Connecting Librarian

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

Repositioning Brimbank Libraries for 21^st century service deliver – Chris Kelly & Jarrod Coyles

 Libraries are competing for the time of their local communities. They have to have a good knowledge of not only their current users, but also of whole community.

Commenced a period of substantial change, which moved it from a collection service to a dynamic community hub. The change process incorporated three key areas – new technologies, building design and staff work practices. All changes were in direct response to community needs and aspirations.

One such change was self-service system. Sydenham gave them the opportunity to trial RFID. They ended up moving their self-serve kiosks which initially were too far from staff assistance. With the new model of having the kiosks and staff assistance adjacent, they were able to increase self-serve loans from 40% to 95%.

Lessons learnt from this were used in the deconstruction of the desk at Deer Park Library. That space ended up being more flexible and has since 2008, been moved and rearranged several times.

In 2010, they developed a customer self-sort returns system – in conjunction with their RFID vendor. It took some time, but it works and it works in an area where 1/3 of the residents have low literacy. They also changed back end functions to help the flow – including more floating collections, express holds and increased loan limit (without telling the users). Around 65% of items go through customer self-sorted returns. They have consisently maintained 95% of loans and 65% of returns through self-service.

Greatest fear was job loss. That hasn’t happened – instead, they have increased hours and got additional staff hours to support those extra hours. Staff have moved from passive to active customer support service – they have to be encouraged and trained in this. They have also doubled the amount of programs they offer, many focused on lifelong learning. Many of these programs have been delivered with community partners and many have a focus on literacy, reading culture, social connectedness and employment.

Staff are heavily involved in developing programs, through a variety of teams and management groups, where discussions are open and staff are encouraged to contribute to future directions and decision making.

In 2005, they had 35 PCs library service wide. Now they have 75 and have the highest PC bookings for a public library service in Victoria. They have designed spaces to accommodate PC and games use. Youth were using them almost like an extended living room and doing so together.

For young people, the spectator space is just as important as the gaming space, so at Deer Park, they have made the space and the furniture to fit this need.

Learned that Flexible Design is required, because your users will be the ultimate designers, the IT department relationship is vital, continuous improvement through incremental budgets and small wins help build resilience.

The big bang: establishing the Victorian Government Library Service – Laurie Atkinson and Bernie Lewin

Government libraries in Victoria have expanded and contracted over the years, quite like our universe. At present, it has again contracted, from multiple government department libraries to a single library service working across 15 departments.

Why did it happen? To give greater access to resources, equitable service across government, reduce the cost of providing services, reduce the effort, delays and costs associated with departmental restructures, professional development for staff. Although government librarians were quite informally collaborative, it has now been formalised, with all library staff now working for the Department of Treasury and Finance, although based in the various government departments.

The Vision – shared service provider and clients linked to resource identification, resource procurement and collection management – which result in access to the right information at the best price, for library users.

It has been a huge journey, taking more than 10 independent library services, over 15 sites, managed by over 50 staff, serving a workforce of 50,000 and with a mission to build one high-powered streamlined information machine and do so within a couple of years. Time invested in developing a common lexicon made further integration much easier. Even the range of roles that librarians undertook in their departments was very broad.

They had to integrate 40 in-house catalogues and related databases across a huge range of software and platforms. Ranged from large to small services, running from InMagic and Lotus Notes to Symphony and many more.

The vision was one interface for 50,000 staff, which incorporated the catalogue, inter-library loans and enquiry management, which had to include both physical, electronic and subscriptions services and had comprehensive reporting. No single vendor could do it, so they ended up with Sirsi Dynix for the system with extra modules, including Serials Solutions and Ref Tracker. Achieved it in a ridiculous timeline, but only achieved with a funding extension.

Some of the difficulties included:

• departmental IT policies and setups made some changes more difficult and couldn’t always been foreseen

• funding cycles and resource access to a single government library service has had its challenges with licensing etc

• conflict with IE 6 needed for in-house software, but didn’t work well with SD discovery layer until one of the VGLS tweaked the style sheets

The implementation team was resourced internally, with backup staff were appointed temporarily to backfill them. Advantage that the team was totally involved in the change process. Libraries were clustered by subject area, then by process.

Staff communication was vital. Had regular management meetings and regular staff meetings which seemed to come too fast, but whose value was outstanding. Heavily used a wiki for staff communication and has a blog for news, calendar and wiki pages for whatever they needed. Incorporated a Q&A section – so that staff knew what they had to have done and by when.

Lessons learned: still learning, system integration is incomplete, a the bleeding edge of Whole of Government, the data is still a problem. Opportunities: scalable business model, stakeholder management. Integration is the way of the future.

Engaging student spaces: Library in the Deakin Online Learning Environment – Sharee Crocker

A Learning Management System is the most efficient way to get resources to students. Libraries need to be in that space, to help students get the resources they need.

Because of the plethora of resources that we offer and that are available on the web. Its all very confusing for students. Despite all their efforts, some students don’t attend library classes and are sometimes not embedded into courses. Even if they do attend a course, they may walk away still confused. They may not know about library guides, never ask or never come to the physical building.

How do they reach these students? LMS is used as a central teaching space and provides online learning anywhere any time. Library resources alongside unit specific learning materials – give seamless access to customised unit specific information and necessary to encourage searching beyond the web. If the extra information is one click way, they will use it. Its our responsibility to customise the user experience, designed to connect students in a familiar environment.

In 2010 – Deakin transitioned to Desire to Learn (D2L) LMS from Blackboard. Transition was a staged process over 12 months. Library began by embedding a permanent link to the top menu bar on D2L. Needed more. They then embedded the core library resources for each course, including databases, library guides and journal titles, into the D2L page for that course.

They also created a Library Showcase, which displayed all library resources. Anyone can see the page and if requested by faculty, a resource on this page can be imported into a course page, for easy access to those students.

A widget was created to further enhance access. Faculties were very supportive, so one was developed for each faculty, in conjunction with faculty staff and the LMS vendor. The content in each widget could include e-readings, library eresource guide, specific databases, ebooks, ejournals and external websites. Every widget also included a library catalogue search box. They started with 4 widgets in Trimester 1.However, 60 units going live in Trimester 2 meant a huge increase in the creation of customised course specific widgets.

However, with the need for 1200 widgets eventually, the view changed. Instead of course specific widgets, they moved to 85 discipline specific widgets, with a limit of 5 links – chosen by faculty. However, every course widget also includes a catalogue search box. Every student will have access to these.

Used dynamic linking that enabled the widget to recognise the course and then link to the appropriate e-resources. All widgets also link to at least one library resource guide.

Alison Delitt and Sarah Schindeler – NLA – Trove – the terrors and triumphs of service-based social media

Trove – free online search tool that brings together bibliographic records from libraries and archives. Best known for OCR, human corrected digitised newspapers.

Trove already has an interactive base – including lists, tagging, comments and more. Social media channel attached to it 18 months ago.

NLA has a Facebook page, Twitter channel and YouTube channel. NLA posts all of the content – using the corporate brand as the online identity. Use your brand to attract attention and followers – fits with a business model.

Difficulty in serving all our users in any depth, due to their diversity. Its both good and interesting, but can make it difficult for us to deliver content online which is appropriate for a large proportion of our users.

Social media is a free puppy – there is a cost – in generating content, monitoring and responding to users, archiving content, exploring new tools. NLA is investigating tools such as HootSuite to monitor their online social engagement.

More specialist channels, like British Library’s Magnificent Maps blog, Reel Culture, Dinosaur Tracking, From the Catbird Seat, Children’s Literature @ NYPL. Advantage of these is that you can focus in and users are more likely to tune in and engage with their content.

Unfortunately, we are not able to engage with all of our users, regardless of what we do. Our users and their interests are just too varied.

Results of their 12 month trial with social media. Had no resources to invest in social media, so there was no publicity or marketing of these presences. The first thing they did right was setting their aims for Trove’s social media:

To increase use of Trove

To increase the visiblility of Trove

To provide customer service to Trove

To solicit feedback about Trove, in order to improve the service

Getting it wrong was not thinking about which social media channels they should use. They thought they could re-purpose the content for use across different channels. They couldn’t do it easily.

Facebook didn’t work for them – there were some technical issues, but they weren’t able to resources many different feeds. Need to acknowledge that it is a far more interactive presence and requires more work than a broadcast medium like Twitter. So they moved away from Facebook quite quickly.

Twitter worked perfectly for them. Their aim of constantly exposing their content. Were able to use quirky humour. Thought it would be used differently than it was. Rather than linking to blog posts which contained multiple Trove links, they instead linked directly to digitised snippets. Side benefit was a huge growth in media interest in the content shared and in Trove itself.

Under-estimated how quickly and easy it was to communicate to and with their user base. When you treat your user with that sort of respect, you get a return of good will.

When you user has a win using your service, you are more likely to receive a complimentary tweet, than you are to get an email etc.

Twitter presence is not just about getting Twitter followers, but to get people to come into Trove itself.

There is a cost to not operating in this space. If we are not there, we are missing what people are saying about us and missing a chance to get your message out.

Tim Sherratt – Mining the treasures of Trove: new tools and technologies

1913 – the year that Canberra was officially founded. It was also the year before World War 1 began. Showed a word cloud based on articles from Trove which included the phrase “the future”. It included 11,000 articles. To make this job easy, Tim created a Python script which harvests the data in a form which you specify. Instead of 35,000 clicks, it was a handful.

Once the text files were returned, they were cleaned up. He was able to identify consistent OCR errors and bulk correct them. Once done, we combined them into one file and then put the file into Voyant (a text exploration tool). More refining to remove stop words, so that the more significant terms could come to the fore.

There are a number of tools besides Voyant, that enable you to explore text in interesting ways. Mallet will look at large amounts of text and identify themes (clusters). You have to do some work and decide what the clusters relate to. Natural Language Processing Toolkit (python resource) – enabled him to extract the next six words after a given phrase.

None of these are analyses on their own, they are starting points for future research. They are ways of peeking inside the dataset and helping to decide what approach to use. However, it can be rather slow.

How to speed up the process?

Used QueryHarvester which examined how many articles mentioned your search terms, as compared to the total articles for a year. He then used QueryPic to graph and create a html page which you can then add text to. It encourages exploration in a way that the Harvester alone does not. If you then click on the point on the graph, it then retrieves the first twenty articles from Trove. It gives another interface into the depths of Trove.

This channel is starting to be used by other people, including the Airminded blog. You can too – they are all available and free from Wraggelabs Emporium. Check his blog for more on what he is doing and how.

Why is he doing this? The nature of historical research is changing. In the past, we had scarce resources, but with digitisation, our trickle is becoming more like a flood. “nearly every day we are confronted with a new digital historical resources of almost unimaginable size” Dan Cohen (2008). Its even more true now.

Other tools are out there: Mapping Texts.

Researchers need “a methodology for the infinite archive” Bill Turkel (2006). Now that the historical resources are growing, we will be able to do so much more with the data we can harvest. We can start exploring in ways like never before.

Interfaces are just points of contact between us and the data. Interface development will happen everywhere and they will continue to be developed and alternatives created.

Check out the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities.

There are challenges around this material. One is the de-humanisation of data – the danger that we might forget what its about. We need to keep perspective, understand the human story behind the data.

Phillip Minchin – Stacks of fun: games, community, libraries, technology

Asked questions and used A4 coloured paper to get audience feedback. Consensus was that although most didn’t play games a lot, most considered them very important.

Books are very important and have a place in our lives, but are no longer enough.

Collections: lending is suitable for RPG book and for ones that don’t require registration. Also online subscription games. In-house is suitable for board and card games – is changing with advent of 3D printing and generic self-printing game pieces. Curation is suitable for rules-only games, free electronic games and PDF rule-sets. Subscription suitable (but not available) for: some online games, some ebook-based games. Unsuited to libraries, except as a venue: Collectable Card Games.

Gaming is much more common than most people realise. Part of the appeal of gambling is the gaming. There are a surprising number of games clubs around and they get big numbers. Conventions are big and friendly. Melbourne has a club called Cafe Games – something that libraries could be tapping into.

Gaming is a great way to build community. His library is looking at using games to connect two disparate local communities – older affluent and poorer migrants. Games are a good way because they are non-threatening and fun.

Games in the library: for managing teens/rowdies, chess/scrabble clubs, informal/self-organised play, games club (like book clubs), gamers are our people – geeks and libraries are a natural fit – most are heavy library users already, games and community also a natural fit – Herodotus story – read it in full paper.

Benefits – welcoming space, increased inter-patron interaction, more visitors and longer stays.

Drawbacks – increased potential for patron disputes, more stuff to keep track of, noise level management.

Shared spaces – noise has to be OK and games have to be amenable to audiences or new participants. Dedicated spaces – soundproofed, but preferably visible, but need to manage curiousity.

Games days – for specific well-known games, trying new games, BYO games, open games. Tournaments – if the game is sold commercially, the makers may well support you. Self-organising events – BYO games or open gaming events might well spawn these.

 International Gaming Day @ Your Library – First Saturday of November – 3^rd. http://ngd.ala.org/

Steve Jobs 2010 – analogy to cars – we have had PCs for 30 years, but now our needs are being fulfilled by other devices – pads and smart phones for example.

 Once upon a time………… there was a princess, the princess loved books, but the princess also loved computers – enamoured with the digital, loves media on all sorts of computers. Her media is everywhere and goes with her everywhere she goes. She doesn’t understand what “we don’t have it” means. She didn’t understand videotapes and the requirement to rewind before watching, it was broken technology to her.

 Our users expect our services to reflect the experiences they are getting from external services, such as Amazon and Netflix.

 No surprise that smart phones outnumber computers. It is a bit of a surprise that it is the same worldwide.

 Linux is less common, than even iOS, which is on the iPad. Australia has over 100% cell phone penetration and nearly ½ of the population have smart phones. The access this gives these people is transformative. In the US, penetration is over 100%, but smart phones is 35%. Mobile phones are the fastest spreading communication technology in the world.

 84% of Australian online adults who have mobile phones use them for more than voice. Not just SMS either.

He works at the University of Tennessee – Chattanooga – has 10,000 students. A good representation of a mid-sized school in the US. 82% of students access their resources online – the other 18% in person. Gate count – 428,032. Website – 1,973,612. Think about how many people are serving in your buildings and then how many are serving your website.

 They can measure on campus use. 18.25% using Macs, 39.32& using Windows devices and 39.31% using mobile devices. 2.89% using games consoles and the remaining mostly Linux. So what are the most common mobile operating systems. These includes 5 Nooks, 41 Kindles, 69 Kindle Fires, over 1000 Androids, 770 iPod Touches, 839 iPads and 2173 iPhones.

 Of the Australian smart phone users, over 50% are using iPhones.

 What are the campus users doing on their devices? 36.5% Netflix. 17.8% Flash video over Http. 11.2% Http – standard web traffic. 11.1% http – media stream. 65.4% – of all traffic is streaming video. How much is coming from the library? People aren’t coming to us for this stuff anymore.

They have this as Chattanooga has the fastest Internet in the US and its cheap. $300 per month for a Gig of bandwidth. This is coming everywhere though. Media streaming is just the beginning.

 What does a post PC world look like? Not just talking about mobile. Its about everything that connected to the Internet. The Internet of things that talk to each other is coming.

 In ten years, we went from iMac to iPhone, from 2000 to 2010. Moore’s Law gets us this – every 18 months get twice as fast and half as expensive. This is what 10 years of Moore’s Law looks like.

 We have single-purpose devices – the Kindle is a great example – it is great at reading books, but terrible at everything else. We have multi-purpose devices – such as the iPad or Kindle Fire. They become anything you want them to become. Harder to understand how we deliver content to these devices because they are infinitely flexible. 55.28 million iPads sold in the three years since its launch. In 2008, Apple sold more iPhones than in 2007. In 2009, 2010 and then again 2011, they sold more than in all previous years combined. In 2011, Apple has sold 315 million devices running iOS. This is the platform we need to pay attention to, because this is what they are buying.

 PC is an example of a mediated interface – you interact with it via a keyboard or a mouse. With a touch screen, there is a direct interaction. Touch is something that everyone understands as a means of interface. What have we done for our library that uses touch as the interface. Its the easy one.

Microsoft Surface Table 2 is out now and that’s another big change coming.

 Xbox Kinect is another change coming. It controls via gesture. People are building it into laptops and will be coming to tablets. It will be commonplace within the next three years. We should be paying attention to this.

 Voice control was envisioned by Apple in the late 1980s and is now happening with smart phones. Another area to be watching.

 Jawbone bracelet monitors your daily movement and links to your phone to provide a daily report. It is becoming more widespread because the cost of sensors is dropping, making it much easier. Twine is a small ambient sensor which started as a Kickstart project – it can be left somewhere to sense changes and then contact you. eg. Lets you know when washing machine stops, if your aquarium leaks, if someone raids the pantry – its a generic device. It could text you, tweet you, when your programmed event happens. We could have them on our shelves, to record when someone moves a book! They can be bought right now, but are probably 3-5 years away from being robust.

 “Predictions are hard – particularly when they are about the future” – Yogi Bera.

 Showed Arthur C Clarke video about the difficulties of predicting the future. If what he says sounds ridiculous, its more likely to be true.

 Showed video on flip scanning from University of Tokyo – just flip through the pages and it is digitised. Can scan a 200 page book in about one minute, uses lasers to de-skew and uses a usual camera and a infra-red camera. The professor in charge sees this eventually in mobile phones. What happens when a user can just walk in with their phone and walk out with everything we own. Samsung Transparent Smart Window – light transmissive, unless you want it to be. Coming out later this year – already in mass production. 3D printing – Maker Bot already has a depository online of things to print – can buy one for $1750 in the US. This is an awesome opportunity for libraries to get into, before they become affordable to the average consumer.

 “Rainbows end” by Vernor Vinge is a MUST read – he describes an academic library after the human race is rendered super-human.

 There are heads up displays in goggles and glasses already available. LEDs on contact lenses are already in development.

 We are experiencing temporary INCOHERENT RAGE – Please stand by!

 We need to be thinking long term – Moore’s Law makes everything cheap eventually. They get so cheap that they end up being disposable. We need to be ready for when that happens.

 We need to be looking outside ourselves. Our issues are not unique and there are solutions out there that can work for us as well. Others are doing better than we are.

 We need to be thinking about mobile first and not fourth or fifth. “Adaptive web design” by Aaron Gustafson. Need better metrics and prepare for the data flood – its not about circulation or gate count. There are other things that are much more important.

 Roger’s adoption curve for adoption of new technology. Not all libraries need to be on the cutting edge. We need to be where our users are. If our patrons are late majority, we need to be early majority. Knowing where our users are, should drive where we our library is.

 Douglas Adams – anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things – unfortunately this is the group that most librarians are in – we need to change this.

 Clay Shirkey – tools dont get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

 Henry Ford – if I’d asked them what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

 Steve Jobs – It isn’t the consumer’s job to know what they want.

 The best way for us to predict the future is to create it. Libraries need to be involved in this. The future needs us.

 griffey@gmail.com

jasongriffey.net

 Questions:

 We are needed? Please elaborate.

Patrons bypass us for resources. But they don’t use the web well – they need us to help them to discover and assess appropriate online resources. We also have a local role – not just community centre, but cultural memory – about the objects for which the community cares.

 Experiences cause expectations. How do you manage your undergrads who are early adopters and academics who are laggards?

We serve populations as best we can by segmenting them. Different services for different users. “but those people are going to die” – plan for the future, which means not planning for those who won’t be around for it.

 Are staff ready and willing for the post PC world?

Fortunate to work in a change oriented library – even if have had times where people have been dragged kicking and screaming. However, if they won’t change, then maybe they need to be elsewhere. Cant let the contrarians keep us from the future.

 Breakdown of remote to on campus students?

About 1200 remote – but large growth in off campus users, which will continue.

 NBN impact besides video?

Communication, learning etc. Skype is a trivial example but most relevant. Streaming media ranges widely between learning through classes to watching cat videos on YouTube.

 Concern about social control issue and privacy?

Should get over it because its almost about to go ahead away. Privacy is something we need to frame differently – users should have control over it themselves. Dont yet have a culturally good way to express the changes brought about by ‘things like CCTV, biometrics, social networking and more – much of which will have to be controlled legally. Going to have a hard time with personal privacy over the next ten years.

 When our free broadband is no longer required – where does our careful training go?

Our careful training will be used elsewhere – collection development – human filtered is still better than machine filtered.

This VALA Boot Camp session was a lesson not only in social and mobile media, but in user design. Here are my notes from the session.

Will Donovan from Will Donovan and Mark Watson from Design Providence.

 Mobile and social media – what’s all the fuss?

 37 million iPhones sold in the last quarter in 2012. More than 15 billion apps downloaded – 11 billion for Android. 3 billion iPad apps downloaded. Android now has about 50-60% of market, Apple around 30%. End of last year, smart phone sales overtook PC sales – 488 million smart phones sold, compared to 415 PCs.

 Showed Socialnomics video – related to the book of the same name.

 Social media is not about technology, its about relationships, commerce, memories and much, much more. Over ½ of world population is under 30. Social media has overtaken porn as the number 1 Internet activity. If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3^rd largest in the world. 50% of mobile traffic in the UK is for Facebook. 69% of parents are friends with their children in social media. $6 billion spent on virtual goods. Wikipedia in print would be 2.25 million pages long and take over a century to read.

www.socialnomics.com

 Social media trends 2012:

• Convergent emergence – mobile and billboards – bringing your services together and across platforms

• Cult of influence – Klout – what influence do you have online?

• Gamification nation – incentivising your users

• Social sharing – getting your reviews and publications out through social media

• Social television – Q&A (ABCTv) – panel involvement via Twitter

• Micro economy – Kickstarter – people funding other people to create new ideas

 Trends for libraries for 2012

• Mobile friendly websites

• Using YouTube for marketing and education

• Using social media to educate

• Google+ usage will increase, but Facebook will still rule

• Create mobile apps for various uses – not the website

• More services via mobile – due to database vendors

• Goodreads and Library Thing will be used by more libraries as tools, reviews and locating

• Adapt more open source programs

• Online gaming for marketing and education

• More use of Google apps

 86% of people are using their mobile devices whilst watching TV.

 Facebook has become bigger than porn, for the first time ever.

 Three trends that change business – Mobile, Social and Cloud Computing. (Forbes) Its personal and its ubiquitous. Its the new world of services.

 If your site is doing bad, maybe its just not engaging the right way.

Paper.li – social newspaper, for a topic or cause, curated and free flowing. Yammer – private social network (started like Twitter, more like Facebook now). Meetup – social network for groups that have events.

Design process:

Design is messy – no hard and fast way – “This is service design thinking”.

From research (uncertainty) to concept (patterns) and prototype (insights), through to design (clarity/focus).

Designers use inductive thinking – they make observations, find patterns, make tentative hypotheses and create theory – as the process to solve a problem or to create a service.

Discover (design, research, methods) – Define (personas, journeys, maps) – Develop (scenarios, role play, story board) – Deliver (document, concept. (Double diamond design process)

Discover – observe, question (surveys and interviews), map

Define – interpret, establish scope, needs, delineate problems

Develop – work though concepts to establish the appropriate action (journey mapping, story boarding etc)

Deliver – document and build

WORKSHOP – My group decided to work on an actual problem. One of our team has a great store of atmospheric and oceanographic data which is underutilised as it isn’t well known outside the university.  We determined that potential users included scientists, corporations, government, educators, students and researchers. These people all required quick and easy access to such data. Our solution to ‘spread’ the word was to create a Wikipedia article on the repository, which would include snippets of data from the database and a YouTube channel which would show videos of how the data was collected and used.  This would help make it more findable through web searches. We also determined to improve SEO on the website and to offer RSS feeds to the data, to make it more findable and more useful to those who could benefit from it. 

How we did this?

Scoping – define your challenge

Ideation and Concepting

Prototyping

Deliver

 Phase 1 – explore the problem, the challenges and the conventions that you are currently in

• what is the problem opportunity

• who are the users (personas)

• what are they trying to achieve (scenarios)

• concept/storyboard/journey

Phase 2 – wireframe – prototype

• test

• amend

• test again

• deliver

Rules of engagement

• yes and…. (build on what the other person said)

• defer judgement (don’t get caught in arguments, move on)

• go for quantity (share what you do)

• one conversation at a time

• encourage wild ideas

• build on the idea of others

• stay focused on the topic

• be visual

Open share what you know:

• what do you know about social media and mobile

• what tools have use used and pros and cons

Brainstorm the services and challenges now:

• what services do you offer

• who are your users/visitors and their needs

• Visitor + Need = Insight

Create a “How might we”problem statement

Many ways to approach new projects. It is important to collaborate. You don’t need to be an expert designer to innovate. Have a content strategy – be a content expert.

I am working as Acting Branch Manager again at my library – a branch of a regional public library service, so taking care of the running of our biggest branch, on top of my usual Info Services tasks, were what made up my work day in this 8th round of Library Day in the Life.  I worked a late shift today, so it didn’t start until 1pm, so the morning was spent in domestic duties etc.

So here goes my work day.

12.00pm – Start work at 1pm so of course I arrived at work at 12.00pm, where I completed the staff timesheets for yesterday, whilst also catching up on what had been happening during the morning. Business as usual, except that it has been much busier than we had experienced of late. And of course, checked email.

12.30pm – Followed up on the resignation of a shelver – she had resigned on the weekend, so I followed up with the staff member who took the details and chased up with the personnel manager about what was required as follow-up. Signed off on a pile of leave applications and travel allowance forms. Followed up on completed and in process maintenance issues.

1.00 – 3.00pm – Frantically busy on desk. We were down a person due to staff training on our new discovery layer being launched next week and spent the first hour just trying to clear the backlog of returns etc, whilst serving the library users still pouring into the library. Once the backlog was cleared, spent the next hour just trying to catch up with clearing all the returns from the desk and back out into the library where users could gain access to them.

3.00pm – Uploaded helpsheets for our new discovery layer and created new links on our website, in preparation for next week’s hard launch and for our soft launch, which went live today. Also dealt with assorted staff needs and queries. And phone calls to various staff following up on assorted items.

3.45pm – Created some new book covers and information for our new books slideshow on our website. And more staff queries.

4.00pm – Added our recent library news blog post and the Gorilla Librarian (Monty Python) video to our Facebook page.

4.15pm – Did a tidy up of our website RSS feeds and deleted expired events slides.

4.20pm – Made some calls related to maintenance issues.

4.35pm – Emailed our library bloggers about changes to the new catalogue and the need to begin adding links to the new catalogue in their posts.

4.45pm – Catch up and clean up of email.

4.50pm – Started a blog post on our adult blog about Oscar Best Picture nominees which came from books. Saved it in draft form for completion another day.

5.00pm – Home for dinner.

6.00pm – 9.00pm – Back on desk for the evening – filled with loans, returns, memberships, internet assistance, copier/printer assistance, holds, console games bookings – setup – pack-up, tidy up around the library (amazing how messy some people are), as well as other numerous administrative tasks.

9.05pm – Home for another day.

Pretty normal day really. Nothing exciting in a way, but I love my job and I work in a wonderful library service with great people, so I wouldn’t change a thing.

Happy New Year everyone. Here’s hoping that 2012 is better than 2011, regardless of whether it was good or bad.

I just finished reading a post by Andy Burkhardt at Information Tyrannosaur which got me pondering. I’m only new to Andy’s blog, but I highly recommend you check it out, if you haven’t already.  Entitled Creating Meaning for Library Users, it took some great ideas from a TED talk by Experience Designer Nathan Shedroff.

What caught my attention however, was his closing paragraph.

“We are not simply delivering access to e-books or databases. We are not only conducting reference interviews or doing information literacy. We are doing something much more important than that.”

He’s referring to all the things that libraries do for their users, that is meaningful to their users. The things that keep them coming back for more, that leave them satisfied each time they leave our buildings.

It’s not new. We all know the future of libraries is not just tied up in our collections or our roles as information intermediaries.

But what are those things we do, that address the ‘meaning’ that our users are seeking. And what are the things we want to do that we aren’t doing yet and why aren’t we?

At my library, we have had an amazing increase in the number of people wanting to use the space for study this year. Not necessarily the collection, but definitely the wi-fi, the tables and in a lot of instances, some quiet. Unfortunately, we are not too well set up for the latter, with every inch of floorspace being used and being a public library, more often than not, its far from quiet. Plans are being made to fix this, but it all takes time and money. In the meantime, we do what we can. So one of the things we would like to do, is to be able to provide that ‘quiet’ study space, whilst not becoming the ‘shhh’ police that we all abhor (and don’t have the time for).

I want our users to know and remember the services we have that suit their needs, so that they can access them when they need or want them. Unfortunately, we can only tell them about those services when they join and when they ask, otherwise we can’t make them remember. Its very frustrating too, I can tell you.

I want more people from our community to come in and discover the treasures that we offer, in facilities, programs, collections and more. Our communities are great supporters of libraries, but nowhere near enough of them are members.  Our marketing programs are great, but somehow people still don’t actually make it into our buildings or onto our websites, to learn more and make use of the great things we have on offer. If only there was a way to make a library card the latest hip trend, one that never goes out of fashion……

What do you want for your users? What can you do to make it happen? I don’t know what I can do to make my wishes reality, but I am going to work on finding out.

Happy New Year!