Science Library Pad

a very human assumption

As I explored in in which the OPAC was wrongly provided, there are some fundamental library assumptions that simply don't hold in the digital world.

Librarians think mainly in terms of human-intermediated interactions.  Computer Science people think a lot about computer-to-computer (or machine-to-machine) direct communications using APIs.  Basically, as a CS person, I think computers should do what they're good at, and humans should be freed up to do what they are best at.

Free The Humans!

That's why it's very important not to assume things about what computers can and can't do.  CS people learn that computers are dumb.  Very dumb.  Staggeringly dim.  Anything involving any kind of natural language understanding, any kind of linguistic analysis, many types of visual recognition - computers suck at these.  Like in Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, we learn that in order to get answers OUT of a computer, you first have to put all the answers IN, in incredible detail.  Want a computer to recognize a natural language query?  No problem.  I'll just imagine every possible query variant, and program a decision tree for every single possibility (yes, I did this for an Artificial Intelligence course, in Lisp, for a program that could answer questions about a television schedule).

So the great nemesis: GOOOOOOOOGLE.

Google does relevance-ranked keyword matches against billions of web pages in a fraction of a second.

But that's ALL it does.  Google can only answer questions if you, the intelligent human, have already parsed them into an appropriate set of keywords.  (Other than some very very simple questions that Google can parse.)  If you think choosing keywords is easy, ask an inexperienced Internet search user what keywords they might use.  I know myself that many people without such experience construct queries that I know won't give them good results.

But anyway, think about what this tells us about what Google CAN'T do.  Google can't answer many types of complex questions, or questions that use even basic natural language expressions.  That's why this profusion of AskVille type solutions.  Humans can answer questions.  So let Google do what it does well (and remember "does well" is as defined by the satisfaction of the user, not what you THINK the user should be satisfied with).

But here's the thing: if you let the computers do what they're good at, there are still tons of things for humans to do.  I would argue, more interesting and more creative things, since it's those areas where computers are weakest.  Don't make assumptions about what computers can and can't do, about what processes should be transferred unchanged into the digital world, and about what should and shouldn't be intermediated.  Instead:

1. Redesign online processes to recognize the strengths of computers and the opportunities for non-intermediated machine-to-machine interaction
2. Recognize what computers suck at, and find opportunities for human intermediation there

Second Life, Warcraft, and SOA

Yes, I can relate anything to SOA.

I was thinking about the experience that Steve and I had with Second Life, which is, we went in, we wandered around, but we couldn't quite figure out what it was for.  There was no game.  There was nothing to do.  We were homeless and impoverished.  (Well, I was impoverished.  Steve has six dollars.)

I think the answer is that it was the wrong question.

Second Life is platform, not narrative.

We were tripped up by assumptions, based on our previous experiences and background.  Computer Science people of my generation are used to being outside of programming environments.  In Google Sketchup, you also create 3D objects, but you don't create them from inside of a virtual environment, you create them from the outside, Godlike view.

Second Life is like the blinking cursor on a Commodore 64 screen.  READY, it says, and you don't say "what is the narrative" you say "what can I do with this?"  Second Life is like the Tron version of the C64, where you're inside the computer looking out.  The fact that you're inside the SL environment is what threw my thinking askew.  I'm used to programming environments where you're outside, looking in.  In my lifetime, rich visual interaction (well, as rich as was possible on the technology of the moment) has been mainly used for games.

Second Life is a hammer and nails, not a book.  You don't ask "what's the narrative of a hammer?"  Our difficulty with SL was contrasted with our immediate understanding of World of Warcraft.  WoW meets our assumptions, in that it fits into one of the visual game assumption slots, the "Dungeons and Dragons on a computer" one.  There are only a few types of computer games really.  I won't list them all, but here's resource management like in Civilization, there's first-person shooter like Doom, there's abstract shooter like Asteroids, these are all narratives that long-time computer users of my generation understand immediately.

Second Life is not a book, it's a World Processor.  It's interesting that we didn't immediately perceive Second Life as a command-line prompt, because that certainly would have made things clearer.  I don't expect any narrative from the prompt of my terminal application.

There is actually a whole set of relationships to command prompts that I think is interesting to explore.  (And yes, we are getting to SOA eventually.)

David Brin got a lot of attention in the CS community with his article Why Johnny can't code, and certainly those of us from the TRS-80 / Commodore 64 / Apple II era have been wondering how kids get into computer programming these days, without that flashing prompt of the BASIC programming language.  I had been speculating that "the new coding" was designing levels using game editors (many of the Doom / Unreal type games include editors to create new game environments).  Second Life would be a natural extension of this.  So maybe "Johnny doesn't code, he creates in SL?"

The path for my generation of programmers looks quite different.  Flashing READY prompt.  Then maybe an Adventure game (text-based).  They're related in a twisted way.  Most of the adventure games suffered from a limited and extremely specific vocabulary, which turns out to be the same "suffering" that a computer programming language has.  As we were decoding the syntax of C64 commands and lines of BASIC, we were typing stuff into adventure games like

"open the golden cage"
UNKNOWN

"unlock the gilded cage"
CAN'T PARSE THAT

"use heavy hammer on cage"
UNRECOGNIZED OBJECT "ON CAGE"

"get the ^%$^ bird out of the *%&^&*^% cage!!!"

and so on

Eventually that led to MUDs, and MUDs are a clear lineal antecedent of Second Life.  In MUDs you could also create objects and do programming.  However, I think few people embraced the platform aspect of MUDs, most people used the narrative of the D&D type quest game.  Second Life is sort of like a MUD without the game built yet.

This difficulty between the abstraction of an empty platform and the immediate understanding of
a narrative is evident to me when I talk to librarians and others about SOA (you see I told you I was getting here eventually).  They always say "that's nice, but give me concrete examples".  In the context of this posting, I guess I would say, "Web Services are a hammer, not a book, and SOA is the architecture of the house you could build with that hammer".

In a similar way, this illustrates some of the challenges between the catalogue and the idea of a general open library technology platform.  The catalogue has narrative.  I would argue it's the wrong narrative, with concepts mis-adapted from the traditional librarian-card catalogue-patron world of paper, but it is as least something one can grasp.

The attraction of narrative is probably one of the reasons that Steve and I have been spending way too many hours in WoW, while our visits to SL usually last about five minutes.

In my next posting, I will talk more about how assumptions can create challenges and barriers, specifically about how extending analogue library paper world assumptions to digital can lead to incorrect conclusions.

Tapscott: turn your organization inside-out

Ok, the way he puts it is

Part 5: Platforms for Innovation

This is a very important, key concept.
In fact, let me say it again, with colour and size:

This is a very important, key concept.

This is absolutely foundational, in fact, to understand a lot of the issues that I talk about.

The core is as simple as simple can be: you get more from sharing than from secrecy.
But you have to understand the context of "secrecy".  In many cases, anything that is not published on the public Internet, might as well be in a locked box on a high shelf.  In fact, you might as well print it out, send it to the new Library of Alexandria, and burn down the new library.

The benefits of sharing are so enormous, and the extra overhead so tiny, that I have never quite understood why people don't post more information publically on the net.  My thinking has always been "if I do this for myself, maybe there is someone else out there it might be useful for".  Considering that a page I did for myself as a firewall sysadmin gets over a million hits per year, it appears this concept is valid.

During the time of the Clinton Administration, as reported (in passing) in The River at the Center of the World by Simon Winchester, they turned classification inside out.  Instead of saying "prove this should be declassified", they said "prove this should be secret".  That led to the author of the book getting a map of China that, I suspect, he would no longer be able to get today.

This is the challenge for your organization.  Don't ask yourself "what's the justification for sharing this information on the net".  Ask "can anyone strongly justify NOT sharing this on the net".

I see the most ridiculous stuff go on.  Librarians (and many others) take written notes at conferences, then labouriously transcribe them to a written report, which is then emailed to like two other people and immediately forgotten/lost.

People don't have crystal balls to see within your organization or within your mind.  If you don't share your information, you might as well be invisible.  How's that for a slogan?  "Share transparently or be Internet invisible".  Additionally, these are not the days of late-1994, early-1995 when I first put up a website.  Then an interesting effort was highly visible, because there were so few pages.

There are now billions of pages.  The good news is, you can still rise out of those "foothills".  The bad news is, if you have a search surface, an acreage (hectarage?) if you will, that is tiny, you have very little chance of being noticed.  If your land isn't continually being expanded and improved, in fact, it will probably get little (search engine) notice.  So here's another concept: "Sharing increases your search surface".  In security, we talk about making your "attack surface" or "vulnerability surface" as small as possible.  Internet presence is the opposite: you want to make your Internet surface as big as possible.

I know this is true, because my website and my blog bring me incredible contacts and opportunities that I could never have imagined, despite the fact that both Internet surfaces are often little more than "stuff that I wanted to research and think about anyway, which I'm sharing because there's no reason not to, and someone else may have similar interests".

Anyway, this posting has grown very long, but that is because it is of such critical importance.  Think beyond container to content.  Think beyond content to sharing content.  That is where everything is going to be happening.  That is going to be the new expectation.  If you've seen the controversy in Toronto and Ottawa about private municipal contracts and secret city meetings, that thinking is mired in the past.  Citizens, young and old, are going to be demanding the end to ridiculous, needless secrecy, from their governments and from all other organizations that they deal with.

So what is library Service-Oriented Architecture about?  It is about no more (and no less) than helping libraries collectively to build an open, shared platform, that enables sharing of containers (e.g. books) as well as sharing of content (e.g. articles).

Here's how Tapscott puts it

A growing number of smart companies are learning that openness is a force for growth and competitiveness. As long as you're smart about how and when, you can blow open the windows and unlock the doors to build vast business ecosystems on top of what we call "platforms for innovation."

Because I am a prideful creature, I must say I wrote this entire posting after having read only the first few sentences of Tapscott's article today, it is therefore heartening synchronicity to read

Jeff Barr, who runs Amazon's Web services program says developers and marketplace sellers are "increasing the surface area of Amazon." They add more and more things to sell, in more and more places on the Web. All of this happens in a completely self-organizing fashion, which makes Amazon's already low overhead even lower.

So let's wrap it up with a final combination: library SOA will increase the Internet surface of all participating libraries.

Tapscott on collaboration and Wikinomics in the Globe

Don Tapscott has the great fortune to get not one, not two, but seven articles in a series in the Globe based around his ideas in his new book Wikinomics.

The third article is out today.  I will update this post as the rest come out.

UPDATE 2006-12-30:

Part 4: The New Alexandrians

I wasn't able to extract a lot of meaning out of this, other than

A shared research infrastructure, in turn, allows project participants to harness insights and resources from thousands of university researchers, and hundreds of company researchers, too.

These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology -- breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders.

So keep that thought of shared infrastructure, shared platform in mind.

See next posting for part 5.

ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2007-01-02: The final two articles. ENDUPDATE

Part 3: The Prosumer Revolution - Life game a signpost for future

in Rosedale's business, customers do 99 per cent of the work. His "product" is a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, for short) called Second Life, a fascinating world where more than 400,000 participants socialize, entertain and transact in a virtual environment fabricated almost entirely by its users.

In fact, Second Life residents are far more than just "users." They assume virtual identities, act out fictitious roles and activities and even create virtual businesses that earn some 3,100 residents an average net profit of $20,000 a year.

The end sentence is a bit misleading.  "earn some 3,100 residents (out of a total user base of over 2,000,000)" might have set the context better.  Yes, I'm still bitter that I only have a dollar.

Second Life is no typical "product," and it's not even a typical video game. It's created almost entirely by its customers -- you could say the consumers are also the producers, or the "prosumers." After all, they participate in the design, creation, and production of the product, while Linden Labs is content to manage the community and make sure the infrastructure is running.

It's interesting to see that the "prosumer" terminology continues to gain ground, after being introduced so long ago by Toffler.

Part 2: Ideagoras - A new marketplace for ideas

In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits. In the process, Mr. Lafley and his managers like Mr. Huston transformed a lumbering consumer products company into a limber innovation machine.

I'm all for collaboration and external sourcing of innovation, but make no mistake, collaboration is hard.  Think about how difficult it is for you to communicate ideas within your own organization, to people who already have some common context.  I spend person-weeks every year doing this, with only limited success.  Now imagine trying to extend that conceptual integrity outside of your walls.

Part 1: Peer Pioneers - Get your mass collaboration road map set

Though it is unlikely that hierarchies will disappear in the foreseeable future, it's clear that the traditional business enterprise is no longer the sole engine of wealth creation in the economy.

The quintessential example of mass collaboration is Wikipedia -- a collaboratively created encyclopedia, owned by no one and authored by tens of thousands of enthusiasts.

See, this makes me dubious right away.  Wikipedia is a very finely tuned collaboration engine with an actual number of active contributors that is very small.  Businesses need to be very wary of the idea that they can just wave some collaboration wand and get useful results.

Not part of the series, but effectively Part 0: The Net Generation is entering the workforce

According to New Paradigm's research, N-Geners are used to more choices in their everyday lives than previous generations, whether it's which of the thousand songs they want to listen to on their iPod, or which blog read. They thrive on the freedom to chose, yet are not naive when it comes to the boundless determination of marketers to sell them stuff. They are especially discriminating when it comes to evaluating companies and what they sell, and will not buy from — or work for — one with a poor reputation.

The traditional approaches to planning, decision-making and information transfer are painstakingly slow to this group reared on instant everything. They are incredibly well-connected and can tap into a huge network of their peers, either through their instant messaging contact lists or through social networks. Nothing stays secret for long. N-Geners don't take well to the hierarchical and authoritarian management style; they like to work in teams, collaborate, so that problem solving becomes a communal task. They expect to be involved in decision making.

There is a Wikinomics Blog.

Previously:
November 24, 2006  the Wikinomic Generation

Askville: everywhere a reference, nowhere a librarian

Amazon has gotten in to the Q&A business with Askville

• Guarantee to get Answers - We want to make sure that every legitimate question that is asked on Askville will get at least one good answer.  To ensure this, we are using the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to help provide good quality answers to your questions. 

• Rich Content Answers - Askville allows its users to embed rich content including YouTube/Google videos, Google Maps, and Amazon products in their answers as well as a rich-text editor.  This allows our users to provide a more comprehensive answer leveraging existing content on the web.  In the future, we plan to add more widgets that will help our users create even better answers.

via Askville Blog

I find it really interesting that websites are basically re-inventing library reference, done by non-librarians.  It's also interesting that (AFAIK) libraries themselves didn't come up with a Yahoo Answers or Askville concept.

Is Ask the new Advanced Search?  Is Ask the route to reintermediating reference?  What is your library doing to participate in this area?  Are people more comfortable asking a question of anonymous peers, than of a librarian or other authority figure?

reintermediation?

Dave Pollard has some interesting ideas in The Challenge of Reintermediation.

My comment was that the reintermediated IT professional role he describes sounds a bit like enterprise architect to me.

I do think that "information gathering" is going to be a big challenge to convince people to reintermediate.  Senior managers, who could benefit most from the time-saving, are too aloof to either surf the web or to request this kind of information service, so they operate in a perpetual information vacuum.

The rest of us are quite content to take a bit of time to surf the web on our own.

Remember the challenge of "switching cost".  People will only switch to a new service if you can demonstrate that it is DRAMATICALLY better than the previous one.  That's why we have settled on CDs/MP3s DVDs/Divx Windows 2000/XP Google.  It's good enough.  There are billions of dollars trying to move us to AAC and super audio CD and HD-DVD and Windows Vista, and you can see how successful that has been.  Now you're going to try, without billions of dollars, to move me from Google to a human intermediated search?  I don't think so.

the service of discovery

a quote from Tom Sanville, Executive Director of OhioLINK. Sanville is interviewed on pgs. 56-58 of the September 2006 issue of Against the Grain. He says:

We need to consider a total rearrangement of how we do things and certainly think about our priorities and their relative importance. We are probably paying a lot of attention to the wrong things - old things and ideas that have been successful for us, but will not keep us successful. We need to connect with where and how our users are starting their Web activity, not where we’d like them to start…In a search engine dominated world, we have to apply a massive amount of effort and resources into changing this or recognize our three important priorities to building our services: 1. discovery 2. discovery, 3. discovery. If our users don’t find us or what we provide in the first place, end of game.

via ACRLog - Good Quotes To Think About

in which the OPAC was wrongly provided

Perhaps you have heard this expressed already, but I haven't seen it put this way, and it helps me to frame the issue.

Libraries used to do two things:
- librarians talked to patrons
- librarians used the catalogue

then the Internet came along, and they decided patrons should use the catalogue online

MISTAKE

There are two things libraries need to support in the Internet environment
#1 patron access to library services
#2 advanced patron and external system access to library data and services

#1 is belatedly being attempted with layers on top of the catalogue, like Endeca
Personally I would have just said to Google "make me a website that will return relevant results to my patrons from my catalogue data, and link to the appropriate ordering pages", but since libraries have a hate on for Google, that's basically what they're cooking on their own with Lucene.

Anyway, #1 seems to be understandably the current number one library obsession, and I'm not going to say it's trivial, but it certainly appears technologically straightforward. Step A) rescue your data from its catalogue prison - suck it out somewhere that modern technology can be applied to it. Step B) apply modern off-the-shelf search technology to it.

I'm not even sure you need to do Step B. Step B could equally be "let every search engine in the world index it with appropriate links back to my library, and some way for patrons to identify what geographic location or specific libraries they are interested in".

#2 gets more into the Service-Oriented Architecture areas that interest me. I don't think libraries ever really thought much about machine-to-machine communication of data and provision of services. Even Z39.50 works in the library world something like a) librarian formulates search b) search sent by Z39.50 c) librarian analyzes results of search and e.g. uses for copy cataloging. That is to say: humans. Always humans.

So while I think getting data out of the catalogue is an important first step, there is much more to making a full SOA for libraries, at least one that won't be DOA. Think about

* how can you expose your data for use by other people and machines - microformats? REST interfaces? Web Services?
* how can you expose your library services ("request ILL", "please purchase this book", etc.) for similar use by other people and machines?

I think considering the above issues will lead you to conclude that either your library individually, or all libraries in general, need to do a service-oriented analysis of their business functions and data.

Previously:
December 5, 2006 but how does SOA fix my ILS?

Operator - microformat detection for Firefox

Mozilla Labs [has released] Operator, a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. Operator demonstrates the usefulness of semantic information on the Web, in real world scenarios.

Mozilla Labs Blog - Introducing Operator

via Just a Gwai Lo

PLoS ONE launches with document meta layers and linking

I think if anyone can figure out how to do annotation well, that will be a killer app, but so far there is no "YouTube for annotations".

Most of the PLoS content is not very accessible/interesting to me, but I did explore Concentration of the Most-Cited Papers in the Scientific Literature: Analysis of Journal Ecosystems. PLoS supports both annotations and discussions.

As well, many (but not all) of the reference have a "find this article online" link. As far as I can tell, it parses the link up into a format it can pass to PubMed or Google Scholar. So for example

Garfield E. (2006) The history and meaning of the impact factor. JAMA 295: 90–93.

has a link

http://www.plosone.org/article/findArticle.action?author=Garfield&title=The history and meaning of the impact factor.

presumably if you want to hack, err, "mashup" PLoS findArticle, you just have to pass it an appropriate author= and title=

When you click the above link, you get yet another PLoS page, which says

The article may exist at:

* PubMed/NCBI
* Google Scholar

which seems like a rather click-heavy way to get to a result set.

The links it constructs are

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Garfield%5Bauthor%5D+AND+The history and meaning of the impact factor.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&safe=off&q=author%3AGarfield+%22The history and meaning of the impact factor.%22

Is it just me or are we maybe not leveraging the full richness of article metadata here?
As far as I can tell, PLoS ONE knows nothing about OpenURLs, or resolvers.

via Open Access News - PLoS ONE launches

Web Services for Learning Object Repositories

Via SlideShare I discovered Web Services and Semantic Web for the Next Generation of Learning Repositories by Stephen Downes.  I was attracted to it because it uses one of the NRC presentation templates.  (UPDATE 2006-12-21: The presentation is from 2002, it discusses the creation of eduSource Canada.  I don't know if there has been any work on it recently, after the project finished in 2004. http://www.edusource.ca/ )

Considering that Stephen is working on topics of interest to my group, and the fact that we're in the same organization, we really should probably meet and talk sometime.

Does everyone else have the same experience of only finding out what your organization is doing from surfing the web, not from internal communications?

how to geocode Wikipedia entries for Google Earth display

The Google Earth User blog describes how to code your Wikipedia entry to appear in the new Geographic Web layer:

Editing Wikipedia Layer Content

via Google Earth Blog

I think we are going to see more and more of these kinds of cross-linkages.

Google Earth now supports NMEA, GPX

Release notes:

    * Real-time GPS tracking using NMEA (Plus, Pro and [Enterprise])

Major fixes since last beta:

    * Numerous GPS fixes (including GPX import)

Windows and Linux - version 4.0.2693, Mac - version 4.0.2694

This is a major update to the GPS support, which was previously Garmin/Magellan only.
The only option for NMEA support before was to use EarthBridge with a serial interface on Windows, with no option whatsoever on Mac.

It's not being pushed as an automatic update yet, you have to download it (the beta will download by default).

via Google Earth Blog

my presentation on SOA and BPEL for Access 2006

My presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/library-web-services-for-discovery-and-delivery-of-scientific-information

Bookmarks from within the presentation, with some corrections and additions, available at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/access2006akerman

The audio of the presentation is at

http://www.access2006.uottawa.ca/2006-10-13-07-akerman.mp3

Overall, I thought it was well-received, but I still don't think most libraries are thinking beyond adding a few Web Services.  The main focus for library technology seems to be around the catalogue and adding layers on top of it, not breaking it apart into services.  There still seems to be limited concrete action in working on library SOA to integrate with the various frameworks that are out there.

If we can't fix the ILS, maybe we could work on a smaller group addressing issues related to journal article repositories?  I didn't even touch on the Fedora Web Services and workflow support in the above presentation.

I basically continue to be concerned about a lot of diverging wheel-reinvention activities, rather than seeing a lot of unifying activities starting to deliver good models and services.

Previously:
October 15, 2006  SOA BOF - links and thoughts

Sidebar:
This is not as-presented, this is a previous version, the reason being that somewhere between Windows PowerPoint 2000 SP3 and Mac PowerPoint X, the clickable weblinks got completely munged.  Wedged to the extent that even when I try to fix them in Win PowerPoint 2000, it won't let me save the changes.

I don't know if this is related to some bizarre Microsoft limitation, or to some Win-Mac interchange bug, or to a Mac specific bug.

Plus which I got an exciting SlideShare error when I tried to upload: "Camping Problem! SlideLoader::Controllers::Upload.POST"

more on flying and carbon offsets

CBC Radio One's The Current has a report Christmas Commercialism and Ethical Travel (MP3) as part of The Best of The Current Podcast.  The information starts at 16:20 in.  They interview George Monbiot, author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning.  He basically says you should fly very rarely if at all.  He doesn't like carbon offsets.

Considering that travel is the main thing I look forward to each year, I will continue to fly anyway.

I do think if you're flying purely for a quick beach vacation, or if you're flying for a single business meeting, you might want to re-consider.  But you also need to think about the big picture of your carbon emissions.  Ultimately it's whatever is possible for the whole of your life, not just each aspect considered narrowly.

So after looking at various sites in my previous posting airlines and everything with built-in carbon offset,
I have decided to use Green My Flight to purchase my carbon indulgences.

Itinerary:
OTTAWA - YOW to HALIFAX - YHZ: 955.7 km
   
Total Distance: 1911.4 km
Total Emissions: 259.8 kg
Program Cost: $7.00

CopyScape

I don't know how widely-known this tool is, I've used it for a couple years, it's basically just an easy way to identify other sites that have text duplicated from yours (which may be legitimate fair use)

http://www.copyscape.com/

thinking about SOA and Web 2.0

Some interesting thinking from FastForward blog

SOA is about enterprise efficiency. Web 2.0 is about individual empowerment.

For Web 2.0 projects, the operative term is ‘just do it.’ For SOA, build a business case first.

In a way, this tells you that if you don't have an enterprise, you don't need to be as concerned about SOA.  But that then also tells you about scale.  So SOA may not be a good match for some individual libraries, but it may be a key methodology for efficient resource sharing in the overall system of libraries.

Curation and Access services

I just ran across the C21st Curation: access and service delivery lecture series.
Slides and audio are available.

Some of interest to me:

Curation and Access for Scientific Research
  British Library
  Neil Beagrie

The Digital Revolution - and service delivery in national institutions
  National Archives
  Natalie Ceeney

Scholarly communications and the role of researcher funders
   Director of Communications & Information, ESRC.
   Astrid Wissenburg       

Scholarly communication- Trends and Developments
   Head of the Scholarly Communication and Innovation Support at the British Library
   David Brown

Note: the Epic 2015 "Museum of Media History" link given in the last presentation no longer works, it should be http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/  Link via Wikipedia - EPIC 2014.  I found it a bit of a slow watch, and their predictions go rather rapidly awry, at least at the detailed level.

my Web 2.0 presentation to InfoConference

Here's a presentation I did on a few Web 2.0ish topics, with LibraryThing as an exemplar

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/web-20

You may want to click on the "full" icon (lower right of the presentation) in order to get the fullscreen view.

Interestingly, SlideShare uses Amazon S3 for storage.

The presentation was given to a CISTI internal event, our yearly InfoConference for information specialists.  It was originally done in Keynote 3, exported to PowerPoint for the purposes of SlideShare import.  In uploading it, I was as usual reminded of my difficulty in tracking as-presented files.  By the time it's gone through various drafts on various local and network directories, circulated in email a few times, and passed through a laptop and USB drive or two, it's a wonder I can still find the file at all, let alone know which version I actually presented.  This one has been very slightly redacted to remove some internal info.

The main points of the presentation were:

1. it is difficult to predict the future
2. Web 2.0 is very new (about 5 years old at most)
3. we can extract some basic characteristics of Web 2.0 applications, as demonstrated by LibraryThing

http://www.librarything.com/

These characteristics are:
- a personal or person-centric nature ("your library")
- user created/generated/submitted content ("add books")
- novel, informal description and discovery tools ("tags" / folksonomy)
- recommendations generated based on human-generated content and relationships, or human intentionality ("pssst")
- social networking ("ratings, reviews, shared books")
- open, active participation (discussion groups, easy inward linking)

4. In addition to text, audio and video, there is a new type of data being added to the web: geographic information.
4a. As a secondary note, the patterns of the (now over 6.5 million) geographically tagged photos tell us something about the profile of active web users - the Flickr map of photos

http://flickr.com/map

to me bears a striking resemblance to the classic "earth at night" satellite view, and I have also seen this pattern in Google Analytics maps of web traffic.  It seems that it is mainly in the developed world, in Canada, the USA, Europe and Australia, that people have the free time and wealth to be able to afford to participate in these kinds of peer production activities.

5. Web 2.0 is also opening up science to the public - I give four examples of projects that invite public participation.
5a. As a secondary note, these projects have a relationship to the Amazon Mechanical Turk concept - it turns out that there are many tasks for which a crowd of humans is dramatically better than machines (artificial intelligence).  Humans are particularly good at visual recognition tasks.  There is a general Web 2.0 idea I think, that people (if you have a big enough crowd) are better in some sense at producing content, relationships, and certain types of analysis than machines.  Machines are better at some classes of meta-analysis, e.g. deriving recommendations by data mining Amazon user intentionality.

6. Blogging is growing tremendously (in fact, all Web 2.0 graphs seem to have a sharp upward curve).  That means a lot of junk, but also a subset of valuable content, including serious scientific content.

Although not covered in the presentation, I also think Second Life and World of Warcraft (WoW) tell you a lot about the kinds of efforts that people are willing to put into online activities.  To me WoW indicates that people will actually tolerate a very high level of complexity and tremendous time investment, if the (perceived) reward is very high.  (WoW has over 7.5 million paying subscribers, far outstripping other online 3D environments.)

are you #1?

Wise thoughts from Library Geek Woes

how realistic is it to try to be the #1 stop, virtually, for our patrons?

It's not. The world(s) of our customers does/do not revolve around us, no matter how much we might wish it so. Online, the competition is even more mind-boggling than offline. Libraries have been slow to realize that they can't compete with Google (Really. They can't. Let's move on.). Now some libraries believe that they can compete with the likes of Yahoo! as an Internet portal, or create online communities to rival those of Digg or MySpace. This is a result of misguided thinking and not understanding the current, crowded market. New social tools and communities are born every day (check out Mashable), and they have better programmers and bigger budgets and they still can't compete with the bigger services.

What I find amusing/sad is the obsession with Google and "beating" Google.

Next time you use Google, measure the amount of time you're on their site, before you've clicked away to the page that interests you.  5 seconds?  Less?  This is what we're concerned about, 5 seconds of someone's attention at the beginning of a search?  Wouldn't you rather be a high-ranked, useful search destination, or link to your content from other high-ranked search destinations (e.g. Amazon)?

I don't have a problem with Google.  Google sends me thousands upon thousands of visitors per year.

The library problem with Google is that libraries know jack about getting good rankings.  And no, you don't need SEO bulls--t to get good rank, you need lots of good content, frequently updated, that's easy for Google to index.

It's ridiculous that I, writing my little blog, outrank my entire 300-person organization in a search for canada library science, but I do.  That's not a failure of Google... hmm, who does that leave...

#9 Science Library Pad: Canada library building in Second Life
Science Library Pad. Thoughts on the use of technology and other issues for ...

#10 Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
CISTI, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, is a science library and a world leader in document delivery for all areas of science, ...

LGW link via LIS News

a couple new blogs

As always, new-to-me

1 Brian Kelly is the UK Web Focus
one might wonder, where is his web presence?

behold http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/

2 Some interesting thoughts about libraries and IT from Alexander Johannesen (currently at the National Library of Australia) in his old blog and new blog

Gartner Emerging Tech Hype 2006

This is way old news, but I just got around to checking it today, so it's new to me.

Gartner's 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle Highlights Key Technology Themes

They are all about Web 2.0 and something-driven architecture.
If you want to see the actual chart, there are copies at Geospatial Semantic Web Blog.

There's some thoughtful words about Enterprise 2.0 at EarlyStageVC (via Infectious Greed)

Enterprises have two core attributes that do not exist as widely in the public web -- purpose and accountability.   So 'empowerment' and 'collective intelligence'  are not end points.  Nor are 'discovery,' 'networking,' nor 'sharing.'   These are embedded in processes and are methods for creating context to purposeful transactions.

...

only a tiny community of developers have built Web 2.0 apps using AJAX, ROR, or LAMP.  It is really just a few thousand people -- and very few work in large enterprises or ever will, again.   So how will the Enterprise 2.0 apps get built?  I doubt it is from a startup like Jotspot who has no business process expertise nor business data management expertise.  I doubt it is Oracle or SAP who pride themselves on selling Sherman Tanks as radiation-hardened compact cars. The users will build Enterprise 2.0 apps, not the vendors.

The question is who will "get it" first?

Previously:
September 03, 2005  Gartner Hype Cycle 2005

UK Research Reserve

An interesting idea for "resource sharing" (as the library terminology seems to be).

The role of the UKRR would be to provide a venue for coordinated reduction in collection sizes, for securing the future of the higher education 'collective collection', and to provide ongoing access. The idea is that at least 3 copies of any item would be kept, one at the BL and one each at at least 2 other libraries who would agree to commit to long term retention.

...

This is a natural evolution for the British Library. In her presentation to the meeting, Jan Wilkinson, of the British Library, discussed the decline in revenues from document supply, and how they looked to the UKRR as a way of replacing those revenues.

(The latter point being of interest as CISTI is also a leading doc del provider.)

see UK Research Reserve Update [pdf] for details

via Lorcan Dempsey - Research Reserve

the Internet, it's made of people

Time puts it rather generously: Man (err, Person) of the Year 2006?  You.

This paragraph is awesome

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

The usual suspects like Second Life are reported upon, as well as the required "this bubble is different" story: Web Boom 2.0

You know what people always say during a bubble?  "You don't understand, it's different this time."

I'm sorry, you can dance whatever 2.0 dance you want, but you can't change the laws of economics.  If you don't make any money, you can't stay in business.  There is no Money 2.0

BusinessWeek is rather more mercenary about it: Best Idea of 2006?  Free labor.

The year 2006 may well be remembered as the annus mirabilis of free work. Whether it comes from open-source developers, obsessive fans, angry customers, or lonely Web addicts looking to burnish their egos with a little attention online, businesses have learned how to leverage the gratis workforce as never before. So much so that futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler argue that “prosuming,” or creating what we consume, is restructuring the economy by funneling free money from the hidden economy back into the mainstream one that economists track.

via The Toronto Star - Tasty reads from the newsstand - December 17, 2006
The prosumer concept seems to be having a resurgence.
I mentioned it in my review of The Long Tail.

Rethinking Resource Sharing: Get It

Somehow this managed to fly beneath my radar, it looks like because it's people talking document delivery / ILL language to other librarians, rather than people talking Web Services to library IT people.

Here's what I discovered

A browser plugin which annotates web pages with links to “getting” options for published resources held by libraries

The GET-IT plugin scans web pages for book-like resources and attempts to annotate the page with “getting” options provided by libraries, tailored where possible to the user.

from Kent Fitch's presentation A New paradigm for “getting” (PowerPoint) from Libraries Australia Forum 2006 (LAF06)

I have to express some mild annoyance, mixed with hope, to read statements like

Mission of the [Resource Sharing] Initiative

* Create a new global service framework that allows individuals to obtain what they want based on factors such as cost, time, format, and delivery.
* This framework will encompass promoting and exposing library services in a variety of environments.

from presentation Rethinking Resource Sharing (PDF) by Candy Zemon, given at NISO Workshop Discovery to Delivery, November 3, 2006.

A "global service framework", hmm, where have I heard that before, it's almost as if they want to build an architecture based on services, how shall I put it, a sort of "Service-Oriented Architecture".

No offence to librarians, but if you want to build an SOA, how about actually calling it an SOA, and working with the Web Services and SOA working groups?  Does everything have to be a separate initiative with a giant Steering Committee that uses special language ("Resource Discovery") so that no one outside knows what they're talking about?

Why can't we all get along?  And speak a common technology language?

Isn't the Get It button already used by OpenURL resolvers?  Is this going to make things simpler, or more confusing?  Are the LibX people involved?  Are we going to end up with a bunch of competing browser extensions?

Apparently you can attempt to find some information starting points at
http://www.ala.org/rusa/stars/

Here's my modest proposal:

1. Let's have a single, shared set of terminology and a single, shared library Service-Oriented Architecture

2. Let's make one high-functionality browser extension and lobby Microsoft, Firefox et al. to have it included in the default installs