Science Library Pad

finding BBC Radio audiobooks

These are abridged books, usually in five 15-minute episodes (1.25 hours), although sometimes in ten parts.
For unabridged audiobooks, you may be able to get them on loan from your library, usually through the monopoly KKR OverDrive Libby app.

To find BBC Radio audiobooks that you can listen to outside the UK, go to

BBC - Programmes - Categories: Audiobooks - Available now

and then look for only the books that say "BBC Radio" after them.  Books that say "BBC Sounds" are not available outside the UK.

This doesn't cover all of the things you may consider to be audiobooks, as BBC categorizes many of them as "Drama".  The BBC website doesn't provide any way to filter out just drama based on books.  It also doesn't have any way to filter just drama presented on BBC Radio 4 Extra (which is mostly books).

Rather unexpectedly, BBC Radio 4 Extra has usefully collected many murder mysteries (a beloved comfort listen for the British) under "Whodunnits", possibly as a Christmas 2023 feature.

BBC Radio 4 Extra: Whodunnits

Even more unexpectedly, all episodes listed are still available, although they differ a bit in how they're grouped.  In any case see e.g.

• Miss Marple - They Do It With Mirrors, Episode 1 of 5 (2 days left to listen)
• Hercule Poirot - The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, in a single combined show (4 days left to listen)

Dramas are also not consistently named.  Sometimes it's by author.  Sometimes it's by author and book title.  Sometimes it's by character name.  e.g.

• BBC Radio 4 Extra: Dick Francis (author) - "Adaptations of the popular thrillers by the British steeplechase jockey turned crime writer."
• BBC Radio 4 Extra: Jack London - The Sea Wolf (author and title)
• BBC Radio 4 Extra: Miss Marple (character) - "June Whitfield stars as the iconic sleuth created by the queen of the whodunit, Agatha Christie."
• BBC Radio 4 Extra: Sherlock Holmes (character)

UPDATE 2024-01-21: The Book of the Week and Book at Bedtime pages are no longer being maintained.  So even though a book may be a "Book of the Week", it won't show up on the pages below.

• No longer maintained: Book of the Week – BBC Radio 4 – audiobooks, usually in 5 or 10 episodes
  • Note books are only available for a limited time; only books with a speaker icon are actually available online
• No longer maintained: Book at Bedtime – BBC Radio 4 – audiobooks, usually in 5 or 10 episodes

END UPDATE

Omnibus-eses

BBC Radio will -- sometimes -- publish an "omnibus" edition of a book, combining 5 days worth of episodes into a single continuous show.  Inexplicably, they almost never actually link the omnibus to the main page for the book.  The omnibus sometimes shows up on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and now these days sometimes shows up as e.g. "Episodes 1-5" on BBC Radio 4 itself.  There is no consistent pattern or linking.

UPDATE 2023-05-26: For a while BBC Radio 4 audiobooks weren't showing up on BBC Radio 4 Extra as combined omnibus episodes at the end of the week, but now it looks like that is happening again, although maybe mostly for older books being presented again.  END UPDATE

SIDEBAR: Don't use the very similar BBC Sounds - Category - Audiobooks page as it doesn't show which books are BBC Radio and which ones are BBC Sounds.  END SIDEBAR

See also:
January 21, 2024  finding France Culture radio audiobooks

SGC Open Notebook Science - January 2018

On January 19, 2018 the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) launched an initiative for Open Notebook Science at an event supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Wellcome Trust.

Open notebook science is basically the concept that researchers publish their research publicly as they conduct it, with all the challenges and successes along the way.  You can read more in Wikipedia - Open notebook science.

An interesting aspect of the particular model of open notebook science being employed by SGC is the combination of described datasets uploaded to the SGC Open Notebooks community in Zenodo, with links from more general descriptions of activity in a blog platform hosted by SGC.

There was coverage related to the event in various venues:

• eLife - Open notebooks galore: The Structural Genomics Consortium - Jan 19, 2018
• University of Toronto news - Open science: University of Toronto researchers to publish lab notes in real time - January 19, 2018
• Springer Nature - Research Data - Data Dialogues - Open Lab Notebooks to increase impact and accelerate discovery - by Matthieu Schapira - Jan 26, 2018

UPDATE 2018-02-19: Rachel Harding and Aled Edwards discussed open notebook science before the event on the Colper Science Podcast.  ENDUPDATE

Twitter hashtag was #SGCOpenNotebooks

Webcast is available at https://youtu.be/vxoxKVUWsUY

Presentations (including mine) linked in the agenda below.  Note that due to technical difficulties the first few slides of my presentation don't show in the webcast.

09:00 - 09:10	Matthieu Schapira, PI, SGC - Twitter @mattschap Introductory remarks
Session 1 – Chair: Matthieu Schapira
09:10 - 09:30	Aled Edwards, Director, SGC - Twitter @AledMEdwards Scientists and society: striking a new bargain (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158763)
09:30 - 10:30	SGC Extreme Open Science Unit: Carla Alamillo, David Dilworth, Genna Luciani, Heng Zhang, Jolene Ho, Jon Fu Wong, Liz Brown, Mandeep Man, Megha Abbey, Nirav Kapadia, Roslin Adamson, Rachel Harding. Scientific project outlines (5 minutes each) (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158769)
10:30 - 11:00	Rachel Harding, PDF, SGC and open notebook trailblazer - Twitter @labscribbles 2 Years of Open Notebooking; lessons learnt from Labscribbles (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1155846)
11:00 - 11:15	Coffee Break
Session 2 – Chair: Arij Al Chawaf, Director SGC Strategic Alliances - Twitter @TweetsFromArij
11:15 - 11:45	David Carr, Open Research Program Manager, The Wellcome Trust, UK Open Research – a funder perspective (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158767)
11:45 - 12:15	Richard Akerman, Senior Policy Analyst, Environment and Climate Change Canada - Twitter @scilib Open Science in the Government of Canada (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1160435) - also available on Slideshare - starts at 2h35m into webcast on YouTube
12:15 - 12:45	Kelsey Merkley, Open Program Designer, Creative Commons - Twitter @bella_velo Creative Commons CC-BY: opportunities for open (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158765)

Previously:
September 21, 2007  Wired on open data
August 9, 2007  the peer review logo
June 28, 2007  thinking about open science - me being sceptical

Every Blog Its Reader

I did a keynote in 2008 where I said "Every web resource its machine reader", reinterpreting Ranganathan for the computer age.

I want to look back on how we almost built an ecosystem of information for human and machine readers, and then it fell apart.

Below, I will see if I can tell the tale of the decline of the blogosphere and end up with thoughts about the Antikythera Mechanism and scholarly communication.

In 2007, Darren Barefoot wrote in The Tyee about an era that just 9 years later, is totally gone.

It begins:

I subscribe to the RSS feeds for about 175 blogs.

Later down, it says

Technology reporter and uber-geek Tod Maffin runs Inside the CBC. It's kind of an industry blog, in that it covers the world of Canadian public broadcasting...

The Rise and Fall of Inside the CBC

Let's have a look at Inside the CBC now, in 2016

It is definitely not by Tod Maffin, nor does it cover the world of Canadian public broadcasting.  It's more or less what we would call this year fake news.  More specifically, it's a kind of human content written for robots, but not at all in the way I intended.  It's most likely, given the jumble of topics (neopets, skates, weddings in Gatlinburg), a search-keyword-driven tasking of quick content creation.  "Neopets searches are peaking, quick, write something about neopets!"

Which is to say, the ecosystem of interlinking conversations that Barefoot describes in 2007 is quite gone.  It's clear there's some complicated history behind its demise, but for simplicity's sake, here's what we can find from the Internet Archive: by February 1, 2011 the blog has a posting from January 10, 2011 at 8:58 pm.  And that blog post remains, frozen in time at the top of the page until at least January 28, 2013.  By June 21, 2014 the page reads simply "The domain insidethecbc.com is no longer parked by GoDaddy." By December 21, 2014 it has become, rather unexpectedly, a blog in German: "Wir haben ein großes Forschungszentrum mit über 100 Mitarbeitern und Niederlassungen in Übersee und Asien." / "We have a large research center with over 100 employees and branches in overseas and Asia." By September 9, 2016 it has transformed again, writing in (sort-of) English about "The advantage of getting nucific bio x4 coupon codes" and by October 22, 2016 it has settled into its current format.

The long and short of this is firstly, this is a disaster for a "many small pieces, loosely joined" ecosystem, and secondly, without Internet Archive, or even if the current owner of Inside the CBC changed their robots.txt, all of the original site would be gone.

The Other Shoe Drops

The story of Inside the CBC turned out to be more complicated than I thought.  Is it illustrative of the decline of the blogosphere?  Well just seven years after his article in The Tyee, Barefoot is blogging "In 2014, what is my blog for?"

Whither Alexandria?

What has happened?  Well, basically, it turned out that this world of interlinking blogs and feed reading at best fell apart, at worst was deliberately dismantled.

I realise the latter is a more compelling story than the former, but it's a combination of factors.  In the In Our Time episode The Library of Alexandria, we may look to hear again the story of how the library burned, but the conclusion is actually that it really just faded away.  With the rise of the Christian Roman Empire, the old knowledge and the old conversations, the dialogues between the books, just weren't of as much interest any more.

But one of the reasons we still have this discussion about the destruction of the library is because of the reality of so much loss of information.

In Reality Is Not What It Seems (BBC Radio 4 adaptation episode 1, Fiat Lux), Carlo Rovelli tells the history of physics in the conventional way that most western European scientists do, beginning with the Greeks.  In particular, he speaks of Democritus, and of his dismay at the loss of Democritus' original writings.  "We know of his thought only through the quotations and references made by other ancient authors, and by their summaries of his ideas.  I often think that the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of Classical civilization."

SIDEBAR

This formulation of the history of physics is so common that The Big Bang Theory parodies it in episode 3x10, where in order to teach Penny about Leonard's current research, Sheldon will only present the topic by starting with "It is there in Ancient Greece that our story begins..."

The episode is entitled The Gorilla Experiment, it aired in 2009.  It's not to be confused with 7x23 The Gorilla Dissolution which aired in 2014.

ENDSIDEBAR

Consider that while Rovelli is lamenting the loss of writings from 2400 years ago, we are not even doing a good job of maintaining writings from 9 years ago.  In fact, some Internet content is only now available through quotations and references made by other bloggers.

(And its worth noting that when you read this, you probably won't be able to listen to Fiat Lux, because the BBC is only making it available online for another 25 days.  And depending on your local copyright laws, you may not be able to legally view a clip from The Big Bang Theory without having purchased access to the episode.)

Thanks Google and Facebook

It didn't help that Google closed Google Reader.  It's a minor miracle that Google FeedBurner still exists.  The demise of (Facebook-owned) FriendFeed removed a conversation option from the web.  Overall, the ecosystem has shifted to closed commercial services and to search results driving traffic to commercial sites.

Whither Quebec?

If you want an idea of how fragile this ecosystem is, turn to the Elections Quebec page on Electronic Voting.  It used to include four press releases.  These press releases have now been "archived", which in this particular case means removed entirely from the web.  This is what the page looked like September 16, 2016 with the press releases (page from the Internet Archive)

and this is what it looks like now, with no indication the press releases ever were there.

There is nothing insidious about this, this is just standard web procedure - the press releases are from 2006, probably they were rarely accessed, so you run your ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) analysis and conclude that ten years online was enough, it's time for the press releases to go.

But once they go, they're gone.  Are they in the Library and Archives Canada web archive?  Are they in the BAnQ web archive?  It's hard to know.  Neither provides a public search interface that can uncover the Elections Quebec pages.  Without coverage in the national archive, and in the provincial archive, and in the Internet Archive, content that is removed from the web is just simply gone forever.

So this is where we find ourselves.  We have a single main service, the Internet Archive, that depends on private funding and that is attempting to make a backup of itself in Canada.  Coverage from other web archives is unclear and may be nonexistent.  Every day, as websites are reorganised, or content is deliberately removed for various reasons, or websites are simply neglected until the domain expires, our online Library of Alexandria fades.  Not in some blaze of destruction, but more from lost interest, the same as the original.

You might think this is not a problem, because we can get the press releases from the Internet Archive, but it never indexed them.  So for all intents and purposes they are gone now.

SIDEBAR

Because I happened to be paying particular attention to Canadian electronic voting information over the past few months, I was able to recover three of the press releases using a combination of Pinboard, Google and Bing caches.  The search engine caches would have been replaced very quickly, so it's only good fortune that I was able to grab the content before it was lost.

I have also become a bit obsessed about adding manually adding pages to the Archive, which you can do by going to https://web.archive.org/ and pasting the URL into the box under Save Page Now and clicking Save Page.

ENDSIDEBAR

The Loss of the Immune System

Blogging, with its interlinked web of discussions, was a kind of web immune system.  It wasn't perfect, but it was a way to have a conversation, and a way to provide signals to Google about what was and wasn't important, and to some extent, about what was and wasn't true.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get discovered through the network of blogs, to get added to feed readers, to become a new information source.

It used to be possible to blog about a topic and get good Google search ranking, to be discovered through search and thus be an important contributor to the conversation.

This is all basically gone.  Many of the blogs are gone, the blog discovery ecosystem is gone, the feed readers are gone, and Google search rank is very hard to get.

The Post- Era

Here's a quote

For some, this past election year was about the slow death of the current political system.

Can you place it in time? It's from... 1997.  Jon Katz wrote enthusiastically in Wired about how online conversations were going to transform political discourse.

On the Net last year, I saw the rebirth of love for liberty in media. I saw a culture crowded with intelligent, educated, politically passionate people who – in jarring contrast to the offline world – line up to express their civic opinions, participate in debates, even fight for their political beliefs.

...

I watched people learn new ways to communicate politically. I watched information travel great distances, then return home bearing imprints of engaged and committed people from all over the world. I saw positions soften and change when people were suddenly able to talk directly to one another, rather than through journalists, politicians, or ideological mercenaries.

I saw the primordial stirrings of a new kind of nation – the Digital Nation – and the formation of a new postpolitical philosophy.

Jon Katz, in 2016, now writes books about dogs.

So how did the hopes for online conversation and engagement go to the dogs?  How did we get from a postpolitical philosophy to post-truth as the word of the year?

Amusing Ourselves to Death in 2016

2007 may have been the tipping point.  The iPhone was announced in January of 2007.

Sitting in front of a desktop, you have a keyboard and a mouse and a screen.  This drives a certain kind of text-based, highlight-and-insert content creation.

Smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, are terrible at long text and inserting content.  They are great for creating photos and videos.  And so now that's the world we have, the photo and video world. 

All of the signals that we needed to rank and sort and link and discover are gone.  Now it's just bam! image, bam! video.  No context, no links, just endless streams of content.  The web now is, in short, television rather than a library.  And the consequences of this are huge.

In MIT Technology Review, Hossein Derakhshan writes

Before I went to prison [in 2008], I blogged frequently on what I now call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured varying opinions. It was related to the world of books.

Then for six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links.

...

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” (Emphasis added.) And, Postman argued, when news is constructed as a form of entertainment, it inevitably loses its function for a healthy democracy.

In other words, we used to be able to use the web to have a conversation, and now we are basically using the web to amuse ourselves to death.

The blog ecosystem helped to create a kind of web immune system, an immune system that Google could use to surface healthy information.  With that gone, it's no wonder that false news can spread easily.

Finding the Antikythera Mechanism

Science depends on a web of citations, a web of knowledge.  Without a web of knowledge on the actual web, how can we hope to make discoveries and determine what is of interest.  How can we challenge information when we're in our filter bubbles, Facebooking to one another, off of the public web?

In 2008 (remember my talk from 2008? it's way back at the start of this blog post), I thought we might be able to meld human and machine understandings in order to advance the conversation.  I promoted the idea of better formatting information for machine processing, in order that we could benefit from machine-aided search and discovery.

I deliberately chose not to emphasize automatically-generated information.  Depending on the era, I've heard that the Semantic Web would solve discovery, or that OAI-ORE was going to link everything together, or now that Artificial Intelligence and Big Data will discover all connections automatically.

Would that this were so.

In Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Adrienne LaFrance writes

What if other objects like the Antikythera Mechanism have already been discovered and forgotten? There may well be documented evidence of such finds somewhere in the world, in the vast archives of human research, scholarly and otherwise, but simply no way to search for them. Until now.

This is a compelling vision of knowledge that we don't even know that we have, that could be unearthed if we just digitized and translated everything, and then sent our AIs digging for connections.  Maybe Democritus is out there, in some copy of a copy of an Arabic translation.  Maybe this whole lost world of complex mechanical devices is out there on paper somewhere, just waiting to be found.

But there is a pretty harsh collision between that vision and the reality of the web we've created.

We were on a path that might have enabled this scholarly discovery, although probably with a lot more human intervention than techno-utopians would like.  But now we can't even find things from a few years ago.  We were assembling the book-to-book conversations of a new Library of Alexandria, and now we're scraping down the pages like in the Archimedes Palimpsest

This medieval Byzantine manuscript then traveled to Jerusalem, likely sometime after the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204.^[7] There, in 1229, the original Archimedes codex was unbound, scraped and washed, along with at least six other parchment manuscripts, including one with works of Hypereides. The parchment leaves were folded in half and reused for a Christian liturgical text of 177 pages; the older leaves folded so that each became two leaves of the liturgical book.

But we're doing far far worse than writing over thousand-year-old knowledge.  We're erasing completely information from last year, with no xray to recover it.

Which is to say, as much as I love the vision of recovering the lost history of the Antikythera Mechanism, I'm more worried we won't even have a history of last year.

Remaking the Web We Made

This is the web now

The Web of Desperate Popup Intrusion.

That used to be the web of users deciding to subscribe to feeds, instead of being badgered to sign up to email newsletters, or to view ads, or to pay up immediately.

So let's try to unwind some of our mistakes.  Rather than some AI utopia that will unearth lost connections from millenia past, let's deliberately build a human reality of intentional reconnection.  Some suggestions:

• more slow, less fast
• more longform, less shortform
• more blogging, less Twitter
• open your feedreader, not your email
• less reaction to images, more thought about text
• get more sleep
• read more books
• put the smartphone down
• more services that let us pay for them, less ad-supported data-mining intrusion
• more public broadcaster support
• systematic public investment in web archiving
• less closed conversation, more open public conversation
• a more realistic blend of human-created metadata and machine analysis

I will readily admit that I got pulled away into the quick rewards of Twitter from the slow work of blogging.  And it's become a self-reinforcing system.  As blogging and feedreading faded, blog hits and links and comments faded.  Blog rank in Google faded.  Wearing another hat, I wrote 595 blog posts about online voting from 2004 to 2016.  All that work, and (for the particular Google results I see today on this computer), the blog shows up once on page 5 of results for "online voting" canada.  It's hard to maintain one's enthusiasm for 5th page ranking.  It's hard to maintain one's blogging for two web hits a day.

But then I remember I originally started blogging just for myself.  I didn't anticipate my blog would grow and connect in the way that it did for a while.  So I am going to try to get back to blogging, because everywhere I go now, even for the few seconds of an elevator ride, I see people lost in their smartphone screens.  I don't see how we can continue on losing ourselves in those little personalized screens.

Data archiving and sharing - Le partage du savoir - Dominique Roche - Les années lumière

Canada's national French language public radio Radio-Canada has a science show, Les années lumière.

Every episode has some standard segments, including Doc / Post-Doc, which is an interview with a doctoral or post-doctoral researcher.

For February 21, 2016 the researcher was Dominique Roche, specifically about his research on Policies and practices surrounding data archiving and sharing.

You can see his academic home page at Université de Neuchâtel: http://www2.unine.ch/ethol/lang/en_GB/dominique_roche

and his Twitter is @dom_roche

Relevant papers on this topic are:

• Data deposition: Fees could damage public data archives - Nature 502, 171 (10 October 2013) - doi:10.1038/502171a - Published online 09 October 2013 (closed access)
• Troubleshooting Public Data Archiving: Suggestions to Increase Participation - Roche DG, Lanfear R, Binning SA, Haff TM, Schwanz LE, Cain KE, et al. (2014) Troubleshooting Public Data Archiving: Suggestions to Increase Participation. PLoS Biol 12(1): e1001779. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001779
• Public Data Archiving in Ecology and Evolution: How Well Are We Doing? - Roche DG, Kruuk LEB, Lanfear R, Binning SA (2015) Public Data Archiving in Ecology and Evolution: How Well Are We Doing? PLoS Biol 13(11): e1002295. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002295

You can visit the segment page for the Feb 21, 2016 Doc / Post-Doc on Roche, but the JavaScript popup audio player may cause problems depending how your system is set up.

Here is a direct link to a web page that should take you to the specific audio segment, but it requires Flash for playback on desktop computers.

An easier option may be to go to the audio segment in the podcast.  It runs from approximately 36:02 to approx. 43:13.

• direct MP3 link
• general podcast feed link (you'll have to pick the right episode)
• iTunes general podcast link (you'll have to pick the right episode)
• iTunes specific episode podcast link (note that this doesn't always work)

Rebooting the public square with open data and open source

there are myriad categories of raw data that are locked up inside the boundaries of government.  If governments were simply to publish this data, then private companies, civil society organisations, citizens and other government agencies will self-organise to use this data to create public value.  This holds the promise of better, cheaper government.

Don Tapscott - 03m43s to 4m06s

The fifth and final episode of CBC's ReCivilization was "Rebooting the Public Square".  Ignoring the apocalyptic "this is the end of everything we know" tone at the beginning, it looks at the infrastructure of open sharing online (through discussions with Google and Mozilla), open data (through a discussion with Sir Tim Berners-Lee), and the kinds of activities that are enabled in the government sphere (through a discussion with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy).

I think it's an ok starting point for understanding some of the pieces, although there is a lot more to open government than is covered in the segment.  I was disappointed that as a Canadian show there was no mention of Canadian open government initiatives, which include

• national - open.gc.ca and participation in the Open Government Partnership
• provincial - data.gov.bc.ca
• municipal - ottawa.ca/opendata

(More sites are listed on Wikipedia - Open Data in Canada.)

The audio is available as broadcast on the web, there are also extended interviews available.  For those interested specifically in open government, the extended interview with Thomas Kalil is the most informative.  The series is also available (for free) in iTunes.

Twitter:

• @recivilization
• @dtapscott
• @adw_tweets
• @WhiteHouseOSTP
• @ericschmidt
• @MitchellBaker
• @timberners_lee

Previously:
December 30, 2006  Tapscott: turn your organization inside-out
December 28, 2006  Tapscott on collaboration and Wikinomics in the Globe
June 6, 2005  SLA2005 - live, semi-awake blogging of opening session - Monday 9:30 AM (featuring Tapscott keynote)

Carleton Science Café talk on LHC is up

The Large Hadron Collider: A particle smasher designed to answer the fundamental question about our Universe

Listen to the Science Cafe podcast featuring Louise Heelan

View the powerpoint presentation by Louise Heelan

Speaker: Louise Heelan, PhD candidate
department of physics

Minor note: as is often the case, what is just an MP3 audio file is called a "podcast", although there doesn't seem to be any way to subscribe to it.

From Carleton Science Café archives.

A bunch more are coming up, including "Leonardo Da Vinci and his mathematics" on April 22, 2009.

Previously:
March 11, 2009  Large Hadron Collider at Carleton Science Cafe

government and social media - CBC Ottawa Morning reports

Audio from CBC Ottawa Morning (radio) today:

Government encourages employees to experiment with social media (RealAudio .ram file) - February 13, 2009

Covers Government of Canada, City of Ottawa, and Province of Ontario (which is apparently using Second Life a lot).  It's a good report, over 9 minutes long.

A lot of people don't seem to quite get the idea of Enterprise 2.0 - using Web 2.0 on a closed intranet, just to make the operation of your own organisation more efficient.  I guess this is understandable, since most people use these tools to interact in their private lives with their friends.

Got this link via "social media", on Twitter from Nick Charney.

On the side of using Web 2.0 tools, open data, APIs etc. to interact with the public, we're trying to further the planning for ChangeCamp Ottawa - there may be a meeting next week.  See the ChangeCamp Ottawa wiki for more information.

can Canada learn from US open government? - City News reports

Kris Reyes uses the announcement of President Obama's Director of Citizen Participation, Katie Jacobs Stanton as a jumping-off point for discussions of Canadian government and social media, touching in particular on the Toronto-based ChangeCamp.

You can see video of her interview with Mark Kuznicki as well as additional links in a posting on her City News cityonline blog, "All about ChangeCamp".

Incidentally, for those who think one technology kills another, this posting is an example of tech interactions - I saw the end of the story on TV, sent a tweet to Kris Reyes to ask about her blog posting, got her response, and then added info from her blog to this posting on my blog.  New tech adds new capabilities, but it doesn't necessarily replace existing services.

Sidebar 1: Until I read the techPresident posting about Katie Jacobs Stanton, I had forgotten that Google Moderator existed (it's a ranking / discussion site, similar to digg, obamacto, or some features on change.gov)

Sidebar 2: Mark has been pretty busy recently, he was also interviewed by CBC's Spark - "Full Interview: Mark Kuznicki" (Spark is on Twitter as well - sparkcbc) and was part of TVO's AgendaCamp.

science book audio from Ottawa International Writers Festival

Lots of great audio of authors talking about their books, including

• Gwynne Dyer talking about Climate Wars
• Leonard Susskind on Black Holes, October 24, 2008

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.

10 years of Google

TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin had a good segment on 10 years of Google.

You can watch Flash video of it on the site,
they also have podcasts in audio and video flavours.

You can also follow them on Twitter

twitter.com/theagenda

twitter.com/spaikin

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.

The Agenda on Microhoo and the Compute Cloud

The Agenda had their somewhat-usual technology suspects on talking about the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, with a majority of the show devoted to the idea of the "compute cloud" future for computing.  It's quite impressive that they took this fairly technical topic on, and they did a good job of covering it from various angles.

The Debate: The Coming Cloud (switch to the Mark Evans tab for the other discussion) - video is linked from these pages, just click on "Watch video" there

also available as iTunes audio and video - I'm npt seeing it in iTunes yet though

Overall I liked the show, but I would have liked to have seen a cloud computing user, rather than just a panel of pundits.  Show me someone who has moved their enterprise over to Amazon EC2/S3 or other cloud services.  (For example, Internet Archive has been experimenting with this... and I see I'm the top hit for this information: "Science Library Pad: Internet Archive 20th Century Search".  Also SmugMug photos uses Amazon S3 storage.)

I think the future splits into multiple models of computer use.  Gamers, for near-term, need local graphics engines and local storage (holding the multi-gigabyte virtual environments they use).  The intensive computer users like me probably still have their whole elaborate local network and local storage and local computing... well, basically entire personal data centre.  We're probably the only ones left with a lot of non-cloud data and computing.

The digital dividers (old people, poor people, the technically unsavvy) will have very simple devices, something very akin to thin clients - probably in many different form factors - built in to televisions, set-top boxes, things like OLPCs and Eee PCs, "intelligent LCD displays".  The highly mobile will have quite sophisticated but completely mobile devices.  All of the data for both groups lives in the cloud.

This being said, there is a very, very long history predicting the demise of the PC and its replacement with set-tops and thin clients, and it has yet to materialize.  People use a bunch of devices (cell, camera, PDA, laptop) AND their home computers, not instead of their computers.

SIDEBAR: Jesse Hirsh had quite the slag on for the Preventers of Information Services in IT Departments.
First he says home users can't be trusted with personal computers, and then he says work users must be trusted with unlimited use of Internet applications.

It is true that some of the Dr. No aspect of IT is arbitrary, but some of it is either out of their control (layers of regulations imposed from on high), and some of it is related to user support.  IT is about user productivity.  Computer secure, applications running smoothly = happy IT.  If this could be guaranteed through the magic of trusted cloud computing, that would be fine.  But the reality is, users download a bunch of cr*p and access a bunch of cr*p websites, and then IT has to come in and try to clean it up.  That's why IT tries to lockdown.  Lockdown is about being able to guarantee a stable computer, network, and sustainable support experience.

If you want to see what happens in an uncontrolled environment, just let a bunch of consultants into your organisation and let them "manage themselves" and see how well that works...

LimeWire led to data breach: N.L. justice minister

an outside consultant had installed LimeWire, a popular program used to swap music for free, on a laptop computer that was being used to work with data for the Workplace Health, Safety and Compensation Commission.

As a result, information — including names, addresses, dates of birth and medical and work histories — related to 153 individuals was exposed

END SIDEBAR

SIDEBAR 2: A minor quibble with terminology used during the show, Amazon's S3 is cloud storage only, their compute cloud service is EC2.  END SIDEBAR

CNI Fall 2007 presentations, podcast

Lots of interesting material from fall CNI.

An audio interview with Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, Director of Development at the State and University Library in Aarhus, Denmark about the Summa search system and other academic library topics.

Current Experiments & Future Directions in Scholarly Communication - Timo Hannay, Nature

The eCrystals Federation: Open Data Repositories Supporting Open Science
Liz Lyon, University of Bath
Simon Coles, University of Southampton
Manjula Patel, University of Bath

Summa podcast link via DigitalKoans

Previously:
October 26, 2006  the future of the scientific paper and more on open web science (Timo Hannay)
March 31, 2006  presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation (Dr Liz Lyon)
October 11, 2005  ILI2005 - Tuesday 11th - Living with Google: New roles for libraries (Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard)
September 27, 2005  Info Grid 2005 - Tuesday 27th, 09:00 - Developing e-infrastructure to support new research and learning paradigms (Dr Liz Lyon)

the researcher of the future

The picture that emerges from internet research is that
most visitors to scholarly sites view only a few pages,
many of which do not even contain real content, and in
any case do not stop long enough to do any real reading.
This is either a symptom of a really worrying malaise -
failure at the library terminal - or maybe a sign that a
whole new form of online reading behaviour is beginning
to emerge, one based on skimming titles, contents pages
and abstracts: we call this `power browsing’. We
urgently need to understand the root causes of this
phenomenon.

Students usually prefer the global searching of Google to more
sophisticated but more time-consuming searching provided by
the library, where students must make separate searches of the
online catalog and every database of potential interest, after
first identifying which databases might be relevant. In addition,
not all searches of library catalogues or databases yield full-text
materials, and NetGen students want not just speedy answers,
but full gratification of their information requests on the spot.32

It can be said with confidence that librarians do not
currently design information systems around this form of
user behaviour and how best to accommodate it
represents their real challenge. The way forward has to
be via a flexible, `suck-it-and see’ model. Trying things
out in the digital space, monitoring the reaction and
adjusting accordingly. Moving from counting hits to
watching users.

The significance of this for research libraries is threefold:

• they need to make their sites more highly visible in cyberspace by opening them up to search engines

• they should abandon any hope of being a one-stop shop

• they should accept that much content will seldom or never be used, other than perhaps a place from which to bounce

Information Behaviour  of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB) [above from page 31]

Also see press release including audio (MP3, 77min 22sec, 66.3MB)  of launch event.

Other than the fact that "suck it and see" doesn't translate very well or clearly on this side of the Atlantic, it all seems sensible advice.

I guess we should have a new slogan... "The Research Library: Your Trampoline of Knowledge"

via CISTI's Michael Ireland, via CISTI's Frank Oda

Wikipedia death watch?

I didn't even know the Globe had "podcasts".  This one has some thoughtful musings about Wikipedia.

It's all very wonderful, but it's not on a path to perfection.

As for Knols, anyone who thinks Google's initiative is about anything other than the fact that Wikipedia has no Google ads is barking up the wrong tree.

There is a bit of a battle for Wikipedia's soul, between those who are happy for it to be an encyclopedia of everything, like me, and those who want it to be Very Serious Citable Work.  For example, I find it very convenient to go to WIkipedia to lookup Cylon model numbers, while The WikiPowers That Be are beginning to tag such pages fancruft.

SOA and escience info via EDUCAUSE

Ran across a couple items on Service-Oriented Architecture provided by EDUCAUSE:

"Service-Oriented Architecture—What Is It, and How Do We Get One?" by Jim Phelps and Brian Busby in EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2007

And from the Seminars on Academic Computing (SAC) 2007 (August 3-8, 2007)

Session on Service-Oriented Architecture
Charles F. Leonhardt (Georgetown University), Piet Niederhausen (Georgetown University), and Jens Haeusser (The University of British Columbia) - three PowerPoint presentations plus a podcast

The Institutional Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure and E-Research
Clifford A. Lynch - podcast

There is also an EDUCAUSE tag view you can follow:

http://connect.educause.edu/term_view/Service-oriented%2BArchitecture

Previously:
January 30, 2007  report on [EDUCAUSE] Library Future Roles webcast

New World of Open Access - Ottawa - Oct 10, 2007

The University of Ottawa Library, in association with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), hosted a public seminar entitled Open Access: the New World of Research Communication on Wednesday October 10, 2007.

Open Access: the New World of Research Communication

Speakers were Kathleen Shearer, CARL Research Associate; Stephen Choi, MD, FRCPC, Co-Editor, Open Medicine; Christian Sylvain, Policy, Planning and International Affairs Director, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); and Professor Michael Geist.

The presentations are available along with audio

http://web20.uottawa.ca/academic/library/openaccess.mp3

(Note: Although the audio starts out in French, the main seminar is in English.)

There's a webcast as well but I couldn't get it to work.

via Resource Shelf

videos of research both improbable and probable, on TVO

TVO's Big Ideas is one of my favourite shows, a venue for interesting lecturers.  Today's was

Marc Abrahams, editor of The Annals of Improbable Research and one of the organizers of the annual Ig-Nobel Prize ceremonies at Harvard University, discusses the work of scientists and academics that, "first makes you laugh, and then makes you think". Highlights of the lecture include discussions of a study that proves that Kansas is flatter than a pancake and a paper investigating The Forces Required to Drag Sheep Over Various Surfaces.

The second lecture in this episode of Big Ideas is by University of Toronto Zoology researcher Susannah Varmuza who discusses the evolving field of Epigenetics and what research into such things as mouse coat colour is telling scientists about the age-old "nature versus nurture" debate.

Lancet says eat less meat, save the world

The Lancet doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61256-2

Series, Energy and Health

Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health
Prof Anthony J McMichael PhD, John W Powles PhD, Colin D Butler PhD and Prof Ricardo Uauy PhD

Because rapid reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions per unit of livestock production would be technically and culturally difficult in the short term, the prime objective must be to reduce consumption of animal products in high-income countries, and thus lower the ceiling consumption level to which low-income and middle-income countries would then converge.

The headline the Lancet put on the news item was "World meat consumption should be reduced by 10%: less meat means less heat".

The bloody Lancet has an elaborate registration process whereby you name your medical subspecialty and probably at some point your blood type, if you prefer to bypass such things, you can try BugMeNot.

The above article is part of a Lancet Web Focus Series on Energy and Health.

There is also accompanying audio from the 15 September 2007 issue (MP3) as well as from the press conference (MP3, not great quality) that launched the new Web Focus.

The Globe (from Agence France-Presse) reported the story as "Limits on meat eating could keep global warming at bay" on September 13, 2007.

Alvin Toffler interviewed by Allen Gregg

ALVIN TOFFLER
Future Shock. The Third Wave. Two classics that revolutionized the way we think about our rapidly changing world. They established Alvin Toffler as one of the world's most influential futurists. In his new book, Toffler once again takes us back to the future. It's called Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be Created and How it will Change our Lives.

Web Exclusive Preview: Allan Gregg in Conversation with Alvin Toffler

Allen Gregg in Conversation (on TVO) - August 31, 2007

Note: a lot of the links on the TVO site won't work if you have cookies turned off.

Previously:
October 1, 2006  Alvin Toffler on Big Ideas

Talis talks to Peter Brantley

I listened to this on my iPod on my flight to California.  Peter Brantley always has interesting things to say about the future roles for academic libraries.

panlibus - Peter Brantley Talking with Talis - July 31, 2007

Or you can access the MP3 directly.

technology and scholarly publishing: audio of SXSW panel

Ok, they called it

Web 2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing (MP3)

but I refuse to use such buzzterms.  Or to call it a podcast when it's just an audio file. Anyway, it's interesting listening.  The panel members are

Moderator: John Wilbanks Exec Dir of Science Commons, Creative Commons

Matthew Cockerill   Publisher,   BioMed Central Ltd
Melissa Hagemann   Program Mgr,   Open Society Institute
Timo Hannay   Dir of Web Pub,   Nature Publishing Group
Amit Kapoor   Managing Dir,   Topaz

from south by southwest festivals 2007
via Peer-to-Peer

open data and more from Peter and Paul

Both Paul Miller and Peter Murray-Rust have interesting ideas about our changing information environment, so what could be better than the former interviewing the latter?

Peter Murray-Rust Talks with Talis about Open Access, Open Data, Science, and the Semantic Web

via Open Access News

audio interview with Peter Brantley about library service collaboration

a 19 minute [audio] interview with Peter Brantley, new Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation

via EDUCAUSE Connect - gbayne's blog - An Interview with Peter Brantley at CNI's 2007 Spring Task Force Meeting

via ResourceShelf

The main topics as I heard them:

• the challenge of getting libraries to collaborate deeply and meaningfully on technology
• determining what kinds of technology services (network-level services) that libraries can usefully contribute to an already-rich discovery environment
• how to put those kinds of the library collaborations together in a way that includes the ability to sustain and support the new technology services
• the challenge of shifting staff to support new areas of activity

I wonder if I've been using the wrong terminology all this time.  I've been talking and talking about library Service-Oriented Architecture with (as far as I can tell), very little uptake.  And I will be talking about it more in an upcoming presentation and an article in Library Journal, as well one of my colleagues has an article upcoming in a different journal.  It is hard to sustain one's enthusiasm indefinitely however, in the absence of much response.

We already have framework upon framework, but I can't seem to get anyone to talk about how they might inter-relate.  Are there communication barriers?  Terminology barriers?  Resource barriers?  Culture barriers?

I wonder whether we shouldn't really be using language more like "library technology service collaboration" or "library network-level enhancement collaboration".  I think maybe when we say "digital library" or SOA, people say, "oh, that's not me".  But it is.  We're all digital libraries now.  What the whole collaborative library SOA idea is about is more libraries producing and consuming more network services, so that we can all better participate in the online experience.

Previously:
January 30, 2007  report on Library Future Roles webcast
September 26, 2005  Info Grid 2005 - Monday 26th - Deploying Services, Not Libraries