LITA 2011 Day 3 - Keynote - The Evolving Semantic World

Barbara McGlamery, a taxonomist at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia gave the ending keynote for the LITA National Forum 2011.
In her engaging presentation she described the concept of the semantic web as web pages that can both be processed meaning fully by humans and by computers that then index and present the data from those pages in new and interesting ways.  She argued that if web 1.0 was about making connections online, and web 2.0 was about online collaboration, web 3.0 will be about intelligence and making the web smart.
She then went on to describe the process she went through when she was working for Time on trying to implement the semantic web, in what she called the "Big S" method of making a website completely readable by a computer.  In such a system a computer is given enough information that it can draw its own conclusions.  If you have a dataset that has enough information about the relationship between things, a computer can make inferences.  In such a system you can do some powerful things, however it is time intensive to implement, processor intensive to search, and laden with many other problems.  Despite this, McGlamery described several attempts to use these methods at Time, that ultimately did not lead to a practical project.
After this, McGlamery described how she has instead been using "little s" semantic web principles in her work at Martha Stewart Living.  This uses lighter-weight standards and is much easier to implement, but you wind up needing people to filter and adjust the conclusions a computer may come to based on its understanding of data, because of the limitations of this kind of approach.  Despite that, this seems to be the way of the future, and I found myself quite interested in learning more about what is involved, particularly in implementing Google's microdata semantic standard in order to make our own website smarter without the immense work required with a heavier "Big S" solution.

LITA 2011 Day 3 - Social Networking the Catalog : A Community Based Approach to Building Your Catalog and Collection

The last day of LITA 2011 started not with a keynote, but with a presentation.  As a half day, one round of presentations was first, followed by the keynote.  The presentation I attended was made by Margaret Heller of Dominican University and of the Read/Write Library, formerly known as the Chicago Underground Library.
I thought this was a really interesting and unusual session, if applicable to what I do in only the most abstract way.  However, even not being particularly useful to me, it was informative since it described something near to where I live that I'd never heard about.
The Chicago Underground Library is apparently a small collection of largely print materials that has Chicago as its single, unifying focus.  There are a lot of zines and items with small print runs and limited conventional interest. The library focuses on materials and programs that appeal to the artistic community and is independent of any other libraries in Chicago.
Recently the library has changed its name to the Read/Write Library, referring to the common concept of web 2.0 collaboration sites as the "Read/Write Web."  Eschewing conventional librarian wisdom, the library allows anyone to catalog its materials using the library website.  Some of the people who work on this have library degrees, but most do not.  Furthermore, they use their own Drupal-based catalog system, not the standard record types and cataloging standards used in almost all other libraries.
This whole system works because of the unusual nature of the library, but this vision of the library is something from which other libraries could stand to learn something, and that was where the value of this session was.  We have been fixated of late on adding social networking capabilities to our computer systems while the physical locations have remained much the same.  Heller made the point that without adding some kind of social integration to the library itself, the social integration on the catalog is largely meaningless.  Her unique library has found a way that makes sense to make that happen.  Other libraries hopefully can find their own ways.

LITA 2011 Day 2 - Lightning Talks

The lightning talks were interesting, although generally not applicable to my situation.  As lightning talks, they were very short, so at least I was able to hear a lot of different things that had limited applicability to my situation, than listen to one thing that had the exact same low level of applicability.
The first presentation was from Rice Majors from the University of Boulder who described his generally successful effort to loan out someone from his IT department to a different IT department on campus that had had a bumpy relationship.
Then Rebecca Fernandez from Midwestern State University discussed implementing a hosted service on Primo.

Next M Ryan Hess of DePaul University provided a talk that was somewhat intriguing to me about how he tested a theory about potential problems he was having with Google Analytics by implementing a browser cookie for tracking purposes for 3 months and then comparing that information with the information he was getting from Google Analytics.

Hannah Kim from Utah State University described her efforts to switch from a Drupal-based Intranet that wasn't being used and wasn't serving staff needs to an online course system that wasn't designed for Intranets at all but had the features she needed and, with some work, she was able to bend to her purposes.

Todd Vandenbark from University of Utah drescibed his using card sorts to update website navigation during a redesign process.

Finally, Annette Baily presented on the new release of a browser plugin called LibX that I hadn't heard of and that I thought sounded pretty interesting.  I think I'll have to look more into that and see if there's a way we can use it.

LITA 2011 Day 2 - Changing Times : How Mobile Solutions Provide a Catalyst for Expanded Community Reach and Relevance

This presentation was made by Greg Carpenter, C.E.O. of Boopsie, and Jim Loter, director of The Seattle Public Library.

I have been to presentations made by representatives and founders of companies before and I was a little concerned that this talk could be much like some of those: boring sales pitches with a PowerPoint presentation.
I was pleasantly surprised by this one.
Although Greg was clearly not entirely neutral in that he had a product that the other presenter had used successfully, his talk was generally a solid overview of the mobile space with some information that Boopsie has learned about mobile users from its product, some of which were obtained because of some special features of the Boopsie mobile product.

After Greg, Jim Loter from The Seattle Public Library presented on their process of setting up their mobile website with Boopsie.  Comparing what was literally called "mobile services" back in 1931 and what we consider "mobile services" today, Jim described how their app/mobile website has been useful to their patrons in downloading electronic books/audiobooks and in dealing with the week when the library had to shut down due to budgetary issues.

I particularly found interesting Seattle's efforts to make sure that their staff had access to mobile devices so that they can help their public with using them.  They are rolling out a "get out from behind the desk" campaign where they are hoping to have the bulk of what librarians at public service desks do available to be done from a mobile device, and consequently done from somewhere other than seated behind the reference desk.  It's an interesting plan and I think a good one.
I enjoyed this session and found it quite worth my time.

LITA 2011 Day 2 - Trends at a Glance : A Management Dashboard of Library Statistics

This was a good session presented by Emily Morton-Owens of New York University and Karen Hanson of the NYU Medical Center.

Emily and Karen described their problem of wanting to make the monitoring of information easier. They had a new director who wanted to know how the library was being used. They had access to a lot of existing data and had multiple uses for this data: to make decisions, to show worth, and to make one-off reports.

Their data came from open source, homegrown, and available sources. In deciding how to create an interface with graphs showing the data they used “above all else, show the data” and the principles of Edward Tufte to guide them. It was important to have truthful propotions in the data and eliminate graphical junk.  For this reason they eliminated the use of pie charts, which have been determined in studies to be sometimes difficult for users to properly interpret, and instead used bar charts.

They built their bar charts using Google charts, which made the process quite simple (they showed the entire code for a chart that they had to write and it was less than 50 lines).  They also implemented a nice linear regression line and described how they did that.

The dashboard they created has multiple graphs on it that are not necessarily related except that they show information about the utilization of resources at their campus.  They used as a principle that a good dashboard should have benchmarks and goals. The dashboard that they wound up developing and demonstrating was geared toward providing an operational view of their data, although they would like to adapt it to show a strategic view.

One of the things that they discussed in their data usage an analysis was the parsing of EZProxy data, which I use a lot.  I haven't seen many presentations on parsing EZProxy data before, even though I'm doing it frequently, and it was interesting to see their approach.

LITA 2011 Day 2 - Extending Library Services with AI Conversational Agents

I loved this session from David Newyear of Mentor Public Library and Michele McNeal of Akron-Summit County Public Library.  I'm not sure I loved the automated cat avatar, but I loved much else that they are doing, and it seems to me there is a place for some kind of avatar with this kind of program, so I don't really fault the cat avatar at all.

They have been working on a largely open source automated reference program that you can see in action here: www.mentorpl.org/catbot.html.   Following in the path first forged by the classic computer program/experiment Eliza, their cat uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language to recognize forms of questions and provide canned answers or direct users to appropriate resources.

This seems to me an interesting, albeit challenging, alternative to long FAQ lists or having basic information about services spread all over your website.  Instead you have the chatbot programmed to look for questions like "what are your hours" and have it reply appropriately.

The presenters gave several examples of the language used to create the chatbot which I found most useful and an example looks like this:

Do you know who * is

The presenters also provided sample log segments showing actual conversations with the chatbot and discussed some of the problems with the chatbot, the process required to develop and maintain it, and the general reaction to the chatbot.  It seems users have taken to the chatbot generally in a positive and sometimes playful way, proposing marriage to it even.
I think this is something that could be fun and interesting to pursue, and probably something that could add value to our services.  More information about their chatbot system can be found at:

www.infotabby.org

LITA 2011 Day 2 - Keynote - On the Web, Of the Web : A Possible Future

Karen Coyle presented this excellent keynote to begin day 2 of the the 2011 LITA National Forum.

She began by expressing a key sentiment from the prior day's keynote, that we are getting toward the end of something and the beginning of something else. Below are my notes expressing many of the key concepts:

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“If Moses were to come down from the mountain today he would have to come down with comments enabled.”

Wikileaks and bloggers are examples of actors who are changing the balance of power. Print isn't going away but it is waning. Print will become analogous to electronic like live performances are to recordings. We haven't managed to progress beyond filenames on computers – we don't see title and author information when we look at what we've downloaded.

The world where books are written and other books are written later to respond to that book are disappearing. Our conversations have become faster and shorter. Coyle sees a new media now is dominating old media. Informal communication is becoming formalized. With Facebook, Twitter and email we've lost our ability to be off the record.

There are two primary activities that libraries are engaged in that can help. One is the FRamily (FRBR, etc). The second is linked data. This is the year that linked data is going big and several libraries in Europe are already implimenting it in their catalogs.

Linked data is a metadata format that is designed for the web, and the web is where we need to be. It provides a flexibility that you can't get with other formats and an expansion of your metadata in a non disruptive way. Linked data can be built up incrementally without having to change your technology. The MARC record is comparatively all or nothing. With the use of identifiers multiple language displays are easy.

The Semantic Web vs. the Pedantic Web.

Library catalog data can be cryptic “xii, 356 p.; 23 cm.” What's 23 cm? What does xii mean? “Library cataloging is like the secret language of twins.” It doesn't make sense to put this out on the web. We're too focused on our stuff, not on our stuff as to be organized as knowledge.

Neither FRBR nor RDA address the isssue of subject headings and organize information topically. Search engines do keyword rather than topic searching because it's easy. The simple search box puts a big burdon on the user to figure out what they should put in that will match what they are looking for. “At the same time, it is known that users in their attempts to search by subject sometimes find themselves at a loss for words” - Elaine Svenonius. Searching for concepts or things with common terms in their names causes problems with the simple search box.

Wikipedia is organized information and has concepts that don't appear easily in a keyword search, which is part of why it's so important in Google searches. Keyword searching is like dumpster diving or dynamite fishing for information. We pay attention to what's right in searching and ignore what's wrong.

Even tagging is not a good answer. We are using Victorian era knowledge schemes – Cookery has finally become Cooking, too little, too late. We can use computing to do a lot of interesting things with faceting – things that were worked on by Raganathan and others in the past, but were too complex to be implemented in an analog fashion. We tend to be good at helping people find a title, but not so good at finding a concept.

Users need to use information, not just find it. Use is an information activity and we should be available to support information activities. Linked data can help.

The library catalog needs to become a backroom database, not what gets shown to users. We have to move beyond the catalog. It may be wasted time to try and make the catalog better. It may be better to figure out how to make that information useful to people where they do their work.

The concepts behind FRBR were find, identify, select, and obtain. We need to really focus on find and make that the priority, and then add on a major focus of use. If FRBR and RDA are going to support this need to change radically and evolve. There are data points that we need that are not included in these standards.

Users flock to Wikipedia because the knowledge is organized and they can understand it.

LITA 2011 Day 1 - Making Smartphones Smarter in the Library : Reaching Mobile Users with QR Codes

Anne Morrow and Nancy Lombardo of the University of Utah and Benjamin Rawlins of Kentucky State University presented this fun session on QR Codes and their use.

The first part was an overview of what QR-codes are, their history, and ways they can be used. The second part had a more detailed description of different ways libraries are using them. A QR Code scavenger hunt was passed out and attendees got mini chocolate bars at the end for completing them and chatting with the presenters.

Some suggested uses for QR codes were: way-finding, directing users to online forms and registration, research assistance, directing users to services, providing announcements, and directing users to additional information in immersive exhibits.

They mentioned their use of BeeTagg.com and Delivr.com to create and track QR Codes.  Delivr.com is free for small institution uses and BeeTagg.com costs between $1 and $5 per code for use of their tracking system.  I'm wondering if it wouldn't be too difficult to create a system which could be easily installed and customized to provide this service without depending on a third party.  QR codes are easily created using open source software and there are open source solutions for creating short URLs (see Casimir) and some basic statistics package.

LITA 2011 Day 1 - Getting Your Mobile Web Presence Off the Ground

This was a great session, presented by Kathryn Frederick from Skidmore College, on developing a mobile website, which they launched just over a year ago.  The presentation is at https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dff8vx6_17hd6nvzcd and the mobile website itself is at http://lib.skidmore.edu/m/.

When developing a mobile version of a site it is important to ask the questions:

• Who are your users and what would they find useful?
• What resources (staff, money, time) are available to you?
• What would you do if you had no limitations?

It's necessary to decide whether you want to make an app or a mobile site.  In the case of Skidmore they decided to make a mobile site.  It's then necessary to decide whether you want to take the existing site and make it work well on mobile, or to design a new mobile site that has a subset of information that's on the regular website.  Finally you have to decide what technologies you will use to make the site work.

When devoloping for mobile it's important to keep in mind the small screen size and the variable connection speed that users will have.  Kathryn also provided information about a lot of different tools to use to test your mobile site and make sure that it works well on different platforms.

Some things to consider including in a mobile website are directions (perhaps GPS based) and clickable phone numbers.  Android Chrome doesn't deal well with RSS feed content which is good to be aware of if you want to integrate that.  It's helpful to use a mobile redirect script and Kathryn included a link to a sample script.  Finally, Kathryn dealt with marketing a mobile site saying thtat QR codes are a handy way to disseminate the URL.

LITA National Forum 2011 - Day 1 - Keynote

Having for several years been a member of the Library & Information Technology Association section of the American Library Association and seeing that they were going to be having their National Forum not incredibly far away in St. Louis, I decided to investigate the possibility of attending, and now I'm here for three days of some discussion of technology in libraries.

Today's keynote was titled Gathering the Sparks – Rebuilding With the Same Old Brand New Technology and was presented by John Blyberg from Darien Library.

His keynote was a broad overview of the change that has been occurring over the past few centuries, trying to play off of the National Forum theme of "Rivers of Data, Currents of Change."

He began with some observations on the change that has occurred just in the lifetimes of kids now entering college.  Then he backed way up to look at some of the sources of that change and settled on the beginning of patent law with the Statute of Monopolies in 1624 and how it changed the way people owned ideas and provided a motivation to invent, as before that inventions were owned by royalty who were benefactors of the inventors. Many of the innovations that have since transpired have been disruptive. Disruptive effects can be positive (life enhancement) or negative (spreading of extremist ideas). We actually have less leisure time due to the spread of technology than we did 50 years ago.

Using Google as an example he made a point of taking a long view of things. If you look at where Google is looking you have a vision of the future (investment in self-driving cars, wave & solar power).

To elaborate on the issue of change he then looked at a lot of technology prompted changes and events that have happened in the 94 years since his grandfather's birth putting them in the context of his own family.  Technology keeps changing and is involved in important moments that change the way we look at the world. 

His point was that this is a world for which we are in many ways unprepared. What, he asked, is the role of the library in a world where print publishing is marginalized into a niche by 2019? John is optimistic about the future of libraries considering the brain power and the problem solving capabilities of librarians that will be able to reinvent the field.

Not much here that I hadn't heard before, but it got me thinking a bit and I guess that's the point of keynotes.  I'm more interested in the main sessions where I'll get to see what people are actually doing.

CIL - Day 3 - Building Community & Mobile Experience

This session, my last for Computers in Libraries 2011, was a mild disappointment. The first part of the presentation, done by Bonnie Roalsen and Ryan Livergood, Dover Town Library, was actually quite good, although short. Bonnie and Ryan described the use of QR Codes for various library programs in an affluent community with high cell phone/smart phone ownership. These programs included:

• A summer reading program that utilized a QR coded scale model of the solar system scattered throughout the community
• A program where seed packets with QR codes were distributed and the QR codes were placed next to the plants. The codes would point to pages about the plants and somehow the participants were encouraged to grow the seeds in places away from the community in their summer travels and then plotted on Google Earth.
• QR code scavenger hunts

The second portion of the session was Boris Zetterlund from Axiell Library Group in Sweden. He described in general terms his company's creation of an iPhone/Android app which could be used to access information about different cultural institutions in a community. There were some interesting ideas, but no information that I found would be useful in trying to implement an app of this sort.

CIL - Day 3 - Planning & Realizing the “Fourth Place”

This was a kind of quirky session which was nonetheless interesting and valuable. Paul Signorelli from Signorelli & Associates was supposed to be Skypeing in for the first part, but there were technical difficulties and this could not happen. The two live co-presenters, Jill Hurst-Wahl from Syracuse University and Maurice Coleman from Harford County Public Library had planned ahead though and were able to fill in for Paul and then present their own ideas.

I was primarily interested in what the concept of the "fourth place" was as I'm quite familiar already with the concept of the "third place" (the first and second places being home and work/school, with the third being somewhere to be when you're not at places 1 or 2, commonly a coffee shop, bookstore, or as some have suggested, a library).

To start they provided a broad definition of a library which I think can be in many cases useful:

1. A place that connects people with knowledge
2. For students, a place that increases their hours of learning activities.

The "fourth place" concept is to really play up this "place of learning" role of the library. Some of the ideas in how to do this I thought were quite interesting and to a point applicable in our situation. In particular:

• create a space that allows the users to redefine it. Get furniture that can be easily rearranged so that people can setup for study groups or individual study or whatever they need
• use signs to encourage behavior rather than discourage behavior (“Texting encouraged, silence cell phones keep calls brief & quiet”)
• also mentioned was a vision of the library as a dirty, noisy place where people can learn different skills (bicycle repair and gardening were mentioned as specific examples that at least one library was doing)

An interesting, although probably not practical in my situation, suggestion for this dirty place was the acquisition of used shipping containers to build a kind of garage like structure where such kinds of classes could be done without having to worry about getting grease all over the carpeting. I'm afraid that given the realities of our location, such an implementation will have to be tested out by a different public library.

CIL - Day 3 - Cool Tools : Measuring, Visualizing and Analyzing

Darlene Fichter from the University of Saskatchewan, Jeff Wisniewski from the University of Pittsburgh, and Michael DeMars from California State University - Fullerton each presented in this session which covered some interesting ways to evaluate a library's online presence.

Darlene Fichter started out with one of her always great lists of different online tools and ways to use those tools. After she provided her list, Jeff Wisniewski added a few more. Some of the more interesting items on the list of tools included:

• boardreader - A site to search message boards. A good way to find out if your organization is being mentioned on any message boards.

• omgili - Like boardreader, except for social networking sites.

• howsociable - Shows how frequently a brand is mentioned on different sites

• addictomatic - Similar to howsociable, but shows recent examples in the box for each site

• socialmention - Similar to the above but with a smaller user base and some interesting evaluative measures like strength of mentions, and passion.

• Klout - Measures influence on Twitter.

• MyWebCareer - Provides a credit score-like number to indicate brand popularity on social networks

• Twendz - a tool that analyzes activity and sentiment on Twitter

• Hootsuite - a social media dashboard

Michael DeMars added to these recommendations, describing tools that he had used in a project to get analytical data to drive decisions regarding the website.
Using a combination of Google forms and Zoomerang for user surveys, javascript, and Google Analytics. I liked seeing the way that he was able to use these things together and also to see some of the ways to use Google Analytics data.

CIL 2011 - Day 3 - Usability Express

This solid and useful session was led by Bohyun Kim and Marissa Ball from Florida State University. The session was divided into two sections. In the first, Bohyun Kim examined common problems on library websites and the basic principles that can be used to correct them. These problems (most of which I can agree with emphatically from experience) were:

• Clutter & Noise - in promoting everything, nothing really gets promoted. I found it interesting that in this session the presenters stated that the conventional wisdom that people don't want to click more than 3 times to find anything, is in fact incorrect and that people don't mind clicking a lot to get to what they want as long as they don't have to think about where to click.
• Dated Look - If your site looks old, even if it's regularly updated, users will assume it's out of date.
• Too Subtle Design - With a 500 millisecond evaluation period that most users apply to websites they are visiting, your website should have the visual simplicity of a billboard.
• Unclear Terms/Library Jargon - Avoid library jargon (something we've generally tried to do), don't use vendor provided names for databases (something we haven't necessarily done well), and use a short description if necessary. After the session I was talking about the jargon problem with someone and they mentioned the case of a library having a database of the month promotion with the catchy phrase (something like) "This month tango with Mango" without mentioning that Mango is an online language learning database. It would be far better to avoid the Mango name entirely and just say "Learn a language for free"
• Redundant/Unnecessary Content - Avoid stuff people don't care about (welcome/introduction text) and any stuff that functions as a kind of small talk. Users of your website don't care about small talk.
• Bad writing - Cut the length of any text by half and then cut more. Avoid full sentences if possible and use bullet points. Short paragraphs. If someone can't glance at a page and quickly find the important text, they will get frustrated.
• Design against convention - In this case "against" means "using as a measuring stick" not "contrary to." People expect sites to be consistent and there are a lot of established website conventions which you should adhere to.
• Unintuitive Navigation - If you can't figure out what intuitive navigation is, do some usability testing

That last point led into Marissa Ball's portion of the program which focused on doing quick, cheap and easy usability testing. Here she described a variety of ways to get the biggest bang for the buck in testing individual users on your site and then building a design with user feedback that should be easy for them to understand.

CIL 2011 - Day 3 - Thinking Strategically & Critically

Having enjoyed the talk which I saw her make on the first day of the conference, I went to see this talk by Rebecca Jones of Dysart & Jones Associates on the last day of the conference.

This was a presentation that I kind of wish that I had seen a year ago, when the library's strategic planning process was much earlier along, but I still found it valuable even as we are wrapping up and preparing to present a final report to the library board.

Jones started out with a good, basic definition of what strategic planning really is. It's not about making a document to put on the shelf, it's about "engaging people in the thinking and making sure that the implementation steps go right into each employee's job." It's about thinking differently about what we do, seeing the possibilities from a different vantage point and adjusting.

Jones mentioned several times a tactic that she has used in strategic planning sessions were a spot on the floor is marked out as "the future." One by one members of the committee visit "the future," (generally defined in a specific way, like in 3 years) close their eyes and tell the others what they see as they imagine what they think the place should be like then. It seems a little corny, but it seems that this kind of approach, getting people's adrenaline going and forcing them to imagine an ideal, which can then be used to find ways to try and achieve the ideal, or at least forge some kind of common ideal once you've heard from several different people.

Jones' presentation covered a lot of ground and provided a lot of great information. Some worthwhile snippets to mention are:

• Divest to invest - you need to give up some things to truly get something different
• Don't look for "buy-in", but rather get people to buy with you.

• Watch trendwatching.com, the world futures organization, look at what your community is reading, look at stumbleupon.com for current trends.

• Curiosity rarely, if ever, kills the cat

This was another worthwhile session which will be worth reviewing.

CIL - Day 3 - Keynote with Lee Rainie

My third and final day of Computers in Libraries 2011 began with a keynote by perennial favorite Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life project. Mr. Rainie always has interesting and valuable insights in trends in Internet and technology use by the population as a whole, and this year was no exception.

The first interesting point was the although they continue to grow, both Internet usage and broadband adoption in the United States have flattened out considerably. Internet usage flattened out as of some time in 2007 and broadband adoption started flattening out in 2009. As adoption of broadband has flattened out it has become clear that there are certain segments of the population which still are slow to adopt this technology and Mr. Rainie identified these as those with a high school degree or less, those over 65, persons who when interviewed prefer to interview in Spanish, the disabled, and African-Americans.

Using this as groundwork, Mr. Rainie proceeded to start to identify areas where libraries can show that they bring value to their communities, the first way being by helping to fill in some of these internet access divides in the population.

Throughout his talk Rainie built on this groundwork and identified the following additional ways that libraries can bring value to their communities:

• libraries can embed themselves into peoples attention zones so we can connect with people in what he called the “golden age of amateur experts” and help them in “deep dives” into their subject areas or as they “info snack”

• libraries can embed themselves into media zones and social streams to participate in users study and work space

• libraries can be nodes in social networks as sentries of information where word of mouth matters more

• libraries can act in social network modes as information evaluators where they can help vouch for or discredit a business's credibility and authenticity

• libraries can be teachers of new literacies such as screen literacy (graphics and symbols), navigation literacy, how to create content, and teachers of what is ethical in a new world

• libraries can help fill in civic gaps and help people perform “the big sort” among institutions and on news and the information landscape

CIL 2011 - Day 2 - Dead & Innovative Tech Session

I was a couple minutes late for this session as my dinner went a little late although I caught most of it. As usual it was entertaining while at the same time mildly disturbing and challenging.

I will briefly try and describe three of the 13 minute talks which I found most challenging.

Marshall Breeding's talk, as usual at these affairs, was the most laid-back and least funny, but it was still quite good. His main points were that the following library jargon terms and concepts need to change:

• The Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) needs to change to a Discovery Layer System (like our recent introduction of Bibliocommons at the Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District/Cooperative Computer Services Consortium). Using the canned catalog system is no longer adequate in a world of Amazon and social networking.
  

• Federated Search, which allows searching multiple databases at once using and intermediate just-in-time search of all of the databases, needs to be replaced by the concept of Consolidated Search, where Google-like an index is made of all of a library's database holdings and searches are done instantly against an index.

• The centrality of the Integrated Library System needs to give way to the concept of a Comprehensive Technology Support Platform which takes into account all of a library's electronic assets

• The hype of Web 2.0 needs to receed back to just the Web, as the marketing concept of Web 2.0 is merely the delivery on the promise on what the Web was supposed to be in the first place.

I also liked Sarah Houghton-Jan's (the Librarian in Black) one note, although passionate longing for the death of DRM. Her key points that DRM is in the end ineffective, adds cost, hinders accessibility and access, and stifles efforts at preservation are all dead-on. As a community libraries need to find a way that we can provide easier electronic access to materials while respecting both the publisher's and the reader's rights.

Finally, as always, Stephen Abram's piece was a wild, passionate call to arms that is hard to summarize. Suffice it to say that Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs were renounced as three of the four horsemen of the 'bibliocalypse' (Sarah Houghton-Jan's word, but it seems appropriate here), with Bill Gates mentioned as a reformed and former fourth horseman. Meanwhile librarians were described as frogs that can freeze with the winter and as things warm up we need to find a voice and unite on a topic for the first time since some decision was made about catalog cards in 1975 (I missed that one as I was only 2 then). The only reference that Stephen seemed to miss in his frog analogy was the classic parable of the frog being cooked to death as the water slowly is heated, which is rather what I became concerned of as a distinct possibility at the end of this session.

Funny, informative, challenging, and scary.

CIL 2011 - Day 2 - Ebooks & Their Growing Value for Libraries

This presentation was really 3 presentations featuring 5 presenters and covering two timeslots in the schedule.

The first presentation was made by Amy Pawlowski from Cleveland Public Library & Sue Polanka from Bright State University Libraries. They provided an overview of the eBook situation and provided public library and academic library perspectives. The notable points from the public library perspective (which is what I was most interested in) were:

The Public Library Future

• 72% of Public Libraries are offering eBooks

• 5% of public libraries circulate preloaded ereading devices, while 24% are considering it. Kindle was the top device.

• Currently only 1/5 of the US Online population reads at least two books per month

• If you buy 1 eBook from Amazon for $9.99 a week for an entire year you'll spend about $520, some of which you could be saving by downloading books from the library.

Value for Libraries

• 24/7 access anywhere

• Econtent meets users where they are

• Shelf/Storage Space

• Expanding free content to our users

• Staying current/relevant by delivering a service to a growing demographic

  • eReader & Tablet Market

  • Mobile Market

How to position your library

• The waiting is over
• Know the platforms and products and how they workstationsStart planning for the future now
• Create programming around devices/service
• Consider circulating devices to help those who are looking to purchase in the future
• Come up with a plan for collection development
• Decide where your eBook budget dollars best fit into your library's budget
• Train
• Market

Following this presentation was a presentation done by Ellen Druda and Rosemarie Jerome from Half Hallow Hills Community Library. They described their efforts in using eReaders with reading clubs and their summer reading program. The reading club effort was interesting as they had a discussion of iDrakula by Bekka Black, and iPhone App/eReader reworking of Dracula in modern times. Based on their virtualization of their adult summer reading program registration from last year (and a considerable boost of participation as a result) they are now taking that even further and this year are planning a summer reading program where it is completely unnecessary to step into the library during the entire program. People will be able to register online, download ebooks, and post reviews of ebooks from home, in addition to the more conventional summer reading club options. It will be interesting to see how successful this is.

The last presentation of the session was done by Bianca Crowley of the Smithsonian Institution. It addressed the Biodiversity Heritage Library's digitization project where in concert with archive.org they have put the contents of hundreds of books in the collections of member institutions online. In it she described some of the issues they've had with metadata. It was most interesting to me just to know that it was there.

CIL 2011 - Day 2 - eBook Models and Challenges

This presentation was in two parts. The first portion was presented by Sujay Darji of Swets. And was a description of Swets entry into the eBook distribution business.

Subscription agents, like Swets, are primarily know from periodical subscriptions. Publishers have been approaching subscription agents asking for a way to distribute content. Subscription agents had been working with e-content for journals for over 10 years and this required some infrastructure changes and research into the field. Different agents have chosen different methods and approaches to the problem.

Meanwhile librarians are struggling to keep up with all of the different models. It's been difficult to compare vendors with different pricing models, different styles, etc. Swets did a survey of librarians and decided for a variety of reasons to focus on an acquisition model rather than an access model, which meant they didn't need to establish a new platform and didn't have problems complying with different demands from different publishers. Swets set itself up in a position of an “aggregator of aggregators and publishers.” As a subscription agent the goal is to provide access to many titles from many publishers without having to worry about platform changes. There's a free access research tool from Swets.

The second presentation, was made by Stephen Abram, was far more interesting and challenging, and like most Stephen Abram presentations is more difficult to summarize.

In his presentation he stated that historically we have made all kinds of compromises for different media. Reflected light works very well for fiction (and end-to-end experience), but other light levels have different impacts on reading different kinds of media. Reading bright light increases stress. Reading a dimmer light brings that down to an action level. We need to evaluate the media that different material use. We like to take the old way of doing things and just make it electronic rather than thinking about what we can do with current technology to make something.

When interviewing a 13-year old who had been told by his teacher to depend on sources from the government, the boy said that he used Wikipedia anyway, since “Who are you going to trust, the government or the people?”

From the research that he's seen 1/3 want print, 1/3 want pure electronic, 1/3 want hybrid reading. People learn in different ways (text based and visual) and formats need to accommodate these different learning styles.

How would you reinvent the book?

• We are moving to an article level universe.

• The Chapter and Paragraph Universe

• Integrated with visuals, video, sound and speech, social web, interactivity

Abram emphasized that the FCC Whitespace Broadband Decision is going to have a huge transformational effect and that effect will go global.

He also emphasized that if we win our arguments on text-based books but ignore multimedia and other options we will lose the big picture.

We need to move faster together.

It was a good, thoughtful presentation.

CIL 2011 - Day 2 - Empowering the Reader in a Digital World

Al Carlson from Tampa Bay Library Consortium and Chad Mairn from St. Petersburg College co-presented in this good basic overview of the ebook landscape which, for those already familiar with the landscape, was made worthwhile by an energetic pace and a call to action to save the place of the library and improve the lives of our patrons in a world that is going digital.

A key concern that they voiced was that the rate at which people are adopting new technologies is accelerating and that this is likely to happen with the move from the codex to electronic books and readers. Currently libraries are not in control of their own destinies in the world of electronic books and competing DRM schemes and formats. The attendees were challenged to:

• Create open source software that enables a library to store and check out books without Overdrive.

• Devise a purchasing plan that creates a win for the whole revenue stream

• Find out and share the true cost of publishing a book in hard copy vs. publishing that same book and an eBook to create bargaining tools in negotiating with publishers
  

CIL 2011 - Day 2 - Learning from Inspirational Libraries

Marshall Breeding, one of the few people alive who has been to all 26 Computers in Libraries conferences, presented this overview of different ways that libraries are innovating in their communities. This is not a session from which one would bring back a lot of practical things to implement, but rather something that inspires you to try and think "outside the box" in the light of what others have achieved.

Marshall started out with some of the wealthiest, beautiful, and stunning libraries in the world such as the Yonsei Samsung Library in Seoul, South Korea, the DOK library in Delft, Netherlands and the Customs House Library in Sydney, Australia. These libraries are all doing impressive things with touch screens, computers, gaming devices, and design to create unique spaces.

He followed this with some national libraries as well as the Library of Congress, which is doing some fascinating things particularly with A/V resources.

Finally he showed what libraries are doing to transform society with relatively limited resources in places like Colombia. This was inspirational seeing important things these libraries were doing to preserve the history and enhance the lives of those living in some of the poorer regions in that country.

CIL 2011 - Day 2 - Keynote on the Digital Native

This morning's keynote was on “Three Keys to Engaging Dital Natives” and was made by Michelle Manafy from Free Pint Limited, author of Dancing with Digital Natives.

Digital Native refers to today's youth who have grown up with ubiquitous digital technologies. Everyone else using digital technologies are digital immigrants. (The term was coined by Marc Prensky author of Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants) Those who turn 15 in 2016 will spend between 1200 and 1500 hours a day on digital technologies.

Ms. Manafy described in detail three characteristics of digital natives.

They are all about public opinion, not private lives. Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame has changed to 15 people to whom you are famous. Example: IJustMadeLove.com. Police monitor Twitter & Facebook for gang activity, because they actually post stuff they are doing there. The use of social sign-on (using an existing social network login to sign into a new site) is something that appeals to the digital native. By the nature of this activity the digital native can be one of your greatest advocates.

Digital natives are about knowledge sharing, not knowledge hoarding. Crowdsourcing is a good example of this attitude. Haul videos, where people provide details of shopping sprees, is likewise an example. Quirky.com is a place for social product development. You submit your proposed invention to the site and people can comment on it, and then products which have been voted on are brought to market. It provides real-time market feedback. Local Motors uses this system to make cars. ProPublica does this for reporting. DigitalKoot does this to improve digitization projects with games. Proctor & Gamble's developer site, P&G connect, collaborates with outside innovators for packaging, products & business models. IBM has a collaborative development site. It's founder says that he used to think that “knowledge is power” but now believes that “knowledge shared is power.” This is a generation that wants to be involved in product creation and are more likely to buy products with which they played a role in creation.

Digital natives are interested in interactions, not transactions. If you don't provide a constructive forum to express dissatisfaction, they will find one that you will not control. United Airlines has suffered from negative press for high prices for bicycle transport and damaging guitars. Their Twitter feed has a picture of a plane, not people, unlike American Express's Twitter feed. Threadless t-shirts has a business model similar to those above (user submitted, voted designs). PBS digital nation project posted rough cuts from the project. Users submitted editing suggestions as well as pictures and comments about how digital technologies have changed people's lives. Australia's State Library of Victoria has done a lot of interesting things. They have thousands of book lists in their kids section of the website and many have comments. The Library of Birmingham in the U.K. has beenbeen doing a lot of innovative things. Using QR codes, GPS navigation, and virtual imaging to help people find things with their phones.

To survive we will need to learn to think more like the digital native, which means that we'll probably have to do some scary things.

CIL 2011 - Day 1 - Dine-Around

I had a lovely dinner with 9 other attendees at a Chinese restaurant where we discussed any number of interesting library topics (including the explicitly advertised topic of the dine-around, screencasting). Among the people there (not meaning to leave anyone out, but my memory is quite fallible when it comes to remembering 9 different names) were Holly Hibner from Plymouth District Library in Plymouth, MI, Ryann Uden from Barrington Public Library District, Trina Burns from Rockford Public Library, and Natasha Bergson-Michelson from Google.

A highlight from the dinner worth sharing with all those interested in Google searching is, if you want to find out what people in other countries are saying about a topic, do a Google search on it, then go on the left and click on more search tools. Then click on Translated Foreign Pages, and you will get foreign sites, grouped by language translated into English for you.

CIL 2011 - Day 1 - Performance Measures : Illustrating Value to your Community

Rebecca Jones from Dysart & Jones Associates presented this last session which I attended on day 1. This was an excellent session although a little dense for my tired brain to handle. Ms. Jones discussed the selection of different measures in determining an organization's, and in particular a library's, effectiveness. One key point on which the rest of the presentation was built were that a measure, by definition, either have a beginning point or a goal (end point) against which the measuring is done, which seems to be something often forgotten. Meaningful measures:

• Matter to you and your stakeholders
• Demonstrate that the library makes a difference
• Focus attention on what is being done & what is most important for the organization
• Are critical for managing, planning and decisionmaking
• Are organization-dependent and must be connected to strategic directives to employers.

She noted in particular a book Measuring for Results : The Dimensions of Public Library Effectiveness by Joe Matthews as a key reference.

This session, I think, will be one to review again later with the conference CD-ROM.

CIL 2011 - Day 1 - Innovative Marketing Tools and Strategies

Stacy Bruss & Nancy Allmang, Information Services Office, National Institute of Standards and Technology

This was a pleasant presentation, but not one I really got a lot out of.

Stacy & Nancy began by talking about their experimentation with audio and video podcasts. They then discussed a plugin for PowerPoint called PPTPlex. This plugin makes PowerPoint zoom in and out of slides. They also described their use of PowerPoint for digital displays. They are considering using Prezi and xtranormal as well.

PPTPlex was new to me and I wasn't familiar with the open source citation management software Zotero before this session, but that was about it.

CIL 2011 - Day 1 - Demonstrating the Impact of Public Access Technology

Opportunity for All : How the American Public Benefits from Internet Access at U.S. Libraries

The presenters collected data with case studies, telephone surveys and web surveys at libraries across the United States on public library Internet users.

245 million people 14 and older have used a library in the past year. 30 percent of visitors use a computer terminal, 12 percent use wireless. 22 percent of users rely on the public library as their sole source for Internet. 78 percent o the population have access to a computer somewhere but still are using a computer terminal.

67 percent of users received one-on-one help from library staff or volunteers. 14 percent of users attended a computer-related training at the library. Library Internet access helps people connect, research, find employment, get educated, health & wellness, government & legal information, and more. People felt more comfortable using the library to help find employment than going to employment agencies.

Congestion was a major time barrier. Policies such as time limits help ease congestion but it makes it harder for specific tasks (such as finding a job, researching government policy, etc) to complete their task. Digital literacy is another common barrier for patrons as well as shadow mandates (schools closing their libraries and sending all usage to the public library. Managing shadow relationships can be important.

Full study can be found at http://tascha.uw.edu/usimpact/us-public-library-study.html

The speaker recommended Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government by M. H. Moore.

Effective messages for external audiences:

• What's happening at the library in terms of technology services available and their impact in specific high-value areas, especially job search, education, health and wellness, and eGovernment

• Benchmarking the library against national averages to highlight impact, strengths, and needs

Effective messages for internal audiences:

• Equipping friends and board members to advocate for the library by helping them understand the value of public accessible

They are making the survey instrument available for free usage by libraries to survey patrons about public access. This might be an interesting thing to pursue if our community gets over the survey fatigue induced by the last survey.

Lunchtime Keynote Makeup

I decided to pass on a formal lunch today and see the Google Books talk that we were unable to see earlier and find miscellaneous calories as I could manage.

The mission of Google is to “organize the world's information and make them universally accessible and useful.” The mission of Google Books is thus to “organize the world's books and make them universally accessible and useful.”

Google's now scanned over 15 million books (5 billion pages, 2 trillion words). The majority of books have come from libraries (about 3 million have come directly from publishers). The process goes scan → image process (correct for page curvature) → OCR (originally just for search, but Google purchased ReCaptcha to try and improve percentage of properly recognized words) → Tag → Metadata → Rank (not book to book references, but circulation and sales data) → index.

He covered a lot of interesting problems Google has, like the wide variety of languages, date inconsistency, page number recognition problems, mis-matched metadata (J.R.R. Tolkien vs. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien).

One striking graph showed the large number of books that are out of print but under copyright.

A huge amount of Google Books users are students. There is a big drop in traffic during spring/winter breaks.

No real news on the book settlement, but he provided a brief overview of the current status.

He mentioned the ngram viewer and had some interesting observations on the regularization of verbs in English over time. The example graphs he provided for ngram were good: “United States are” vs. “United States is” and the prevalence of different decade mentions in literature (1980, 1990, 2000, etc.).

In the Q&A session he mentioned that there is a process for getting missing pages from scans added. Sharing libraries as a feature is coming to Google Books. He mentioned that there is some effort to correct public domain errors (books published by the U.S. Government being shown as under copyright).

The talk was interesting, but not really fantastic. Biggest annoyance James Crawford's consistent mispronunciation of Tsunami (tsoo-nah-mee) as "too-sah-mee," which for some reason he thought would be a good example word throughout the talk.

CIL 2011 - Day 1 - Improve Your Website Now

10 Things You Can Do to Make Your Library Site Better Right Now! (International Ballroom East) – Laura Solomon, Library Services Manager, Ohio Public Library Information Network

1. Don't use library acronyms on the library website (at least first time)

2. Avoid large chunks of texts – Stephen Crug (Don't Make Me Think) – When you write text for the web, write your text, cut it in half, and then cut it in half again. People want to scan.

3. Don't bother patrons with mission statements – don't put it on the front page. People don't care about mission statements, board members, etc. so much that they need it on the front page.

4. Weed your graphics. Evaluate every graphic used on the website. Each graphic costs attention space and download time.

5. Clip art is evil. It's unprofessional. It's better to use stock photography. Paid stuff can be less than $1 a picture.

6. Don't waste prime real-estate with weather & news gadgets. People don't go to the library website for weather and news.

7. Don't say “Come to our cool program!!!!” - don't use exclamation points. Professionals don't use them.

8. Don't put a welcome mat on the website – use the front page real-estate wisely.

9. Don't put a photograph of the library building on the front of the website. Your logo is your brand. Use your brand. Don't use the building as a brand.

10. Put the library's phone number & address on the front page.

Most of this stuff we do (or don't do) as necessary for compliance. I could see and argument that we put a welcome mat (eat up valuable space) on the website with the pictures we rotate there, and we don't have a strong brand/logo presence.

Solving Problems with Free Tools - Alex Zeeland, Stacia Avel, Jonathan Newton from Arlington Public Library

The Arlington Public Library presented on their struggles with trying to be creative within a structure provided by the Arlington County website (they are a county agency and have this requirement).

They created a news blog and tagged the news appropriately to make it show up in places that make sense. They post summaries of news to Facebook/Twitter and linked back to their news blog. They used Blogger for their news blog platform. They then used Yahoo! Pipes to make specialized feeds using the Google tags. And finally Feedburner was used for display.

It's interesting to see a library serving a population area of this size (~215K, 8 branches) using this approach. It basically gave them a more sophisticate content management system (via the mature Blogger platform) plugged into what they found to be an inadequate county-provided CMS. This approach (as implemented) does require getting Blogger to present data in a way that's not totally incongruous with the design of your website, but the basic way of dealing with the problem is quite interesting (using one CMS to fill in holes in another CMS).

The finished fruit of the Arlington Public Library's labor can be seen at http://library.arlingtonva.us/

CIL 2011 - Day 1 - Promoting with Web 2.0

This session opened with the announcement that James Crawford will be speaking between 12:30 and 1:15. The lunch break is 12:15 to 1:30. So I need to decide between lunch and Google. Hmm....

Curt, who had an article published in the Fall in Computers in Libraries, discussed how Fremont has been using Facebook to reach out to its users. Their website, which is managed using Joomla, has been made mobile using a Joomla plugin. This created some headaches with Facebook. No one used the site while the Facebook page continued to get feedback. Curt mentioned that places where a mobile site has worked seem to have a larger budget and staff to put into the development of the site. Their site has turned into a static informational site.

He feels that their use of Facebook has been successful since they have built a unique presence there and it is practical, innovative and fun. He also said that it is important for the the Facebook page to be different from the Library's main website. He suggested the book Facebook Marketing for Dummies, which has this advice as well.

Interesting tip, you can embed one (and only one) RSS feed into a Facebook page. It's also possible to create customized links at the side of a Facebook page using Facebook Markup Language (which apparently is a superset of HTML). Also interesting is that you can now, as an administrator, post to the Facebook page as the page, not as yourself, which makes it clearer that the manager of the page is responding or posted. It might be a good idea to put the semi-buried BookBlog feed here.

There are apps that can be added as links to a Facebook page. He recommends the GoodReads and YouTube apps.

An interesting thing that Fremont has been doing is using iLike to highlight music that they have recently purchased. Not useful for Winnetka-Northfield as we have no popular music collection to speak of, but interesting nonetheless. Another interesting thing they do with iLike is using it (after establishing an artist profile) to publish podcasts.

He's looking at Dapper (http://dapper.net) which can be used to extract information from a website.

Using Facebook Markup Language they've managed to embed Meebo into their Facebook page, which is not a bad idea. They've also added a Bibliocommons widget to their Facebook page, which I think we'll definitely need to investigate.

An new observation I've not seen before: Facebook walls are the new discussion board, even to the extent of running book discussions there.

Curt provided a nice definition for the difference between Facebook & Twitter. Twitter is active communication versus Facebook's passive communication. An interesting analogy is Twitter to a large wedding reception where you know 1 or 2 people, so people introduce you to other new people and you hear some new stuff you've never heard before. Facebook is more like a dinner party where you've invited only people you know.

CIL 2011 - Day 1 - A Rough Start & Keynote

It seems that I'm not the only one with issues this week. To my surprise, when I was reviewing my flight information I discovered, to my horror, that my flight was not for 9:04 am but 9:04 PM. I tried to get on an earlier flight on standby, but that failed. Then my already late flight was delayed, and delayed again, and delayed again, finally flying away from Chicago around 11:40, an hour later than it was supposed to have originally arrived in D.C. I finally checked into my hotel at 3:00 AM. Nonetheless I pulled myself out of bed to make it to the keynote, which I was looking forward to, featuring James Crawford from Google where he was supposed to be discussing Google Books. I arrived at the ballroom, grabbed some breakfast, and then discovered that Mr. Crawford's flight had been delayed 3 hours and he was just arriving at Dulles Airport. So an impromptu panel discussed the digital book landscape instead while waiting for Mr. Crawford.

This actually went pretty well and was interesting, although probably not exactly what Mr. Crawford would have preferred, let alone done. An early comment exemplifying this mood was made by Marshall Breeding when he commented that the situation shows that you can't count on Google for everything. Although not filled with Google hate, by any means, the general feeling from this panel was that libraries need to be concerned with a situation where corporate interests which may run counter to the best interest of libraries. Stephen Abram made an impassioned plea that libraries need to be concerned and take action in a world were companies (specifically referencing Amazon and Apple) lock down their devices under the name of patent, and by doing so limit the kinds of content that can be placed on them. A good, although entirely unplanned, keynote.

At the end an announcement was made that Mr. Crawford was horribly sorry about how things turned out and that something would be done so that his keynote could be heard, likely a recording that would be available to be streamed.