web-scale discovery and hiding complexity

The exchange below was between me and a colleague who had recently been to a collections conference in Charleston, S.C.

DB wrote:

Hi all, Just got back from the Charleston conference and wanted to share a few thoughts and also questions.  The conference is focused on Collections Development and Acquisitions, but the content went far beyond that. Web-scale Discovery and ease of use for patrons was key topic, and several libraries were using Summon from Serials Solutions.  My understanding of these tools is the they pre-harvest and pre-coordinate a collection for fast, accurate results, but I was a bit lost at times.

Thanks for the run-down from the conference. Sounds incredibly
interesting. I'd love to discuss this at greater length, but I've
interspersed a few comments in your original post.
Steve

"Web scale discovery" is really exciting to me. Simply put it is the
next level of federated-search/single-search, although "federated" might
be a bit of a misnomer here. As you quoted the summon press in your
second post, "No need to broadcast searches to other databases" Webfeat is using "translators" to search each database separately, hence the slow and individually grouped results.



Seems like competitors are Worldcat Beta, Ebsco Discovery Service, Primo Central, and Google Scholar Beta, but I may have missed some.  Excuse my lack of knowledge, but are we already in one of these products on our webpage, or will we be moving to Summon or another product?


We are not using a Web scale discovery tool on our Web pages, we're using WebFeat, a federated search tool as a simple one box article search from the "articles" tab.


A keynote on the mission of the library got a writeup in LJ:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6705641.html?nid=2673&source=link&rid= I had mentioned it in a meeting yesterday and wanted to send out the link which appears to contain a link to the full presentation, which was very thought provoking. Other topics were Is use "King" in driving collections?  If so, is the use data we get accurate?

My opinion? NO! But use is definitely first among equals in terms of collection decision making. Making use the primary decision factor...
1. Assumes a lot about the equality and accessibility of our print and electronic resources. If use were to dictate decision making, then eventually only the most successfully branded and added-feature laden products would be collected. All other things being equal, (visibility,accessibility, discoverability) use might be the most significant factor. As things stand right now, the playing field is far from level.
2. A research library has to support the research mission of the university. In my mind that means we also have to anticipate and provide for scholarship in areas of research that may not be highly used.


Does one budget by use?

Maybe, if use could be quantifiably weighted into the decision.

Other topics at the conference were Branding, and new types of Branding.  I talked with the R2 people and besides regular branding, we have the option of configuring the collection so that when people logout, they are automatically sent to a library webpage, to reinforce the idea that it its the library that supplies the product. Do we want to configure our resources to do this type of thing?  Or will we annoy our patrons?

Yes! We should send or patrons back to our site. We should brand (in the unfortunately business-y parlance) our resources to the greatest extent we can and put concentrated effort into the development of our "brand" Our site is their gateway to the electronic resources, it goes beyond a "reminder" as to who is paying for it. If I had my druthers, we'd be pulling content into our library Web environment as opposed to linking out to licensed resource interfaces. Users need the content. The only people who NEED to know what Ebsco, CSA, Springer, etc. are, are the librarians.

I helped an undergraduate find an article via the our link resolver yesterday. We followed links through four different branded interfaces to get the pdf file. That is four different opportunities for the user to get confused about where the article is published and where it is coming from.

One speaker said "Brand It, Market It, Name It, Promote It, and give up BI." I don't know anything about the BI part and I'm not advocating that but just reporting, but the speakers point was that...

Ok, yes, brand it market it, promote it, but abandoning Library
Instruction (BI is sooo 20th century) is a thoroughly ridiculous idea.

...we should be able to make the library easy enough to use (like Google, with Summon or some other tools) that people should not need BI in the future, we should just have to tell them how to find our wonderful, self-explanatory web site.  KISS was her theme (Keep It Simple ...)- we need to resist the urge to display complexities to our users but rather hide them.

This I agree with. Prioritize the content not the container.



Patron driven book aquisitions, and consortial based aquisitions were hot topics.  One library loads all relevant records from its vendor into its catalog with a purchase button, so that the catalog was a bit like Amazon. Journal pricing was a topic of a plenary with both publishers and librarians speaking. IOP has seen their submissions go from 11,000 in 2000 to 40,000 plus in 2009 already, the growth of science research is staggering at the moment, and researchers expectations are changing as well, they want faster publication, instant access, etc... They used the journal Nanotechnology as an example, it published 126 papers in 2001 and 1,411 in 2008.  I knew things were expanding but found these numbers to be an eye opener. How to cope with with above realities and the realities of our budgets and space were the constant topic of the conference, which had the title "Necessity is the Mother of Invention".

It was a bit of a pep talk: these are exciting times and we have the chance to really change the way we relate to out patrons, but only if we act to take control of our future. To be user focused and part of the user community was a constant theme, and to guard against having an inward focus on processes and artifacts.

But user-focus requires complex thought about the ways we are dealing
with processes and artifacts, in addition to having a finger on the
pulse of patrons needs.


One session was on never wasting a good serials crisis, another entitled "Its the Economy Stupid" talked about stepping back and using this chance to really look at what we do.  One vendor scolded us librarians for not being good business people, well that may be true, I never took a negotiations class or business class in library school but I think I'm prepared to be a lot tougher in the future in negotiations.

Perhaps Library schools ought to develop courses on negotiating and licensing with the business college? Perhaps they already do?

waiting on a wave

In my last post I said I'd asked google for an invitation. So far, I am not worthy. harumph!

I requested a Google Wave invitation

I requested a Google Wave invitation just now. Here is the message I sent the Google team:
Dear Google Wave gatekeepers,
I'm a reference librarian and as such I am ALWAYS looking for ways to help college students understand the Web-based research process for credible materials on the free Web and in the library subscription databases.
Google wave will let me work with them in a way that they are already familiar with by incorporating multimedia in a collaborative environment. I anticipate that Google Wave will also go a long way toward the development of a for-credit college course in Information literacy, scholarly communication and information architecture both as a development tool for the library faculty involved in the project and as an educational tool. I can't wait to try it out and start our conversation!

Steve Brantley
Reference Librarian
Assistant Professor
Daley Library
University of Illinois at Chicago
-Go UIC Flames!

If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, there are lots of informative posts and videos about the new project. Here is the official one: wave.google.com

Web services development and academic library faculty infrastructure

The following exchange was sent via email to several library faculty
members at a university library. I am posting it because I think it is
representative of some of the problems we as academic librarian
practitioners face when negotiating technological opportunities with the
time demands of scholarly activity.

Dear __,
First all, I think the Duke project is cool and it would be very
useful for us to have a mobile app, and/or an alternative Website
interface designed for smaller mobile screens.

As far as pursuing these projects goes, we are faced once again with the
dilemma of opting to explore the creation of new technology projects which
could be of benefit to our users, or focusing on research and publication for promotion and tenure. To be fair,
research benefits our users in a much more abstracted way, by advancing the profession and
increasing our own knowledge.

Secondly, our talent pool of programming/scripting, API, app development
skills is ad hoc and, with no disrespect intended, shallow.

An alternative approach from building this kind of tool from the ground up
might be to monitor librarian/developer sites and lists (web4lib, open
source for libraries) to find a customizable tool for our needs. We might
also find a commercial service or developer who could provide the
necessary tools, as we have done in the past with questionpoint and, currently,
springshare.

thoughts?
Steve

A colleague's reply,

While I think that developing apps is undoubtedly cool in many ways, and
it does give us something pretty and shiny to show outsiders, it's not yet
something we can do. We don't have the policies, infrastructure,
staffing, and pool of expertise in place - not so far as we are all aware,
that is. The idea of finding a customizable tool is more achievable, but
again, we very much need essential pieces of a foundation in place to
support such possibilities.

It is illustrative to me of the difficulty of establishing the proper
foundation for potential innovation in the Library that this discussion
did not include anyone with a technological perspective to contribute.

The notion that research and publication prevents us from exploring
options is a red herring, and I'm disappointed to see the failure of _blank_
Library to do cool mobile apps attributed to a system that many of us
committed to when we accepted our positions. After all, our library is
hardly unique in having tenure for librarians, and I cannot believe that
there are no interesting explorations of technology and avenues of service
being undertaken at places like CU-Boulder, Penn State, UNM, and
elsewhere.

I then replied,

If I gave the impression that I blame the tenure system, I didn't make
myself clear because I do not blame the system for the above mentioned
difficulties we face. I do feel however, that an identifiable tension
exists between the need to research and publish while on the tenure
track, and the ability to: 1. establish policies, infrastructure,
staffing, and a pool of expertise; and 2. explore new skills and modes
of practice that would allow us to create productivity tools that can
benefit our users.

I wholeheartedly agree that such projects create research and
publication opportunities both in advancement of one's career and, to
share with our colleagues. However, since the projects we are talking
about require the acquisition of a new skill and then the
application of that skill (in an environment already possessing the
necessary policies, infrastructure, staffing, and pool of expertise), and
only then designing a study, publishing scholarship based on research that
has a lower time intensity seems to be a more prudent choice.

Perhaps I misspoke when I said "we are faced once again with the
dilemma of opting to explore the creation of new technology projects which
could be of benefit to our users, or focusing on research and publication
to ensure our career on the tenure track." The word "dilemma" is not
the best term to use. Maybe I should have said we are faced with "a
frustrating choice" Independent of our commitment to the tenure system,
The system is not without its shortcomings, and in libraries as in many
other areas of scholarship, the tenure system undergoing examination if
not outright change in terms of the acceptable forms that scholarship
takes.

Steve

nano-vlog? video-im v-tweets?

Lately I've come across two new Web services that have a lot of educational potential. 12seconds.tv currently in beta and Seesmic.com, which advertises itself as video instant messaging.

My first thought besides that it is totally fun, is that it could make class discussion boards way more interesting.

Everything Bad is Good for you

I just requested this book from the library. Here is the text from the book jacket:
"Drawing from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory, Steven Johnson shows that the junk culture we're so eager to dismiss is actually making us more intelligent. A video game will never be a book, Johnson acknowledges, nor should it aspire to be - and, in fact, video games, from Tetris to The Sims to Grand Theft Auto, have been shown to raise IQ scores and develop cognitive abilities that can't be learned from books. Likewise, when examined closely and taken seriously, successful television - the hit shows of every genre: The Simpsons, 24, The Apprentice - reveals surprising narrative sophistication and intellectual demands." "Johnson calls this upward trend the Sleeper Curve, after the classic sequence from Woody Allen's mock sci-fi film, where a team of scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Johnson argues that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and that it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down." -attribution

New Ian McDonald Story Collection

OK, this is a just a re-post of Cory Doctorow's February 27th Boing Boing front page with some of that good 'ole librarian added value.
(C.) Doctorow writes,

"Ian McDonald is one of science fiction's finest working writers, and his latest short story collection Cyberabad Days, is the kind of book that showcases exactly what science fiction is for.Cyberabad Days returns to McDonald's India of 2047, a balkanized state that we toured in his 2006 novel River of Gods, which was nominated for the best novel Hugo Award. The India of River of Gods has fractured into a handful of warring nations, wracked by water-shortage and poverty, rising on rogue technology, compassion, and the synthesis of the modern and the ancient. " (more)


Ian McDonald in...

Contemporary Authors. Go! (restricted access)
Half.com Go!


Ian McDonald Titles:

Futures : four novellas, Peter Crowther, Peter F. Hamilton, Watching trees grow, et al. 2001 Warner Books. pp. 365

Watching trees grow, Peter F. Hamilton, Ian McDonald and Tendeléo's story. 2002 Gollancz. pp. 103

Cyberabad days, Ian McDonald. 2009 Pyr, Projected Date: 0902.

Brasyl, Ian McDonald. 2007 Pyr.

River of gods, Ian McDonald. 2006 Pyr.

Ares express, Ian McDonald. 2001 Earthlight.

Kirinya, Ian McDonald. 1998 Victor Gollancz.

Sacrifice of fools, Ian McDonald. 1997 Vista.

Evolution's shore, Ian McDonald. 1995 Bantam Books.

Chaga, Ian McDonald. 1995 Gollancz.

Terminal café, Ian McDonald. 1994 Bantam Books.

Scissors cut paper wrap stone, Ian McDonald. 1994 Bantam.

Necroville, Ian McDonald. 1994 V. Gollancz.

The broken land, Ian McDonald. 1992 Bantam Books.

King of morning, queen of day, Ian McDonald. 1991 Bantam.

Out on blue six, Ian McDonald. 1989 Bantam.

Desolation road, Ian McDonald. 1988 Bantam.

Empire dreams, Ian McDonald. 1988 Bantam.

new social media aggregators

I only recently checked in on my Twitter account after six months. I didn't see the point. But after reviewing a really old message from Erik Swedlund, I started surfing the social media sites again. Swedlund had posted a few tweets from an app called twhirl, which led me to seesmic, and along the way Hulu, and return to Friendfeed. I doubt I have all that much content to generate on these user generated content sites, but they are fun to play with and they could benefit my Internet life and work in one way or another. OK well, cheers hipsmart and all, I've gotta go to Second Life right now and make my avatar walk, fly and sit down.