Over the last few years the World Wide Web has changed from a place where we passively consume information to one where everyone can carve out their own little place to participate and contribute. The set of Internet technologies that encourage interactivity and user contributions—blogs, wikis, social networks and social bookmarking sites—are called Web 2.0.
Over the last year the library has embraced many of these Web 2.0 technologies, venturing out in the wilds of the interactive web and looking for involvement with our students, faculty, and anyone else around the world.
Here are some of the projects we have up right now, and one or two that are still just experimental glimmers in our eyes.
Automatic synchronization of collections among multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
Free automatic backup of your library data on Zotero’s servers.
Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a WebDAV server (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).
Other New Features
Automatic detection of PDF metadata.
Automatic detection and support for proxy servers.
Trash can with restore item functionality
Rich-text notes
A new style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats.
Support for Endnote® export styles
Syncing being the feature that pretty well everybody was waiting for.
This is really interesting for a number of reasons. Most of all, Zotero is a free and open source software package, so it can potentially be customized to work for local groups. Zotero is now a very real competitor to RefWorks and others for consortial and institutional site licenses and local implementations.
Looking forward, if I were interested in designing and building a cradle to grave research environment for researchers, Zotero has to be a candidate for the citation management component.
Two things I'd still like to see are some social sharing features like with Del.icio.us or Connotea. Looking forward to that seamless research environment, it would also be great if they could work out integration to an online document preparation system like Google Docs or Zoho.
I'm about to start some pretty intense literature reviewing myself pretty soon, and I have to admit I was still unsure which way I would go, citation management-wise. Now I'm thinking I'll give Zotero a shot.
The first wave of social media books, like Wikinomics or even Here Comes Everybody, were of the "what the heck is this all about" variety. They focused on getting people up to speed on what social media is and what it could be used for, not so much on concrete strategies for implementing social media for a particular organization or community. The second wave of social media books is starting to hit now, books about the nuts and bolts of online community building, and Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social media is an excellent example.
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who actaully wants to implement social networking or media software in their organization or for their community. Yes, library and science 2.0 communities, this means you. Want to engage your patrons in online library spaces? Want to build a "Facebook for scientists" that will actually be more than a barren windswept wasteland? This book is for you.
Trying to summarize or explain all the lists of suggestions and strategies the authors give us is probably not that practical, especially since their top to bottom, beginning to end treatment of implementing social media will mean that some chapters are more relevant to some people and other chapters to other people.
A brief outline of the sections will probably give a better feeling for what the book is about. The first part explains what the social media groundswell is and why it's suddenly become important for organizations to engage their communities directly. Part two is about tapping into the groundswell: listening, talking, energizing, helping and embracing. Part three is about transforming your organization internally so that it can embrace the customer groundswell.
One like I did like, at the very end of the book, does give us an idea of how the authors see organizations transforming their attitudes to allow them to embrace the groundswell.
So, we'll finish with some advice, not on what to do, but on how to be. This is the essence of groundswell thinking we've been describing...developing the right attitude. Here are some lessons we learned from groundswell thinkers, lessons that will help you make this amazing transition.
First, never forget that the groundswell is about person-to-person activity...
Second, be a good listener...
Third, be patient...
Fourth, be opportunistic....
Fifth, be flexible...
Sixth, be collaborative...
Seventh, and last, be humble...
These are the principles of groundswell thinking. Aspire t these qualities, and you can use the strategies we've laid out to your advantage -- or invent your own. You'll be able to build on you successes, both with customers and within you company. And then, as the groundswell rises and becomes ubiquitous, you will be ready.
I'm often critical of business hype books and their shallowness and repetition. This book just isn't like those others. It's actually pretty down to earth and practical. It has certainly changed the way I think about library web presences and how we can work to engage our patron communities. It also shapes my thinking and research directions every day.
This book is suitable and recommended for any collection that supports entrepreneurship and online community building, be it in a business, social science, technology or industrial setting. As well, public libraries that reach out to local business communities could do with this book, both for their patrons and for figuring out how to reach out to their communities.
And has there ever been a better time in recent memory to be a community organizer?
This was a hard post to title, in that I wanted it to be reasonably short yet pack in a lot of information. The real post title should be: What can library web sites learn from commercial book-related web sites such as Tor.com and the brand new Globe and Mail Books site?
First of all, a brief note about where I'm coming from. This is a a thought experiment. It's a thought experiment about a very particular idea of what library websites could look like. There are lots of other possible thought experiments I could have engaged in about different ideas.
One thing about library web sites is that they tend to focus on concrete problem solving behaviours: find a book, find some data, find some articles. Some library web sites are good at facilitating those activities, some not so much. One thing we tend not to focus on is creating our own entertaining and engaging content or explicitly promoting specific content created or curated by some other organizations. Again, some do do this, some well, some not so much.
As a result, library web presences can be a bit dry and static. How to spice things up a bit, content-wise? (Note for that the purposes of this thought experiment, I'm assuming that we do want to spice things up. In actual fact, I'm not entirely convinced of this but I think it's something that I explicitly want to explore.)
An interesting place to look is commercial web sites that are somewhat seriously intentioned but that are also engaging and entertaining. It would also be nice if the general topic of the site more-or-less maps to what we in libraries do. In other words, good old fashioned books. Now, a case can be made that we should follow the model of YouTube or Perez Hilton for creating our own engaging content, but this thought experiment is really driven by a couple of sites I've been following lately.
So, what can we learn from a couple of relatively new commercial sites that are about books.
Tor.com
Tor.com is the home page for the sffh book publisher Tor; in other words, they are ultimately trying to sell books.
I find it very interesting that this page actually has very little directly about Tor's products -- you have to follow the link to a different Tor Books page. I also find it very interesting that the home page for the publisher is a blog and that very few of the blog posts are directly about Tor's books but rather about the world of sffh in general. I presume they do this with the idea that if people go to the site a lot to read and interact with all this content and they get tons of pageviews, this will generate a certain brand awareness and product awareness that will translate into sales. Or more specifically, they will create a community (there are forums too) around their site and their content that will create brand loyalty in a way that merely publishing good books never could.
My take-away on this: As it happens, what I really find interesting and provocative is the idea of using a blog as your home page, the idea that you can leverage the content you create and put on the blog and direct it towards the "stealth" purpose. In Tor's case, that would be buying books. In the case of a library that would use a blog as it's home page, the stealth purpose would be to funnel students to our catalogue, online resources and various services.
Would this work? The first problem is finding enough interesting and engaging content to post on the blog that is even remotely related to the library mission. The second problem is to actually do the posting in a regular enough fashion to make the library a destination blog for the community. The third problem is actually getting students who dropped by the blog to read a cultural critique of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to actually follow through and use books and articles about Buffy (or biology). Or, having enjoyed the Buffy post, come back at some later time for information about biology or history or whatever. I'm not convinced that any of those three problems are easy to solve.
Globe and Mail Books
The Globe and Mail Books site is the newly launched hub for the G&M's book coverage; in other words, they are ultimately trying to use coverage of books and book-related topics to sell advertising. This site is more-or-less replacing a radically slimmed down print print books section, which used to be separate but is now merged with the Focus section. Books sections have been easy cost-cutting targets at newspapers for quite a while now so I'm happy to see that the Globe has seen the trend as more than just an opportunity to cut costs but as an opportunity to build something that responds to the rise of book review culture on the web. Books may be old media and the web new media, but an awful lot of the web seems to be about books.
As I said, this site is very new so I imagine that they'll be tweeking it a bit over the next little while to adjust to the early reception. However, I have to say that I like the site quite a bit. It has multimedia, feature stories, exclusive daily reviews, blogs, author interviews as well as linking to book stories elsewhere on the web. It includes all the content of the vestigal print edition as well as adding a fair bit of new stuff. I find that the site does definitely draw me in and get me exploring and clicking.
The blogs could be better integrated into the site as a whole and the external posts could be better positioned as well, but they do seem to be somewhat stuck with a common Globe look and feel. The stuff that's not in the print edition (ie the blogs) really needs to be featured and highlighted. Overall the site seems to lack a really exciting visual pop -- a bit too staid even for a book site. I hope they add more bloggers and begin to seriously highlight the work of the larger books blogosphere. I also hope they surface the interaction that happens in the comments sections of the articles and blogs better. User-generated content in the form of reviews and other stuff might be interesting too, as well as a way to recruit a new generation of reviewers.
Of course, I really hope they improve their coverage of science and technology books (as well as non-mystery genres like sf, fantasy and horror), but for that only time will tell.
My take-aways from this: Even if the site is lacking a bit of pizazz, the thing that I do find interesting is that they're assuming that coverage of old media like books will generate new media pageviews and result in advertising, advertising that I guess was disappearing from the print edition.
The interesting thing for library websites here I think revolves around the kind of content we could create for the kind of bloggy site that the Tor example could lead to. The stuff on the G&M Books site is seriously intentioned but also interesting. It's multimedia and interactive in a way that draws people in rather than away.
A lack of pizazz is not usually a good thing, design-wise, but I do thing the overall approach is something that a content-oriented library website could learn from.
Conclusion
The bottom line? Maybe cool and interesting content can be used to engage students and faculty and draw them to the library web site. And once they're there, maybe they'll stick around and make use of our other collections and services that are more directly related to their tasks as scholars. Or maybe not. I guess I'm still stuck on what actual problem that our users have that that they're going to want our websites to help them solve. Is their problem that they don't have enough YouTube videos to watch? I don't think so.
Is this whole thought experiment really a case of a solution in search of a problem? Is the problem we're solving by making our websites more interesting and interactive really about improving our own self-image?
So, what can library websites learn? As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on this one.
A couple of not-quite-so-recent posts here have gotten me thinking about some of the interesting stuff going on in the web 2.0/science 2.0 space. The first post dealt with some definitional issues and sparked a nice discussion on FriendFeed. The second was some impressions I had from the Science in the 21st Century conference and how what's going on in science may affect libraries.
I thought it might be nice to bring some of those themes around to some more concrete ideas about what I might be able to do in my library to engage students (graduate and undergraduate), faculty and researchers in that science 2.0 space.
Here's some ideas, some fairly widely implemented already, mostly pretty easy to get started, some of which I've tried and some I haven't, some I probably never will. Some of them will be good ideas, some will be bad, some will work in some places but not others.
Institutional FriendFeed Room. The idea here would to create something like a "York University Faculty of Science & Engineering Room" and post interesting stuff to it, both about science and engineering in general and about York's contributions. Furthering the idea, members of the York Science & Engineering community would also participate, post and comment.
Nature Network. The idea here is to encourage some forward thinking faculty and grad students to jump in and join Nature Network. We could create groups and forums, some of us could blog and comment in other blogs and groups. The interest and excitement sparked by this core would attract others and maybe the groups would be viable and some faculty or grads would find that blogging suits them.
Institutional Blogs. I think that there are two kinds of focus here, one internally focused and one externally focused. An inwardly focused blog would be all about library and general science news focused on the community. A lot of institutions have these kinds of blogs, with the York Libraries having a lot of them. An outward focused library blog would try to bring the institution's story to a broader audience. My CSE blog had some elements of that and I'm not sure what others have done in this vein. The problem with an externally focused blog is that it might step on toes of faculty or institutional communications people. But, if they aren't blogging, maybe the library should just do it; it's easier to apologize than to ask permission.
Overall, blogging is an established activity and a good way to build community. This could be a good way to start, but definitely with a strong commitment and with keeping expectations is check as these types of things can take a while to build momentum.
FaceBook Group and/or Page. This is the lamest option. They mostly don't work at creating community but I feel that I do have to mention them here. Easy to create and maintain, so it's not a bad idea to create one but expectations have to be low. We have one with a fair number of fans but not a lot of activity
Citation Management. An interesting idea would be to make a big push promoting a citation tool that really emphasizes sharing and collaboration, like Connotea or Mendeley or that is really cool and user friendly like Zotero. These are all free and very cool looking so they'll attract grad students. On the other hand, they're also not quite as functional as a boring old standby like RefWorks. But, since these types of tools are very popular and necessary, they can be a way to get people involved.
Leverage what's already happening. If there are social spaces that faculties or departments are setting up, find a way to get the library some real estate in those spaces. When I look at something like what MST Visions is doing, I always think that there's got to be a way to take advantage of that, to get the library involved and providing content. It's not always possible, but it's worth trying. If some departments, faculties or schools already have blogs or whatever, find a way worm our way in. The worst that can happen is they say no. Be persistent and persuasive. Often the people that run the sites are looking for content and contributors.
Just throwing these out there.
In many of the above scenarios, the real challenge is first, creating something that's useful, fun and compelling. The second challenge is to interest people in joining and contributing. The two challenges are related, of course. The degree to which these kinds of initiatives and useful, fun and compelling is directly related to who's involved and how much they contribute. The chicken-and-egg factor is quite high here and there's only so much that the library people involved can function as pump-primers. There's nothing sadder than an empty social network.
What I'm really hoping for from you out there is some input on all this. What are some other ideas that are worth exploring? Which of the above have the best chance of working? What are some strategies to get the buy-in and participation that are
If you're a scientist or faculty member out there reading this -- what would work for you? How could your library facilitate a discussion around scholarly communications issues in your institution. How could your library help you to connect and share information both locally and with scientists nationally and internationally. Any librarians or Research/Communications Officers out there with any ideas? Grad and undergrad students are also welcome to pitch in.
If you think the answer is that I'm delusional and that libraries don't really have a role in those areas, you can feel free to just be blunt about that too.
(Escience and open science are a couple of whole other cans of worms and maybe I'll come up with some ideas about libraries nosing their way into those a bit later on.)
(This post has been percolating for quite a while, so sorry if it seems disconnected to my recent posting. I'm doing an OLA presentation more-or-less on this topic in the new year, so this is also part of those ruminations.)
This is a conference I have to get to one of these days. This year's edition is actually going on right now in Pittsburgh -- ironically, since I'll be in Pittsburgh next week for ASEE. Had I been sufficiently foresightful, it would have made a great two week visit!
You can see the program on the Conference web site here.
Ambient findability describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. We're not there yet, but we're headed in the right direction. Information is in the air, literally. And it changes our minds, physically. Most importantly, findability invests freedom in the individual. (p. 6-7)
This is a very good book. If you're interested in the way the web works, you would be hard pressed to find a better book to help you in your researches.
Peter Morville is perhaps best known as the co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, one of the true classics in the web design/development/architecture field. Morville is also a librarian and has great sympathy for libraries as institutions and the problems we face in adapting ourselves to a new information landscape.
So, what's this new book all about? It's basically about how to design your web presence so that people can find your stuff when they're looking for it, even if they didn't know it was your stuff they were looking for. Sound relevant for libraries? You betcha.
The opening chapters deal with definitional issues such as information literacy, wayfinding and information retrieval and interaction. The book goes on to discuss "interwingling" as an important concept -- the idea that everything is everywhere, all bunched up together. But how to find interwingled stuff? Push or pull? Maybe the semantic web has the answers? How do we make informed decisions in a complex, networked culture? What are our sources of inspiration? According to Morville, we will find the clues to these questions in an ambiently findable information landscape. But, interestingly enough, he's not really that fond of a totally miscellaneous world, being quite fond of classifications and controlled vocabularies to help make things more findable. (p. 129) Being one of the tribe, he also has a high regard for the work librarians do and for our efforts in promoting information literacy. (p. 172)
Morville is a great writer -- the writer of the kind of book that stops you in your tracks and makes you re-think
On attention:
We love our cell phones but not the disruption. We love our email but not the spam. Our enthusiasm for ubiquitous computing will undoubtedly be tempered by reality. Our future will be at least as messy as our present. (p. 97)
This book is a classic in the making. It's well worth reading and re-reading as the problems and issues it discusses are both eternal and of immediate and vital importance.
Sometimes it's hard to believe all the stuff you find on the Web. I like to think of my self as a cautious utopian, but some people just go a bit too far in either direction for me.
The question "Is the Web different?" is actually not so much a question as a shibboleth in the original sense: The answer determines which tribe you're in.
The Web utopians point to the ways in which the Web has changed some of the basic assumptions about how we live together, removing old obstacles and enabling shiny new possibilities.
The Web dystopians agree that the Web is having a major effect on our lives. They, however, think that effect is detrimental.
The Web realists say the Web hasn't had nearly as much effect as the utopians and dystopians proclaim. The Web carries with it certain possibilities and limitations, but (the realists say) not many more than other major communications medium.
I think that this is a pretty useful analysis, one that lets us analyse where people are coming from, including ourselves. Like I said, I tend to be a cautious utopian, but perhaps a better description is a contrarian utopian. I tend to try and present the utopian perspective to dystopians and the dystopian perspective to utopians.
Weinberg obviously falls on the side of the most starry-eyed utopians.
But I don't want to leave it at that happy, liberal conclusion because it is, I believe, incomplete. The fuller statement of the conclusion should include: It is vital to have realists in the discussion, but they are essentially wrong.
*snip*
And we need lots and lots of them. There is so much to invent, and the new forms of association that emerge often only succeed if there are enough people to embrace them.
Web realists perform the vital function of keeping us from running down dead ends longer than we need to, and from getting into feedback loops that distort the innovation process. For those services, we should thank and encourage the realists. But we should also recognize that beyond the particulars, they are essentially wrong.
The contention among dystopians, realists and utopians is is a struggle among the past, the present and the future. The present is always right about itself but — in times of disruption — essentially wrong about the future. That's why we need to flood the field with utopians so we can be right often enough that we build the best future we can.
Needless to say, as a pure contrarian I find Weinberger needlessly dismissive and antagonistic here. I firmly believe that utopians should see realists as their natural allies, not their implacable enemies. Calling people that are mostly on your side wrong all the time does nothing to build the kinds of social networks and collaborative webs these utopians seem to want us to think that they're all about. A little humility can go a long way.
Has there been an uptick in bizarre and pathological behavior since the Internet became a common household implement over, say, the past 10 years? There’s no way of untangling the Internet from the many other elements of society. But one might speculate about the soaring consumption of antidepressants, a reported increase in suicides among middle-aged men, and several spectacular mass murders at universities. Violent online games, pornography, and detachment and isolation from human contact come easily to the Internet user. Is there a connection? No one can say for sure, but the possibility can’t be dismissed.
Like all technologies, the Internet is employable for good and bad, and where it is applicable to benign purposes, it can be uniquely useful. But it is easily adaptable to mischief and worse. By many accounts, it has spawned an epidemic of plagiarism among college students — and an ensuing cat-and-mouse game with professors sifting their prose online. Identity theft is another gift to online malefactors. And sheer confusion — deliberate or inadvertent — on important public matters easily flourishes on the Internet.
Holy crap. What codswallop. It's a shame that Greenberg is the closest they have to a science gal/guy. He doesn't generally seem to like science or scientists or the internet or technology of any kind. Couldn't they find, like, a scientist to contribute? Science is part of Higher Education, after all.
It's great that this new-fangled web can let us share our thoughts and follow the thoughts of other so easily even though they may be georgraphically very far from us. I know that there's very little I enjoy more that audio or video from some far flung conference or meeting that I couldn't attend. I do conference summaries on my blog because I think others might find them useful and appreciate it when others do the same for sessions I couldn't attend.
Now, Will Richardson is a noted thinker in edcational technology, especially in the pedagogical uses of the read/write web. I often find his highly utopian musings provocative and instructive. But...
Wondering what future conference organizer is gonna get smart and only allow attendees who:
Have their own Ustream channels and broadcast live facial reactions of attendees as the session is in progress
Can Tweet out the best quotes, engage in lively back channel repartee, and live blog the session to their own sites at the same time
Create a VoiceThread story of the presentation within 10 minutes of finish by incorporating photos taken during the session and uploaded to Flickr, adding voice over narration to contextualize the event, and soliciting video comments from virtual attendees
Put together a wiki page for the session that collects dozens of various RSS feeds compiled from keyword and tag searches on the presenter’s name, the general topic, del.icio.us bookmarks, YouTube videos and more
Create a Google Map that identifies where all of the virtual attendees live and helps them upload photos of themselves watching the UStreamed, Tweeted, VoiceThreaded, wikied presentation in progress.
Conduct a live Skype call with other experts who challenge the ideas being presented and scream out provocative and borderline insulting questions
Have their own conference space in Second Life where live video and audio of presentation is being streamed and where they have organized a post session social featuring virtual local microbrews and coffees
Notice how he says "only allow attendees who..." What, so my money isn't good if I'm not on Twitter? Weinberger meet Richardson, Richardson meet Weinberger.
I sort of have the impression I should be agreeing with Waters on this one, but ironically this is one of the most scrambled and unfocused "essays" I've read in a while.
What I’m saying is that the first step to re-establishing the essay as the standard in humanistic writing is to reinvigorate the sentences we write, so that, when one reads an essay, one feels it. One feels it the way one tastes — and here I’m going global — a good curry. It really sets you back. Or maybe forward. Style, maniera, modo is what we readers demand. The humanists of the Renaissance knew the Romans had the ability to put sentences that had concinnitas, but that their ancestors in what we call the Middle Ages had lost that ability. When the Ancients constructed the Arch of Constantine, it stayed together for centuries, even though neglected. Concinnity — what a splendid word!
*snip*
What an outrage! I remember the would-be contributor whom we were demanding more of who said “But I’ve written the perfect New Historicist, feminist, deconstructionist essay. You dare not tamper with my very self and voice. And we dared not tell Professor Polonius that he did not have any writing voice at all. You cannot be comical-pastoral-tragical (I am playing on what Polonius says at Hamlet 2.2.397.) and speak in any tongue in which humans have spoken. We nearly turned down an entry by one of the chief editors of that book. With the Marcus/Sollors I confess to having stacked things towards readability by making one of the founding editors of Rolling Stone be one of the two editors-in-chief of the volume. Guilty as charged. The way I have set up the Marcus/Sollors is all around the essay. The book is a collection of 220 essays that resonate in surprising ways so that the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts, but each individual part is a free-standing essay.In the making of this book I have pursued the essay so strongly that I have made it function in a new way like an individual instrument in Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
I know I'm only a simple science type, but, Huh?
My apologies for the crankiness of today's post. The snow must be getting to me.
It's taken from Rob Weir's Learning from Cats article in today's InsideHigherEd. The article is about figuring out what battles we should just call closed and walk away from. Since it's from the faculty perspective, not all of them are all that relevant to libraries. My answers in bold.
The first is a good one, though:
1. What Do We Do About Poorly Prepared Incoming Students? How about teach them? It seems like I’ve been hearing the same tape loop since I was 18 and was told my generation was ignoramus-ridden because it had no training in Latin. Let’s just admit that each generation comes to the table with different skill sets and move on. This is the ultimate lost chase. What students ought to know is irrelevant when faced with a classroom of those who don’t know it.
I agree here 100%. The students are who they are and we just have to deal with it. At the same time, we also have to remember that our job is to help them learn and grow rather than encourage them to be comfortable with their current habits and limitations. An important aspect of this issue is to remember that there still is a huge digital divide amongst our students. By no means are they uniformly tech savvy. By the same token, they are often not as tech savvy as they think they are, they are often quite over confident in their abilities.
And teasers for a couple of others:
3. Should the Academy Operate According to a Consumer Model?
A tough one for libraries. We have to walk a fine line between helping students find resources that just happen to be provided by commercial vendors and acting as a conduit, providing eyeballs to vendors for commercial exploitation. Same with the way we implement a lot of the newer tech tools. Our first loyalty is always to our patrons, not our vendors.
4. Why Should Faculty Be Forced to Be Tech-Savvy?
Why should librarians be forced to be tech-savvy? Hehe. It's a bit different here, as not all librarians have the same job descriptions, where as all faculty have to teach and interact with students. So, let's just talk public service librarians. First of all, it's unreasonable to expect everyone to be equally tech-savvy. There's going to just be range, and in my experience the range isn't as determined by age as people like to make out. That being said, any reference librarian that can't help a patron with simple questions with Word or Excel is behind the times. Similarly, the use of USB memory sticks is pretty standard now. To help students at the reference desk, we need to have a pretty decent average tech savviness.
Similarly, for instruction we're just going to need to be fairly familiar with the tools of the trade, be it CMSs, wikis or creating web pages, handouts or whatever. As advocates for and stewards of our libraries' online presences, we need to be aware of trends, open to new ideas, willling to experiment and critical of fads and snake oil salespeople.
SciAm is trying out a really interesting experiment. One of their journalists, M. Mitchell Waldrop, has written an article on Science 2.0, which is timely but not revolutionary. What is a bit revolutionary is that they've mounted a draft of the article on their web site and are inviting readers to comment on it, shaping the tone and content of the final version which will appear in the print mag. As of today, there have been 24 comments, some positive, some skeptical, some ranting. But, hey, that's web 2.0 for ya.
A taste of the draft version:
The technologies of Web 2.0 open up a much richer dialog, says Bill Hooker, a postdoctoral cancer researcher at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland, Ore., and the author of a three-part survey of open-science efforts in the group blog, 3 Quarks Daily. "To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I'm doing every day. That's an immense leap forward in clarity. In a paper, I can see what you've done. But I don't know how many things you tried that didn’t work. It's those little details that become clear with open notebook, but are obscured by every other communication mechanism we have. It makes science more efficient." That jump in efficiency, in turn, could have huge payoffs for society, in everything from faster drug development to greater national competitiveness.
The article concentrates on open notebook science, the use of wikis and blogging mostly, but also mentions social bookmarking and peer review experiments. As can be expected, a lot of the usual suspects are interviewed: Jean-Claude Bradley, Bora Zivkovic, Timo Hannay (my interview), Bill Hooker and others.
Overall, I think it's great that SciAm is giving such good press to these new ideas and new ways of doing things. Perhaps it would have been nice if they'd covered social bookmarking or eprint servers a little more. Also, they could have talked more about the possibilities of social networks like Nature Network. On the other hand, I realize that you can only cover so much in a short article and they probably made the right choices about what to talk about. it's hard to argue that given limited space that they could only cover so much.
I plan on using the article as a way of introducing some of these ideas to the faculty and administration here. Who knows what could happen!
Libraries have seized upon advances in computer technology, using computers and the Internet to offer unprecedented access to information and library resources. Ironically, the prodigious increase in tools for accessing information has left many with difficulty managing information about these tools. Projects are announced on blogs, in IRC channels, on websites, at conferences, and many other venues. It can require a research project just to find out what a tool does. Online professional/social networks help mitigate this problem, but entering into these networks can present an unnecessary obstacle to the uninitiated.
The Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) will provide an access point for people looking to learn more about these tools, about approaches and solutions to real-world problems, and about possibilities for building on the work of others, so that the wheel need only be invented once, and can then be cooperatively improved by all.
Also needless to say, I'll reiterate some of my past comments about the way e-only journals are set up.
The full citation information should be easy to spot on the first page of any article print out. Preferably it should be listed in one of the standard citation formats and should include the stable url for the article.
Articles should have DOIs which should be visible on the table of contents and in the citation information for each article. This will help with Connotea integration as well other such services I'm sure.
Integration with Zotero is a great idea too.
Each issue should have a stable url associated with it and that url should be on the home page and on every mention of that issue.
It's handy to be able to print out the whole issue in pdf as well as each article individually. Links to the individual article pdfs should be on the table of contents along with the links to the HTML versions.
OCLC's newest state of the library world/environmental scan report was published a few months ago: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a Networked World. This one focuses on the potential roles of social networks for libraries and the implications they might have on our practices and norms.
It's an extremely interesting and provocative report, one that inspires us to move forward with new initiatives while at the same time setting some pretty daunting challenges before us.
The practice of using a social network to establish and enhance relationships based on some common ground—shared interests, related skills, or a common geographic location—is as old as human societies, but social networking has flourished due to the ease of connecting on the Web. This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including:
The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web
How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues
Opinions on privacy online
Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking
The report is based on a survey (by Harris Interactive on behalf of OCLC) of the general public from six countries—Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—and of library directors from the U.S. The research provides insights into the values and social-networking habits of library users.
As it happens, I was lucky enough to receive a print copy in the mail a month or so ago without even asking, no doubt with the idea that I'm some sort of opinion leader in these things. Be that as it may, as with most of the free books (and there's not many) that come through here I feel compelled to comment.
In this particular case, I do have some overall ideas about the implications of the report but I'll get to those later. First off, I think I'll tackle some of the statistics that are presented, highlighting what struck me as interesting, surprising or unusual. I'll also comment on some of the interviews with their librarian panel of experts: a good list, rounding up some of the usual suspects but also quite a few voices that were unfamiliar to me.
The sections include the survey responses (sections 1-3), interviews with US library directors (4), libraries and social networking survey responses (5), interviews with the panel of expert librarians (6), report highlights (7) and conclusion (8).
Onward:
Page 1-6: Interesting that 20% of those surveyed had created content online. A bit larger than I would have thought, but if you include flickr, commenting on blogs, etc., not that surprising.
1-20, 21. People are reading more but increasingly online. Exactly what I would have thought. The web is still largely a text medium and reading text will remain an important part of an increasingly diverse online experience.
2-12 to 2-15. Combining the various language/national groups on the reporting of the favourite social networking site is probably not useful. Comparing the raw percentages for Mixi and MySpace is like comparing apples to oranges.
2-17. No surprise. We use the social networks our friends use. It's like hanging out at the same mall that our friends hang out at.
2-38. In the last two years, it seems only a small percentage of people have actually stopped using a particular social networking site after intially joining in the last two years. Somehow I thought that people would be trying out a bunch of different sites and only sticking with the ones they liked or where they discovered most of their friends.
3-6. It seems that most people use the same password on all the sites they inhabit. There is a significant number (16%) that always use different passwords. I use a small number of configurable passwords over and over and find that the best for me. For example, I never have to write a password down anywhere, I can just remember them all.
3-11. Most people are more comfortable showing their true personality in person while a significant minority are more comfortable showing their true personality online. But what does it mean to share your true personality online. Does it mean that the trolls are totally liberated to be the idiots they truly are? Do they feel constrained by civilized society in person? On the other hand, do shy or awkward people find a healthy and constructive freedom to express things online that they don't in person?
3-36 to 3-38. Really interesting numbers here about how people feel about disclosing their personal information to the library and the trade-offs between privacy and personalized services.
4-13. Interesting. Most people join social networks because they are fun or because that's where their friends are. Library directors join them because they are useful; fun and friends come later.
5-3. Although the population expresses a low level of interest in participating in library hosted social networking activities, I'm not too concerned. After all, a small percentage of a large population can be quite a few people. If only 10% of the 55,000+ population of York publishes creative work or contributes to a discussion group, well, that's 5-6000 people.
5-4 to 5-7. Only 10-20% think the library should build social networking sites. We should be learning or information centres. As if there can be no learning or information in social networking sites...
Section 6. Lots of interesting commentary here by the panel of librarian experts. Mostly about how libraries have no choice but to engage students in social networks, that if we don't find a role in the 2.0 world we will lose a generation. Also about the conflicts between security and access. Good, thoughtful stuff here, a nice range of opinion, some dissenting voices to what otherwise might have been groupthink.
7-8. Both users and library directors are skeptical about libraries' role in social networks. Not surprising. We're in the middle.
8-2 to 8-3. I like that concept that they mention here, messy participation. Social networks are diverse and chaotic, not interoperable in any meaningful way. But they are also incredibly compelling and engaging, almost as a function of their messiness. Privacy and security are evolving concepts, perhaps even in opposition to the messiness.
8-6 to 8-8. The message? We have a challenge facing us.
The twin challenges we face:
My core assumption is that libraries can something compelling to offer our patrons in social network spaces. Unfortunately, any entry into social networks won't be exploiting a need that that our patrons are clamoring for. We'll be ahead of them here, and that's always a challenge. We need to find a way to make the library messier and looser, to encourage participation, to open the doors and engage these new spaces in a way that our patrons will find compelling. There's nothing sadder than an empty social network. We'll need ingenuity and patience, a willingness to try things, a tolerance for failure. The idea nurture a lot of different ideas, some of which grow into successful programs. We'll need a willingness to find partners on our campuses and within our broader communities. We need to work with those partners to build the social spaces that our students will need and use.
The second challenge is privacy. We need to reconcile the clean, secure, private library with the web of messy participation and customized services. We've always seen patron privacy as one of our core, bedrock values but we're going to need to think about putting more of the privacy decisions into the hands of our patrons. If we want them to trust us, to open up to our spaces, we going to need to trust them a little bit too. And we'll probably need to make the first move on this one too.
From page vii of the report:
What is it that motivates, even inspires, millions of users to spend hours online, not searching for information, but creating information, building content and establishing online communities? What drives users to not only contribute information, but to contribute "themselves," creating detailed personal profiles on social sites and sharing that information to establish new relationships with hundreds of new virtual friends?
It's the same thing that motivates people to contribute to open sources software projects. It's fun. They (we) enjoy the "work" we do on the web. We find actively contributing and participating more enjoyable than most tv or films or books or newspaper or magazines that are out there so that's what we choose to spend our time on. How do we make contributing to our social spaces that much fun?
So, read the report. Think about it, engage with it very closely and carefully. There's lots of information to digest and ideas to ponder. The path to the future may or may not be in the report but it certainly has a lot of food for thought about one path forward: making libraries socially networked teaching and learning spaces where students can share and discover. Actually, I don't think that strays too far from what we've always seen as our core mission.
A couple of weeks ago I asked for some help in constructing a Brown Bag Presentation on Cool Tools for Scholars.
Well, I finally gave the presentation this past Thursday. The slides are here.
The presentation went pretty well, if a little sparsely attended. Unfortunately, I was scheduled right after a planning meeting which went a little long. However, the session was pretty lively with lots of questions and discussion. I think the cool tools that were the best received were Google Docs and Zotero.
I really enjoyed giving the presentation and I hope I'll get a chance to repeat it sometime.
Welcome to the latest installment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Richard Akerman, Technology Architect at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI). While I've never met Richard in person, I've long followed the provocative and insightful commentary on his blog, Science Library Pad. Provocative and insightful are certainly words I would use to describe his responses in this interview. Enjoy!
Q0. Richard, please tell us a little about your background and career path to this point and how you ended up at CISTI.
I didn't start out with any particular plan, at university in the late 80s I found I had an aptitude for computer science, and science in general. From there I spent a while building expertise in computer networking and system administration. I worked for six years at a company called AMIRIX Systems, initially as a network admin, and later as a software designer. From there I ended up at CISTI in 2002, again initially as a network admin, and now as a technology architect.
If I look at the threads that run through, the main aspects are working with and understanding computers and networks at a very technical level, and the analytical aspects that computer programming, network troubleshooting, and science all share. What I guess isn't obvious is that software engineering and technology architecture are also highly social activities, that require a high degree of communication skills to gather information and requirements from a wide variety of people, translate those into technical details, and then explain the technical details in an understandable way back to a variety of audiences.
There is another thread which is that from the time of High School on I have been required to do presentations for school or for work, and I've always been comfortable and enjoyed doing so.
Q1. Why did you start blogging and what keeps you going?
For my personal blog, I started in 2001 when there weren't really any good bookmarking management tools. From the early days of the MOSAIC browser, when you had to hand-edit the MOSAIC.INI file to arrange bookmarks, I have always had an interest in being able to re-locate useful information I've found on the net. (Perhaps there is some librarian in me after all.) In 2001 del.icio.us unfortunately hadn't been invented yet, but Google and other search engines had, so the easiest way for me to maintain bookmarks with a rich enough set of metadata that was meaningful to me was to blog them.
When I went to my first library technology conference, Internet Librarian in 2004, I started taking conference notes (mostly since I have a terrible memory when it comes to things people have said). But I shortly decided it didn't make much sense to have my work-related notes mixed in with pictures of my cat, so I launched Science Library Pad (SLP) as a more "professional" location for that sort of information.
I think in a way I was just lucky to hit a moment when library conferences were just starting to get connected out to the web, it would be very different if I started now, when library conference blogging and wikis are common.
From there I started to use SLP as a venue for work-related bookmarks or items of interest, and also to work out some of my thinking about libraries and technology. Working in a public sector science library was a very different experience both in terms of technology and culture from my previous employment at a very technical private sector firm, and I used the blog to sort out some of my thoughts about both the pure computer systems aspect of libraries, as well as my perceptions of how librarians thought about those systems.
From those not particularly auspicious beginnings, I have found my blog has led to incredible and entirely unexpected connections and opportunities.
Q2. Tell us a little about CISTI and it's current and future roles in the library and scientific worlds? If we can imagine a world where everything is open access, what's the role for an institution like CISTI?
CISTI is Canada's national science library and provides science publishing services as well, both of these roles are derived from sections of the National Research Council (NRC) Act, CISTI is an institute of the NRC. We're in a challenging position as we're not an academic library in the university sense - we do serve a campus, but it's a campus of research institutes. Our publishing role is carried out through the peer-reviewed journals of the NRC Research Press. Our library role includes services by reference librarians to every NRC institute, as well as document delivery.
In my personal opinion, three forces have radically reshaped the scientific information provision landscape: the Internet, plus digital content, plus "good enough" search capabilities. I think all academic libraries are reeling from the implications of content directly available from publisher sites to students and researchers. I don't have the answers to what the future holds, but I think it's clear that the library role has to involve an understanding of network computing, and that academic libraries have to examine issues related to scientific data and digital preservation.
As well, there has to be a rethinking of reference services to ensure that librarians are positioned to provide a large degree of added analysis - the simple queries are gone, what's left is much more intensive partnerships and collaborations between librarians and their patrons to take the best advantage of their abilities.
On the publishing side, again as a personal opinion, I think the business models will sort themselves out. The scientific community sees substantial value in peer review and readable papers, and both of those cost money. I think we will see "papers" become much richer online objects, and alternative types of publishing (e.g. video), but the fundamentals of the system remain.
Q3. SciFoo must have been cool beyond belief. What are some highlights and insights you could share with the scitech library community? What were people's reactions when they found out that you work at a library?
SciFoo was a very interesting event. For those who haven't heard of it, it's an invitation-only scientific "unconference" organised by Nature Publishing and O'Reilly, and hosted by Google. The schedule is self-organised at the conference itself, there is no programme published or arranged in advance. The method in their madness is to try to maximise the amount of discussion between participants, to make it a much more interactive event.
So there were a lot of very smart people, of varying degrees of famousness, with lots of interesting ideas. Interesting, but not necessarily convergent ideas. There were a lot of different opinions, perceptions and solutions for the scholarly communications system.
And unfortunately, I have to say for the most case people indicated they didn't seem to see their libraries stepping up to participate in the conversation. They welcomed such participation, they just didn't see it.
Q4. Can academic/research libraries change fast enough to stay relevant? Similarly, can libraries rush to transform themselves into the wrong things, and just a different path to irrelevance?
I think there was a big, big intermediation role that libraries just have to let go of. It isn't coming back. And there's also a big, big technology investment, in catalogues and ILS systems that worked in ways that librarians understoood, that were basically library operations, turned into computer programs and databases. As the library operations radically transform, there is a huge challenge in transforming the supporting technology systems.
For public libraries, I think the library as both place and service has an enduring role. For academic libraries, I think the library as place role continues, but the library service role is going to be a big challenge. For libraries whose role was almost entirely in providing access to information, such as CISTI, the challenge is tremendous when digital files over the Internet, obtained directly by researchers, becomes an easier pathway for access.
I don't think libraries should worry about transforming too quickly. I do think however it is important to separate technological change from organisational change. Libraries made that mistake before. An entire organisation built around serving up Web 2.0 pages is going to be just as brittle as the one that is breaking because it is built around serving up WebOPAC pages. "You are not the technology you use." To some extent, don't worry about the technology, it's not the important part. We have computers and networks that are fast enough that we no longer need to be constrained by technology. Decided what you want to do FIRST, and then implement flexible technology solutions SECOND.
I see far too often a tendency for people to say "we need federated search solution XYZ", when they really should be saying "I think we could serve our patrons better by making it easier for them to find relevant materials, how can we solve that problem?" and then putting in place the organisational structures, processes, and technology to meet your needs.
Technology should never be the driver. As long as libraries remember that, I don't think they will fall into a "change trap".
Q5. What's it like to be a techie working with a bunch of librarians? Don't worry, they won't read this, so you can be honest.
We come from very different backgrounds in terms of training, approach to problem solving, and analogies that we use to understand the world. It is a huge challenge. People from a techical background think of computers, web sites, networking and information quite differently from librarians. But I think the surprising aspect may be that often people with a technical background are less concerned about the details of the particular technology of the moment, than with the problems to be solved.
I think the best hope for a common meeting ground is mutual respect. In a pre-searchable-digital-Internet world, librarians were the Masters of All Information. They have to cede many of the technical aspects of that to the people who are trained in technology. That's hard to do, it's just human nature. I would say that's the biggest single source of friction, on one side of the table you have technical people who have years and years of training in their fields, basically pleading to have their expertise recognized by the librarians. On the flip side, the technology people have to appreciate that librarians draw upon a rich tradition of information management and document preservation, and that the solution to everything isn't necessarily to hand all information over to Google and close up shop.
Q6. And the other side of the coin: What kind of insights on the way science is done, science is published and the way to serve a science community do you think you, as a technology person, have brought to a library organization. (ie. Have you been a disruptive influence...evolutionary or revolutionary?)
Although I do have a background being a physics and computer science grad student, I don't think that experience brought insights into the organisation in any specific way. Academic librarians have a good general sense for the way science is conducted, particularly as many of them have degrees in the sciences themselves.
I think the technology background, the analytical approach to troubleshooting and problemsolving, the understanding of what is possible with networking and computers, these are much more disruptive, revolutionary elements for the library.
Q7. You post a lot on e-science. How do you thing computing will affect the way science is practised (and communicated) in the future?
I think computing has already started to transform some of the sciences, and this trend will only continue and grow over the next decades. Get used to seeing -informatics attached to all scientific areas. Bio-informatics is already a huge area, but chemo-informatics and others are following quickly behind.
It is inevitable that much of scientific communication will move into one continuous workflow, a scientific discussion, with links, data, computation, and visualisation all seamless elements. Just as today we don't give a second thought to moving between a phone call, an email, an IM window and a browser window, the future of science will be that computers and networking will be used whenever appropriate, without a second thought. Scientific discussions will move naturally from virtual environments, to a written page, to an interactive graph, depending on the message, the audience, and the research.
It is a huge challenge for libraries to think about how in the world we ever preserve an understandable scientific record for the future in this kind of dynamic, "participative science web" environment.
Q8. Peer review and other scholarly publishing issues are also among your favourites: Can you envision a day when journals as we know them no longer exist? What do you think will replace them? The recent experiments in alternate forms of peer review: no big deal or long-awaited revolution?
I think in the short term, journals become much more semantically-rich online documents, with linkages out to data and analysis tools, as well as to other articles and relevant content. In the long term, they turn into the sort of continuous scientific discussion I described above.
One of the big things I heard at SciFoo was time-to-publication. I think that is going to drive radically improved ways to do timely peer review. But I don't think the underlying concept of peer review is going away. It is imperfect, but better than anything else anyone has been able to come up with.
Q9. What are your current obsessions and preoccupations? What do you think the Next Big Thing will be?
Impact factor, specifically evaluation of scientists based on impact factor, is driving people up the wall. This was a big theme both at the ICSTIconference and at SciFoo. I think the feeling in the community against the misuse of impact factor is actually much stronger than other issues that may get more press, for example, I think fixing the IF issue is of more interest to the broad science community than sorting out Open Access.
I think we are going to see a lot more screeds against impact factor, and a lot more experiments in terms of both technological approaches (new computable metrics) as well as processes.
I think in order to imagine the Next Big Thing, the easiest approach is to just imagine the Current Big Expensive Unattainable Things become small, cheap, and ubiquitous. So e-Science, the stuff of multi-million-dollar computing and networking, is going to become me-Science, with vast computer power and storage available to everyone, as well as the opportunity for huge "citizen science" networks gathering data and contributing valuable insights.
Things like the Great World Wide Star Count will be a common part of the school and citizen experience in the future. Basically anyone with an interest in science will have opportunities to contribute and participate throughout their lives.
One of my particular interests is what it means to have ubiquitous access to geographic information. What does it mean if everyone has Google Earth in their cellphone? And they can share their position with anyone in the world? Considering that Nokia just bought mapmaker Navteq, this direction seems inevitable.
So I think the future in the near term is something about more e-science, and more participative web. I've actually got an upcoming blog post on the trends that I see, based on an internal presentation I did at CISTI recently. I'm also excited to have been invited to blog the OECD Participative Web Forum this Wednesday, October 3, 2007.
Which I guess in a way shows the limits of my foresight, as I never imagined that when I was sitting in Ottawa making a web storage place for some conference notes that it would lead me to be contacted by an international organisation based in Paris.
Some recent items of interest, some related to some of my common themes, some not.
Wayne Bivens-Tatum and Brian Matthews get it exactly right about academic libraries getting "student centre envy." It's something I writtenaboutbefore and something I feel very strongly about: as libraries on diverse, lively and changing campuses, we have to make sure that we serve the core mission of our institutions and at the same time care about giving students the kinds of physical spaces nobody else will.
As usual, lots of great stuff in the most recent ISTL. Two items in particular I'd like to highlight are Scholarly Communication: Science Librarians as Advocates for Change by Elizabeth C. Turtle and Martin P. Courtois. This one is about the role librarians can have in promoting awareness and adoption of newer modes of scholarly communication. It includes a number of resources, areas where librarians can make a difference and suggestions on how to proceed. Interestingly (and ironically) they don't recommend as resources any of the numerous blogs (librarian and otherwise) that focus on scholarly communications such as OAN, CavLec and Open Access Librarian. I occasionally postonthesetopics.
A prominent U.S. sociologist and student of professions, Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago, has written a thought-provoking thesis on what he terms "library research" -- that is, research as performed with library-held resources by historians, et. al, via the reading and browsing of texts -- compared to social science research, which has a more linear, "Idea->Question->Data->Method->Result" type of methodology.
The pre-print, "The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research," is full of insights about library centric research, including intriguing parallels between library research and neural net computing architectures; a comparison that made me think anew, and with more clarity, about how the science of history is conducted. Armed with a distinctive interpretation of library research, Abbott is able to draw some incisive conclusions about the ramifications of large repositories of digitized texts (such as Google Book Search) on the conduct of scholarship.
Really cool post and paper. I'm certainly looking forward to reading the paper in detail as I've just scanned it so far. I'm not certain how what he's done applies to the scitech fields but I like what Brantley says about serendipity.
Google Book Search is a wonderful thing. But it not so wonderful that we should assume it will transform education and research. Nor should we assume that in the future we might not be able to generate architectures that make books live more intelligently amongst each other - and more freely - than anything that Google might envision. As libraries who might be participating in digitization: let us challenge the fundamental assumptions we are handed - that must seem so dangerously obvious - and rethink the landscape of our profession, and how we might best support our real work of learning.
Now, Google Book Search is my new best friend as far as research tools is concerned, but I think we need to be aware that the research systems we build for our patrons probably need a little chaos built in. I'm not entirely convinced of Brantley's (and Abbott's) points (and the comments on the post are often equally skeptical), but it's something we need to think about.
(PDF version of whole series, including appendices, for printing here.)
In this essay I'd like to talk a little about some areas that aren't as directly job related as reference, collections or teaching. There are other areas where my role is more as a steward, things that I have an shared interest in along with all my other colleagues, some of whom may be more directly involved. I'd like to talk about the spaces we construct for our patrons, both physically and virtually. Administrators, department heads, systems librarians, IT staff, these are the ones directly responsible for these areas but I think I have a role too in shaping how these things develop and evolve.
I'm treating them together here for a couple of reasons. First of all, from a practical point of view I just want to get this series over and done with and combining the two areas just makes sense from that perspective. As well, I've also written about physical spaces before and don't have all that much new to add, making that section relatively short. And perhaps most importantly, I do think that they're related, these physical and virtual spaces, that we should probably begin to think of them together more often, to think about how they can promote each other, depend on each other and support each other.
Physical Spaces
I've already written a fairly extensive post about physical spaces in academic libraries (added as Appendix 2 in the pdf version) and I think what I wrote before still stands up pretty well, so I don't feel the need to elaborate too much more. I will, however, reiterate and expand a little on some of the main points.
Mostly, I think we need to make sure we continue to give students the kinds of spaces they need for their academic work: formal collaborative spaces, informal group spaces, quiet study, lab spaces where they have access to the software they need to do their assignment and can do research. All these things are important now and will continue to be important in the future. I don't really care what we end up calling it, but certainly part of the mix with be things like information or learning learning commons's where we provide collaborative lab space, open concept or group rooms, with librarians and tech support available.
I think we're mostly getting over our food fetish. We need to figure out food and drink rules that make sense, that all the various constituents more or less support and that we're actually willing to enforce. The smell test, bottles with caps, cups with lids, nothing outrageously messy. If setting up a cafe or lounge in or very near the library makes sense, that's something that should be embraced. In the long run, it's much better to replace a few keyboards or carpet tiles than to create a space that's unwelcoming or trying to enforce rules that the community has contempt for and staff are unwilling to commit to and enforce.
It would be great if we also had some fun and relaxing times and spaces too; I'm pretty sure I'll be organizing gaming nights and other fun events events such as journal clubs or chess tournaments. While not part of our core mission, they'll bring kids into the environment, make it a relaxing and fun space, one that they'll enjoy using. And while there in the space, they might just ask a question or use one of our resources that they might not have heard about before.
Another important point is how we as librarians interact with the people in our physical spaces. We need spaces that are conducive to roaming reference, to ad hoc group consultations in study and lab areas, some sort of reference desk will probably still be in use and of course we will definitely need labs and workshops for instruction activities.
Of course, there will be some interesting challenges in realizing this vision.
A big challenge will be doing all that fun, interactive stuff in what are often small branch libraries while still maintaining quiet space and lab space. It's going to be a difficult balance to strike. We also don't want to create a space that draws in some (ie. rambunctious gamers) but pushes away others (those seeking a bit of contemplation). If we try and mimic the functions of a student centre too much, if we drift too much from using our physical spaces to support the core academic mission of the university, then we risk losing support of senior administrators.
Another part of that challenge is that we are often stuck with older buildings full of stuff. Even if we could decide what kind of cool new spaces we want, how we get from here to there isn't always obvious. While we might like to ship our bound journals and print books off into storage to make room for other kinds of uses, at the moment that would be a huge disservice to our patrons. Those materials are still vitally needed, we're still nowhere near able to make those kinds of choices in a sweeping way. I hope that by the end of my 10 year time frame we'll have started to make a major transformation from stuff space to task-oriented study and social/collaborative space and even some fun space. In the shorter term, we'll still have to struggle with a lot of trade-offs and make do with less than ideal circumstances.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to overcome will be monetary. Adding new space or doing major renovations to existing space isn't cheap. Making the case to administrators and potential donors that the library is still a vital organ for any university campus and deserves the kind of investment necessary to adapt to a new student/academic culture is not going to be easy. That convincing may be easier if we start by showing the kind of vision and leadership that less radical transformations can achieve.
Virtual Spaces
By virtual spaces I mean the descendants of today's library website, OPACs, course management systems and to a certain degree the way we integrate material we license or purchase from vendors as well as material on the open web. Basically all web-based applications, past, present and future.
I have no intention here of going into whether or not our current systems suck or if they're broken because I really want to focus on the future rather than the past. It's pretty obvious to me that library web sites and vendor search interfaces of all kinds have been left in the dust by the Googles & Amazons of the world and getting all dramatic about it doesn't move the discussion forward, it only gets people polarized and defensive. ILS vendors have let us down these last few years, but at the same time I'm not sure we've demanded enough from them over those years either. Not to mention that they are not particularly large companies with the resources of a Google or Amazon to propel that innovation. Can they come through for us in the next decade or are we on our own? Are open source systems going to allow us to build our own systems? The 10 year time frame may very well see larger institutions like universities (and larger public systems) abandoning the front office systems of ILS vendors and embracing something else, be it relying on network level search and discovery tools or building our own systems.
Just as the internet today would be almost unimaginable to us 10 years ago, so too the internet will evolve in unpredictable and unimaginable ways in the next 10 years, thus making any attempt to discern exactly what shape our online presences will take over the next decade will be difficult to say the least. Some things are pretty safe bets: more social, more collaborative, more open, more integrated, fewer product silos. On the other hand, maybe the whole social collaborative thing won't prove to be a big for academic libraries as we thought/hoped? What if you build a collaborative space, and students don't care enough to contribute? To a certain extent, since our presence in faculty and student virtual spaces is omnipresent in all these My Job in 10 Years essays, I just want to talk a little about the attitude we should approach developing our web presences.
First of all, we should not be afraid to make mistakes. We should be most afraid of always erring on the side of caution. Flying headlong into every shiny new technology, magpie-like, is probably a waste of precious resources, but always being the slow and steady tortoise in equally risky. We should neither automatically reject nor embrace something just based on our own personal opinion: new is not always good, old is not always bad and vice versa. It's hard to find the balance here, but there's good advice on that too. We should take the lead from the various interrelated communities dealing with people and machines: CHI, UX, human factors, ergonomics, we should read the tech blogs and books like Information Architecture and the World Wide Web, Ambient Findability, Wikinomics or Everything is Miscellaneous to name just a bunch of recent buzz books. We should figure out what the heck Web Science is. We should be restless, we should see the impossible-to-predict new paradigm shifting trends (like the rise of Google) of the next decade as opportunities not as threats, but as opportunities to engage our communities, to be mentoring our patrons into new technologies rather than scolding them about risky behaviours (hey, we're all guilty of this one sometimes). Or to let our patrons and more adventurous colleagues mentor us into new technologies.
Here's a partial list of some of the technology trends we should be keeping our eyes on over the next decade:
E-Science: The way science is done is changing, and so it the way it is being communicated. It's just getting started now, but I thing the next decade will see major changes: ScienceBlogs, e-science, data visualization, geolocation, the semantic web, web science, open access, open data, open source, open peer review. Not to mention electronic lab notebooks, lab wikis and a whole host of other such innovations. To the extent the way science is communicated transforms, we must follow that transformation. Embryonic systems like Nature Network are worth checking out.
The social web: Social networking software is the hottest thing going right now, but it's impossible to tell how what shape these embryonic systems will take and how permanent and wide ranging a lot of the innovations will be. Stunning, transformative innovation or flash in the pan that everyone will soon tire of: only time will tell. (I tend to the former, by the way) The one thing I am fairly sure of is that we won't see the web get any less connected or any less about relationships and definitely no less about collaboration. So, applications such as the descendants of today's course management systems, Facebook, Myspace and all the rest are definitely worth watching. We must seize opportunities to be appropriately in the same virtual shared spaces as our patrons.
User-created content: It's something that isn't going away either: blogs, wikis, mashups, photos, tags, personal data stuff like LibraryThing databases. And we can't forget that a lot of our science and engineering students essentially already create mashups of data, photos and output of programs such as MatLab or GIS applications for their assignments.
Virtual worlds: Second Life, RuneScape and Kingdom of Loathing (my sons' current favourite) and all the other virtual worlds are a very interesting phenomenon to watch. They certainly have a huge future as gaming environments but it will be interesting to see if they take off as business, educational and leisure environments. The potential is there for distance education and for any kind of remote mediated transaction, exactly the kind of things libraries and librarians want to engage our patrons in.
Mobile and ubiquitous computing: They are already huge trends and they will only get bigger. Mobile in the sense that a wider range of handheld, portable and wearable devices will have greater and greater connectivity and computing power so we must be prepared to deliver our content to those devices. Ubiquitous in the sense that information and access to information is almost like the air we breathe these days, it's everywhere, part of every device we use, part of every landscape we interact in. We need to make sure that the content we purchase and license and the services we offer are part of that ubiquitous landscape. If it's not, we risk being left out.
MicroGoogleSoft: They're calling it "discovery at the network level" now, the idea that people want to use free web search tools to meet all their information needs so we need to make sure our licensed and purchased content is findable via those tools. I more or less talked about this in the A&I Databases installment, but I think it merits a mention here as well. Right now our web presence is partly geared towards directing patrons to A&I databases and then to full text journals. If we're assuming that our patrons don't want to use our web presence directly to find their full text content, but that they want to use a network level tool such as Google, well that's going to mean a pretty major rethinking of what we're doing with our web pages. In a narrow set of circumstances, Google Book Search is already a better tool to find books in our libraries that our own OPACs. That trend is only going to get more pronounced.
OPACs: And speaking of OPACs, better minds than me have speculated about the future of that beast. I hesitate to make any predictions myself, but I would be extremely surprised if what we call the OPAC is at all recognizable in 10 years. Or at very least, the transformation into complete unrecognisability will be well under way. Findability, resource discovery, user tagging, integrating with network-level tools are all going to be important trends to keep tract of.
Special Collections: One trend that's not going away is libraries creating and publishing their own content, whether it be hosting a journal or institutional repository, digitizing special collections, retrospective digitization of old journal or just contributing content to large-scale digitization projects run by other organizations. And there's no reason we can't host social networks as well, such as the University of Toronto's Biome project.
Serendipity: And then there's by far the largest category of stuff we should keep our eyes on: the stuff I've forgotten, can't imagine or seriously underestimate the importance of. Feel free to add some of these to the comments.
Some "on the other hand" considerations that cannot be ignored (My apologies for sounding a bit cranky on some of these but think of it as a way of countering some of the generally boundless optimism in other parts of the series):
Creeping commercialization: We can embrace the model of Google & Amazon & Flickr and whatever, be we have to be careful not to embrace the companies themselves too closely. We mustn't forget that we are public institutions and we have a duty to spend public money in a appropriate way. Sure, we need to partner with vendors to deliver the collections and services that our patrons need, but it's not now nor should it ever be our job to facilitate commercial access to our patrons. These companies aren't our friends, they want to make money off of us and our patrons -- and that's fine, it's their jobs. I'm not saying we shouldn't have excellent relationships with our vendors and their representatives, just that we should remember what the relationship should be.
Privacy: Our patrons may not care about their privacy, but it is our professional duty to protect it for them whether they want us to or not. They may not be worried about telling all to Facebook or MySpace, but our responsibilities are different since our relationship is different. They are not customers we are trying to exploit but rather patrons whose interests we are serving. Patronizing? So are seat belt laws. We need to find balance between an environment so locked down that nobody can do anything interesting or engaging and one that appropriately protects a patron's right to privacy. If you don't think privacy is important, two words: Patriot Act.
Offensive content: Radical trust and user-generated content are great things, but what do you do the first time someone posts racist, sexist or otherwise offensive or hateful content, the first time there's an incident of bullying or harassment of students, faculty or staff. Do we really want to run a clone of RateMyProfessors or have our own Kathy Sierra incident? There's no guarantee that's ever going to happen (and we all hope it doesn't), but if it does we must be prepared to respond with policies and procedures that our communities support. Universities can be very fragile, sensitive places sometimes, quick to explode. We shouldn't be afraid to do interesting things, but we should be aware of the risks and be prepared to respond and not get caught flatfooted.
Build it, and ...: What if we build social spaces where patrons can network and create content and...they just don't. It's one thing for people in the 18-22 age range to use the web to have fun and procrastinate, but do enough of them really care enough about their school work to actually contribute to the library's web site? Remember the 80/20 rule. And Sturgeon's Law too, 90% of everything is crap (except this essay, of course, which is all good). How do we make our virtual spaces interesting and fun enough to attract users' attention and yet useful enough to be worth our time and energy -- and theirs too. Students want their own social spaces, and may not be as interested as we would like to think in "official" social spaces.
Digital divide: There's a couple of digital divides we have to keep in mind. We have to be aware that not all our students have the economic resources to play with the latest gadgetry so we have to make sure we design our offerings to be accessible to everyone. We also have to remember that not all our students want to be engaged with all the latest technologies; there's a wide range of aptitudes and inclinations within any student body. We have to resist the temptation to lump everyone in the same generation together, assuming they all have the same technology profile; we also can't forget that there's going to be a wide age range among our students, that not all of them are teens still living in their parent's basement. We have to meet our students in the diversity of places where they actually are, not where we would like them to be.
Preservation: If we create systems that have user-generated content and if we digitize special collections and host journals, in other words if we are stewards of unique content, we will have to ensure the long-term preservation of that content. Lots of the user-generated content may seem ephemeral, but I'm not sure if we should treat it as such. We will definitely need the opinion of professional archivists on this one.
Academic integrity/intellectual property: Sharing is one thing, stealing is another. Or is it? What's the difference and how can you tell? What if students post assignment answers in one of our forums, for example? We have to be prepared to deal with these types of issues if we allow users to create content in our virtual spaces.
Patience: This is a hard one. The challenge is not to be too impatient for things to work themselves out. Sometimes good systems just need to evolve from crappy systems, we just don't know how to get straight to the right solution at first. An example of such a transitional technology today is SFX and other link resolvers (i.e. what we call Findit@York). What we have now is not ideal -- we just aren't where we need to be yet. But compare it to what we had to do before: look in the A&I database, check the catalogue to figure out if it is online or not, try various online databases and aggregated databases. Just ugly. So, being too impatient can lead to a kind of defeatist frustration. Of course, if we're not impatient enough, that potentially leads to a complacency, stagnation and failure.
Vision drift. In our rush to be all things to all people, we can't forget that our core mission is always going to be connected to the academic mission of our institution.
My job in 10 years? To plan an active role in moving my institution forward in a sane, balanced way that also embraces the endless possibilities of new technological and social patterns. To advocate for better systems and spaces for our patrons, to plan, to facilitate, to organize, to help build, to advertise, to cajole, to promote, to teach. To see the interrelationships between physical and virtual spaces, how one can be used to promote the other, how they are complementary not competing. To promote our physical and virtual spaces to faculty, students and staff. To raise funds to implement grand ideas, to make tough decisions, to understand trade-offs.
Next up: The Earth Shattering Conclusion! (Maybe even as early as next week.)
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