Authentication Hacks

My first talk was on User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems, all about integrating WP with LDAP/AD/CAS and other directory authentication schemes, as well as the hacks I did to make that integration bi-directional and deliver new user features. My slides are online (.MOV / .PDF), and you can read earlier blog post summing up the project.

Plugins Mentioned

• wpCAS (long description)
• Alternate Contact Info
• WordPress Ticket Framework
• wpSMS (long description)

Scriblio

I was most excited, however, to talk about Scriblio, a plugin that turns WordPress into a library catalog with faceted searching and browsing. Those slides are online as well (.MOV / .PDF). The core plugin is in the repository, but I’d recommend people join the mail list if they’re thinking of diving in to it.

Scriblio Sites I Demoed

• Collingswood Public Library
• Colby-Sawyer College Archives
• Beyond Brown Paper photo archive

It’s not WordCamp Paris (running on 7 February), but WordCamp Edu Northeast is today. I’m there to meet up with fellow WordPressies and talk about extending WordPress with Holladay Penick and Dave Lester.

Squeezing the three of us into a single time slot requires quite a bit of cutting, especially if we hope to have time to answer questions, so I’ll be focusing on Scriblio. That means I won’t be talking about how we’re going to use BuddyPress or replace significant portions of our university portal with it. Still, my slides are available as both QuickTime and PDF files.

It’s worth mentioning wpCAS (plugin directory page) in this context. I maintain the plugin and we use it to integrate WPMU with our central authentication infrastructure.

I’ve long been a fan of WordPress, and my feelings on open source are clear, but here’s another reason to love WP: A list for the commercial portal software we now use had seven messages last week, most of them asking for help and few of them getting answers. WP-Hackers, the development list, had 179 in the same period. It’s that kind of activity that supports the development of new features and the rapid fixing of bugs (or not, in the case of the commercial product).

Slides: QuickTime or PDF.

I’m excited and honored to be joining Meredith Farkas and David J. Fiander in a roundtable discussion of Top Tech Trends, an OLITA program at Superconference. We’ve made a pact not to share our trends with each other in advance (no peeking), so it’ll be interesting to see how much overlap we have and how differently we approach the issues where we do have overlap.

Sophistication

The search box with its flashing cursor is a powerful tool, but it’s positively pre-cambrian when compared to our hyper A/V culture. Voice recognition is a reality (try it with Phonepedia), but image search is soon to come.

Jim Bumghardner’s Flickr Colr Pickr and System One Labs‘ Flickr Retrievr are a bit toy like (in that they’re great fun), but Google is eyeing OCR enabled image search (with implications for Street View and a potential for real open source OCR). Riya is now a “visual search engine,” but in 2006 the company promoted itself as a kind of flickr with facial recognition. And if identifying your friends in your photos (as well as the crazy guy that made a funny face in the background of your vacation snapshots) is too narrow, Microsoft’s Photosynth will identify the location of your photos and stitch them into the larger fabric of photos around the world.

Contextualization

Our TVs (and DVRs) are networked, our phones are networked, soon they’ll both be smart enough to talk to each other and pause TV when we pick up our phone (this one does, according to Zach). But the technology that can do that is very nearly the same technology required to make our phones (and computers) aware of what’s on TV (and our TVs aware of what we’re talking about or surfing; see The Pudding). Advertisers are learning to take advantage of the detail afforded by technology, soon they will leverage its integration to target messages across media.

Watching TV, a commercial for a new car plays, you go to browse web, you see banner ads for the same car. You mention car to friends in chat, then sign in to Second Life and get an offer for free virtual car there. You buy real car, then get offer inside Facebook to get exclusive theme based on the new car.

Unlikely? Google recently purchased an in-game advertising network and has plans to generate automated psychological profiles of users, and an unrelated patent speaks of “obtaining revenue from the distribution of hyper-relevant advertising through permissive mind reading, proximity encounters, and database aggregation.”

But this isn’t limited to advertising. Our iPhones know where we are, how long before the maps application shows us points of interest based on that? Or perhaps our location will be add as part of our web searches in the browser? If locally or contextually relevant results aren’t too creepy, won’t we appreciate them?

Disintermediation

Amazon’s Kindle cuts libraries from the picture, but it could also cut publishers from the picture. Lulu.com made self publishing cool, and Amazon is aiming for the same market. You can read all today’s best sellers on the Kindle, but Amazon is hoping their Digital Text Platform becomes the publisher of choice for tomorrow’s

But, Lulu and Kindle books are difficult to access for libraries. How will we handle such materials? How might we use the huge volume of full-text digital content that is being created?

Somebody asked a well-published friend of mine for advice about how to get published. His answer: start a blog and you may discover you don’t want a publisher.

There is huge pressure in all markets to leverage technology to reduce costs, but that same technology also better enables content creators to speak directly to content consumers. And the growth of mashups has blurred the line between creator and consumer. Where libraries fit in this picture remains to be seen.

Identity & Reputation

I’ve been saying identity management is the next big thing for a few years now. I may have been calling it by the wrong name, but now it’s a reality.

Facebook is becoming an application platform, Google is countering with OpenSocial, and Gravatar has been acquired by the WordPress.com people. And in the area of single sign-on, Yahoo! and Google have thrown their weight toward OpenID.

But who owns your identity or reputation? Who owns your friends? Ebay reputation is valuable, but the exodus of users from MySpace suggests reputation there isn’t.

As we struggle with how to figure out how to deliver services to the Facebook crowd, commercial competitors are leaping right in. Amazon is courting Facebook developers (AWS Blog post) and making it easy for third-party developers to deliver library-like applications (book reviews.

Comments & Contribution

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from my work on Scriblio in libraries is the importance of comments in our systems. Cook memorial library in Tamworth NH, a town of 2500, is discovering new patrons and strengthening the fabric of the community in its comments. The Beyond Brown Paper photo archive has shown that it’s the people of the community that hold its history, the photos we have are only artifacts. Both sites have received hundreds of comments, despite limited access (at best) to broadband and other barriers to use in their target communities.

I’m honored to be invited to the Ontario Library Association Superconference to present my work on Scriblio today (session #1329). A PDF of my slides is online.

Scriblio has had about a year of use in production at each of three sites, and the lessons suggest that Web 2.0 technologies really do work for libraries. And the best news: we can do it without breaking the budget: I’ll be demonstrating how to install Scriblio and reinvent a library in about ten minutes.

Why the slide above? Web 2.0 applications work best when they have a good logo. That’s Scriblio’s.

Update: I’ve posted the screencast I used to demo the Scriblio install and configuration process. It really needs the narration I did during the presentation and I’m planning on doing a new screencast soon, but I think this may offer some value to someone.

My presentation for today’s hottest IT trends is nearly completely new, though it draws a number of pieces from my building web 2.0-native library services and remixability presentations. What it adds is an (even more) intense focus on the people that make up the web.

Denmark is among the most wired countries of Europe, and it’s especially interesting that more than half of Danes over 55 use the web at least once a week. Of course the prime minister blogs and is on MySpace and FaceBook (though the Microsoft connection is sad).

And rather than serving as a broadcast medium, delivering the same messages we see in TV and elsewhere to all these users, the web is enabling conversations between users. Conversations like these:

• “This washing machine is too noisy.”
• “If you liked Into Thin Air you’ll like Touching The Void better.”
• “Those National Guard documents look forged.” (Not all of these conversations lead to politically favorable conclusions.)
• “Hey, I just opened this bike lock with this plastic pen!”
• “People are dying.We need to do better.”

The point of the slide above is that Kodak’s understanding of the photo experience was narrower than the user’s understanding. Flickr is built for how people use photos (sharing, discussing, remembering), while Kodak is built around the transactions people will pay for (purchase of film, processing, printing). Once those transactions became irrelevant, Kodak became irrelevant. How are our libraries working to understand the information experience and remain relevant to today’s users?

The slides for my main talk are online in Quicktime and PDF format.

The conference program says I’m speaking about designing an OPAC for Web 2.0, and I guess I am, but the approach this time is what have we learned so far? And though it’s the sort of thing only a fool would do, I’m also planning to demonstrate how to install Scriblio, a web 2.0 platform for libraries (foolish because I plan to do it live and in real time).

The slides for my main talk are online in Quicktime and PDF format. Extra: how the steam engine relates to all this.

Scriblio, IL2007, Internet Librarian, libraries, presentation, conference, web 2.0, native, library 2.0

I’m at AALL in New Orleans as part of a program organized by June Liptay and Alan Keely, speaking with U of R’s David Lindahl and NCSU’s Emily Lynema. From the description (see page 5 in the program):

Traditional library online catalogs are being marginalized in an increasingly complex information landscape. …Better methods are needed for mining the wealth of information in library systems and presenting it clearly and concisely.

My slides are online (PDF version) and I’ll be posting a textual version of my presentation later (as usual, my slides are nearly meaningless without my spoken presentation).

aall, american association of law libraries, presentation, libraries, lib20, library 2.0

I was honored to be a panelist at the LITA/ALCTS CCS Authority Control in the Online Environment Interest Group presentation of “Authority Control Meets Faceted Browse.”

What is faceting? Why is it (re)emerging in use? Where can I see it in action? This program is intended to introduce the audience to facet theory, showcase implementations that use faceted approaches for online catalogs, and facilitate discussion on the relationship between structured authority data and this type of navigation.

Kathryn La Barre of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explained the theory, while NCSU’s Charley Pennel, Vanderbilt’s Mary Charles Lasater, and I each described its implementation in Endeca, Primo, and Scriblio respectively. Scriblio is an open source project that has less than one FTE working on it, so it’s an honor to see it compared against commercial offerings, especially NCSU’s groundbreaking work.

My slides are online in QuickTime and PDF form, and I was proud to be able to show off the new public beta of the Lamson Library website and catalog, based on Scriblio.

I should be careful to point out that faceting is a theory of cataloging and classification, while clustering is the technical process of aggregating and reporting relevant metadata in search and browse screens. The difference is that Scriblio doesn’t impose rules on our cataloging practice, it simply supports clustering the metadata to make it easier to find the resources we’re looking for.

If anything, the importance of authority control increases in faceted/clustered search and browse systems, but it is a matter of exchanging one set of technological constraints for another. Card catalogs, with their alphabetical access and physical affordances (or limitations) demanded cataloging practice that is in some ways at odds with the very different affordances and limitations of faceted/clustered search and browse.

Among current implementations, clustering does well with subjects, but poorly with authors. Looking at the cardinality of those facets, it’s easy to understand the problem:

(statistics from the Lamson Library (beta) catalog.)

The number of unique authors compared to the number of total authors is very high, while a large number of subjects are represented by a small number of unique headings. Still, some authors are well suited to faceted browse, and their emergence in a result set could be mined to help users further refine their searches. Example: J. K. Rowling is an obvious top author in searches for both “harry potter” and “j k rowling”. Her statistical “pop” in the results might be worth looking at and worth leveraging elsewhere.

As currently implemented, however, clustered results most help the user who doesn’t know the proper terms for her field of interest. A user searching “sociology of education” is likely to be interested in materials cataloged under “educational sociology,” and clustered search navigation works well in that and similar circumstances.

clustering, faceting, faceted search and browse, authority control, library, library 2.0 lib20, libraries, Scriblio, presentation, LITA, ALCTS

Part of the Transformation Track, Transforming Your Library, and Your Library’s Future, with Technology, program coordinators Alan Gray and John Blyberg (both of Darien Public Library) described it like this:

Technology can transform your library and its services, as it is transforming the lives of your patrons. From do-it-now technology improvements to next-generation implementations, from software to SOPACs, from in-your-face competition to over-the-horizon transformations, three accomplished experts will instruct, enlighten and challenge you to use technology to make your library more relevant to your patrons — today and tomorrow.

I was among Lori Ayre, who showed how automation solutions can transform your physical library, and Roy Tennant, who addressed issues of technology leadership. My own presentation (slides available in QuickTime and PDF) focused on how we can leverage web technologies to build valuable online libraries that serve our communities.

Your library is more than books…your website should be too

Recent attention to our catalogs is leading to much needed improvements in their usability, findability, and remixability, but a catalog does not reflect the full breadth of programs, services, and answers our users value. We need to look carefully at our entire web presence and leave nothing behind.

Your website is not a marketing tool…it’s a service point.

Our users don’t care about us, they care about what we can do for them. We need to go beyond describing the resources available in our brick and mortar branches and deliver easy to use, self service resources online. Every search is a question, we need to deliver answers.

Culture is local…so are our libraries.

Libraries face stiff competition from publishers, online and local retailers, and even other libraries in delivering mass culture materials to users, but each library stands alone in its efforts to preserve and disseminate locally unique resources. Local history is a good place to start, but libraries that become experts in helping local businesses or community groups become finable and usable online will be well valued.

Examples

• A catalog mockup that gives more than just a list of matching books.
• A live beta of Plymouth State University’s new website and catalog that tries to answer questions asked in the search. Search for “reserves” (or “course reserves” or a variety of other forms) and it directs you to the course reserves form or to the reserves request forms for instructors. Search for “anthropology” and it directs users to our subject guide and to our Ask a Librarian service.
• Tamworth Library is posting (anonymized) answers on their website to questions that come in from patrons, such as this one about what gardening materials are in the collection. Posting like that helps answer questions for users who might ask a search engine but haven’t asked their librarians about. And because the library’s events are such an important feature of their services, the events calendar is posted in the sidebar to every page and available as RSS.
• Tamworth’s website has also become an important feature of the community (take a look at these comments), and their hoping to put online the unique pieces of local history in their collection. Thomas Ford Memorial Library in Western Springs has shown how much patrons near and far appreciate libraries for exposing local materials with their obituary index.
• And the engagement of the community in a local history collection can enrich our knowledge of events and places that official historians didn’t record. The comments at Beyond Brown Paper, a collection of photos from a paper manufacturer in northern New Hampshire, reveal the rich history of the mill, the town, and its people.

library, libraries, transformation, lib20, library 2.0, ALA, presentation

Context: Below is the text of my virtual presentation to the LITA BIGWIG (it stands for blogs, wikis, interest group, and stuff) Social Software Showcase. The presentation is virtual, but the round table discussion is going on today, June 23rd, from 1:30-2:30 p.m. in the Renaissance Mayflower Cabinet Room. I won’t be there, though. My bad scheduling got me double-booked and I’m presenting in the Transforming Your Library With Technology track.

— – —

We’re swimming in reports that tell us to reduce expenses while the costs of our systems continue to rise. Compare this to the trend outside libraries where commoditization of bandwidth, storage, and even servers as well as the maturing of our software and management practices has made possible large numbers of competing, free services in almost every category (among the most recognizable we find Gmail, YouTube, and flickr). And those who want more direct control over the network services they use can find open source software to match those offerings and service providers to help them use it.

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 or build network-dependent features. One result is that it’s often cheaper to buy a book than to do an ILL transaction. The success of Linux, Apache, and every other open-source application has been the success of network-enabled efficiencies that allowed aggregation of improvements from a broad range of contributors.

In libraries, this applies equally well to both our systems and data. 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.

Extending some of the affordances of open source further, remixing and mashups have shown the power of open systems and common, easy to use protocols. Those mashups are pointing the way to new applications and features that the platform providers themselves often can’t foresee or afford to develop on their own. Libraries, struggling as we are with developing the features our users are demanding, need remixable platforms to support more rapid and sustainable development.

And we need platforms that are affordable to all libraries, including the nearly 30% that serve populations of 2,500 on an average annual budget of less than $50,000 (about 60% of America’s libraries serve communities of fewer than 10,000 people).

That’s some of the philosophy driving this IMLS grant proposal. The key features of what I hope to achieve are simple: We’ll need a lot of applications to do this, and all of them will share these characteristics:

• Open source and free in both the “free beer” and “free speech” senses of the term
• Remixable and open for others to innovate with
• Social

From there it’s really a matter of what we hope to achieve…what we build.

scriblio, internet archive, imls, bigwigshowcase07, open source, community informatics, presentation

Speaking Thursday at the Boston Library Consortium’s annual meeting in the beautiful Boston Public Library, my focus was on the status of our library systems and the importance of remixability.

My blog post on remixability probably covers the material best, but my slides are online as both an animated QuickTime and PDF.

BPL, BLC, boston library consortium, boston public library, presentation, remixability, library, libraries, library systems, l2, lib20, library 2.0

ALA Midwinter 2007, ALCTS Future of Cataloging presentation: Collaboration, Not Competition. (slides: QuickTime & PDF.)

Stir my writings on The Google Economy and Arrival of the Stupendous post with frame four of the ALCTS And The Future Of Bibliographic Control: Challenges, Actions, And Values document:

In the realm of advanced digital applications, we are interested in collaboration, not competition.

We take as axiomatic the idea that library catalogs and bibliographic databases on the one hand, and Web search engines on the other, have complementary strengths. No matter what their respective popularity may be among the general population, neither of these broad categories of tools can compete with the other, on the other’s own ground. Realizing this, we maintain that “future catalogs” discussions based on the idea of “competition between the catalog and search engines” have become passé, leading to redundant sets of questions and answers. Such discussions lead to foregone, dead-end conclusions which tend to ignore points 1-3 above. The interesting questions about “the future of the catalog” now have to do with collaboration, not competition. Collaborations with librarians and nonlibrarians who operate social networking sites, implement “Web 2.0” or “Library 2.0” services, and pursue creative mashups of the most heterogeneous types of metadata, will invigorate both our practice and theory, as well as strengthen our relationships with our user groups. These collaborations will also be fueled by our expertise in metadata creation, of the traditional library type as well as in newer forms. Because recent and future data mining products, such as Endeca, will continue to require sources of rich metadata, the value of bibliographic metadata itself is likely to increase.

alamw2007, alcts, collaboration, competition, future of bibliographic control, future of cataloging, google economy, midwinter, presentation

ALA Midwinter 2007, ALCTS Cataloging Norms Discussion Group presentation: Metadata and faceted searching: an implementation report based on WPopac. (slides: QuickTime & PDF.)

Faceted searching such as that made possible by WPopac (look for the new name soon) improves the usability of our systems and findability of our materials, but also puts new demands on how we catalog them.

My favorite search example is sociology of education, both because it’s a common search in our logs, but also because it demonstrates how our systems can help bridge the gap between what our users know and what our catalogs know. That is, the user doesn’t have to know that the proper term is educational sociology, the aggregated facets (or clusters) gently reveal that to the user.

Cookery may be an even better example. Not because it’s the subject term everybody loves to hate, but because a search for cookbooks has a high likelihood of returning cookery as a facet.

The problem, though, is that cookery is often cataloged as cookery, French (650 $a cookery, French) instead of cookery — French (650 $a cookery $a French).

And all those other regional divisions of cookery are there too, each one trying to claim its own place in the cluster of subject headings. The result is that, while educational sociology easily rises to the top of the results for a relevant search, cookery does not.

There are, of course, other headings. Art is divided almost the same as cookery is, giving us art, Indic, cookery, Indic, sculpture, Indic, and probably a dozen others.

If properly used, the metadata in our collections will set libraries apart from other information services in terms of usability and findability. The improvements to searching that WPopac offers rest directly on the body of good cataloging data in the collection. I look forward to even more improvements in the findability of library materials as we start to consider the new ways the metadata we’re creating can be used.

alamw2007, alcts, cataloging norms, midwinter, presentation, subject headings, wpopac

In an anomaly that we would eventually recognize as commonplace on the internet, Touching the Void, a book that had gone out of print, remaindered before it hit paperback, was all but forgotten, started selling again in 1998. Chris Anderson wondered why, and found that user reviews in Amazon’s listing of publishing sensation Into Thin Air had people recommending Touching the Void as a better read. Today, Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air 2 to 1.

Clearly, Amazon and the internet had hit critical mass.

Based on statistics reported in 2005 or earlier:

• Over 200 million Americans have internet access
• 94 million Americans use the internet on an average day
• Over 62 million households (55%) have internet-connected computers at home
• 87% of youth 12-17 are active online
• 89% of college students and 87% of the general public start their research in a search engine, not a library
• 80% of internet users believe the internet is a reliable source of information

But it’s certainly not just youth driving this:

• Over half of 2005 US tax returns were filed electronically; the IRS is mandated to raise that number to 85% over the next few years
• Online banking is a reality for most Americans who have bank accounts
• The leading demographic of those purchasing movie tickets online is adults over 35
• The early adopters for the iTunes music store were adults over 35

And, as a measure of growth in the past year, John Battelle’s The Search in 2005 reported under 5 billion monthly searches on major US search engines. By July 2006 that number had grown to 6 billion.

The internet is truly changing us. The ability to instantly find anything we want and get recommendations from people of similar interest, irrespective of geography or time, is changing us.

Stories:

• Mark Michaelson is passionate about mugshots. He’s posted them on Flickr, people are finding and commenting and blogging about them, people are developing stories about them, and Mark is part of the conversation. Now he has a show, and a book, and if you send him a self-addressed, stamped envelope, he’ll send you a sticker.
• A friend who likes The Decemberists goes searching for more, finds a photographer who’s done some of their photos, browses more from her portfolio, finds some of a band called Dirty Martini, finds their website, finds their MySpace, previews a few tracks, and decides to purchase the album.
• Sam Brown, who can be found at explodingdog.com, bases his drawings on short phrases emailed to him at sambrown@explodingdog.com. He’ll also mail drawings to fans who mail him their phrases — “i will doing drawings from titles mailed to me. mailed in a truck. i will mail you the drawing back to you. in a truck.” Fans can buy t-shirts, books, and prints of his work. Wikipedia, updated faster than any print encyclopedia, offers details of the site and its creator.
• Then there’s Ranjit Bhatnagar, whose photos were discovered on Flickr by NY MTA Arts For Transit curator Lester Burg. Now his works are on display in the Atlantic Ave station through September 2007. I know all this, of course, because the story appeared in the Flickr blog.

How does this work? How do these thin threads come together to be woven into those stories?

If written a few years later, Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point might include a story like that of the re-emergence of Touching The Void long after it had been remaindered among the tales of the boom of Hush Puppies and Paul Revere’s social networking skills. But, as it is, the emergence of the internet does more to support Gladwell’s thesis than question it.

The internet has created new opportunities for people to make the personal — but often momentary — connections that Gladwell identifies as being so important, to the spread of an idea, a product, a phenomenon.

The internet adds links.

The internet adds comments.

The internet changes the basic economics of doing business, of making a sale, or finding an audience.

Chris Anderson, who was so fascinated by the story of the re-emergence of Touching the Void, followed up his initial article with a book-length examination of the changes that made it possible. What he found was that because was able to make findable an inventory of over two million books, dramatically more than a typical bookstore’s 130,000 books, and because Amazon had almost no inventory carrying costs, it was in a position to turn people who’d heard about Touching The Void, through Amazon’s own comments or elsewhere, into customers. By shortening the distance between interest and purchase, Amazon changed the shape of the marketplace.

But it’s not the technology that delivers success. It’s the personal connections made possible by the technology that are build success.

An example how that can go wrong comes from Reprise’s efforts to market Bonnie McKee. After premier a song on Yahoo!’s LAUNCHcast with good results Reprise decided to make a big CD release in September 2004. Despite being a huge hit with girls aged 12-17, and becoming a top searched name, the album ended up selling only 17,000 copies. An explanation cited in Anderson’s book notes “fans weren’t invested in the artist, only the song.” The explanation is that the internet has changed the rules, and music buyers, or consumers of any item, are becoming partners in a marketplace that expects more than the old marketing drivel, and has access to a broader selection than todays top 40 or whatever fits on a retail shelf.

Vincent Flanders author of Web Pages That Suck explains:

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?

And, for emphasis, from the Cluetrain Manifesto:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter–and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

There is, perhaps, no better time to be a niche producer, a craftsperson, an artist. The world wants to hear human voices rather than marketingspeak. This is David’s moment against Goliath.

Long Tail, NH Visual Arts Coalition, art, arts, google economy, presentation

MAIUG 2006 Philadelphia: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (interactive QuickTime with links or static PDF)

Web 2.0 and other “2.0” monikers have become loaded terms. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems to be the conclusion millions of Americans are making, as current estimates show over 200 million users in the US, including 87% of youth 12-17.

Web 2.0 isn’t driven by technology, it’s driven by that critical mass of users. And while social software and AJAX enabled web applications get most of our attention, people are turning to the internet for some very mundane everyday activities that were little more than science fiction in 1996. The commonality of internet banking, for example, reflects the trust users now have in the security and reliability of online services.

But the web has weathered so much hype and hyperbole that it may be difficult to recognize its arrival as a true cultural force. Computing has become so common that children often learn to type before they learn to write. And the instant, self-service access to worlds of information and services is changing industries — a fact we can see clearly in the decline of the role of travel agents, even while air travel continues to grow.

Kevin Kelly, in a Wired Magazine story described this apparent blindness:

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. [thanks to Josh Porter for alerting me to this]

So the question of how to design a web OPAC for today is a question of how to design an information service in a world rich with information services and filled with users who make information seeking — though not necessarily at libraries — part of their everyday lives.

note: this is an update of my IUG2006 presentation.

Mid-atlantic innovative users group, iii, lib 2.0, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, maiug, maiug2006, online catalog, opac, opac 2.0, presentation, web 2.0, web opac, wpopac

I’m honored to join Katie Bauer, of Yale University Library, in a program coordinated by Mary Jane Kelsey, of Yale Law’s Lillian Goldman Library.

The full title of our program is Technology Scouts: how to keep your library and ILS current in the IT world (H-4, 4PM Tuesday, room 274). My portion of the presentation will focus on how we’re fixing up our catalogs, with a big emphasis on how APIs can be used to continuously reinvent the way we look at — and thus understand and use — the information we have. The big idea here is that as we separate the systems that store and manage our data from the applications that display and manipulate it, we open the door to faster, cheaper development — and make room for a bunch of new ideas along the way.

Because it’s a short program, I’ll only be able to gloss over some of the discussion of what’s wrong with our catalogs and how we’re fixing them, and while there’s a lot to say about WPopac, I’ll have to leave it to Jenny Levine to explain most of it.

My slides are online. As usual, all the underlined text is hotlinked along with all the screenshots, so click them for more information and detail.

AALL, AALL2006, American Association of Law Libraries, api, conference, law libraries, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, opensearch, presentation, rss, web 2.0, web20, xml

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

IUG 2006 presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (also available as a PDF with space for notes)

Web 2.0 and other “2.0” monikers have become loaded terms recently. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems to be the conclusion millions of Americans are making, as current estimates show over 200 million users in the US, including 87% of youth 12-17.

Web 2.0 isn’t driven by technology, it’s driven by that critical mass of users. And while social software and AJAX enabled web applications get most of our attention, people are turning to the internet for some very mundane everyday activities that were little more than science fiction in 1996. The commonality of internet banking, for example, reflects the trust users now have in the security and reliability of online services.

But the web has weathered so much hype and hyperbole that it may be difficult to recognize its arrival as a true cultural force. Computing has become so common that children often learn to type before they learn to write. And the instant, self-service access to worlds of information and services is changing industries — a fact we can see clearly in the decline of the role of travel agents, even while air travel continues to grow.

Kevin Kelly, in a Wired Magazine story described this apparent blindness:

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. [thanks to Josh Porter for alerting me to this]

So the question of how to design a web OPAC for today is a question of how to design an information service in a world rich with information services and filled with users who make information seeking — though not necessarily at libraries — part of their everyday lives.

note: this is an update of my ALA Midwinter presentation.

iii, innovative users group, iug, iug2006,lib 2.0, library, library 2.0, library catalog, online catalog, opac, opac 2.0, presentation, web opac, wpopac, libraries, web 2.0

Ryan gave me the drop on this presentation by Dave Chiu and Didier Hilhorst where they do an amusingly effective job of explaining the concept of reputation management. It all went down at the conclusion of the Applied Dreams 2.2 project at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milano.

The project brief begins:

Our identities are changing due to our constant exposure to enabling technologies.

Our old physical identities, fixed to a house, an address, a tax number, private, detached, individual, introvert, seem increasingly at odds with our new electronic identities, mobile, self-published, publicly exposed, extrovert, shared, accessible, communal.

Simultaneously, an interconnection between individuals, commercial and authority is leading to the increasing relevance of self-organising, temporary socio-spatial communities and to the creation of micro-economies.

Dave Chiu, Didier Hilhorst, RentAThing, applied dreams 2.2, identity, identity management, idm, presentation, reputation, reputation management

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

ALA Midwinter IUG SIG Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

update: PDF version with space for notes

Web 2.0 and other “2.0” monikers have become loaded terms recently. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems to be the conclusion millions of Americans are making, as current estimates show over 200 million users in the US, including 87% of youth 12-17.

Web 2.0 isn’t driven by technology, it’s driven by that critical mass of users. And while social software and AJAX enabled web applications get most of our attention, people are turning to the internet for some very mundane everyday activities that were little more than science fiction in 1996. The commonality of internet banking, for example, reflects the trust users now have in the security and reliability of online services.

But the web has weathered so much hype and hyperbole that it may be difficult to recognize its arrival as a true cultural force. Computing has become so common that children often learn to type before they learn to write. And the instant, self-service access to worlds of information and services is changing industries — a fact we can see clearly in the decline of the role of travel agents, even while air travel continues to grow.

Kevin Kelly, in a Wired Magazine story described this apparent blindness:

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. [thanks to Josh Porter for alerting me to this]

So the question of how to design a web OPAC for today is a question of how to design an information service in a world rich with information services and filled with users who make information seeking — though not necessarily at libraries — part of their everyday lives.

ala, ala midwinter, ala midwinter 2006, iii, iug, lib 2.0, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, online catalog, opac, opac 2.0, presentation, web 2.0, web opac

Tech Tuesdays: Blogs and Blogging

blogs, blogging, presentation

I think I’ve been avoiding commenting on this issue for weeks because it hits so close to home. First I read it in BiblioAcid, then Jenny Levine picked it up, then Richard Ackerman picked it up at the Science Library Pad: library catalogs are broken, and there’s no amount of adding pictures or fiddling with colors that will fix them.

I nibbled at the edges of this in my IUG conference presentation, but I didn’t say it as well or as clearly as Roy Tennant did in his widely quoted April 15 Library Journal column:

Recently I viewed a library catalog redesign before it went public. This was the first major change in many years, and it turned out to be quite an improvement to the look and feel of the system. But despite this, it still sucks. Badly.

I don’t know how much time was spent on this cosmetic facelift, but until the deeper problems that plague this system are addressed, users will remain poorly served. Librarians appear to be afflicted with a type of myopia. We see only minor, easy-to-make corrections instead of changes that will truly affect the user experience. We ask our vendors to tweak this or that to make our lives easier, while the users are left to founder on an interface that only a librarian could love.

Thing is, we’re about to go live with our own much updated OPAC, the first redesign in many years, and Roy’s points are right on. I’ve had complaints about the limitations of our OPAC and the reticence of the vendor to support customers who are seeking to address the problems identified by Roy and others, but now I find it nearly impossible to continue “polishing the turd.”

Little things always crop up just when you think you’re done with a project, but increasingly I want to say: put this in perspective, we’ve got to cut the line on this and go live with what we’ve got now so we can invest our time into fixing the real problems. Our students are using Google not because they’re dumb or lazy, but because we are. The limitations of the OPAC and our inability to think beyond what the vendor offers us is leading to a narcissism of small differences where we argue about where to put the cover art for an item in an attempt to make it look like Amazon, but forget that we need to make it work as well as Amazon or Google.

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