Connecting Librarian

I can’t believe its been3 weeks since VALA 2010 finished.  But it has been and in the wake of all my notes from the conference and inspired by some excellent summary blog and twitter posts from fellow conference attendees, here are my key reflections from VALA 2010.

1. Discovery layers

It doesn’t matter what vendor you use these days, a discovery layer will sit over pretty much every library system and open your content to your users in a new and exciting way. Academic and State Libraries have already implemented this software and public libraries are starting to. And it sits on top of your website to give the integration between the website and catalogue that our users expect and that librarians have been seeking.

I never realised the range of offerings available until I chaired the Vendor session which demonstrated a wide range of the offerings available from different companies. If you don’t already have a discovery layer in place or in process, you need to be looking at them now.

2. Metadata

I have heard talk about metadata for well over a decade.  Til now, I thought it was the domain of repositories, archives and the like. After VALA2010 I can finally see its relevance for my own library’s web content, which is neither archival nor relating to repositories in any form.

So add another thing to the list of things to do.

3. Semantic Web

Linked data and the whole concept of the semantic web is moving from a concept to a reality in small ways.  Its fascinating to watch this evolution, from concept to working tools. Its early days yet, but there will be a lot more interesting developments in these areas in coming years, which I will be watching for with continued interest.

4. Mashups and APIs

I always thought that APIs really belonged to the realm of programmers or those with some programming knowledge/skill, of which I have a minuscule amount.  After listening to Paul Hagon at the L-Plate Series at VALA, that misconception has been corrected. I have already been planning with APIs without realising it (its only Google Maps, but hey, its still an API) and Paul pointed out some great tools to help us get into some more serious stuff. It’s time to play!  Thanks Paul.

5. Trove

This new service from the National Library of Australia is very cool and I look forward to learning more about it and seeing how we can better utilise it and promote it to our users.  There was several papers on Trove, so check them out to find out more about how it was created and exactly what it can do.

6. Open source

Is more widespread than I had ever thought about. But when I did, realised that we are using so much open source software already – it runs our Internet servers and our browsers, as well as much of our communications.  Is it that big a step for us then to start using open source software for other purposes? It’s already proven its worth in those areas listed.

7. Twitter and Blogging

Twitter was the new kid on the block at the last VALA conference.  This year, it made its presence felt big time.  It was a great back channel to what was going on in other sessions, a guide to what was worth checking out and a great way to network with other librarians, both at the conference and following along from outside.

Much to our delight, the hash tag #vala2010 was in the top 5 twitter tags in Australia the week of the conference, hitting number 1 on the Thursday – the last day.  It was also a great delight to finally meet all those twitterers I had only known online before then and to meet and start following twitterers that I met there. I think that I have started following at least another 20 people since the start of the conference.

Keep up  the good work all – you make working on computers all day all the more interesting and what you share is  entertaining, informative and useful in turn.

Twitter probably outdid blogging in terms of content sharing this VALA, but it still had its place for the detail on content. Being a conference blogger myself, I really appreciate the depth that I can get from a blogger’s reports. They are also a great teaser for the papers that I may want to go and read in full. The papers BTW are freely available from the VALA website – well worth checking out.

8. Networking

It was the best conference ever, for just spending time with other like-minded library staff.  The social events were great for this, but it was even happening whilst waiting for sessions to start, or during the breaks. It was wonderful sharing thoughts, ideas, feedback and what you’re up to, with other enthusiastic librarians (and others), who speak the same language.

9. Presenting

I was fortunate enough to present two papers, and get away with it, lol.  Both my papers, presented with two different co-authors were well received much to my amazement and relief. I have had several people follow me up with questions on both papers since, much to my delight.

Writing a paper is a difficult enough process to begin with, but then trying to present that paper in a snapshot presentation is even more so. I learnt a lot from other presenters at VALA about how to engage the audience and even how to present so that you retain their interest.

10. VALA Conference Committee

I was a member of the conference program committee this year, but the role we played was so small, compared to all the work put in by the VALA committee in general. These guys all have regular jobs and real lives, yet put everything into getting this conference off the ground, running as well as it did and responding to issues quickly and efficiently as they arose.

Alyson Kosina, the backbone of VALA is an amazing lady, who you should take a moment to meet and chat with. You will walk away enriched. David Feighan and Bart Rutherford, the Conference Chair and VALA president respectively, were endlessly everywhere, managing, listening, participating, anticipating and in Bart’s case, presenting one paper when the speakers couldn’t get here in time. Dedication personified.

I really enjoyed working with them in the small role I played and learnt a lot. I very much look forward to more opportunities to be involved with VALA.

And amazingly, this blog posts has ended up with 10 reflections. That was not my intention, it just developed that way.

Thanks to all my co-conference attendees for helping to make it the best conference I have ever attended.  Bring on #VALA2012!

I have been very busy since VALA2010, preparing presentations for a forthcoming seminar.

So here’s my shameless plug.

It is with great delight that I will be presenting “Libraries 2.0: using Web 2.0 and new media to revolutionise your library or information centre“, with my Libraries Interact co-blogger, colleague and friend, Kathryn Greenhill from Librarians Matter.

So, if you:

• have a good-sized training budget (which many of you I know don’t)
• are wanting to learn more about using Web 2.0 in your library
• would like to see one of the best and most engaging library presenters in Australia at work (that would be Kathryn, not me)
• can attend a two day seminar at the end of March
• and either live in Melbourne or could get the package deal to get here for two days,

then we would love to have you join us and other attendees, for what we are planning will be a learning, collaborating, questioning, informative and hopefully also a bit entertaining two days.

</end of shameless plug>

McKenzie Wark – Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research New York – The Networked Book

Developed his book Gamer Theory with interaction with kids, teens, parents, librarians and professionals in the gaming industry. Many books are being developed this way, using the power of Web 2.0, but it is not appropriate for every title.

Have lots of tools around for different types of knowledge, but he couldn’t really find one that was appropriate for encouraging critical thinking. So they built their own. They made the paragraph the unit of thought on which people could think and comment. The comments are then placed alongside the paragraph. Its now available as a Word Press plugin (Comment Press). Navigation was resolved by displaying them like index cards, in a group of five.

He put up a pre-polished version of the book, so the majority of the work was done. However, it was an implied contract that he would read all the comments and would take them under consideration. It resulted in the whole start of the book being changed.  After consideration and feedback the book was put up again for comment. Not many comments were made this time, because it was pretty much the final product and all feedback already received had been considered.  Third copy was the final version.

He suggested that they offered it free online, to encourage sales. Publishers said yes – tried everything else which hadn’t worked, so lets try this! Pre-sales were over 1600 copies which was considered an overwhelming success. Third copy incorporates the comments, was better edited and looks good.

Built some stuff that didn’t work. Built a reputation index, which slid comments up a scale etc – spent tons of money on it but wasn’t used, so is no longer on the site.

(check it out at: http://www.futureofthebook.org/mckenziewark/gamertheory3.0/textarc)

Wanted to explore visualisation to explore the three dimensional space of text – gives a three dimensional paper of words that have any value in the book – working around in an arc. The start of how we could visually organise the text, from the view of the creator.

People are losing the capability of reading long non-fiction texts. Visualisation and user interaction could be two tools which could help people to re-engage with this full length of this sort of content.

Showed a video using machinima (MMOPRG world), used to illustrate a talk-show voiceover where Ken was interviewed about the Networked book. Very cool!

Never did anything in Second Life – he hated it and is glad to see its time has past.  Suggested that Twitter may be the next Second Life. (ooo)

Had a real problem trying to get elements. Can deal with the text readily enough, but the use of images and music is much more complicated and expensive – overly strict copyright rules.

Media culture is broken when lawyers are trying to sue people from their own companies who are just doing things to market their products. eg. Giving products away to encourage purchases.

To get around all the restrictions imposed on images, he employed a graphic artist to create in mimic, similar images to those he was interested in using. These were licensed under Creative Commons and went along with the book.

Ironic – that people are writing books about the fact that books are disappearing and then those books disappear.

Are there boundaries between libraries and publishers and do they need to be there? The technological barriers have gone, why else are there barriers. Main barrier is the boundary between the gift economy and the commodity economy. Where the boundary lies is not really understood.
Where is the space where we can interact?  Authors and publishers are bemoaning the future, but librarians are a lot more optimistic, talking rewiring and keeping people reading.

The important thing is the continuing democracy of knowledge.

Privacy concerns in social networks and online communities – Amirhossein Mohtaswebi – Extol Corp Malaysia and Parnian Borazjani – Univerity Technology Malaysia – presented by Bart Rutherford.

Degrees of trust: with social networks you lose control over 2nd degree onwards, when you have 130 friends in the first degree and those friends have 130 friends and so on.

Privacy settings on Facebook for example, are hard to configure and confusing lack familiarity an there is a loosely set default policy.

Research was carried out at Malaysia Universities, with a good range of ethnicities and gender. They were working in an environment of open access – no blocked sites or good firewalls.  Their objectives were to find threat awareness levels in social networks and to run a threat model – can they find contact details, photos, personal information etc.

Blind in the sense that they sought participants through publicity around campus. Gained some information initially through the process of selecting participants.

Results – 52% did not accept a friendship request from an unknown person. However, 42% would, most (21%) if there was a friend in common. No significant difference in gender.

Vulnerability vs education – more educated students are less vulnerable to social attacks – no correlation with gender or age.

Privacy statements – 48% never read them, 14% didn’t know what they were and only a small percentage opted out of joining because of a networks privacy statement.

38% never set who can see their personal information among the rest.

New friendship requests – 70% accept without investigation. High percentages shared personal pictures and email addresses. Much lower percentages for non-personal pictures, phone numbers etc.

Mined the data from their Facebook profile to search Google, where they were able to get more information about the person. Could have serious implications for under1 18s.

Interesting: received friendship requests from unknown people to their fake Facebook profile.

Fiona Salisbury and Sandi Monaghan – La Trobe University – Finding a new voice: keys to building successful online communities

Why encourage participation? More user centred focus by offering where the users are as well as encouraging participation between users themselves.

ANZ – 68% of university libraries use at least one Web 2.0 tool. Internationally its over 70%.

Lessons learned from putting these tools in place (particularly relates to their blogs): regular posting and updating required to retain audience interest, informal friendly language is more engaging, timely replies show the value of their comments and usability is essential.

They promoted interaction not just by putting the technology in place – it doesn’t work. To get comments, they posted content that prompts a response or comment, such as opinion posts, user services suggestions, posts with multimedia, students interacting.

Library discussion threads in LMS; open communication which promotes discussion and cooperation amongst students related to library research.
Lots of questions came through, ranging from notices and information seeking, to deep referenc questions. The discussion boards also involved the students talking with each other.

Choose the appropriate technology for your environment, convey enthusiasm in your communications, chosen platform must be easy to use, use open and relaxed language, exerient analyse and review often.

Ellen Forsyth – SLNSW – Wiki ecosystems: the development and growth of online communities of practice.

Wikis are always under development.

Ellen works with NSW public library staff to encourage collaboration. Can get a maximum of 300 or so people in face to face meetings in a workforce of 2300. They use multiple blogs, wikis and a twitter account to help communicate and collaborate with each other.

Readers advisory wiki – created by the NSW Readers Advisory Working Group, using Wetpaint. It is self-managed, no oversight. People have self-assigned roles on the wiki – tagging, grammar checking, content contribution. Most interest in the 2010 Reading Challenge on their wiki.

How is the community working – they check for reading lists and meetings – both details and minutes. Most visit are daily or weekly (¾).

Ref-ex Wiki – based on Ohio Excellence Project. Offers training modules on reference service. It uses Media Wiki.  Lower visits than readers advisory wiki, but fits the purpose of the site.

75% of users said that they felt part of the wiki community, 25% said they weren’t sure for the Ref-ex wiki. Lower figures for readers advisory, but most who didn’t feel engaged felt that it was their own fault.

No one communication tools suits everyone, so they offer multiple tools to meet diverse needs. No community is going to fulfill everyone the same way either.  For some it is too quiet, for some its too busy. Although they get emails about updates, staff have said that they would appreciate updates via Twitter or Facebook.

Readers Advisory Wiki is like a rainforest – wild and ever growing well in the wet season (which is now). Ref-ex like a semi formal garden – still growing, but more planned. Both wikis are still growing and developing.

http://readersadvisory.wetpaint.com

http://wiki.libraries.nsw.gov.au/index.php/Reference_excellence

The first presentation for this session was my paper, presented with my co-author Paul Mercieca. Our presentation Evaluating Web 2.0: user experiences with public library blogs is available at Slideshare.

The impact and benefits of Learning 2.0 programs in Australian Libraries: Michael Stephens – Dominican University, Richard Sayers – CAVAL and Warren Cheetham – City Libraries Townsville

Methodology – lit review, web survey of program administrators, national survey of Library 2.0 participants and case study at City Libraries Townsville.

National survey was conducted in June 2009 and garnered 385 responses, across all sectors, but particularly from the public and academic sectors. Most did it at work (61%), nearly ¼ through a consortial ie. State Library of Victoria and the rest on their own by joining in on another program. 85% completed the program. For those who didn’t finish it, 3/4s reported no time or too busy, 25% too hard, didn’t like it, not comfortable.  Reasons included program too fast, other demands on time, sites blocked and personal privacy concerns.

Open question: After finishing Learning 2.0. I feel comfortable using new technologies – agreed and strongly agree – up around 80%. I like to explore technology on my own dropped a bit. Team/committee structures have improved because of this training – only 40% strongly agreed.  Personal impact seems to be much stronger than institutional impact.

Impact on your libraries after Learning 2.0 has been completed: better awareness of these tools 30%, more use 21%, no change 20%.

Success =  Support plus Time allowed – perceived usefulness.
Support = Admin plus coworkers plus programme leaders plus IT support

Its not bringing broad sweeping changes to libraries, but is changing how individual staff perceive technology and how they work with it.

Find out more at: http://research.tametheweb.com/.

From library automation to Library 2.0: exploring Web 2.0 tools,while reflecting on our traditional values as we move towards Library 2.0 and beyond – Paul Sutherland – Christchurch City Libraries.

Thinks he was born digital, using technology from a very young age. Threw in a convicts comment (cross Tasman rivalry). Lots of Facebook users, not many Friends of VALA – MUST FIX THIS.

Don’t be afraid of being afraid.

What are your top trends?

Libraries have never been about books – they have been about ideas and creating new things from those ideas.

Let go and see what happens, stop acting like librarians (twitter comment).

Connections, content and conversation. Books we can see, data we can’t see, it just whizzes about us. Learning 2.0 is more about learning to adapt and adopt.

What is a blog? Its really a conversation, but also directing users back to the library.

Libraries need a presence in library thing. We should own and manage our presence in these spaces.

Used Flickr to engage their users – asked for and scanned their photos in Flickr about the ordinary day things happening in their city. People want to share their content with the world and where better than the library as a channel for that. People want to tell us things. Stop using ‘user-generated content’ as a term, use local experts. Librarians don’t know everything, we should know however, where to find it.

Very bad at recording our own history.  Need to get better at that.  Every library should have a Wikipedia presence. Check how many incoming links come to your wikipedia entry (when you get it).

Embed your catalogue – make it easy for your users – eg LibX toolbar.

How do you try out a new tool, with really committing to it or feeling foolish when you don’t go through with it. Running a competition solves this problem.

Check out Open Library.

History of Melbourne on Wikipedia only has 12 references.  We are in a position to fix this for our local communities’ entries.

Where is the memory space for things like Black Saturday.  We need to be collecting the things of now, because they will be important in future – including things as simple as shopping catalogues.

Christchurch is piloting Kete – trying to use it as a place to store their stories – not about accuracy.

Impressed with what libraries are doing with open access to data.

DigitalNZ – GLAM plus more – check the website. Want to find stuff for our users and be able to deliver it to our users with our brands.

Roy Tennant was joined by Bart Rutherford, Heather Crosby, Carol Tenopir, Teula Morgan, Jane Burke and Ingrid Mason to discuss the future of published content.

Implications of ebooks and other online content for libraries? Continuation of process at libraries,which are becoming more digitised, The main difference is that our books are not coming to us bound. Libraries need to jump in with ebooks – its not going backwards. Its a replacement of reading behaviour, digital rather than print. Its the next natural way to read a book.

What is the impact on AV when that is the format most used by the younger generations?

What is the impact of this content coming through non-traditional channels? How does this impact our collection development processes? Is our publication medium going to become more television like and what is the impact on storage and management?

A lot of multimedia content is being produced, but no-one is trying to catalogue and manage this, to move beyond the streaming and/or immediate use. Something that need libraries really need to be thinking about.

‘The book is dead, long live the book.’ Is abstracting and indexing dead? Still a need as not everything is available in full text, so there is still value. There is a definite decline however, but its still fulfilling a niche market. If you are just trying to make money with that alone, its no longer enough. Still need the indexing work, because it supports good search.

As discovery layers are coming pre-populated with content such as abstracting and indexing, libraries are asking if they can stop subscribing to it separately. If they do however, then there will be no A and I to access at all.

What is the future of ebooks? Single purpose ebook readers are not dead – as Roy has been noted for saying in the past, the popularity of Kindles and other devices illustrates that. Real challenges for libraries providing ebook content, with DRM issues. Technology is not necessarily a long term issue, as it is constantly changing. Commitments will have to be made on a much shorter basis. Don’t get too caught up in technology restraining you as it will be changing.

Are libraries going to be more about delivering online audio-visual content and what will that mean for current library practices?

There is a role for libraries to help to upskill our users to help them produce content. ALIA will be having discussions with ABC Open. There is  definite potential for libraries partnership with media organisations to produce such content.  Same debates are happening in the media market – metadata and curating content. No parallel in the US that we now of.

What is the core role of public libraries in the world of ebooks? Aggregator, publisher, curator, collector?  Where is this puppy going? Trove could be the way of the future for public libraries. Digitisation of local content is only a niche, small community need. Still have to serve all the broader needs of our local communities, whatever their needs are.

Collaboration is very difficult. Easier to do it within the library world, but still has it challenges even there. Always looking for more Australian content. Potential to collaborate with publishers to get our concern online, the downside is that it is not freely available to all, only subscribers.  Should libraries be Bit Torrent sites. The time to lobby about more content is now – lots of agreements in process between publishers and ebook resellers.

If we can’t get content for our users, they will go and get the content elsewhere. Is it time then to consider whether we are relevant anymore anyway – if they can get it elsewhere, why do they need us?  Should we close our doors and move into other industries.

Agreement is being developed between the National Library of Australia, the National Archive and the National Sound and Vision Archive.  Well worth watching. Discussions will also be happening in the whole Government 2.0 movement.

One wish – simplified DRM and Copyright. Remember that even if the changes that are happening seem overwhelming, we do have power – move with it, adapt and make the most of it.  That libraries are the central point for information needs, to deposit their content, that they couldn’t exist with the products and services – a lot about PR but also about the choices that libraries make. That libraries can change more quickly delivering services our users want – not irrevelant but will be if we continue doing the old stuff after our users have moved on. That we could find tools to automatically generate high quality metadata a lot faster with a lot less effort. That we have more speed, but not to the point of wobbling – more unique material online with great descriptions – we can lead in this endeavour.

Top Trends Panel – Tom Tague, Roy Tennant, ? ,Marshall Breeding and Karen Calhoun – moderated by Anne Beaumont.

Anne began with an example to start the conversation. It started with a photo, with information provided by the library, which conflicted with what a user offered, who dated it between 1870 and 1876, due to the type of features included or lacking in the image. How do you check the authority of it when things are coming in so fast.

What do you do? Suggested that we add it like a kind of letter to the editor, so that its a chance to share the information, without needing to worry about authority.  If its wrong then the community of users will correct it amongst themselves. Need to acknowledge the difference and separation between library generated content and user generated content.

Powerhouse Museum has this problem all the time, but not often that they get something that needs the curators to go away and fact check, but when they do, it is well worth the effort. Powerhouse allows uses to add and delete tags, both their own and other peoples. We would be lucky to get tags, so we shouldn’t be putting barriers in place to discourage this. Flickr is a social environment with people who are used to tagging and where you don’t have ultimately responsibility for what people add.

NLA adds their user generated content as a layer to the content. It can look as if it is integrated but it isn’t, but the difference is made clear. UGC is not moderated. Need to be able to hear from them. Can blend these things in useful ways. Sometimes our users know more about a subject than we do, so we should make the most of their knowledge when they contribute it.

Starting point for user contributed content – using the alphabetic descriptors that match particular Dewey numbers. It gives people a stepping off point.

Warwick Cathro and Susan Collier – Developing Trove: the policy and technical challenges

Trove is a free discovery service for the public. It allows them to discover annotate content. For both the casual user and researcher. It is part of Australian infrastructure not a purchased product. Its all NLAs services rolled into one, then with more added.

Two imperatives for the NLA – streamline and integrating the proliferation of national collection discovery tools and as per their Direction Statement, to develop online spaces for user interaction.

Trove comes from treasure trove – the latter coming from French to discover, so it combines the content and finding it.

It benefits from their experiences with Libraries Australia, Pandora, ARO and more.

Small team of five developed Trove.  Started September 2008, prototype in May 2009, nine versions of prototype and released version 1.0 in November 2009.  Three updates since then.

Challenges: collection views, works and versions, what is online?
Collection views: search results are grouped into collection views. Need to decide what they would be. Newspapers and people were easy, the rest was not so easy. Realised that they were working from a library view – recruited a group of students, teachers, family historians and general public to card sort the different types into groups and got them to name the groups.  Then used the group names to get people to put types into them.   The results were: books-journals etc, pictures and photos, Australian newspapers, diaries-letters, and much more.

Creating metadata for these groups was very difficult. Rules are not perfect, so they know that there are items which are in the wrong groups. Hopefully in future, users will be able to suggest alternatives.

Trove is FRBRish. Has a similar structure, with some variations. Trove takes old MARC records and make them do new things.

Issues with determining online access. Easy to discover a resource is online, but hard to discover what the item is and whether access is free. Three types identified: available online, available online (access condition), possibly online.

Want users to add value – they can tag, split and merge records, fix the OCR on the newspapers. Enhancements are included in a separate layer. It improves the quality, as evidenced by the Australian newspapers project.

They can monitor what users are doing online, in terms of interaction with the content. Comments have been added to Trove by users. Eg, photo had comment from person’s grandmother, giving more biographical detail: newspapers have been corrected and more information provided.

Future developments: currently working on RSS feeds, enhanced sorting, more external targets, more full text, an API. Then – search and delivery of NLA digitised journals, inclusion of journal article indexing data from partner vendors, more goals for obtaining data from archives and museums.

Trove release comes after three years of discussion and development. Takes resource discovery to a new level. There are other products out there that will do the same. Trove is different, includes more unique content and is national.

Paul Hagon – Everything I know about cataloguing I learned from watching James Bond.

Senior web person at the secret society of librarians at Canberra – also known as NLA.

Newspapers used to be papers in metal filing drawers, all carefully labelled with metadata – then fed into a microfilm reader. Services like Trove allow the discovery down to deep content – the metadata has been relegated to the rear. Content now rocks and metadata is relegated.

All full text searching of the  newspapers is made possible through OCR. Deep content searching is possible with text, but what about images?  Computers are good at identifying mathematical markers within images. Begin with facial recognition. Can we use this on our collections on a global scale. Chose a series of photos on a range of Australian Prime Ministers, using iPhoto. Laborious process to do, but didn’t do too well at identifying people accurately – 32%.  OpenCV – from Intel was tried out – didn’t try to identify people, just tried to identify a face. When it did, it boxed it. It was very successful in identifying two photos of the same person, regardless of context. Didn’t do so well of people in profile or poor quality images.  Was successful 85% of the time.

What could it be used for? If you do a search on Parks, get people, town and feature. If you click on portraits, you would get images as well.

Also did work on colours. Broke down images into colours, recognising both the colours and the % of the image that had that colour. Some colours can be lost however, as there is not enough of the value to display this. Can go up to 64 colours (from to pick those up, but then data storage requirements grow dramatically.

Did more testing with ImageMagick – which can analyse an image – shows the RGB values which can be stored in the database.  You can then search the database just by colour. Can end up with different types of images depending on which colours you search.

http://1104.nla.gov.au -go and play and get feedback to Paul.

Why research? Computer applications are already using this technology. Iphone – Shazam app – identifies music that is being played and gives you more info about it. Etsy craft store lets you search by colour. Google Goggles – take a photo and it analyses a feature and brings back info on it. Pattern recognition in an item, no metadata required.

Marshall Breeding – Vanderbilt University Libraries – Blending evolution with revolution: a new cycle of library automation spins on

Library Technology Guides (website) is where Marshall puts all the information he gathers as he does his research. It shows whats going on in the field of library automation.  Check out the chart on the Australian LMS scence at www.librarytechnology.org.  Interesting to look at the current standings of LMS’s, but more interesting to look at the dynamics of change – who is taking the library field into the future.

Perceptions 2009 – third annual survey, gatherered November to January, over 2000 responses with 109 from Australia and New Zealand. Asks library staff about what system they use and what they really think about it. Its not just gossip, its an informal survey showing what people really think of the products they use.  Available online.

Observations from this study: smaller library and nice products generally receive better perception scores, companies supporting proprietary products generally higher satisfaction that those involved  with open source, except for libraries already using open source – these products were perceived as poor performing.

Library Journal Automation Marketplace – published annually in April 1 issue, based on vendor provided data, focused primarily on US market. Gives a broad view of the industry.

Context: Libraries in transition – shift from print to electronic, increasing emphasis on subscribed content (especially articles and databases), strong emphasis on digitising local collections, demands for enterprise integration an interoperability. Electronic resources and projects are taking increasing amounts of library budgets.

Marshall reflected that Abbey in the VALA video from yesterday, had summed up what he wanted to get across at VALA.

New generation of library users, millenials wwho are tech savvy.

Technologies are in transition: XML is the focus, Web services and service-oriented architecture. W e are beyond Web 2.0, its now part of what we do. Moving from local to cloud computing – Saas, private and public cloud. Full spectrum of devices: full scale – netbook, tablet, mobile with the focus on mobile at present. Need to be more device indpendent.

Dynamics of the Library Automation Scene:
Evolutionary path: gradual enhancement of long-standing LMSs, wrap legacy code in APIs and Web  services.  Library market prefers evolved systems, hard to build systems from scratch.
Revolutionary path: Ex Libris URM, Kuali OPE and WorldCat Management System which are clean slate automation frameworks or cloud based.

Rethinking library automation: LMSs don’t work too well for hybrid libraries.

OLE Project is collaborative project, with NLA involved – one to watch. OCLC Management system will take what they already have (eg. WorldCat Local) and just add back end operations to make it a full LMS.

Open Source LMS are growing fastest – not just in US, big companies in Australia and New Zealand.

Opening up Library Systems through Web Services and SOA: Hype or reality? Library Technology Report. Showed that proprietary systems had more APIs for customers to use. Even best APIs are still quirky and not comprehensive – still a way to go. Need to have the widest range of APIs available, so that we can use the data the way we want to. Open APIs allows you to tweak, without using the deep source code of your LMS.

Marshall spoke about discovery layers – check my notes from the L-Plate series so that I don’t have to take these notes for the second time.   Discovery products list and information available from www.librarytechnology.org/discovery.pl.

Outlook for next five years: most libraries still using evolved systems, increasing ranks of next generation LMS, library resource discovery matures,, mobile, transition from local to cloud computing.

Tom Tague – Thomson Reuters – Next up? The linked content economy.

In 2008, Thomson Reuters made a decision to give away the Open Calais software. Its a new experience to give something away. There was a rush of ideas, some fascinating people dove in. Interesting 48 hours after article on Slash Dot – bought servers on the fly to stay online.  Resulted in a huge user base, 30,000 registered users and 5 million transactions daily. 90% of users pay nothing – no pornography or hate speech – paying customers for huge transactions.  Open Calais is semantic plumbing. Not really competing with anyone, so people talk to them about new and creative ways of using the product.

Patterns have emerged – naïve users just tag individual documents. Sophisticated users looked at collections of documents and how they could link. First sophisticated user and project was Powerhouse Museum. Resource deprived plus passion equals interesting things!

Looked at ways to take those learning activities, distilling them and sharing them outside their domain. Web 3.0 when we clean up the mess and organise the experience that was created by Web 2.0 (Tom’s definition).

There is value in semantically tagging content that has a short shelf life – eg. Tweets, blog posts, news articles.  However, when gathered together, aggregated into a subject area over a period of time, it has even more value.

Invest 10 minutes in next week – check the Linked Data standard on wikipedia. Use is growing faster than you can imagine.

Live demo site viewer. – http://www.opencalais.com

Some great work is being done – Powerhouse Museum is using it to automatically generate tags for items in its collection; Mediacloud, an open research tool making it easier for users to explore trends in media oreage, blog posts and more; Documentcloud, a unique online resource that will offer public access to reporters’ original source materials, and facilitates the discovery of hidden connections.

What about collection? Getting closer to the iPod moment, where the technology takes the back seat to using it and getting things out of it. Searching ‘big content’ will just work. Mega-scale interoperability is on the horizon.

Providing you and your users with the ability to creatively mine your collections and offer new content mash-ups to your users; the ability to integrate relevant social media and real-time web resources into your collection; intuitive, web 3.0 interfaces that take the burden off both you and your users.

You are part of the linked content revolution. We need your help, we need to enlist your knowledge experience and expertise, commitment to truth trust authority and access, keen understanding of users needs.

Build a tool, share it – link something to the public take the first step, don’t just think end users – think back office, build domain/technology partnerships.  Expose your stuff and see what your users can do with it.