Beyond the Search Box

The slides from Paul Hagon's fascinating talk at the Reference at the Metcalfe Seminar are now available on Slideshare.net.

Beyond the search box (long version)

View more presentations from Paul Hagon.

Paul is doing some really interesting things by mashing up data from the National Library with web services and APIs from sites like del.icio.us and Flickr to create enhanced services for users.
Visit Paul's blog for some more insight into what he's been up to...

Is Web 2.0 a Revolution?

In the final post in my series on Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody, I want to share with you his idea that Web 2.0 tools may actually revolutionise society, and consider what that might mean for Libraries.

In my first post I introduced the idea that new technology can only effect societal change once it becomes ubiquitous or invisible. When Web 2.0 tools become ubiquitous everyone becomes a content creator. This is what Chris Anderson calls the democratisation of production in his book, The Long Tail. Shirky argues that once the lines blur between producers or publishers and consumers there is a fundamental change in the way our society operates, that "the category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity." (Here Comes Everybody, p. 108). The result is that previously impossible things start occuring.

The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolution cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced, or destroyed. We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the media businesses, but their suffering isn't unique, it's prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on managing of information for two audiences - employees and the world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organisational structures, is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be. (my emphasis)
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, p. 107

What is the role of Britannica in the age of Google and Wikipedia? I think they're trying to work that out themselves. What role do reference librarians have when only 1% of college students begin their information searches at a library? (OCLC Perceptions report, 2005).

I think that information is the core product of libraries and that the sharing of information now and into the future will profoundly affect how libraries operate. What do you think?

Six Degrees Makes for a Small World

Did anyone see the documentary, How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer, on the ABC on Tuesday night? In a case of serendipity it examined an idea that was explored in Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody, that I was about to blog here. I highly recommend it and if you missed it you can still catch up with it on the ABC web site.

This documentary was about a relatively new field of science called network theory. It used the Six Degrees of Separation game, the idea that any two people in the world can be connected within six steps, as a way to explain Small World Networks. How come I know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows anyone in the world?

The answer goes something like this:
In any social group most people know all the other people in the group because the group shares something in common and there are many such groups. Most people can be considered to be part of several of these small groups - your workmates, friends, family, and so on. There are some people, however, who are part of many more of these groups than the average person. These highly connected individuals form the connections that create the small world phenomenon. While you may not be highly connected there is a good chance that you know someone who is - that is that you know someone, who knows someone. So when you meet someone new and after a brief conversation you realise that you both have a common friend you say, 'it's a small world, isn't it'. These highly connected nodes in the network are called hubs and they are the key for linking disparate nodes. This is essentially how Myspace and Facebook work.

Shirky devotes a whole chapter to small world networks and how social networking tools make use of these small worlds to bring people together. As I was reading this chapter I started wondering whether libraries could capitalise on these highly connected social hubs and convert them into library champions. How do we identify the people in our community that are part of many smaller social groups and get our message to them in the hope that they will pass it on? Indeed, can libraries become these highly connected social hubs for our communities? Surely we are in a position to bring together disparate groups - to make the library a place Does this have any implications for how we might engage in online social networks.

I don't have answers to these questions but I'll bet some of you have suggestions. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Here I Come Too...

In a case of me tooism I've also just finished reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. I agree with Linda and recommend that you track down a copy if you're interested in how social networking via the web is changing the way society operates. I think it has big implications for libraries - but if you've read anything I've written before you'll know that already.

I was struck at certain points throughout the book at how eloquently Shirky illustrates the impacts of technology and I thought that there was a bit too much to put into a comment on Linda's post. I think I'll create a series of posts of the next week or so, sharing some quotes and ideas from the book.

One of the main themes of the book that came through to me was that technological change can only create a revolution once the technology has become ubiquitous. Call it a paradigm shift if you like but Shirky argues that we are only just heading into the territory where the Web 2.0 tools are 'not new' and that we are only beginning to see the ways that these tools will change the way society works. He poses a lovely tech history question to illustrate his point:

Which went mainstream first, the fax or the Web?
People over 35 have a hard time understanding why you'd even ask - the fax machine obviously predates the Web for general adoption. Here's another: which went mainstream first, the radio or the telephone? The same people often have to think about this question, even though the practical demonstration of radio came almost two decades after that of the telephone, a larger gap than separated the fax and the Web. We have to think about radio and television becasue for everyone alive today, those two technologies have always existed. And for college students today, that is true of the fax and the Web. Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn't create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody. p105

Clearly Web 2.0 is not pervasive in Australian society and in the wider community of public library users yet. Some would argue therefore that libraries are wasting their time implementing services aligned with Web 2.0 as most of our users aren't using those tools.

In the early days of the web there was much talk in the library world about how this new tool - the Internet - would revolutionise library services and that we needed to be involved in how it developed and how people navigated the Information Superhighway. Then along came Google and made finding information on the Internet simple and reliable. Meanwhile, our OPACs haven't changed remarkably in the last 5-10 years. There great for finding a particular title or author but if you visit your library's online catalogue wanting a 'good book' on management the OPAC can't help. There's no relevancy ranking, no indication of what others thought about this book, no indication of what are the really seminal texts.

Somehow, despite our intentions we got left behind as a destination for people seeking information. I don't want libraries to be in that situation again. I would argue that we need to start using some new communications technologies and integrating them into our services so that when they do become invisible libraries don't disappear with them.

Here comes everybody .... wait for me, I'm catching up.

I've just finished reading "Here comes everybody" by Clay Shirky which has helped me understand the fascination with blogs and social technology. In chapter 4 he explains it so well. Basically blogs are a conversation between people similar to those conversations you might overhear at a mall, at a cafe, in the train, etc. So these "conversations" are not meant to be read by everybody, only those people interested. If you're not interested, then the blog isn't for you. To quote Shirky on p. 85 "It's simple. They're not talking to you."

Before I read this chapter I really didn't get the whole concept of blogs at all and I didn't understand the attraction of them. So I've really come full circle to now being a blogger (still learning!) myself.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in this area - he uses some great examples of what technology and groups organised around social technology can achieve.

Beth Jefferson on Bibliocommons

I've just been listening to a fascinating interview with Beth Jefferson, founder of Bibliocommons - a social discovery system for libraries. Bibliocommons gives libraries a way to allow their users to contribute to the metadata of their collections by allowing them to tag, review and link items in the catalogue. It's a similar idea to what Jon Blyberg is doing with The Social OPAC. The best way to understand is to have a play with the Oakville Public Library Catalogue, which is running the Bibliocommons software.

What really struck me about this interview is the insight that Beth had on the role that social search and discovery can play in library services. Where Web 2.0 ideas, the Internet, library users, librarians and library collections fit in the puzzle that is the future of libraries.

A couple of points that had me nodding my head...

First of all, there is a recognition that the Internet is changing the ground rules under which libraries operate, but also that public libraries have a high participation rate from the community. We are in a very good position to harness the knowledge and good will of our users to improve our service

One of the roles of libraries has always been to facilitate the seredipitous discovery of books - the perennial RA question, "I just want a good book to read". Traditionally OPACs have done a very poor job at answering this question. Web 2.0 has shown how much benefit there is in social discovery (think Amazon recommendations for instance).

The vast majority of people who visit their library online do so to undertake tasks within the catalogue - search for books, check their account, etc. Integrating the social discovery tools directly into the catalogue places them 'in the flow' of our users and provides us with the best opportunity to gain maximum benefit from them. Sharing this social data between libraries (who use Bibliocommons) gives the critical mass of users required to give the social data relevance.

Librarians have traditionally seen themselves as expert navigators of information. However, we may be better served in the long run by providing the tools that let people facilitate social search and discovery as a means of information navigation. Combining these tools with traditional library discovery tools may give us the best of both worlds.

Beth makes many more observations in the interview than I have outlined herebacking them up with interesting data and there is much value in what she says. If you kind of understand the Web 2.0 concept but are wondering how it might fit with libraries I strongly recommend you have a listen to this podcast.

Britannica vs Wikipedia

Have you heard people suggesting that Wikipedia is no good on the basis that anyone can edit the articles? Have you thought it yourself? At least one contributor to the Britannica blog certainly held similar views - but, the times they are a-changin'!

It seems that Britannica is "throwing open its elegantly-bound covers to the masses. It will allow the “user community” (in the words of the encyclopedia’s blog) to contribute their own articles, which will be clearly marked and run alongside the edited reference pieces".
Josh Fischman - The Wired Campus

Here's the announcement from Britannica. Fancy that!

Thanks to Michael Stephens for the heads-up.

Beyond 4 Walls: Presentation Slides and Links (Martin Boyce)

Beyond 4 Walls: Imagining Reference Services in a 2.0 World was presentation given at the Reference @ the Metcalfe Seminar yesterday. In the presentation I looked at a possible future for reference services and argued the case for starting to plan for that future now.

You can view a version of this presentation below.

View Upload your own

If you can't read the text view the presentation on Slideshare, where you can see it in full-screen.

The links mentioned in the presentation can be found on my del.icio.us bookmarks.

If you view this slideshow or saw me present then please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Some ideas from David King

Have a look at this recent presentation by David King (he blogs under David Lee King).

Think about these ideas as they relate to your library, in particular the reference and information services. This may be a good way to start limbering up for the seminar next week - it will be a great opportunity to think about some big ideas and how they are relevant at a local level.

Skilling Up for the Next Generation

There was an interesting post on the ReadWriteWeb blog recently suggesting that Sexy Librarians of the Future Will Help You Upload Your Videos to YouTube. The article presents a future where one role of librarians is to help people improve the discoverability of their online content. You should read the whole post but here is a snippet:

'Imagine a future when you go to the library with a 5 minute video you've just made about last night's Presidential debates and that librarian says to you:
You should upload it to YouTube and tag it with these four tags - two broad and two more specific to existing communities of interest on YouTube and the topic of your video. Then you should embed that video in a blog post along with some text introducing it and linking to some of your favorite posts by other people who have also written today about the Presidential debates. Make sure to send trackbacks to those posts!...
...Would that be great, or what?'

What I find interesting about this scenario is the recognition that the findability of information is a big challenge. The networking aspect of social software - blogs, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc allows people with converging interests to become recommendation engines. These are the spaces that potential future library customers inhabit. Libraries need to not only understand these new spaces but also to ensure that we are disclosing our content in these places so that our customers can discover us.*

So, how would your staff cope with an enquiry like this? Has your library started planning for the future skill sets your reference staff will require? Does your marketing strategy include online communities? Have you considered running a Learning 2.0 program in your library? If not, why not? Would any of the arguments in these posts sway you toward training staff in new technologies?


*See my comment on Ellen's post about Planning for the Future for a more in depth explanation of what I mean about discovery and disclosure.

Planning for the future

During the recent LIANZA conference the National Library of New Zealand used the opportunity to find out what visions people had for 2017.

The ideas are available from flickr under the heading In 2017 libraries will be…

This idea has inspired a suggestion from Michael Stephens (Tame the web blog) that this method be used to collect visions from your community.

How do you see reference and information services in 2012 and in 2017? What are we doing, do we still have a role? What are the new areas of engagement with the community? How has our capacity to provide reference and information services been enhanced? How has it been eroded?

I think we have a hopeful future, but we need to plan for it, rather than react so I would be interested to know how you see the answers to the above questions.

What tools need to be developed to help libraries lead? There are many great tools out there – but what would help you provide a better service to your customers. What is the next tool like a wiki or a blog?

What else are we talking about that we need to develop? What actions do we need to take to move these ideas into being?

To Blog or not to Blog: the Sutherland Shire Libraries Story

In this post I would like to share with you the motivation behind the introduction of a blog as part of Sutherland Shire Libraries web presence, with the view that it may provide some insight to other libraries who are considering introducing one or more web 2.0 services to their online portfolio. From the outset I would like to state that this is the story of the process a single public library went through and it is peculiar to our situation. Even so, our story may inform your library service in some way and maybe answer some questions you have about moving down the library 2.0 path.

The genesis of the Sutherland Shire Libraries News blog involved a particular issue I was facing with our main web site. I am responsible for the bulk of the Sutherland Shire Libraries web site and I wanted to use the home page to highlight particular aspects of our library service - events, news, services, tips, etc. There is no doubt that I could have done this using the existing Content Management System (CMS) we use to maintain our site, however, I felt this would be a clunky way to do it. Our CMS is not the most productive tool going around and there would be a lot of work manually adding and archiving the various news items, which I expected would change at least every couple of days.

Around the same time I had been doing some reading about Library 2.0 (from some L2 evangelists such as John Blyberg, David Lee King, Michael Casey, Michael Stephens and Jenny Levine) and investigating what some other public libraries (eg. aadl.org) were doing with blogs and other web 2.0 tools. It occurred to me that a blog was the ideal solution to the problem I was facing. Blogging software/tools are essentially a CMS with the exact requirements I needed for this part of the web site. A blog could solve all the problems I was wrestling with in trying to introduce a rolling news archive on our home page.

A blog to the rescue!

So how did a blog fit in with what I was trying to achieve?

• A blog is simply a web site that consists of a number of pages (or entries, posts, items) arranged in reverse chronological order. This is exactly what I wanted on our home page, to highlight the most recent library news. Every time I added a new item it would appear at the top of the list and the oldest one would drop off.
• Blogs can accommodate multiple authors and those authors do not need any technical skill to contribute to them apart from using a standard web browser. No problem for any self respecting 21st century librarian. I figured that the staff with the most knowledge about each event or item could write a post for the blog. Our CMS handles distributed authoring but each author needs to come to grips with a sometimes confusing interface and workflow, which involves training and practice.
• Blogs provide an automatic archive of past news stories. Anything that was added to the blog would be archived and access is managed automatically by the blog software, which creates a list of entries by date. Trying to achieve this on our CMS would have been extremely time-consuming.
• Blogs allow a different writing style to traditional web writing. Ordinarily when writing for the web you try to be brief as most people scan the page quickly rather than reading every word from right to left, top to bottom. Blogs, on the other hand, lend themselves to more in depth description and allowing comments often promotes discussion among readers and writers.

One last problem

The blog idea fitted so nicely with what I was trying to achieve but it still left me with one last problem. How was I going to get the content from the blog into the home page of the main web site?

Blogs provide an RSS feed – a version of their content that can be understood and exchanged by machines. Ordinarily, RSS feeds are consumed in an aggregator but it seemed to me that there was no reason that a web site couldn’t be set up to display an RSS feed from a different web site. Indeed, I had seen this happening all over the web. This part actually proved one of the bigger stumbling blocks but I discovered a service called Feedburner which, among other things, allowed me to republish a feed as html using something called buzzboost. There are other sites that allow you to achieve the same thing, Feed2Javascript for instance.

Asking Permission

OK, I was now quite satisfied that setting up a blog and using that as the basis for a sort of running news service on the home page of our web site was technically feasible and would actually make the process of maintaining the news quite straightforward. It was time to suggest the idea to the Library managers.

Before I approached management with my idea I took one step back and asked myself, ‘do I really want to do this?’. You see, I had a fair idea of the response I would get and it sounded something like – ‘OK, you can do it as long as you maintain it and make sure the quality is maintained’.

Starting a blog is a commitment. You need to commit to regular updates; otherwise your readers will quickly lose patience. I didn’t necessarily want to be the only one in our entire Library service that was adding things to our blog. I already filled my days with my existing duties. How was I going to find time to keep adding new stuff to the blog?

This and some other management challenges formed the basis of some discussion with my management about whether we should go ahead with the idea. Obviously, in the end we decided to go ahead and introduce the blog. However, these are some things we had to consider before establishing our blog.

Management challenges

• How do you get the balance right between maintaining quality and workload? Giving a single person responsibility for a blog provides consistency but it also imparts a significant workload. Multiple authors spread the workload around and allow the most knowledgeable staff to contribute their expertise; however, not everyone is a capable or natural writer. In the wash up we decided that all staff should be encouraged to contribute but rather than posting directly to the blog they would send their contributions to me and I would add them to the blog, thus maintaining consistency. This also meant that I could control which stories went on to the main site and when they appeared.
• Is cost an issue? Blogging services or software is actually incredibly cheap. We use Blogger, which is free! There are many blogging tools and other web 2.0 services that are also free and where they aren’t free the cost is usually fairly insignificant. However, staff time costs and this may be an issue for you.
• How important to you, your manager, your Council or other funding body is branding? Do you want your blog to look like the rest of your web site? Do you have access to staff with the technical skills to alter the default templates of your chosen service to match the rest of your online presence? Can you afford to pay someone else to do this for you? Are you happy with simply adding your logo to the corner of your blog? These are important questions to consider but keep in mind that these tools are designed for Joe Public to use and you can often do a lot without being an expert. It does take time though and the less technically adept you are the more time it is likely to take (see staff cost above!).

Unexpected Benefits

The upshot is that at Sutherland Shire Libraries we decided to implement a blog because it solved a particular problem we were facing. It wasn’t until we had established the blog that we started to see some unexpected benefits.

RSS technology wasn’t a very important part of the reason that the blog works for us. It is the glue that binds our blog and our web site. We were using the blog to improve our web site but the RSS feed also allows our customers - our community - to consume our content wherever and whenever suits them best. They no longer need to actually visit our site to see what’s happening.
In addition, allowing comments on our blog opens up a communication channel between us and our customers. Direct feedback from customers is something that you get surprisingly little of from people who visit the library in person. We hope that comments will allow people a little anonymity and make them a little more comfortable in telling us how they really think we’re doing. We haven’t been greatly successful in eliciting comments on our blog but I don’t think that is particularly surprising. Australia is still a long way behind some other countries in embracing the blogosphere but if we look at what is happening in the US I think it is only a matter of time until we start to get some really good feedback through this channel.

The moral of the story is…

The message I hope that you take out of our story is not that I think that you should all immediately go out and start a blog. That is not what Library 2.0 is about. What I hope you take from this is the benefits there are to be gained from many of the web 2.0 services that are available. Make time to keep up to date with what is happening in the online world because there just might be some service that solves a problem you are facing. Using these tools may open your service up to your community and get them involved in your library more cheaply and easily than you otherwise could.