SJRLC Connections

VALE's Next Generation Academic Library System Symposium

VALE's Next Generation Academic Library System Symposium

WHEN: Wednesday, March 12, 2008, 8:30-4:00
WHERE: The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ
WHO SHOULD ATTEND: Library administrators, systems librarians, public and technical services librarians

The Virtual Academic Library Environment of New Jersey (VALE-NJ) has a vision of the Next Generation Library System. You are invited to attend a symposium at
which you will learn about open source library systems and the potential for improvements in many aspects of library operations and services that such systems
can bring.

We are excited to present a full day of speakers and discussions. Come learn how this might be a part of VALE and New Jersey's future.

Learn more about the symposium and REGISTER TODAY to attend. Registration deadline is February 25, 2008.

Registration Details, including directions: http://www.valenj.org/newvale/ols/symposium2008/

Interesting Debate on Web 2.0: Weinberger vs. Keen

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a piece, "The Good, the Bad and the Web 2.0" that featured a debate between Andrew Keen, author of, "The Cult of the Amateur" and David Weinberger, author of "Everything is Miscellaneous".

I highly recommend the article, but for you fans of Cliffs notes, here's my quick 'n' dirty summary, followed a by a few questions to ponder.

Notes on Keen's position

IS WEB 2.0 A DREAM OR A NIGHTMARE?  It is: "The radical democratization of media which is enabling anyone to publish anything on the Internet.    

• Web 2.0 tranforms all of us into digital writers, music artists, movie makers, journalists (and critics)
  
• YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Tagging
  
• A flattened media is a personalized, chaotic media without that essential epistemological anchor of truth.  The impartiality of the authoritative, accountable expert is replaced by the murkiness of the anonymous amateur.  When everyone claims to be an author, there can be no art. no reliable information, no audience
  
• Web 2.0's Democratization of information is creating a generation of media illiterates.  That's the Nightmare.
  
• Web 2.0 (combined with broadband) will transform the media into "ubiquitous chatter".  Digital abundance will lead to intellectual poverty.  "The more we know, the less we will know."
  
• Traditional media has done a good job in discovering, polishing, and distributing talent.
  
• To use this chaotic media efficaciously, we need to invent our own taxonomies -- which isn't realistic to the majority of the people.

Notes on Weinberger's position

THE WEB IS ABUNDANCE, WHILE THE OLD MEDIA IS PREMISED ON SCARCITY

• The web is problematic because there are no centralized gatekeepers BUT the Web is ALSO the continuing struggle to deal with that problem:  sites that enable users to tag online resources; the Web invents ways to pull together ideas and information, finding the connections and relationships that keep the "misc" from staying that way.
  
• People rely on a wide range of trust mechanisms appropriate to the domain to guide us (i.e. ebay reputations; persistence of posts on blogs; recommendations of other bloggers; Wikipedia's sophisticated governance and complete transparency…)
  
• Amateurs aren't driving out pros.  But the criteria governing our choice of whom to listen to are expanding from "those are the only channels I get".
  
• Keen's picture of talent is formed by the binary view the traditional media has forced on us.  It's been expensive to produce, market, distribute products (book, records, films).  The traditional distribution system made it look like talent is a you-got-it-or-you-don't proposition.  That doesn't reflect the scarcity of talent so much as the scarcity of distribution, a result of the high cost of delivering the first copy.
  
• We couldn't find so much on the web if finding required creating our own taxonomies as Keen says.   We rely on taxonomies created by experts (catalogs, indexes), computer assistance (search engines) and recommendations from people we trust.  We're getting better at all of these.
  
• Consider how much more we know about the world because of bloggers.  They may not be "journalists" but they are sources.

Thoughts/Questions

1. What can libraries be doing to help people find information?
   • Creating (good) expert taxonomies
   • Building recommendations systems into our catalogs and websites
   • Leveraging our reputation as a trusted source
   • Become actively involved with social tagging.   
     
2. What can/should libraries be doing to help customers create and share?  Can/should we be aggregating or creating local community or subject oriented:
   • Blogs
   • Wikis
   • YouTube "channels"
   • Podcasts
     
3. As information professionals, what are our information competencies in the web 2.0 world?
   • Can should we be helping to teach our customers how to use new information technologies to enhance their lives?
   • What do you think of David Lee King's suggested competencies. 
   • How do Livonia Central School's tech competencies for 3rd graders compare/contrast with the current competencies of library staff?   
     
4. Web 2.0 fosters communities of interest.  Are there opportunities for libraries to strengthen their role in their community and/or connect people (or connect with people) in their communities?

Joan Bernstein has an article in CIL

Joan Bernstein, Director of the Mount Laurel Library, has a feature article in this month's Computers in Libraries entitled, Train Employees and Officials to Be Ready for Privacy Challenges.

If you don't subscribe to the wonderful magazine, don't fret:  You can access the full text online at: http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/jun07/Bernstein.shtml.

Future of Catalogs?

Check out the cool mashup (fig. 1) that the Allen County Public Library (IN) developed.  If this isn't the future of library catalogs I don't know what is! 

As a library (and bookstore) customer I love browsing, and have enjoyed the browsable interface with "face-out" covers that Overdrive provides for our Audiobooks project.

Sean Robinson, head of IT Services at ACPL, created this mashup of book covers for the books that ACPL cataloged the previous day.  It pulls that information from their catalog, and pulls the cover art from Amazon. 

When you click on the cover of a book, you get information about it (fig. 2) on a little graphic of an old-fashioned library catalog card (itself another mashup from John Blyberg, of http://www.blyberg.net/)

The "bookwall" is updated automatically each day as new items are added to the catalog.  From here, it's not too much of a step to have different bookwalls, perhaps even customizable by the customer, that display topics of interest.  As a customer, I would love to be able to subscribe to a "new materials" email that showed up in my inbox every day and allowed me to browse the cover art and reserve books with a click.

So what do you think?  Will this be standard under the hood of our LIS systems in 5 years?  Less?