The press release:

Making Libraries Relevant in an Internet-Based Society

PSU’s Casey Bisson wins Mellon Award for innovative search software for libraries

PLYMOUTH, N.H. — You can’t trip over what’s not there. Every day millions of Internet users search online for information about millions of topics. And none of their search results include resources from the countless libraries around the world—until now.

Casey Bisson, information architect for Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library, has received the prestigious Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for his ground-breaking software application known as WPopac. The Wpopac software will revolutionize the online search process by allowing titles and descriptions of library holdings to be found on the Internet.

The award was presented at a ceremony hosted by the Mellon Foundation on Monday, Dec. 4 at the fall meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, in Washington, D.C. Bisson’s project was selected as one of only 10 recipients out of several hundred nominees for 2006, the first year the MATC awards have been granted. The decision was made by an all-star panel that included Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports the thoughtful application of information technology to a wide range of scholarly purposes, including developing digital technologies to enhance research, teaching, and online and distance learning, and new technical approaches to archiving text and multimedia materials.

Christopher Mackie, program officer for the Mellon Foundation’s Research in Information Technology section, was pleased with how well WPopac fits the foundation’s criteria.

“The award committee was particularly excited by the way WPopac makes library patrons more active participants in their library experience,” Mackie said. “By allowing patrons to add information to library records online, the software allows the community to work together to make their library resources more informative and more valuable. When you couple this with the reduced costs of access that WPopac permits, and the enthusiasm with which it has been received by librarians and patrons alike, the committee judged the project to have a truly revolutionary potential.”

“For years we’ve been talking about the digital divide in terms of access, and we’ve been working hard to put computers and networks into every school and library,” Bisson said. “But those same libraries, and their communities, are invisible to people online. If libraries are to be more than study halls in the Internet age, if they are to continue their role as centers of knowledge in every community, they need to be findable and available online. They need the tools to represent their collections, their services, and the unique history of their communities online. That’s what WPopac does.”

Dwight Fischer, director of information technology at PSU, called Bisson’s work an appropriate centerpiece for the university’s transformed academic library. “Over the past year, Lamson Library has implemented what is known as a Learning Commons,” Fischer explained. “This joint effort between library and IT professionals brings more technologies, online research materials, academic tutoring, writing and reading services to a central location in the library. Library faculty and staff members work side-by-side with IT professionals, forming a collaborative team that better reflects the needs of today’s students. Casey’s project will help build more bridges to more information for more people. We’re very proud of him.”

andrew w mellon foundation, award, mellon foundation, press release, wpopac, libraries, future libraries, lib20, library 2.0

LCE2006 was a success. Let me quickly join with the other participants to offer my appreciation to John Blyberg and Alan Grey for all their work planning the event, as well as Darien Public Library director Louise Berry and the rest of the library for hosting the event.

Side note: Darien is a beautiful town, but we all have to learn to pronounce the name like a local.

Michael Golrick and John Blyberg each have a number of photos on Flickr, and I’m jealous of those like Lichen Rancourt who can live-blog events like this. I’m still digesting what I learned, but at least I can wash it down with a sip from my new LCE mug.

Further discussion will continue, as always, in the blogosphere, in the L2 Wiki, and just about anywhere else librarians gather.

In addition to all that material, let me offer some screenshots and notes from my short preface to the discussion about OPACs. (And, I hope my words were clearer than the pictures snapped of me at the time — vis: one and two).

camp, darien public library, future libraries, lce, lce06, lce2006, lib20, libcamp, libraries, library, library 2.0, library camp, library camp east, unconference

I’m not going to ALA/NO so I’m hoping those who are will blog it. Two events I’m especially interested in:

On Sunday, June 25:

Catalog Transformed: From Traditional to Emerging Models of Use

This program, co-sponsored by the MARS User Access to Services Committee and RUSA’s Reference Services Section (RSS, formerly MOUSS), deals with changes in library catalogs in response to the increasing Googlization of electronic resources. Speakers include: Cindy Levine (Reference Librarian for the Humanities, North Carolina State University), Jill Newby (English Language Literature and Writing Librarian, University of Arizona), Andrew K. Pace (Head of Systems, North Carolina State University), Jina Wakimoto (Librarian, Head of Cataloging, University of Colorado at Boulder), and John Blyberg (Network Administrator and Lead Developer, Ann Arbor District Library).

And an ACRL debate on Monday, June 26:

The Emperor Has No Clothes: Be It Resolved That Information Literacy is a Fad and Waste of Librarian Time and Talent.

Moderated by James Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian, Columbia University, two teams composed of Stanley Wilder, Associate Dean in the Library, University of Rochester, Jeff Rutenbeck, Associate Professor and Director Digital Media Studies, University of Denver, Julie B. Todaro, Dean, Library Services, Austin Community College, and Gary P. Radford, Professor of Communication Studies, Fairleigh Dickinson University, will debate the relevance of information literacy as we know it. Is information literacy a concept created by academic librarians to make themselves more relevant to the curriculum or is it one of our most important roles? Is information literacy critical thinking in disguise or is there a real body of knowledge to be communicated? Does civil society’s dependence on life-long learners require the acquisition of information literacy skills? Can libraries justify the expenditures they’ve made on teaching information literacy or do the data suggest otherwise? This debate will test our assumptions and beliefs about a core element of the academic librarians’ role in the educational process.

I’m also sad to be missing the Blogger Bash, but happy to see this blogger-friendly side come out. So please, blog this stuff.

ALA/NO, ALA2006, American Library Association, New Orleans, ala, conference, future libraries , lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0

Nicole Engard last month posted about The State of our ILS, describing the systems as:

I’d say it’s a like the crazy cousin you have to deal with because he’s family! It doesn’t fit, we are a very open IT environment, we have applications all over that need to talk to each other nicely and the [ILS] is a brick wall preventing us from getting the information we need and sending the information we’d like.

Nicole’s point about interoperability is well put, and the post is part of her preparation for conversation and discussion she hopes will go on at the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in July.

Coincidentally, I’ll be at AALL next month. My presentation will focus on the things we can do once we overcome the problems Nicole describes, but my concordance with her point should be clear (see previous posts one, two, three).

Extra: When will people who want to improve things not feel as though the ILS is against them, as in this post by Steve Lawson?

update: I keep forgetting to link to this public example of how bad our OPACs/ILSs are. Thanks go to David Walker for making me ROTFL.

AALL, American Association of Law Libraries, future libraries, ILS, interoperability, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, Nicole Engard, standards, Steve Lawson

Following Edward Tufte’s advice, I’ve been wanting to offer a presentation without slides for a long time now; I finally got my chance in Portland. The downside is that now I don’t have anything to offer as a takeaway memory aid for my talk. My speaking notes are too abstract to offer for public consumption, but below are the URLs from them along with a tiny bit of context.

Foundation

Increasing use of the web is changing our expectations of information services and places greater demands of self-service on them. If “Web 2.0” has any meaning, it’s this notion that internet services are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a part of our every day reality.

One interesting reflection of this increasing usage and comfort with the web is the development of social software like MySpace, Facebook, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, Flickr, and also LibraryThing.

It takes a moment, sometimes, to realize what’s changed in the ten years since the first Mosaic browser opened the web to a mass audience. Kevin Kelly tried to explain that when he noted: “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.”

Okay, now what?

We need to understand how people now search for and interact with information. Part of that means making peace with search engines and making sense of “findability.” Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability addresses this question in terms directly relevant to libraries. To that I add the notion of The Google Economy and a set of rules for participation (and findability) in it:

• Linking must be possible
• Linking must be desirable
• Linking must be measurable

I argue that libraries are rich with the stuff people would like to link to, but the architecture of our systems often fails us on the other aspects.

I’ve been exploring this with my WPopac project, and I’ve seen some interesting results in the four months that it’s been live and available to the public. One example is that a web search for “joe monninger” returns the WPopac page as the top hit. Elsewhere, WPopac content is appearing in blogs (examples: Fuzzyfruit and Angie) and as a result some of the books in WPopac are now highly ranked in web search engines (example: A Baby Sister For Frances is now the only non-commercial result in the first page of Google results).

A rather more controversial look into how the Google Economy works can be found in Google’s explanation of their search results. Interestingly, the same factors within the Google Economy that created the controversy also made possible a solution: the top search result for “Jew” is now the Wikipedia page.

How can we track our participation in the Google Economy?

Alexa might be best described as the Nielsen ratings for the web. Tracking the daily changes in reach and rank (and looking at all the variations of the graph) can be rather addictive. Alexaholic serves that fix by offering more varied views of the same data.

It should be said, however, that the results in Alexa are the slowest to reflect changes or improvement in a service’s role in the Google Economy. A more immediate pulse of things can be taken at Technorati or within Google.

Last word

As we consider ways to improve our online services — as we look to build the online library of the near future — these words echo in my mind:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
• They want/need to be entertained.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

In short, our libraries’ web sites are the online embodiment of our libraries. Our patrons don’t want to know how to use our library, they want to find in our online services the value that libraries offer in their in-person services. They want online services that deliver answers.

findability, future libraries, google economy, lib 2.0, libraries, library, library 2.0, online libraries, opac 2.0, presentation, usability, web, web 2.0, wpopac

A: Because we compare them to the wrong things.

I’m in training today for a piece of software used in libraries. It’s the second of three days of training and things aren’t going well. Some stuff doesn’t work, some things don’t work the first (second, third…ninth) time, and other things just don’t make sense. At lunch, one of the other participants mentioned to the trainer that some of the activities in the software seemed to have too many steps, too many places to go wrong, too many turns between beginning and end.

The answer began by explaining that the most analogous activity would be the acquisition of books for the collection. Adding a book to the collection requires first identifying the book, reading the reviews, choosing to purchase, identifying a vendor and cost, identifying funding, ordering, receiving, cataloging…

The list went on, perhaps with too much detail, but it landed on the following: “there are at least 12 steps to just putting a book on the shelf. When you think about it like that, our software is easy.”

I bit my tongue at that moment, but I’ve been grinding my teeth about it since.

Here’s what’s eating me: You can compare one unlikable thing to any other unlikable thing and come out ahead, but what about “real-world” comparisons?

Paul Graham explains in his “Hardest Lessons For Startups To Learn” essay that developers often compare themselves to the wrong things, misunderstanding who their competition is:

A lot of startups worry “what if Google builds something like us?”

What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.

Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing. A corollary is that you shouldn’t relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there’s someone else out there working on the same thing. (emphasis added)

Graham is talking to startups, but switch some words around and you’ll get my message: if you compare yourself to something that sucks, you’ll only be able to say you’re more or less sucky.

A better comparison for this product would have been against flickr, where activities that are closely analogous to those in the software we’re being trained on often require only one step. And taking Graham’s advice, the best way to approach it would be constantly ask “can we do this better?” “Could a competitor we don’t yet know about do this better?”

(Aside: social software is that which gets spammed, that which gets you laid, and that which you’ll need no training on.)

Please, stand with me now and repeat:

When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.

Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.

bad answers, compare, comparison, competition, crap, developers, development, failure, future libraries, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, software, startups, suck, sucks, sucky, training, vendors

My first reaction to the notion of librarians running reading groups in Second Life was a question of whether this was akin to putting a reference desk in a bar.

My second reaction was a question of how our systems will support these extra-library interactions. Can people quickly and easily trade URLs to access the library materials they’re talking about? Will library systems ever be as easy to use as the game/social environments we’re trying to use them in?

My third reaction is a question of politics. The movement of people online doesn’t respect geographical borders, nor those of gerrymandered political districts. Libraries may serve online users, and some of them will be successful, but our funding models are for local libraries that serve geographically constrained communities.

future libraries, libraries, library, library 2.0, online gaming, online libraries, second life, social gaming, social libraries

It can be hard for library folk to imagine that the web development world might be as divided about the meaning and value of “Web 2.0” as the library world is about “Library 2.0,” but we/they are. Take Jeffrey Zeldman’s anti-Web 2.0, anti-AJAX post, for instance. Zeldman’s a smart guy, and he’s not entirely off-base, but let’s not confuse his argument. What you don’t see him suggesting is that we abandon the web. And he certainly hasn’t packed up shop.

What Zeldman and now Michael Calore are suggesting is that their fellow web developers use these fancy, (sort of) new technologies like tags and AJAX carefully. But where they go wrong, and it’s an apparently common mistake, is that their definition of Web 2.0 ends there. Conversely, Tim O’Reilly’s definition of the term admitted to some difficulty in bounding it. In fact, it seemed more an attempt to identify the core attributes of both a number of wild successes (think Google) and emerging stars (think Flickr).

At the center of all of this, however, was the unspoken but undeniable fact that huge numbers of people were turning to the internet for their information, news, and entertainment.

That’s why Zeldman and Calore are publishing no end of tips on how to get better search engine placement, how to design usable and accessible sites, and how to design them well. Look back at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 spiel. Right there on page one you’ll see him talk about how “the web is a platform” and a discussion of why Google is the “standard bearer” for Web 2.0. Google’s success has nothing to do with AJAX, and it’s not tags. Google’s success is in the way it delivers, for the most part, what people want when they want it.

With search engines handling over five billion searches per month, it’s pretty clear that there’s a huge number of Web 2.0 users out there. Yes, Google and other Web 2.0 technologies may be difficult to make sense of, and it might take us some time to find our place in this new world. But be wary of those who suggest they’re irrelevant, for our customers have already voted with their feet.

arguments, definition, definitions, future internet, future libraries, internet, internet usage, jeffrey zeldman, lib20, library 2.0, michael calore, tim o’reilly, web 2.0, tim o’reilly

These pictures are mostly foolish, but here’s a small point: none of us had ever seen a cop pull over a cab — certainly not a cab with passengers — before this, so we were all rather curious about why. In front of us stood a question, an example of the many questions we all encounter every day, and it’s the kind of question that few of us would ever suggest going to the library to answer.

Later on we found Jason, who taught us a bit of history we probably should have known, and clearly could have taught us some more. But when asked about how he’d settle a bar bet, he said he’d likely go to Google. He noted that he’d look at the search results carefully, but admitted that he probably wouldn’t be found going to his library for answers.

cambridge, cambridge ma, future libraries, future library, information, information behavior, information seeking, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, massachusetts, police, question, questions, reference, reference information, sign, silly

I loved this quote from Dave Young when I first found it, and I love it more now:

Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.

Read that again, but replace the relevant bits with “user” or “patron” and “your library” or “your databases.”

The point of all this in a post from Jessamyn about understanding what users understand.

Part of the problem is that the information landscape and our behaviors — well, our users’ behaviors anyway — have changed faster than our systems and services. That is, the value of the library is distributed among our catalogs, institutional repositories, digital archives, many dozens of databases, and thousands of ejournals. We struggle for ways to differentiate between them when all our patrons really want is “information.”

My friend Joe wrote:

Younger people, naturally, find all of this equivocating silly. They know where they are going to look for information, and it sure as heck isn’t the library — at least not the library as it currently exists. In a healthy way, perhaps, they don’t make distinctions about information. They use it, then move on.

I doubt there are many who praise the complexity, the dis-integration of our online services. Yet because of limitations of our technology and, perhaps, just the enormity of the task, these problems persist.

That’s why I like John Kupersmith’s pages of “library terms that users understand,” where you’ll find a quick guide to usability tested terms and other goodies. Because, yes, one of the biggest problems we face has nothing to do with the technology.

communication design, customer, dave young, future libraries, john kupersmith, language, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, targeting, taxonomy, terminology, user expectations, user knowledge

Users want a rich pool from which to search, simplicity, and satisfaction. One does not have to take a 50-minute instruction session to order from Amazon. Why should libraries continue to be so difficult for our users to master?

— from page 8 of the The University of California Libraries Bibliographic Services Task Force Final Report. I find a new gem every time I look at it.

design philosophy, future libraries, information behavior, information design, libraries, library, library 2.0, search, searching, simplicity, user centered design

I prefaced my point about how the standards we choose in libraries isolate us from the larger stream of progress driving development outside libraries with the note that I was sure to get hanged for it.

It’s true.

I commented that there were over 140,00 registered Amazon API developers and 365 public OpenSearch targets (hey look, there’s another one already), but that SRW/SRU would always play to a smaller audience. Basing arguments on the popularity of the subjects is dangerous, especially so within the library community, and touching on such inflammatory arguments during a 20 minute presentation is certain to leave people feisty.

It’s also especially dangerous to use an apparently sacred cow as the object of what I wanted to be a general example. My overall argument was (and remains) that we should look for opportunities to break down the barriers that isolate our work and find means to expand our community. Still, I believe a specific argument about SRW/SRU has merit, and I’m willing to carry the flag on this side.

So let’s start with what I believe we can agree on: SRW/SRU, OpenSearch, and Amazon Web Services all serve substantially similar interests: the ability to issue a query, get a list of results, get a detailed record for each result (not possible with OpenSearch). From here, many people seem to argue that XSLT can be used to mutate the results of one schema to the other, or directly to browser-displayable content with ease. On the face of it, this seems to solve many of the incompatibilities while preserving the unique features of each.

Sadly, those XSLT arguments ignore one problem while creating another.

XSLT (and similar techniques) can change the representation of the data in a record, but they can’t change the type or nature of the data and such techniques certainly can’t address differences in the way applications interact with the API. As an example, consider that an XSLT could likely be written to translate Flickr’s schema for a single image into something that looks like Amazon’s schema for a single title, but no XSLT can make an application that interacts with one API properly interact with the other.

The problem that XSLT solutions ignore is that if all these schemas can be translated between eachother (either cleanly or not), and if catalogers working with one metadata standard must be aware of the limitations of other standards to which their work might get XSLT’d to, then what’s the value of their differences? Why invest the duplicated time and effort in each?

The rest of this argument assumes that XSLT solves neither the needs of the programmer who must still learn to navigate different APIs nor the cataloger who must either use lowest-common-denominator cataloging standards or write metadata that can’t be cleanly translated to other schemas.

With XSLT out of the picture, it becomes clear that SRU/SRW is indeed among the wall of standards that make it impossible for us within the library to share executable code with anybody outside our community. And because of our low numbers and natural variations in chosen environments (preferred language & database among them), we often find it difficult to share executable code among others within our community.

It’s also worth considering the differences in features between SRW/SRU, OpenSearch, and Amazon Web Services: Both OpenSearch and AWS offer ways to include suggested alternate searches within the search response set (OpenSearch does this especially well). Nothing I’ve seen in SRW/SRU does this (please correct me if I’m wrong), yet considering how much interest there is in developing more human search interfaces and those that allow faceted searching, these are clearly essential components of any useful standard.

Further, AWS supports all aspects of the usage of materials, not just the search and retrieval of them. Are AWS’s shopping cart and checkout features not similar to our circ checkout procedures? Could AWS’s list management features not be used to show patrons what they have checked out now or throughout their history (if we or they wanted that), as well as allowing them to maintain the reading wishlists or personal bibliographies?

And AWS’s support for returning related and recommended items for each record, as well as comments and reviews is outside the scope of SRW/SRU, but required for many of the features we want to add to our applications.

The point here is that while there are substantial differences in the details between SRW/SRU and OpenSearch or AWS, it is not easy to conclude that SRW/SRU is substantially better for the applications we seem to most want to build.

And this is when we have to take note of the recent University of California libraries report and the quote that puts us all in our places: “for the past ten years online searching has become simpler and more effective everywhere, except in library catalogs” (and the same could be said of our online databases).

The problem isn’t that we’ve been bad coders, and we certainly haven’t intentionally built systems that were difficult to use. The problem is that our community has been isolated and unable to leverage advances made elsewhere. Again, my argument is that we need to change this, that we need to find more ways to collaborate not only with those within our community, but with those outside our community.

There’s much we might be able to offer coders outside libraries, but the arguments defending SRW/SRU seem to ignore the lessons we might learn from them.

Final example: it’s pretty obvious to all of us now that chat reference should be done using common and freely available IM tools, but that didn’t stop us from investing huge sums of money in building and buying custom, library specific chat reference tools. Where else will history show we’ve made similar mistakes?

a9, amazon api, amazon web services, argument, AWS, cage match, code4lib, code4lib 2006, future libraries, information retrieval, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library standards, opensearch, search, search and retrieval, search retrieval, sru/srw, srw/sru, web services

As with all my other presentations, the my slides tell less than half the story, but I’ve posted them anyway. I’m told the audio was recorded, and there’s a chance that will help explain all this, but until then you’ll have to piece this all together from my previous writings, what little I’m about to offer here, and the slides (which, again, without the spoken component, probably do more to misdirect interested readers than answer questions).

My code4lib 2006 presentation included discussion not only of (WPopac, my open source OPAC based on WordPress, but also a plea for us within the libraries to look outside our community for practices and standards that are in use and supported by larger populations than we can ever hope for on our own. WPopac is one attempt at that, using an application that can already claim “hundreds of thousands” of current users and many thousands of developers. Amazon offers another example, boasting 140,000 registered developers of its API, making it the defacto standard for the exchange of bibliographic information online. Meanwhile, our community of programmers within libraries, which is far smaller than 1% of Amazon’s registered API users, must contend with dozens of metadata standards (MARC, MODS, METS, DC, etc., etc., etc.) and communication interfaces (SRU/SRW, z39.50, and more) to do substantially similar work.

I’ve talked about this before (here, here, here, and here, among others), and I’ll be talking about it more yet. Most exciting for me, I wasn’t alone in my plea, as Art Rhyno made some great points about how our acquisitions and accounting processes are substantially similar to what’s called ERP in the outside world.

library, libraries, standards, wpopac, code4lib, presentation, great wall of standards, population density, sustainable development, sustainability, programmers, coders, developers, isolation, future libraries, library 2.0

I noted Aaron Schmidt’s points on IM in libraries previously, but what I didn’t say then was how certain I was that popular instant messaging clients like AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo!’s or Google’s are far superior to the so-called virtual reference products. Why? They’re free, our patrons are comfortable with them, and they work (three things that can’t be said about VR products). Ah, heck, just take a look at what Michael Stephens was saying about them last week (as quoted by Teresa Koltzenburg at ALA TechSource):

“Back in 2002, my library jumped into the virtual reference game, and we wrote a gigantic check to an unnamed VR company. We spent the summer doing intensive training. I was training at that time at my library, and I designed a four-session, four-hour-apiece training course to get people comfortable with this huge, scary thing that was virtual reference.”

According to Michael, after the large initial investment made by his library in the VR product, plus probably another $5,000 on the training, and the staff time spent promoting it, his library’s virtual reference service, via the vendor-supplied software, “fell flat on its face.” He explains, “After you pulled your users into this Java-enabled, chat queue, they got the message, something like, ‘Hold on. The library will be right with you.’ Then the whole thing would crash. What kind of message were we sending with that one?”

IM, for SJCPL, was meant to be a temporary VR fix, but as of today, says Michael, “It’s permanent. We cancelled that contract on the unnamed VR product, said ‘good-bye,’ and today we use IM. I can’t tell you enough how great it is.”

Perhaps I like this story because it gives me another chance to bang the drum on my not invented here story, but the point is that none of this need be expensive or complex. And while I’m tempted to suggest you ask the kids in the young adult section about it, the truth is that AIM is larger than that, it’s just another facet of our ballooning internet use.

AIM, aol instant messenger, change, changing modes of communication, communication, communication technology, im, instant messaging, modes of communication, aim, virtual reference, library, libraries, reference desk, reference, future libraries, library 2.0, lib20

First things first, this thing probably needs a better name, but I’m not up to the task. Got ideas? Post in the comments. For the rest of this, let’s just pretend it’s an interview.

What is WPopac? It’s an OPAC — a library catalog, for my readers outside libraries — inside the framework of WordPress, the hugely popular blog management application.

Why misuse WordPress that way? WordPress has a a few things we care about built-in: permalinks, comments, and trackbacks (and a good comment spam filter), just to start. But it also offers something we’ve never seen in a library application before: access to a community of knowledge, programmers, and designers outside libraries. Because the core of WPopac is WordPress, and because it preserves WordPress’s rich plugin API and themes structure, it already has more users, designers, developers, and administrators than all the ILS vendors combined.

So, down with the ILS? Well, no. There are some brave souls working on full-fledged open-source ILSs, but that’s not my goal here. The ILS does a lot of stuff I don’t want to be responsible for, like the acquisitions workflow and financial, inventory, and circulation management. When you peak inside your ILS, you realize there’s a lot there you don’t want to have fix.

So, we have to have both an ILS and WPopac? Well, you don’t have to have anything, but if you want it, at least WPopac is free, extensible, and open-source. Less flippant answer: yes, it does assume there’s an ILS in the background somewhere, but more than a few people see potential for projects like this to serve underfunded libraries that may lack automation. That could be interesting.

But blog posts are unstructured and library data is full of structure. What gives? The standard WordPress content database is buttressed with extra tables to represent all the bibliographic information in its atomic detail. But even the ‘unstructured’ data takes some clues from the microformats camp, putting everything in XML parsable XHTML.

How’s that work again? Well, let me be careful here. I’m not proposing WPopac as a solution, rather as a framework for building a solution. That said, you can get a pretty good idea of how the first draft of this concept works by looking at a real record (be sure to view the source, as there are some hidden divs in there). But if you don’t like that, you can change the look by fiddling with the stylesheet or switching themes, and you can change the content with the WordPress API or by changing the way it’s loaded in the first place.

Further, because all the bibliographic data is there in its atomic detail, plugins can use and display that data anywhere on the page. Try a search to see how I’m using that data in the right column to improve findability, as in my clustered search results prototype from last fall.

So, does that mean I can do XYZ that I’ve wanted to do? Maybe. Anybody who knows how to write a WordPress plugin can take a stab at playing with all that data. The “refine search” content in the right column, and the “alternate searches” content at the bottom is generated that way. Try this one: I’ve finally got the Wikipedia results I’ve always wanted in the catalog, just look in the right column. Or take a look at the “add to del.icio.us” link in the record display, that’s generated by a regular wordpress plugin written by Arne Brachhold, who wasn’t thinking of libraries or OPACs when he wrote it. And down at the bottom of the page you’ll see the a list of related works that’s built by my own bsuite plugin. Want COinS-PMH/unAPI? The interface and all the data are there to make it happen, and here’s a good plugin to start from.

So no guarantees, but hey, give it a try. And if you run into trouble you’ll be among hundreds of thousands of WordPress users and supported by a huge community of plugin and theme authors.

What about RSS, XML, OpenSearch? WordPress solves the RSS feed for us (look at this URL to see). A feature-complete XML API, is a bit further off, but maybe somebody wants to pitch in to help solve that one? And full OpenSearch support, taking advantage of the suggested and alternate search features, is my next big project (here’s where I’m going with that).

This is awesome, can I run it at my library? Well, Jenny called dibs… But, really, this project started with my attempts to find a way to make my work sharable, so, yes. Call me a dreamer, but I find the notion of a community of libraries sharing plugins and code changes really exciting. But right now, there are three major components — the data importer, the plugin, and some modifications to the WordPress baseline code — and all of them need a little more work to make them distributable. Stay tuned.

This sucks, it doesn’t do X, and your plan for Y is all wrong. You’re probably right. This is my first stab at a really big problem, and there’s a lot that isn’t done and certainly a few things I didn’t think of. The plan here is to build a framework that let’s us ask questions, build possible solutions, and share them easily. The only thing I’m certain of is our need to find ways to make our systems easier to use, easier to extend, and integrated into the larger stream of progress that’s shaping the internet that over 200 million Americans are making an essential part of their lives. Take this as an invitation to get involved, there’s lots to do.

library, libraries, library 2.0, lib20, opac 2.0, opac, library catalog, library services, wordpress, wpopac, future libraries

Anybody who questioned the Pew Internet and American Life report about how teens use the internet and how they expect conversations and interactivity from the online services they use might do well to take a look at this comment on my Chernobyl Tour story:

Student Looking for Info that your not give us
February 3rd, 2006 10:11

you people suck. We have to do a school report and you are not giving us any info on what happened to the people, and the environmetn, we need a story from someone and about someone who lived through this inccident.

Ignore the bad spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Ignore the personal criticism. Instead, think about enormous shift of worldviews that allows a reader to make that comment about a popular story on a top-ranked website. Yes, the internet really is conversational — even if some people may be bad conversationalists.

Now imagine instead that the comment was on a related post at a library’s reference blog. Kindly worded or not, that’s a reference question. It’s an opportunity to serve a patron who obviously isn’t being served by traditional library services, and it’s a huge argument for libraries to make sure they’re blogging this stuff and fully participating in the Google Economy. Afterall, the person who made that comment certainly didn’t search the library.

Keep reading: the language of your website, institutional blogging done right, and designing library services for today.

library, libraries, web 2.0, social web, social internet, blogs are conversations, blog, blogs, comments, blog comment, blog comments, teens, internet generation, reference blog, millennials, future libraries

Ryan Eby speaks with tongue firmly in cheek in this blog post, but his point is well taken. Privacy is serious to us, but we nonetheless make decisions that trade bits of our patrons’ privacy as an operational cost. While we argue about the appropriate time keep backups of our circulation records, we largely accept them — and the way they connect our patrons with the books they read — without question.

The problem here is that it’s a decision we make on behalf our patrons, often without bothering to inform our patrons of the risks we take with their privacy. And the problem there is that it violates users’ expectations of transparency and self determination — some of the same expectations you’ll find in Jenny Levine’s Online Library User Manifesto.

So here’s the trick: how do we deliver targeted and customized services online, without unhinging our patrons’ privacy? The answer so far is that we allow patrons to choose, giving patrons the tools and knowledge they need to make their own decisions about how much they reveal. But that answer depends on the notion that library services must be self-contained, that the only way our patrons can manage reading lists and the like is if libraries offer those services.

One only need look at LibraryThing to see an alternative. It’s not that I think LibraryThing or Listal or any other service will make better privacy decisions than we will. My point is that our attempts to build out customized services will likely draw resources away from efforts to improve the way our existing services interoperate with the rest of the internet. Listal and LibraryThing work because Amazon built an outstanding API and made it freely available to all. If libraries offered an API like that, those services could easily integrate our holdings, and LibraryThing users could match their interests against materials available at their local libraries without revealing themselves to us. Patrons could run desktop applications like Delicious Library and (mostly) avoid revealing themselves over the network. Libraries are in the awkward position of having identifying information about their patrons, but online-only services might not need any more identification than an anonymous username and password.

But even more simply than that, it’s worth asking how easily our online services work with basic expectations of web sites. Can users bookmark an item in your catalog in their browsers? Can they send the catalog URL of their new favorite book in an email to a friend? Can Google or other search engines index your catalog and help your patrons find materials even when they don’t know to search your site specifically?

Circulation records can be subpoenaed, but getting at the reading list I’ve been keeping as bookmarks in my browser is more likely to require officials to serve me with a search warrant. Building systems that work with the internet puts users in charge of their own privacy decisions.

library, libraries, privacy, transparency, web 2.0, internet, bookmarkability, durable links, web20, web architecture, usability, privacy, privacy and libraries, future libraries

Lichen pointed me to this Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette post about new technologies:

Keep up to date with new technologies that you can co-opt for library use. So what if no one will ever listen to the pod casts of your bibliographic instruction lectures, subscribe to the RSS feeds from your library’s blog, send your reference librarian instant messages, or view your library’s profile on facebook.com? At least you did your part to make all these cool technologies a little bit lamer.

Point taken, and it’s a reasonable caution. The same rush to embrace trends that has us putting coffee shops in our libraries might also push us into trying to setup shop in online forums like Facebook, but who’s to say we should go there? After all, people have been gathering in bars for years, but the we don’t see branches opening in Cheers or libraries offering Irish coffee in their new coffee shops.

But there is something to learn from these new technologies. I just saw numbers that suggested Facebook (an optional service) gets about the same usage by our students as our university portal (which students are required to use, even to check email). Match that with the growing number of stories I’ve been hearing of students using Facebook to collaborate on class projects, and we have to conclude that something interesting is happening.

I’m going to avoid the question of whether libraries should be trying to offer services inside Facebook, and instead ask the question of how well our existing services work for those using Facebook. If students are collaborating, they’re likely sharing URLs, but our OPACs and databases often aren’t bookmarkable, making it difficult to exchange links to those resources (and instructions like these don’t help either). And if somebody blogs about one of our items, our catalogs don’t support comments or trackbacks, making it a one-sided conversation. Facebook and other online services are important to our patrons, and we would do well to think about how information is exchanged using those technologies. We would do well to build services that interoperate with the internet that people are using.

social software, social internet, internet and society, internet and academia, facebook, myspace, library, libraries, future libraries, information behavior, durable links, academia

We can be forgiven for not noticing, but the world changed not long ago.

Sometime after the academics gave up complaining about the apparent commercialization of the internet, and while Wall Street was licking it’s wounds after the first internet boom went bust, the world changed.

Around the time we realized that over 200 million Americans have internet access, that 94 million Americans use the internet ?on an average day, and that 80% of them believe the internet is a reliable source of information, we looked around and found that along with doing their banking, their taxes, and booking tickets for travel and movies, those users were making about five billion web searches each month.

Now that over 62 million households (55%) have internet-connected computers at home, and 87% of youth 12-17 are active online, is it any surprise that children may learn to type before they write? Bloggers are changing the way we get news, but it’s Craigslist that’s killing newspapers’ old cash cow.

And perhaps most amazingly, the internet became not simply a market, a bazaar, it became a component of almost every facet of our lives. Facebook and MySpace were born of this simple desire to be human, with other humans, regardless of medium. A desire that drives, to greater or lesser extents, services like Flickr and 43things.

As Kevin Kelly noted in Wired:

“The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.”

It may seem as unlikely as Norman Bel Geddes realizing his Futurama, or Chesley Bonestell achieving interplanetary flight, but what was once science fiction has become a part of our daily lives. The internet age is here. It is now. We just don’t know what it means yet.

And here’s the library connection: We will all struggle with questions of relevancy in this new world. Inevitably, this will require us to examine our core values and change our services, but the results will be magical. As never before has the technology been available to so connect questions with answers, patrons with libraries.

library, libraries, future libraries, internet, internet usage, tiny marvels, stupendous, arrival, information age, science fiction, reality, social change, cultural effects, society, culture, networked information