Connecting Librarian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The important thing is the continuing democracy of knowledge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ive been so busy of late, more on that later, however, I have had the pleasure of being able to liveblog guest speakers Karen Schneider and Lizanne Payne, visiting us for the 30th Anniversary of VALA and CAVAL, with the theme of 30 years of Looking Ahead.

Karens talk was entitled Open – looking at how open source has long been a part of the library profession. In the late 1800s it was the creation of ALA. Many more examples followed, which I lost when I mistakenly deleted what I had already typed into ScribeFire and couldnt get it back. Heres where I picked it up again. 1935 – talking book collections established. 1939 – The introduction of book covering enabled libraries to share and market books to the public. 1976 – Copyright law in US. 1977 – library departments began writing their own automation systems, after 100 years of innovation in libraries. 1978 – AACR2.

In the 1980s, libraries moved to learned helplessness, where they moved to vendors providing their automated systems. In the direction of open however, in the mid 80s, GNU was developed, in the early 1990s Linux began development.

This set the state for Evergreen. Developed by the Georgia Public Library Service, in response to the Y2K issue, built a catalogue to serve the Pines Consortia which comprised all but a few public libraries in the state of Georgia – 258 libraries altogether. Initially, they were looking to purchase a system to support the large demands of their consortia. Initially happy with their choice of ILS, after a few years, found that it was not keeping up with the changing libraries and changing users, both in terms of the size of the consortia and the capabilities of the system.

They decided in 2004, that they would write their own package. They were criticised, forgetting that librarians had been innovators for the previous century. It took 2 years to develop. Its free to use, download and share and libraries are doing so, some without the support of organisations like Equinox.

Its software written by librarian, for librarian. In 2008-09, it is live in over 300 sites, including some international and covering consortia, single library services, hosted sites, academic, public, special and more.

OSS in real life? Perception is that it is only a last option choice, it is not mature enough, the cost is deceptive. OSS is liable to rapid application development, which is generally true because there are multiple developers out there working towards solutions. OSS is easy to customise, although its interesting that the customisation requests from libraries are often for things that other libraries would also want.

Partnerships have been developed with 3rd parties in an open environment – so the focus is on the service, not on the proprietary code. OSS has interoperability, adding other modules and software, because the package has been developed on open standards. OSS not great in general on documentation – takes back stage as the developers generally know what it is and forget that other people need it. Has been a problem for Evergreen, but one that is being resolved now with a dedicated team of people writing the documentation as we speak.

GIft Economy – the development group has been small, with a very limited group of library software developers, but as more libraries come on board, this group is growing.

When libraries handed over the reins of automation to vendors, we removed ourselves from the design of such systems. We bought the packages and then grumbled about it. Librarians have great ideas for their ILSs, but those ideas rarely come to fruition in those same ILSs.

Best way for librarians to find ways to improve their ILSs is to use them prolifically as a user, not as a staff member. That way you can truly have the library experience, whilst keeping an eye to how it can improve.

Intrigued by the Biometric lending option utilised by one small public library in Georgia – for those people who consistently forget their library cards.

After afternoon tea, Lizanne Payne spoke on the Future of Library Collections: access and stewardship in a networked world. Lizanne is the Executive Director of the Washington Research Library Consortium.

Until about 40 years ago, libraries were local centres of learning, where the aim was to gather as many resources together in one place, as possible. We still attribute higher value to libraries with the greater number of volumes, even though our value goes beyond this now.

In the 60s, our resources were accessible through the joys of the oak drawer encased card catalogue. In the 80s, the online catalogue, meant that you could at least find out what resources were available in your library, before physically entering it. Now, our resources are electronic, available anywhere, anytime, but we also remain custodians to our physical collections. Lizanne believes that libraries are becoming more global and that we are within 10 years of being system wide repositories.

Trend: libraries as place – they are for people. They are moving from places to house books to places to host people. New spaces are for users, not for books. Print holdings are moved to less accessible parts of the buildings and the focus is on the user and the electronic.

Trend: electronic journals and books are viable alternatives. Vast majority are available in electronic formats.

Trend: campus attitudes towards libraries are changing. Only 10% of users start with the library building to start their research. Only 25% started with the library catalogue. Of faculty, 50% viewed the library gateway function as very important – for librarians its 90%.

In increasingly valuable campus space, the justification for unused print resources taking up this space is being questioned. 35 million volumes in Australian academic libraries at present (OCLC stats). The numbers are not declining, as titles are still being bought and needing to be stored. Space is being reclaimed in the main library, by utilising high density facilities – usually offsite, to manage the less used resources the library has.

Harvard model storage facility – volumes stored by size for maximum density and hold up to 2 million volumes per 4000sq.mts, cherry picker for retrieval, usually off site, scheduled delivery with a construction cost per volume of approx USD $3. Typical retrieval is 1-3% per year.

Automated storage and retrieval system – volumes stored in metals bins, retrieved by robot mechanism, can hold over 1 million volumes per building module, built on campus, delivery in minutes, construction cost per volume approx USD $10. Some libraries are putting a hugh proportion of their collection in such a facility, as it aims to have it as quick to collect as if the user had to go to the shelves to collect it themselves.

Shared Storage Models: Shared secondary storage for multiple library services, with no collection sharing – separate space within the same building. Shared or last copy storage – where ownership changes to the consortia when item is put into storage.

Print journal archiving: Prospective archiving is where the print edition of an electronic subscriptionis sent to storage for archiving. Digitizer dark archives – print editions are available for rescanning in case something happens to the digital archive.

Bright Archive is a consortia of Australian university libraries working on an agreement to share and archive resources.

US Research Reserve – aims to safeguard the long term future of printed research journals, can access copy at the British Library, with 2 other libraries holding backup copies – other copies can be withdrawn. Got central funding for deduplication and have continuing funding for deduplication and too develop systems, Project goal – 100km of free space across academic libraries in the UK.

Mass Digitization will have a profound affect on how we retain print copies locally. Google Book Search is mass scanning from major libraries without selection, in copyright works shown as snippet, full image for out of copyright, new feature of library subscriptions to full-text (may be free for public libraries), MARC records going itno OCLC API for one-off search, millions of books scanned although exact number not known. Also Open Content Alliance, scanning out of copyright titles and the Hathi Trust aiming to develop a long term digitisation program to protect these materials, in case the other projects break down and disappear.

Local scan to build e-book collections is being used by Emory University. Machine scans the book and then they are available for purchase from Amazon. CAVALs Carm Centre is doing something similar.

Networked print on demand printers have become small enough and financially viable for some libraries to take on. University of Michigan prints from Google Books, Open Content Alliance or other digital books.

Evolving library ecosystem – electronic content will be even more ubiquitous resulting in print repositories serving the greater network – holding non-common, unique titles, bound journals etc.

Our focus over the next decade, will be finding the balance over how we retain items centrally and locally and how we manage our collections within and between library services.

Moving to a planned redundancy model – need to plan for a certain amount of copies be kept by libraries, so that with the pressure on libraries, we dont come to a point where there are no copies left. Yano study determined the minimum number should be 13.

Access and stewardship model for the future is now the just in time being prolific and the just in case being the backup.

However, dealing with the politics, systemic needs, local needs, administration and more will be the biggest challenges into the future. Lizanne doesnt have the answer to these issues, but putting them out there for discussion is a good first step.

Towards guidelines and practices in Australian indigenous digital collections – Professor Martin Nakata

Wow, here I am live blogging the conference, using ScribeFire for Firefox and wi-fi at the Alices Springs Convention Centre. So sit back and enjoy the conference through mylimited eyes. Papers will be available on the conference website – http://www.alia2008.com/

So here goes.

Martin is the Director of Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning and Char if Australian Indigenous Education – UTS.

Challenges in digitising indigenous collections included IP and copyright regimes, indigenous needs and concerns, digitisation and public domain.

An issue that has been taken up by IFLA amongst others.

The Gap – need for consistent standards and protocols across the collecting sector. (maybe a 1/4 of attendees work in libraries which hold such materials – survey of hands) .
Resulted in a project for a preliminary investigation, in partnership with the NTL, SLNSW an SLQ.

The project is investigating digitisation processes, digitisation of indigenous materials working towards guidelines and protocols.

It first focussed on the technical issues, which have now been standardised. The focus is now on consistent formats, workflow and management of collections, legal and sensitivity issues

Working on the implications for the digitisation process, including selections, clearances, decisions, time and costs, prompts, checklists an exemplars and a clear management strategy.

There are also implications for prioritising indigenous materials – both within all materials to be digitised and within indigenous materials to be digitised. Rationale for these decisions should not be based on ethnic compositions or population proportions. Unfortunately, we still dont know the extent of indigenous materials held by Australian cultural institutions.

Prof Nakata believes that inidigeous digitisation should be included in core business and not treated with separate policies and procedures.

Legal and sensitivity issues are the reasons for departure from the standard digitisation process of libraries. The next project aims to produce guidelines to assist in this process. Digitisation should also give indigenous people timely access to and the use of these materials. There should also be a higher priority for the digitisation of the materials of our native population.

Question: federal government funding – it seems there may be funding available for projects if organisations work together.

Question: will protocols being developed cover all formats and all cultural institutions, not just libraries – aim to work with GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) in next project. Picture Australia is doing some groundbreaking work here, as are other cultural institutions around the world. Thinking not only about the process, but the end users needs.

Question: moral rights, any legal developments – still on turntable.

Question: protocols are first step, when do we think we will able to do this as a major project, on a national/international basis. Time is right, funding is available and the government is asking for input. TIme is ripe for a major injection of funding, not just small grants and volunteer run.

Question: what research has been done about how people use and wish to use these digitised materials. Found out during NT project – assemble much material and asked lots of questions, not just about technology. Researchers are still struggling with the issue, but it is improving.

Comment: Australian Collections Council has been heavily lobbying the government, but no positive answers yet.

Question: is there any potential for funding in the Innovation Review and the Cutler review? Havent had a chance to investigate them, but we should.

Early last week I was flown to Sydney to conduct the first day of a 2 day Masterclass – Revolutionising Library Management for the Ark Group. My topic was Web 2.0 in Libraries and my thanks go to our hosts and our committed, enthusiastic and knowledgeable group of participants for an informative day for me and hopefully for them too.  My slides, if you are interested, are on the presentations page of this blog and also on Slideshare.

The 2nd day, for which I opted to stay, was on Digitisation and was presented by Mal Booth from the Australian War Memorial. I was interested in this day for several reasons, one being digitisation work at my library (local history) and another being knowing the great work that the Australian War Memorial (AWM) has done – especially their virtual resources and services.  (check out his slides from the session at Slideshare)

As digitisation is not my area of expertise, I found most of what I learned was well explained by Mal’s slides – I encourage you to check them out if this topic is of interest to you.  However, I did take in the following points:

- The Australian War Memorial is constantly hearing from users that they want the content, not just the catalogue record and opening hours.   They are useless when the user is not in Canberra.

- It is extremely important to create a collection development policy for your digital collections.  For the same reasons that we have one for print, AV etc.

-  Mal’s recommended software for digitisation is Photoshop.  But if that’s cost prohibitive, then Photoshop Elements or the free open source software Gimp.

- Digitisation projects can use sponsors as a funding source – AWM does.

- When choosing a file format and standard for digitisation, three important things to consider are is it migratable? does it use an open source standard? and will it last?  May seem obvious, but not always the case.  File format and standards are continuing to develop.

Just some small points that grabbed my attention and that is saying something as Mal is an engaging speaker. He was able to make, what could be considered dry content, an interesting experience.