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| | Do we have the time?Published on 20100826 Do we librarians have time to meet our library users in person? All of them? There are close to one library staff members per 1000 inhabitants in Denmark and in Finland. Most probably this is among the highest rate - many countries only have half as many or less. These two countries also have, to my knowledge, among the highest lending and visiting figures in the world. Staff matters! Assuming there is one library employee per 2000 inhabitants (like in Sweden and slightly less in UK) and that 50% of them have public contact leaves us with one public staff member per 4000 inhabitants. Working at the most 250 days and hopefully meeting about half of the population this means that every public staff member on a yearly basis meets about eight (8) new persons per day. Every one of them longing for and expecting a great experience! Besides meeting new customers we as library employees of course need time for our regular duties of selecting, collecting and presenting our stocks and to take good care of all of our patrons. The interesting point here I think is how to meet the users. What means do we have? One possible valuable way of contact is the web, the virtual path. Many libraries are doing a great job in presenting media on the web by lists, tips and blog articles. With interactive web communication there is room for reactions to a blog article via the comment facility. With due respect and careful “listening” to the comments and answering them thoughtfully (without overdoing it of course) the user will get an impression of the library as a valuable service point of, for example, literary thought sharing. A good thing here is that people who are not participating in the dialogue can have a good experience reading it. I think, and this could be important, that if I as a library user know that the person in dialogue with me is locally employed it will enhance my feelings for the local library and it will add to my acceptance for the library as a tax funded institution. Where will this thinking leave the centrally driven library web sites with no clear affiliation with the local library? An example is the new very nice central children’s site in Denmark (Palles Gavebod) which seems to me to be the library point for the children to visit. 80 librarians from different parts of Denmark will contribute their time to the site. From my point of view the Danish site has some really good stuff and looks really attractive. It is a good thing that the user needs a local library account to register. Even so, I do miss the possibility of having all the content (and design ideas?) available to reuse/mashup locally if the library chooses to. That will put the local library forwards in the dialogue with the end user. This would give the local library a great advantage. It would tie bonds with the local public and it would cultivate a locally based creative common ground for the library and the community in the local municipality. There is, I think, an underestimation of the power of local interactivity. There are many paths to explore. One nice example is the library (Oak Park outside Chicago with Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright references) that arranges book clubs at the local cafés and reflects the discussions on the net. It has given that library a lot of credit locally (and made them famous nationally but that is another story). Is there a future for centralized library efforts to develop services for the local community? This will be effort consuming but will hold the advantage of the local presence. Do we perhaps prefer the synergy of our joined library forces to efficiently be presented in strong national web sites?
The bad and the good - managing the virtual worldPublished on 2010-06-07 Now and then you try all the fantastic possibilities on the net. Anything new to explore? Things you didn´t find last time could magically pop up the next. I do this quite often to see changes in service levels, new search facilities and so on. Haven´t tried Google Books for a time i gave it a go the other day and naturally (?!) I searched for something I was involved in. A report published under it´s title "En gång invandrare, alltid invandrare?". There is no author on the title page. I decided it to be that way, but I worked on it and wrote it all under the beautiful mentorship of my then boss Tove Persson and with the support of my collegue back then Barbro Roos (and with the help of a lot of other people too of course). Well, imagine my surprise when the report was in Google Books but with an author! I know that this person wrote a lengthy and mostly very positive review. She was, though, not at all involved in the project. Irritating, isn´t it! The "definitive" critical blog on Google Books metadata; http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701 . Now to the positive. Having a Gmail account on the computer i was working on I was automatically logged in to Google Books as a confirmed user. I used this to write a "review" where I commented on the wrong metadata. This worked smoothly and fine. A good lesson on "Single Sign On" possibilities. Whatever we think of Google things like this enhances the internet experience. Solutions like this should be and is on it´s way in to our products (for example, NemLogin, the danish variety of the international SAML 2.0 standard is now part of the Arena product). Anyway, should I sue Google Books? :). Some do http://www.pcworld.com/article/197618/woman_sues_google_for_bad_directions.html
When indexes are not enoughPublished on 20100430 At the Computers in Libraries conference in April two trends seemed important to me. · Digital Literacy · Federated Index Digital literacy is according to Wikipedia “the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology”. Libraries have for a long time trained and supported their communities with these skills but having “Digital Literacy” on the same importance level as “Literacy” it will surely for the libraries mean changes in strategies, policies and the overall efforts. It will start an explosion of planned and structured activities when the goals are formulated in ways of having the whole community being able to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology. That is somewhat undermining the other trend “Federated Index”. A novelty last year, a trend this year. A Federated Index, in opposite to “federated search”, collects all possible metadata beforehand and indexes it for the one point of search purpose. Ebsco Discovery, Summons and Primo Central are examples of this. Axiell Arena has the possibility to do the same. A “One stop shop” federated index is of course an attractive model. “Giving up” your local data to central indexing machines (WorldCat is another example) you lose possibilities. Possibilities to explore, interact, enrich, collaborate, mash up, “serendip” with your data. That is if you fully give it up. Go for the option of the smartness of the one stop shop federated index. You use it when know exactly what you want and that media it is not available to you physically/electronically from your own library. When keeping the power of your data locally you can use it with your preferred tools to electronically build your site where your community enjoys a rich end user experience combined with the full opportunity for you and the community to exploit the digital literacy path together. Note: See more about "Federated index" in the blog article from 20090423.
The syndication of mePublished on 2010-03-23 “Self expression is the new entertainment” said Arianna Huffington from Huffington Post at the O´Reilly Publishing conference a month ago. I was there, and now and then this sentence comes to mind. She said it as a positive comment on why we are abandoning our TV sets (are we?) and instead pour our selves in to social media. She could have chosen the word “communication”. She could have chosen “interactivity” … or “community engagement” or …. She did not. She chose “self expression”. I think she is right, though, we are living in a time where individualism is the haute couture and media time is the measure of success. Arianna surely meant the techniques which are used in so called “social media” like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace. In my mind internet activity like forums and chat are social two way communication tools the structures of which “force
Will the Publishing Industry SurvivePublished on 20100301 You can add any video to YouTube, any photo to Flickr, any message to Twitter/Facebook, any app to App Store and any song to MySpace. The general implication is that anyone who wants to will find your stuff. So why should anyone with a good bunch of words in the shape of a novel want to loose up to perhaps 90% of an income to agents and publishers? Why not publish your own novel on the net and thereby get rid of all middlemen. I went to the O´Reilly Conference TOC, Tools of Change for Publishing, to learn what publishers say about the new instant virtual world. What do they see as threats or/and challenges. Especially now in the time of the second coming of the e-book. The publishers seem to be in the same – hopefully creative - confusion as libraries. “Everybody knows” that there is a change going on but the direction, the means, the methods and actions are not clear. In times of change it is a good idea to once in a while take a step back and view and review the battlefield before you take action. As somebody said; “being too early is being wrong”. In order to have any progress you of course have to try and break out from what you have always been doing but you want to keep those try outs within a controlled budget. That is, if you can´t fool some venture capitalists. This kind of conference gives the opportunity to review what is happening. The main impression from the conference is that there are a lot of things going on but the conclusions are not yet in place. - What about the impact of e-books and e-book readers - What about DRM - What about learning from the music industry - What about digital storytelling - What about interactivity - What about using Twitter as a marketing tool - What about pricing models - What about the impact of mobiles The best about the conference was that people have tried all of this and could tell about their experiences. Maybe some of the attending publishers could build their decisions on these experiences so we will be closing in on the conclusions? I will here choose to tell about Pragmatic Programmers, LLC http://www.pragprog.com/, two programmers who decided to publish books without any experience in publishing. They modelled a tagged input form for their authors which they call PML (something like simple xml). They then built software which they and their authors could use to process the document to be seen in PDF (and other formats) including multimedia material. The build process from document to a published electronic book is something like 30-60 seconds. All of this happens in the “cloud” so no worries about machine maintenance. They often choose to publish a “beta” of the text to get feedback from the readers. The readers seem happy to buy an unfinished book and engage in the process to make it as good as possible. But, of course, this is niche literature. The authors get 50% back of all income related to the book and they have authors with an income of 400 000$ (most have a lot less). The books have the increasingly popular “Social DRM”. At the bottom of the page the buyers name is imprinted. All the work around the virtual publishing space including the web shop is in the hands of the company. It is not until they decide to print the book that stores like Amazon get involved. No marketing has up till now been needed. They have been around for 5 or 6 years and I got the impression from what I described that they have chosen some radical steps which lowered their publishing costs substantially compared to traditional publishing houses. They refer their way of thinking and the processes to the software development theory of “agile development”. This is, by the way, also used in the Axiell Arena development.
E-media on new devicesPublished on 2009-12-19 There is a lot of buzz surrounding e-book media today (last one was around 2000-2002). This is because the tools for reading has evolved, especially the e-ink based like Kindle and Sony e-reader. Some of the main obstacles 7-9 years ago was screen readability, battery life and media availability. These have been addressed with the new offerings. Well, Kindle isn´t that new but it hasn´t been available in Europe until this autumn. One which looks really good is Nook, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/index.asp, with 1 million titles and with a more open approach than Kindle. You can lend books and you can read them on other devices than Nook. Unfortunately, it is not (yet) available for non US customers. We should remember that we have over 1 million full text books available for free at http://www.openlibrary.org . Though not, yet, in a format that to my knowledge suits your cell phone or e-book reader. A flashy presentation for magazine reading http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntyXvLnxyXk An alternative which does a good presentation of what values to incorporate http://www.bonnier.com/en/content/digital-magazines-bonnier-mag-prototype The interesting stuff is the demonstration of how it could work. You could (should be able) to use your laptop, your smart phone or your tablet pc. None of the examples are, though, totally convincing in how you know to choose the next view. Here´s a fine example of a reliable alternative http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVMnmTFxAjA
The GGG or Puff, is the magic gone? - The Semantic Web on Online International, LondonPublished on 2009-12-15 GGG is Tim Berners-Lee’s acronym for Giant Global Graph, an expression for the semantic web which can be seen as the step that follows WWW. All data on the Internet related via agreed metadata schemas would make it possible using machines to extract new knowledge. This will benefit everything from advanced research to the “best” method to cook Paneer Palak (Indian cheese and spinach). We know that html is a presentation markup, xml a definition markup and RDF, RDF schemas, tell us about the content of the document with the aim of identifying resources. It is done by expressing the relationship of entities. In practice RDF embeds xml in a html presentation. Most of us do not have to understand exactly how this is done. As librarians and being part of the information society we must however evaluate this in respect to our services. How can this add to a better experience? Content does not matter if we do not get it. Here we have a method which implies that not only will we get it, it will also extract the “most relevant” chunks and abstract new levels of information. This new information will be adapted to the context that I am based in when making my enquiry. And even better, I do not express an enquiry, I get serviced just by moving around on the web. I get efficient information on levels that I did not know I could comprehend. On a basic level it is “just” all things connected via relationships (not “simple” links). An example: If you want to buy the book “Sirk on Sirk: interviews with Jon Halliday”* and you fill in a form in one service on the web, theoretically all buying and selling services on the web would thereby know about your wish and could address you with an offer. To make this happen all services need to have the same metadata descriptive framework and there need to be applications doing the connectivity and keeping account of the relationships. Tim Berners-Lee described that all of the Internet wouId be like one database. If we have this then it would also be possible, on the next level, to make calculations on the content and the relationships to extract new information. With these algorithms we would then have the semantic web. One of the main tracks of Online Information in London this December dealt with the semantic web. Most of it was about how it worked and the “fact” that it is the next thing to come. Today on conferences like this we also get practical evidence of that it is, in reality, working. This is done in smaller and larger projects. I may be wrong, and to be frank I am not competent enough to make a real judgement, but as I understand it, it seems that the more limited in scope the project is the easier it is to implement the semantic metadata logic and get results out of it. One presenter, Paul Sonderegger from Endeca, did mention some questioning about the semantic web and said that machines are able to calculate evidence but you need people to judge relevance. Clay Shirky (who Paul mentioned) wrote an interesting article about the semantic web. If I paraphrase him with the example above we will have the following: Boris wants to buy Sirk on Sirk: interviews with Jon Halliday, which gives Boris is interested in books by Jon Halliday Jon Halliday has written a book on Mao People interested in Mao are interested in communism Boris is interested in communism (Boris is a communist) Of course this is far-fetched. But not for a machine building relations on schematic metadata. We see here one of the challenges for the semantic web, the integrity question. Please read the article by Shirky, it is interesting. Maybe the semantic web should be questioned as a solution for the whole web and should instead, as it is now, be used in clearly defined areas. Semantic technology? In the product BookDesire qualitative subjective metadata is added to the catalogue record (also q data) to make it possible to refine the search for a good book. With advanced algorithms on the relationships we will find the book which is closest to our wishes. I want a very long mystery book about the rural eighteenth century with a lot of humour and love. There is none with a lot of love so instead the product will suggest a novel with some love as the first alternative. This service would have been easier to build with a filtering technique but that would not have given me a result. Agreed and defined qualitative metadata cooperates via algorithms. This is value based semantics and an example of that it can actually work. So we, and others, will continue to experiment and implement technologies handling relationships of metadata. A very foreseeable thing to do for a library technology vendor! We would like to discuss areas and projects that you believe will have a valuable impact. *Douglas Sirk was a very fine director whose movies ( I´ve seen a dozen) are no less than a fantastic enjoyment. Comment on “Puff, is the magic gone”: “Puff the magic dragon” was a Peter, Paul and Mary hit which was analyzed beyond proportion. I am just playing around with the notion that the semantic web hype maybe is out of proportion. Work in projects and time will tell.
In search of open solutionsPublished on 2009-10-09 In search of open solutions Libraries in the world are in the maelstrom of internet and technology development. Libraries are intermediating media and information. Libraries in many part of the world are in touch with the majority of the population of the society. There is a responsibility, a mission, to keep and develop this advantageous status. Being in contact with the current trends is important so the libraries can reach the users in their preferred technology and choice of communication. As providers of IT-technology to the libraries vendors should be in the forefront of the technology development. In the buzz of development there are three extremely important things not to be missed - Customer focus - Long term relationship - Long term value Customer focus It is said that infrastructure companies (like energy and communication providers) have this focus order 1. Own Organization. 2. Product. 3. Customer And it is said that for example shoe retailers have the opposite 1. Customer 2. Product. 3. Own Organization Of course the electricity providing company does want to prioritize their customers. But if their organization/infrastructure brakes down no one will be happy. They are extremely aware of this. If not carefully managed this priority order, if enhanced, can lead to an alienation of the customer. In this kind of companies you have to be very aware of your customers even when you are burden with infrastructural calamities. Companies who have a relatively strong (or true monopolistic, like state owned) situation in a country could be in a similar situation. These companies should be aware because they too risk losing the important focus on the customers. Do not ever take your customers for granted. For example, carefully following our contracted Axiell Arena customers is crucial. We are in constant dialogue with our potential customers regarding their needs. We had hundreds of discussions with customers and customer groups before starting to develop. We are expecting and initiating reference groups and forums for Axiell Arena. A community driven development will be in effect. One strong conclusion from our initial discussions is that it is important that our organization and products accommodate the customers different needs. Looking at Tyresö, Norrköping and Lerum it seems that this works but we need to be careful not losing this touch and to continue further on this path. The long term relationship When developing a requested feature you are always counting on the ROI (return of investment). How much effort is put in to make the feature and what is the gain. There is a difference (normally) between a consultancy company and a product development company. When a customer is requesting and paying for a feature from a consultant the consultant will produce on specification. Then both parties will be happy. Or will they? Did the request cover - Variations in use? - Variations of access (other features and applications cooperating)? - Upgrading efficiency (especially in connection with other features and applications)? - Development potential (is it built to be easily enhanced)? - Maintenance? As a product development company like ours we have to take all this in to account. Sometimes we choose not/miss to/cannot go all the way in all aspects – but it is a part of the game. We are discussing this with our customers because we constantly need to match these criteria with the needs. Long term value Developing an application or a feature in an application it is important to calculate the possibilities of the feature. Eventually enhancing the functionality will cost more in developing expenses. First thing is always to ask the customer/s – would they like to have this extra flexibility/advantage. Is it a good thing? One example of this thinking is the possibilities of a web portal like Axiell Arena to interact with external services. The easiest procedure is to code on prescription. This service we want like this and this service we want to connect to by …. and so on. These services will be (hard) coded in to the application. Any changes will be an additional cost the customer. It could for example be changes of the service, the need for an exchange of service or adding a service. We chose not to go “simple”. We developed three different features, all three fully customable by the customer. 1. Automatic search Link any search or any record in Axiell Arena to any web site. This function searches and presents the hit list or record from the external site automatically. Present as many alternatives as you like to your end users. Change any alternative in a minute. You can have as many as you like on any page with a hit list or record view. 2. Automatic embedding Embed an external website with its answers in a window at your Axiell Arena site automatically. Change it in a minute. You can have as many as you like on any page with a hit list or record view. 3. Automatic data inclusion Embed data, normally XML formatted, from an external web site automatically on any page in Axiell Arena with a hit list or record view. You can have as many as you like. This is a little trickier to get going because you normally want to design the data from the external site so you need a so called XSL per service. We will deliver some examples and help with others. Delivering a product like this the customer knows that when they have this functionality in place the can connect, include and embed any adequate external service. At no additional cost. Even the third alternative, “Automatic data inclusion”, can be very cost effective when sharing the service specific information between libraries. This is long term value. We are, of course, able to and will sometimes take the short cut. Mainly because of timing issues. Developing open solutions to specific needs as in the example above will establish flexible products which can be used over time at a controlled cost. We will of course evaluate this line of thinking with our customers all along. The libraries are our customers. Our only customers really. We will strive to, in dialogue, to find the right ways. Keep us informed of your opinions!
Accessibility and Usability – can we combine the easiness of Google with the functionality of Amazon?Published on 2009-09-30 To start with, Amazon and Google do not follow the WCAG 1.0 Accessibility guidelines according to the simple tests I tried. When you deal with search engines (like this two), it can get even more complicated when you do a search. I count library OPACs and library portals as search engines here. You need to have a tool where you can analyze a hit list page after you done a search. If you use a tool in which you only put in the starting page you will probably not get adequate results in these kinds of web applications. That is because these sites are interactive applications and not restricted to static pages. Tools like Cynthia and Wave can do a test on a specific page. Of course you need to be very careful analyzing the results from this kind of tools. Are they up to date? Are they WCAG1.0 or WCAG2.0 compliant? Are their alerts/warnings adequate for the screen (-reading) tools your users have. You also have to be aware that automated testing does not cover all accessibility guidelines. A number still require manual testing to be performed. With these tools I also tried the new web/discovery portals from library vendors on the Swedish market and did not find anyone who managed to be alert and error free. The Bibliotek24 had a clean error report in Wave (there were some alerts) but failed in Cynthia. This is a service which just works with search and hits. No interaction except search. No “fancy” 2.0 stuff. All others (tested) had a lot of warnings/alerts and all had some errors. So apparently when our company is saying that we will deliver WCAG AA (priority 2) level on our Arena web platform in our November version (this year!) it seems to be a bolder statement than I first thought. We do have the experience though with OPAC installations in UK which are delivered to meet the WCAG AA. These UK OPACs are functionally rich platforms. The new web/discovery portals, like Arena, which interest the libraries today are, if flexible enough, of course another kind of challenge. And if you like to add flash, flair and tingle-tangle to the already multi functional possibilities you need to be careful about it so that it will not disturb the main services (you could present alternative pages). When you as a vendor deliver a product with a lot of flexibility it of course makes it easy for the customer to introduce non compliant functions/pages. It is then up to the customer to value the need and the accessibility compliance. In Axiell we are since some time executing usability tests on Arena. We are noticing that a lot of the test persons would like to have “cleaner” pages in the test situation. When e g looking at the Google site you are impressed by how simple and elegant it does it’s work. But then Google is a two step task procedure. Google are abandoning, naturally, the user as soon as it comes to the real content. But even Google are introducing more functionality by adding small links to every search hit. They are still a two click service but with some outreaching opportunities. Amazon is another story, but then also an interactive, multi rich and customer inclusive web site. So do people manage this kind of site? Well, apparently. After some tough starting years Amazon is a profitable site with a supposedly growing customer base. Combining the elegant solution in Google with the richness of Amazon is of course an almost impossible task but with continuing usability tests in a constant dialogue with our customers we will improve the solution over time. You are our partners and judges in this.
Is Arena a social web? Part 1Published on 2009-07-14 Wikipedia: The Social Web is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web. I have discussed with and listen to many librarians and web professionals and I still do not have the whole picture, but here some of my thoughts on the subject.
The basic social needs could be divided in
I think that it is all a mix of good things, otherwise it would not have been that successful in establishing itself as a concept, both technically and up till now strongly addressed as lucrative.
If you need some technical or graphical and whatever assistance you can use professional help in the community but there are maybe also volunteers for some. I heard of one library using volunteers to check scanned materials. Another one gets volunteer help with their posters (virtual and on paper).
Is Arena a social web? Part 2Published on 2009-07-16 Some social web representations, social interactivity on the net, from my point of view:
Most of the above functions can be hosted by library web pages and even included in products like Axiell Arena. The advantage of that are the connections between the user account, the library media and the social web techniques. Solutions like Arena can make it easy for the user to reach their library material, their own virtual media shelf, tag a book and add a comment in a book circle in the same account name (login) and at the same time have access to all media comments from the whole country. There is, for now, no competition between Arena (and similar products) and for example Facebook. The vendors can make apps for showing Arena functions in a Facebook context but Facebook apps in that way are, to my understanding, not very popular in Facebook of today. There is a possibility that venture capitalists now will be more restrictive with investments until more thorough research/best practice has proven otherwise. We will probably soon see some movement regarding the business ideas of Facebook and Twitter. Well, to some statements then, conclusions if you like:
And your opinions?
Cell phones and something about Scandinavian Literature (Computers in Libraries conference 2009:3)Published on 2009-04-23 The cell phones are taking over but the concept of the book is still kicking. By one estimate the cell phone activity on the internet will trump the pc:s by 2020. The apps for the I-phone and for the Google Android platform are exploding. There are at least 25 000! And 2400 apps which have something to do with books!! And these platforms have not been out there for long. Megan Fox’s (Simmons College Library) presentation about cell phones demonstrates a new world out there evolving the last year, the last months, especially with these new technologies. She talked wind sensitivity apps (blow a kiss!), accelerometer apps, image identifiers like http://snaptell.com/ (possibility: send the book image to the store/library and get automatically price or loans status), compass mode (Android) and maybe the “worst” app: The Librarian app (voice level checker). Having Bio. (biography.com) and Britannica available via the phone is now a natural thing. There are still some work to be done to have a library system app in full bloom available but e g III and Axiell have versions in different varieties (please try this one http://m.bookdesire.se/lsb). The mobile site builder – On the site MobiSiteGalore you can build mobile web pages and apps for free. “Most Innovative Enterprise Mobile Internet Application” in 2008. And a last tip: Try searchcloud.net where you decide on the relative importance of every search word (from Mary Ellen Bates presentation). And a last notice: Picking up a bookmark at Kramerbooks&afterwords I read the recommendation for the two books from Scandinavia: Stieg Larssons The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo “Swedish financial thriller (what?) with serial killing, cyberpunks, bumping sex, snow and a zillion plotlines. Masterful” Morten Ramslands Doghead “Three generations of a Norwegian-Danish clan. Full of angst, booze, retardation, and tattooed phalluses. Very funny.” We do write some interesting novels in Scandinavia …
Federated index, Flickr Commons, Open Source and Graffiti (Computers in Libraries conference 2009:2)Published on 2009-04-23 Federated search is dead, long live the Federated index. The Elin product from Lund University, the Summa project in Århus statsbibliotek and the Axiell Arena product has the possibility to index different sources, not only the ILS catalogue. Building on this technology Serial Solutions and Ebsco now are working on a new kind of product, Summons respectively Discovery Service, where you change from searching different databases to include these databases in one single index. Then huge connector databases will be obsolete. In theory anyway. If this kind of a mega index covers the most will it then be good enough with a linked search to the rest of my sources, databases? Those sources which cannot be indexed by this "Federated Index" products because it is too expensive, to inefficient or lacks the “local touch”. It will be very interesting to see a combination of this kind of resource combined with a locally driven and locally populated service with user interactivity (like Arena). Proprietary image sites are dead, long live Flickr Commons. The deposits are still there and available with the full quality of the files but the exposition, their “shopping window” is in Flickr. It started a year ago with Library of Congress and now even a Swedish institute is on track (Swedish National Heritage Board). One of the big advantages, besides the “window”, is the community involvement where people can enhance the information about the pictures. Open Source Software is not dying, but not flourishing either. Marshall Breeding in his speech about the “Global Library Automation Scene” still sees OSS as a trend if not as strong as it seemed a year before. API:s are essential and more in focus than e g changing the ILS. Breeding sees cooperation (consortia etc) as a strong trend, gaining economy and efficiency. A facet of that; SaaS (Software as a Service) is coming strong. Buy a service via the net, do not bother about hardware and software. Breeding mentioned SaaS even in conjunction with OSS. On a direct question from me about this “contradiction” he answered that libraries usually are not “tampering with the code” but want freedom in deciding on the vendor. As I have understood it a lot of libraries in US who have chosen OSS either had no ILS before or have been very displeased with the development and possibilities of their OPACs. I think that we need a lot of attention from vendors (like us) on the API:s breeding mentioned.. Please make some graffiti! The Darien Library has writeable (and erasable) glass walls as part of their interior architecture in the youth department. Appreciated by teenagers who among other things use it for school work. The library has some restrictions of the use but it seems to work very well. Why not use this idea in physical 24/7 libraries? Leave a question on the wall, it will be answered till the next day, by the staff or other visitors. Reversing the virtual world by making a physical representation? Or(/and) even, let the writable glass wall show the virtual bulletin board.
Humans are not binary (Computers in Libraries conference 2009:1)Published on 2009-04-23 “Second Life is dead” has been a theme for a year now. I went to a session to see if there is any life kicking in the Library Second Life world. This session did nothing to shed any light in this matter. Ambitious and interesting work is still being done, see http://infoisland.org/ but I cannot see that this area is gaining any more substantial ground among libraries. The hype seems to be over. It’s dead: http://gawker.com/5158190/the-end-of-second-life. It’s alive: http://www.ioltechnology.co.za/article_page.php?iArticleId=4890728&iSectionId=2883. Gartner predicted a breakthrough for 3-d worlds by 2011, not necessarily in SL though. From my point of view the Second Life interface is not, for most people, comfortable and efficient enough to get a reasonable output for their efforts. Also the image of the whole thing is, in my view, not that attractive. Not yet anyway. However, a sites appearance has not bothered Amazon and Facebook users … Facebook applications are dead – (not talking core Facebook here. 200 million active users!). There seems to be an agreement on that Facebook applications from Libraries are not popular. Library applications features are not “Facebookish”. Joseph Ryan from NCSU confirmed this by telling that an average Library App has 15 users per month … He conducted a research on a newly developed Courses application, a university courses collaboration platform with social connectivity. The reaction – “cool, but why Facebook”? There seems to be negativism on Facebook apps in general . There is a manual individual “Block this app” function in Facebook, but automatic blocking facilities are being built, like http://tech.karbassi.com/2007/09/19/automatically-block-facebook-applications/ (I take no credit or blame for this). The digital “native” is dead - Lee Rainie in his keynote pointed out that there are not only digital “natives” and digital “immigrants”, the picture is more diverse. The findings are from a Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.I take it that we are oversimplifying the internet users when dividing them in two-three groups. And it is often irrelevant. The groups in the survey have a 7- 14% share. The divisions in two main groups and in 5 sub groups respectively: Internet and mobile users
Stationary Internet users
The importance of libraries in a recessionPublished on 2009-03-31 This blog entry follows on naturally from the one below by my colleague, Boris, on the value of libraries. I have just come across an article from the back issues of the Library Review which highlights the fact that in the Great Depression of the 1930s public libraries were founded in 48 of the 50 US states. It concludes that this was not due to federal intervention or funding but to local communities deciding that libraries had an important social role to play. Of course, we are better off than the citizens of the 1930s in many respects, not least because public libraries are, in most countries, funded under statute but few would argue that they are not operating under severe budgetary constraints. It is perhaps precisely now in this current harsh economic climate that they ought to be receiving additional investment, not being asked for budget cuts. Libraries are a relatively cheap public service and are well placed to serve their communities and, critically, their communities are perhaps more in need of them than at any other time since the 30s. Reference: The American public library during the Great Depression, by Charles A. Seavey. Library Review, 2003, vol. 52, issue 8, pages 373-378
The value of libraries and a library heroinePublished on 2009-02-09 The value of Libraries It is in some investigations discussed the value of libraries. Most of these come to the figures of 3-6$ return on an invested dollar. These are some commonly discussed advantages of libraries:
• Work force development • Small business support • The equalization of democracy • The power of place In these five areas there really are no competitors, at all. The libraries are prone, though, to prove this in all the ways they can. The economy is overall being more transparent and business and organisations are challenged in many ways when the “bottom line” kicks in. The libraries need to find the means of showing that the above statements are in effect . Having been to three different conferences at the end of last year, PLIN in Copenhagen, Axiell Nordic Symposium in Nacka and London Online, I looked for the different perspective which could accomplish the above 5 criterias. Even if we inside the library world “know” that we work on all these scenes it is obvious that a lot of the outside world look upon the libraries as book containers. And maybe the standard library interior does not oppose this view, on the contrary. Do we need a radical approach to have the experience library and even go beyond the “experiments” of the Cerritos and Delft libraries? The Idea stores? Do we need a radical change of jobs to be the real communicative virtual library? More reading: The report “Making Cities stronger” (embracing four of the above statements).
The web is the libraries arena – but maybe only if the echo rings truePublished on 2008-09-24 The web is the libraries arena – but maybe only if the echo rings true We want library activities to be noticed. What needs to be done? Libraries now has a respectful recognition of the free redistribution of selected material. Is that enough in a future world? If libraries want to make a change in the attitude of people most surely they have to make some changes? There is an ongoing debate about this. It could be necessary for libraries to reorganise their work forces, localities and programs in the coming years, among other things echoing their future work on the web. Is it e g necessary for the library to reserve at least 30 % of the work force for web activities and 20% for program activities to make a real change? And will this make things happen? Which is our role if we as system builders want to support this kind of thinking? We think we need new web orientated systems with open interfaces to the LMS:s. When we, as we do now, are building comprehensive library system API:s for web platforms we face a lot of challenges. You realize that a metadata box on top of the old system is not enough if the libraries need a seamless integration of all the virtual presence in their systems. Is this kind of API:s (broadest scope on the market?) what the libraries need? We at least think so. If the libraries want their competence, their users’ power and the system’s functionality to merge, in one for-all-parties beneficial creative scene, we think this is the path to tread. The power lies in new scenarios where the users’ suggestions form a base for another user forum which is echoed in a search for the same theme in the catalogue. The librarian’s suggestions of a good book in a theme will show up in a search for the title. The archivist’s carefully chosen metadata is picked up by a search for local history. The football fan’s search for local football literature also gives references to the local team and a telephone number. Opening the web site of the City Environmental Office offers new EU reports on relevant environmental issues. The home users have the (library) services they want on their desktop. The traditional searches have all the lipstick you can imagine plus facets, relevance rating etc. We however go on from there. E g we work on tags by making them context controlled, at times an explorative functionality, at times more like a drill down instrument, refining your search. We will work with all possible metadata in a city or university and we will work with the relevant information “objects”, including full text. From our side we will start by bringing forward the API:s and a corresponding full web site solution for six library systems this year. Of course there will be a need for some adjustments and a lot of further development but we are sure it is the right way to go. This we think will be a platform for us and others for many years to come. And your opinions on this are much appreciated because you are the ones who are going to use it!
Openness and the power over softwarePublished on 2008-07-15 Open source at your desktop was very in some 5 years ago with e g the city of - Functionality (enhanced over time)
Green ITPublished on 2008-07-09 Green is the colour of hope - Axiell is doing something about it!
The fashion world enters the librariesPublished on 2008-06-23 Normally you don’t associate the fashion world with being a librarian, but this is actually the case in the Vice Magazine, which has made an article about Swedish librarians and their fashion. Five different librarians are portrayed in the journal with pictures, description of their clothes and why they find it hype to be a librarian.
Is there such a thing as a lib tech guru?Published on 2008-04-22 I’m hesitant about how fashionable the now popular title “Evangelist” really is. In my mind, harshly put, an evangelist is a prejudiced, narrow minded, message driven, company edged fan boy. Do I think of Matthew, Mark. Luke and John? In a way, yes. But, of course, I am trying to make a point. Guru, for me is maybe more of an appropriate "title" of somebody who has the relative knowledge to be an authority of foresight in their area. Wikipedia: “In a further Western metaphorical extension, guru is used to refer to a person who has authority because of his or her perceived secular knowledge or skills.” I do not think Marshall Breeding would present himself as a library technology guru but in my mind he is among the strongest contestants. At the 2008 Computer in Libraries Conference he summarized the necessary development of the libraries “public interfaces” (his expression): - Decoupling of the front end interface from the backend - A single point of entry of services offered by the library - Print and electronic resources - Metadata and fulltext - Local and remote (metadata) - Relevancy ranked results (users expect the “right” stuff first) - Facets, clusters, for narrowing the search - Query enhancement (“Did you mean?”) - Suggested related results (similar titles) - Locally created content - User-contributed content - Navigation “bread crumbs” - Single sign-on and personalization options We will come back on the “Locally created content “ in a blog close to you. Read more at http://www.librarytechnology.org/
No romance and a lot of humourPublished on 2008-04-21 This is about a coming product, BookDesire, so you know. With some provocative (?) questions in the end. I want a feelgood novel with a lot of humour but please no romantic nonsense. I want a thriller with a lot of excitement but please no brutal violence. I want a new thick fantasy novel for youths with preferably a girl as main character for my eldest daughter? And when I find one, I want similar ones. This kind of service has not been available to our knowledge. There is Whichbook in UK but it is not, as we understand this, close to what people are asking for. We want to build a service which is directed to exactly the kind of needs people have walking in to the library or wondering about what book they should give away as a present. We are cooperating with some algorithm geniuses at Ideon Research Center in Lund because this solution needs a lot of mathematics even if it seems simple enough using it. We now have about 2000 titles for the mentioned three genres in the prototype. We will renew and expand this yearly because this kind of service has the novelty need and touch. It is possible to use it from the web as a standalone web page or integrated in the library interfaces (Arena). It is available from cell phones for the moving seeker or from terminals for those who like touch controls. So the technicalities are in place. We do have a lot of questions though. What genres should be the first after the existent? Is it necessary that a chosen title is available in the local library? Do you have any qualms this being definitely not a scientific precision instrument? It will be based on very subjective input (from librarians or librarian students). Is it ok that end users can change the values? Is it then ok that a logged in end user has a lesser saying than the librarian? And what relation would that be? 10 end user matches one professional? Pleased to get your comments!
Mobile solutions – technology of the future or already "last year"?Published on 2008-02-27 Innovation Lab writes:
User content - the competence of the massesPublished on 2008-02-12 Makeupalley has now 1,042,028 reviews. Amazon.com has for sure millions. The Swedish Discshop has tens of thousands of DVD reviews. When you contribute as a user to these sites they can grant you the Ownership of your content. The sites normally grant themselves the Right to use, in some cases any way they like. The can even make sure of the possibility to alter your user input at will. Normally they promise integrity security. They will then only show your alias connected to your input. In the commercial world of internet the above regulations seems not to bother the contributor, the consumer. Why can we draw that conclusion? Because of the masses of input and as we have seen almost no fuss at all about it (tags and “comments”/reviews that is). As long as we do not count it as a work on an artistic integrity level it seems to be ok.
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