Freak out, geek out or seek out: trends, transformations & change in libraries – David Lee King

New book coming out next year – Face to Face – connecting with users online.

Was at NLS #5, lots of energy and enthusiasm. Saw lots of good ideas there.  Also had lots of staff telling him that they take their ideas back to their libraries and get told NO. Got told a few times that their IT guys are Evil!

Mentioned Grove Library and Community Centre – doing sustainability type things underground. Have movable, comfortable furniture. Don’t have a ref desk, but have staff workstations located around the library as the staff are circulating. They moved shelving and furniture to make room for the community.

Can be a bad place to be freaking out – not good for anybody. Should we be geeking out – as soon as it hits market? No, should be testing out for our users. We need to be seeking out.

Personal technology has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. In libraries, we have online resources, new technologies, new collections and new user expectations, online resources. Gone the way of the past: floppy disks, typewriters, film cameras and watches seem to be on the way out, at least for some.

One big change is we now have competition. Thirty years ago, the only place to get answers or borrow books was the library. Book stores have gotten big and offer many of the same services – they do storytimes, read books, enjoy coffee. Breaks down in the reference question department. If you want something fast – Amazon. They are a big competitor for us.

Not so much competition, but a change that has messed with libraries, is that newspapers are disappearing from print. In US, 120 newspapers have already changed from print to digital. On the Newspaper extinction timeline – it is expected that Australia will no longer have any print newspapers by 2022.

In US, they have rent DVDs from a vending machines on the street. But they don’t have the older titles. Competition for us. E-books, are the same. Overdrive now offers Kindle compatible ebooks now for libraries which maybe helps ease the pressure if we offer it.

Tablets, notebooks and laptops are taking over from desktops. Google has taken over from the ready reference collection. The positive is that it frees us up to answer the deeper questions, that’s if they know to come to us to ask. And then there’s the smart phone – which does everything!  Including making phone calls!

Tech changes in libraries – in the past included fiction, electricity, phone reference, copiers and then in the 1970′s we got our online catalogues and in the 1980′s the PC took off, the 1990′s the internet appears and in 2004 it was Web 2.0. The three biggest destination sights now are Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which were created in 2004, 2005 and 2006.

Emerging web has changed dramatically and has nothing to do with technology – it is about connecting people. It is real time, decentralised (can visit library on the web, without going to the website), its multimedia (line between newspaper and TV websites are blurring). Every company is a media company – we write articles, create content, pushing out our wares. Emerging web is very mobile – the web is in my pocket – but it should also be that the library is in my pocket. Mobile websites for libraries are a valuable tool – want it to be useful for people who want to do a task quickly – renew, ask a question etc. Emerging web is social, its two way, public with global reach, so need to be careful about what you say – if you can’t say it in person, don’t say it online.

David is Digital Branch Manager, he has a department – IT and a concept – Digital branch. He is a community manager, he scans the horizon, he is executive editor, long range planner, manager, evangelist and he answers the tough questions.

His 3 realities:
1. all services will be physical and digital – not so easy to achieve eg. storytimes
2. we’ll use the web to build unique stuff
3. to some, the digital branch will be their only branch – can place holds and pay to have them mailed out

Content – digital branch has to have things for people to see, do, read etc when they visit. They have catalogue searches on their website as well as their Facebook page. You can subscribe to their blogs by RSS or email. Blogs have photos and info about their blog contributors, so you can focus on the content you enjoy most. Photos they have on Flickr and YouTube are also reposted on their website in their blogs etc.

Community – how do you do community in a digital branch? They have instant messaging reference (using Meebo) and get an answer (if the library is open) – on both their website and embedded in their catalogue. Need to have a front door – that’s dramatic, but every page on the website is a front door, as well as Google, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter are also front doors. We have many digital borders.

Conversation – lots of discussions going on, between staff and users and between users. Conversations on the digital branch include the instant messaging widget, email reference, comments on the blogs (good and bad – which provides opinions and can help you continue the conversation), Facebook comments, Flickr comments, Twitter. Will follow their customers that follow them on Twitter, because they want to focus on their local community. Will celebrate achievements – they sent out a T-shirt to their 1000th follower.

Can have vanity searches for your library, town, postcodes and things like reading etc. Find out what the community is talking about. It gives you an opportunity to step in if you see they’re talking about you, but not talking to you.

Tackle change – ideas to get started thinking about it. A lot of libraries are not seen as relevant in our communities. They go to everyone else, before they come to us and only if they remember. We need to be first. How?
Model the way – you better be doing it first if you expect your staff to be doing it, everyone needs to be on the bus (Jim Collins book – “Good to great” – if you don’t have the right people on the bus, get the wrong ones off and get the right ones on) .

Our websites, our buildings, our services need to be as easy as a light switch to use – so that they don’t have to think about what’s going on – libraries have to stay out of their users way, unless they want to deal with you
Know your patrons – know what they are doing in your buildings, on your PCs, on your website – it can help you with designs and redesigns. It also helps you to know who doesn’t use your library. Find out where your non-users are and then market to them.
Online services have to reflect physical – no “will answer your email within two business days” on your online reference.

If we don’t change, we will die and some libraries in the US are already closing.

As print books slowly disappear and ebooks come to the fore, we will still need libraries, we will still have jobs – our patrons will lead us to where they want us to go.

Finding time – “what do you want me to drop, so that I can do that”. Its not about that, its about changing focus – what is the priority of your library and concentrate on that first, then if there’s time left, you can do other staff. If you can’t, the other stuff will fall to wayside and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Its about the user ultimately and they are online – so we need to be there.

Question: Improvement in catalogue, that negates the need to have instant messaging in catalogue. They are getting a new OPAC, which will meet that. There are overlays, and plugins that can be used to improve catalogue response.

Tablets and roving reference experience. Staff are answering a lot of questions when they are roving around, working well.

New website – can we get immediate content on there. Yes, it is possible, consult with your website provider (small library – Council IT).

Sustainability – what are you doing? Measure use against work input. Have service – personalised reading lists – fill in a form and a librarian will compile a personalised reading list for you, to meet your needs. Wasn’t getting a lot of use, so they re-jigged the form and marketed it and already the response has been good. If it doesn’t improve, they will stop the service.

What is the one next big thing?  Fun – thinks he will be wrong. Google + – just gone public in the last few days. No organisational pages yet, but that will come. Very different to both Twitter and Facebook, so there is definite potential there. Very closely tied to Google Apps, which is potentially a huge change – brings together Facebook, Microsoft and wiki-like content.

His current book: Designing the digital experience.  Website: www.davidleeking.com

Putting IT back in reality – Hamish Curry, Application and Online Learning Manager – State Library of Victoria

Mash-up idea – take photos and put them on top of each, as you rub the them on your  iPhone, you rub down through the years and see the space/place as it was going backwards through time.

Contact: hcurry@slv.vic.gov.au @hamishcurry  slideshare.net/hcurry

Statements heard from people he has spoken to about the SLV: ebooks must be killing libraries, this digital stuff must be making your job hard, guess no-one wants to go the library any more, bet your numbers are down.

Reality – the worst game ever! IT can help augment the experience. Smart phones, tablets are helping to do this. Extend the experience – after this you will look further, online of course. Enhance the engagement – you may tweet your own thoughts and ideas which enhances things.

What breaks assumptions over expectations? How can we get people to come in physically or online, to see for themselves. Seeing is believing, but you have to not only market, but be able to back it up in reality, to participate. They have to also have a social connection, not with the building, but with the people in the building – with people in the library who they believe are more honest and authentic.

Instead, you can offer surprises – offer them something they don’t expect. You need to do things that make your users curious. Give them a chance to discover – so that they end up owning it – even if we miss out on getting the credit. Let them make connections, both to people and to the place.  Learn – check out Happy Planet Index: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/ – number five is learning. So very important to ensure people keep learning. All this will keep people coming back.

Do something unexpected and make it cool, both in the physical and online environments. (I geek the library).

Always offer silence, trustworthiness, answers, quality and Wi-Fi. Quality, means finding the balance between doing it right and do it quickly.

From the community section on SLV website – helps embed them back in with their users.

Digital is not so scary – we are still trying to make the worlds information accessible in our pockets – but has moved from a miniature library in a matchbox, to online – the only difference is that we use mobile devices to access it and the content has been outsourced.

Technology has really shaped learning and literacy. We can talk to anyone at any time. We can work together from anywhere at any time. We can connect with people anywhere, any time. The curriculum has had to change too, but teachers are struggling to keep up with these phenomenal changes, so that they can lead young minds. They are getting on board and librarians have to do so too.

Information has changed, but even though trusted sources are always the best, they are not the first two results on a Google search, where people think they are trusted sources. There is so much learning now available on the web, not just content, but ways of providing learning – eg. Video conferencing. Information scarcity has changed to information complexity. Clay Shirky – “Its not information overload. Its filter failure.” This is what librarians are great at and we need to be able teach everyone.

Khan Academy – www.khanacademy.org – 2500 videos to teach you just about everything. Some good, some bad.

We are answer rich, but question poor. (Susan Greenfield – “Quest for identity in the 21st century.”) Hamish has great admiration for reference librarians who deal with people who have done the search but cant navigate what they found, or find the answer they seek.

University of Sydney has created a great range of engaging resources to help people to search and filter. SLV has done the same with ERGO (http://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/). Designed for students, but stats showing that teachers are finding it very valuable.

Hoddle Waddle (http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/explore/student-teacher-resources/hoddle-waddle-education-kit) – program to help students navigate 50 sites in the CBD in a day. Not taken up initially, but once they made most of the content Freemium, bookings have improved and all the resources are being much better used. Teachers are now presenting on the program at conferences. They are now considering offering it as a public program, for cultural visitors to use it. Improvements in progress including mobile contributions using Broadcastr. ARIS is another app which does something similar. As augmented reality becomes more mainstream, there will be even more opportunities to put IT back into reality.

Change involving technology, needs not only the tech, but also a cultural change.

Interaction with inanimate. SLV playing with QR codes – used it in a gallery to see how people
use it. There are also Google Goggles, i-nigma, Red Laser, Photosynth – a 360 degree mapping app.

Risk: Partners and programs – risk is not a dirty word, being risk adverse – makes you slow and inflexible – wont do anything because we could get it wrong, it requires trust of the organisation in their staff, motivation, relationship – always remembering that shift will happen.

If you don’t step in and do it, someone else will – and they not present what you think should be.

Some tools to do this: RSS, Twitter, Google +, Facebook, Yammer. Half of SLV is now on Yammer, after starting with 5 a year ago.

Networks are always changing – online mimics what nature does – new networks develop and old ones die and drop away.

“Use the force, Luke”. – Obi Wan Kenobi. We need to harness the world around us. We want to be able to pull people on site and push them online. Don’t create your own social space, go to where your users are already. Need to occupy multiple spaces to access different audiences.

Sometimes you need to prepackage content and bring it to the fore, to make it easier for people to access and to bring our collections alive.

“The more you learn, the more acutely aware you become of your ignorance.” (Peter Senge – “Fifth discipline”) SLV programs: TedX Melbourne and now happening around the world, but it pulls people in and engaging with you, Personal Learning Network with SLAV teaching teachers and teacher librarians about the online world.

Its not so much I Communication T, but change as the C in ICT. We need libraries to be FUN – not just the physical, but the online as well. Need to know what the drivers are, have to be prepared to play and technology has a role. (Night at the Mitchell Library video).

Video games are changing how things work. They have play, replay and experimentation, they involve risk and reward, they can be integrated experiences and augmented experiences. The only difference between chess and video games is a shift in format – the skills and experience are very similar.

International initiatives – Find the Library at NYPL, National Gaming Day in US Libraries, Freeplay at SLV.

Merge and mirror programs – a fusion between what they experience in one space and are further enhanced in another. Transmedia – can stand alone (eg. Facebook), but can also be linked to draw people to other spaces. Hacks and Library Apps can also be used to enhance experiences.

Data is becoming sexy as people are presenting it differently. eg. Infographics, Library Hack, Open Government Data.
“But problem solving , however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results. ” (Peter Drucker – “The Effective Executive”)

“When people in motion, meet a library in motion, anything is possible” – Director Stockholm Public Library.

Our library has five blogs, four of which are hosted by Blogger. To make the most of this content, to ensure that people are seeing it when they don’t know about the blogs (and many don’t, regardless of how much we promote them), we feed each of them to our library homepage. (the fifth is already there)

We were wondering how effective this was and started doing some statistical analysis. Up until recently, we only counted visits to the actual blogs at  Blogger and to our news blog on Drupal.  The statistics were better for some than for others, but one of our blogs was quite low and it was getting a bit discouraging, when you considered the effort that went into creating both the blog and the regular content that goes into it.

So I took another look at the blog content and how it was being used in various locations.  Between readers of the actual blogs (counted using Google Analytics), subscribers (using Feedburner) and then reads of the blog posts on our website (counted using Drupal Statistics), we found that our blog content was being read by anything up to 300% more than just at the blogs alone!  Quite eye-opening really.

And this doesn’t count the people who just scan read the summary of each post as it appears on the library’s homepage. The Drupal only counts a read when the post title is clicked on and the reader goes to the full-text of the posts (which is also on the website).

So we have this great content, being utilised in numerous locations and getting a much wider audience, with little effort from library staff, due to the joy of RSS feeds. (gotta love em).

Then back in August, Brian Herzog posted on his blog Swiss Army Librarian – Visualising the flow of my library’s information online and I pounced on that idea.  His flowchart came after their Facebook page launch and so I created one for our library, to help convince our management that we should launch our Facebook page.  Their reasonable concern was that it would be too staff-intensive for too little return. The flowchart was designed to show that staff time would be minimal and after some guidelines on management of the page were created, we got the go ahead to launch.

Here’s the flowchart I created:

We could have automated the process further, by posting the feed from our library news blog straight to Facebook, but decided against it. Instead, we post that content to our Wall, in a bit more of a casual voice, which gives us the opportunity to engage more personally with our Facebook page and our fans.

The flowchart has also given us some areas to consider improving in and things to consider if we ever expand our online presences to include sites like Twitter, Google Plus and others. (after all, who knows what the next big online thing will be!)

Can we use this concept for other information flows?  I am thinking of doing one for my personal presences, seeing where I can maybe get a more consistent message out on my various networks.  But that’s a task for another day.

How does your library’s online information flow work?  Would love to hear any ideas you have that might help us change or improve ours.

And thanks Brian for the awesome idea!

The reference librarian in me likes being able to look things up at the spur of the moment.  The nerd in my just likes having the internet available to me, whatever the reason, everywhere I go (ISP/Phone provider allowing that is).

As these sorts of devices proliferate, my library has headed down the road that many have, of providing our content in a mobile accessible format. Its just basic at the moment, with links to mobile accessible versions of our branches and opening hours, our catalogue and account logins, our calendar of events etc.  Our library system vendor has an eyephone app, so it links to that as well.   Its a work in progress and its live, so it will be interesting to see how it is used.

Our website detects when a request for it is being made by a mobile device and it automatically delivers the mobile version. That’s great and I am pretty sure most mobile accessible websites work the same way.  From statistics we know that the library items we have on our mobile site are the most used, but they are not the only ones used. So we have a link to the desktop version of our website for those who are seeking other content.

You can imagine my frustration then, when I have gone to do something similar on other mobile sites – get to content that is not on the website’s mobile version, but is on their main site, only to find that I can’t. There have been at least two sites recently that I have ended up having to wait until I got to a desktop computer to access the content that I couldn’t from my phone.

A lesson learned for us.

The other lesson we are learning at the moment is considering how much of our website content needs to be there and if it stays, can it be into a mobile accessible format. But that’s ongoing, so stay tuned……

What sort of mobile accessible website delights or disasters have you come across?

Hope you get something out of it. I got plenty.

Open Source Software – Kathryn Greenhill
Imperfect analogy – spaghetti sauce – buy it in jar or make it yourself.
Flexibility and control.  Open Source requires particular skills, still has a price, but involves community effort and altruism.

Proprietary software: license, user restricted, no source code
Open Source: free redistribution, source code accessible, derived works, integrity of code, no discrimination, not specific to purpse, device, works with other software

There are checks and balances before any new code goes into the code base.

Key ideas of Open Source – release early – release often, many eyes make bugs shallow, peer review, developer-user relationship.

Koha – open source library management system.
Check http://www.ohloh.net for cot comparisons between proprietary and open source over time.

We already use open source software – linux, apache, mysql, php, firefox.
Who else uses os? Denmark using Open Office by 2011, Trove at NLA, White House uses Drupal, for their website, North  East Kansas Libraries for their LMS.

Examples of open source software: Open Office, Word Press, Drupal, Mediawiki, Gimp, Dimdim, Zimbra, Pidgin, Audacity, VLC media player.

Open source LMS – Evergreen, Koha, OLE project

Discovery layers – Scriblio, Sopac2 and more

Digital resources management – Kete, Omeka

Whats stopping us from using Open Source?  Skills. We need to know about relational databases, SML,  indexing and programming
Cost – of change
Perceived accountability
Centralised IT
Maturity of the products
Consortial impacts
Monopolies – marketing
What users have at home
Cloud computing and Software as a Service (Saas)
Closed hardware

What we can gain by using open source software?
Skills, flexibility, control, nimbleness, accountability, budgetary control.

However, software needs to fit the purpose and the organisation.

Library Mashups and APIs – Paul Hagon
RSS is a common API (application programming interface)
Can be used to interact with other services – application on iphone for eg.
API is used to put javascript showing marker on a Google map.
Don’t have to do the hard work, that is all done for you.

Can use APIs to adapt URLs to change what you are getting out of a site ie. Google calendar display on our website.
Can be used with our website – but they can be fragile, as they can break if you change your website.
Can use microformats – ie. Vcards for phones and internet.

Mashups using more than one data source to make something new – may be totally disparate. One of earliest was chicagocrime. org – Google maps and crime reports.
Libraries are using mashups involving Google maps and Flickr, Picture Australia has an open search interface – can add search to your browser options, Picture Australia with Google maps and geotagging, along with your location giving you photos of local area.

Code alert – a lot of  mashups involve XML. Jquery and YUI can help ease you into the process.

Where to start: Your library catalogue can help – check your RSS feeds – play with the XML and see what you can do.
data.australia.gov.au – data licensed for re-use under Creative Commons.

delicious.com/paulhagon/vala2010-lplate – links to all the resources and demos used.

Tools available to help – Yahoo Developer Network – YQL, use common language to extract XML. Yahoo Pipes, Firebug – plugin for Firefox.

Why? – Our community not just consumers, also producers once data is made available. Some of ours could be creating these sorts of things, if only the data is available – let our geeks loose on our data.

Semantic Web – Tom Tague

Check out stuff on semantic web on Wikipedia – good foundation.

Variety of interpretations: web 3.0, near religious standard, set of technical standards and capabilities we can use – very hard to define

Standards and Capabilities: RDF (resource description framework – form of XML – ugly but it is the standard), RDFS/OWL/Other ontology standards – great debate about these, Linked data, Automated semantic information generation.

OpenCalais – Thomas Reuters initiative to connect world’s business content, free service that brings new efficiencies and productivity to publishers and content creators, fastest easiest way to categorize your contentand tag the entities, facts and events therein; 30,000s of users, 4-8 million transactions daily.

Issues: attaching metadata to content is expensive – both in time and money.

Metadata generation – feed content into their extraction engine, categorizes the stories and returns the metadata to you, also returns links.

Linked data – standard for publishing data on the web – uses RDF -  add data as well as links to other relevant linked data (not webpages, actual data). Standard is exploding, but there is no governance – ‘geeks playing in highway’ – librarians can add a lot of value to this as well as using the data generated.

There are alternatives to Open Calais – Yahoo and more.

Use it to:  add metadata to cotent, content enhancement via linked data, build your own linked data could, but don’t just think source content (commentary, user submitted content)

Think about collections: repositories, trend analysis, harmonization across data sets, federated search.

Cloud Computing – Bart Rutherford
Geek and poke cartoons.

No standard definition of cloud computing – consistently about the internet however.

Charting –  input/processor/output, corporate computing – people with money had these systems (banking, transport).

Progress of clients – fat clients, thin clients, desktop computer as client, browser as client.

How things have changed: mobile as client, internet, cheap storage, broadband, wifi, 3G and LTE, Open source and Linux, Ipv6

Lots of different types of clouds – public eg Facebook, private – Intranet, hybrid. Joined by VPNs and virtualization (servers with sub-servers within it)

Saas, Iaas, Paas
Software as a service – vendor provides hardware and infrastructure, user interacts through PC – eg. Webmail, facebook, twitter, Apples App, Google Docs, BitTorrent, DropBox and so  much more.
Infrastructure as a service – Amazon, Microsoft Azure.
Platform as a service – software and development tools hosted on the providers infrastructure, access and delivery (API) – Google Apps, Yahoo Pipes, Google Maps, Sugar CRM, Finance eg. Paypal.

Complexity runs from low to high – moves from consumer to developer.

Services are based on buy as you use – like utility bills. Scalable – to meet your needs, cost effective – PAYG and low tech input, secure and automated, mobility.

Warnings – no network connection – no cloud, no local storage – no local data,  slow connections no good, what to do if provider is destroyed?

Global outlook – EASE – Everything as a service, everywhere!  Won’t matter where your data is, just need the power and network connection to get to it.

Discovery Layer Interfaces – Marshall Breeding
Crowded landscape of information providers on the web – lots of non-library destinations, ie. Google Search and Scholar, Amazon, Wikipedia, Ask.com.

Digital natives are more experienced than us in web stuff, so when they come to our websites and catalogues, they are way underwhelmed. Don’t want to lose relevancy to this audience who have been raised on those listed above.

Evolution of library collection discovery tools: bound handwritten catalogues, card catalogues, OPACs – many libraries have stagnated here, discovery interfaces, web-scale discovery services.

Not just about books on shelves, but about all our subscription content, digital items and more.

Don’t want a computerised card catalogue, although that is generally what we still have.  Amazon is our competition in terms of user interfaces and information presented.  They make it as transparent to the user as they can.  It has a complex layered structure, but with a simple user interface.

Have a lot of great content and services, but have too many barriers to our users accessing them.

Disjointed approach to delivery: silos prevail – catalogue, databases, website and more and each one has to be accessed individually.

Simple vision – single point of entry to all the content and services offered by the library, but wth precision, nuanced sophistication and multiple dimensions. Doesn’t preclude advanced searching options and ability to hone in on particular services or collections as alternative options.

Modernized interface – single search box, query tools (did you mean, type ahead), relevance ranked results, faceted navigation, enhanced visual displays – covers and summaries/reviews, recommendation services. Must be visually pleasing, give more than a single record and helps users find more.

Can have any front end almost regardless of what back end you use.

Deep indexing – metadata is no longer enough, increasing opportunities to search full content, commercial providers already doing so.

Current phase of discovery tools now focused on pre-populated indexes that aim to deliver Web-scale delivery eg. Summon, WorldCat  Local, EBSCO Discovery, Primo Central, Encore with Article Intergration.

Products available will index the vast majority of content that libraries have in their collections.

Beyond local discovery – eg. NCSU – Summon, Phoenix Public – Endeca (very Amazon like interface), Queens Public Library – Aquabrowser.

Need to make our search compelling, but not overwhelm our users with the guff about what and where they are searching.

Being social: apps for libraries – Kim Tairi
@haikugirloz

Social media conversion scale – image from – darmano.typepad.com

Social apps about conversations, marketing and communications with our users.

She follows High Country Public Library on Twitter – they talk about the library and things that are happening in their broader community as well.

Amongst top 10 tools for libraries – niche networks – eg, NING, built by users, focus on particular interest, UX – User experience, want to create good ones – starts at design and works through testing, evaluating and decision making.

More visual infographics – designing messages so they are clear, short, sharp. eg. The story (so far) of Twitter (image). Move to make visual communication more widespread.

Twitter can enhance your experience – back channel is interesting and adds to the experience. Librarians are sharing. Kim’s presentation was based a lot on the feedback she got from people on Twitter. It gives you a sense of community and helps to build a community. It is self-selecting, creates conversation, can be used for public note-taking and it’s interactive. Great as a personal learning network, both with workmates and colleagues at other libraries. Can get followed by bots or social media gurus, but can control it by blocking them or making your tweets private.

Mobile interfaces for catalogues and websites. Deakin Uni has done this. NYPL has an iPhone app. Can get into mobile interfaces, apps, info literacy, tours and QR codes (see Powerhouse Museu who are doing great things with these).

Technology petting zoos – letting users play with the new technology, as well as staff.

Social apps and networks have taken off since VALA2008 – need to get into it. Australia has now 7.9 million active Facebook users, there over 400 million worldwide.

eBooks – Bart Rutherford

File formats for ebooks include text, html, pdf, mobipocket, DjVu – magazine specific, EPUB – Kindle uses azw which is a modified mobipocket. Some locked in DRM, some not.

Can read ebook content on desktops, mobile phones etc – software includes Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, Adobe Reader (pdf) and Calibre (open source read and convert).

EPUB – open publication structure – open XHTML, open packaging format – SML, OEBPS Container format – bundled ZIP file. Many readers that originally came out with proprietary formats are now opening up to EPUB. Keep watch out for EPUB and the devices that will read it.

DRM – Digital Rights Management (Bart’s boss calls it Don’t Read Me). PID Personal identification number – can restrict to one user, unlike print copy,  Access levels include print, copy, paste and now lending, depending on device and content.

Content – Amazon: Fiction to Kindle, Dymocks – using eBook library growing fiction, Gutenberg Project, Read Cloud, EBL – nonfiction, academic learning model using Adobe reader.

Should not have to worry about how the content gets on the device, it should just happen.

Publisher rights are still a problem, so a lot of content that could be available, is not because of these issues.

E-Paper technologies: Elerophoretic technology used by eInk, iRex, Sony Reader, Kindle, Plastic Logic Que. Use glass back pane, but they don’t flex so can break.

Cholesteric technology – Modified LCD, being used by Fujitsu FLEPia. Need to have a colour display which doesn’t require a backlight and doesn’t use as much power.

Combination of eInk and LCD – eg. Nook. LCD gets turned off when reading the ebook.

Electrowetting – controlled water/oil interface, then Electrofluidic technology which uses the former.  Deals with the issue of slow display and these devices will be able to show video.

Interferometric – wavelengths of light etc, uses reflective natural light, low power usage, which can also show video eg. mirasol

Growing market – lots of options and many more on the way. Be sure the one you choose does EPUB.

News Limited is launching the Skiff interface – from publishing to reading, including payment process and their own software.

Publishers will hopefully start putting material out in a wider range of formats so that multiple readers can access them.

The Dream for DRM – Desktop reading, when called away, you pick up where you left off on your e-reader, then the same again with your phone.  As you can with a book.

Felipe Morin

I’ve been doing something that I have never really done before – reading a lot of non-fiction. I have always been a strictly fiction gal, with only the odd non-fiction title thrown in for good measure. They are very different styles to read.  For me, non-fiction takes a lot more work and is a lot drier reading, whereas I can get lost in a good fiction book.  On the otherhand, I will persist with a non-fiction book, but won’t with a fiction book if its not engaging me.

Anyway, after reading recommendations on blogs, websites, article and more, I decided to throw myself in to the world of popular culture and more, usually relating to the internet. Being a good librarian, I got them from my public library of course!  Either from their collection or from the collection of one of the 13 other public library services in our ILMS consortia.  So here’s what I’ve been reading, with a bit of a review and my thoughts on each title.

Purple cow: transform your business by being remarkable by Seth Godin

I have been following Seth Godin’s blog and although I don’t always find it interesting and relevant, there is the odd post which really catches my attention.  Its also a good way to keep in touch with what’s happening in popular culture.  So Purple cow talks about the things that businesses can go to make a real impact on customers – and its not about the right television ad or the best logo – its the things that you do that are really attention grabbing.

It was interesting to read it as a librarian, because we do remarkable things everyday – lend latest bestselling everything – FOR FREE!  So how do we add to that remarkableness and how do we get people’s attention in the first place.  Its short, full of great practical examples and it makes you think about marketing practices, so it was well worth the time invested in reading it.

Long tail: how endless choice is creating unlimited demand by Chris Anderson

The Long tail has been talked about around the blogosphere since it was published in 2006 and although I understood the concept of it, I wanted to know more of the details.  Although libraries aren’t true representatives of the long tail, as a library user reminded me the other day, we do lend items that they can’t get through the shops anymore, so we have more of the tail than retail does.  So it was interesting to read how the long tail works and to recognise libraries’ place on the graph.

Dancing barefoot : five short but true stories about life in the so-called space age and

Just a geek : unflinchingly honest tales of the search for life, love, and fulfillment beyond the Starship Enterprise by Wil Wheaton

Wil Wheaton, of Stand by Me and Welsey Crusher on the Enterprise (Star Trek) fame, has become a noted blogger and popular culture commentator, as well as actor and now author.  These books were stories from his life and were a hoot.  He is an excellent writer, engaging, amusing and captivating.  Both books were easy and enjoyable to read.  As a result, I now follow his blog and am looking forward to seeing him in guest spots on TV shows.

The cult of the amateur : how today’s internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy by Andrew Keen.

There was a bit of controversy over this one, mainly that author Keen was sensationalising everything.  He does.  He takes every story of how the internet is being used by the average person and takes it to the extreme.  The only chapter I actually agreed with and got anything out of  was the last chapter, which looked forward with a measure of caution.  If you like getting frustrated, or need the background to be able to play devil’s advocate, then check it out.

Here comes everybody : the power of organisation without organisations by Clay Shirky

I’ve just finished with this one and its almost the opposite of Keen’s book.  Shirky looks at how the internet is being used, with a lot more objective eye than Keen does, although he focuses more on the positive outcomes from the net.  I got onto this one after seeing a short presentation of his on YouTube.  A good look at how the internet is changing the world.

So that’s whats been keeping me busy when I haven’t been so busy.  I still have a list of books I have on hold, so there will be more at another time.  Hopefully I have motivated you to do some reading along these lines.  Knowing what I’ve been reading, if there is any other titles you think should be on my must read list, please let me know. 

Where is the Library as a brand?
Perceptions of libraries and information resources – OCLC report (available online)
3300 respondents to questions on library use, awareness and use of library electronic resources, internet search engine the library and the librarian, free vs for-fee information, the brand itself.
Libraries are trusted sources of information, search engines are trusted about the same, people care about quality and quantity of info they find, but speed is less important (not believable). However, convenience is very important.
Do not view paid infomration as more accurate than free info.
The overwhelming brand image of libraries is BOOKS!

Library Brand Equity – we need a strong visible brand on the web.  Libraries currently are a black and white presence in a colorful, flashy web world.
How do we build the brand?  Build on the trust of our patrons. Build on our business model – making info look free to our end-users.  Build on the scale that libraries represent – presence in every community, global scope and reach.  Improve awareness of library resources.  Make libraires a part of the new electronic environments that dominate social, educational and work environments.  We need to be there!

Social netowrking software!  Its not new, just the technical manifestation is. Deliver library services into the emerging social networks. Motivate people to participate: tagging, book reviews, emergent relationships that are evident from data about what people borrow, like and dislike, link to the people as well.  Need to build our own systems into the social structures that are so quickly developing.

Numbers of content creators and contributors are changing – increasing.  More people are wanting to get their content out on the web.  Their are great innovative approaches to attract that content to the library community.

Social Networking is not just for games: Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and Twitter.  All are flawed as service delivery models – business models are closed or obscure, features are rudimentary or overbearing. But they foretell a digital future in both their virtues and faults. Stuart Weibel has both Twitter and Facebook accounts and will be your friend.  They teach us about what people are doing out there – think of it as a professional investment.  They are all goofy because they are all new.  They will develop and some of that development will be interesting.

Libraries must compare favourably with experiences that our patrons expect: discovery and recommender services, web 2.0 social network capabilities, experiences of comparable commerical services, last-mile delivery capability, bookstore social experiences.  We are offering an experience as well as a service.  Save the user time.

Can Libraries compete in this space?  Should they?
Social software movement is fueled by (dollar denominated) entrepreneurial fervor.  Rate of innovation (and failure) is rapid. Distinguish between trends and the trendy and don’t get wrapped on the latter, especially when they fail.

Future of library catalogues?
Evolving towards network level. Collections linked to people, organisations, global location, concepts, context, metadata and social networking benefits.  Fit into the workflow and social lives of patrons. Help create a scaffolding for past knowledge and future productivity.

Web or Scaffolding?  We want more conherence and context, durable environments that help us preserve and fix resources in the context of culture, librarianship embedded in the emerging technologies of a social web.

Our catalogues need to be wholistic, treating not only works, but also people, concepts, works and objects (FRBR).  In addition we need book reviews, lists, services, commentary, other?  Book reviews are part of social bibliography, user created content.  All these things should be First Class Objects which have to ahve a persistent identity on the web, accessible by anyone or any applicaation, stand alone (attribution, clear IP rights), curated (not left alone). Allow the user to enter and tranverse the catalogue from any point.

WorldCat Identities – Beta product from OCLC – Another piece of the puzzle?
Tag cloud shows the top 100 identities.  Uses bibliographic data and mining it from other sources at OCLC.

Complicated puzzle – where ya gonna turn?
People, information, resources, places, terminologies, user generated content, FRBR (explain it to your patrons).  We need to better mine and utilise the data that we have.  Hook everything together with the right sort of identifiers.  A coherent identifier infrastructure is essential. Broad dissemination of identifiers serves the library collaborative and is the single most compelling means of making library assets persistent and visible on the web.

Persistence: not technological but rather a function of the commitment of organisations.  Libraries and other cultural memory organisations do this well.  Harder to do in the digital era, but the community is up to the task.
Universal access and global scoping: open to all, public identifiers in a public Web. Should work everywhere. WorldCat is the first globally-scoped identifier architecture for library assets in which the global surrogate is mapped to locality.  But we’re not quite done yet.
SEO and canonical identifiers – visibility of assets in the global library is diluted by the multiplicity of identifiers, agreement is needed on a canonical identifier.  Lack of it is a dilution of our brand and a lack of visibility on the web.
Branding is an important component of URIs – every URI is a micro-billboard branding library content in a crowded and largely commercial Web landscape. URIs need to be designed for people as well as machines, should be speakable, should be as short can be as managed, should have a predictable pattern that makes them hackable and truncatable.

FRBR is an important ocintrubtion to resource organisation on the web, but it is a challenge to explain to users.

World Cat – Mid 2006. Globally unique, freely available, citable and resolvable, independent of location, but not quite canonical.  Falls short because of duplicates, either mistaken or functional, not always resolvable to content and only sort of canonical.

NEWS!!!   Pilot project by OCLC – GLIMIR – Global Library Manifestation Identifier which is global in scope, canonical, business neutral, provides the URL equity necessary to support the library brand, fits comfortably with the FRBR model.  If its going to work, it can’t be an OCLC product, but it will be managed by them. It will require participation, buy in and support, all of which will be very tricky to achieve.  Can a global community agree and adopt this when there are already so many identifiers – eg. ISBN.  OCLC is launching this pilot to identify functional requirements and practicalities solicited review from technical specialists,moving forward will require a careful balance of use cases, business issue and more.

Identifiers are key to fulfilling the mission of libraries in a digital future, to compete ont he open web for recognition of our brand, to integrate our traditional bibliographic values with social networking content, to provides services and access to the digital tribe – our future constituency.

weibel-lines.typepad.com.
twitter – stuartweibel
flickr – weibel-lines

Early days of the web (90s) were seen as a hands-off time for government, leaving it to the practitioners and users.  However, government and policy have always been a part of the internet.

Internet 2008: World of blogs, podcasts, social networking which is enabling people to create, speak out, making their voices heard.  They can share experiences and find that they are not alone. Creation, using desktop software and distribution of video is also growing exponentially – eg. Star Wreck, Elephant’s Dream.  Public broadcasters are allowing their users (and funders) to do the same. (eg BBC)  Flickr with billions of photos now has over 100 million photos available under Creative Commons licences – enabling others to create with this content as well as millions of other online works.

Growth of the collaborative media – ie. Wikipedia – 2 million articles in english. Encyclopedia of Life aiming to catalogue all life on earth in 10 years – started last year.  OhMyNews – citizen journalism contributed by the person on the street, to a handful of editors.  Project Gutenberg, LibriVox (audio of it), MIT Open Courseware (7 years old) – online syllabi, course materials, powerpoint demos, podcasts and videocasts. Public Library of Science – open access peer reviewed scientific journal. Internet archive is good for more than the Way Back machine, it will host any content that the individual has the copyright to. Digitisation projects worldwide making previously unknown titles or those thought to be lost, now available to all.  Underlying a lot of this is open source software.

Internet 2018: Four pillars: connectivity, enhance participation,copyright, content
Price of admission for participation, lifelong learning, self expression is access. Connectivity – Broadband for all.
Muni wifi – market can’t do it all, there is a place for public utlities
net neutrality (not the Internet 2 model – pay for better service) – will help develop innovation – much would not be around today if it had not been in place ie. Google, eBay and Amazon.  Need legislation to ensure equity for all.

Enhance participation – intermediary liability issues – being blamed for the content of others and sometimes having legal action taken.
domain names
privacy – protections are often dictated by the policies of the sites they inhabit
trust
transparency

Copyright – anti-circumvention – trying to keep it away, but if not, then retain fair dealing rights
fair use – ensure robust enough to deal with the shifting landscape
term extension -
orphan works
WIPO -

All communities need to speak out so that our governments are truly representing the view of the people in international negotiations.

Content: Open access, digitisation, crown copyright sometimes used as a legal form of censorship, public broadcasting.

Pew/Internet regularly produces reports related to online use. One of the latest was conducted with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois on Information searches that solve problems: how people use the internet, libraries and government agencies when they need help.  Interesting results include high use of public libraries by Generation Y’ers for the scenarios surveyed, digital divide is still an issue and the expected result of the internet as a first stop.  Well worth a look at.

University College London has produced another in their series of Ciber briefing  papers, this one on the Information behaviour of the researcher of the future.   The study was commissioned by the British Library and JISC to “identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years’ time.”  Very eye opening with some interesting results.

The Horizon Report 2008 from the New Media Consortium is out.  It aims to “identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning or creative expression within learning-focused organizations’.  This is their 5th annual report.  Considering the link between libraries of any type and our learning organisations, this is a key document to be watching.  The key emerging technologies highlighted in this report include grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence and social operating systems.   You can get the gist of the report through the Executive Summary.  Definitely food for thought for our libraries.

Enjoy!

Unshelved is a daily comic following Dewey and the library staff at Mallville Public Library. I have subscribed to the RSS feed so that I can get my daily fix. Working in a public library myself, it comes very close to home at times and is even more amusing as a result.

Anyway, this week’s comic strips were based on the Hi I’m a PC and I’m a Mac ads, with the substitution of Hi I’m the Internet and I’m the Library and as I said, they have all been very amusing – so check them out!

Monday – Beyond Google
Tuesday – Copyright
Wednesday – Information authority
Thursday – Novels
Friday – Censorship

Enjoy!

PS. And now Saturday’s comic which sums it all up!