IRs@Cornell

On Monday I made a presentation for CUL’s Professional Development Week titled, “IRs@Cornell: The Expanding Role of Institutional Repositories“. I used Prezi.com to make it, so it’s viewable online.

Like many of my presentations, it loses something without my “voiceover,” therefore I will provide an excerpt from said that may clarify one portion of the presentation:

The purpose of institutions and measures like the Federal Depository Library Program was to preserve government documentation in case of fire, flood, technological mishap, or other natural disasters.

(beat)

Too soon?

See if you can guess where it goes!

The trendy and the dead

Another CiL has come and gone, leaving in its wake longer Facebook friends lists, crowded Twitter feeds, numerous travel horror stories, and several gaggles of library folk who’re more informed and engaged than they were a week ago.* My Day 3 began with Michael Edson’s excellent keynote address detailing the insights he’s gained as the Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian, and ended in a Holiday Inn in Edison, NJ, quite further from home than I’d hoped to be. (But then, getting back to Ithaca can be difficult.)

Since the conference, I’ve found myself considering and reconsidering Amanda Etches-Johnson’s presentation during Tuesday evening’s Dead and Innovative Technologies session.  In a display of audience participation which warmed the cockles of this former teacher’s heart, she’d put the name of a technology up on the big screen and ask the audience if it was alive or dead. Unsurprisingly, “blogs”, “Twitter”, “Second Life”, and “information architecture” went up on the screen to be soundly and joyously declared deceased by the crowd, and Amanda concurred with their assessment.

But then, with the first two examples, she did something I found very interesting. She showed how the purposes of blogs and Twitter had become diluted in content and infested with corporate advertising, and noted that this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that such things were no longer trendy.  And the part of me that used to teach LSAT prep perked up and said, “That’s a scope shift. Just because something’s not trendy doesn’t mean it’s dead.” And sure enough, then she showed a blog that was honest and interesting, and a helfpul Twitter conversation between a library and a patron. In cases like these, such tech doesn’t seem nearly so dead.

It’s easy, I think, when we play around with so much new tech, to mistake trendiness for viability.** It’s easy for library folk to forget that, by and large, we are not our target audience. Neglecting technology that our patrons might still be using because it’s not trendy is just another iteration of the mindset that gives us user-unfriendly OPACs that librarians think are awesome.  And considering that most studies of library presence in Facebook indicate that the kids don’t really want us there right now, maybe communication and networking technologies like these only become viable for libraries when they’re not trendy anymore.  

Finding the viability window for communication technology strikes me as one of the major issues that librarians need to grapple with in coming years, and Amanda and the other presenters did a great job of kicking folks’ brains into gear on the subject. And, it was fun to play RockBand with her.

* Based on extrapolation from a representative gaggle who’s posted to this effect on their various blogs.
** Of course, the fact that I’m still blogging and Twittering indicates that I’m clearly immune to this. Or slow. One of those.

CiL2009, Day 1: A retrospective

This retrospective was supposed to be written and posted last night, but while delicious tapas and a pitcher of sangria have many virtues, the facilitation of effective blogging lies not amongst them. Instead, I’m typing this while waiting for the second day’s keynote (an interview which seems to involve at least one individual that I played RockBand with on Sunday) to begin.

Saw a number of interesting presentations yesterday; the two most interesting involved sharing code from your library and learning about academic library users, respectively. The first half of the latter described a study of students at the University of Maryland that, among other findings, happily noted that 54% of students used UMD’s ResearchPort system in their last batch of course-related research (with 35% using it first), while only 36% used Google (18% using it first). And they even put all the tools necessary to run a similar study in the conference materials, and put their prototype up on the web for us to look at. The second half involved an interesting discussion of user-generated social tagging of library resources.

The first presentation that really struck me, though, was from the University of Colorado’s Nina McHale, who talked about building widgets and other chunks of sharing code based on library resources, and allowing people to take that code and do with it what they will. It was one of those presentations that turns your brain inside out in a good way, because while we’ve snagged other folks’ embeddable code — most notably Meebo — we haven’t thought of building our own widgets for others to use. It’s an idea that I think may find a lot of traction back home, and I’m excited about exploring it.

Another fun note: I had a question for Nina, but I watching the clock told me that having to leave for my lunch committment would prevent me from asking it. On a lark, I looked for her in Facebook, found her, and — apologizing for the possible presumptuousness — asked my question via Facebook message. She not only answered it, but friended me… which made our accidental face-to-face meeting later that day all the more interesting.

I love living in the future.

Tag decay

Last week I mentioned a conversation with David Lankes that touched upon folksonomies and the idea of tag decay. Folksonomies are a subject near and dear to my brain, and Dr. Lankes made me aware of a completely new dimension to them.

When I talk up the concept of user-created tags, I often tell folks that it’s a way for those within the libraries to get an idea of how the users are thinking. After all, when I’m on the ref desk showing a patron how to find items on a particular subject in a catalog or database, I’ll usually tell them to do keyword searches to track down a single item that meets their criteria, and then look at the subject headers. These headers will indicate how the database creators categorized the item, and those categories can then be used to quickly find other similar items.

So, it should work the same way in reverse, right? If librarians look at how users tag an item, it can give us a parallel insight into how users think!

Except, as Dr. Lankes pointed out, a user that places a tag on an item may not consider that tag appropriate a year later, as that user’s knowledge, experience, and relationship with the item change. So the picture tags give us gets blurred.

Enter the concept of tag decay*. Tags are no longer permanent, but fade over time; this could mean that its relevance slowly decreases to nothing, or maybe every tag gets a simple expiration date. Such a practice would raise other issues, such as users assuming their tags are permanent. For example, if I still think a resource should be marked “NYS government,” how will the system let me know that the tag I placed in 2007 is no longer valid? Is such a system even feasible without some kind of user authentication, and would such authentication prove too great a barrier to use?

User-created tagging is a technique that I think holds great potential for libraries who want to know more about their users (this is why I mention the Powerhouse Museum so frequently); even without something like tag decay, tagging is a powerful tool for users to customize their experience with resources and to communicate with those who maintain those resources. Addressing the disconnect between permanent tags and impermanent preferences would only help to better meet that potential.

* I found a researcher — Terrell Russell — who uses this term to refer to the growing staleness of tags over time. To clarify, in this post (and in the conversation it describes), the term is used instead to refer to a system that would allow older, obsolete tags to fade into irrelevance automatically. If I write on this again, I may follow Joshua Porter’s lead and refer to the the other phenomenon as “popularity decay”, for clarity.

Post-mortem: Professional Development Week 2008

Friday marked the end of CUL’s Professional Development Week, one in which my own participation was both less and more than I might’ve hoped. On the final day I sat on two panels and made a presentation, but the preparation needed meant I didn’t have time to go to many events during the rest of the week.

The first panel discussed the CUL Mentoring Program, which I’ve participated in since Fall of 2006. I’d only been invited to sit on the panel the previous week, but it was a fun opportunity to talk about a program I think highly of. My mentor, Jesse Koennecke, helped me get into library school and has provided great advice on navigating the ins and outs of CUL, so I was glad to get a chance to talk up the program.

The second panel was on Web 2.0, and consisted of the folks who taught hands-on training sessions for various 2.0 applications over the past year as a part of a program sponsored by the Committee for Professional Development. I taught a session on RSS back in November, and the panel led a great discussion on the application of stuff like blogs, wikis, Facebook, and del.icio.us within the library. However, going on about the potential for that sort of thing on a blog would be preaching to the choir, so I’ll just say it was good to share ideas, and move on.

My presentation was on Berkeley Electronic Press’s SelectedWorks, and the use it’s been getting at the Catherwood Library. The slides were sparser than usual for me, with more time spent on the SelectedWorks site itself. But the product speaks strongly to elements of Dr. Lankes’s keynote address, specifically in how it lets the library cast itself as a facilitator of faculty-to-faculty conversations. The level of use SelectedWorks has seen at Catherwood, and the fact that it was created specifically to fulfill requests from faculty, seemed to get people’s attention.

The case can be made that services like SelectedWorks are within the purview of the academic library, and represent a definitive service that such institutions can offer the academy going forward (which again ties into elements of Dr. Lankes’s keynote). The case I’m less sure of, and frankly one that I didn’t even touch upon, is that such a service likes within the purview of a librarian. I’d like to think that this sort of thing doesn’t just provide purpose to paraprofessionals, but my own lack of experience leaves me without the confidence necessary to claim otherwise. Hopefully, that will change as time goes on.

All things considered, PD Week was probably a good thing for me, in terms of discussing the work with others, learning about what librarians are working on, and getting my face in front of the people I hope to be working with for the foreseeable future.

Professional Development Week 2008

So, Monday was the kickoff for the Cornell University Library’s Professional Development Week. Keynote speaker David Lankes spoke on “Library Science in the Ivy League,” a presentation he’s been kind enough to post to his blog, as well. I had the honor of escorting Dr. Lankes from his car to the hall wherein he spoke*, and with speaking him afterwards on subjects ranging from tag decay to the slide transitions he used in his presentation. Dr. Lankes’ speech dealt in part with the notion that libraries need to be flexible in order to establish their niche in a changing academic world, a point I think I’ll refer to in my own presentation on Friday.

Before and after Dr. Lanke’s presentation, I got the opportunity to check out posters from three excellent presenters: Pat Viele (“Information Fluency and Physics Graduate Students”), Somaly Kim-Wu (“Blackboard in Numbers”, which was co-produced by Baseema Krkoska), and Erin Dorney (“What is an Unconference, Anyway? Flexible Forms of Library Continuing Ed”). I enjoyed talking with all three presenters, and left with an even greater love of poster sessions in general. (Not to mention a strong desire to attend an unconference.)

2007’s PD Week really helped clarify what I needed to to do actively pursue librarianship. I hope that 2008’s will do the same, even if much of my brainspace this week is dedicated to preparing for my own presentation and panel participation on Friday. Of course, the fact that I’ve gone from audience member to presenter in a year may well say something for the program’s efficacy.

* Why, yes, I did make a joke about escort quests to several people. Yes, they did ask me if I got any blues as a reward; I told them no, I just got XP and rep with CUL and the Syracuse iSchool. It’s only fair, really: it’s not like we were set upon by brigands.

PMOG: A slick veneer of steampunk gaming for your web browsing

So, after seeing links to it on Boing Boing, Brass Goggles, and what felt like half-a-dozen other blogs, I decided to set up an account on PMOG, the steampunk-themed Passively Multiplayer Online Game. Described by its creators as “an infinite game built on individual network histories, transforming our web surfing into ongoing social play,” PMOG lets you level up a character by surfing the web: taking missions, avoiding traps, or traveling through portals, all of which were left by other players (and leaving some of your own to boot).

There’s functionality present in the game that I think has some applicability to the sort of online public service I’m interested in as a proto-librarian. Portals are the simplest example: a player can place a portal on any web page that, if used, will bring the user to another web page. Missions, meanwhile, take players from one web page to the next; the mission’s creator can add captions along the way, basically creating a tour of related web-sites.

This sort of interface could be used to provide online tours of a library’s resources, or even as a form of marketing. It took me a minute or two to set up a Portal leading from Wikipedia’s entry on industrial relations to the Catherwood home page.

Of course, right now most of the missions I see involve webcomics. But PMOG is, if nothing else, an amusing distraction, though I think it provides some tools that should be be looked at much more seriously. Until then, I’m going to shoot for membership in the Vigilantes.

Down with OED?

I’d like to begin by apologizing for this post’s title. I’m terribly, terribly sorry.

As I’ve noted earlier, I spend a lot of time working with digital representations of print resources. Which brings me to this article about the decision to make the Oxford English Dictionary a purely digital resource.

To give you some background, a housemate of mine owned the lovely two-volume OED that came with the magnifying glass. It was a source of much wisdom, including that fact that one definition of “fornicate” is “to play billiards.” We loved the OED for its insane thoroughness and thorough insanity; it was a magnificent reflection of the English language.

So now they’re moving it online, and not only do they have to worry about preserving its content in the face of changing technology, but they also must look backwards and realize that definitions a century and a half old might not be as helpful as they once were. But I have to wonder: do you preserve those less-than-helpful but wonderfully poetic definitions? Do you supplement them? Do you replace them?

The OED is both a reference resource and an oddly living history of the last 150 years of language. Its digital incarnation should be watched, as it could prove an illustrative tangle of the priorities of preservation and usability.