What will be the iTunes of the eBook?

Forbes: The end of the printed book?

Tim O'Reilly: Not exactly. I think we're seeing a transformation of the marketplace. The biggest challenge is not the death of print; it's the question of how books will change. Take the map: The print map has largely gone away, and online mapping has become the norm. In the process, what we expect from maps has changed: They include directions, nearest gas stations, nearby merchants. The book's format will change, sure, but so will the very form.

The format of the book is in a state of change. Right now, the ebook reader resembles a thin stone tablet and the ebook itself mostly closely resembles photocopies of pages more than anything else. Coincidentally, if you want to save a passage from your ebook to share with others, the easiest way to do it is to photocopy your screen (via David Fiander).

While it is admittedly very important that we pay attention to ebook readers and the ebook file formats they use we must not neglect the software that readers will use to store, organize, and access their collections. Otherwise, we will be like the music industry grappling with iTunes and the movie and television industries who are grappling with Netflix... but possibly much, much worse.

This insight came from a conversation I had with Art Rhyno. He told me that his son, who is taking engineering at the University of Windsor, already has developed a habit of going to Springer eBooks for his research needs and has gotten quite comfortable with using its features. Art then raised the point that it might be difficult for get our users to start using the Scholars Portal ebook platform once the Springer ebook content is migrated there, if these users have already created a 'bookshelf' and saved annotations in the previous platform. (Scholars Portal only added user profiles to their ebooks platform just this week).

I'm far from the first to cotton to the idea that its annotations that might prove to become more important to readers than where their ebooks come from. The best thinking that I have read about the idea is from James Bridle's Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook. Of note, the subtitle of the work is "The form of the book, and its aura".

But even traditional pen and ink annotations play an important role in literary scholarship even if the annotation is only a check mark and a squiggle.

When (Laurie) Anderson told a friend about the project, he showed her a Bible that Melville purchased just before he began writing his literary masterpiece. Many of Melville's original pencil notes had been erased by his wife, with whom he'd had a less-than-perfect relationship. After an unsuccessful attempt to have the erased passages reconstructed, Anderson pored over the pages herself with a magnifying glass, hoping to find the inspiration behind Melville's tale.

In Isaiah 27:1, she found what she'd been searching for: "In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." Next to the verse was a check mark and a long squiggle.

"I thought, 'That's it!'" Anderson recalls. "The whale is his snake and the ocean is his garden, the place where he works out good and evil."

When our conversation at the OLITA Council meeting turned to annotation and ebooks, Nick Ruest, keeper of the Digital Collections of McMaster University, told us that it was the annotations of the scanned material that particularly interested scholars and students.

It's worth noting that, at the moment, publishers either don't understand the value of the ability to annotate and share annotations, or they see it as too costly a value-add for too few people. Footnotes are disappearing while references are published separately from the work itself.

Where do you keep your book annotations, references and citations? Is it separate from your library?

I keep mine in Zotero. In fact, Zotero is my library. My ebook reader is my browser. This blog is how I share my annotations.

For now.

Libraries and The Fear of Free

Let us speak plainly.

Ebooks are the proverbial iceberg on the horizon of libraries. If the library profession doesn't act appropriately, decisively and soon, libraries are screwed. 

We need to stop insisting that the value of the library is made by the subsidy of objects alone. At the moment, our primary value is that we provide free items that only cost the user the inconvenience of having to physically come to the library to pick up the item when that object is available. But when the price of the such items drop, then the relative cost of the inconvenience goes up to the point that paying $8 a month for Netflix becomes much more attractive than paying for parking twice a month at the public library across town.

Academic libraries are not immune to the forces of cost vs. convenience. There is a growing interest in Activity-Based Budgeting (ppt) or Incentive-based Budgeting at public universities (book) and this means that the campus library, once a shared resource, explicitly becomes a cost centre that must be paid for directly from the other faculties on campus. (The University of Toronto started using ABB since 2007 and two years later, their libraries started charging graduate students from other schools a substantial fee to access their collections). Now imagine a future scenario in which the largest commercial publishers decide to drop the cost per article to $5. Those faculties who will be able to do research without their campus library will advocate that they shouldn't have to subsidize the other faculties that do. Now, I'm not trying to make the case that this particular scenario is likely to occur and play out. I'm just trying to make the point that if the library is seen only as a subsidy, then our future will be controlled by those who set the cost and convenience.

Libraries can change course. It may even be easier than we think. But in order for us to do so, we need more hearts and minds to re-interpret our collective mission and express it in new ways through the communities we serve.

First, we need to stop making free the enemy of the library. 

My own personal epiphany of the matter came through a conversation at OLITA council about the reticence of many public libraries to promote free books from such ventures as Project Gutenberg. One observation was that libraries aren't interested in promoting resources that don't result in an increase in library circulation counts. The stakeholders of public libraries don't think highly of connecting users to free educational material on the Internet.

In the academic sphere, there are similar forces at play. Every time, I hear a librarian say that the library is the place to find "trusted" and "quality" information, I cringe because such thinking implicitly debases open access research because it's free to readers. Librarians don't want institutional repositories (campus research free for the world) at the expense of being able to buy commercial research for our campus.

Next, we need to start expressing the value of libraries through gate-counts (and website hit counts) rather than circulation counts. Not through books, but through book clubs. And writing circles. Letter press workshops. Wordpress bootcamps. Book digitization.

Then, we need to stop waiting for a commercial product to save our profession. It is maddening to see the extent that public libraries are willing to spend their energies castigating Overdrive and Harper-Collins for acting as a business rather than partner with the Internet Archive to lend ebooks. It is troubling to see academic libraries collectively spend millions of dollars on "Google-like" discovery layers and outright refuse to even consider simply using Google Scholar (or customizing their own Google Search Engines or taking on the responsibility to build their own digital library for themselves).

And my last recommendation (for the moment) is ask libraries to stop spending money licensing commercial products that they can never own (nor preserve for the future). Instead, libraries need to use, support and develop open source tools and collections - for ourselves and the communities that we serve. Again, there is resistance from many libraries to use free software. Ironically, if you ask them why not, these libraries will tell you that they don't feel that they can own a product if they don't pay for it. My own personal observation is that the ability to pay for a service contract from a dedicated developer or support company encourages organizations to use open source software.

I haven't read it myself, but I understand that Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" makes a convincing case that software should be thought of as a service and not as a product. As soon as my Sunday afternoon reference desk shift is over, I'm going to head upstairs and borrow this book because I think this is the same transition that libraries have to make.

There is still time.

Poetry has left the building. Have books gone too?

Ever since I've watched it this past Sunday afternoon, I’ve been thinking about Darren Wershler’s talk about modernist avant-guard poetry, Marshall McLuhan and Christian Bök's Xenotext Experiment. I keep coming back to Darren’s post-mortem of poetry and his description that poetry is currently on the same scale, in terms of economics and impact, with making doilies for the church rummage fair.

The situation has been a little more than century in the making and has everything to do with media theory. To cite Friedrich Kittler again, whose thinking on the subject is heavily indebted to both McLuhan and Innis, before the second half of the 19th century, literature, especially romantic poetry, had a monopoly on the delivery of vivid cultural experiences. That changed in the mid-19th century when virtually every form of electro-mechanical media reached a mass audience within a few decades. For Kittler, from the era of silent cinema onward, film establishes immediate connections between technology and the body, which make imaginary connections unnecessary. Film exhibits its figures in such detail that the realistic is raised into the realm of the fantastic which sucks up every theme of imaginative literature.

When you compare the cultural force of film to poetry... well there’s really no comparison anymore, is there?

Now, are we ready to make a similar comparison between books and YouTube, videogames, Facebook, and text messaging and the rest of the digital realm?

No matter how relevant u THINK ebooks & ipads are to the community, video games are even MORE important to them http://bit.ly/hu8rTF #hcod

Now there’s been lots of hand-wringing over the future of the book. Heck, at this point there is an entire genre of books dedicated to the death of the book out there. But I don’t think we in the world of 26 character combinations has really come to grips that it’s not just poetry that has left the building.

Look at your own Twitter, Facebook, RSS, and email inbox. Count the number of references to videos, blog posts, and online newspaper and magazine articles. Now count the references to passages of books.  I work in academia... hell, I work in a library.. and the former dwarfs the latter by an order of magnitude. Or two.

Unless we are able to read, store and share books effortlessly online, books will die.

That is, unless they are already dead.

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Possibly related:

I've overhead university kids talk about Pokemon as if it was the lingua franca of their childhood.

I've played an ARG called Snow Town in which the readers of the story became characters within the story and in doing so, changed the story's outcome. This and the real-time unfolding and telling of its unfiction, made Snow Town much more engaging and enjoyable than the remaining texts belie.

TED Talks. The TED speaking series is probably the best example that I can point to as a form of cultural idea transmission that might have surpassed books in terms of impact. And speaking of which...

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Immediately after I saw Darren’s talk, I decided to catch up on some TED Talks and, having two preschoolers in the in the house, decided to watch Deb Roy's Birth of a Word:

Most of the talk is dedicated to an absurdly ambitious project to capture, using digital video, every interaction and sound within Roy's house in order to understand how his newborn son learns to speak. How a child learns to speak is fascinating unto itself but then, near the end of the talk, there is a brief description of a related project that hit me like a hammer.

Using the same parsing technology used to analyze the information captured in his house, his lab team processed thousands of hours of TV footage along with thousands and thousands of comment streams (from sources such as Twitter, one assumes) and then looked for assocations between one and another.

(It's hard to explain the visualization. You should see it.)

Just a like a small child who learns to associate the sounds of ‘WAH-TER’ with the sight of water, it appears that we are becoming something larger than our individual selves and this something is learning to speak to itself about the images it sees.

And we are not talking about books.

Ebooks and the existential crises of libraries

Yesterday, I was in Toronto for the first OLITA Council meeting of 2011. OLITA meetings are productive and good fun. At this meeting, we spent some time planning for the upcoming one-day Digital Odyssey  conference. The theme of the conference will be Ebooks (R)evolution and those involved will be approaching potential speakers shortly.

Generally there is not a formal call for speakers for the event, but if you know of someone who has done some work or writing pertaining to ebooks, you can let me know and I will forward your suggestions. Obviously equity is top of mind at the moment and so if you know of a great voice on ebooks that should be heard by a wider audience please let me know.

There was a running joke at yesterday's meeting that councilor Fiacre O'Duinn has a knack for instilling existential crises in others. At last count, I had about four yesterday. Here's the first one. It deals with ebooks.

The topic of discussion was the possibility of ebooks privacy and Fiacre brought up of the scenario when book scanners would drop in price and size to become a common consumer-item.  I said, "well, let's remember what the TV networks did when they saw their viewers go online to watch old episodes. They all banded together to create Hulu" and as soon as I said it, the penny dropped.  What's stopping the Big 6 publishers from creating their own online library to lend out ebooks and bypassing pesky libraries altogether?

AIEEE! EXISTENTIAL CRISIS!

I've found much of the discussion regarding the recent Overdrive-HarperCollin's 26 books controversy important but lacking.

I have to admit that I feel that the whole notion of lending ebooks is problematic. Digital copies that disappear after a set limit of time is a model that has not been established for music, newspapers, magazines, television episode, movies, or video games. My feeling is that the publishers are just buying time before they create their own Hulu.

There has been some sentiments expressed that HarperCollins recent actions betray how dumb they are. But maybe they aren't so dumb after all. Eric Hellman has done some analysis that suggests there is cunning in their strategy to strangle the long tail of lending.

In my own reading outside of libraryland, I've learned that Harper Collins is doing some interesting ebooks projects at the moment. From the world of Alternative Reality Games, the blog ARGNet reports in PC Studios Takes the Reading Experience Mobile :

Carman’s other foray into mobile storytelling is Dark Eden, a paranormal thriller targeting the 12 and up demographic, published through HarperCollins. The story centers around seven teenagers attempting to overcome their fears. Sharing the same counselor, the teens are sent into the woods to meet with a man who will help them overcome their fears. Both the book and the app will debut at Comic-Con this July. An alternate reality game that Carman describes as PC Studios’ most ambitious yet will launch on May 10th, offering a terrifying taste of what’s to come.

And from O'Reilly's Publishing News: Week in Review: HarperCollins may be on to something with its all-digital imprint

Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, has launched an all-digital line, Avon Impulse... the imprint will put out one original e-romance a week... Authors do better with e-books however, since they're paid a royalty rate of 25% of the net sale. With paperbacks, they're paid 8% to 10% of the list price, which works out to be considerably less.

Look who's on their way to building their own Hulu?

Dear Patrick Deane, President, McMaster University

I am writing this letter to you today on International Women's Day. Or, to be more accurate I'm writing you this letter *because* it's International Women's Day.

I am writing to ask you if you think that it's acceptable for a symposium that you will be a speaking at - The Future of Academic Libraries - to have what appears to be only 3 women presenting out of a possible 21 speakers.

The percentage of women in Canadian academic librarianship is 73% [CAUT Almanac, pdf].

---

Last night I got a call from a student from McMaster as part of the University's current Alumni fund-raising drive. She was kind, clear, engaging and polite. When I told her that I was able to apply my geography and environmental science degree from McMaster in my work as a science librarian, she told me that she really appreciated librarians and just recently a McMaster librarian helped her find the data she needed for her GIS class. 

But as able as she was, she was not ultimately effective in getting closer to her fund-raising goal for reasons that were not her fault. So after I told the student my reasons why I would not donate to McMaster University, I told her that I would write you personally and tell you those reasons myself because... well because it only seemed fair.

---

I support McMaster librarians and the excellent work that they do. I'm looking forward to working with them at Code4Lib North (that McMaster University is kindly sponsoring) and I hope to run into them again at The Humanities and Technology Camp being held two weeks later at UWO. (As an aside, did you notice that there are no McMaster Librarians speaking at The Future of Academic libraries at the symposium? Others have.)

I will not be attending The Future of Academic Libraries Symposium because 15% doesn't sound fair to me.   I want a future that's more fair than the present, for myself and for the student I spoke to last night.

Learning to code. On doing it and not worrying about doing it wrong

Some weeks ago I let you all know that I was trying to learn how to code by doing a little bit of hacking with the Head First series of books every night after I do the dishes.

The bad news is that's not I have been doing what I said I would be doing. But the good news is that I'm happily hacking with OpenStreetMap and OpenLayers with help from P2PU. (Lookie! I made this! )

Sure, I would be more pragmatic if I spent my nights working on improving my Drupal skills for our ongoing website migration at MPOW or (in support of the same ends) I worked on expanding my understanding of PHP and MySQL, but I'm much happier at the moment making maps.

I'm happier learning and hacking maps because I want to eventually contribute work to CrisisCommons. I'm happier because learning a little bit everyday gets me closer to the day that I am able to launch a map-related website using open government data for my community. And I'm much happier because I know someone who is also interested in maps and my work has inspired her work and her work inspires mine.

I have the tried the formal route of learning computer science. I took first year Algebra while I was on maternity leave so I would have the prerequisites to enroll at the University of Windsor's one year Bachelor of Computer Science (General) for University Graduates program. And I took my first computer science course of that program when I returned from maternity leave, but I found that the coursework and studying were taking too much away from time with my family. It also was not particularly enjoyable.

So I'm blazing my own path. I'm not worried that I'm "doing it wrong" (I'm not inclined to learn Python for the sheer beautiful purity of the language and I'm not going to apologize for that). As long as I put in the time, the work, and the mindfulness I will get to where I need to be.

The alternative to Alternative Reality Games is Alternative Reality Locations

In my last post, I mentioned that there is a new library-based ARG (Alternative Reality Game) that is just getting underway. 


The game began when a noted ARG game-player received these overdue notices in the mail. A web search brought up this suspicious library website but there wasn't much to go on until someone found a phrase encoded in these four index cards:

The solution can be found here with a wee bit more explanation here.

I've been following the game/story rather than actually play the game and solve the puzzles involved because 1) I'm not very good at puzzles and 2) by the time I get to puzzle, it is already solved by someone better than I am.

And these reasons just happen to be two of the largest inherent limitations of "traditional" ARGs : they can only be played once and a relatively small percentage of those who play, end up actively contributing to the game. Now this doesn't mean that ARGs like Snowtown Library lack merit. I for one, am completely hooked on its mysteries so I'm following the game like its a story - through a discussion board called Unfiction, no less. 

The genre is developing and there seems to be a couple solutions to the design limitations of ARGs. The first, is to the make the game about making and documenting things. Two examples of these games would include SF0.org and Urgent Evoke (if you missed its first run, you can apply to play a three month trial of the season one dark site).

There's another development that I'm particularly interested in. ARGs are now being developed to be played in a particular place. The most notable example of this new type of game is the Jejune Institute which I haven't played because you have to be in San Francisco to experience it. That's what's lost. But much has been gained. From an interview with Jeff Hull, one of the founders of the Jejune Institute:

One thing I really like about the Jejune Insitute is the fact that it’s a cross-platform interactive narrative that works a little bit like a gallery installation: it’s just *there*, online, on the air, and in physical space. This represents a very different approach to storytelling than that found in more “traditional” ARGs, which are typically structured around the gradual unveiling of story information leading up to a climax event of some sort. What made you pick this different path? What did you gain (and/or lose) by abandoning the unity of time?

You’re correct about the induction center as “gallery installation”. We wanted to create an immersive automated well-curated environment, and to have it exist semi-permanantly. We were outsiders to the ARG universe, and totally ignorant of it’s culture and customs. So when we finally appeared at the ARG Fest-o-Con in Portland, we learned that we had inadvertently solved one of the major stumbling blocks of earlier ARG’s; “replayability”. What we had produced could be experienced over and over again, and shared with friends, and so on. The big trade off was that it was local. People in other parts of the world are not able to experience it directly. But ideally we’ll be able to produce unique experiences in other cities in the future. Every city should have their own game!

I like the idea that every city should have its own game.

Maybe each library, museum, or school should have one too.

Some starred items from my Google Reader Account

Normally, I like to wait until there about three related items on my radar before I write about them on my blog, but I've stumbled upon some reading recently that seems too good not to share immediately:

• From eaves.ca : The problem with the UBB debate
  David Eaves makes the case that it is Industry Canada that should bear the consumer wrath associated with UBB and not the CRTC.

• I have no time for it and I'm ready set to play Humans v. Zombies on campus next week, but how can I resist an ARG based in a library: Snowtown Library. I'm in. Are you?

• MIT offers a lunchtime Apps4Academic class for those interested. Would love to something similar at MPOW.

• In libraryland, there's are tentative efforts underway to help our users with their data. Outside of libraryland, there are tools on the way that might help with the cause:  The Locker Project: data for the people.

• Also from O'Reilly is a new website of theirs called Future of Search. I just find that O'Reilly focus of  looking forward so refreshing. One of my misgivings associated with librarians continuing to teach "Boolean searching" is that I believe the professionalization of the technique originated from early librarian work with pay per use search tools such as DIALOG and is no longer relevant or even suited for sets of hundreds of thousands of  items.

That last link probably could have been developed into a post unto itself, but I've got a game to play...

Leddy By Design

If you are in libraryland and you have a hand in web design, then you might be interested in my workplace blog dedicated to MPOW's new library migration and re-design. We are moving from a Lotus Notes environment to Drupal.

I've been collecting similar work-in-progress blogs in this post and if you know of any that I've missed, please let me know via a comment.

OnFocus! OnBlur! OnChange! How I am going to learn how to code

I've been meaning to learn how to code beyond HTML for years now, but never have managed to do much more than borrow other people's cryptic code and, by trial and error, swap out variables until things worked for the situation at hand. But this year, I have a DEADLINE and this deadline is as fierce and as frightening as a tiger.

I'm not going to dwell on the fact that I should have started my learning earlier. There's no time for that. Instead, I'm going to roll out my plan on learning how to code.

I've already completed the essential first step: I've found my learning community.

I've also got the second step under control: I've collected a selection of books that fit my style of learning. I'm a huge fan of O'Reilly's Head First series as it recognizes that most folks find it difficult to learn from technical manuals and so they structure their books on these learning principles:



And now all I have to do is the business of *doing* what I need to do.

A couple years ago, I was so inspired by this talk by Matt Webb that I resolved to find and dedicate 100 hours to learning Ancient Greek history. I did and the 100 hours passed faster than I had imagined and I found my life so much richer. Now while I do dishes, I listen to the most excellent History of Rome podcast. I'll be listening to episode 92 tonight.

And doing the dishes is the key to how I am going to learn how to code.

I am going to build a new habit into my existing daily routine. After my kids are put to bed and the rest of the dishes are put away (I have a difficult time resisting my kids persistent request to play with them after supper), I am going to sit down and spend at least 15 minutes learning to code. I'm actually hoping to put in 40 minutes a day, but right now the most important thing is get the "Kids. Dishes. Code" routine in place.

At 40 minutes a day, it will take me 150 days to reach the 100 hour mark which should bring me to June 1st. And that's a date that's much more inspiring than a deadline.

The future of libraries is what we create in the present

Things have become clearer.

In the future, collection development will be opposite of what we do now. From the description of Dorothea Salo's upcoming talk at the 2011 Superconference:

Buying books and journals distinguishes libraries less and less, as published information becomes a commodity and open access makes inroads into scholarly communication. Perhaps this will turn collection development inside out! Instead of collecting from the vast information world for our patron base, we will collect unique materials from our patron base to preserve and present to the world. 

In the future, librarians will help people build their own libraries.

Students will search and browse through the online libraries of their professor and other experts, both living and passed, for research and learning materials. In the future they are likely to do this before searching google because this is the behaviour that they are exhibiting in the present.

When it came to course-related research, however, almost all of the respondents turned to course readings first—more than Google, and more than any other resource. The findings suggest that students in our study turned to course readings because the resource was inextricably tied to the course and the assignment, were at hand, and were sanctioned by the instructor (pdf).

We will come to see one large collection of items as the result of a quaint but ultimately unkind hoarding instinct. The mission is now to associate every item in a library building into a smaller and more meaningful collection of items. Each item in the library will have an explanation of why it was selected for the collection, just like a museum. With attention and selection, even the cast-offs of libraries have become valuable. Nothing will be allowed to be de-selected from the collection until it is digitally scanned first.

Some are inclined to believe that libraries will be places where people will create together.  I tend to think that the future is festivals. The library that first brought subject guides to the profession now  lead the way today with their event programming.

As we no longer live in a world of scarcity, librarians and other digital humanists will develop and use tools to help manage and understand information.

Library “discovery systems” and/or catalogs are designed to organize and provide access to the materials outlined above, but they need to do more. First of all, the majority of the profession’s acquisitions processes assume collections need to be paid for. With the increasing availability of truly free content on the Web, greater emphasis needs to be placed on harvesting content as opposed to purchasing or licensing it. Libraries are expected to build collections designed to stand the test of time. Brokering access to content through licensing agreements — one of the current trends in librarianship — will only last as long as the money lasts. Licensing content makes libraries look like cost centers and negates the definition of “collections”.

Second, library “discovery systems” and/or catalogs assume an environment of sacristy. They assume the amount of accessible, relevant data and information needed by students, teachers, and researchers is relatively small. Thus, a great deal of the profession’s efforts go into enabling people to find their particular needle in one particular haystack. In reality, current indexing technology makes the process of finding relavent materials trivial, almost intelligent. Implemented correctly, indexers return more content than most people need, and consequently they continue to drink from the proverbial fire hose...

What can we do to make these things come to fruition?

By the way...

When I talk about the future I really mean this afternoon.
When I talk about the present I really mean this morning.

5 books, group selection, depression, suffering, and games

One of my favourite websites of late is FiveBooks. The premise of the site is simple: Every day an eminent writer, thinker, commentator, politician, academic chooses five books on their specialist subject.  It's a simple project done well and well worth reading.

In July, I read Jonathan Haidt's five book selections on Happiness and I ever since I've been expanding the connections that he's made into a wider frame of reference to include some thoughts I've been having about games.

But before I get into games, I want to highlight a particular passage from Jonathan's Haidti's interview where he casually drops some ideas that are largely heretical to current evolutionary thinking

The reason I have found this book so wise is that I am interested in the possibility that human beings are products of group level selection. That’s the idea that we evolved in part by groups competing with other groups. I’ve come to believe that we have a variety of mechanisms in our minds that allow us to temporarily become like bees in a hive, and these experiences of collective merger are among our most prized and important experiences.

I was first introduced to the idea of group selection by Harold Bloom's book, Global Brain:  The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. Bloom is not a scientist but an uninhibited free-thinker and I found his ideas fascinating and the lens of group selection a powerful one (while reserving judgment of whether such thinking is 'correct' or not). For example, he asks us to consider depression as a biological 'self-destruct mechanism' that can be triggered when an individual does not have strong ties to family or friends.

Now obviously this is a very powerful and dangerous idea and I think all of us know someone in our own circle of family and friends who have suffered from depression despite having strong social ties to people who love them. But I mention this concept only because I have recently read two different accounts of how the force of depression can be pushed back by encouraging the depressed person to become more social.  The first was this article in the Guardian that gives a brief summary of the book The Depression Cure: The Six-Step Programme to Beat Depression Without Drugs.

The second example is the account of Jane McGonigal's battle with a concussion that also included a bout of depression. In order to save herself from thoughts of suicide, Jane created a game called Superbetter for herself *and* her caretakers. The game worked.

There are several other ties between Jane McGonigal and some of her games and Jonathan's Haidti's book picks on happiness, with most obvious being the common interest in positive psychology. But to me, the most significant connection is that both researchers address the changing of mind to address human suffering: see Jonathan's book pick of the Dhammapada  and Jane's cookie-rolling manifesto : "When we're playing games, we're not suffering.".

In short, it's got me thinking along these lines: is the transformation that removes the drudgery of work in a game, similar to Buddhist transformation that removes suffering from pain?

I think I can find five books that suggests this is so. I've got two so far: The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits and Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Let me know if you know other ones.

(cross-posted : New Jack Almanac. I'm going to combine all my blogs sometime eventually)

When an imploring librarian is not enough

So last month I had a doozy of a library research class.  It was a 3 hour class about "library research" to about 100 second year undergraduate students and it wasn't tied to a particular assignment, a particular course, or even a particular discipline. Furthermore, the primary instructors for this particular program promptly exited the room as soon as the majority of students had signed in. Not exactly win conditions.

But I survived and the students survived. Some parts of the class went better than expected. Other parts I wished I could do over. And the class both reinforced and challenged my ideas about research, habits and tool use. Here's what happened.

This particular class was held in a large lecture hall and students were instructed to bring their laptops with them. Those without laptops were to share with those around them. I didn't pay that close attention to the few students that came without laptops but I strongly suspect that they, at best, only watched their seatmates work through the class exercises. Laptops are simply too personal to hand over to strangers. Unless its made explicit that students must have laptops for classwork then I think the school does bare some responsibility of having laptops to lend out on a short term use. But the matter of equity of access aside, I much prefer that students use their laptops rather than placing them all into a computer lab. What better way to simulate a research experience than using the actual research tool that the student uses everyday?

After I introduced myself and our co-op student (who kindly joined me to help out with questions from the students) I briefly told the students what I hoped to cover in the class and then started off with a quick five minute activity. I asked them to find a paper written by a University of Windsor professor and to raise their hand when they did. As they raised their hands, I would walk over the student, look at their screens and ask how they found the paper.

Most of the students answered "Google". A considerable number of students used the search box on the University of Windsor web site and searched the word, "paper" or a variation of that word. Only one student that I visited in that five minutes used a library indexing tool to find a paper.

After the five minutes was up, I gave brief synopsis of what I had seen and I make no explicit value judgment of which way was the "right way" to find a research paper. I wanted to send a strong signal that I was more interested in how they really did their research rather than set them up for praise them if they used library resources. I simply reported back that most people used Google and the Google-powered search engine on the University of Windsor website to find a paper.

I then asked the room this question: "How is doing scholarly research different from your everyday searching with Google?"

I think this is an important question. We know that students "search" multiple times a day in their everyday life and in most cases, they are largely successful and confident in their searching abilities. Unless we clearly ask students to confront the possibility that things could be done differently, they won't even consider changing their practice.

Now in this particular class, I had a problem. The first person gave a thorough and correct answer: "scholarly research involves using peer reviewed sources that has most likely been published." There's nothing like a correct answer to nip discussion in the bud. I've had similar discussions in classes that have meandered in all sorts of great territory, like the non-commercial nature of scholarly communication, the use of the scientific method and statistical analysis, what indicates expertise in a field, the acknowledgment of bias... but in this class, I wasn't able to catch a spark and I caught myself doing most of the talking. Luckily, I had prepared an escape route.

I asked the class, can you trust everything found by the library?

After a muted response of  "most times" and "meh", I explained that they absolutely shouldn't everything trust that they find in the library because I, as a librarian, had added to the collection such titles as Yes To Human Cloning!

That book is by the Raelian cult and they are my new favourite research example because they touch all sorts of disciplinary ground: science, UFSs, religion, media manipulation, sexuality, and Canadian Content, to boot. And, even better, the kids these days know nothing about these weirdos.

So I let the class know that this was a book from a cult called the Raelians and pointed out that the book is just two books down the shelf from one of the most important "real" books about cloning). I told them that the library had books about intelligent design and books about evolution. And while on this theme of healthy skepticism, we went to Wikipedia to learn more about the Raelians. We looked at the History tab on the page to see the level of discussion this topic was generating and to see if there was any tell-tale signs of Raelian influence on the page. I then asked the students to find newspaper articles to confirm the information found in the page.

And even though I navigated on my own screen to the library's newspaper page and suggested that they try to use these sources for this mini-assignment, the majority of students still defaulted to using Google and Google News where they found some newspaper articles and reprints of newspaper articles in blog posts. This has happened to me before. I once led a class about scholarly visual arts resources and even after immediately showing what fine tools we had, the majority of the class used  dictionary.com for their research assignment. It throws me off every time. Their online habits are too strong to be broken by the imploring of a librarian to change.

And yet I persist because I'm not sure what else to do. I then used the same method to introduce tools to find journal articles on the topic: ask them to use the tool they would normally use for an in-class assignment, show them the advantages to using Google Scholar instead of Google, and then show them the advantages of using library-paid scholarly tools instead of Google.  At the end of this part of the class, I'm quite sure I have converted many of the students to using Google Scholar instead of Google but I don't have same confidence that I have made a convincing case for what we provide from the library.

But later in the class, I accidentally stumbled on a way where I actually had students ask me if there was something better than Google Scholar was available. 

In the second hour of the class, I introduced RefWorks and Zotero to the students and gave them a mini-assignment to create a bibliography that they would then have to share with someone else. I didn't teach them how to use the tools - I just pointed to the screencasts that both citation management products provide and wandered around to help out the students who were stuck. And I would like to note that the students *loved* these tools. At first, at least...

And that's when it happened. Students starting importing articles from Google Scholar into their bibliographies and noticed that many authors and other key bits of information were missing. I told these students that at this point they had a choice: they could either correct the citations manually, or they could use a library-provided tool like Web of Science that would do a better job of the citation information.  And it was only then that I saw real and genuine interest in using library subscription products for their research needs. For better metadata, no less.

I'm still working through ideas about how tool choice and habit influence how students learn, both within and out of higher education.

And you are reading this because my own habit is to write out my thoughts in a post as I work out difficult ideas. I implore you to do the same.

The other gaming platform war - LibraryThing, Wikipedia and The Zotero Commons

I’ve been investigating the spaces between and the spaces that overlap games and libraries as of late and while I have been doing so, I’ve been stumbling upon various forms of ‘library games’ and – of greater interest to myself – “research games”.  One such “research game” that has caught my attention is The Wikipedia Game.

During a lull in class, me and some classmates figured out a way to combine our favorite things: wasting time and Wikipedia. We invented a game where you try to find a certain item (for example, pancakes) the fastest, measured in either time or clicks. Here are the rules:

• You cannot edit any pages
• You must start from the home page (http://wikipedia.org/)
• You cannot type anything. Everything must be done via mouse clicks.
• You cannot use the categories, A-Z listings, etc

Here's a sample game, searching for "witchcraft."

Wikipedia > English Wikipedia > United States > Massachusetts > Salem > Salem Witch Trials > Witchcraft

I'm not sure whether the example above is the first incarnation of the game but it is not the last iteration. There is also The Wiki Game in which the word goals are auto-generated and there is a ticking clock that you compete against.  It appears that the same game has been ported into a $2 iPhone app.

Now I have to admit that I have entertained the thought of trying a similar game but using the an online public library catalogue (an OPAC to those in the profession) instead of Wikipedia, but it didn't take much visualization at all to come to the conclusion that such a  game would be difficult and not fun for most people.

The main reason why is that Wikipedia is an idea-space where there are multiple means of making connections between disparate concepts ("Your start page is: Sulfuric acid. You are looking for: Reality in Buddhism. Go!") Library catalogues can only make connections between authors and  Library of Congress Subject Headings which are few and not intuitive. And while making connections between actors is a bona fide fun thing to do, most books are written by a single author and so any connections are few and tenuous at best.

Of note, LibraryThing - which is very rich in its connections between authors, descriptions, and users - already is the platform of at least two games: CoverGuess and Another silly game part 67,

I feel a maxim coming on. Let's try this one:

Until your platform can support a game, it cannot be called social software.

Hmm. I'm not crazy about the maxim myself but rather than refine it, I want to continue this speculation of what an alternative idea-space game-platform could look like. Because I've been thinking about it for a while now. And would you believe that I think one of the best candidates is... footnotes?

Citations are what connect the ideas within various works together.  They make up the web in The Web of Science. They allow Google Scholars to Stand on the shoulders of giants.  And yet inexplicably, online footnotes are vanishing.

The beta version of Zotero 2.1 (available for download here) provides users of the Zotero citation management web service, an easier means of uploading primary documents into the Internet Archive using Zotero Commons. Perhaps future Zotero developments will make stronger and more plentiful connections between ideas and works. There's already one Zotero game out there but I would rather play The Wikipedia Game for now.

Information tool literacy

The program for Access 2010 ("the premier library technology conference in Canada") is now available. It looks like there will be lots of good things in store for those going to Winnipeg. Oh, and while you are looking at the program, why not check out the description for the session, After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control? Here's a snippet:

How should we (reference librarians, systems people, and users) work together to better exploit the possibilities of open source systems so we can focus on discovery and understanding instead of the mechanics of searching?

I mention this because I think it's not only a good question, it's a very important question. How indeed should reference librarians get involved in systems work so that we build systems of understanding and not just search?
 
As if on cue, Eric Lease Morgan presented some possible answers to this question in a piece called The Next Next-Generation Catalog:

Instead of focusing on find, the profession needs to focus on the next steps in the process. After a person does a search and gets back a list of results, what do they want to do? First, they will want to peruse the items in the list. After identifying items of interest, they will want to acquire them. Once the selected items are in hand users may want to print, but at the very least they will want to read. During the course of this reading the user may be doing any number of things. Ranking. Reviewing. Annotating. Summarizing. Evaluating. Looking for a specific fact. Extracting the essence of the author’s message. Comparing & contrasting the text to other texts. Looking for sets of themes. Tracing ideas both inside and outside the texts. In other words, find and acquire are just a means to greater ends. Find and acquire are library goals, not the goals of users.

I also want to bring attention to Eric's specific call to those engaged in information literacy.

People want to perform actions against the content they acquire. They want to use the content. They want to do stuff with it. By expanding our definition of “information literacy” to include things beyond metadata and bibliography, and by combining it with the power of computers, librarianship can further “save the time of the reader” and thus remain relevant in the current information environment. Focusing on the use and evaluation of information represents a growth opportunity for librarianship. 

In response to Eric's promotion of indexing tools, Kathryn Greenhill commented:

I think librarians need to look toward using textual analysis tools from the disciplines they serve and incorporate it into their “beyond discovery” layers.

It’s a pity that often subject liaison librarians in universities do this job because they are not so interested in “techie things”….How to get them to understand that this is their role will be interesting.

[I'm assuming that her last comment is missing a "not do" so that it reads, "It’s a pity that often subject liaison librarians in universities do not do this job because they are not so interested in “techie things” - I'm going to send her an email to clarify this matter.]

I think there is an significant reluctance by Information Literacy librarians to introduce genuinely useful tools (such as Zotero) to users because after years of teaching users just how to use the catalogue, many teaching librarians refuse to do any teaching of tools. Add to this scenario that an information librarian generally has only a very brief period of time to introduce large and hairy concepts to students such as genre theory, critical reading, and transliteracy, and you have librarians who will refuse to teach students textual tools on principle.

But "tool choice" is not the same as "teaching a tool".

So let us recognize that a reader's choice of information tool fundamentally affects that user's "use of information". Let us embrace information tool choice and use as a inherent component of Information Literacy. Let us ask ourselves why we promote the use of CINAHL instead of PubMed, WorldCat instead of OpenLibrary, RefWorks instead of Zotero...

OK, I admit that doesn't sound very poetic. Let's try that again:

I know I'm not alone here. While still in the minority, I believe that there are many librarians who believe that tool choice and development should be a fundamental component of our profession's work. In face, there are librarians who hold that tool creation is essential for our profession's survival. Also published yesterday, here is K. G. Schneider:

The fundamental problem with the proprietary software model is not one of evil ownership or grasping vendors. I’ve seen both of those occur in the open source software community. The problem with proprietary library management software–from a high-level perspective, profession-wide–is that it makes us stupid. It deprofessionalizes who we are and disengages us from tool creation.

Conversely, every librarian who engages in tool creation to any degree improves the state of librarianship for all of us. This has been true since some guy in a toga put holes in a wall to store the papyrus, and it was true in the 19th century when we agreed as a profession on the size of catalog cards (which led to our early adoption of standards and network-level records), and it  is true in the open source community today.

And her conclusions about why librarianship needs open source dovetails nicely with why I think librarianship needs to embrace tool choice and development, so I'll end with her words from the same post

If librarianship will survive the Big Shift, it will do so by reinventing itself. To reinvent itself will require many muscles of invention. And that, in the end, is why we need open source.

Open Endorsements

My favourite response to the federal government's Digital Economic Strategy came from David Eaves in a piece written some weeks ago called Why we risk asking the wrong question. Its a wonderfully concise and insightful piece. My pullquotes of choice:

I think we need to stop talking about a digital as the future.

This whole conversation isn’t about being a digital country. It isn't about a future where everything is going to be digitized. That isn't the challenge. It is already happening. It's done. It's over. Canada is already well on its way to becoming digital...

The dirty truth is that Canada's digital future isn't about digital. What is special isn't that everything is being digitized. It's that everything is being connected....

So if a digital economy strategy is really about a networked economy strategy, and what makes a networked economy work better is stronger and more effective connectivity, then the challenge isn’t about what happens when something shifts from physical to digital. It is about how we promote the connectivity of everything to everything in a fair manner. How do we make ourselves the most networked country, in the physical, legally and policy terms. This is the challenge.

And today, Eaves specifically brought attention to three citizen-suggested proposals that are worth supporting. I think they are worth supporting too, so here are their links:

• Open Access to Canada’s Public Sector Information and Data
• Government Use and Participation in Open Source
• Improved access to publicly-funded data

Eaves also supports Michael Geist's recent recommendations of proposals to support - which are the same as David's but with an addition of an proposal to support Open Access to Canadian research.


To register your support for these and/or other proposals, you need to register with the website and then, seconds later, you are able to comment and vote on these issues.

Why How What Now

At MPOW (my place of work), we are about to embark on another round of strategic planning. Before it starts, I wanted to work through my own thoughts on the matter before my simple brain gets too clouded with competing visions of our collective future.

I've been through enough of these planning exercises to know that the matter can be described in a fairly straight-forward manner: first you establish values and from these and an environmental scan, you (being either the management  or the entire organization) set the strategic priorities. Then, if you are keen, you determine what variables you will pay attention to when you get to the point when you are able reflect on the exercise and determine if you have been successful in the tactics that you established to achieve your priorities.

The best organizations are those who embed their values into such a clear mission that it informs all of the decisions made by that organization. Those are the findings of Jim Collins in his seminal book, Good to Great.

Making things simple is hard work. This is why so planning documents are long, ambiguous, and cumbersome. Instead of a core value, they come up with eight. Instead of one priority, they come up with 12.

Now I'm considering the possibility that it might just not be possible to distill the complexities of an organization into one core concept. But even if we are able to boil down the understanding of our work into something distilled, we can come up with powerful magic. Case in point: generations of work in libraries and library science can be described in 24 words, broken into 5 short, memorable laws.

Simon Sinek has tried to distill the lessons of great leaders into a model that he calls the golden circle: in the centre of the circle is why, the circle is how and the outer circle is what. Notice how this model maps quite nicely with the strategic planning process: why=values; how=strategies, what=tactics. And like Jim Collin's, Sinek's conclusion is that great companies and great leaders are those who are able to convey a clear why they do things.

In 2006, Dan Chudnov put down these thoughts in a post called, Because this is the business we've chosen:

If so, then what's the mission of the librarian in 2006? It's not an easy question. I've been stewing over it for two months, and think I've come up with the only answer that works for me. Yours might be different, but this describes what I'm here for, and the thread runs through every disparate bit of work I'm involved in one way or another... My professional mission as a librarian is this: Help people build their own libraries.

I too have been thinking about what's the mission of the librarian and I haven't come up with anything as clear and as powerful as Dan's statement. But I think I'm getting to something that is getting closer to where I would like such a statement to be. Here's what I've come up for our own strategic exercise:

Turn local problems into global solutions.

What I mean by this statement (and the fact that I feel that the statement needs some explanation tells me how weak it is as a mission statement) is that I would like to see libraries break out of the "special snowflake" syndrome and recognize that many small problems that we tackle in an ad hoc basis can be redrawn as larger problems faced by many readers and many libraries and thus, could be met with shareable solutions. It would remind us that we have a duty to make all of our work (research, software development, innovation) open and accessible to all for use, re-use, and re-mixing. It could make our work more meaningful and more important. It could inspire us to tackle important problems so that we can help others as we try to help ourselves.

The odds that this suggestion is going to survive the first stages of our planning process are slim to none.

But there is a good chance that this mission might end up as the work that I have chosen.

Go to Go to Hellman

One of my favourite blogs is Eric Hellman's Go To Hellman. I've been recommending his recent post on understanding eBook messes to my colleagues and for you, well, I think you should read his Are Public Libraries in a Death Spiral?

In this essay, Eric Hellman laments how library directors are opting to reduce library hours when faced with budget cuts. In one painfully honest sentence:

A library that reduces its hours is just training its public to meet information needs elsewhere, and that public isn't going to rush back. 

The alternative that stops the death spiral?

The public library of the future has to stop being about collections and start being about helping people and communities.

I love the clarity of that call.

What if the libraries who are facing cuts, decided to slash book and DVD budgets instead of hours?  What if, instead of asking their community to act as political lobbyists on their behalf, these libraries asked community groups and individuals to donate their own collections into the community library? Ironically, by asking the community to help the library, connections between the community and the library could even be strengthened. Building a library builds community.

We need the community to help the library so that the library can help the community.

Points do not a game make

In the last week or so, Jane McGonigal recommended a couple presentations that address point systems and games with both making the case that adding point system to an activity does NOT transform that activity into a game.

Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games from Sebastian Deterding tackles this issue directly and it sounds pretty much note perfect to me.

Amy Jo Kim makes the case in her presentation MetaGame Design: Reward Systems That Drive Engagement that point systems aren't games but meta-games. Furthermore, she suggests that that meta-game systems already exist in many of our offline activities in some obvious areas such as sports (e.g. martial arts) and also in other less obvious activities such as scouting  (heck - they even use badges!). Amy seems more optimistic than Sebastian that game elements can be integrated into UX and she outlines under what conditions where she believes where they work best.

The only library application that I know of that uses a point system is Bibliocommon's Community Credit system.

At this point, I believe that most of the libraries who have chosen to implement the system have only used the lists for draws of small prizes. But with a point system, meta-games for the library catalogue *are* possible. That is, if we choose to play.

What we can learn from Nike’s Persuasive Technology

[This is an older post of mine that was on a now-retired community blog called tech-ink.net.] 

The cover story of the latest issue of WIRED Magazine is dedicated to the success of the Nike+ sensor system. Nike+ allows users to track and share the time, speed, and distance of their runs using an iPod or Nike+ wristband. I can personally attest to the motivational power of such feedback. I ran fairly regularly when I used it but when my wristband sensor died, I used its untimely death as an excuse to stop running. (I’m waiting for a free replacement of a next gen model. The WIRED article fails to mention the high failure rate of the first batch of the system’s technology.)

My friend who runs marathons doesn’t need a Nike+ system to help her keep track of her runs – shes uses a pen and paper. But I, like most people, find that just this extra bit of little work feels like a huge burden. Like Nike, libraries need to strive to create systems that feel as effortless as possible (just one example: writing down a 20 digit call number isn’t hard but it feels hard).

I think there are other things we can distill from the Nike+ experience. Its worth noting how rich an experience Nike+ is able to generate for its 1.2 million users with just three data points.  We should consider what information we could capture to help motivate our students. Privacy advocates tells us that no one likes to be watched but that’s not exactly the case. “The gist of the idea is that people change their behavior – often for the better – when they are being observed (which is why it’s sometimes called the observer effect).”

Visual feedback helps reinforce positive behaviour. From the above WIRED article, “a 2001 study in the American Journal of Health Behavior showed that personalized feedback increased the effectiveness of everything from smoking-cessation to interventions for problem drinkers to exercise programs.” The Prius dashboard encourages better driving for high fuel efficiency. Recently there’s been some folks creating library dashboards but they haven’t been developed yet to provide individual user feedback of their borrowing or reading habits.

Video game designers are masters at presenting user data and creating rewards for user behaviour and Jane McGonigal thinks we can use what they’ve learned to improve our happiness and our future in the real world. In her IGDA Education Keynote 2009, McGonigal makes a number of book recommendations including Persuasive Technology by B. J. Fogg (2003) in order to learn more about the ramifications of using computers to try to change user behaviour. I’ve got the book on my lap right now at a page in which Fogg describes a hypothetical library-related example of persuasive technology:

Because she’s serious about school, Pamela runs an application on her device called Study Buddy. Here’s what the application does: As Pamela begins her evening study session, she launches the Study Buddy system and views the display. Study Buddy congratulates her for studying for the third time that day, meeting the goal she set at the beginning of the academic quarter. The device suggests that Pamela start her study session with a five-minute review of her biology vocabulary words, then read two chapters assigned for tomorrow’s sociology lecture.

As Pamela reviews biology, the Study Buddy screen shows a cluster of shapes, which represents her classmates who are currently studying. This motivates her to continue studying.
Later that evening, as Pamela wraps up her work, she’s curious about her mentor, Jean so she turns to Study Buddy for information. Jean also subscribes to the Study Buddy system and has invited Pamela into her “awareness group” (1). Pamela sees a symbol on the display that indicates that Jean in currently in one of the campus libraries. Jean is a good role model; she’s a senior who was recently admitted to a top graduate school. Being a study mentor means that Jean has agreed to let Pamela remotely view Jean’s studying habits. Using Study Buddy, Jean can send simple sounds and tactile cues such as vibration patterns to Pamela to encourage her to study.

I should note that I haven’t actually read the rest of this book. I’m hoping by posting writing about it I’ll shame motivate myself to do so.

My new fave search engine is Zotero

[This is an older post of mine that was on a now-retired community blog called tech-ink.net]

While Zotero – “the free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources” – isn’t exactly new, the program recently made the jump from 1.0 to 2.0 (beta) and with in doing so, has become social software and something more: it’s becoming a favourite search engine of mine.
But let me back it up a bit so I can say a little bit about custom or personalized search engines. I think they’re great and I wish more people would find them so they could enjoy their greatness too.

For example, I use LISZEN to search the library blogosphere and search my own homemade Google Custom Search Engine of OCUL libraries whenever I wonder if someone up the highway has some insight on the matter at hand. The University of Winnipeg uses a Custom Google Search Engine for its Canadian Art Library Guide, which I think is a brilliant application and breathes new life into the traditional library subject guide. And at one time, I entertained the notion that libraries could use Google Custom Search Engines as an alternative to the proprietary indexes that we offer, but after trying out The Economics Search Engine of 23 000 economics web sites  its pretty clear that this technology doesn’t scale. That’s too bad because I think we need a prominent index of the open access journal content out there.

OK. Back to Zotero.

I had waited to try out Zotero properly only after Zotero turned 2.0 because I was waiting for its automatic backup and synch features. And in the last handful of weeks, I’ve been slowly adding material into my Zotero library as a way to get a feel for the software. And then it just today that I realized that Zotero was indexing not just the metadata of the websites and journal articles I was planting into it – it was indexing the fulltext of the saved snapshots as well as and the text in the saved pdfs.

So, I plunked in the annual literature reviews dedicated to Library Instruction and Information Literacy from Reference Services Review and voila! I had myself my own little Information Literacy Research Index in my browser!

If you haven’t tried out Zotero yet, I wholeheartedly encourage you to do so. Zotero has some big plans they are working on including a partnership with the Internet Archive. That’s the project that really intrigues me. Not only will scholars be able to add material from the Internet Archive into their personal Zotero libraries but they will also be able to contribute their own digital work contributions into its commons.

When I think I of the future of libraries, I can’t help but think our future dovetailing into Zotero somehow.

Freebasing the University

(This is an expanded version this previous post that I'm submitting to Hacking the Academy)

If you ran the zoo, how would you redesign your presence on your university website?

I wasn't looking for the answer to this question but a couple weeks ago I was reading up on the nascent Open Government movement in Canada when I stumbled upon a website that immediately struck me with its grace and power. And ever since I've been repeatedly asking myself, "How can I make my library's website more like openparliament.ca?"

openparliament.ca is the volunteer, spare-time creation of Michael Mulley, who is the one man of a one-man web development shop based in Montreal, Quebec. He developed the site to make political information easier for citizens to find and follow as well as to encourage transparency in government. But it's not so much the information on the site that I want to draw attention to. Instead, I would like to praise how openparliament.ca so elegantly links politicians to the words they say, to the bills that they vote on, to the media coverage that they have received, and to the populations that they represent.

And so, I have been re-imaging The University as Parliament. Parliament has reports, bills, laws, committees, parties, departments, a House, a Senate, rules of order, Members of Parliament, transcripts and media coverage. The University has courses, programs, departments, faculties, a Senate, rules of order, research groups, committees, reports, research articles, and media coverage. They seem more alike than not.

So imagine your university website with a front page like openparliament.ca with a set of keywords taken from the day's seminars, speaking events, as well as nouns from research papers just published and even from course descriptions of classes being taught that day. Each event, paper or class would be automagically linked to the people involved with the work. These people would be, in turn, linked to all their various campus affiliations (faculties, committees, departments, research groups) as well as to the courses that they are presently teaching. Each course would be linked to a description to that course and would be further associated with matching library resources....

In short, if you had to build a university web presence from scratch, you would be mad not to build linked data into its foundation.

And yet, after looking and asking around I have only found one institution of higher education that describes its organization, the people of that organization and their work using the recommended RDF framework for computer mediated linking. At this point in time, this is understandable: Tim Berner's Lee campaign for linked data is only just over a year old and at this stage, the instructions on How to Publish Linked Data On The Web are still quite daunting to those not already familiar with the language of the Semantic Web. But there are new tools being developed to help build this new scaffolding of the Internet. At the moment, my tool of choice is Freebase, which aims to be the Wikipedia of linked data. My university, among many others, is already there as a Freebase topic.

Incidentally, I'm well aware that you might not be as enamored with the prospect of your university's website being replaced with a search box and keywords just like openparliament.ca  That's okay. In fact, your displeasure actually supports another reason why academic institutions need to embrace linked data: the information within our institutions need be able to be re-mixed and re-presented in a multitude of ways to fulfill the multitude of different research, teaching, institutional, and promotional needs that are currently not being met.

For example, I've been trying to figure out how to link library-licensed  research databases to particular courses being taught on campus and, more importantly, trying to determine how we can have links from course websites go to a set of relevant library resources. Making such connections are important because undergraduates lack an understanding of an academic discipline which makes their search for research (and even their search for research help) a difficult one. At the moment, it is near impossible to make such links because some faculty have their course material within course management systems, while other instructors have gone edupunk and have found their own ways to share and communicate with their students online. A publicly available linked data schema for our course catalogue would make my library-linking project possible because it would generate links that are not dependent on platforms.

"Public information should be meaningfully public, which today means shareable and computer-readable". That's from openparliament.ca today but it very well may be from our students, our surrounding communities, and perhaps even our politicians tomorrow.

University Websites, Linked Data and Giants

Finding out about what your member of Parliament is up to takes work - but web sites such as openparliament.ca have been wonderfully built and elegantly designed to make this work much, much easier.

Our library's web team has been recently activated and as chair, I've been casting around ideas on how we might re-build the foundation of our website as we move from a Lotus Notes Domino environment to a Drupal one. And the question that I keep coming back to is how can our website be more like openparliament.ca?

And so I've been re-imaging The University as Parliament. Parliament has bills, laws, committees, parties, departments, MPs, transcripts and media coverage. The University has courses, departments, committees, instructors, transcripts, research articles, and media coverage. Hmmm.. sounds somewhat similar.

So imagine your university website with a front page like openparliament.ca with the day's research and learning topics filling the page. Each topic would be associated with a class or research paper. Each paper or class would be associated with a researcher or instructor who would in tun be linked to all their various campus affiliations and the courses they are presently teaching. Each course would be associated with matching library resources...

If you had build a university website from scratch, it would be mad not to build linked data into its foundation.

But the trouble is, once I start browsing the Guides and Tutorials about Linked Data, I become so overwhelmed with the terminology of semantic linking and frightened of the enormity of the task before me that I promptly flee in terror.

So I am at a loss. I can see a conceptual structure that we can build our library website upon. I can see the opportunity to show others on campus (and on other campuses) what can be possible with linked, open data. Except I would much rather find a giant who's shoulders I can stand on so I see how this may be done.

But I have no giant. All I have is this handful of beans.

Reflections on #WILU2010 Re:learn

One of the largest concerns within Information Literacy (IL) is the matter of scalability. This is understandable if you hold that the mandate of IL means that the librarians of an academic institution are responsible to ensure that every student of that school should graduate with information literacy skills even when the librarians don't have an institutional mandate to teach those students.

So we're still trying to figure out how to reach more students with IL. Some are slowly integrating IL into the various curriculum on campus. Some are teaching faculty, teaching instructors and mentors so that they can pass on IL to their students on our behalf. Other schools are developing online tutorials and even games to reach the widest number of students, and some of them are doing this work reluctantly.

It was this reluctance that I picked up on at WILU 2010, as a number of presenters let the audience know that they were pursing an online IL strategy because budget cuts meant they had little option to do something face to face. Some people almost sounded apologetic about their online creations.

But it was also at WILU where I also saw signs of another means to address IL in a scalable manner. Instead of pursuing "one to many" avenues of teaching, one can see the start of "many to many" learning platforms.

Indeed, I very much enjoyed Dr. James Paul Gee's opening keynote address to WILU. While Dr. Gee spoke a little bit about games, the primary focus of his attention was online learning communities which he feels represents a new paradigm of learning that outperforms traditional classroom experiences.

I very much share Dr. Gee's enthusiasm for online learning communities having been part of a 10 week crash course in changing the world called Evoke. Scaling is actually also an issue with these new type of environments: within the first 24 hours of the Evoke, players submitted more than 2000 blog posts, videos and photos as evidence and in the first 15 days of the network, more than 10,500 players registered to play from more than 120 counties (slides 57,58).

But back to the conference. I did see other hopeful signs that many-to-many learning systems are starting to find a place within academia. There are more and more examples of courses and assignments that require students to publish their work so that they can learn from the peer's work and the assessment of their peers and not just their own experiences.

There was another example of the power of group learning spaces at WILU: the birds of a feather sessions. Not entirely unlike an unconference, attendees were asked to write down topics of interest and sit at designated tables where these topics would be discussed. I decided to sit at the table dedicated to addressing student motivations and there was a great conversation at the table that brought out a flurry of different ideas and perspectives on the topic, with a breadth and depth that is difficult to summarize

(On a somewhat related note, it appears that the summaries of the Birds of the Feather sessions are no longer on the WILU 2010 blog. That's too bad. I like the idea of making adding each conference session into a blog post so that speakers can add links and addendum as necessary and so that questions and conversations about the topic can continue even after the conference has passed. Actually what I would really love is if each conference I attended followed the template of the THAT conference in which each attendee was given their own blog - with the sum of each making up the conference site - as a means to facilitate sharing of ideas before, during and after the event.)

The power of that BoF session reminds me of the keynote address at WILU 2007 done by Rick Salutin in which he surprised me with his preference for the complex and ever shifting conversations of our oral tradition over the paucity and mechanical tyranny of the written word.

And isn't this what is a conference is or should be: a means to host conversations at both large and small scales?

Reflections on #WILU2010 Re:design

On Friday I returned from attending my second WILU conference. It was a well-hosted event and I thank the organizers for the experience.

When I introduced my own talk at WILU, I stressed that my opinions tend to be strongly stated but they are not necessarily strongly held. I want to repeat this disclaimer as I share some of the reflections of what I've learned from the three-day conference.

I tend to divide work in Information Literacy (IL) into two broad camps. The first camp spends their efforts directing students to use library websites, research guides and indexes for approved sources to meet their research needs. The second camp opts to instead teach students how to recognize sources that they might find and how they might fit these into their own research work.

It's my perception that most of our profession's IL work falls in the first camp and most of the sessions that are in the program of WILU 2010 fell in this category.

And, if you know me at all, its shouldn't surprise you that I place myself in that other camp.

All my favourite WILU talks have all come from this second perspective: Rochelle Mazar's Making Coursework Matter, Joel Burkholder's The Information Seeking Habits of Students: Are They Really That Bad?, and John Willinsky's keynote address come to mind. And my favourite talk from WILU 2010 also is from this perspective: Joel Burkholder's (again!) Sources as Social Acts: Using Genre Theory to Transform Information Literacy Instruction.

For myself, the perspective that IL should not preoccupy itself with indexes that only academic libraries can afford, allows librarians to fully pursue the end goals of the Open Access movement and of supporting lifelong learning in our students, without contradiction.

More reflections later. I think about the notion of 'scaling'...