Science Library Pad

in the age of geoinformation

You may wonder what interests me about automated geotagging of photos using a GPS.
There are a couple things.
One is that I can see the tracks of where I've walked (or ridden on the train, or flown).
The other is that I can learn more about what I photographed.

I'm walking around Paris, I see a church with a motto GLORIA DEO * PAX TERRAE

That's cool.  Snap a photo.

I have no idea what church it is.

Get home, georeference it automatically, and now I'm in Google Earth

So that's cool, now I know where I was, and I can see the beautiful cross-shape of the church.
But what church?
Turn on Geographic Web... no help.
Turn on Google Earth Community... aha!

It's the E‰glise Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet (website, Wikipedia).

In a sense, physical objects can now tell you about themselves, as in Vinge's Rainbows End.

But it's quite a delayed process.
What I should be able to do is load my phone or camera's multi-gig memory up with map info (or download live info, if I didn't have outrageous data charges) and do this in real time.  But unfortunately Google Maps Mobile seems to have no concept of running as a nice generic Java mobile app that can talk to my GPS (e.g. on my K790 phone using Bluetooth GPS), Google Maps Mobile instead is all locked up with specific carriers and phones, and I don't think it will let you download maps in advance.  j2memap for some reason only pulls in satellite views, not street name views or enhanced geographic info.  Hmm, if only I had a chance to talk to someone at Google...

(This posting for Colin, geothinking author.)

More info and thoughts along these lines in my Mapping category and on my geocoding photos page.

georeferenced crowdsourcing network - Ogle Earth speculates

Daily Wireless excerpts a Newsweek article that struck me: Both Tele Atlas and competitor NAVTEQ already employ hundreds of "road warriors" in the field to gather data that satellites can't catch: traffic signs, one-way streets, points of interest...

"At the end of the day, there's no substitute for going out there and capturing the real world ourselves," says Navteq CEO Judson Green.

How to scale that? Build a crowdsourcing network, so that others can capture the real world for you — using devices that companies like TomTom (and Garmin, and Nokia) can build.

Geospatial crowdsourcing already has a impressive working example: OpenStreetMap.org, where you can (manually) upload your own GPS tracks to create a collective world road map or edit existing data. And now it turns out that Google has been piloting something similar in India

...

This is where this week's under-reported acquisition plays a part: Nokia bought Twango. Twango is a media sharing web application for mobile devices. Unlike its main competitor Shozu, which offers to forward your media to your web sharing app of choice (such as YouTube, Flickr and others), Twango wants you to store all your media in one place, on its servers, and share it using its URLs as a destination. With Twango soon installed by default on new Nokias mobiles, Nokia will be making a play to capture the generated media of its hundreds of millions of mobile phone users, so that network effects are its to dispense — with uploaded videos and photos providing eyeballs to advertisers.

from Ogle Earth - The human sensor web

UPDATE: Via Map Room I see there was also a recent New York Times article With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking

On the Web, anyone can be a mapmaker.

With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos.

data-driven science - Lee Dirks - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

Lee Dirks - Director, Scholarly Communication - Microsoft
"Open access, data-driven science & the impact on research communication"

* basic research ACTIVITY unchanged
  but output options dramatically changed
  - blogs
  - wikis
  - scholarly journals
  - IRs
  - discipkine repositories
  - podcasts

Current Issues vs. Anticipated Trends

* OA to scientific content, specifically data, will become the norm

* international cross-discipline research facilitated by interoperable standards

* "evolved" methods of peer review will be adopted

* preservation of data will become a requirement

* services develop around scientific content and prevail over pure publishing
  - data analytics, publishing workflow tools, long term storage/access

EDUCAUSE "Horizon Report" 2007 - for higher education IT in USA

* key trends
  - academic review and rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship
  - the notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship
* critical challenges
  - assessment of new forms of work
  - isses of IP and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done

OA momentum

... S.2695

Blogging
- example: useful chem
- recording experiments that fail

Wikis for Sharing Lab Protocols
- example: OpenWetWare

Bookmarks
- example: Connotea

IR
- 1400+ repositories worldwide

Influence of IRs

http://www.webometrics.info/top3000.asp

The Promise of Data Sharing

PLoS article - Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate

"this is going to radically change science"

ISSUES
- data integration and interop
- annotation
- provenance & quality
- exporting/publishing in agreed formats
- security

"an aspect of competitive differentiation"

Publications as Live Documents

MS will have some results on this later this year

* helps with reproducibility if you can get to the raw data, simulations etc.

Trend: The Rise of Mass Collaboration

* Novartis released all its raw data on genetics of type 2 diabetes

[missed the end of the presentation]

blogs, wikis and libraries, oh my

LITA BIGWIG (Blogs, Wikis, and Social Software IG) is pleased to present the first ever online, unconference at ALA Annual 2007. The Social Software Showcase will be occuring around and during Annual. We have gathered eleven librarians and leaders in the field to present on cutting edge technology and social software. Regardless of where you are in the world, you will have the opportunity to view and discuss the presentations on the official Social Software Showcase Wiki.

...

We will have a Twitter feed

http://www.twitter.com/bigwig

More great work by libraries adopting and promoting new web technologies - I have to say I'm impressed by the speed at which things are moving.

from LITA Blog - Social Software Showcase, sponsored by BIGWIG

The presentations aren't up yet, but they will be by the time ALA gets underway at the end of June.

Trendwatching: Still Made Here

The always colourful and engaging Trendwatching has their latest report: (Still) Made Here.

If everyone starts to report the full lifecycle (transportation included) carbon amounts in their products with carbon footprint labels, it may help to promote the Buy Local movement.

via OCLC It's all good

future of tech and libraries

The Shifted Librarian has lots of blogging from the "Future of Technology and Libraries" meeting.  You can start at

"The Future of Technology and Libraries" Meeting - Thursday May 17, 2007

and read forward.

soft peer review

Via Library 2.0 - Social Software and New Opportunities for Peer Review, I find a fantastic posting about the many different ways in which formal "hard" peer review can be enhanced by open web technologies:

Academic Productivity blog - Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation

Although I don’t think social software will ever replace hard evaluation processes such as traditional peer review, I suspect that soft evaluation systems(as those made possible by social software) will soon take over in terms of efficiency and scalability.

This is very much the position I took in my submission to the Nature peer review web focus, and which I will be re-emphasizing with a community-interaction angle in my upcoming Allen Press Seminar presentation.  I really like the comprehensive view that Academic Productivity has taken in looking at the many types of peer evaluation that can be provided on the open web, and the call for more APIs exposing more data for all of us to use.

I do think the debate about "open" peer review vs. traditional peer review is a bit of a red herring, and it very much concerns me when people suggest that open review can replace traditional (or in the language of this posting "hard") peer review.  We have already had open peer review for years, it's called preprint feedback, mailing lists, ArXiV, letters to the editor... it's a tremendous addition to, but not replacement for, the rigourous anonymous peer review system needed to provide a publication filter.

Tech to Watch in 2007 Horizon Report

They identified six technologies with time-to-adoption of between one and five years.
In addition to their analysis, they provide a useful list of web links for more information on each topic.

UPDATE: Probably I should link to the report (PDF). ENDUPDATE

Of most interest to me was "The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication".

New forms of scholarship, including fresh models of publication and nontraditional scholarly products, are evolving along with the changing process. Some of these forms are very common—blogs and video clips, for instance—but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. Some scholars worry that blogging may cut into time that would otherwise be used for scholarly research or writing, for example, or that material in a podcast is not as well researched as material prepared for print publication. Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research—a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work.

I also found it interesting that they separated "Virtual Worlds" (e.g. Second Life) from "Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming".  I think these categories are too often combined, whereas I find they are quite separate experiences, as I described in Second Life, Warcraft, and SOA.

As with last year, they had a Horizon Project Wiki

http://www.nmc.org/horizon/wiki/Main_Page

They also have tagged bookmarks in del.icio.us under hz07, and invite others to add to their tagged collection

http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07

via Stephen's Lighthouse

Previously:
February 26, 2006  New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE 2006 Horizon report

the future: plan for uncertainty

Via Steve I find a good Library Journal article by Roy Tennant

Facing the Not Knowing - January 15, 2007

We need to become comfortable with the not knowing. We need to foster personal and professional strategies when things don't go as planned.

He makes a number of very good points, of which I think "If it doesn't have an API, it's not worth having" is a particularly important one in the library world.

JFK on the pace of technological change

I happened to be watching the JFK Moon Speech last night, and I was struck not by his famous lines ("We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard") but by the fact that a politician was using his bully pulpit to actually try to explain history and science, and to be thoughtful and inspiring about the implications.

Is it just me, or does no one, least of all politicians, do this any more?

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them.

Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.  Newton explored the meaning of gravity.

Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

I have tried to put forward a similar position on Web 2.0, which basically, we developed two days ago.
As JFK says

This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers.

I for one welcome our Robotic Microsoft overlords

Microsoft Robotics Studio

Robot + Microsoft software = chills of fear up and down my spine

I'm sure they'll get that "kill all humans" bug worked out of the robotics laws subroutine any time now

Bill Gates wrote an 8 page article for the January 2007 Scientific American called (I am not making this up) "A Robot in Every Home".  Yes, you read that right, January 2007, not January 1957.

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

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?

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.)

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

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

 

IT directions for National Library of Australia

Libraries, IT and Everything
Mark Corbould
Assistant Director-General
Information Technology
National Library of Australia (NLA)

presented at Library and Archives Canada (LAC)
December 15, 2006

presentation notes by me, Richard Akerman

- strategic vision of the national library of australia

- function: basically, maintain a national collection and make it available

- 479 staff
- over 550,000 [physical, presumably] visitors
- 110 million page views on website, up 59%

~ 9 million items (including 2 million manuscripts and 2 million serials)

Access

- 365,000 physical items delivered
- 45,000 reference enquiries (4,000 via Ask Now)
- 13 million digital objects delivered

~80 TB of digital object storage, including Australian Web Domain Harvest
- main stuff digitized is unique cultural heritage
- 40% of digital collection is oral history

Web Site Usage

- nice chunk on PictureAustralia, new chunk on MusicAustralia

- IT Strategic Plan (3 years, annual update)

Strategic Directions [phase] 1

* for a long time it was build, describe, preserve and provide access to the physical collection

Strategic Directions [phase] 2 [in addition to phase 1]

* since 2000 "to provide rapid and easy access..."
- outcome: online federated discovery services with "no dead ends"

Looking Outwards

* Internet-enabled collaboration
- lots of freely available content
- organizations are making their content available for remixing and repurposing
- low barries to participation
- light-weight trust models, no MOUs
- sharing personal views of contemporary events
- creating social networks around areas of interest
- near enough is good enough
- loss of control
- need to be less risk averse

Strategic Directions [phase] 3 [in addition to previous]

* In 2006, "to enhance learning and knowledge creation by further simplifying and ... services..."
[slide switched before I got the rest]

Key IT Outcomes

1 ensure collecting record of Australia
2 To meet user need for rapid
5 Ensure relevance

[yes, he skipped a couple]

IT Goals

many including
* Develop and deploy new full-text search software
* Provide online spaces to support publishing, collaboration, contribution and interaction

The rest of the world wants to find stuff in Google etc.
"we've got to get our data out there"
worked with Google to get their books in Google Scholar

Get this item

* Bookshops
* Suppliers

Also A9.com - Libraries Australia is searchable by using OpenSearch lightweight protocol

working to do federated search across museums and other organizations, using OpenSearch

Libraries Australia [national union catalogue I think]

* considered replacing individual library catalogues (as a starting point) with
"Libraries Australia, as the  primary database to be searched by users"

to do this you need to be able to integrate well with all the OPACs, which of course is a problem

Expanding Borrowing

* Wake-up calls: statistics and commentary
- [Lorcan] Dempsey "Materials are not being united with users who want them" [not sure of quote,
switched to next slide]
[You can see the entire quote and more info in Kent Fitch's presentation A New paradigm for “getting” (PowerPoint) from Libraries Australia Forum 2006 (LAF06)]
- Long Tail argument

Current Fulfillment
- charge $13 for ILL, total cost actually $49

steady decline in ILL

ILL: Strong disincentives to participate
- Expensive
- Slow
- Loss of control of assets
- Inconvenient / impossible

Fulfillment

Making "Search, find, get" seamless

* Lend directly from library to reader - NetFlix model - "NetBooks"

Also get your presence into e.g. Amazon.com "Borrow this book from Libraries Australia" (using greasemonkey)

PictureAustralia
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/

includes pics from Flickr
about 6000 images harvested

  "All you need in Aussie" - by Alicia Zappier 
  Originally uploaded by desertgirl.

MusicAustralia

* bought metadata catalogue of australian contemporary music - will interface to ecommerce gateway

Model

* "metadata discovery should be free, but you may have to pay for fulfillment"
* or I would say "easy access is more important than zero cost"

AustraliaDancing

* "Take Part" - customized wiki

There's more...

* People Australia, based on using authority file
* Open Access Journals - "really cheap and easy, blurs between publishing and collecting"

Issues

* Sustaining existing services
* Managing expectations
* Supporting innovation
* Enabling rapid prototyping
* Being vibrant and relevant

Ok, but how

* Reorg IT

* Review IT Architecture
- Service Oriented [emphasis mine]
- Consolidate metadata repositories
- "single business" model

* Create an IT-aware organization
- Communicate, collaborate and train

42 IT staff, over 400 library staff

Additional tech notes
- using Lucene full-text search
- using Confluence - new IT architecture is on a wiki
- training business analysts in BPM

Q: How does IT decide on priorities for projects?
A: Through the operational plan, reviewed by Corporate IT Group that sets the priorities

If necessary, escalate to corporate management.

Q: Web Harvest?  How made accessible?  Federated discovery - what challenges?
A: Paid the Internet Archive.  Ran for 6 weeks.  About 180 million files.  On a PetaBox, installed in
Australia.  Internal access but not public.  Also the Internet Archive will put it up.

Permissions/legal issues within Australia.

Issues with robots.txt - if you follow robots, you may not get inline images or CSS.

Federate search is basically around OpenSearch, plus may need to add relevance ranking.

Q (me): How are you doing relevance ranking?
A: Currently Teratext

but going to use Lucene.

Globe on library online media loans

North of Toronto, the 140,000 men, women and children who are members of Vaughan Public Libraries have become virtual pioneers. The city's eight libraries -- seven of the traditional books-on-shelves variety and one e-library -- are the first in Canada to offer downloadable videos and television programs through the Internet.

Library patrons can access the material from anywhere in the world, any time of day, and they don't have to worry about any fines for late returns: The material simply expires from their computer when the loan period ends.

Forget about having to go to the library -- all across Canada, public libraries are embracing new technologies, ranging from downloadable e-books and audio-books to online research tools.

Globe and Mail - Not your grandfather's library system - December 12, 2006

The article continues:

If libraries face a challenge with technology, it is not in adopting it but in informing people of the profusion of e-resources available, Ms. Scardellato says.

"The problem is we just don't have any effective way of promoting our various services," she says.

"We get 21 million hits a year to our website, but when it comes to the take-up rate for specific programs, those figures tend to drop dramatically."

What about getting Microsoft and Firefox to automatically install a browser extension that highlights local library resources?  I think it's a tragedy that libraries spend millions to license content that patrons have no idea about.  Free access to newspaper fulltext, for example, is almost always buried somewhere deep in an "electronic resources" subsite.  Seriously, "Quick Links... Databases"?  Who do you think is going to click on that?

The article, understandably, also doesn't address any of the content ownership and access issues.  Is this content that the library actually owns, or are they paying to license DRM-protected content?  Because if it's the latter, it means there is essentially an ongoing transfer of taxpayer dollars from the public library, to the private company that controls the content.  And the minute that transfer stops, the content is gone, permanently inaccessible.

The article mentions the CLA Emerging Technologies Interest Group but the info site

http://staff.library.mun.ca/etig/

doesn't seem to have a blog or anything.

via CISTI's Michael Ireland

Nature web focus on new energy technologies

The good news is that Nature has a new web focus

Energy for a cool planet

The most pressing technological problem facing the world is uncoupling the provision of energy from the production of carbon dioxide.

the bad news is that very few of the articles are FREE ACCESS

tech evangelism conf

I find this kind of bizarre

GNoTE (Global Network of Technology Evangelists) was founded to foster technology evangelism and help establish best practices for technology outreach in the industry.

Technology Evangelism is a thing?  A thing big enough to have a conference about?
I would say "a thing big enough to have a blog", but is there anything that doesn't have a blog?

http://www.gnote.ws/blog/

I can't believe that after writing this whole posting, I look in the gnote blog comments and discover Paul Miller beat me to this topic.
Paul, we've got to stop meeting like this.

via Amazon Web Services Blog

Amazon Computing Cloud - for academics?

Declan Butler has an article in Nature (behind the paywall) about researchers using Amazon's compute services

The service is still in a test phase, so few scientists have even heard of it yet, let alone tried it. But it is a movement that experts believe could revolutionize how researchers use computers. In future, they will export computing jobs to industry networks rather than trying to run them in-house, says Alberto Pace, head of Internet services at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva. CERN has built the world's largest scientific computing grid, bringing together 10,000 computers in 31 countries to handle the 1.5 gigabytes of data that its new accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, will churn out every second once it is switched on next year.

"I see no reason why the Amazon service wouldn't take off," Pace says. "For a lab that wants to go fast and cheaply, this is a huge advantage over buying material and hiring IT staff. You spend a few dollars, you have a computer farm and you get results."

[Dutch computer scientist Rudi] Cilibrasi, a researcher at the National Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, was using Amazon's service to test an algorithm aimed at predicting how much someone will like a movie based on their current preferences. He says he is a convert: "It's substantially more reliable, cheaper and easier to use [than academic computing networks]. It opens up powerful computing-on-demand to the masses."

Amazon puts network power online
Nature 444, 528 (30 November 2006) | doi:10.1038/444528a; Published online 29 November 2006

He emphasizes in particular the new capabilities enabled by virtualization.

via Declan's blog

Previously:
August 24, 2006  Amazon EC2: the AmazoGrid

the Wikinomic Generation

Don Tapscott is a bit of a "paradigm evangelist", which puts him in the business of perpetually declaring that everything is undergoing revolutionary change.

He does have some interesting ideas sometimes.  But to some extent I get a bit weary of this "old people try to figure out young people" stuff.  The young people can type too you know.  Why not have them report on themselves?

There's an article in the Post today, Net Generation 'wired' differently.

They value freedom This includes freedom of choice and of scheduling. For instance, some 42% do not watch television live but pre-tape to watch shows when it suits them.

"Primetime is now MyTime or AnyTime," he said. They also value the freedom to customize, mixing video, music and other content for their own use or to send to others.

They are scrutinizers "They have developed online and media BS detectors about everything. If they are on a social site they must determine whether the person contacting them is really a girl, a boy or a predator or their parent checking up on them?"

This is also why they rely on Jon Stewart or Web sites for news and information rather than the mainstream media.

I'm not sure this is necessarily Net Generation stuff.  Hardly anyone I know watches TV with the Real Timers any more, and we're all way past 30.  (Plus which "pre-tape"?  What's a tape?)  Many people are not just time-shifting, they are season-shifting, as they discover that two-or-three episodes on DVD a night with no commercials is a much more efficient and satisfying way to manage television.

I think it's important to understand that a huge amount of the "Internet transformation" stuff translates simply into: people are watching less TV, and in particular, they're doing everything possible to escape commercials, and to watch it according to their schedule.  This has marketers going mad, because there are literally billions of dollars of business done every year based on (in particular) selling free-spending American teen eyeballs to advertisers, and the eyeballs aren't watching TV in the same way.  MySpace, Second Life, and so forth: it's all a mad rush to find places where that vital service of telling teens what to consume can be performed.

I'm not sure "changes in general media consumption trends" translates into "revolutionary re-organizing of generational thought paradigms" but anyway...

Tapscott has a new book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

I suppose "some things may be changing although most of the technology is only 5 years old at most, so no one really knows exactly what it all means" would not have been as compelling a title.

Gratuitous Amazon linkery

Wikipedia - Book Sources - ISBN 1591841380

Previously:
June 06, 2005  blogging of Tapscott's keynote at SLA 2005

Pew Internet reports

Pew has a couple reports out about how people use the Internet.

The Future of the Internet II - September 24, 2006

By 2020
* A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.
* Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.
* Tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.
* People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy.

Riding the Waves of "Web 2.0" - October 5, 2006

The Web 2.0 report compares traffic for sites, e.g. pitting the Web 1.0 Geocities against MySpace

The Geocities vs. MySpace comparison not only demonstrates the commonalities between the internet of 1996 and 2006, but it also provides a point of departure for understanding concepts of online presence in the Web 2.0 era. While the Geocities model relied on the metaphors of a place (cities, neighborhoods, homepages), MySpace anchors presence through metaphors of a person (profiles, blogs, links to videos, etc.). Geocities encouraged us to create our own cities and neighborhoods as points of entry to our personal worlds; MySpace cuts to the chase and enables direct access to the person, as well as access to his or her social world.

Um, but isn't Second Life entirely about imposing awkward metaphors of place on all interactions (touch an object to view a web page, for example)?

Previously:
February 26, 2006  New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE 2006 Horizon report

the future of the scientific paper and more on open web science

Timo Hannay has an interesting presentation The Scientific Paper of the Future (9.2 MB PDF), from the Microsoft eScience Workshop at JHU.

The idea of the journal article as a window or an interface to data is a very interesting one, I'm reminded of Leigh Dodds' presentation on The Scientific Paper as Palimpsest.

Via Nascent, the Berkman Luncheon Series, and MediaBerkman blog I also find pointers to PowerPoint (23 MB - unfortunately many images don't show up in Windows PowerPoint 2000), audio (MP3) and video of Timo giving a presentation on What the Web Means for Science.

This in turn leads me to a presentation by Dan Burk on Open Source Strategies for Science.

techno trends? ask a teen

It's very challenging for us to understand technological change, as there is not just one line of change marching forward, there are multiple overlapping waves of change.

There are big generational gaps in technology use, as younger people adopt newer technologies that are more appropriate for them.

For example, I send and receive many emails, and never send SMS messages.
University age and younger, it seems, send SMS messages as a conversation, and only use email to communicate with, err, old people.

I always think that we shouldn't be having panels of adults talking to adults about Web 2.0, what do we know?

As luck would have it, Guy Kawasaki assembled a panel of 15-24 year-olds and asked them questions for an hour about how they use technology.

Next Generation Insights (Young Adult Panel)

via Darren Barefoot