens of Ontario. ... Knowledge Ontario is the public face of the Ontario Digital Library and unites ODL initiatives into a single service point and set of projects.

See Knowledge Ontario Business Case (PowerPoint).  I think it is proposed but not approved.

* Alberta

The Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library, announced in the ‘2005 Speech from the Throne’, is a $30 million continuing investment in electronic and digital resources that will bring content rich collections to post-secondary institutions and their constituents, and it will deliver those resources dynamically using state-of-the-art technologies to the four corners of the Province.

from Business and Implementation Plan - Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library (PDF).

Net Libraries for Net Generation?

I find it interesting that people talk about social bookmarking, but never refer to any postings based on bookmarks they discovered.  So... I bookmarked

LibraryCrunch: Evolutionary Technology and the Emerging Divide

and got the result

People who furled this, also furled:

• Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Libraries, logistics and the long tail
• LibrarianInBlack: Library Systems Vendors Stray from the Light
• Main Articles: 'The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After', Ariadne Issue 46
• Millennial Net Value(s): Disconnects Between Libraries and the Information Age Mindset (PDF)
• EDUCAUSE REVIEW | January/February 2006, Volume 41, Number 1

Now most of those articles I already know, but Millennial Net Values was a new one on me.
It's a paper that examines the gaps between the expectations of incoming Net Generation users and the existing library services.  They examine three fundamental disconnects: in technology, policy and opportunity.  I will quote from the first two:

TECHNOLOGY DISCONNECTS

Libraries have done little to embed themselves and their resources
into non-library tools and spaces that are important to Net
Generation learners (Lippincott 2005). Furthermore, libraries have
done little to make most of their systems and discovery tools
customizable or easily integrated into the life of online users.
Library technologies remain substantially limited by an enduring
obsession with individual privacy and copyright. Other user
desires that have emerged in recent years, such as capabilities for
collaborative and group work, remain essentially unaddressed in
library conceptions of technology development. Such oversights
and lack of responsiveness are good examples of why Millennials
may be disappointed when they find that the technology
infrastructure they expect to find in libraries turns out to be more
limited (Oblinger 2003).

Some of the other key technology disconnects between libraries
and online communities include:
• Libraries typically do not provide tools, hardware or software,
nor support for students to create new digital products
(Lippincott, 2005);

...

• Libraries are not using technology and standards like RSS to
permit choice-driven alerts on new resources or services, or to
enable more effective need-driven help from libraries;
• Libraries continue to segment systems and technology for
designated types of activity and information, when online
users want more seamless integration (Jones, 2002);

...

POLICY DISCONNECTS

... a policy solution might be required to address the
following types of disconnects between libraries and online users:
• Library staff lacking sufficient technology and media
competency;
• Deliberately pushing library search tools into other
environments, and conversely;
• Integrating other popular external search tools into library
systems;
• Libraries linking and pointing only to what they own;
• Re-structuring access to reflect use instead of library
organizational structure (Lippincott 2005).

As you can see, they're keen on Joan Lippincott's work, this turns out to be an EDUCAUSE report called Net Generation Students and Libraries. 

It was all the buzz early last year, here are some postings about it:

• Lorcan Dempsey - Net generation students and libraries - February 24, 2005
• LibrarianInBlack - Net Generation Students and Libraries - March 07, 2005
• Tame The Web - Lippincott's Net Generation Students & Libraries - April 1, 2005

I posted on a related topic, The Shifted Librarian: OLC Presentation on library technology environment, on April 07, 2005.

become a Trend Unit

I wanted to highlight a link from Michael Stephens in the previous Emerging Technology Watch posting:

trendwatching.com is a site dedicated to uncovering consumer trends.  This month's briefing is about trend watching itself, a set of information they want to build upon, permanently located at http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/trend_unit.htm

Our recommendation? Start your own corporate TREND UNIT. Today. Even if that unit is just you (in which case it's really a TREND YOUNIT ;-). The TREND UNIT is not some multi-million dollar/euro/pound affair. It doesn't have to employ a staff of five (though that eventually would be nice ;-). It's more a state of mind. It can be low-cost, unauthorized, and grass roots if need be.

...

Ongoing activities
               
  Needless to say, the TREND UNIT is an ongoing affair. First and foremost you will have to:

• Build your web of resources
• Build your trend framework (see below)
• Set up your own weekly or monthly sessions

About the latter: get a motley crew of people together who are interested in discussing your findings, your trends. One easy way to do this is to pick, present, discuss and brainstorm just one trend. Assign one person to do a 20 minute presentation, spend 30 minutes discussing what's truly driving this trend from a consumer need perspective. Spend another 30 minutes relating these findings to your industry and brand: what will the impact be? Last but not least, ask all participants to dedicate half an hour to coming up with new ideas for your brand. ...

For further intercompany distribution of your work, set up a semi-official TREND UNIT website or page, explaining what you do, which trends you’re tracking, including the implications for your company. Use a corporate wiki to invite people to contribute. More on this in the next update.

They provide lots of recommendations, in a lively style with pretty pictures.  They cover issues to consider, a framework for evaluation, and starting points including many websites that were new to me - lots of great material.

iSERV Ontario to provide utility computing service

iSERV Ontario, the provincial government’s IT infrastructure services provider, is turning to utility computing services designed to offer access-on-demand to servers, desktops and applications via virtualized machines.

iSERV, or the Office of the Corporate Chief Service Delivery headed by Blair Smith, has been looking at implementing a utility data centre model for the past 18 months and began installing a system of Web portals in December and January.

The portals enable a user to order a custom-configured server or desktop and then download the virtualized machine, or master image, from a back-end farm of blades that is maintained by a service provider.

iSERV Ontario is responsible for managing infrastructure service delivery, including the mainframe, servers, desktop management and procurement, for the government’s 30 ministries across Ontario.

The utility system integration was set up and implemented in partnership with Commerx Computer Systems Inc., a Mississauga, Ont.-based services provider that offers specialized virtual LAN switching technology.

...

Commerx joins Toronto-based Charon Systems, Nexxlink Technologies of Montreal and ERP specialist CSB Systems of Winnipeg in [contributing to?] Bell Business Solutions.

The unit runs a Virtual CIO program that aims to offer utility-type infrastructure services, software as a service, hosted security and disaster recovery, as well as managed telecommunications, according to Robert Courteau, president and CEO of Bell Business Solutions.

...

To support between 1,000 and 1,500 virtual machines, the back-end might consist of a full rack of 96 dual-core blades, 100 terabytes of disk in a storage area network, SAN cards, and a network switching layer like HP’s ProCurve or Cisco.

...

The pilot project with Bell will start with 10 blades, 40TB of disk and Cisco switching gear housed at the Charon data centre in Calgary, according to Levinsky. The partners are initially aiming at 10 Ontario customers and 10 from Quebec. Bell hopes to go live with the system in April and officially launch the service in July, says Courteau, with possible expansion to its Montreal data centre.

from Network World Canada - Government taps utility - February 17, 2006
requires registration, blah blah blah, you can try BugMeNot if you need a registration...

The Commerx site also has more info

Bell Canada has teamed up with Commerx to bring on-demand, Express Servers, to the Canadian marketplace. These Virtual Intel Servers give customers an alternative to purchasing expensive new hardware and can be self-provisioned in minutes. Available within secure MPLS or I-VPN networks, this new service will change the way companies think about computing resources.

from their PDF announcement Pilot Program for Virtual Servers on Demand dated January 16, 2006

“The average Windows based server is running at less than 15% capacity,” according to Stuart Levinsky, President of Commerx Computer Systems Inc. “Our customers are tired of purchasing hundreds of new Intel Servers every year simply because existing leases are expiring. CIO’s in Canada have already identified that they use only a fraction of their existing computing horsepower and they’d like a viable alternative to more hardware. Hosted, secure, virtual servers on-demand from Bell will be ideal for disaster recovery environments as well as fixed length development projects.” Network centric applications like Windows Active Directory and SharePoint are also ideal initial candidates for hosting on virtual servers. This service will change the way organizations plan and manage their IT environments.”

Emerging Technology Watch

An assortment of ideas about performing an "Emerging Technology Watch" (I categorize this as Technology Foresight).  Does your organization have such a process / team?

So when my group, the Emerging Technologies Team, sat down to examine the current and future technology landscape, we quickly came to the realization that while there are some wonderful new things that can be put into our plan, few of them are actually new technologies.  Most are modifications or improvements on existing technology.  All of this leads me to believe that technology, at least right now, is in an evolutionary phase, whereas only two or three years ago we were still in a revolutionary time period where new ideas were rocking the library boat on a regular basis.

...

Our Emerging Tech team is also making a strong effort to push for the introduction of certain Web 2.0 technologies into our service offerings, such as formally encouraging the use of browser-based office applications such as Writely and BaseCamp.

LibraryCrunch - Evolutionary Technology and the Emerging Divide

Have you had the chance to dream at your library job? Have you had the chance to stop for a minute in the buzz buzz of your routine and think about the future? Are you encouraged to innovate?

If not, then I urge you to do so. And I urge library administrators to encourage dreaming on the job. Formalize it—call your innovation group “Dreamers,” or use the more-grounded moniker "Emerging Technology Committee". Give 'em a couple of hours a month to talk emerging trends, about trendspotting, and about creative thinking. Read some cool stuff like Business 2.0 and Wired and ask yourselves, "How might the technologies occuring outside of the library impact library services?"

Why? Because we have the potential to bring about the next big thing. We have the potential to be the leaders as we all move toward a seamless information and knowledge environment.

ALA TechSource - Michael Stephens - Are You Dreaming?

another nifty program offered through the Metropolitan Library System, which has offices in Burr Ridge and here in ALA-headquarter town, Chicago, IL.

“Are you Dreaming?" is about making room for dreaming—about imaginative ways the library can create and offer user-centered services to those in a community—and in it, he urges his fellow librarians to dream… at work, every month, and even formalize it! “Why?" he asks. “Because we have the potential to bring about the next big thing."

But that “buzz buzz of your routine" that Michael also refers to, a lot of the time, can be a stifling force in many of our overloaded realities, so even if you do get a chance to dream, will you get to see your dream come true?

Well, if you're an MLS member library, and if you take advantage of its new Zephyr Program, it's very possible you will. According to Kathryn Deiss, director of strategic learning and team leader of the Zephyr Innovation Incubator Program, if you can dream it, the creative thinkers at MLS can help it come true. And even if you can't dream it, they can help with that too.

... More information about Zephyr is available at www.mls.lib.il.us/cats.cfm?catid=175.

ALA TechSource - Teresa Koltzenburg - The Winds of Change

I think a wiki is a good collaborative space for the information gathering and discussion associated with a technology watch.  Via the blog of Adrian Sannier, Arizona State University Technology Officer, I find their University Technology Office Strategic Technology Plan 2005-2006 wiki.

Previously:
July 15, 2005  more on Technology Watch

presentation on building communities at CLA 2006

32. Building Communities that Transcend Jurisdictional and Regional Barriers
Technological advances help remove barriers of distance and physical storage space, while other barriers, including funding, jurisdiction, and intellectual property, provide ongoing challenges. Learn about how initiatives that aim to provide universal, barrier-free access to resources in diverse libraries are contributing to the development of a national digital library service.

Speakers:

• Lucy Pana, Executive Director,The Alberta Library
• Lucie Molgat, Director of the Canada’s scientific infostructure project, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information [CISTI], Ottawa, ON

Will be in CLA 2006 Concurrent Session E, Friday, June 16, 2006.

LibraryThing: Currently Reading

So I was on Catalogablog and there's the LibraryThing Currently Reading list so I thought, hmm, LT is all the buzz these days, guess I'd better check it out some more.  And in doing so I saw it can import from Delicious Library, which sealed the deal.

So I signed up and then I wanted to use the Currently Reading widget.
Except there is no such widget.
So I though hmm ok... reading... display... ok I'll TAG it and display the tag feed.
Except it doesn't show that option either.  Leastwise for free member me.  For me it showed only "Random Books", "Recent Books", and "Top Authors".  So I wandered around the net until I found the &show=tagran syntax for the JavaScript to pass.

So then I entered a tag "Currently Reading" on the book.
So that's fine, just a satisfying tech investigation.

What the story turns out to be is that until you enter a tag the widget creator won't show any tag-related options.  Once you do, up appear "Top Tags", "Recent Tagged", "Random Tagged".  Now I can see this both ways: don't show the user options that don't apply to them.  But then we're stuck in the basic vs. advanced world.  I am crazy power-user guy.  I want to see ALL the options ALL the time, because otherwise, how do I know they even exist?  If there was a help system, that would, err, help to uncover such features, but there isn't one.

I was also puzzled by an odd accent: a dropped "h"... Helped Unleas Fundamentalist... but it turns out this is also present in the record at Amazon.ca  What's very interesting is that Amazon has a built-in "correct this entry" feature - very smooth, sign in, click your way through to the error and put in your correction, then

Confirm Your Catalogue Corrections

and then they will review your submission.  Does your OPAC have such a feature?  Now, when I fix it on LibraryThing, where will that edit go, just to my catalogue? 

Incidentally my catalogue is at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/rakerman
and I have added the Currently Reading dojigger to my about page.

There are only a few entries so far, I need to fire up my DV cam and barcode scan the rest into Delicious Library and then export them to LibraryThing.  (In case you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, a Mac + Delicious Library + a digital video cam = barcode scanning library system.  You just hold the barcode in front of the camera and DL beeps once it has scanned it, then it looks it up at Amazon.  Note: it only supports video cams, not still cameras.)

Elsewhere:
Stephen's Lighthouse - LibraryThing - Dec. 13, 2005
Library Stuff - 2.5 Million tags! - Feb. 26, 2006

Previously:
January 12, 2006  the hidden library, the P2P library...
my helpful idea of augmenting (I dare not say obsoleting :) public libraries with Peer-to-Peer booklending powered by Delicious Library / LibraryThing type apps

NPR on the future library

[US] National Public Radio If a Library Is Bookless, What's In It? aired today, February 27, 2006

The "Bookless Library." Is it a contradiction in terms, or a sign of the times? Information technology changes as soon we think we understand it. With mammoth collections to maintain, libraries are struggling to keep up -- and to redefine their role.

Audio is available.

via ACRL blog, with a side trip to Free Range Librarian

info from Federated Search Symposium

There was a Federated Search Symposium at the University of Calgary sponsored by The Alberta Library.

Info via Library Boy.

Distant Librarian has a good Federated Search Symposium wrap-up.

Roy Tennant of the California Digital Library did a presentation Metasearching: the Good,  the Bad, & the Ugly.

Also incredibly useful, the CDL posts their evaluations and assessments online http://www.cdlib.org/inside/assess/evaluation_activities/

The symposium website also has the other presentations, and since I know y'all want to see what the Google Scholar people had to say, here's the PowerPoint from Cathy Gordon, Director of Business Development - Google Scholar: Providing Visibility to Scholarly Literature.

The general tone I get is: metasearch = megapain.

I have a maybe naive question: why do we need to search, in the exploratory sense?  That is, within the specific context of library journal article holdings.  Don't we already know all of the journal issues we hold?  Isn't that the function of the whole licensing department?  Don't we have (or at least, have the ability to buy) the article metadata for all of our holdings?  What is there to be discovered?

Can't you just buy a service as follows:
1) I tell it what journals I have, ideally by having it talk to the publishers directly (e.g. machine to machine holdings API)
2) Since the service holds the article-level metadata (author, title, abstract) for every article, it just carves out that data into a search subset
3) I do a search on that subset.  No federation, since all of the data is in one place.
4) It points me to the fulltext - e.g. using my OpenURL resolver, which knows what stuff is held in what "databases" (websites)

OPML Reading Lists

As best as my addled morning mind can parse, OPML Reading Lists is simply the idea of subscribing to someone else's (RSS) subscriptions (their "Reading List").  It's just subscribing to the OPML list itself, rather than to individual feeds.  As their set of subscriptions changes, your view is also updated.  Anyway, that's the nugget of knowledge I excavated out of the jargony paragraph

Reading lists are OPML documents that point to RSS feeds, like most of the OPML documents you find, but instead of subscribing to each feed in the document, the reader or aggregator subscribes to the OPML document itself. When the author of the OPML document adds a feed, the aggregator automatically checks that feed in its next scan, and (key point) when a feed is removed, the aggregator no longer checks that feed. THe editor of the OPML file can update all the subscribers by updating the OPML file.

from Next steps in RSS, Reading Lists - October 13, 2005
There is a howto of sorts at http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/howtoReadingLists

You're supposed to keep your reading list small, e.g. 15 items or less, apparently mostly for technical reasons.  But I don't see why we can't fix that with a layer of technology.  I've already got all my 100+ feeds in tidy categories containing most-15-or-less items within Bloglines, why can't it just suck up that, then let the subscriber select which categories they want within the big file?

Now Technorati Favorites would seem ideally created for this, but inexplicably they have not provided OPML export.  You can leave feedback in Sifry's posting New Technorati Features: Favorites. And Reading Lists/OPML for Blog Finder (February 21, 2006).

UPDATE 2006-05-01: Technorati now provides OPML, see Technorati Favorites: RSS and OPML

ENDUPDATE

Thanks to Steven Cohen for pointing out reading lists and for putting me on his.

My Bloglines list is at http://www.bloglines.com/public/rakerman

And my TechnoFaves (currently quite incomplete) are at http://www.technorati.com/faves/scilib

Next Gen + Library = ?

Another idea-filled and thought-provoking presentation by Michael Ridley:

"Re-Imaging the Library: The Net Gen Meets Melvil Dewey or We're Not in Kansas Anymore." Toronto Public Library, Information Services Conference. November 23, 2005. http://www.uoguelph.ca/~mridley/TPL-Nov2005.ppt

Library and Archives Canada - Electronic Collection

The Electronic Collection of Library and Archives Canada consists of Canadian websites, books and periodicals published online. It includes more than 16,000 titles and more than 64,000 serial issues published by both the commercial publishing sector and the government publishing sector.

... In 2005, the Electronic Publications Aquisitions Section changed its name to Legal Deposit - Internet Unit.

About This Site - Electronic Collection

There is both usual fielded seach (e.g. keywords) as well as full-text search.

They have some of CMAJ, the latest snapshot seems to be from October 24, 2001.

Physics World on Physics bloggers

See the Editorial:  Rise of the bloggers
and the article, Blogs Add a New Dimension to Physics

UPDATE: List of blogs from above article

• LANL: The Real Story (lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com)
• Quantum Diaries (interactions.org/quantumdiaries)
• Cosmic Variance (cosmicvariance.com)
• The Quantum Pontiff (http://dabacon.org/pontiff)
• PP Cook's Tangent Space (ppcook.blogspot.com)
• The String Coffee Table (golem.ph.utexas.edu/string/index.shtml)
• Luboš Motl's Reference Frame (motls.blogspot.com)
• Not Even Wrong (www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog)
• Leaves on the Line (astro.imperial.ac.uk/~jaffe/blog)
• atdotde (atdotde.blogspot.com)
• Uncertain Principles (www.steelypips.org/principles) [moved to http://scienceblogs.com/principles/ ]
• Three-Toed Sloth (www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog)

from Physics World, February 2006 edition
via Christina's LIS Rant

Canadian Library Association blog

I was poking around the Canadian Library Association (CLA) website and found this co-operative blog: Re:Generations . From the Canadian Association of College & University Libraries (or CACUL), a division of CLA, the blog's aim is to dialogue with young academic librarians and re-energize the profession.

via Connie Crosby

the library as an information manipulation lab?

Librarian 1.5 conceptualizes the new library as a lab for development

The experimentation and development going on in libraries around the world makes me think that one charatcteristic of Library 2.0 is that the library functions as a laboratory for development. This can take many forms. The OPAC experimentation that Casey Bisson does with WordPress, Ann Arbor Public Library and their superpatron does stuff with Amazon APIs that makes me sit up and think, and elsewhere other experiments are changig the library both in the electronic and physical world. If we start to regard change as a “normal” situation as I suspect you have to do in a lab, then maybe we can have a go at realizing what Michael Casey wrote about having to live with constant change. This sounds slightly threatening to me, so thinking about the library as a lab and myself as a slightly demented scientist/librarian helps me accept the concept of change as a permanent fixture of library life and even enjoy the process.

I would take that further: maybe the future of the library should be as a lab for information manipulation - helping you to slice, dice, pivot, visualize, integrate and mix (dare I say "mash-up") information to meet your needs.  This has always been a part of the library role, but the difference is that the new library enables this by providing technology tools to support this activity online.  Will we see new signs going up: Welcome to your local Public Information Lab?

I suppose I can't pass up the opportunity to plug our very tentative efforts at CISTI Lab.

New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE 2006 Horizon report

The 2006 Horizon Report [Adobe Acrobat PDF] is now available. The 2006 edition is a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.

The 2006 Horizon Report, just as has been the case with previous editions of the report, highlights six technologies that the underlying research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years.

There is an extensive 2006 Horizon Project Wiki that was used to develop the report.

via Ten Thousand Year Blog

librarians brainstorm, electronically

The British Columbia Electronic Library Network (BCELN) set up a Blogger/Blogspot.com blog for staff of member libraries to share ideas as part of a 2006 to 2011 strategic planning exercise: Electronic Brainstorm: Wild Ideas!.

via The Ten Thousand Year Blog

librarians and technologists

I'm not going to say a word, as others are eloquent on this topic:

This illustrates the one item that we cannot put on our Emerging Tech suggestion list, a programmer.  Clearly, one of the major divisions that now separates libraries is whether or not they can bring a programmer on board -- this will be what divides libraries in the next few years.  The Blybergs and Bissons and Vielmettis of the library world are the newest must-haves, and perhaps they are the new revolutionary technology.

LibraryCrunch - Evolutionary Technology and the Emerging Divide

“More attention is given to librarians’ needs than the needs of those who work intensively with the ILS.” In other words, the tech staff. Libraries have been incredibly reticent when it comes to letting technical people make the technical decisions. The result? Vendors who are given laundry lists of nonsense by folks who really don’t know what they’re asking for.

...

Libraries should be listening to their IT departments and vetting requests through them. If you don’t have an IT staff, then a part of the solution is reevaluating your staffing needs so that you have some technical people on-board–this can be as simple as canvasing your existing staff, looking for someone who wants to make the move into geekdom. I believe that a coder-on-board sign is simply a characteristic of most 21st century libraries–it’s not enough to employ the best librarians you can find, you need to get passionate, interested techies as well. Ideally, library schools ought to be considering the merits of a CS track. Courses need to be developed that synthesize coding skills with library science. The more technical know-how that is mixed in to their customer-base, the better chance vendors have at getting sensible feature-requests.

blyberg.net - The Rime of the Ancient ILS

UPDATE: why Johnny Librarian can't code, via librarian.net

Previously:
February 25, 2006  the new library - can it provide new technology-based services?

the new library - can it provide new technology-based services?

The information environment within which libraries find themselves is changing, probably
faster than ever before. These changes offer great opportunities for progressive libraries to reach out far beyond the boundaries of their buildings and web sites, and to engage with an increasingly literate body of information consumers.

Amazon, Google, eBay, Skype and the other darlings of the Information Revolution do not threaten the progressive library. Rather, they create whole new opportunities for us to engage with an empowered, interested, and skilled set of audiences.

Similarly, the techniques and technologies that have enabled these new organisations are also suitable for deployment within our libraries, to enhance the ways in which we make our own data work for ourselves and our visitors.

Library 2.0 is a concept of a very different library service, geared towards the needs and
expectations of today’s library users. In this vision, the library makes information available wherever and whenever the user requires it, and seeks to ensure that barriers to use and reuse are removed.

That is one of the clearest explanations I have seen - kudos to Paul Miller of Talis, who starts Library 2.0: the challenge of disruptive innovation (PDF) with the above Executive Summary paragraphs.

I think there are huge challenges that are cultural, not technological.

One challenge is simply the role of the library within the society.  Capitalism is founded on private property.  Libraries exist for communal property.  Talk about your clash of cultures.

The second is that these ideas as expressed by Paul beyond the executive summary are primarily about the transformative impact of technology.  New technology lets you do new things, and maybe requires you to do so in order to remain relevant.

I think this creates a really foundational challenge for libraries.  We have talked in my library about the problem of building new services - too often people are trying to "refinish the attic without having built the foundations of the house first", that is, people want to deploy new services quickly and we have to tell them that they need to build the entire supporting infrastructure first.  And that's not generally something people want to hear.  "We need to get something out now!" is their cry, and we have to tell them "if you wanted to deploy something this year, you should have started laying the groundwork of infrastructure 5 years ago".

Plus which, the foundation of these new services is technology, not librarians.  I can conceptualize Web Services reasonably well, because as a computer science guy, I have a foundation to build on.

Service-Oriented Architecture is in some ways an abstraction on top of an abstraction on top of layers and layers of abstraction... if you don't have the foundational layers, how far can you get?

I'm just saying that we have thought leaders like Paul, Lorcan Dempsey, Stephen Abram and Michael Ridley who are thinking about building Library 2.0 on top of layers and layers of concepts, while meanwhile I daily encounter people who don't even understand how the web works.  People who literally don't understand the interaction between a web browser and web servers. 

You can certainly be an advanced user without needing to know anything about technology, but I'm not convinced you can be a creator, and its creators that we need.  Of course, we also need leaders - people who can convey their vision to the technology and library people, in order to move the entire organization forward.

But I am concerned at the gap between thought leaders, who are talking massive transformative disruption due to technology, and others who are talking safe incremental improvements to existing technology platforms (Library 2.0: it's the OPAC, but users can leave comments!)

Plus which, I believe it's even worse for an academic library, which may depending on its clientele be very journal article-based, which coupled with online availability of articles creates a big challenge.  For public libraries, books remain useful chunks to loan.  In fact, the physical loan model can be extended beyond that - the Ottawa Public Library will loan you a pedometer to measure how many steps you are taking per day, or a kilowatt meter to measure you home energy usage.

Anyway, my thoughts and links on this topic are in my Academic Library Future category (including library role in e-research infrastructure and will changes in library technology and patrons change librarianship?), as well as my librarians should/should not be coders threads (including coder discussion continues and your library needs networked services).

keeping track of your comments with cocomment

coComment is a new service to enable you to keep track of comments you leave on other sites.  Write your comment, click their bookmarklet, and they will keep a copy of the comment.

via O'Reilly Radar

loo 2.0 - washroomquest.com

Washroom Quest, an interactive toilet map [for Toronto], will launch this spring and plans to expand to other Canadian cities depending on demand.

via Dose

VIA rail offering wireless

We are pleased to announce that our wireless Internet service, which has been available on a trial basis for over a year, is now offered permanently on board selected trains.

We are getting closer to achieving our main goal: that of extending our Wi-Fi offer to all our trains in the Québec City-Windsor corridor, thus further developing a service that VIA Rail was the first passenger rail company in North America to offer.

http://www.viarail.ca/wirelessinternet/

It's not free, there are three service plans: per-minute, per-day and per-month.

business wikis, including Canadian Meteorological Centre

A wiki is a Web site that can be edited by anybody who is granted permission. In a business environment, that can mean a workgroup, a department, or even the whole company. The people who access the data and documents in a wiki are also the authors of the wiki, making it ideal for information sharing.

While wikis aren't the best tool for discussions or real-time collaboration, they excel as resources for archiving documents and tracking workflow.

...

about 100 workers at the 250-person Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC), a section of Environment Canada that deals with weather forecasts ..., use a wiki based on the open-source Tikiwiki platform.

...

The Canadian Meteorological Centre was first introduced to the idea of wikis by a physicist who was contributing to Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia and world's largest wiki. He managed to convince his boss of the value of wikis, and the first wiki, based on the open-source Tikiwiki platform, was installed by the IT group. The wiki was at first relegated to a test bed, but quickly proved both stable and popular enough to graduate to legitimate status.

From there it was simply a matter of time as adoption grew. Michel Van Eeckhout, Scientific Programmer Analyst at the CMC, told us that within three months of the initial wiki deployment, eight wikis had sprung up. Van Eeckhout now administers 10 active wikis used by 28 employees, but adds that there are other wikis at the CMC that aren't administered by him. He estimates that about 100 CMC employees use wikis, and that number is growing every day. ...

Van Eeckhout ... told us that people were initially thrown by the idea of a wiki, but once they overcame that, the usefulness of the tool became evident.

from InformationWeek - Wikis At Work - February 3, 2006

Also see InternetWeek story Wikis In The Business World, from August 08, 2005.

What I want to know is, can you actually use a wiki officially in a bilingual government environment, according to the Official Languages and Common Look and Feel rules?  Because one reading of the rules says all content online must be in both languages, which kind of excludes the dynamic creation of unilingual pages.

Google Scholar searches now link to more local libraries

Recently I’ve been working with libraries on something we’re excited to announce for Google Scholar users. Libraries are fantastic repositories of scholarship, and we want to make them as visible and accessible as possible. We’ve just expanded our Library Search program in Google Scholar to help people around the world find works of their interest in local libraries. That program now includes links to libraries in Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland.

If for example you're a student in Sweden searching Google Scholar for [chemistry], you can click the “Library Search (Sweden)” link underneath the book titled "Principles of polymer chemistry" to see the list of Swedish libraries that hold the book. Then just pay a visit to one of those libraries to reserve it. If you’re outside Sweden, you can activate the Swedish library catalog links from the "Library Links" box in the "Scholar preferences" by searching for Sweden.

Google Blog - Global searches go to local libraries - February 20, 2006

via Maxine's Connotea bookmarks (bookmarked link)
I also noticed that Google Scholar results now also link to BL Direct, is that new?  Was there an announcement about it?

interesting upcoming library events

The DigiCULT (digital culture) feed http://www.digicult.info/pages/rss/digicultevents.xml points me to some interesting upcoming library events.  Here are four, which link to more information below:

1. 2006 NFAIS Annual Conference - Content Unleashed: Delivering the New Information Experience
2. SRU Implementors Meeting
3. The Digital Library and its Services
4. Scholarship and Libraries in Transition: A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects

Here's more info about each one:

1 2006 NFAIS Annual Conference - Content Unleashed: Delivering the New Information Experience, February 26-28, 2006, Ritz-Carlton, Philadelphia

A new information experience has been created.  Combined with sophisticated search engines and autonomous agents, the Web has become the dominant worldwide search and retrieval system.  This system not only meets the information needs of its users, but also provides them with a highly satisfactory “experience” - from start to finish.  Traditional information providers - publishers and librarians alike - have offered respected and authoritative content for centuries.  But do the products and services that have been built around that content provide the ultimate in today’s information experience?  Do they facilitate real-time, interactive information exchange?  Do they accommodate multimedia and offer access to analytic and desktop management tools?  Are they continually - and rapidly - enhanced to meet user demands?  And do they provide the enjoyable, multi-sensory, interactive information experience that is the benchmark for acceptance by the new generation of information seekers?

2 SRU Implementors Meeting - ? March 1-2, 2006 followed by Integrators Meeting March 3, 2006 ?, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague, Netherlands.

Those interested may attend either or both. There is no charge for attending, however, attendance is limited: The SRU meeting March 1-2 will be limited to 50 participants; the Integration Workshop will accomodate a few more (75-100). So please register.

...

The theme of the workshop is Integrating Services - Integrating Standards. We hope to answer the question: "What are the next steps towards improving integration of services?" We think SRU will play a central role.

3 The Digital Library and its Services, BL + JISC + UKOLN, March 6-7, 2006, British Library at St Pancras, London, UK

Over the past decade there has been substantial progress in the use and delivery of digital resources. This evolving area has now reached a point of maturity where digital library providers, be they national libraries, universities, or bodies coordinating and delivering distributed national and global services, have begun to identify common service requirements and service frameworks. These emerging digital library services might be delivered in a distributed manner or shared centrally. The core aim of these approaches is to achieve interoperability, ease of access management and use, as well as ways in which to manage digital resources into the future.

The British Library and JISC are both heavily involved in the development of digital library services and joint partnership activities. A key aim of these partnerships is to ensure that learning and research in the UK is supported by the leading-edge digital library technology and access to exceptional content. As a result, this two-day meeting on the Digital Library and its Services is being jointly sponsored by the BL, JISC, and UKOLN to bring together experts to discuss evolving approaches to digital library services and will focus on four major service areas.

• persistent identifiers
• access management
• collection and service registries
• digital preservation

(I did some edits to highlight the service areas.)

4 Scholarship and Libraries in Transition: A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects, March 10-11, 2006, Rackham Auditorium, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

What are the transformative issues and implications that emerge from mass digitization initiatives? How will initiatives such as the Google partnership with academic libraries impact libraries, universities, government, information policy, publishing, and education? What are the professional, social, and economic issues? How will we identify and respond to the challenges and opportunities to shape future directions?

There will be a live webcast of the Scholarship and Libraries conference..