Connecting Librarian

After a week chock full of wonderful conference joy at VALA, it was a further joy and a bit of a relief to be able to attend Library Camp Australia 2012, at the Unversity of Melbourne on February 12th. Here are my assorted notes from the course of the day.

 1st session – Jason Griffey – GADGETS

 165,000 attended the new consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in January. One of the large company booths at this is more than ½ the size of the exhibition space at ALA. Awesome that librarians are attending these conventions.

One laptop per child – equivalent XO tablet – runs Sugar Linux or Android – supposed to cost under $100. Sugar is designed to show you how to program as you use it. Designed to be used in disadvantaged areas, so has a hand crank, solar power connection and much more. Uses mesh networking.

Parrot AR Drone, which includes a video camera. Low battery power (about 15 mins), but battery power is improving. Expensive versions have GPS and are programmable, have sensors which do obstacle avoidance. The military ones can have recharge themselves by attaching to powerlines.

Lytro digital camera – $300. No controls. Lens looks like a flies eye – lots of facets. A picture takes multiple everything all at once. The computer does all the work afterwards. You can’t be a bad photographer with this camera. (plenoptic lens). People have used these to create video – but takes a hugh amount of computing power to do this. Makes imaging of pages easier.

 Nest smart thermostat. Created by an ex-Apple engineer. Whole front is touch screen and dial is controller. The aim is to never have to use them. Sensors pick up when there is people in the house. You adjust for the first few days and then it learns. Has wifi, so can control it from elsewhere.

Local studies

NZ has Keta. Want to get people to create their own data. Partnerships need to be developed to ensure the library is not alone in creating and curating it.

 How do we scrape the information that is already out there. Needs to have geocoding, hash tags and tags etc. Storify does it well, but you need to manually create. Pinterest is also being used for local studies – Smithsonian. Need to also accept that these tools may not be permanent, so we need to have it safe elsewhere. ABC Open is doing some great stuff and will do free staff training.

Libraries can do great leadership in using tagging, so content is at least findable. Part of digital literacy skills. But also about leaving things open so that other people can tag.

Create an exhibition, to demonstrate the potential to users. It gives them a framework and an inspiration. LibraryHack was good in that it had an ideas competition so that people who didn’t have the skills could participate.

Also important to highlight the different groups within the community. What are the different ways we can be collecting the stories.

We are all interested in simple permissions process – form. Just using ‘good enough’ technology. You don’t worry about lighting, sounds etc.

Cowbird – online tool for storytelling.

Today is tomorrow’s history. We need to keep that in mind.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EB9eRqEE6A_h5Vkmp29-iSwAdQbK_YCHY9BTtNk4Cxo/

Sydney public library creates a Flickr group for local festivals and collects photos from it – then sometimes gets permission to re-use.

New content should be released under Creative Commons licences. Also need to say when things are out of copyright and can be re-used.

NZ Public libraries – looked at what kids are doing at school and then engaging them with the library on local history connections. They then ran sessions on creating oral histories – aimed at connecting with the school work requirements – from a human point of view.

Australian National curriculum bringing about opportunities for libraries to engage with their local schools.

Library Camp 2012 Lightning Talks

 Ben – Embedded metadata in digital objects.

 What are libraries and museums doing? Not much. Librarians are committed to their end users and embedded metadata is an end user benefit. We are obsessed with our catalogue, but don’t add metadata to our digital objects. There is a whole stuff attached to the image when it is online, but need to make it downloadable with the object. Yes, its difficult and extremely challenging, but it is possible and it is invaluable.

http://regex.info/exif.cgi – tells you what metadata is in an image online.

Julia – Shameless self promotion.

 Don’t talk about ourselves enough in a positive light. Doing so brings you to amazing places. The thing to remember is to use your strengths – particularly make use of your PLN. Don’t hesitate, go for it, you never know what you will get out of it. Use your community and your interests. Find out more about what you want and then tweet, blog or write an article about it. You are worth the time and effort to do so. Above all, remember it is all up to you.

 Leonie – Money

 Public libraries often have great project ideas, bur not the money to do it. She won the Barrett Reid scholarship for studying young people spaces. Its worth putting in proposals to do a study tours, education courses or programs within your library. Great for PD. Also Churchill Scholarships, ALIA grants and awards, as well as grant applications. Your networks will help you to do the applications.

Amy – Amanda Palmer

 Knew Neil Gaiman was going to be in town, so emailed him and asked if he could come to the library. He said yes. Amanda Palmer emailed them to ask if she could perform at their library (they have a grand piano). Both artists blogged and posted etc about it and they were crammed to the rafters. The lesson – Ask. Its OK to try and fail. Social media was huge, particularly as they asked the artists only tweeted about the event just before it happened. It also helped to improve their social media followings, as those they promoted, promoted them back.

Sara – supporting education in combating social disadvantage.

Digital literacy is going to be big for libraries. To be digitally literate you have to have comprehension literacy and reading skills. Smith Family supports disadvantaged children in their education and a number of components in helping children to help each other improve their reading.

Jennifer – 3D printing

MakerBot 3D printing. You feed plastic through the top and layer by layer it makes up a shape, using glue guns. You can find plans on the web or make your own. You can make just about anything that can be made in plastic. Limit to 10x10x10 centimetres, although you can print in parts. You can also print in multiple colours. Built by engineers. Public libraries can have a role in this. Can get a demo at her library.

Carolyn – Innovation

Tom Peters has a series of videos on innovation on YouTube. Innovation is risky, but risk is not bad. Quite often it is good. It should not be avoided. You should identify it and then work out how to manage it. Innovation can be hard to recognise – its not always gadgets. The companies that we think of as innovative, don’t talk about being innovative. Their goals are focused and innovation is part of the toolset that helps them to achieve that. Innovation shouldn’t be a goal.

You can also check out summary notes on the Library Camp Oz blog (http://libcampoz12.blogspot.com.au/) and tweets on the Library Camp Oz Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/#!/LibCampOz).

One of the big changes is not value being added by owning the server, its by the people adding content to the server.

The Internet did not kill print, TV killed it ……. in 1940. The Internet will save us from television. More time is spent on the Internet now, than the total amount of media consumption in 1940.

14 to 55 billion pages indexed by Google in 2 years. There is no keeping up with the growth. 

Web culture understands that its out there somewhere for free. It doesn’t care about legal and the only thing stopping people from getting it is the time taken to find it. What is being sold online is not access, its convenience.

1985 born,  its normal, ordinary and natural. 1965 its exciting, new, revolutionary. Before 1965 it against the natural order.

Older people are using it because its the only way of communicating with their grandchildren. Younger users are using the Internet in a completely different way – finding a document is an exercise in probability – they search for words that they will appear on the site they are looking for.

Memetics – memes can not be created on purpose, they have to grow organically. There is a lot out there and no one predicted them. egs Ryan Gosling and Cats 2011. Some memes are changing the world and they are global. A meme has a vector and a host, it is decoded into a host mind and then spread further.

Media is meant to be remixed – not a view held by intellectual property. Doesn’t stop it from being a problematic part of our society. SOPA was a bad attempt at trying to solve these problems.

When you download a copy of something from the web, you are taking a rubbing. You haven’t stolen it, remove it, its still there.

When you share a pattern, you don’t know what is going to happen to it. You can’t control it after you post. If you don’t want anything to happen to it, don’t post it.

Unauthorised duplication is not theft, it is just what it is. Sharing is not piracy. Its like saying eavesdropping is equivalent to armed robbery.

Once you purchased a container, you could do anything with it. Then late in 20thC, licences were brought in to bypass copyright. You can’t steal it if the person still has it after you take a copy.

Some information is valuable. There is a key economic fact – that the Internet does not break the law of supply & demand. If supply is high but demand is low, the price is low and vice versa.  The installation of a paywall, will drive your legitimate customers away. 

To make money, make things available at a decent price, with ease. Grow a big audience by giving things away then sell experiences, such as concerts, clothing etc. eg. Cory Doctorow has rights to ebooks without DRM – but even more money is being made on sales of hard copies. Jonathan Coulton – selling CDs, T-shirts and concert tickets, but his music is free.

Another business model is advertising. Its not new – its been with us on newspapers, television, radio etc. The cost of a newspaper does not pay for its production. Advertising created the free media. Is it such a bad thing to have ad-sponsored e-books?

Ebooks are artificially priced at the moment. Some publishers are testing out lower pricing to engage the impulse buyer and making a lot of money as a result. The bubble will burst soon and it things will change quickly.

Open Educational Resource movement is also going to change things. They are proud of the work they are doing at university, so they are pushing to release it publicly.

In this world, where content is released for free, how do artists and musicians make money? They don’t now. Sites like Kickstarter make the impossible possible. You may be paying for something virtual, but you are getting something physical in return.

Doing it right on the web means doing it DRM free.

 Bits have no value.

So, what’s left for libraries? Our secret weapon is sharing. Unless there is a bottomless pile of it. Sharing implies scarcity, which doesn’t apply to media. Lending collections such as telescopes etc. are a niche that libraries can tap into. Access to equipment and objects that they can’t get any other way.

How can we do things that have value for our community, when the things that we have done, no longer have value. It means being local. In the 21st century, we are taking our community to the world. We also need to produce content that others won’t and bring that to the world. This content will not exist unless we create it.

We need to give experiences that they can’t get anywhere else.  AADL has had a film-making workshop and an annual Lego creation event. They help attendees achieve and then get images on it on the web – not taking away the rights at any stage.

The library is where you spend your social capital usually. However, now when we run these types of events, it is somewhere you can earn social capital.

What would the library look alike when we spend half as much on our experiences, as we do on our collections. Things we can buy is going to decrease.

Had a tagging competition which ended up contributing 200,000 tags over the summer. they made it an open-ended game. Got asked, does the summer reading game end? So as it did, they launched two new continual games, which continue the game and the tagging process. In these games, there is no purpose to the earning of points, as they can’t spend them – but still they come and earn points. They use the catalogue and the web to solve these.

The cloud is not to be trusted. The library can be trusted and we can host, where the cloud disappears. We can be the place.

Libraries: we share stuff – stuff you want, you need, you made and you can stuff here.

Secret mission: fight for the user. Tell them what they can do with the media they download – they should be aware of their rights – fair use etc.

Lighting the FUSE: innovation and partnerships by Rita Ellul and Indra Kurzeme

SLV and Department of Childhood Learning had an agreement to deliver 25 unified projects over 2010-11 financial year.

SLV was involved in this project to extend its reach. They were already good at information management, but project management externally was a new area for them. They had past collaborations and had good relationships with external agencies and they are in the learning business. They have a strong focus on preofessional development and research is a major part of their business.

How do they take their information management skills outside the library? Took the same principles of right information with the right people at the right time. This project met all these requirements.

They set up a Ning page to faciliate collaboration and utilised other people networks to get the assistance needed, when it was required. SLV faciliated a range of groups in getting them resourced and able to get their projects completed in the set time. It was a weekly update and prompt. They also provided a lot of professional development, which was totally funded.

Essentially what they built was a library of digital education resources.

 Had to determine what digital content needed to look like for the kids. the projects are housed in the FUSE repository. It incorporates 27,000 digital resources, is content and quality assured, is searchable by teachers and students.

FUSE provided Web 2.0 functionality, integrated active collaboration for students, was linked to VELS and open-ended.

Sample projects: Act Wild (Zoos Victoria) -information and events, but also a range of activities that can be undertaken offline – making a difference on an issue. Also has an iPhone app. Also has a blog where the kids can ask questions of library staff.

Travelbugs (Asian Education Foundation) – information about Asian countries, through visiting countries, go on to blogs, ask questions and more. It is still being used in the Sister School program.

Vidfest (SYN Media) – information about how to host a film festival at their school, has teacher support and resources, guidelines for filmmakers and hosting space for uploaded films.

Virtual History Centre (History Teachers Association) – kids create an avatar and enter a virtual world to do a tour of the Quarantine Station, both the virtual museum and a virtual copy of the station. Includes in world activities and teacher resources.

They work done has created resources that will truly support the work of the teacher and the learning of students.

Online learning: eMpowering eFutures through developing staff capability at Monash University Libraries – Lisa Smith and Steven Yates

Monash University Libraries has 6 libraries in Australia and 2 overseas, with 260+ FTE staff, including casuals. They work in partnerships with faculties and other areas of the university. They offer increasingly interactive and engaging resources, services, tools and spaces.

Program was founded on both the unversity’s and the library’s Digital Education strategies, which has a blended learning approach.

The library’s strategy is underpinned by a research approach, which consists of four areas – methods and approaches to development of self, develop staff capability, identifying content and exploration of tools and learning environments.

Capability: training, providing tools and standards, consultation.

The aims of the course were toe develop the knowledge and skills of Library staff to create e-learning tutorials using Adobe Captivate and to create several useful online tutorials (some of which are created by staff).

Course was run in Moodle, using a constructivist learning approach and involved 12 task based activities and 3 workshops, with real life outcomes which matched up to important milestones and was a blended learning course. Most took place online, but also involved face to face.

Mostly doing stuff, but also evaluation. Involved higher order thinking from creation to assessment. Used multiple methods and design experiments for the learning experience, with the emphasis on qualitative feedback and tasks artifacts.

There were 12 course participants, 2 expert reviewers and 1 participant observer.

Course was developed using mindmapping, then was storyboarded, from which it was developed.

Course commenced in June 2011 and was designed to run for two months, but ran to 6 months due to work commitments. Three projects were completed.

Evaluation determined that the course was effective as they all produced effective e-learning resources, with minimal technical expertise. Participants gave a good rating, but there were areas to improve, including improving clarity, reduced workload, software practice, negotiating time to complete tasks.

Next steps: consider next and ongoing interactions, improve submission process and documentation, confirm staff development process and time allocation, improve evaluation, increase collaboration, include staged reporting and enhance the staff e-learning development process.

Playing at professional development? – Ellen Forsyth

How much do you play how much do you work.

92% of Australian homes have electronic games devices. 59% play for an about an hour a day. (only 3% for five hours or more).

Ellen joined up to World of Warcraft a few years ago and is now involved in training in the library in that space. The library is in a public space, but the interaction between participants is restricted to the particular guild. Transcripts are saved to a wiki. Ellen has been running these professional development talks in this space for 12 months.

Even though presenters kept presenting and people kept attending, it was still hard to know whether it was working. She went back to the participants to find out how it went.

Speakers are speed typists. Questions from attendees are best as YELLED out. And it is up to the speaker to acknowledge and respond.

Talks have been about using games in the library, reflections on play – pedagogy and World of Warcraft, WOW in schools, how children learn from computer games.

Presenter feedback – thought it was good, but they have to be a fast typist and fast reader. All presenters were game players, but not all had been WOW players, but they adapted well. It was more relaxing and they enjoyed it more. It also involved trust – on the Internet, no-one knows you’re a dog. They found it easier to engage with the attendees.

Results are skewed because it only involved participants. They came from the US and Australia – from ages 20 to 50 and from across library sectors  etc. You could participate even if you couldn’t play. They came because they thought it was the right environment in which to learn about this. The cost entry was low, allowing them to tap into international knowledge for the cost of a WOW subscription. Transcripts were useful for picking up on things they missed.

Series of talks is just the start of exploring the use of games into libraries and for players to be involved in professional development in the games environment. Implications for bringing in reluctant potential participants are still being explored.

QR codes: do they provide the missing link between the physical and the digital? – Tristan Badham

Received the VALA Travel Scholarship to see how QR codes were being used in libraries, their implementation, reception from users and staff, further ideas etc.

QR codes are 2 dimensional barcode when scanned by a mobile device, you get linked to the resource the creator intended. Could be website, email address, phone number, coordinates on a map. You need a mobile device, with a camera, an Internet connection and QR code reader (an app) to make use of QR codes.

Being used a lot in advertising, real estate signs etc.

How they can benefit libraries:

• act as a bridge between the physical and the digital

• make access to information and resource easier

Providing information at the point of need:

• video guide on how to use the print management system

• a map of the library layout

• library audio tours

Catalogue records, with links to specific location information

QR codes within the collection, to link to online resources – particularly to the mobile version of them.

Social media – can communicate your library presences.

Contact the library and research help – particularly SMS reference services.

Other non-library uses included:

• videos by curators talking more about the art work being viewed

• Powerhouse Museum has built an app which the QR code refers to when scanned – each specific piece links to a specific page

Positives:

• Cheap and relatively easy to implement – time is in the staff and sign creation – also have good tracking

• Marketing appeal – makes the library look tech savvy

Negatives:

• Device can’t read the code – too big or too small or incorrect lighting

• Used the wrong way

• People don’t know what they are or how to use them

• Devices need a QR code reader which means downloading an app….

The more content your destination has, the more complicated the QR code, which loses pixilation in resizing. If that is the case, use a URL shortener first.

So are they really all that good?

• They are worth exploring as a useful technology, especially within the broader context of the move to mobile technologies

• one tool among many

• could complement rather than compete with other technologies

Awareness of the codes is high amongst young people, even if they don’t know what they are called.

QR codes could burst on the scene, but if they are used in the wrong way, they may disappear. (bit like Brendan Fraser as an actor).

Hacking the nation: Libraryhack and community-created apps – Margaret Warren and Richard Hayward

LibraryHack was created to foster re-use library data – a direct result of the NSLA Re-imagining libraries vision. QSL was responsible for Project 5 – community created content. It aims to make real the ability to help people to find, remix and create new content. Library hack was in four parts.

        1. Release of library data and digital content for re-use.

Data was to be made available on data.gov.au, so to ensure the data was discoverable where other public data was available and to add a presence for cultural data. All ten participating libraries placed their data in this central location. Fifty-three datasets were added, primarily images, but also search transaction logs, music and art. Data was able to be licensed for re- use, using Creative Commons. Copyright is an important consideration. Discovered that having geo-spatial data included, made the data more popular and re-usable and that most library formats are not re-user friendly. If we want to encourage more photo mash-ups, we need to make high resolution images publicly available.

Interestingly, Ancestry has taken on the public data and made good use of it.

2. Ideas competition

Discovering the sorts of things that people would be interested in

3. Hack days

Days for people interested in working with the data, to come and talk to the content specialists and to find out more about the datasets.

4. Learning

Offered a range of learning opportunities, focused on different topics, including animation and more on how to mash-up this data. Videos are still available at QUT for anyone who is interested.

Received 168 entries for the competition, as well as people creating new apps that were never entered into the competition.

Judging criteria: use of data/digital content, originality, quality, usefulness. Judging panel came from NSLA libraries.

Ideas category winner – Discovery by Diana Iles – included maps, images, manuscripts and map overlay integration. It delivered a visual message, but can be interactive when properly encoded with geo-spatial data.

Apps category winner – talking maps by Michael Henderson – walking West End multimedia tour (Brisbane suburb), custom built geographic interface, talkingmaps.com website, can listen to audio and explore images on the walk

Photo mashups category: Reflection of Time by Andrew Young – included historical images, with reflection of the artists own original work of a contemporary version of the same scene incorporated into it.

Digital media mashup category – Glorious image viewer by Mark Balandzic – projection of historical images on a variety of rotation lamps.

Collaboration was the key, between hackers and between them and the library. Mostly it was fun.

Also resulted in great staff engagement.

Next: More. Better. Easier. Collaboration.

Harvesting and semantically tagging media releases from political websites using web services – Peter Neish

Why are they interested in media releases?

• Play an important part in political process

• establish a party’s position on an issue at a particular time

• often used in time urgent reference request

• may go back many years (library has database back to 1992)

Number of political media releases released in Victoria has risen from just over 1000 in 1992, to over 6000 in 2009 and 5000 in 2010. The government puts out a lot more media releases than the opposition. The government keeps it own databases of these media releases. If it was online, the library stopped duplicating that work.

Due to the potential loss of this data when a change of government occurs, the decision was made to begin harvesting this data on the go. The aims of the project were to automate the process, combine the different databases together and to examine the possibility of automatically applying tags to media releases using web services.

Part 1 – Automation

• Key was RSS

• Political parties have websites, which had RSS feeds, which were used as a standard input to software.

• Built, in Java, a servlet which polled and returned the data from the political parties website – put the full-text and its associated metadata into the library database. It also produced and saved a pdf version of the media release.

It works, having harvested over 11000 media releases since July 2010, freeing up 2 days of staff time per week. Problems include having non-standard content in feeds (eg. dates), which they addressed with Yahoo Pipes and website’s changing their structure or CMS.

Part 2 – Semantic tagging

Manual tagging was no longer viable. After examining many options, went with Open Calais – from Thomson Reuters. Although business focused, it matched up with the type of data they had, gave a good number of tags (around 20), minimal false matches, good documentation sand community and generous limits on API calls. Unfortunately, their algorithm is a closely kept secret and not as much development is happening. Check out an example at http://viewer.opencalais.com/.

User Interface – did some useful user testing which helped inform the creation of the interface.

Review – of tagging – about 85% were correct – 4% were incorrect, 6% repeated and 5% redundant. One of the things they always got wrong was Victoria which it placed in the Seychelles – very frustrating.

Linked Data – get the info back in JSON and RDF. It links to its own ontology – which means that limited classes for government.

Media releases are now available as they are released – no backlog. Data is enriched by tagging and in future will link to other databases in the Linked Data ecosystem.

Working as an archivist in a business, specifically in a brand environment.

Guinness Archive framework– digitisations, dissemination of information, types of users and their needs, accessibility to information, intellectual property, cataloguing prioritisation and copyright.

Background: was founded on New Year’s Eve 1759, by a young brewer signed a 9000 year lease. It is brewed in 50 countries worldwide and enjoyed in over 150 countries world wide. It uses its heritage to promote itself. Guinness has a well-resourced archive which is well used in marketing. Its the only corporate archive open to the public in Ireland. They have barley grains from Tutankhamen’s tomb.

The interior of the Storehouse is in the shape of a glass of Guinness and the facility attracts 1 million visitors each year. It is the fourth largest brand experience in the world. The Storehouse is a brand experience, not just a heritage experience.

Advertising digitisation project:

Involved materials back to 1929 and covered both print and multimedia materials. The items were digitised for mainly marketing, but a side benefit was archiving and preservation. The project can be queried and marketing teams have created new products from the resulting inspiration. $18 million pounds has been made from products created with inspiration from the archive – 30% of new products, began with an idea from the archive.

Genealogy digitisation project:

Guinness holds 20,000 employee records from the 1880s to 2000s. They are very rich in detail and help fill the gaps resulting from the loss of national records during the Irish Civil War. Often had generation of families working in the brewery. Due to the growth in interest in genealogy, they were receiving an increasing number of requests.”Brewery life – trace your Guinness roots”. In house terminals were made available to researchers to access and more recently the records have been made available online.

Data protection:

The records have some information that could have some personal information. They can not publish any records for people still living, or where they don’t know their time of death and they also do not publish rates of pay or medical information.

Archive:

The Storehouse is no longer the only place for this data. The aim however, is that a visit to the centre is the start of a brand experience, not just a one off visit. At the Storehouse, they have a digital project where they have terminals to Facebook or Tweet about their experience of it. Each user gets a unique token with an RFID tag, which helps to enhance the user experience. The visitor provides their contact details and in return they receive a much richer experience. Guinness gets visitor data and the user gets a Guinness visitor only wallpaper which they can use as social currency with their friends – a value exchange.

Website:

25% of visitors attend the website before they come to the Storehouse and 10% book online. To help increase this latter, they provide additional information to help the visitor make the best choices about their visit. They also have a booking form for genealogical research access.

Guinness Stories:

To mark the 250^th anniversary of Guinness and in conjunction with the Irish Government, they resourced residents who had lived on the doorstep of the brewery, to record their stories of their experiences with the brand. The users were able to record and edit it themselves, which considering their average age was in the 70s is quite remarkable.

Visitors to the website are encouraged to add their own stories which then complement the companies own records.

Audio guides are provided free of charge to visitors at the Storehouse, but with the growth of mobile technologies they have now launched a mobile app for iOS, Android and Blackberry in five languages. It provides users with pre-visit, during visit and post-visit content. It also allows them to share their own experiences. The likelihood that visitors will recommend the Storehouse to family and friends is high – making the app sticky helps that process, when visitors go home and share the app, particularly the 360 degree view of the Dublin skyline from the top floor gallery. In future, they will include an augmented reality layer on that view.

Smart Library:

Guinness has local marketing teams in regional areas besides the main team in Dublin. They have used a wide range of tools available for these marketing teams, regardless of their location. Smart Library is available to all marketers or those doing marketing projects on behalf of Guinness. They have uploaded key iconic marketing items and can download low resolution copies for reference. When a high resolution copy is required, they must request it from the archive – thereby ensuring branch protection. All records are well resource with metadata. All marketing campaigns are also uploaded to Smart Library, with metadata, copyright, permissions and more, to enable other marketing teams to reuse or remix the campaign for their own markets.

Guinness 250 Website:

The focus was year long and created a celebration of the past and of the future, built on the foundation of the past. It was aimed at supporting media requests for this important event. As there was no complete published history, the website became a default one, with a wide range of information on a great range of topics about the heritage and development of the organisation. As a result, they were able to digitise a great number of images for inclusion on it. It was password protected and media were given access on confirmation of their credentials. It included both low and high resolution images which could be re-used. Post analysis, they discovered that 2 billion requests had been fulfilled by the site.

Emarketing and Branding:

This form of marketing, is much more immediate and engaging and is requiring a shift in thinking by marketing teams. Dominoes streamed feedback from their customers on billboards in Times Square, both good and bad. They use Facebook to tell stories or did you know, and tell your stories, most often using imaging, to engage with fans of the page. Archive content is being used to spark these entries.

Have a clearly defined mission statement – you have a brand. What is your unique selling point and what are you doing to promote it?

With the decrease in available resources, you need to be project specific, outlining the items which add real value back to the organisation and/or to yours users, so that you can justify the required expenditure.

You need to show the value back to your organisation, using metrics.

Should not operate in silos, but seek collaboration with partners, especially in GLAM sector.

And most of all, have fun with it!

Data is a the new oil – Andres Weigend – Stanford.

There is millions of pieces of data being collected every hour of every day. Data on every corner of the world is being collected. One of the last areas of global mapping is the oceans, but even now they have robotic vessels covered in sensors that are exploring our oceans – they can stay underwater over decades.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced that UK’s personal health information – anonymised , so that everyone can become a health researcher. You can pay $99 to get your personal genome data and then share it with the world. Companies are gearing up to track your retail transactions through your smart phone – Google Wallet.

One in every 5 people on earth is on Facebook – 30 billion pieces of content are shared on it monthly. Flickr gets 3000 images per minute. 450,000 new Twitter accounts daily. Every minute, there are more than 138,000 new tweets. And that’s all data on the airwaves.

Data is the new oil, yes, but is more like soup – its messy and you don’t know what’s in it.

Quantified self movement – self knowledge through numbers. Recording your bodily functions, physiology, moods etc. and using that knowledge to improve your life. The DIY approach to managing data.

The Herculean and Heroic approach to dealing with data includes the search for the God particle. The data is so massive, that external teams are being brought into CERN to help filter it.

Crowd-sourced approach, such as amateurs involved in helping discover new planets.

Researchers need to help to manage their data, which librarians can do with a bit of re-engineering.

1.Leadership – getting attention of the academics is one of the hardest things. Six reasons why you should care about data management.

• Risk: where is your data – a fellow UK university lost a lot of data in a tragic fire

• Reputation: data access, FOI – climate Gate case, universities have become reluctant to share data around certain topics

• Quality: data gold standard – to prove research assertions, you should be able to replicate the data that underlies them

• Scale: an explosion of data – there has been a massive explosion in the amount of genome data, which is costing less and less. Sharing data has led to progress on Alzheimers.

• Funding: research councils are expecting universities to develop road-maps for resource data management, that align them with that council – otherwise funding will be cut.

What libraries can offer is some carrots (after the sticks being imposed):

2. Research Data Management services – providing tools and support

• understanding data requirements – what data do you have, its types and its state – can use Data Asset Framework or Cardio to help in these assessments (DCC Tools) (ANDS is Australian equivalent)

• data management plans – tools include DMP online and DMP Tool

• advocacy and training – informatics, storage etc.

• data licensing

• tools to track impact eg. Total Impact – can be used on all online output

At Bath, they have a partnership approach. Internally, they work with UKOLN, the Library, IT, Research Support Office and Doctoral training Services. Their research is then often in partnership with external organisations, including commercial enterprises. http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/research360/

Library and institutional stakeholders were identified and tables with their responsibilities, requirements and relationships.

 3. Developing data informatics capacity and capability (the skills)

These are explored well in “Managing research data” by Sheila Corrall and “Reskilling for research”from RLUK.

 Points to consider:

• there is a skills shortage for data informatics support in libraries

• what is being taught in our LIS curriculum that fits to support today’s researchers?

• people of what background are enrolling in LIS courses?

• do we get credit for informatics work?

 A plan for action:

• define core components of data informatics – visualisation, workflow and analysis

• analyse LIS entry qualifications and increase STEM entrants

• International Data Informatics Working Group to explore, promote, recognise and reward

Lots of jobs becoming available for this skill set, internationally. In other sectors, there are already data journalists (The Guardian) and data artists (the New York Times), who tell stories with data, using visualisations.

Lots of implications for big data and data science. McKinsey Global Institute predicts a shortage of 190,000 data scientists by 2019.

Many of the tasks that data scientists carry out have a lot of synergies with what librarians do.

Managing research data effectively will give an organisation a business advantage.

The ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualise it, to communicate it’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.

I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualise the data, communicate the data, and utilise it effectively. But I do think those skills – of being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis – are going to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access and understand the data themselves.

Hal Varian – Chief Economist – Google

Libraries are on a data journey – the Informatics Transform is a step in a new direction.

What is the catalogue – Helen Livingston – University of South Australia

Catalogue is a register of all items found in the library. (showed Wikipedia definition – long). Told us Charles Cutter”s definition – incorporates what there is and where can I find it.

Who is the catalogue for? Our users, but not sure if it was always that way. Have lots of content to assist users to find what they want. Its also for inventory control – tells us loans, physical location and helps with acquisitions.

What do we catalogue? Physical items, databases, aggregations, web sites and items owned but held elsewhere? And it has changed over time. Since 2004, the ANZ expenditure on e-resources has climbed from 15 to 30% of budgets.

Special collections, serial collections are all digital and are being catalogued.

User behaviour – what is the easiest place to start research according to students? – Google.

So what is the catalogue becoming? Is it to provide access to library materials or just a place to collect metadata. Most catalogue data now comes from national agencies, libraries, publishers and commercial entities.

The standards of cataloguing are changing. RDA, based on FRBR principles, to replace AACR. It will bring different format of same title together. eg. dvd, books, notes etc. Recently announced that ALA will begin the massive transition away from MARC.

Catalogues inventory control purpose isloans – between 2004 and 2010, loans ffell from 24.5 million to 15 million.

What might we do? Keep the catalogue, continue to buy records, layer the catalogue with discovery layers, maintain loan systems, work with library vendors to improve systems. In other words, we can keep up with the times, moving along gently.

OR

We could stop copy cataloguing, stop focusing on details, point to records rather than buying or storing them, embrace new standards (and be cheerful about it), incorporate virtual and physical shelves in the virtual and physical worlds. Become super efficient and flexible.

We don’t do so well at getting knowledge of our virtual resources to our physical shelves.

OR

Ditch the catalogue as a tool for users, ditch it as an inventory control system, incorporate records for in-house physical material into discovery systems, get a simple inventory control systems for the decreasing physical purchases, make loans REALLY simple (or don’t lend the physical out of the building!)

The Internet of everything: linking the print and online collections – David Feighan and Sue Healey

Showed the “Internet of things” on YouTube. (IBM Social Media)

The internet of things is going to be big, to the point where there will be many more things on the internet than actual people on the internet. NIC sees it as a major disruptive trend by 2025. Raises a lot of privacy concerns etc. China has also identified it as a key strategic emerging industries for them.

First two areas that physical collections and spaces have gone virtual, have been via RFID and QR codes on their rooms. But will students use them? Surveyed them and found that at Year 7, 45% had smart phones, but Year 10 it was 83% and ubiquitous in Years 11 and 12. They showed a QR code and as long as they could say how they were used, they were defined as knowing what they were. It was over 70%.

The library space is being used so they are using QR codes to connect them to the online resources. On shelves, they have A4 size shelf talkers, which are themed and have a QR code which links to their online resources.

www.qrstuff.com Allows you to link to websites, Facebook, YouTube video, Google Maps location and many, many more. There are other sites for QR code generation and doing a site on YouTube will give you many videos of how QR codes are being used.

Near future? Using RFID and geospatial tagging will your phone show you where the items is?

And then let you touch on to check it out? Its not happening because we want them, but is actually being driven by the retail and entertainment sectors. But these developments can also lend themselves to libraries.

As we re-purpose our space as learning commons, how do we get those space on the internet?

Linking objects and people within spaces and games (Parallel Kingdom).

Change or fade away: school libraries need to change – Bronwyn Foxall – Abbotsleigh

School libraries are not immune to the challenges facing all libraries. The only way forward is to discover what your own community wants.

Why are librarians important in schools? What do you do that is so important that the school would suffer if you weren’t there.

Library functions are changing – AV is going digital, reducing number of books, empty spaces due to PC removal and more.

Surveyed students and stakeholders to find out what they could do to revision what they are doing. Main reason why students came to the library, to study alone, to research, to find a book, to attend a class and then to study in a group. Use of computers will die due to laptops for every student.

Asked them what spaces they needed? Quiet study was the biggest demand, and then individual spaces. Open ended questions biggest response was a request for a cafe. More demand for specific spaces – quiet study rooms, group study rooms, individual study space. They were also asking for more books, even more than requests for e-books and magazines etc.

In response they removed shelves to create discussion spaces, created quiet study rooms and a multimedia space – all of which have delighted students.

Need to keep rethinking the library facilities, but also the services. Used a fun film and library vouchers to reach Year 12s, added a discovery layer and federated search to their catalogue, library blogs, run competitions around the library using QR codes and the students have responded well.

Some of the things they want to be able to do:

• new furniture styles for collaborative learning

• add a bit of whimsy

• put some bookcases on the balcony with tables and chairs (WD books)

• funky shelving spaces

• different lighting styles

In order to survive, school libraries must be engaged in a continual process of assessment and evaulation.

The web is the most successful commerce and communication platform every conceived. It has become so pervasive in such a short time – no other technology has been as pervasive or as universal. It has quickly become one of the most pervasive data management and integration platforms ever imagined. And no-one owns it.

It has moved from only a communication tool to a data tool. Most of the web currently is pages and links – its things pointing at other things, via a common platform, which can be accessed from a variety of devices. The Web as a protocol has been a very effective way of wrapping other protocols which are required for specific purposes. Its a very lightweight infrastructure – a very powerful unifying principle. It has enabled people to make connections on the web, record the connection and make it available for others to follow. And it was done by us!

Most of the web is for humans, but opaque to machines. We understand relationships, but to machines its just code. We add the meaning.

Most of the web is connected, but compartmentalised. Its page granular – pointing from one to another. Not much is being done with underlying data. But there are sites like Expedia.com, retrievr which grab the data from other sites.

Remix

• mix data from different sites tor provide added value

• the mix sources don’t need to be involved

• hybrid client-server mode

Problems:

• data is mostly locked up in pages

• each website is different

• and keeps changing

• very blurry lines between use and fair-use

• even after extraction, data needs to be modeled so that it can be mixed

• a remixed website looks like another website (so difficult for further mixing)

Remixing is extremely useful, hard and doesn’t cascade well.

Success story: News!

Whether its RSS or Atom. It describes a chronology of news items, consumers poll and receive new items, items can be easily mixed-up by web sites and applications and they cascade. A web range of applications can also be built on that. eg. Pulse

Achieve that by using XML instead of HTML, give extensibility through XML namespaces and granularity at the news item level.

But its not enough. Limitations include no standard ways of representing relationships between items (its all temporal and chronological), no ways of joining similar items and no standard way to query the web other than polling (can only get the most recent stuff).

How do we solve this issues? Linked data – ways to integrate data in a huge range of ways. Databases are set up for the types of queries you expect to receive. Not knowing what sort of queries were going to be received, linked data had to be built on flexibility.

Linked data is a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing and connecting pieces of data, information and knowledge on the semantic web using URIs and RDF. (Wikipedia) This allows us to get down to the level of relating things, not just pointing to other things.

This web of data is about making it easier to publish, remix, cascade this data and empower people to do new and interesting things with this data, at a reduced cost.

Many organisations are looking at this as a framework to expose their data, not just libraries, museums and archives. Showed backstage.bbc, the New York Times, NPR,The World Bank, Data.gov, HM Government and many national libraries.

We are no longer matching on the string, but on the identifier. These organisations are creating identifiers for the concepts that they are concerned about sharing. These identifiers can be reused, rethought or new ones can be created.

Rather than leaving data where it naturally resides and making it easy to connect to. Integration is not by heaping it all into centralised repositories or apps.

There is power in human computing – OCR correction, captchas. The power of identifiers – Creative Commons – the licences are identifiers. We are assigning this relationships, making it easier for the search engines to bring back things that we can re-use.

Power of recombinant data – Lego works. Lego can be recombined to create new things. It works for Eric’s kids and it has its own meaning, which is understood and done quickly.

RDF- Resource Description Framework – common model for identifying and linking data. Can link a wide variety of types of data that we didn’t traditionally see as linkable. If the data can be surfaced, it doesn’t matter what format its in, it can be referenced and linked.

What”s the catch? It takes the big step of fundamentally rethinking applications and their integration. Not applications on the web, but in the web, using the webs existing architecture. I want your data, in my way!

Example: where to stay? Ask for accommodation recommendations and was site a website which listed local hotels and motels. He was able to scrape and encode the data as addresses and prices etc and then displayed it on a map. He built wrappers and scrapers to extract data from his calendar, to then match up where his meetings were to be held, in relation to potential accommodation.

LOC Digital Preservation Program:

• 180+ partners (NDIIPP)

• Located across the globe

• each with different charters, goals, budgets

• benefits for sharing and connecting their data

• but it exists in disconnected silos

In order to facilitate the sharing, they created “ViewShare – interfaces to our heritage”. http://www.viewshare.org

Using identifiers, we can specify data and then contribute more data – eg. Once assigned address type, can then add latitude and longitude. Was able to do a search of Powerhouse and narrow down by height of the title, as this data is surfaced by them.

Solution is to empower users to create their own views of data, build a community round the data.

Linked data gives us simple conventions for expressing context, a mechanism for collaborating despite different points of view and a mechanism for recording agreements as they evolve. Its about building on how people communicate to mature the way systems interact.

Adoption: Google, Microsoft and Yahoo schema.org effort and LOC Marc efforts.

Libraries have the oppportunity to use our trust, brand and skills to be involved in making these connections. Its not far from where we are to where we need to go. we need to expose what we have, build the policies that enable this and empower our users to build off it.

Xiaolin Zhan is the head of the National Science Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Lots of information challenges to e-science:

1. eScience is built on a lot of data – it is smart data, not just because you can play with it using computers, but because of forthcoming technologies like semantic publishing, and computable. It not only comes as numbers, but intelligent, computable, with metadata.

2. eScience is more than a lot of data – it covers the entire research and development chain, enables integrated resource development and analysis and envisions an integrative infrastructure. Its computable knowledge – can have visualised searches, intelligent tracking, tech trends analysis. Its knowledge driven scientific discovery, workflow and problem solving. The whole discovery process then becomes knowledge driven.

3. eScience is a different information world? Its strategic innovation, interdisciplinary and translational research, its cooperative research, its data intensive knowledge discovery. Now serving R & I decision-makers, lab & project leaders, front-line researchers and engineers. Now scientists go from data to information to intelligence to a solution is happening on the go. They need scholarly publications, research data, applied and market data, applied market and social information and more.

4. A new approach is required. Library solution is no longer the user solution. Library can only build its contribution on users solutions. Users solutions are not data or collections, but R& problem solving solutions. Library should aim for high impact services.

Libraries as smart power for e-Science:

1. Re-purpose the research library: trends tracking, potential testing and priority selection. Not just data, but visualisation and presentation. If we miss these opportunities, we miss this trust and miss the future. Focus on R&D’s new and hurting knowledge bottlenecks – help them to do research better, but with added value. Knowledge as a service – science as service, take steps to make the knowledge into a live tool – smart data.

2. Smart reading for R&D. First look at how people consumer information. No longer linear, static and lonely or reactive. Now weak vs strong information – weak is information you don’t know and don’t know its relevance. Power browsing – key messages rather than linear reading. Strategic reading – fast scanning to extract and accumulate for building context, frameworks and direction. Looked at who is reading what – the higher the position, the more strategic, innovation, interdisciplinary and translational research. Need to provide a lot of information analysis and tools to do this.

3. Integrative knowledge support for R&D> need discovery, customised, embedded, analysis and preservation provenance. Which matches the R&D workflow.

4. Knowledge based collaborative R&D; networked-based knowledge experiments,not just resources, but tools, experts and specialists. Need the facilities, the rights, ability to experiment.

5. Capitalising on complexity of meta-knowledge – we help by building knowledge as a service. Provide knowledge on knowledge, on collaborating, on processes, structures and interactions. Its now a verb as well as a noun. It is live. To do so, need to be strong, have special expertise and organisation. Libraries can do this, but are not ready to do so quite yet. Vendors are already offering this type of service.

Because most researchers and students live over 1000kms away from the National Science Library, they have built a system where the information is pushed out to the users (who are all connected online). They are shifting to a R&D support service, which incorporates an integrated discovery service. They are experimenting with clustering,GIS and visualisation technologies to gather and explore diverse data resources from many institutions and websites. Put much more emphasis on building user environments.RH

Planning a China IR alliance, with other research institutions and also with European partners. They are supporting OA publishing and are a member of arXiv.org. They plan to be a central force in OA resources and policies.

Have fourteen teams working on Research Intelligence Services. Do regular R&D tracking, R &D structure and evolution analysis – using purchased tools and others they have developed themselves, Mapping of sciences and R&D roadmapping, Tech trends analysis – now a big part of what they do. They are developing computer-assisted integrated analysis generation, including automatic profiles, customised analysis, etc.

Also have embedded research support – they liase with their institutes, but not library or documente based. They are user centred. They are doing integrated resource development, helping their institutes to determine what information they need and how it should be organised.

Developing Knowledge platforms as an Academy wide initiative. By end of 2012, it will be live in 15 institutes, by 2012 in all 100 CASS institutes. This will include improved knowledge literacy, so that they not only know how to find the data.

Library will become an open innovation centre. From a library, to a knowledge co-laboratory? They are using the under-utilised library space for consultation, video conferencing, lectures, exhibitions, experiments, seminars and classes.

Challenges:

• technologies – types and integration

• staff – need a knowledge of R&D and tech, not just subject areas

• organisation – reversing pyramid structure – embedded knowledge specialists first