Posted in Uncategorized at 2:48 pm by Sean Fitzpatrick
One of the more lively discussions at LITA Forum was during a session whose topic had more to do with next year’s Forum topic than this year’s: Ken Fujiuchi from Buffalo State College in New York and Kathryn Frederick from Skidmore College in New York gave the audience a lot to consider in their talk “Designing Library Services for the Cloud.”
“We don’t want to trust the cloud, but we’re sucked in anyway,” said Fujiuchi. Budget issues in libraries and patron expectations for certain types of services make moving data and services to the cloud pretty enticing. The bottom line is that cloud computing is more efficient, flexible, and portable. Their examples ranged from storing bib records on cloud servers to speed ILL among institutions that share the records (wait, aren’t we already doing that?) to Google Sites for statistics to speculations that maybe one day library cards can be standardized to simplify borrowing outside one’s own library–just as OpenID does it on the web and ATMs do it with debit cards. I was particularly interested in libraries’ using Google Sites for statistics because of how well Google’s forms interact with Google Docs and then output basic analytics–a perfect fit for keeping track of stats on reference transactions, it seems.
Of course, privacy is a concern, but OCLC’s Matt Goldner reminded the audience that sales units have been trusting the cloud for years with customer relationship management tools like salesforce.com. “It’s been done,” Goldner said. “Librarians just need figure out what needs to be in the cloud for us.”
The discussion led to ideas about what could happen if libraries refused to turn to the cloud for their computing infrastructure. The speakers suggested that librarians will risk losing patrons, saying that the cloud is to IT what Google is to libraries–motivation to maintain relevance.
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:53 am by Sean Fitzpatrick
David Weinberger
When David Weinberger, author and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society talks, I listen up. So his opening the presentation by saying that “the Age of Information is pretty much over” was tough news to take first thing on a Saturday morning. (Although we’ve been hearing that since at least 2002, it’s still pretty shocking for those of us making a living organizing and passing around information.) But LITA Forum’s Saturday keynote speaker quickly explained himself, saying that people didn’t stop using stones when the stone age ended; the information age is over because we’ve moved beyond a time when we place so much value on a relatively small amount of data. And whatever this shift away from the Information Age means, we can be sure it’ll be interesting.
We’ve entered the age of abundance, as Weinberger calls it, where the old ways of reducing knowledge to a few data points and paring things down to, say, whatever can fit on a catalog card or even a full MARC record, have given way to an age where there is simply too much information to handle. While a lot of that information is good, most of it is crap, he said, quickly pointing out that with sophisticated spam filters, pop-up blockers, and so forth, we’re actually better at weeding out the bad stuff than we are at dealing with the good stuff.
“Knowing the world means understanding the chaos and seeing the meaning,” Weinberger said. Handling the good stuff, it seems, is difficult because we like knowledge to be settled and neatly packaged, not chaotic, and in books mostly. And recreating discourse among these books is tedious work: Footnotes are there if we want them, sure, but who really follow them regularly? Books, therefore, and footnotes are dead ends.This is how Western culture has always handled knowledge, said Weinberger. We assume knowledge is basically simple, scarce, and settled. Fortunately, this model lends itself very well to libraries and how they work.
But the Age of Abundance has blown apart the simplicity, settled-ness, and scarcity of knowledge, giving way to more transparency through hyperlinking–just like footnotes in many ways, but “hyper.” Whereas most punctuation tells us when to stop and for how long, the HTML anchor tag element is punctuation, if you will, that tells us to go somewhere. Citing the Scottish philosopher Andy Clark, Weinberger explained that the internet becomes almost a sort of extension of our mind (scaffolding, he called it) so that we think with our brains and store information elsewhere.
Weinberger was quick to point out that there were four ways in which abundance of information makes us stupid. First, we often can’t find information. There’s too much of it. But we’re getting better at building systems to handle the abundance, he said, and we’ll only continue to get better. Second, the digital divide is getting worse as the skill set needed to function in a digital environment grows. Third, we stay within our comfort zones. Where there is so much information, we’re drawn to that which interests us. Last, we’re pretty lazy by nature. Although Wikipedia has rich “Talk” pages to encourage discourse about its articles, most of us pay no attention to them.
While the internet has a huge potential to make us stupid, overall it’s making us smarter, said Weinberger. The web mirrors the fundamental architecture of morality, he asserted, and compassion and curiosity are our bulwarks. And the one thing the web is teaching our children, according to Weinberger, is that the world and its people are far more interesting than we are told.
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:03 am by Sean Fitzpatrick
Will Kurt
The last concurrent session at LITA Form 2009 will be the first one I’ve written about so far (but more will come, to be sure). Sunday morning Will Kurt from the University of Nevada in Reno talked about his new library (lots of cool technology there) and how they’re actively looking toward the future. It’s not just the cloud we need to think about, he said. The future will also bring more integration of computers into our physical environment–ubiquitous computing.
We spend all our time going to computers to do our work, but what if computers could come to us? “How can we integrate computing power into our environment?” Kurt asked.
His library recently bought the Microsoft Surface, a table–an honest-to-God table–that has a big multi-touch computer screen right inside. Because it’s a table, you can put a cup of coffee on it, spread out some books on it, whatever. “People have even changed babies on them,” said Kurt. So rather than going to a computer to do work, the computer is part of an environment where people are already working.
Students’ reactions were mixed. Kurt heard comments ranging from “this thing is sweet” to “don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty sick, but I don’t want my tuition to rise.”
Successful technologies need to be perceived as valuable–not just novel. Though the surface wasn’t built for an educational environment, Kurt had to build some useful applications for it. The first thing he did was to build a copy of Conway’s Game of Life, which was greatly enhanced with the ability to input commands at multiple touch points.
“The Game of Life was neat, but I didn’t expect it to change the way people worked,” Kurt remarked.
So next he created some applications to enhance users’ experience with the anatomical models that the library circulates. Working with the university’s anatomy program, Kurt developed an application that added high resolution images to the Surface to correspond with the library’s models. (See Will’s video below, and even more here.)
“The students were already putting their lab notes and models on the table,” Kurt said. So the Surface adds to the experience.
In the near future, Kurt plans to add images from the library’s media collection to the Surface.
In the first week of the semester, Kurt saw 70 hours of continuous use on the Surface. “It’s really an amazing thing to see,” he said.
