The following was my email response to a thread on the web4lib mail list:

Okay, it must be said: you’re all wrong[1].

I can understand that news of a librarian being fired/furloughed will raise our defenses, but that’s no excuse for giving up the considered and critical thinking that this occasion demands.

Consider this: the principle’s blog reveals a reasonable person actively trying to improve academic performance despite crushing economic conditions. The communications show a level of transparency many of us can only wish for.

Unfortunately, many on this mail list seem to have come to the conclusion that this library was a stellar, but unappreciated example of everything that libraries should be, capriciously closed by a principle who secretly wanted to see the football team shoving bookshelves around on a hot summer day.

Go ahead, mock the story (and so far we only have one story about this) for suggesting that the books have been “re-organized” by subject, but the fact remains that this community didn’t think their library was organized in a way that met its needs. This suggests that either (a) it wasn’t well organized, or (b) the librarian had failed to educate the users and develop the finding aids necessary to help the community use the library.

Nobody here is banning or burning books. Nobody is suggesting that libraries are irrelevant. Far from it: this story about the modernization of a library to make it a more significant part of students’ academic activity.

News that a member of our profession has been furloughed is sad. But, news that a principle is investing time, attention, and money in the library is good. News that those two stories are one in the same should make us ask critical questions about how we and our libraries are positioned to serve our community.

[1]: Everybody but Robert L. Balliot, whose message has so far been ignored.

Bret Victor offers the above design suggestions (from 2006) to Amazon in the book search results display (he’s comparing to this). I didn’t discover them at the time, but many of them are still relevant now. Bret notes that Amazon’s display doesn’t do a good job of answering the questions a person has when searching for books: “What is the book about?” and “is it any good?”

Unfortunately, these questions are completely unaddressed by the information provided. To see relevant information, the user must click on each listing individually. That is, she must navigate by hand instead of by eye, and must use her memory to compare information across time instead of space.

The problem is that this graphic was designed as an index into a set of webpages, but is used as a catalog for comparing a set of books. The purpose of this graphic should not be to return a list of query matches, but to help the user learn about books related to her topic of interest.

Who doesn’t want to be an anarchist librarian? Or a bibliophian?

Richard Wallace’s Juice project (Javascript User Interface Componentised Extensions) is a “simple componentised framework constructed in Javascript to enable the sharing of Ajax Stye extensions to a web interface.”

WordPress or Scriblio users might do well to think about it as a way to put widgets on systems that don’t support widgets, though as Richard points out, “the framework is applicable to any environment which, via identifiers contained within a html page, needs to link to or embed external resources.”

I got a little excited when Shirley Lincicum wrote to the NGC4Lib mail list:

[O]ne of the most frustrating things for me about Next Generation Catalog systems as they currently exist is that they seem wholly focused on the user interface and can, in fact, actually hold libraries back from designing or implementing improved “back end” systems because of the dependencies introduced by the new “discovery layer” applications.

I was excited because almost two years ago I wrote something like this:

Libraries are good at sharing data, but we’ve done a poor job of taking advantage of the network and new technologies to reduce the costs of sharing. …We recognize now that our data is living and evolving, but synchronizing available record enhancements with individual collections remains costly and laborious.

Without efficient mechanisms to share improvements, the value to any one library of trying to share what local improvements or corrections they make is limited, preventing libraries from benefiting from the network in ways that open source software development has.

Some, however, have called Scriblio a “next generation catalog,” so I’m anxious to point out the following: The Scriblio MATC Project Final Report, which hits on some of the above points; this (not funded) IMLS proposal, which fully embraced the challenge (take a look at this diagram); and Scriblio 2.7 with its new internal data model, which finally delivers some of the answers I’ve had in mind.

On the other hand, I’ve resisted the label “next generation catalog” for Scriblio not only because the software does a pretty good job of hosting digital libraries in addition representing library catalogs, but because my hope is that Scriblio does more than put a pretty face on antiquated systems. It’s hard to deny the dramatic changes in writing, publishing, and information sharing, and WordPress is very near the center of it all (WordPress.com alone hosts about 150,000 new posts each day); I see an opportunity for libraries to participate at the start of information creation, rather than at the end.

Shirley continues:

If our metadata and communication standards, and the systems we use to manage the resources we collect, were open enough, and therefore able to be integrated seamlessly into general discovery interfaces like Google, Facebook, etc., it would allow librarians to focus on collecting and organizing stuff (which is challenging enough to do well), and let the folks with the resources to do really good usability research and hire lots of really good programmers to design the interfaces.

I might argue with the end of Shirley’s point, but the overall message that we build systems and data that integrates with Google, Facebook, and whatever else is next is a good one.

I should have done screencasts like the above long ago. It’s not that they’re great, but they are a wonderful excuse to use the canned lounge music I’ve got. Those videos are now on the front page of the official Scriblio site, and I did five more to demo the installation and configuration. Big thanks go to Collingswood NJ Public Library Director Brett Bonfield who let me use his library like this.

My slides for my presentation yesterday at code4lib are available both as a 2.7MB QuickTime and a 7.8 MB PDF, while the gist of talk went something like this:

Scriblio is an open source WordPress plugin that adds the ability to search, browse, and create structured data to the the popular blog/content management platform. And WordPress adds great ease of use, permalinks, comments/trackbacks/pingbacks, and other social and web-centric features to that structured data. But that’s not news. The news is that Scriblio now has an internal data model that supports much more sophisticated uses (slides 3 and 4). Whereas previous versions of Scriblio were mostly just display and social interaction interfaces to data that’s created or managed elsewhere, this new version supports soup to nuts creation and management of collections. Colby-Sawyer College’s archive (slide 5) is the first to implement this (take note of how the horizontal search layout makes the facets more visible and usable).

And that new data model also improves the usefulness of Scriblio to regular libraries (Collingswood (NJ) Public Library is shown on slide 6). Because Scriblio has an internal awareness of the metadata, it can automatically merge records from multiple sources (or multiple copies of the same record from the same source). The source of each piece of metadata in a record is identified and preserved (see the sourceid column in slides 7,8,9), allowing records to contain data from multiple sources (each with, perhaps, its own licensing terms). A practical example is enriching book records with data from LibraryThing’s Common Knowledge web service, making that data part of the index and facets in the local catalog, while also properly crediting the service when a record contains that data.

The automated merging of records enables a few new applications. Among them: the merging of an A to Z periodical list with the ILS’s inventory, or the creation of a union catalog from several systems. Slide 11 shows a prototype union catalog that shows materials (and their real-time availability) from three institutions in New Hampshire. Assembling that catalog was as easy as entering each ILS’s hostname and record number range in the harvester (slide 12).

I didn’t mention it during the presentation, but Scriblio is now built to work well in both regular WordPress as well as WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress that allows a single installation to host many different sites (think WordPress.com) at a marginal cost to the hosting organization that approaches zero. The work to make Scriblio compatible with WordPress MU was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities (there’s lots more to say about that project soon).

Re-imagined a bit, anyway. Why browse a vertical list of results when you can flip through them like pages in a book (or album covers in iTunes). Searchme on the iPhone and iPod touch does just that.

As you type your search term, icons representing rough categories appear, allowing you to target your search and helping people who’re searching for information about pythons the snake avoid results about the programming language. Though, in practice, the category results for “python” include “computer programming”, “web development,” but no obvious category for animals or zoological queries.

The results are displayed in a cover-flow-like interface, with each website represented by a screenshot image. The result is that you can browse through a half-dozen results much faster than you could individually load each page. Unfortunately, the search results are poor compared to Google or Yahoo (to engines I use regularly), and you’ll likely find yourself having to browse a few sites before you find your answer.

Despite these annoyances, and a few bugs, Searchme is a good reminder that new technologies offer new affordances. Cover flow offers a very simple method of exploring a dataset. I’m not convinced that web search results are well suited to it, but I can imagine a few datasets — photo archives, for example — that might be.

Declaration of Metadata Independance:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Metadata is essential to all Users, and that the Creation of Metadata endows certain inalienable Rights, that among these are the right to collect, the right to share and the pursuit of Happiness through the reuse of the Metadata… (read more)

Via.

The Chronicle’s Tech Therapy podcast last week featured Libraries vs. IT Departments. (Via.)

Hi, I’m Casey. I developed Scriblio, which is really just a faceted search and browse plugin for WordPress that allows you to use it as a library catalog or digital library system (or both).

I’m not the only one to misuse WordPress that way. Viddler is a cool YouTube competitor built atop WordPress that allows you to tag and comment inside the timeline. StayPress is a property management and booking system also built atop WordPress.

BuddyPress is a social network in a box — really, take a look at the theme screenshots. Each user has a profile and friends. Users form groups and engage in discussions or private messaging. And of course, it’s WordPress afterall, users can each have one or more blogs. And then all of that is brought together in this activity updates view.

And again, because BuddyPress is just a bunch of WordPress plugins, you can use it in conjunction with Scriblio to get faceted searching and browsing of all sorts of materials, and, perhaps, use it in your community to build a community driven digital archive.

But this social network isn’t necessarily your social network and not everybody can login to my system. The solutions so far are OpenID, which makes it easy and secure to use multiple systems, and OAuth, which makes it easy and secure for users to give other applications or websites permission to use your data without having to toss their username and password around the web like confetti. And those are foundations of DiSo, the distributed social network, which leverages open formats to reduce social network fatigue (see xfn, hcard, and xoxo).

And that’s cool, because the goal of this isn’t to build a new social network, the goal is to build new applications that are socially aware (and geographically aware too).

I announced yesterday Scriblio’s integration of Google’s new book viewability API that links to full text, previews, or additional book information (depending on copyright status and publisher foresight). Now that it’s live with Plymouth’s full catalog, I spent a moment browsing the collection and taking note of what books had what.

I get no preview for A Baby Sister For Frances, but another of Russell Hoban’s books, A Bargain For Frances. has one, even if the image quality is poor. My friend Joe Monninger has just one book that includes a preview, A Barn In New England.

Ironically The Search, Designing The Obvious, and A Passion For Books don’t (neither does Online Pornography, though it’d likely be a let down for most of the people looking for it). I’m glad to see that An Introduction To Book History and The Future Of The Book both have online previews.

It’s good stuff, and if I was smarter I’d get stats on how often the preview link was clicked. And if I could do it without tracking more information than I want, I’d love stats on how often the preview leads to a checkout or in house use. (I’m confident, however, that more frequently previewed books will be among the more frequently use books).

(crossposted at Scriblio.net)

Using the newly released book viewability API in Google Book Search, Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library and Learning Commons is one of the first libraries to move beyond simply listing their books online and open them up to reading and searching via the web.

Take a look at how this works with books by Plymouth authors Bruce Heald and Joseph Monninger. The “Browse on Google” link in the New Features section leads to extended previews of their works where you can browse excerpts of the books and search the full text.

Matthew Batchelder wrote the JavaScript that makes it work, and all the features are incorporated in the current version of Scriblio. To implement it in an existing Scriblio installation, take a look at Matt’s script how it’s included in the theme’s header.php. You’ll also need to make sure your site’s catalog records include ISBNs to link with (I’ll be adding support for LCCNs and OCLCNs soon). If you’re using the standard MARC or III importers and your source records contain ISBNs, you should be all set.

Hat tip to Tim for giving me the hookup.

This Slashdot post asks the same question a lot of people do: “can libraries be saved from the internet?”

Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept, as evidenced by Seattle’s Starbucks-meets-mega-bookstore central library and Salt Lake City’s shop-lined education mall. Without some dramatic changes, The Extinction Timeline predicts libraries will R.I.P. in 2019.

The premise is that libraries are physical spaces used to house books, and that as books decline in importance in our libraries the buildings must take on some new, third place role. That much would be true, if libraries were no more than buildings full of books.

Libraries in early America had no buildings, just a community group that shared books and sometimes shelved them in their local tavern. Books and other forms of knowledge were shared because there was little to be gained by hoarding them, and much to learn from in discussions about them. In addition to offering important social opportunities, these early libraries were founded on the notion that lifelong education strengthened the community; that libraries strengthened the republic.

Carnegie wasn’t the only robber baron who sought wash his name in this grand notion, and the 19th and 20th centuries saw tremendous growth of physical architecture for libraries. But libraries are greater than that. Before they became buildings, libraries were the means by which a community or culture identified, preserved, and disseminated knowledge. Libraries, in short, were public information architecture. Google, Wikipedia, and the Kindle haven’t displaced the need libraries serve, rather, they highlight it. Wikipedians are perhaps the librarians of the future, shushing noisy patrons, cleaning up messes, and trying to ferret out truth amidst conflict.

The internet is indeed challenging our old notions of libraries, but what’s racing towards obsolescence, the library or our quaint notion of it?

Take note of the “New Feature: Text this to your cellphone” line above.

Adam Brin of Tricollege Libraries explained that the “text this to me” feature he built to send location information about items in the library catalog as text messages to a user’s cell phone is being used as many as 60 times a day. That was the news I needed to decide to offer the feature in PSU’s Scriblio implementation.

The messages are handled by Clickatell via an API I added to bSuite, my do-everything plugin for WordPress (hmmm…what else can we SMS enable?).

Western North Carolina Library Network’s LC outline is full of detail.

LC outline, classification, Western North Carolina Library Network, libraries

Like Mr. Ranganathong said: “The intellect cannot be tied down with a decimal thong.” (via)

A post to Web4lib alerted me to this U Mich survey about libraries in social networks (blog post) that finds 77% of students don’t care for or want libraries in Facebook or MySpace.

the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they felt it was inappropriate or that Facebook/MySpace is a social tool, not a research tool.

This isn’t bad news. It’s worth remembering that 23% of the respondents said they were at least a little interested in connecting with libraries in social networks. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore this opportunity to question the push to put libraries into those spaces. And the first thing to ask is if we understand them.

I doubt the patrons of an average bar would welcome libraries if we tried to set up shop there, and not just because we’d get nitpicky about the weekly trivia games. Bars and libraries are both social spaces, but that doesn’t make them equivalent spaces. Whether libraries belong in Facebook anymore than they belong in my local bar is still an open question in my mind (one major factor is that FB is working to make itself a social applications platform, something that should have all of us paying attention).

That doesn’t mean Facebook and other social applications don’t matter. Quite to the contrary, so let me say it again: Social Applications Still Matter To Libraries.

One giant lesson we can take from the entire history of the internet is that social matters. There have been blips and bubbles where we lost sight of it, but the internet spread because of social applications like email and chat. And more than Ajax and rounded corners, web 2.0 has been all about Social. And now we find it everywhere. Flickr defines itself as a photo sharing site, but it only works because of the social features there. And though Facebook allows image sharing, the different purposes of the two sites are clear to all who use them.

It is essential that we build social features into our libraries. Comments, easy linkability (short, sensical URLs), and findability in search engines are must haves in our systems. But that isn’t enough. We also need outstanding librarians to breath life into them. Librarians who can speak in a post-Cluetrain voice, and be accepted and respected in Facebook, Second Life, and in the comment threads in our own libraries.

Scriblio 2.3 v4 is out. See it. Download it. Install it. Join the mail list.

What’s new?

• Lots of small bug fixes.
• Implemented wp_cache support.
• Revamped SQL query logic for better memory efficiency.
• New widget options.
• Search suggest/autocomplete support (implemented in the new theme).
• New theme. New Theme! By Jon Link.

Ellyssa Kroski’s Librarian’s Guide to Creating 2.0 Subject Guides is good introduction for Librarians who think know “there has to be a better way.” But why no mention of blogs and blogging tools? (I’m still really happy that when you search our catalog for something, a subject guide for that term appears (if we have one that’s relevant)).

library, libraries, subject guides, 2.0, lib20, library 2.0

When a writer goes looking for young Turks (my words, not Scott’s), you should expect the story to include some brash quotes (writers are supposed to have a chip of ice in their hearts, after all). On the other hand, we’re librarians, so how brash can we be?

Scott Carlson’s Young Librarians, Talkin’ ‘Bout Their Generation in The Chronicle this week did it better than most articles: rather than showing how hip or geeky we are, it asks us about the future. And it asks without overly romanticizing the shelves of paper-bound books that our users so identify with us or presupposing that Google will p0wn us.

The answers are good, definitely worth a look. Though I regret that the selected quote from my long-ish interview with Scott didn’t reflect on more of the good work and great people in libraries. Especially now, as code4lib2008 planning is kicking into gear, and with the number of projects on the table — Evergreen, Koha, Blacklight, and VuFind, just to name a few.

The future of libraries is a big, wide open question, but here are two things I’m certain of: Our very notions of the nature of information need to evolve, and we need to move quickly to build libraries that are as relevant to the next hundred years as our adored Carnegie libraries were to the last.

libraries, lib20, library 2.0, information architecture, interview, Chronicle of Higher Education, future

Over at KLE’s Web 2.0 Challenge I was surprised to learn:

Both Bisson and Stephens are so excited about this concept of Web 2.0 they have not taken a good look at what they can’t do for our libraries. …with all this new technology we can not forget that what is the most important in our libraries is the personal touch. We are one of the few institutions left that still offers individual attention.

KLE is doing some cool things, so I can tell this isn’t an offhanded rejection of Web 2.0 concepts, but the criticism makes me feel as though I’ve been missing my target somehow.

We wouldn’t accept poor service at the desk or over the phone, why should we treat our patrons so poorly online? I don’t think we’ve yet figured out what “good service online” is yet, but that’s what I’ve been focused on. Make no mistake, the future of libraries demands outstanding service everywhere we serve our users.

[tags]web 2.0, library 2.0, lib20, service, quality, libraries, criticism, online, good service, good service online[/tags]

Sarah Houghton-Jan’s review of my LTR on open source software for libraries reminded me I wanted to blog this related piece I’d written for American Libraries.

Tim Spalding cocks his head a bit as he says it to emphasize the point: “LibraryThing.com is social software.” However we categorize it, Spalding’s baby has become a darling to librarians, and as we sat chatting over lunch in spring 2006, the web application that had begun life just to months earlier was to catalog its 3-millionth book.

LibraryThing is no library — Spalding’s critics are quick to remind him of that — but it does open some of the activities of librarianship–the cataloging and organization of books–to a world of bibliophiles eager to partake. Librarians and patrons alike cannot help but compare LibraryThing to their own libraries’ catalogs and wonder how this free software, built (well, crafted) in less than a year by a solo developer who didn’t know he was creating a Web 2.0 start-up, could deliver so many features that we’ve wanted in our “real” libraries.

Catalogs, in libraries anyway, are inventories. Their design and features often reflect the interests and needs of those in the library’s back rooms rather than of the patrons entering and exiting through the front gates: but nobody told Spalding that before he began, and the result reflects the things he wanted to do as a reader and consumer of books: He set out to build software that allowed him and any other user the opportunity to organize the world of books to their liking.

But today he can’t quite understand my question: “How did you choose to use PHP and MySQL?” The answer, it seems, was a no-brainer. Spalding was confident and experienced with those technologies–the former a programming language and the latter a database environment–and, even better, they were free. Not just free as in “free beer,” but also free as in “free speech.”

Along with PHP and MySQL. Spalding happily and unquestioningly hopped on board with Apache, an open source web server, and Linux, the open source operating system on which LibraryThing runs. That particular combination, popular worldwide, is known as LAMP (Linux, Apache. MySQL, PHP). Together, this platform of free tools has lowered the cost of development and reduced the risk of exploration.

Librarian Aaron Schmidt agrees. While at Thomas Ford Memorial Library, in Western Springs, Illinois, he started working with open source because it was free and easy. When the library leased a fancy new printer/photocopier/scanner, Schmidt quickly figured out how to automate scanning from the library’s rich collection of historical photos. And when he went looking for a tool to easily post the pictures online. Schmidt immediately thought of using WordPress, a free open source content management application. “[I] figured people had already solved many of the issues I would face,” Schmidt says.

But free open source software isn’t just for brave experimenters looking to push boundaries. Librarian and software developer Dan Chudnov explains that you can no more run a library without software today than you could run a library without a building in 1900. Open source software, says Chudnov is “as massive a donation of time, energy, and products you cannot afford to turn down today as Carnegie-built libraries were back then.”

The economic benefits of open source are undeniable, but Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman says it’s more than that. With an eye toward the growing role technology plays in our world. Stallman holds that the right to “run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve software” is essential to any truly free society.

Chudnov is right: Libraries can’t afford to ignore the value of open source, and those in libraries who are using it agree. But among these success stories, another theme emerges that resonates with Stallman’s message: Open source software is forming the foundation of our libraries of the future, where we all get to play bricklayer and architect.

open source, f/oss, free software, libraries, lib20, library 2.0

It’s an aside to Kathryn Greenhill’s larger point, that all this 2.0 stuff is about a shifting power to the user, but she places L2 somewhere on Ghandi’s continuum of change between ridicule and fight.

The photo above (original by Monster) is in support of Greenhill’s larger point: control is shifting. Trains were once seen as icons of freedom, but that view changed with the development of the automobile — and the way it shifted control of routes and schedules from the railroad to the driver.

We’ve been arguing transportation policy for a long time since, but here’s a simple fact: railroads didn’t realize they were competing against automobiles until it was too late.

Who are you competing against?

libraries, lib20, l2, library 2.0, competition, control, railroads vs. automobiles, change, locus of control

A little more than two years after I realized how (really) bad the problem was and about 18 months after I prototyped my solution, our new library website, catalog, and knowledgebase launched last week — just in time for the fall semester opening.

It’s all built on Scriblio, includes a very simple new books list that you can narrow by subject and get via RSS. And if you search for subject areas like anthropology, economics, english writing, or any of a few dozen other topics, you’ll find our librarians’ subject guides listed at or near the top to help you out. You can also use the facets, clustered metadata shown in the right sidebar that reflect the aggregated results of that search†, to easily explore the collection or find the exact resource you need.

This started out simply, but the distance from prototype to working, um, product is difficult, dangerous, and frustrating. Still, when successful, it’s also wonderfully gratifying. And none of this would have happened without the help and support of a number of friends and colleagues both inside and outside the my library (callouts: Zach, Matt, Lichen, Jessamyn, Jon, Elaine, David, Anne, Dwight, Chris, PSU, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a lot of fellow library bloggers who’ve shared stories, spread the word, and helped make magic).

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

One more thing: This site isn’t perfect, but it’s a library catalog we can fix. Tell me what’s wrong, or better yet, download the software, join the list, and let’s work on it together so we can all have a better system.

† a set of facets can show you that anthropology is related to history, sociology, and ethnology, and help you narrow any of those subjects down to field work, methodology, or study and teaching.

library, libraries, lib20, library 2.0, Plymouth State University, Lamson Library, website, launch, Scriblio, WPopac