New Texting Advert

I read an interesting article today about texting.

Flickr Presentation @ Purdue

We’ve uploaded two collections so far into flickr, a total of about 5000 images. Thus far we have about 25000 views. We’re pretty excited about the progress thus far and we may become a part of the Flickr Commons project.

Because of the success of this project, my colleague and I will be giving a presentation at the CONTENTdm User’s Group at Purdue University in March. I’ll have presentation materials up soon thereafter….

This is the most popular image so far in the collection:

Wikipedia Entries Required for Journal Authors; and Second Thoughts on Second Life

Wikipedia is Winning
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. That’s the philosophy the journal RNA Biology is adopting after realizing that for unpublished scientific information not contained in databases such as PubMed, information-seekers are turning to search engines, which ultimately leads them to Wikipedia, the de-facto authority on the web. They have decided to require all potential authors to submit a Wikipedia entry as well as their article proposal. This is an important move and one I think other publishers and other institutions (including libraries, archival institutions and special collections) should adopt as well. Don’t bemoan the fact that users are going to Wikipedia for information; help improve Wikipedia with your institutional knowledge!

Second Life, not so much
My viewpoint on Second Life in libraries is this: let’s wait this thing out. The technology is still nascent and after 5 years, Second Life has yet to truly take off. Libraries are struggling now with connecting with their users and allowing them to seamlessly access their content. Why put up a buggy, sluggish and sometimes creepy, barrier.
Anyway, others feel the same way regarding virtual worlds: Google just recently pulled the plug on Lively and a Reuters reporter has some honest reporting on SL. I’m not counting out virtual worlds completely, though. With the popularity of Webkinz, Club Penguin and most recently Animal Crossing, there still is a place for this type of technology.

Bulk Image Uploads into Flickr via XML and API

Since the last post, we’ve uploaded 1500 Victorian Trade Cards to flickr using XML exported from CONTENTdm and feeding into Flickr via their API.  Once the process was in place, the uploading took about 4 seconds per image.  The process is completely web-based and I was able to continue working with no problems.

We plan on uploading another collection.  It will probably exceed 4000 images.

Having a local digital collection is great but putting your institution’s collections in the public sphere and in repositories that millions of people from around the globe use adds not only to the value of your collection but it contributes to the edification, education and entertainment of the global community.  After having this collection up for only two days we have contacts from Portugal, Spain, France and Japan as well as the United States.

Here’s a sample of our flickr collection:

Coleman's Millinery and Fancy Dry Goods

Richardson's New Music and Card Store

J. D. Larkin & Co. (Manufacturers)

Miami University Libraries’ Digital Collections on Flickr

Digital Collections & Flickr

Flickr is the most prominent destination on the web for  images. The user experience on Flickr is unsurpassed,  allowing for easy searching, downloading and  manipulation of images. It seems absurd for libraries  to not have their digital collections on flickr as well as  within their own repositories such as ContentDM. In  order for libraries to remain viable, they need to figure  out ways to disseminate their materials in as many  places on the web as possible, where people actually  traffic. I’ve heard arguments against doing this that go  something like this: “Well, we’re not actually getting any more traffic on our site.” In my opinion that’s beside the point. Our goal is to fulfill a users information need, not bring them to our websites. If they are getting the information they need, we’re doing our jobs.

Our library is currently experimenting with adding our digital collections to flickr via its api. I’ll keep the updates coming!

Zip it up and zip it out!

Things I Hope We Don’t Lose in the Web-mediated Library

I came in this morning at 8:30 am after tossing and turning again. So, needlessly to say I was sleepy all day today.  When I got in, I checked my calendar and realized that I had an evening shift on the reference desk from 6-9.  That immediately put me in a bad mood.

Most of the morning I spent time with a colleague working on another video podcast for the libraries.  I think vodcast, podcasts and screencasts are a great way to reach students and a great way to provide service and I’m spreading this idea with help across the library system.

But there are some things I hope we don’t lose in the library 2.0 world. Things that make me forget how tired I am and the uncertain future of libraries.

One of those things happened tonight on the reference desk.  I wasn’t looking forward to the shift.  But then a Ph.D. candidate came up and asked for help on his dissertation.  He was studying the idea of stigmatization and denial of HIV and AIDS in Africa.  He had found only a handful of articles and was frustrated.  We started searching and started finding some fantastic stuff.  I began to ask him questions about his research and he told me a story about how in his home country in Africa his daughter came home from school with a story about how her friend had died from AIDS.  This traumatic experience for his daughter inspired him to look at this problem in Africa and set him on a path to help his people and in his words “empower the people” to help themselves in this crisis. He also said that he wanted to inspire hope in his society.

After about an hour and many sources later he was profuse with thanks and thrilled about the prospects of his research.

These are the types of things I hope we don’t lose.

Zip it up and zip it out.

The Dilemma of Personalized Library Services

Modern libraries, striving to provide a personalized user experience, are faced with the horns of the dilemma.

Horns of the Dilemma by wildphotons

Libraries are competing in the information world against private for-profit companies who are killing us in the personalized web service experience.  We simply cannot compete against the likes of Amazon.com,

My Amazon Recommendations

Netflix, iTunes and the like for a number of reasons.  But the primary reason is that they harvest, store and utilize personal usage data to provide the user with the most tailored experience that an algorithm can provide.

These web services track everything you do.  Your purchases, your views, your comments, your ratings and your tags.  All of this data is fed into collective intelligence, and other, programming algorithms to match your interests and their products as accurately as possible, providing you with, in most cases, spot-on recommendations.  Certainly they do all of this to sell more products.  But take profit out of the equation

My iTunes Recommendations

more a moment.  Wouldn’t it be great to deliver accurate recommendations and appropriate services to our users? Wouldn’t that bring them back? Wouldn’t it make them feel pampered?

What is holding us back, of course, is our Charlton Heston-like grip on privacy.  We value privacy above all else in this profession.  It is, of course, an extremely important responsibility that we have.  The third rule in the ALA Code of Ethics states:

We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.

This strict adherence to the user’s privacy rights has only been strengthened by the passage of the Patriot Act.

This noble responsibility, however, is now hindering our ability to provide the type of service that our users expect.  I think it is time that we begin thinking about this issue and decide whether or not we need to change our privacy policies to allow our libraries the ability to provide innovative web services.  Collectively we have an enormous amount of content, we just need the means to connect that content to its user.

Zip it up and zip it out.

Zotero Improvements & More Virtual Worlds

On July 8th Zotero announced the beta test version of Zotero 1.5 which includes a long-awaited functionality: the ability to sync your library with multiple computers. If this implementation is successful it will go a long way towards Zotero’s success. Essentially, Zotero’s users are saving their content to Zotero’s servers and tapping into them from the web application interface. The drawback to this, however, is that users must still download the software for all of the computers they are using. Thus, if an institution wanted their users to utilize Zotero, the software would need to be installed on all public machines. The 1.5 version is only available now for Firefox 3.

Google doesn’t rest, does it?  It wouldn’t appear so as they’ve just recently unveiled their new virtual world, Lively.  This isn’t surprising.  Virtual worlds are popping up everywhere.  DC Comics are getting into the game with their VW, DC Universe Online.  Both of these virtual worlds cater to the younger set. DC Universe, however, is a virtual world in the World of Warcraft mode, replete with missions, points etc, whereas Lively seems to be more like Second Life and Habbo Hotel.

One of the recommendations the Social Networking Group had was to stay on top of virtual world development because we realized that Second Life was only the first of many.  Future users of our services are going to be used to conducting affairs in virtual worlds and it is therefore our job to integrate into these worlds.  Here are some videos on Lively and DC Universe:

Zip it up and zip it out.

Wikipedia in Print and the age of Big Data

A Print Wikipedia?

Has anyone put an order in for Wikipedia Volume One in GOBI? We need to get that for the reference collection.  Did you ever think you’d hear such a thing? In late April of this year, Bertelsmann/Random House announced their plan to publish a print version of 50,000 of the most popular entries in the German Wikipedia.  This is quite possibly the most ridiculous idea I’ve heard in a long time. But, it provided me with an interesting question: would students/library users use Wikipedia if it were only published in print?

The publishers are saying that the printed volume would provide an accurate snapshot of that particular year’s zeitgeist, which may be true, but the appeal of Wikipedia is its editability and accessibility.  A printed version negates these two benefits.  That being said, I’d still like a copy (despite the fact that I read only a handful of german).

The Age of Big Data

The information revolution of the past 15-20 years has resulted in massive amounts of digitized information.  Because of this we have one primary challenge/opportunity: this glut of information leads to confusion and dead ends but this same glut of information can be used to clarify particularly complex problems and situations if the proper software and computing power is applied to it.

Chris Anderson has written a fascinating article in this month’s Wired about the Petabyte Age and its implications for science, business and technology.  He interviews IBM’s Martin Wattenberg about the massive amounts of digitized literature:

Wired: What will happen when we have digital access to everything, like all of English literature or all the source code ever written?

Wattenberg: There’s something about completeness that’s magical. The idea that you can have everything at your fingertips and process it in ways that were impossible before is incredibly exciting. Even simple algorithms become more effective when trained on big sets. Perhaps we’ll find out more about plagiarism and literary borrowing when we have the spread of literature before us. We think of our current age as one of intellectual remixing and mashups, but maybe it’s always been that way. You can only do that kind of analysis when you have the full spectrum of data.

There is a problem I see in utilizing big data in a library setting to understand our users and provide better, more pointed, service: on a ethical level, we don’t keep patron circulation or browsing records.  This limits our ability to truly understand the needs of, say, a junior physics major.  This is the reason why Amazon and Netflix are able to provide great service…they have a black and white and what’s more important digital understanding of their users.

Zip it up and zip it out.

The Wiki Ethos

Wikis are not just new ways of producing interactive web sites: the underlying philosophy of wikis is beginning to have a pervasive effect on society. Blogger Andrew Sullivan has tied Barack Obama‘s political success to his mastering of “Facebook politics.” Not only is Senator Obama effectively using MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to disseminate his political message, but he’s embracing the openness and transparency that is inherent to wikis and the open-source software movement, leading some to call him the first “wiki-candidate.” Read the full story here.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, a long time critic of Wikipedia (and rightly so in some cases), has begun to test the wiki waters. EB is now allowing some people to make edits to web entries after a thorough registering and vetting process. This is recent news so we’ll see how this plays out, but to me this seems to be a purely cosmetic move. However, as long as EB, Citizendium and other pro-am wiki models gain readership it will only serve to improve on Wikipedia’s model. Read the full story here. EB has also just begun to allow bloggers and other web publishers to pull content from their site for free, which in my opinion, is a great move.

Many librarians, passionate about accuracy of information, deride Wikipedia for its openness and susceptibility to vandalism. You would think that government intelligence officials would be equally, if not more, passionate about accuracy, since they are generally dealing with more critical circumstances. Why, then, have they instituted a wikipedia-like information sharing system called Intellipedia, complete with Flickr-like image sharing and video sharing capabilities? The CIA’s Sean Dennehy notes, “We are dealing with puzzles and mysteries. Everyone in the community is working on something of vital national security importance. We want to get to the point in the intelligence community where everyone is contributing their knowledge to Intellipedia.” Read the entire story here.

What is becoming quite clear is that the Wiki-way is here for good. How can library folks contribute their knowledge? What do we have that is unique and would contribute to the world’s store of easily accessible knowledge? Our Special Collections and Digital Collections come to mind first. Any thoughts?

Zip it up and zip it out (still using this phrase until i get a better one.)