Tim Spalding was fun. And we have something in common. We both like big. The movie. The one where Tom Hanks plays a kid in a grown-up’s body.

Spalding, the founder of LibraryThing, referred to a scene from the movie where Josh, the character played by Hanks, challenges the thinking of Paul, a marketing man, behind a new toy:

JOSH: I don’t get it.
PAUL: What exactly don’t you get?
JOSH: It turns from a building into a robot, right?
PAUL: Precisely.
JOSH: Well, what’s fun about that?

—Source: Script-O-Rama

The reference was made in connection with Spalding’s feelings about discussions regarding next generation OPACs, which do not fit his idea of “fun.” According to him, “The library is the most fun you can have with your clothes on,” but he also says that librarians keep their websites and OPACs separate because it’s their “secret shame.”

Anyway, if you are not familiar with LibraryThing, you may want to check out the following before reading the rest of this post: basics, concepts involved, take the tour and/or press coverage, which includes “Beating Oprah at the book club game” and an August 2006 podcast interview.

Incidentally, Spalding didn’t have slides. He just kept showing webpages as he talked. Very 2.0 =) And that’s why this post will have a lot of links, starting with his previous Thingology posts that explain in much more detail several things that he mentioned.

Is your OPAC fun? (a manifesto of sorts)

Everyone else’s OPACs people have to use. LibraryThing is optional. LibraryThing is an OPAC people WANT to use. They even pay. LibraryThing is the fun OPAC!

When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing

Tagging works well when people tag “their” stuff, but it fails when they’re asked to do it to “someone else’s” stuff.

WorldCat: Think locally, act globally

OCLC isn’t creating a web service. They’re not contributing to the great data-service conversation. They’re trying to convert a data licensing monopoly into a services monopoly.

He’s very likeable, but I liked him even more when I realized that we had big in common. And though big is a movie, I suppose the “bond” I felt with Spalding is very similar to the one that LibraryThingers make with one another through the books they own, like, tag, review and recommend. And they have fun!

Interestingly, however, while discussions about usability, findability, and remixability have been quite popular in the biblioblogosphere, the concept of “funability” could only be found on Danish liblogs before Spalding’s presentation at CIL 2007. So how do you make the OPAC fun?

1. Don’t hide the fun. Library websites should have catalog search boxes. He said that librarians “hide” their OPACs because it’s their “secret shame.” This was greeted, perhaps not surprisingly, with laughter.
2. Allow inbound links. Bloggers and other users who link to a page that won’t be there the next time will not make the same mistake twice. The Library of Congress is the biggest offender.
3. Allow outbound links. Websites are like reference librarians. The more you send people away—and they find what they’re looking for—the more they will come back to you. Regarding concerns about linking to Wikipedia and local bookstores, he shared a little secret: patrons know about them =)
4. Link around. There are so many possible links that can be turned into first-level links in a catalog. But these links should not lead to search results but a page.
5. Dress up your OPAC. Get covers from Syndetics or Amazon. Dress it up with LibraryThing for Libraries, which is now in beta. It won’t be free, but it’s not going to be expensive and it works!
6. Allow user-generated content.
7. Do not call it “user-generated content.” WorldCat’s content guidelines state that reviewers should not comment on other reviews. What’s so fun about that? Plus, reviewers don’t have their own page. This probably has something to with the fact that while WorldCat has more traffic than LibraryThing, reviews of The Da Vinci Code on the former (2) have neither the quantity (343) nor the quality of the latter. Amazon, meanwhile, doesn’t allow outbound links. According to Spalding, “People look at your site not to look at your content, but at their content.”
8. Get your data out there. There are people out there who will do something about it. RSS feeds are not as effective as blog widgets. LibraryThing never advertised. It grew because people were allowed to show off their books.

Finally, he ended by suggesting two things:

1. Do it yourself. You can do more than you think you can.
2. Buy or steal solutions. Or work it into your next discussion with the ILS provider.

Other stuff I found interesting:

1. Examples of differences between Library of Congress Subject Headings and LibraryThing tags:
   • Neuromancer by William Gibson:
     —Computer hackers–Fiction vs cyberpunk
   • Tales of the city by Armistead Maupin:
     —City and town life–Fiction vs gay fiction
2. Examples of synonymous tags on LibraryThing that lead to different recommendations:
   • queer vs gay
   • GLBT vs LGBT
3. Books tagged “katrina” in the days right after Hurricane Katrina were not about weather disturbances but books lost by the owners.
4. The most popular tag for The diary of a young girl by Anne Frank is “holocaust,” a word that did not appear as a subject heading until many years after the book was first published.
5. The Book of Mormon is at the top of the 25 books that people can’t agree on—either they really like it or they really don’t like it.
6. The Suggestions feature makes recommendations based on books you have in your entire library or single books. There’s also the UnSuggester, which… is self-explanatory =)
7. Check out John Blyberg’s card catalog card generator.
8. His “personal hobby project” would not have been possible if he hadn’t “outsourced” the work to users.
9. The cost of OPACs hasn’t gone down, even though Moore’s Law has been in existence for the longest time.
10. The days of one big thing sign off are over. Beta forevah!

—–
Posted by Von Totanes

Note on Rhyno’s slides: Click on the screen to move to the next slide. If you would like to go to specific slides, point your mouse at the bottom-right corner, and wait until the navigation menu appears.

Evergreen is an open-source integrated library system (ILS), which was developed for a consortium of 252 public libraries. Art Rhyno provided an introduction to open source and Evergreen, while Dan Scott presented the business case for adopting an open source ILS.

If you would like to find out more about the technical aspects of Evergreen, check out Open-ILS.org, which includes links to the FAQ, a blog, listservs, downloads, and even a documentation wiki that features a document called, “The Harried Library Developer’s Guide to Using OFBiz as an Acquisitions/Serials Module” (pdf).

Open Source Tackles the Library World’s Biggest Headache

Art Rhyno began by quoting a comment made by Karen Schneider (“Evergreen is huge“), and pointing to an article by Marshall Breeding (“An Industry Redefined“) that mentions Evergreen as one of the “open source library automation systems [that] may disrupt the business models of the industry.”

He proceeded to define “open source” as describing “practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s sources,” and added that the difference between free software and open source software lies in the licensing involved, as promoted by FSF and OSI. Some of the open source projects he mentioned were Wikipedia, Core Practice, and OpenCola Softdrink.

Rhyno then told the story of how Georgia’s Public Information Network for Electronic Services (PINES) decided to change its old ILS and adopted Evergreen. (More information is available in the PowerPoint presentation made at the Future of ILS symposium held last year.) His “shocking slide” emphasized that all PINES libraries had migrated to the Evergreen ILS on schedule. To which someone from the audience replied that they were still waiting for a vendor’s long-promised release.

He went into the core technologies behind Evergreen and its scalability and stability, before showing what he called the “obligatory costs slide,” which showed that Evergreen cost much less and even provided more support. Then, it was on to screen shots of the catalog and the interface used by the staff, and the development of acquisitions and serials modules, which are being developed in partnership with University of Windsor.

Rhyno also shared some of his musings regarding decoupling the public interface from the backend using Solr Flare, and turning the RFP process into an open source one (see the first comment on “Alternatives to RFPs?“).

Finally, he ended by referring to a MakeShift 02 challenge that involved building a water purifier given certain constraints. Rhyno noted that problems can be solved when communities work together, and the successful implementation of Evergreen shows that he’s right. Open source may, in fact, be the cure for the library world’s biggest headache.

Evergreen: freedom and control

Dan Scott has written about his presentation on his blog (“Evergreen and the business case for choosing an open source ILS“) and uploaded his slides (pdf), so the following will be limited to the details he does not go into.

In his presentation, he provided links to Simcoe County’s Library Co-operative, whose staff provide technical support for member libraries; “Are ROI Metrics For Technology Valid?” which indicates that return on investment (ROI) on IT improvements made should include “decreases in errors and rework, improved asset utilization, lower capital costs… [and] improved response to customer demands”; and “The Enterprise Committer: When Your Employee Develops Open-Source Code on the Company Payroll,” which states that “nearly two-thirds of developers in North America use open-source modules.”

Scott also mentioned a project he’s working on that will allow Windows users to run Evergreen without having to install Linux (see “Evergreen VMWare image — oh so close!“); and Equinox and LibLime, which provide support for migrations to Evergreen for a fee, if you don’t want to go it “alone.”

But perhaps the most important point Scott made was that using open source software would not really mean doing it all by yourself. Even if you can’t pay for support, there is a growing community that is willing to help. As he said, in reference to expensive vendor support, “We support ourselves better than the support we’re paying for!”

—–
Posted by Von Totanes

In her Digital Odyssey 2006 session, Beth talked about the research being conducted with BiblioCommons and since then the project has received funding from Knowledge Ontario to further the work of buidling a proof of concept by implementing a pilot project with Ontario public libraries.



Key ideas:

Introduction:

• Consider that: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be” (Gretsky)
• The question then is, what kind of player plays where the puck has been?
• Many are frustrated with existing OPACS, so what can be done about it?
• Next generation catalogue functionality (already) include the following: spell-checking, field weighting, truncation, sort flexibility, in-line query limiters; (and for more advanced examples) faceted search, duplicate detection (FRBR), ratings, reviews, tags…
• Libraries are behind commerce in this area; therefore there is an opportunity here for libraries to ‘leap frog’.
  Where are things headed? ‘Social searching’ (not about blogs, podcasts) but using what others have found to help discovery of resource.
• BiblioCommons focuses on:
  • The library catalogue as being about ‘discovery’ (and discovery as ‘fun’) vs. being limited to ‘finding’
  • Relevancy: No single set of criteria are relevant to ‘average users’ – what is relevant to you is not equal to what is relevant to me – ‘averages’ gloss over subtle but important differences.
  • Communities, niche groups of users.
• If you think about the search interface, it is essential to offer tools that refine searches for users, but tools are also essential for helping the users ‘expand’ their search, and get to a place they didn’t know how to ask for. This is where the value of social context comes in.
• How does the concept of BiblioCommons differ from the ‘social OPAC’ or modules added to existing OPACs (eg. add a review, tag, rate this book, etc.)? Existing modules are pretty straight-forward to implement – they are not tough, and vendors already focus on this aspect of ILS. What is tough is getting at the questions of
  • ‘which data do you ask for? (which data is most valuable, and what format, and what is not asked?);
  • ‘how do we ensure the quality of search results?’;
  • ‘how do we allow for aggregation across systems?’ (Social data is only valuable when there is tons of it, but current practice is to limit data to the local ILS);
  • ‘if provide reviews, how many?’ 10,000 reviews? No, but only 5 of the 10,000 that is relevant to a user (ie. data from sources they ‘trust’);
  • ‘how do we help create or support communities of interests that share values, tastes, affinities, etc., but also integrate it back into the search process? (Once you have data collected, you can invest in algorithms that make the data valuable. Use metadata of library collections, but also people and conversations they have about the collection).



I. Aggregation:

• BiblioCommons proposes a subscription web services model with a central repository interacting with multiple library systems in a direct way. Batch loading of records and authentication would occur on a nightly basis. With aggregation across library systems users can access the central repository through a local library interface where users can also contribute metadata, and in this way work towards a kind of ‘universal library catalogue’.




• Question: Local ILS record vs. a central repository: does one record replace the other?
• Response: The records are copied and there is a redundancy in the system.




• What data should be gathered? What enhances discovery?




• User Reviews: how useful are they? The problem with reviews is that it is only useful when get you get to a record, but it is limited for ‘discovery’.




• Ratings: Ratings are a hug part of the culture, as a kind of voting, there is an expectation of being able to use rating as a way of expressing what we like or not like (numerous examples are available, from movies, to ‘ratemyprofessor.com, etc.). So, why not let users rate the library and collections in this way?
• We need to think about ways to engage huge numbers of users in rating their own experiences and using that information to enhance search capabilities. How do we do this? The ‘my account’ feature of OPACs has the potential to help create an environment for this kind of interaction to take place.




• Lists: Lists are also a big part of popular culture and serves as a way of curating collections. Notice how keyword search results can be very random (e.g. a search for head injury offers titles about a doctor’s story, a mystery novel, etc.). But if we give the task of creating lists to users, the results can be less random, because they can specify things like how a subject like ‘head injury’ is treated, from what perspective, in relation to other topics, of interest to whom, etc. If we unleash tools for doing this on the OPAC, users will use it like they do on Amazon.com.

If use ‘lists’ today, what is expected in the next iteration? Perhaps help users to judge the authority of list creators by looking for consensus. Another thing is supporting a foundation for conversation between users to take place. This can be done by creating an optional check box that permits users to contact a list creator to talk about that topic.

• Tags: The use of tags in finding fiction is important to consider. In public libraries, fiction, as a type of resource is so dominant (about 70 %) while at the same time the LCSH is highly inappropriate (e.g. A Fine Balance – about ‘apt. houses?’). So tags can help us get there. If you go into Amazon, (vs. Library Thing), you can get a list of terms expressing what a book is ‘about’ (friendship, poverty, etc.) and characteristics of its ‘tone/style’ (haunting, heart-wrenching, epic, etc.). In this way user vocabulary can be helpful, but the question or challenge lies in how to elicit rich vocabulary from users to aid the discovery process (vs. what tag clouds show now). What we are doing now is experimenting with ‘faceted tagging’, by prompting users to fill in genre, type, about, tone/style, of interest to fields. Almost nobody in our research of 50 in-depth interviews, were familiar with the concept of ‘tagging’ and so the term was changed and the participants were asked to ca‘tag’orize the books. A focus group of 11 or 12 teens generated a rich set of terms for Harry Potter, but consider the different terms used by different groups of users: ‘dark’ vs. ‘scary’. In this way, adjectives themselves carry social context. These subtle differences among what could be treated as synonyms can instead be used to explore by using these different facets. Tagging can also be used to indicate objectionable content, age appropriateness, but also to combine one person’s option with another’s comment on the same resource to gauge the relevancy of the tag for your own use.




• If we want to get users to provide input, how do we not only get them to do it, but get lots of people to do it? Compare OCLC’s open worldcat’s 2 reviews of the Da Vinci Code compared to LibraryThing (launched 2 or 3 months after the former), which has 400 reviews for the DaVinci Code. This comparison illustrates how implemention is key –
  Tim O’Reilly, writes on this in ‘Architecture of Participation‘.
• If you take a look at the steep pyramid the break down looks like this: 1 creator, 10 synthesizers, 100 consumers. Look at any number of initiatives and consider how often get comments back?
• So we need to focus on how to 1) remove the barriers (people won’t go out of the way to do this, vs. everyone wants an outlet for their ‘voice’ idea – early implementers vs. general public users. – in our survey, out of 7 statements of motivating factors only 1 of 50 said that their motivation would be to ‘have my voice heard’ (vs. other ‘perks’ or for the sense of ‘giving back’).
• Currently, the small number of people who have confidence in their own voice have a huge impact on how collective energy and attention is directed because they can heavily influence e.g. relevancy ranking in Google. The library can play a role in helping the rest of the others to be heard.
• Another factor to consider is a fear of ‘If I write a review, can I edit it afterwards?’ – you can’t with WorldCat.
  In survey of online users, 40% (n = 45) responded that they access their library account online several times a week (eg. Hold status, due dates). If we project this to the rest of North America, we would probably reach a count of several million, which would more than adequately compete for sites like MySpace, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Consider that we get this kind of traffic with the kind of interface we have now – image what could happen if we offered a page that was more interesting!
• We need to make the process ‘in the flow’ for most users but also add functionality for engaged users. Three major motivations (each representing about 1/3 of the responses) to contribute were
a) public good will;
b) want personalized recommendations;
c) nothing or won’t do it unless given something
• Jacob Nielsen on ‘participation and equality’ points out the need to offer rewards. For this reason we are looking at a community credits program, so that we can give a sense that ‘someone is thanking me to do this’.
• But remember, don’t overlook the obvious! Currently libraries don’t have the ability to send e-mail notices to users for changes to their account, and this is the one thing they would absolutely like.
• Privacy control: When users contribute, they have control of what is shared and what is hidden. At first we went out to users with an interface specifying ‘public’ or ‘private’ nature of the their contribution, but most people wanted to keep things private so we had to reverse the incentives, and shifted the semantics to state, ‘share’ vs. ‘hide’.



II. Quality Assurance:

• You can’t monitor contributions for two reasons: 1) it is not scalable, and 2) you then run into legal complications.
• We need to create a welcoming area by laying out the very basic, clear rules, but leave grey areas to be sorted out by users.
• The points of caution we are taking include:
1. users have to authenticate to contribute (often users login at library stations anyway);
2. maintain an anonymous username but one that corresponds to their library account so that they can get kicked out if cause problems;
3. let users control what is relevant to them or not (e.g. ‘I like this person’s comment but ignore these others’);
4. flagging content (these will be reviewed across various library systems and any discrepancies go to the committee of provincial partners);
5. vocabulary filtering (we are testing ways to allow users to customize offensive vocabulary lists (x-out the vowels of specific words).



III. Back-end Analytics:

• To improve relevancy, need to consider niche user groups, and aiming to get ‘results that are relevant to me’. Consider children vs. adults: some people think that the point is to create interfaces and portals that are friendly to children but more specifically, really need to focus on the trouble children have in filtering results by getting better at presenting smaller subsets of results, etc.
• Averages: consider teachers vs. kids — imdb now offers demographic information with ratings. If a 7 to 12 year old girl can get an average specific to the group of 7 to 12 year olds. Take for example a set of recommendations for ‘funny’: a ranked listing of what other people have found ‘funny’ – but to whom? How do we allow people to get to their definition of ‘funny’? Socially provided data is important, and who provided it, is important to the discovery process. In some cases, the question ‘was this review was helpful to you?’ is asked, but then the answer provided is not tied to the user, so that you can’t easily get the same reviewers (but now people are working on this for the next iteration – e.g. the ability to pull down a menu and select ‘trusted sources’ of reviewers, but also, limit that influence for certain subject areas.




• Question: Legal implications? In police investigations, must the library provide information?
• Response: All information is collected by users opting in to do so.




• Question: When a user is rating a review, do they think about legal implications?
• Response: In testing, users were taken to site asking them to get at their expectation of what will be done with their contribution and they all expected the content to appear in the catalogue, but not necessarily tied to their profile. So we are trying to get at what users expect vs. just covering ourselves legally.




• Question: If you move to another city or library system and acquire a new id?
• Response: Users have the choice of linking accounts so that one profile exists for all instances, and you can toggle between library systems.



IV. Communities:

• How do we support communities, conversations, and help users find what they couldn’t ask for? How do we allow users to expand their searches?
• Put things like ILL like you want it to be used (though this may be an issue for some), and offer browsing of local library but also resources held in other libraries, community groups (e.g. hospitals).
• Same thing for ‘questions and answers’. Consider Yahoo Answers: the challenge is, if you have 3 million people, how do you match the questions with the answers? Problem include granularity (e.g. ‘mental health’ vs. ‘mood disorders’). One approach is to ask the person to catalogue questions and answers to help match them up.
• What does this do for the role of librarian? It creates a mega phone for librarians to give rich answers, but also a potential to be viewed by thousands of users.



Notes by Hyun-Duck Chung





]]> http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/21/beth-jefferson-on-the-bibliocommons/feed/ 0 odyssey2007 http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/beth-sadler-open-source-ils-and-library-in-a-box/ http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/beth-sadler-open-source-ils-and-library-in-a-box/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2007 23:29:09 +0000 odyssey2007 http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/beth-sadler-open-source-ils-and-library-in-a-box/ ]]> Bess Sadler is Head of Technical and Metadata Services at the University of Virginia and co-chair of eIFL-FOSS.

Contact: bess.sadler@eifl.net

What is eIFL-FOSS?
Electronic Information for Libraries—Free and Open Source Software

• eIFL is concerned with providing and developing access and support for electronic library services in developing and transitioning countries around the world
• providing alternatives to vendors and proprietary library systems
• contributing to the overarching trend in open access and open source: “Libraries doing it for themselves”
• library members who are part of eIFL-FOSS are often seriously under-funded and have inadequate services

Open Source Software and Library Systems

• what is open source?
  • after writing a computer program, you have to compile it; vendor software is packaged and already compiled which means you can’t make changes

  • free software is not always what it sounds like; there’s a difference between something that doesn’t cost any money (as in beer) and something that allows you to participate freely (as in speech); and something that is easy to come by (free: as in kittens) but has maintenance costs and long term commitment
• UVirginia and eIFL-FOSS are interested in avoiding licensing fees, but willing to pay for developers and maintenance

Building Open Source Tools

• Open Source software already exist and some products actually allow you to build tools e.g. Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice

• the best building tool is “community”; without considering community of users and other builders, you are only building tools for yourself
• harness the developer community, conferences like the Lucene Summit that bring together Open Source software tool developers
• the kinds of tools that eIFL wants to use and supply and support in developing countries are library software like Koha, DSpace, etc

Who is eIFL?

• an international consortium of libraries who are interested in developing and adopting open source systems software

• eIFL is funded by Open Society Institute (OSI) and Soros Foundation whose goal is to allow developing and countries in transition adequate access to information for education research, the economy, and institutional and personal development based on the belief that ultimately there is a chance for democracy when information is accessible
• OSI focuses on promoting free speech, freeing prisoners, etc; as well as improving access to resources that keep the people of those countries up to date
• eIFL is involved in teaching under-serviced member librarians how to gather better resources using a unified voice through:
  • negotiation skills

  • consortium building
  • and knowledge sharing
• eIFL-FOSS is focused on advocating that communities who are self-sustaining rather than building reliance on external aid or short-lived economic support through:
  • the use of Open Source and developing OS tools software

  • building a community who are aware of how to use and develop OS tools
• the philosophy behind Open Access is about ethics: using public funding to provide public access to information rather than taking public funding and creating private, secretive information

Barriers for Libraries in Developing and Transition Countries
Money

• in Zimbabwe, currency does not have longevity which means that relationships with commercial software vendors are difficult because the “inflation rate of above 2000% poses significant (and often insurmountable) challenges in purchasing foreign goods” (Sadler, personal communication**, 2007); however, a self-sustaining OS system overcomes this issue of access

Language Support

• in Georgia, no ILS system will support the Georgian language because those systems are unable to create individuals modules that can be customized to the needs of the community that is not a major language

• most of these countries are recovering from colonialism and trying to reinstitute their own culture and knowledge sets, e.g. Georgia has just been released from Russian rule, but the primary language of most systems are all still in Russian

Library-in-a-box

• modeled on the NGO-in-a-box software from Tactical Technology Collective

• Library-in-a-box aims to be an Open Source ILS that can be integrated, fully internationalized, easily distributed, and installed; internationally supported interface and documentation; self-sustaining systems
• existing options include Evergreen and Koha

rationale

• there’s no point in creating an ILS that recreates something from 10 years ago or reinvent a system that creates the same problems that librarians face right now!

• implementing the “Leapfrog Effect”: developing the software locally means the project also creates local education and job skills, so the trickle effect is that the local infrastructure is also developed and improved because people are trained and can communicate with other developers globally and new interrelationships are created
• for example: Malawi had a 5-year grant from a Japanese funding agent that supported vendor subscriptions, but now the funding is running out, the library is worse off than it was five years ago because they don’t have any sustainable systems e.g. a card catalogue

How do you build it?

• community

• but how do you build community?
• it’s not easy
  • TacticalTech.org is a partner of eIFL

  • TacticalTech helps NGOs build their technology according to their specific needs—e.g. privacy protection and security—libraries are essentially NGOs in the big picture
    • face-to-face meeting is an invaluable way to build community
  • when starting a new project, TacticalTech enters a region, asks everyone to gather and then asks them to say what their needs are
  • then, launch the development project using local tech, not external staff
    • identify and harness the strengths of the local people and then delegate and encourage them to take on the technical parts of the project-everything from working on refurbished hardware to loading Open Source software
• eIFL is interested in creating partnerships between countries that have similar language usage—English, French, Russian and Arabic—grouping is determined by the language that will be the primary development language

eIFL-FOSS Current activities

• studying the current state of the OS ILS available using the Business Readiness Rating, including both versions of Koha and Evergreen and maybe others to compare and design the next OS ILS

• Evergreen, for example, is internationalizing, so everyone benefits from their initiative and funding
• the beauty of OS is that these kinds of initiatives, like translation, become shared—no one has to reinvent these features

Project BlackLight ILS

• Project Blacklight is an OS ILS being developed by a group at UVirginia, it resembles Endeca’s faceted searching and uses Lucene; the experiment version it holds over three million MARC records

• Blacklight retrieves materials quickly according to relevance because relevancy ranking is tuned by the user by choosing format options etc (DVD, book, etc), library collections (by library building), by genre (correspondence, fiction, drama, etc), by topic (e.g. country music)
• also, if unique keys match then you can cross-reference to other catalogues (i.e. the UVirginia SirsiDynix catalogue system)
• this tool was created with basically zero resources; dedicated staff time was the only thing that was unaccounted-for expenditure
• it took them a few evenings to build this; and they hope that something like it will be the basis for Library-in-a-box

How can Libraries Do It For Themselves?

• internal grassroots skill set training

• UVirginia offers a weekly, voluntary programming class
  • e.g. people need to know XSL to work on the digital library system, and the participants learn XSL; Beth gets the participants to work on projects she’s doing, and they learn how to do it
• allow people time, staff, and the tools to “play”—ultimately this has to be advocated to the decision makers as a money-saving initiatives in the long run

Q&A
Q: “Does eIFL work only in countries that are democracies?”

* eIFL “do not make distinctions of that kind when countries want to join our consortium” (Sadler, personal communication**, 2007)

Q: What is the Business Readiness Rating?

* “A Framework for Evaluating Open Source Software”: the BRR is one of many standardization model for assessing open source software so that when people want to take the initiative to build their own tools and software, this is a system that alleviates a lot of the trial and error time and effort usually taken by trying to decide what software to use

Q: I’m involved in Public Services and don’t do any coding: how do I get involved in something like eIFL?

*the best way to contribute is to contribute to the Open Source community, developing tools, advocate for Open Source solutions
*eIFL also need developers who are doing beta testing, attending vendor demonstrations and reporting back to their home organization and also advocating for Open Source alternatives

Q: What kind of advocacy is happening in the developed world as well?

*advocacy and outreach is a primary occupation of eIFL members in the developed world
*developing more open source and promotion of open access alternatives
*whole institutions are taking on the challenge of adopting Evergreen as their primary ILS; again, if Laurentian University adopts it, they will translate it to French, which means that the entire community benefits

Q: How would a library go about adopting or experimenting with an OS ILS?

*no, there are vendors in the OS realm as well
*for example: a company called Equinox Software designs support systems who want to transition to something like Evergreen

• so even if you don’t have the language or programming support, this “vendor” can help the institution make the transition

• the beauty of this kind of “vendor” is that because the software is OS, the relationship with the vendor is non-exclusive
• anyone can start a company to support an OS package

*or, get OS software packages and try them out—you are under no obligation to the vendor to do a set-time trial; you can get them up and running quickly and play with it for as long as you want
*or, attend Code4lib (2008 is in Oregon) and attend an on-site training workshop

Q: What does “internationalizing the interface” entail?

*traditionally, the interface is often fed by hard-coded strings of text, but the interface code should be created so that a translator, for example, can download the interface strings of text, create those same strings but in translation, then it gets plugged back in
*remember that the interface design must be able to accommodate the different requirements for different languages (i.e. French or German language takes more room for saying the same thing)

• for example Manitobia.ca, the interface is available in French and English; and the suffix on the URL is /en/ or /fr/, indicating which version is open

Q: Is the Evergreen, or Open Source, solution also promoting the elimination of vendors?

*no, vendor relationships are still a good thing and have a place
*but the more open access relationships that can be build in the developing world, the more opportunity there is for a similar kind of library-vendor relationship and infrastructure to develop once the training is in place

• for example Project BlackLight is based on CNet which is a for-profit website, but because the code is open source, Project Blacklight adapted it to the library catalogue and user needs
  * in terms of support, though, the benefit of the OS community is that there is generally more interest in supporting users compared to vendors who have already got you in their pocket, and consider their products “delivered”
  *open source developers are really interested in making sure their products work

  Q: How do initiatives like eIFL implement their technology in developing countries where political and infrastructural barriers exist that may not support OS initiatives or ethics?
  * Zimbabwe are not democracies but Zimbabwe is still one of the biggest clients for eIFL
  *eIFL works according to A. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; in referring to this, Sadler, states, she does not mean “his ideas about motivation, [but] that you can’t think about library infrastructure in places where basic nutrition and safety needs are not being met” (Sadler, personal communication**, 2007)

  • there has to be some kind of infrastructure, even if it’s legacy stuff

  • there is a bar set for making a level of success

  *bottom line requirements for pilot projects are in place because otherwise the project can’t meet its goals

  • there needs to be enough people on staff in the host country who speak English

  • host country need to be able to submit a certain amount of staff and hardware, need to have an automated system, i.e. an electronic catalogue

  *eIFL can’t go in and solve all the countries’ problems at once, this is a niche service so it has to be implemented with realistic requirements and expectations
  [notes by Jess Posgate]
  **Sadler, personal communication, follows in comments posted below

  
  ]]> http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/beth-sadler-open-source-ils-and-library-in-a-box/feed/ 0 odyssey2007 http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/tim-spalding-on-social-cataloging-and-the-fun-opac-photos/ http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/tim-spalding-on-social-cataloging-and-the-fun-opac-photos/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:36:30 +0000 digitalodyssey http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/tim-spalding-on-social-cataloging-and-the-fun-opac-photos/ ]]> Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing and closing keynote speaker, put the quotes around the word “fun” in the title for his session, but recently he changed his mind about the quotes. Well, just for this post, his wish has been granted =)

  Notes will follow.

  

  

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  Posted by Von Totanes

  
  ]]> http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/tim-spalding-on-social-cataloging-and-the-fun-opac-photos/feed/ 0 digitalodyssey Tim Spalding on LibraryThing Tim Spalding on LibraryThing http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/beth-jefferson-on-bibliocommons-photo/ http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/beth-jefferson-on-bibliocommons-photo/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:53:34 +0000 odyssey2007 http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/beth-jefferson-on-bibliocommons-photo/ ]]> Beth Jefferson, the founder of BiblioCommons, emphasized that the next generation online catalog should be about discovery, not just finding. Read notes on her talk here.

  

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  Posted by Von Totanes

  
  ]]> http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/beth-jefferson-on-bibliocommons-photo/feed/ 0 odyssey2007 Beth Jefferson on BiblioCommons http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/art-rhyno-and-dan-scott-on-evergreen-photos/ http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/art-rhyno-and-dan-scott-on-evergreen-photos/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:37:33 +0000 digitalodyssey http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/art-rhyno-and-dan-scott-on-evergreen-photos/ ]]> Evergreen is an open-source integrated library system (ILS), which was developed for a consortium of 252 public libraries. Read session notes here.

  

  

  

  

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  Posted by Von Totanes

  
  ]]> http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/art-rhyno-and-dan-scott-on-evergreen-photos/feed/ 0 digitalodyssey Evergreen Evergreen Evergreen Evergreen http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/jeffrey-treciak-university-librarian-mcmaster-university-library/ http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/jeffrey-treciak-university-librarian-mcmaster-university-library/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:35:51 +0000 odyssey2007 http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/jeffrey-treciak-university-librarian-mcmaster-university-library/ ]]> Slides | Photos

  Opening session (9:15am – 10:45am)

  - purpose of talk was to speak about creating a “Culture of innovation”, and preparing the Library of today for the learner of tomorrow

  About Him
  • More than 20 years experience, started career in public library, but most experience in academic libraries
  • From Wayne State
  • Experiences primarily in the IT realm
  • Blog – http://ulatmac.wordpress.com/
  • He is a gamer, with a passion for World of Warcraft, spending 20-30 hours a week
  • On Second Life
  • On Facebook

  McMaster University Library
  • He has been at Mac since July
  • Previous Admin at Mac was very conservative
  • Challenges: small staff (especially in IT), low funding, silo-ized library from rest of campus therefore need to extend to get involved in instruction and research; not on the radar of rest of university community; at Wayne State, library involved with media services, open source, grant writing, digital initiatives, etc. and very integrated with campus, partnerships with public libraries, community groups.
  • Need to start dialogue , become actively involved, establish relationships with other libraries (Mohawk College and Hamilton Public Library)
  Focus on Opportunities and Future
  • Diana Oblinger – Technology has impacted generation
  o they are: digitally literate, constantly connected, experiential, demand immediacy, highly social)
  o They are the 1st generation to never know life without the internet
  • James Duderstadt (library as observation post for students);

  Gaming
  • Is everywhere, is well established, and highly emotional
  • What is gaming -broad definitions – wikipedia;
  • increasing trend;
  o AOL study vs. Nielsen (women, casual games; men, ‘active games’); ‘games are complex’ (take lots of time, communities of practice developed around it);
  o second life (avg. age is 35, nearly half is women)
  o Using Wii with elderly (benefits)
  • Communities of practice
  o Websites devoted to games
  o People clearly spending hundreds of hours creating guides
  • ‘Games are expected’ – what students will be bringing as they enter undergrad

  ‘Gamer generation’ – statistically different generation, different ways of working, different skills, different goals, think differently, compete differently
  • Audience Question: what meant by “Desire systematically different goals”? Goals are more oriented towards taking risks, acceptance, etc. (are these different from others?)
  • WoW -his experience, involvement
  o He is interested in interactions that occur within the game, and the relationships that develop
  o He acts as a mentor, and is part of a guild of over 300
  o It is more social than most people think
  o His goals are more about the social aspect, and learning.observinh how people interact within the world
  o utilities allow to talk but he doesn’t do that because likes to suspend and immerse in the game; PhD in educational technology
  • Neuroplasticity: Marc Prensky ‘gaming changes structure of brain’; ‘distributed cognition’ ie. Working as a team, and accomplish goal with others through cooperation.
  o Challenge: digitally literate generation and stick them into traditional classrooms and libraries; in many ways libraries also look a lot like a century ago, given some changes likes info commons.
  o Think about how much has changed in this brief period to time (card catalogs vs. now).

  Games? Are the Educationally sound
  • Robert Gagne and The Conditions of Learning (1995):
  1 ) gain attention – gaming is more revenue than movies; need to gain attention before learning can happen
  2 ) Inform learner objectives;
  3 )……;
  4 ) present the material;
  5 ) guide learner: advancing through games, pick up skills, get a mentor;
  6 ) elicit performance- practice:
  7 ) Provide feedback: complex user interface with what your health is, etc.;
  8 ) assess performance;
  9 ) promote retention and transfer: visual clues to aid in memory, maps for geography.

  We need a new paradigm – because this generation has already been radically transformed by technology
  • Need to engage users in ways they want to be; know they are engaged with games, social spaces web 2.0, content, handhelds
  • Facebook for study groups as well as social reasons (Mac)
  • Mac: librarian in second life offering reference (New Media Consortium – NMC.org)
  • Open source and second life
  • He is in Facebook, and is “Friends” with president of student union
  • Okay for us to be in these spaces? As authority figures vs. being invited by students to come and engaging with them (e.g. student – ‘Jeff, I want to talk to you about 24 access’)
  • Mac: 4 pillars of transformation: ourselves, (information) resources, services, facilities (tools?)

  Successes
  • Hamilton Spectator newspaper heard Mac implementing Endecca, and library is changing, etc.; publicity
  • Mac president – Peter George -asked for presentation to board of governors, introduced as gaming character, found receptive audience to pleasant surprise, members from industry, etc., so maybe not so surprising (they all put down their blackberries) vs. religious studies group (choose your audience!)

  How Did they get here?
  • Transformation team formed at Mac, blog, http://ultransform.wordpress.com/
  • invited lots of guest speakers (Sept – Dec, 2006); leading faculty to speak of their needs and desires (business, classics, multimedia), other library leaders (to come: Michael Stephens – tametheweb; John Shank – blendedlibrian.org)
  • 5 Rs: restructure, reassign, retirements, retrain, recognize (for presentation purposes)
  o Restructuring – focusing more on learning
  – Users see us as ‘service’ previously, vs. partners, instructors, etc.
  o Retirements
  – Reference – user experience librarian
  o Eliminated ‘cataloging department’ (10 voluntary separation packages / retirements) – 300, 000 salary savings and created new positions (8) vs. vacancy freezes across university
  o New positions: librarians (6), manager (1), CAW (1)
  o Hope to start by September 1, all come in at the same time: digital strategies librarian (take traditional content and get into digital format, eg. Special collection, how fit into Aloutte initiatives, etc. — filled); digital technology development librarian; immersive learning (gaming) librarian, liaison role; marketing, outreach, communications librarian (hamilton public library, Mohawk college) – aim for ‘librarians’ with IT skills; teaching and learning librarian (strong background in education, pedagogy); e-resources librarian (license products).

  Next steps?
  • for new people coming in Mac, give them a year and come up with something really cool and run with it (esp. open source), and let them run with it, except ‘don’t spend a lot of money!)
  • Emerging technologies interest group established (learning 2.0 @ Mac -12 week program, gets MP3 player and draw for a laptop; about 90 people taking it) Staff now using: facebook, flickr, blogs
  • Library services marketing: flyer in facebook
  • Challenges: ILS, Horizon, etc. all bad. LibQual – results say users are unhappy about it; what do about it- Migrate? Sirsi, Endeavor? Other options:
  o Endecca (NCSU, Andrew Pace, happy with service); have office in Toronto, therefore launched a soft roll out of Mac Endecca interface (full force launch in fall anticipated).
  • Digital Technologies Librarian (evergreen as possible solution at Mac? As OS solution)
  • Achievements:
  o second life reference (IM, etc.; looking into virtual access to library resources .e.g. Bertrand Russell material); Hamilton island
  o Leslie McFarlane’s -Hardy Boys Archives
  o Digital commons (repository), has e-thesis, move from print to electronic journals
  o Newton’s Opticks: Re-useable learning object; flash based tutorial on Newton’s theories, etc.
  • Transform Facilities: old buildings, lack storage space
  o Information commons: lots of computers, access to services, ran pilot to open to 2am, and found to be packed until then – have staffing issues, but hope to go 24hour access.
  o Students give 1 year achievement to improve students life – given to library this year.
  o Learning commons @ Thode (coming), ‘nightclub-esque’ design for science and engineering (gaming room); eliminating all stacks in eng-sci building: compact shelving/remote storage off-site (students and faculty aren’t using the facility in the same way); add café, classroom facility, individual work stations to collaborative work stations, ‘pillows on the floor’ (building not touched since 1974); ‘high tech and high touch’ environment; library support in an IT environment.
  o Desktops vs. laptops for students (maybe more important is being able to access software, vs. type of computer used to access it).
  o Mac ‘Collaboratory’
  -Some stacks, large classroom, break out room, offices
  -For faculty and graduate students
  -innovative learning initiative: work with Faculty, instructors to get their input – have space at library, money (faculty in residence) work with librarians for tools and develop ‘information fluency’ programs; resources for ‘teaching digitally’

  Have they been successful?
  • Budget
  o Acquisitions exempted from cuts
  o Allowed to submit deficit budget
  o Allowed to create new positions
  • Support: from students, faculty, publicity

  Next Steps
  • Next: strategic plan for 3 years ahead, and wait for new provost! (impact on direction)
  • Assessment for measures of success (don’t have one in place yet, but are involved with SAILS and LIBQUAL); developing what ‘assessment looks like’
  • Cataloguing: shelf-ready mostly, some for the ‘difficult’ cases
  • Finding librarians with IT skills: no doubt not enough of them to recruit ‘digital projects librarians’ (worked with Wayne State, to form curriculum – graduate 20 in August); training for existing staff and on-going development necessary, internally.

  posted by: Willow Fuchs

  
  ]]> http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/jeffrey-treciak-university-librarian-mcmaster-university-library/feed/ 0 odyssey2007 http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/digital-odyssey-2007-begins/ http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/digital-odyssey-2007-begins/#comments Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:59:39 +0000 digitalodyssey http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/digital-odyssey-2007-begins/ ]]> The sold-out event began this morning with a welcome from OLITA president Catherine Steeves at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. Photos below show Jeff Trzeciak, the opening session speaker, and the audience. Read notes from his talk here.

  

  

  

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  Posted by Von Totanes

  
  ]]> http://odyssey2007.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/digital-odyssey-2007-begins/feed/ 0 digitalodyssey Audience Trzeciak Jeff Trzeciak