January 05, 2008
36 Ideas - #2. What's a social network? (Ribbon game)
Advance Preparation
Purchase a lot of different kinds and colors of ribbons. Minimum of 30 pieces of ribbon, preferably in a minimum of 7 different styles/colors/lengths. Minimum recommended length for a single piece of ribbon is 1.5 yards. Optional: It makes the ribbons a little easier to grip if you tie a small knot at both ends of the strips of ribbon.
NOTE 1: Yarn may be substituted, but is not as durable or visible.
NOTE 2: Many fabric stores will sell bags of ribbon remnants at a relatively low cost. Ask if they have this, or ask when they might next have this.
NOTE 3: If you do use ribbon, you probably want to ask people to give them back, since this can get a little expensive.
Estimated Time
10-15 minutes.
Let's Do It
1. We need a volunteer from the audience, someone who knows a bunch of people here. This person will now be referred to as Mr/Ms. X.
2. Thank you for joining us! Here are five pieces of ribbon. (NOTE: These five pieces may be in different lengths but should all be the same color.) Hold on tight to one end of each piece of ribbon. Now, ask five people you know to come on up here. Give each one of them the other end of one of your pieces of ribbon.
3. You next five people are now known as Mr/Ms A, B, C, D, and E. You all get 4 pieces of matching ribbon, but each of you has a different color. Hold on tight to one end, and look for people you know to hold the other ends. Here are the rules. You may NOT give the end of one of your ribbons to Mr/Ms X. You MAY give an end to one of the other people Mr/Ms X knows (Mr/Ms A, B, C, D, and E). You may also call up someone else from the audience.
4. We have a few more random pieces of ribbon left. Those of you called up by either Mr/Ms A, B, C, D, and E may take a piece or two of ribbon to connect to anyone you know who is already up here. This assumes you are not already holding one of their ribbons.
5. Now let's look at the connections. Everyone up here has at least 1 ribbon in their hand, and Mr/Ms X has 5. Does anyone else have 5? If you do, lift your hands up. 4? 3?
Take Home Message(s)
This is an illustration of what is an itty bitty teeny tiny social network. The idea is to make overt and visible those invisible connections between one person and another, and those people and others. Each person has their own social network, but the social networks of one person and other people often overlap. This is what leads to the concept now known as "6 degrees of separation."
Connect the Tech
Here we illustrated a face-to-face social network. A fundamental concept in the online social networking environments is that the same kinds of connections still hold true, even online, even in virtual environments. (Discuss examples or illustrations of online social networking tools/resources.)
Caveats or Drawbacks to this Exercise
May not work with a very small group who all know each other well. Works best when the space has two levels or an incline, so that the pattern of ribbon connections can be made visible.
May not work with a very large audience, simply because of lack of visibility.
OPTIONAL: If you can get above the group of ribbons, consider taking a photo of the connections and projecting it on a screen for the rest of the audience to see. This is especially helpful with a very large audience.
Posted by pfa at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2007
36 Ideas - #1, Variant A: Who's Your Neighbor? (Social Calisthenics)
Advance Preparation
None
Estimated Time
10-20 minutes
Introduce the Exercise
Once standing, please stay standing. If you don't recognize the name of the technology or the examples, assume you are not using it. Terms will be defined later.
Let's Do It
PART 1:
1. Is anyone here using Second Life? If so, please stand up!
2. Does anyone here share presentations or educational content via Slideshare or Classroom 2.0 or similar sites?
3. Does anyone here contribute content to a social news site, such as NowPublic?
4. Is anyone here in Ning? If so, please stand up!
5. Is anyone here in another social networking site (Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or other)? If so, please stand up!
6. Is anyone here using microblogging (Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr)? If so, please stand up!
7. Does anyone here share images via a photosharing site (Flickr, Zoomr, SmugPhoto)?
8. Does anyone here share, collect or comment on content via a social media site (YouTube, iTunes, Last.fm, Justin.tv) or by podcasting?
9. Is anyone here using social bookmarking (del.icio.us, Digg, Connotea, 2collab, CiteULike, StumbleUpon, etc.)? If so, please stand up!
10. Has anyone here ever edited or added content to a wiki? If so, please stand up!
11. Does anyone here blog, even occasionally? If so, please stand up!
12. Does anyone here use a social shopping site, such as Amazon? OK, everyone standing now?
PART 2:
1. How many of you use 3 or more of these tools? Please remain standing, everyone else sit down.
2. How many of you use 6 or more of these tools? Remain standing.
3. How many of you use 9 or more of these tools? Remain standing.
[4. If there is still a crowd of folk standing, start listing individual tools until most of them drop out.]
3. When you get down to one or two folk still standing, start Part 3.
PART 3:
1. OK, everyone sitting down, take a good look at the folk standing. How many of you know them or recognize them? Please stand up.
2. Folks still sitting, do you recognize ANYONE who is standing? If so, please stand up.
3. Repeat as necessary until a significant portion of the audience is standing.
Take Home Message(s)
1. Social technologies are ubiquitous.
2. Social technologies connect people (duh!).
Connect the Tech
Most people get involved with social technologies because they already know someone else who is using whatever it is. Which people in this room were using which technologies? Does knowing that certain folk are using certain technologies make them (either the person or the technology) more intriguing to you?
Caveats or Drawbacks to this Exercise
None
Posted by pfa at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)
36 Ideas - #1: Who's Your Neighbor? (Social Calisthenics)
Advance Preparation
None
Estimated Time
5-10 minutes
Introduce the Exercise
Once you are standing, please remain standing until instructed otherwise.
Let's Do It
1. Look at the people on both sides of you. Do you recognize either of them? If so, please stand up!
2. Folks still sitting down, look at the folks around you in any direction. Do you recognize either of them? If so, please stand up!
3. Folks sitting down, look up and down the row in which you are sitting. Recognize anyone? If so, stand up!
4. Folks seated, now look around the quadrant of the room in which you are sitting. Recognize anyone? If so, stand up!
5. Take a good look around now, at all those standing people. Anyone look familiar? If so, stand up!
6. People standing up - is there anyone sitting down near you? If so, you now have 1-2 minutes to ask questions to find out if you know anyone in common. As soon as find someone in common, be sure to stand up! On your mark, go!
Take Home Message(s)
It's a small world, and even in a big room in a strange city, chances are you probably know someone.
Connect the Tech
Most people get involved with social technologies because they already know someone else who is using whatever it is. They spread by osmosis (or a virus? airborne?). Look at how many people in this room know someone else in this room, and imagine the potential for an idea to spread throughout this community.
Caveats or Drawbacks to this Exercise
This would only work in a largish group of folk that know each other moderately well. A small group that works together every day would not work, nor would a new group of people where they've mostly never met anyone else there.
Posted by pfa at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)
36 Ideas: Teaching Web 2.0 Concepts
David Rothman and I are going to be copresenting as invited speakers on Web 2.0 and social technologies at the May 2008 Medical Library Association. We thought it would be a really interesting idea to include some audience participation exercises to illustrate fundamental social technology concepts and applications. We had a couple ideas of our own about this, and will be blogging about it (and tweeting and querying Facebook friends, etcetera).
A little over a week ago, I went to a local real-world social networking group - A2B3. A2B3 is a motley collection of geeks, tech wizards, corporate startups, educators, students, hobbyists, politicians, activists, and various other identities who gather once a week for lunch and to discuss interesting ideas. I tossed this idea out to them for starters, with a couple examples, and collected a fascinating collection of cool ideas. I hope to expand on some of these over the next few weeks and months as we develop our ideas for our presentation. In addition, hopefully, this might become a useful collection of teaching concepts for other folk.
What I give below is the scenario I provided to the group, and the notes I took of what they said. Not all of my notes make sense to me now, but those that do will turn into separate blog entries of how we envision they'll work. This is just a sampler to whet your appetites and fire up your imagination. Feel free to add more in comments!
SCENARIO:
You have a room full of people, around 100-200. You want this group to do a few exercises that would illustrate in real world terms the types of connections and interactions that social tech applications facilitate. How would you do this?
IDEAS:
1. Who's your neighbor? (Who do you know.)
2. What's a social network? (Ribbon game)
3. FB Beacon shoutout model (a.k.a. Twitterpation)
4. Reputation networks (verify identity)
5. Playing phone (twitter relay, twitter storm)
6. What is a seminal moment?
7. How would I tag myself? (Self-sorting exercise)
8. Sort in Space (Geographic sorting)
9. Gift introductions
10. Issues of trust
11. LinkedIn Intros
12. 43 things
13. Collaboration
14. Flickr tags (photo sorting)
15. Magazine routing (items of interest)
16. Saving articles to share, ie. digg
17. Ranking and shoutouts
18. Key person who becomes link of influence (gatekeeping)
19. Use all channels available / Common ground / Conversation
20. Proximity (connection to real life)
21. Graffiti is Facebook (used to be tagging)
22. Turf relationships
23. "PlacesDowntown" (a.k.a. Twitter)
24. Pair an open source expert with novice and get them to come up with a new open source project
25. Monkeys Mixer (marriages, divorce, pair up your friends via email)
26. Critical Mass (i.e. fax machines)
27. The Ladies that Lunch (collaborative decisionmaking - refining suggestions of lunch venues)
28. What is a Flickr Topic Pool? (sorting by image prefs)
29. Gallery Night (What is an PhotoBlog?)
30. Rumors
31. Objects of Fascination
32. Organizational Nucleus
33. 57 miles (sticker + serendipitous encounters)
34. Ann Arbor Birthdays
35. Sort by: (geography); then secondary sort by (interest / skillbase / hobbies / pets / cuisine / gender / generation / ... )
36. Game Show Host (come ooonnnnn down!)
Posted by pfa at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2007
UM in Second Life: Our First Community Brown Bag
Second Life is one of several virtual worlds or MUVEs (multi-user virtual environments). Second Life (SL) in particular has become prominent in educational circles over the past couple years, with established presences from many universities. More background information about Second Life is available from this slidecast.
The University of Michigan opened Wolverine Island for use by the UM Community this term (Fall 2007). Since then, Wolverine has continued to rapidly evolve and change, with more interesting and dynamic spaces. The first course to be taught at Wolverine was an elective for the M1 students (more on that later). The first community social event, a brown bag to discuss future needs and plans for the UM SL community, happened this past Friday. I thought it would be remiss of me to not report back on how the event went, generally, and the actual work productivity interaction features of the meeting.
ABOUT LOCATION:
We'd been asked to have a series of events for people new to Second Life where they could come to a campus location and practice their skills with more expert people available to help. With that in mind, this was a combined real world / virtual world event. The real world location was the new Crossroads computer classroom at the School of Public Health.
Regarding the location in Second Life, here are some images of both Wolverine Island and the people (avatars) who came to the Brown Bag.
FOLKS WHO CAME:
Around 20 people attended the session*. 7 came to the real world location, and almost all of those were our team of designated helpers. So where were people coming from?
- 7 = Public Health classroom
- 2 = working from home
- 2 = Med School
- 2 = own office
- 1 = Dearborn campus
- the rest = unspecified
* 17 verified, but I didn't catch all of the names, so there were more.
Not everyone identified their departments, but those that did included people from the libraries, Medical School, Department of Kinesiology, School of Information, LS&A, and Dearborn Campus.
At one point, we were talking about the potential of SL for distance education, but from this I could see some real utility for just regular meetings! Think of all those meetings you go to all around campus and the travel time you plan, and then imagine going to a meeting by popping onto your computer, with your office around you and your desk and files and cup of coffee ready to hand. Even with this meeting, at the end, about half the people leaving on time said they had real world meeting they needed to get to. This made for a bit of contrast.
MEETING PRODUCTIVITY:
Just to show that meetings in Second Life can be productive, let me share a bit of what happened. The topic of the meeting was brainstorming for what we would like to do for future brainstorming sessions. Here is an abbreviated and selected list of topics suggested in the 45 minutes of active discussion.
General:
- invited speakers
- experimental techniques or tools
- checklists or best practices for types of events
Issues:
- rules or guidelines for effective use of voice
- learning curve vs. learning cliff: does SL keep changing too much to be effective in education?
- do we need a real world pre-orientation before students enter SL?
- providing or getting tech support for SL for UM activities
- Doing field research in SL, getting started, logistics, etc
- finding funding for SL projects
Education:
- best practices in SL education
- tours to educational places + discussion/conversation
- SL for distance learning
- Herding Cats 101 (how to coordinate a class moving around SL)
- developing mentoring system for new teachers in SL
- what types of SL instruction and class activities best work with new students?
- how to best orient new students to SL
- teaching in SL, lessons learned
- managing student accounts with money
- conducting constructivist learning activities in SL
- market penetration of SL in our student populations
Skills:
- voice configuration
- safe places for newbies
- best places for education
- who and how to ask for help
- finding professional attire
- getting dressed, making outfits, making clothes 101
- building tutorials
- scripting tutorials
- how to stream audio/video for events
- things to do with textures
- building tours or HUDs
- tips for combined RL/SL events
- capturing class sessions for asynchronous viewing
- machinima
- using mouseview and taking pics in SL
- things to do with your Profile
- lag and how to prevent it
- finding/using animations
- creating custom animations
- navigation in SL, tips and tricks
- inventory management skills
FUTURE:
The group discussed a variety of ideas for future events, so stay tuned. For the short-term, please feel free to join us at more brown bags in Second Life. They are Fridays, noon Michigan time or 9-10 SLT (Second Life Time) at the campfire on Wolverine Island (unless otherwise specified).
December 14, noon
TOPIC: prioritizing future brown bag topics, what is most important to the UM Second Life community
December 21, noon
TOPIC: A tour of Wolverine Island
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Contact Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich dot edu, or IM Perplexity Peccable in Second Life.
Posted by pfa at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2007
MLibrary2.0 Kickoff, Part 2: Kristin Antelman
The MLibrary 2.0 forum series got off to a great start on Friday. A capacity crowd of about 140 people joined us in the Michigan Union for presentations by Peter Morville, Kristin Antelman and Jessamyn West (speaker bios are here). I'll be writing up my notes from the event and posting the writeups here. Slides and videos from Peter's and Kristin's presentations will be posted to the Events page within the next few days; many thanks to Peter Knox for documenting this event!
Update: Having lost Saturday's blogging battle to the forces of beautiful weather, and seeing Patricia's excellent post covering Peter Morville's presentation, I've decided to skip my coverage of Peter's talk (which has also been blogged here and here) and go straight to Kristin's. Note: Since this was the geekiest presentation by far, and hence my automatic favorite, I'm going to include as many links as I can to the things Kristin mentioned in her talk. I might throw in a few related references of my own, and I will label them as such.
Kristin Antelman: Next generation catalogs
Preview: Kristin's going to describe some features of the NCSU catalog, then ask us where we think we as a profession are going with this whole catalog thing.
We've had online catalogs for a long time, but we've never quite gotten it right - in fact, for many purposes the OPAC is worse than the card catalog. Subject browsing is one of them, and there have been several experiments with advanced subject browsing in the OPAC: Mark Ludwig's project at SUNY Buffalo, which indexed MARCXML records; Casey Bisson's WPopac (now Scriblio), which uses faceted browse and runs entirely on free software; Casey Durfee's "Open Source Endeca" (Apache Solr + Django) from Code4lib 2007. Kristin mentioned a couple of recent reports that gave some theoretical background to such efforts: the Karen Calhoun report for the Library of Congress and the BSTF (University of California Bibliographic Services Task Force) report.
Editorial aside: Advanced browsing in the OPAC has a longer history than many people realize. One of the things Peter Morville mentioned in his talk was the Flamenco Project at UC Berkeley, which has been going on for awhile. And Endeca may have succeeded (finally) in patenting their particular implementation of faceted browsing, but a quick glance at the patent itself reveals a reference to Dr. Stephen Pollitt's work on HIBROWSE, one of the first faceted OPACs from the mid-1990s. Many of the ideas behind subject-enhanced browsing in the OPAC were first explored by Karen Markey (for OCLC) in 1983, so it's great to see some of those ideas finally coming to fruition.
Now let's talk about Endeca at NCSU. Shortcomings of the old catalog included a subject search "feature" that was nearly impossible to use, and results were always presented in "system sort" order which made them difficult to navigate (sound familiar?). Title was the standard default search, but of course many users expect a keyword search. Clearly a better solution was needed. NCSU's Endeca implementation uses two search boxes, because they weren't willing to get rid of authority searching (a future goal is to combine them). The top box is for keyword search, while the bottom is for authority (primarily known-item) searching.
Let's try a really general search in the keyword box, like "art history." Sure, we get thousands of results, but the LCSH-based subject facets at the top allow us to narrow the result set very quickly based on readily apparent criteria. So, faceted navigation actually works very well with MARC metadata to allow for fast narrowing. Another benefit of the Endeca software is relevance ranking of results (this was actually their primary goal, not the faceted navigation!). So even for large result sets, the most relevant books are right at the top. Studies they've done show a vast improvement in relevance of keyword searches. The new system also allows users to see at a glance where the book is located, both on campus and in the stacks, and whether it is checked out or not. We can even filter the results to include only books that are currently available. No need to click half a dozen times! We can also sort results by "popularity" (uses circulation data); this is one of the most frequently used sort criteria, along with availability. Another useful feature is the "did you mean" spelling suggestion (ALL catalogs should have this feature!). And the new catalog allows users to subscribe to new books lists (or any catalog search) via RSS.
Kristin modestly asserts that the NCSU catalog is Library 1.1 (not even close to 2.0). However, they have been taking additional steps toward building the catalog of the future. One big step is CatalogWS, a generic XML web service layer implemented on top of the existing catalog. This allows users to search the library from their web-enabled cell phone or other mobile device; it also includes library locations and hours. They are currently working on integrating the catalog into the website, so you'll be able to search the whole library right from the front page using a single search box. [Editorial comment: the UPenn library has had a similar cross-search feature for some time, and it is amazing.]
Kristin then presented some usage data from a few studies they have done since implementing the new catalog. About 67% of transactions are search ONLY. Facets are still used, however (the most popular facets are subject and LC classification). Publication date is the most popular sort option. So users are still searching the catalog in similar ways, but they are able to do it much more efficiently and effectively.
However, Kristin is quick to point out the limitations of the current system. One major shortcoming is that it doesn't really solve the perennial problem of syndetics (how to make a connection between the user's search vocabulary and the controlled vocabulary of LCSH). It's still a keyword search at bottom, and the keywords are not mapped onto LCSH terminology. As an example of this, Kristin did a search for "revolutionary war" and found 870 hits. If you knew the proper LCSH heading to search, you'd get over 3,000 hits, with many useful subdivisions to help narrow your search. Unfortunately these are still not exposed in the catalog in any meaningful way - in fact, faceted navigation "disguises" the problem of syndetics by presenting the results of the keyword search as if it constituted the entire universe of materials on that topic. This leads users (and even librarians) to "satisfice" because they will generally find something, even if it isn't the best or most comprehensive information that's available. [Editorial comment: this is a problem Thomas Mann discusses in his book Library Research Models. Often finding something is worse than finding nothing, because most users will make do with whatever they happen to find on the first try.] It's important to make sure patrons are finding the right book (Ranganathan's second law: every reader his/her book). In principle it should be possible to correct this problem programmatically, because in LCSH there is an entry for "revolutionary war" with a see reference to the proper subject heading. The NCSU folks are working on mapping these references and leveraging them in the catalog.
Kristin then rattled off a list of other "experimental" catalogs and related websites which she considers part of the "next generation catalog" trend:
- Phoenix Public Library has a new Endeca implementation that uses the BISAC subject headings to provide browse functionality independent of MARC records.
- UVA's Project Blacklight, a faceted catalog prototype based on Ruby on Rails and Apache Solr (more information on Bess Sadler's blog).
- The Communicat project at Georgia Tech, which integrates MARC records and user-supplied data into one big open catalog using the Daisy CMS.
- Worldcat Local, which has been implemented by the University of Washington (the University of California is also working on an implementation, in response to issues raised in the BSTF report.)
- Librarything, which has been very successful in creating a kind of "community FRBR" by allowing users to cluster books into editions. (Kristin also mentioned the Thingology blog, which has accumulated a lot of interesting material over the past year.)
- Google Book Search, which at least has the potential to create a scholarly community around works.
- Editorial comment: for more in this vein, see MLibrary2's bookmarks tagged with 'OPAC' on del.icio.us.
Having discussed the NCSU catalog and a few kindred efforts, Kristin moved on to the future of the catalog and its relationship to the evolution of bibliographic control. There has been a lot of recent activity toward developing a new metadata framework, including the Library of Congress working group on the Future of Bibliographic Control and the recently announced partnership between the RDA (Resource Description and Access, the successor to AACR2) and DCMI (Dublic Core Metadata Initiative) efforts (see Karen Coyle's writeup for more info). Much of the discussion has been taking place on mailing lists, notably NGC4lib and RDA-L, so anyone who is interested in these recent developments should go check them out.
What's more important, making holdings available, or bringing them under bibliographic control? There is a real tension here (which was brought out in the Karen Calhoun report), because libraries have scarce financial resources, and when our catalogers are creating metadata that's difficult to leverage in our fancy new OPACs then all that cataloging labor begins to look like a diminishing ROI [Editorial note: I may be interpolating a bit here; my notes are somewhat sketchy at this point.] There seems to be a cultural disconnect between the cataloging and metadata standards community (MARBI, etc.) and the community of OPAC interface hackers (Code4lib). These two groups move at very different paces (RDA has been in the works for, what, 6-7 years now?). You can't have search without metadata, at least not with our current means of bibliographic control, so there is a real danger that the recent advances in catalog interfaces will be stymied by the failure of the cataloging community to keep up.
As a case in point, Kristin asks the question: "What is an identifier?" Librarians have one idea of what it is: a title and an author string. But to web programmers, this is a hopelessly unreliable means of identifying unique objects - in a networked environment you really need some sort of URI. Most OPACs that are currently in use don't even have stable URLs for each record! This leads Kristin to ask what is the most effective way to expose our library metadata to the web - can't we just dump it into an index and have Google crawl it all, so that it shows up in people's web search results? But think of how confusing it would be if everybody did that! We need to develop our own networked services for exchange of bibliographic data - a sort of distributed "bibliographic cloud." Kristin mentioned Jason Griffey's recent comment on NGC4lib that "the true future for bibliographic data has to be in some P2P form, distributed and shared in the background of our systems" (read Jason's follow-up post for more explanation).
So the bibliographic standards community shares many goals with the Semantic Web community; this is what makes the recent decision to use RDF and SKOS to disclose the new RDA element vocabulary (which will be based on the DCMI Abstract Model) so very exciting [Editorial comment: my geek sense is tingling!]. As a further harbinger of momentous changes to come, the most recent issue of Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, "Knitting the Semantic Web," is devoted entirely to the intersection of bibliographic data and Semantic Web technology (UMich people can read the whole issue online). One of the big problems with the current standard of AACR + MARC is that it fails to achieve a separation between the metadata elements and the cataloging rules. Kristin gave an example of how an alternative scheme could work, using SKOS to describe some microform materials [my notes are pretty sparse here, sorry!].
Given all this churn within the bibliographic standards arena, what direction should we be going in with our next-generation OPACs? One thing Kristin mentioned was using FAST to achieve better faceting than regular LCSH can provide; they are investigating migrating to FAST at NCSU. The Worldcat Identities project uses aggregate data from Worldcat to display works clustered by author (see Thom Hickey's post for more info). However, these are both OCLC projects and are based on closed, proprietary technology. On the other hand, open frameworks do exist for achieving the same results - this is what semantic web technology is all about. The biggest problem the library community currently faces is that our metadata vocabularies are not prepared to be incorporated into semantic web applications. For example, authority files are not identified by a URI. Cataloging practices are only loosely standardized; we use partial information to fill in our records and because our search systems rely on vague identifiers that's usually good enough. If librarians want to play on the semantic web, we're going to need a serious cleanup of our metadata models. We also need to have more openness and less concern about authority. How much bibliographic control do we really need? Many people will scoff at this question, but with the volume of information we face today it's a serious issue. This is not to say we should jettison the idea of authority, but we could do much more with our data if our metadata vocabularies were open and extensible.
So what are some requirements for the ideal catalog? Among other things it should recognize clusters of knowledge, show the lineage of publications, identify authors, make previously unknown connections between works visible to the user, and show the authoritativeness and popularity of sources. [Editorial comment: I believe Kristin was referring to a recent thread on NGC4lib which featured a discussion of one person's wishlist for a next generation library catalog. See Futurelib Wiki for more details.] Some of these ideas have been explored by people at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Kristin referred to this post by Ben Vershbow about the idea of a "people's card catalog" built from open source software, to serve as an alternative to commercial products like Google Book Search. Google Book Search has raised the spectre of the elimination of metadata: why spend all that time creating document surrogates when all of the library's text is online and searchable? Needless to say, the library science community is not yet comfortable with such a flagrant conflation of data with metadata, but it's something to which we should give serious thought.
Kristin mentioned David Weinberger's new book Everything Is Miscellaneous (which Peter Morville also referenced in his talk - read his review here) with its notion of three "orders" of information: the book on the shelf, the catalog, and the web. We need to get our data ready for the "third order," but our legacy metadata sets and arcane cataloging practices create a cultural barrier that prevents easy integration with the current state of the art. Librarians cherish consensus on an international level, which makes it tough to innovate in the library world. How can we standardize internationally and still be innovative? Individual libraries can do a lot, and the current technology tools make it much easier, but we could do so much more if our vocabularies were open and extensible! We've put so much effort into the metadata vocabularies that we use, but they are still owned by private institutions (LoC, OCLC). How can we migrate our data into an open web environment? The objective is to be able to control the data that goes into (and comes out of) our ILS. This in an impedance mismatch that needs to be fixed, and soon!
Q & A
Q: Can you give a brief definition of the semantic web?
A: Basically it means we can search for meaning instead of just keywords. The semantic web shares an objective with the OPAC, in that we're trying to apply controlled vocab in a way that allows this kind fo searching.
Q: What about licensed content, like articles? Aren't there going to be some legal challenges in obtaining better control over those?
A: NCSU has looked at clustering metasearch results using something like Vivisimo, but there is no good solution to on-the-fly clustering in metasearch due to huge inconsistencies in the results you get from different vendors. This is a hard problem: as long as we don't have control over the data, there's not much we can do about it. Unfortunately librarians made a decision long ago to give up control over our data, and now we are paying the price.
Q: What about recommender systems and "find similar?"
A: This is a great idea and some libraries have tried it, but it's hard to do well without the ability to get more detailed use data out of our ILS. Our surrent systems don't track much of the info that would be required for building systems like what Amazon provides. We need to do a better job of leveraging use data, but there are also privacy concerns. Think about the long tail effect: we need to be able to make connections between items that may not be very popular in themselves, but that might mean a lot to a student or scholar in the right discipline.
Posted by jkglenn at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2007
MLibrary2.0 Kickoff, Part 1: Peter Morville via Twitter
Remember, read this post from the bottom up.
PM The values of librarianship are very important, and we need to find a way to ensure those are incorporated into the new environment.
PM People exaggerate the way web20 / library20 obviate the need for the old
PLEASE NOTE: These events will be podcasts at the site http://www.lib.umich.edu/lib20
PM: embedded information dense spaces - walking becomes a new form of query
PM: Trends: push for local information / yellow pages will disappear
Q&A - location, location, location = Google rank and what else?
PM: Libraries as cathedrals of knowledge
PM: Story of the 3 Stone Cutters: 1. making a living; 2. the best stonecutting job in the county; 3. building a cathedral
http://tinyurl.com/2gjzwr
PM: Shaping Things / Everyware
PM: Julian Bleecker - blogjects and pigeons / manifesto for networked objects
http://www.delicious-monste...
PM - delicious library scans barcodes and ISBNs for personal libraries / neighborhoods / etc.
PM http://semapedia.org -- tagging RL objects and spaces
PM: Google Book Search / podzinger -- expanding what we consider the web
PM: flickr successful with clustering tags that often appear together
PM - hybrid solution - clustering driven by human selected taxonomy
PM: Clusty & Automated categorization http://clusty.com
PM: NCSU Libraries using guided navigation for site / flamingo project
PM - http://buzzilions.com - guided navigation / search
PM: Search is one of the most important ways we learn.
PM: Marcia Bates - Berrypicking, 1989
PM: Interfaces - one size does not fit all.
PM: John Battelle "search has become the new interface of commerce."
PM - http://etsy.com taxonomic shopping, vendor driven w/ tags ad feedback loops
PM: Stewart Brand - how buildings learn - pace layering (important concepts evolve slowly, less critical concepts quickly - fashion)
PM: Leaves become food for trees.
PM: David Weinberger - Everything is miscellaneous "The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together."
PM: "This is not your mother's metadata."
PM: Who can help? :) Revenge of the Librarians
PM: http://map.net --- interesting products that are fun but not useful
PM: How do we create bigger needles for our haystacks?
PM: David Brin's Transparent Society -- YAYYYY!!!! David! :) http://www.davidbrin.com/ts...
PM - Google StreetView
PM: http://amal.net/rfid
PM: Bruce Sterling - the internet of things / the internet of objects
PM - Apple iPhone - web in your pocket, full featured
PM: Control granularity of information and location, and who sees it.
PM - Privacy concerns of ubiquitous geo-info for real people
PM: device to scare people about the future - wristwatch to track your child's location.
Sorry - http://neighbor.com
PM: neighbor.com beta - mashup of political affiliations
PM: http://microsoft.com/surface
PM: All sort of alternate interfaces -- it won't just be about PDAs and smartphones and ...
PM: highlighting David Rose - http://AmbientDevices.com
PM: Wealth of information creates poverty of attention. Shift from push to pull. What happens to how we make decisions?
PM: The good old days when librarians had *real* power. (Library thieves in middle ages were cursed forever)
PM: Perfect findability is impossible.
@GardnerCampbell -- Listening to Peter Morville at http://www.lib.umich.edu/lib20
PM: We can talk about findability at the object and system levels. We need to think across channels, in transmedia terms.
PM: Every architect needs to have one foot in the past and one foot in the present. We also need to design for the future.
PM: NCI portal. Findability example. Search broad (ie "cancer") NCI comes up; search narrow (ie "ovarian cancer"), they don't.
PM: Trust is associated with high Google results - findability and credibility are interrelated
PM: Credibility audit.
PM: Ask 3 qs: Can users find our site / find their way around our site / can they find our services in spite of our site
PM: Strive for desirability ... Attractive things work better.
PM: "What does usability really mean?"
PM: I tell my mom I organize web sites so people can find things.
Peter Morville - "I'm one of those librarians who fell in love with the Internet."
"Rather than going to someplace on the web, the library comes to you. That's what it means to me." Eric Frierson
"Library 2.0? Sounds like a buzzword to me."
Library Revolution highlighted http://libraryrevolution.com/
John Seeley Brown - Learning Reconceived for the Networked Age http://tinyurl.com/detxs
MLibrary 2.0 begins -- http://www.lib.umich.edu/lib20/
Posted by pfa at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
MLibrary2.0 Kickoff Twittered!
I will say that I have never seen a lbirary workshop here with so many computers and digital gadgets present!
Because so many other people were liveblogging during the MLibrary 2.0 Kickoff, I twittered throughout the event. Twitter is a way of communicating and chatting with people about what you're doing at the moment in very small soundbytes (no more than 140 characters). More on Twitter itself later. For now, as a follow-up to the blog entry by JK Glenn, I'd like to provide the Twitter stream from Peter Morville's talk, with photos from Flickr embedded at appropriate places. Because Twitter is always arranged in reverse chronological order, you will want to read the Twitter stream below from the bottom up to get a sense of how this flowed at the moment. See the next blog entry for the Peter Morville
Twitterstream.
Posted by pfa at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)