The blog for American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association
One last bit from LITA: the video. It features Tim Spalding, Michael Porter, Dinah Sanders, Nicholas Schiller, Conference Chair Dale Poulter, and LITA president Andrew Pace, as well as a very brief snippet (under the opening title) of the blackjack-for-grapes game that broke out at the Open Gaming Night.
From AL Focus.
Concurrent Session 6
“Participation and Power: Combining Community Features with Existing Metadata in Next Generation Public Interfaces”
Dinah Sanders, Innovative Interfaces, and Kelly Vickery, University of Kentucky
Sanders and Vickery discussed using community tagging to complement existing library catalogs. In 2007 the University of Kentucky installed Innovative’s Encore system, which incorporates community tagging features. “[Libraries] have the best data of anyone,” Sanders declared, adding that despite egregious examples like using “cookery” instead of “cooking,” “Most subject headings are really useful to patrons.” Even so, community tagging can fill in gaps where subject headings fall short.
“The more you can support the natural search mechanism people use, the more successful they will be,” Sanders noted.
In an academic setting, Vickery said, tags can be used to identify course materials for easy finding or to build collaborative shared course bibliographies. Tags are also valuable when terminology is too new to be reflected in subject headings. One example he cited was when Pluto was demoted from planetatry status and terms like “plutoid,” “dwarf planet,” and “trans-Neptunian dwarf planet” sprang up overnight.
Public library applications that Sanders offered include book groups tagging their books, the provision of distinct subcategories (”Trip-hop” as an alternative to “music,” for example), and the incorporation of emerging vocabulary and slang.
Sanders has written an article on tagging for American Libraries. Watch for it in the December issue.
Closing Session
The Obligation of Leadership
R. David Lankes, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
In an animated talk, Lankes offered the sculptors of Florence, Italy, as an cautionary tale of leadership. Florentine sculptors considered their work to be the pinnacle of art’s evolution, so the education that a new artist received was geared to replicating what had already been done. “It killed Florentine art,” Lankes said, because audiences had to go elsewhere for anything new. “It was there that I realized that innovation and leadership are deeply intertwined.”
He exhorted the audience to create knowledge through conversation. This is “not waiting for [patrons] to come in and hope that they ask the right questions so we can find them the right book, but proactively going out and saying, ‘this is what the community needs to know.’”
Lankes shared leadership lessons from three of his mentors. From his father, Richard Lankes, he learned that “You cannot wait for a leader. Sometimes that person may not come.”
From Jeff Katzer, a colleague at Syracuse, he learned that change is scary but worth it, and from Ray von Dran, his first dean at Syracuse, Lankes took that leadership is not about careerism, and that true mentorship is wanting your mentee to do better than you.
He concluded with a challenge to the crowd: “I invite you to invent the future, and I invite you to invent the future where we’re the most important parts of it.”
Additional
Total Forum registration was 321. LITA Executive Director Mary Taylor said that figure was a bit low—registration typically ranges from 350 to 375—but called it “still healthy.”
Watch for a video from the conference on AL Focus, planned to be uploaded Wednesday, October 22.
General Session
Michael Porter, WebJunction
“Hi-Fi-Sci-Fi Library: Technology, Convergence, Content, Community, Ubiquity, and Library.”
There’s a decent chance you’ve seen the “Hi-Fi-Sci-Fi Library” video that Porter and David Lee King of Topeka and Shawnee County (Kans.) Public Library made in August. If not, or if you just want the catchy hook again, see it here.
The ideas in today’s keynote were the inspiration for that internet hit. (The presentation might even be considered the inspiration for the song, even though the song predates the speech; that’s a complicated tale that Porter explains better than I could.)
Using examples from television and movies, Porter spoke on the relationship of science fiction to the actual future, and particularly the actual future of libraries. “[The makers] are making entertainment, but they’re thinking about what things might look like in the future,” he noted.
One example Porter offered of science fiction technology that has largely become real is Star Trek’s Personal Access Display Device. These were scaled-down, portable versions of the ship’s computer in the show; in life, handheld devices now perform many of the same functions as desktop computers. (And with downloadable skins, many can even look exactly like their Star Trek counterparts.)
Also from Star Trek—specifically, Star Trek IV, in a scene where Spock meditates by subjecting himself to a battery of intellectual tests—was the idea of a computer input that changes form with the task. While not yet in wide use, Porter observed that “keyboards” that are actually just laser projections on a flat surface already exist.
Some sci-fi prognostications were more amusing, like The Time Machine’s artificial intelligence librarian who was capable of and perfectly willing to roll his eyes while conducting reference interviews. Others were bleak, as in I, Robot, for example, one character scoffed that another’s father “wanted to ban the internet to keep the libraries open.”
Porter observed, however, that the universally accessible computer system in Star Trek had the official name “Library Computer Access and Retrieval System.” “The people they hired to make the decisions about what technology will look like are brilliant,” he said. “It’s no accident that they believe that there will still be libraries.”
Concurrent Session 3
Five Minute Madness
This session consisted of five-minute presentations of projects too new to have had time to develop a full concurrent session presentation. Presenters included Krista Wilde of Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, who detailed a new search and discovery tool for the library’s digital collection; Derek Rodriguez of Triangle Research Libraries Network, who spoke about the Endeca Project that helps connect records for member libraries; Emily Rimland of Penn State, who described the creation of a handheld devices group at her library to implement and evaluate devices for use in roving reference, library instruction, and other functions; and Keith Weimer of the University of Virginia, discussing the library’s new service that allows patrons to send reference queries by text message.
Concurrent Session 4
“Building Your Own Collaborative Web Applications with Drupal”
Weiling Liu, University of Louisville.
Liu shared her experiences using the open-source content management system Drupal to build several applications, including a news and event management system for the University of Louisville Libraries, and an online conference proposal form for the 2008 Kentucky Library Association/Kentucky School Media Association/Southeastern Library Association/Association of Research Libraries National Diversity in Libraries Joint Conference. “Drupal is an application that is so flexible that to achieve one goal, there are many ways,” Liu said.
For the news site, goals included decentralized content management, because each of the university’s six libraries have their own news and events to add, as well as the ability to display different types of news differently. The conference proposal site needed to centralize proposals, include notification when submissions are entered, and have a mechanism to evaluate proposals. Liu discussed how available add-on modules for Drupal helped her build sites that met these goals.
Concurrent Session 5
“Building a Web-Based Laboratory for Library Users.”
Jason J. Battles, University of Alabama, and Joseph (Jody) D. Combs, Vanderbilt University
The web-based laboratories that Combs and Battles discussed are based on Google Labs—a place to share and get feedback on new projects that are being built or considered. “The library labs are a part of a broader effort to address the needs and expectations of library users,” Battles said.
They and a team of four created Test Pilot at Vanderbilt when both were working there. Features tested there include Ex Libris’s Primo search and discovery tool, the LibX toolbar, site redesign options, and library blogs.
Combs said Test Pilot helped the library to introduce new services as they became available, rather than waiting for them to be 100% ready and then waiting for the beginning of a semester. It also generated valuable feedback—182 comments on Primo, for example. In addition, “It occurred to me that this is not just a way to release and get feedback on a service,” Combs said. “It also functions as a kind of marketing.”
When Battles moved to the University of Alabama, he adapted Test Pilot’s open-source code and installed UA’s Web Laboratory in November 2007. Adapting it took less than a day, and it incorporated improvements such as AJAX functionality to make commenting seamless.
Quotable
“Looking at you guys, I know that’s not true.”—Michael Porter, commenting on the Sony Reader’s “Sexier than a librarian” ad.
“Futurama thinks Dewey’s gonna be around in a thousand years. I’m just saying.”—Porter, on the LibraryThing group started to build an open-source alternative to the classification system.
A Librarian’s Ingenuity
After the sessions today was an open gaming night. While cards weren’t among the games ‘officially’ provided, a game of blackjack did break out pretty early on. The stakes? Grapes.
I’m in Cincinnati for the Library and Information Technology Association National Forum. Here’s my first report; I’ll be posting every evening.
Opening General Session
Tim Spalding, LibraryThing.com
“What is Social Cataloging and Where is it Going?”
Tim Spalding and Dr. Horrible address the LITA Forum Opening General Session
Spalding got a laugh off the bat by promising not to define the term “Social Cataloging”—accompanying his villainy with a photo of Dr. Horrible (from the recent online film Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog) and a rendition of Dr. Horrible’s well-trained evil laugh. The gesture wasn’t pure fandom, however. Spalding also told how LibraryThing users worked together to catalog Dr. Horrible’s bookshelf, a collection shown out-of-focus and on screen for only a few seconds.
That’s an example of “Collaborative Cataloging,” the top rung of what he termed the Social Cataloging Ladder. Users start with personal cataloging, move to exhibitionism and voyeurism by sharing what they read and looking at what others read, and then self-expression by adding book reviews. From there, they move to implicit social cataloging, using tags, reviews, and ratings to better categorize their books. “When everyone catalogs in their own separate room, but the rooms are all connected, something emerges,” he said. LibraryThing features that use this information include the UnSuggester, which suggests books that would be diametrically opposed. (One such pairing: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason vs. Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic.)
Beyond implicit social cataloging lies social networking, sharing, and explicit social cataloging, which includes capturing data like locations, characters, first and last words, or places the author has lived or tying equivalent or near-equivalent things together (Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, for example). Spalding said LibraryThing users make about 1,000 of these combinations each day. “They’re doing it to help other people; they’re doing it because it helps them. It’s really kind of remarkable.”
Librarians can be cheered, Spalding said, by the “amazing store of passion out there.” But “Library catalogs are fundamentally not open to the social web,” a problem and a threat. Meanwhile, Library 2.0 is in danger by libraries “concentrating on what they can do, not on what they can do best.”
Spalding recommended fighting back with free services that work with libraries’ strengths, like incorporating book recommendations from library holdings in search results, user reviews, and tagging. “I wish that some of these efforts were directed at the most important digital representation of your assets, the catalog.”
Concurrent Session 1
“User-Centered Design for Humanities Collections Within a Digital Library”
Mark Phillips and Kathleen Murray, University of North Texas
Phillips and Murray described their IMLS grant-funded IOGENE project, which studies how genealogists interact with the UNT Library’s Portal to Texas History. The site has grown dramatically since 2004—from 489 items then to 40,089 today—and the library has a revamp underway to incorporate information from three focus groups.
“We might say that our digital library is very standards driven and the genealogists are very content driven,” Murray said.
Requests from the focus groups included name searches (made difficult because names could appear in metadata in many different places—as the subject, the author, the photographer, and more), additional search fields, improved relevance weighting, and improved search results for serials.
UNT has divided requests into four groups: Two phases of improvements that will be made, one group that may be outside of technical feasibility, and one group that may well be unwise to impose system-wide or that is already available and users need improved information to be able to make it work. Wireframes for the first phase have been built, and the first release quality assurance process is scheduled for February.
Concurrent Session 2
“Portals to Learning: What Librarians Can Learn from Video Game Design”
Nicholas Schiller, Washington State University and Carole Svennson, University of Washington
Schiller and Svennson proposed that gaming literacy and traditional literacy can complement each other. “I really don’t think it’s helpful to see this as a zero sum game,” Shiller said.
Many games are complicated information systems just like libraries. “At the end of the day, the content is very different, but the databases are exactly the same,” Shiller noted. Therefore, libraries can adapt techniques that these games use to keep students engaged when learning and using library systems.
One of these techniques is an emphasis on pure knowledge rather than authority. “[Librarians and professors] are used to being the authority figure in a classroom,” Svennson said. “In World of Warcraft, it was the peers in the game who had the best information. There were official channels to request help, but that was the last place you’d turn.” Adapting that concept would entail the creation of long-term knowledge bases, such as wikis, where students can share information with peers and with future students.
“It feels like giving away the answers, but the truth of the matter is, that’s how students learn,” Svennson noted. “You’re not giving them the answers, you’re helping them get to the next stage.
Other techniques include a level concept that provides “scaffolding” to build on already-gained skills, social functions and the ability to collaborate, intrinsic motivation by demonstrating the rewards and offering options, and persistence through failure—the ability to build on failures rather than repeatedly reaching dead ends.