Tagaloging: The process of adding tags and building the wonderfully flexible self-organizing collections of information like Flickr, Furl, del.icio.us, and their ilk. Perhaps I've spent too much time looking at these tools and not enough time socializing with other humans, but the term strikes a chord with me, more clearly descriptive to my librarian brain than "folksonomy."
This was probably not worth a blog entry, but there you go.
This is a bit far afield, but it got me wondering (not always a good thing).
OCLC has launched an alpha version of an OpenURL resolver. The idea behind this is fairly straightforward, but the devil, as always, will be in the details. OpenURL is a standard for formatting citations (of books, journal articles, etc.) in a URL format that can be passed between a citation database and a full text service for which the user (or the user's library) has obtained access. For example, if you do a search in a database that your library has access to and has activated OpenURL links in, you would see a link after each citation to find the full text. That link would take you to a "link resolver" provided by your library. The link resolver would determine, based on the citation information provided in the link, the best full-text source for that particular item. It might be a full-text database, it might be a paper copy of the journal in the library stacks, or it might be interlibrary loan. You'd see a list of possible sources of the full text, which you could click through to.
Where this great system falls apart, a bit, is if you do not have access to a link resolver or if you are providing citations of one kind or another to people who are not part of your library's licensing arrangements for full-text resources. For example, to bring it back to RSS, if you maintained a list of publications by your patrons (or your library staff) and published that list of citations by RSS, you'd want to make it easy for your RSS subscribers to get to the full text. Since you don't know the URL of the link resolver each of your RSS subscribers uses (if they even have access to one at all), this becomes difficult.
Hence the OCLC OpenURL resolver. The idea is to provide a central resolver that will guess, based on the IP address of the particular user clicking on the link, what the appropriate link resolver might be. So if you are on the Tufts campus, for example, it will know (because Tufts told OCLC) that the resolver address is whatever. Or if you're in another similar environment, the OCLC link resolver would know where you are. This works less well, at least initially, for home users on broadband, but I'd guess it would still be possible to make good guesses based on cities what the public library link resolver would be (assuming cable and telephone companies assign blocks of IP addresses in a somewhat systematic way).
Jakob Nielsen, the well-known usability guru, offers a list of the "Top Ten Design Mistakes" for weblogs. There's lots of good stuff here, but the basic item to remember is that weblogs are web sites. Even if you're using an authoring tool (Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, etc.), it's incumbent on you as a weblog author to provide information on who you are, to stick to your topic, to publish regularly, and to construct meaningful links.
Case Western Reserve University's CaseWiki caught my eye in this article. The school published a wiki that any authorized Case user may edit (visitors may leave comments). Topics include people, academics, organizations, social life (activities, bars, restaurants, theaters, etc.). It looks to be developing into an all-purpose guide to life at CWRU.
Like so many bottom-up tools, CaseWiki relies on the self-correcting power of the population contributing to it. It's not anonymous, so there's reputation at stake (like in the blog world). This raises a question that occurred to me during the recent NEASIS&T "Buy, Hack, or Build" conference: what is the minimum number of participants a wiki needs to be self-correcting and (I hesitate to use this word to a librarian audience) "authoritative"? It seems to me that a small number of wiki participants -- say, fewer than a dozen -- lends itself to groupthink too easily. Large wikis -- the Wikipedia, for example -- are self correcting. Where's the threshhold between the two? A few dozen users? A few score?
Your thoughts are welcome in the comments section...
Coming soon: The RSSTroom Reader. Think of the possibilities for expanding readership of your feeds to all your public facilities! (Full details are available here.)
I think the end-of-year hustle and bustle is getting to me.
Perhaps I've been asleep at the switch, but I just noticed an interesting use of two of my favorite social software tools over at The Washington Post. They include a Technorati and del.icio.us gadgets alongside articles.
So, for example, if you're blogging about the Post's article on Shani Davis' decision to withdraw from the 10,000-meter race at the Olympics, there's a Technorati "who blogged this" box in which your blog will appear. And if you want to save and tag the article into del.icio.us, there's a link built in to the article for just that.
It's refreshing to see a newspaper -- like most publishers, primarily concerned with bringing eyeballs to its pages -- trying new technologies that might actually increase the linkability of their articles. By making it simple to add their content to at least several major social software tools, the Post's editors are making it easier for people to find the relevant news on their web site.
I'm not sure what the connection is to libraries, exactly, but thought I'd share anyway.
Update: Now that Technorati has worked its magic, I realize that the real draw for adding a "who blogs this" sidebar: it's a great ego feeder for bloggers! There my humble little blog is, listed in the sidebar of a Washington Post article. Guess which newspaper I'm going to be trolling for ideas?
The University of Michigan libraries have released a new digital archive, Deep Blue. Deep Blue aims:
The library is offering its academic research colleagues permanence in the digital environment for research work. They acknowledge something more: by publishing through the University, the scholar's works gain the weight of a major research institution. They've launched with an impressive collection of nearly 24,000 digital works, dating as far back as the 1950s. Access to some materials may be restricted based on the work's copyright requirements, but much, if not the vast majority, of the collection is available in full text to everyone.
Now what they really need is RSS feeds for their author, topic, and collection lists.... But that will come, I'm sure.
Have you ever wanted to tell the world where you spend your time? If so, this is the bumper sticker for you. I'm not talking Czech Republic (CZ), Italy (I), Maine (ME), or the Outer Banks (OBX)...
Now you can show your pride in your most frequent destination for those 2-minute mini-vacations at your desk!
I wrote about serendipity and its seeming decline back in the spring. I recently came across a clever catalog tool from the Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne, Indiana) that enables a moment of pleasant surprise.
Ian, on the acpl.info blog, describes what the tool recreates for the patron:
The new tool, a "bookwall," shows the image of a book cover for each book cataloged at the ACPL the day before. Clicking on a cover image brings up a library card with brief reviews of the book -- and, most important, a link to the book's entry in the ACPL catalog. The order of the books is not obvious, which makes it random. A toddler's picture book might be next to an adult biography and above a manga.
I'd love to see this pushed out to patrons as an RSS feed. And to implement this for my library, too!
Nature launched a bold experiment in June 2006 in which scholars could (voluntarily) post their articles for open peer review via a Wiki-like interface. After receiving a number of article submissions that surprised Nature's editorial staff, the staff were perhaps equally surprised when comments from the broader scholarly community were not forthcoming:
Nature and its publishers will continue to explore participative uses of the web. But for now at least, we will not implement open peer review.
The full report, "Overview: Nature's peer review trial," is on Nature's web site.
I find it interesting (though not entirely surprising) that while many members of the scholarly community were open to receiving feedback from peers in a public forum, they were simultaneously less willing to provide it.
I'm likewise curious to see if an experiment like this aimed more directly at rising scholars -- those in the midst of, or having recently completed, their doctorates -- might have different results. Or is the tradition of anonymous peer review is so deeply embedded in academia that it trumps these newfangled "web 2.0" tools?
A rare personal post on this blog... But I wanted to explain the lack of recent posts and what I predict will be continued dearth of items for the next few weeks.
Today is my last day at the Edwin Ginn Library at Tufts University's Fletcher School. I'm moving from Boston to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be the Web Systems Manager at the Univeristy of Michigan libraries.
While I'm sad to be leaving many wonderful friends and colleagues at the Tufts libraries, I'm thrilled to be starting something new and working more deeply with the tools and technologies I've been writing about here. I may squeeze in an item or two in the coming weeks, but probably not until I'm settled in Ann Arbor.
This really has little to do with RSS, but it is such a useful and clever service that I can't resist writing about it.
Tim Spalding of Library Thing today announced LibraryThing for Libraries with its first implementation, the Danbury Library (in Connecticut).
Tim explains the whys and wherefores in great detail in his post, but the upshot of it all is that when you search for a book in the Danbury library's catalog, in addition to the catalog and holdings data, you also see:
The last three items only show books held by Danbury's library. And LibraryThing has restricted the tags that appear in the Danbury catalog so that tags that describe location of the book or the tagger's intent (for example, "at the beach house" or "to read") are not included.
The August 15 issue of Wired has an article about using "ambient information" to generate peer pressure on individuals to achieve a social good. In particular, Thompson suggests that if we make a game out of conserving energy -- by publicizing our individual energy use through our web sites -- that we could create a competition around reducing our energy usage.
Are there ways, I wonder, in which libraries can use a similar approach to foster library usage? Maybe build a small tool that lets library users show the money they saved by not buying the book they just read from an online bookstore? Or perhaps brag about how much time they saved by consulting a reference librarian? As more people put more information about themselves and their activities into social networking and other sites, perhaps libraries should make it easier for their patrons to publicize our institutions' benefits.
Photosynth was demonstrated at the March 2007 TED Conference. A video of the demonstration blows my mind -- particularly the segment that begins about 4 minutes 50 seconds into this 8-minute presentation (well worth viewing in its entirety):
Imagine being able to take photographs of any place, building, or object from all the world's digital photos -- and map them together using tags supplied by people who have already viewed the image. The Cathedral of Notre Dame example in the demonstration is a great start... But think of the possibilities, not just globally, but also locally, in terms of bringing your community's experiences and knowledge to bear on any particular local topic.
What happens when university students have unfettered access to the Internet during classes? Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes in a wireless-enabled classroom knows the answer: of the students with laptops, many are online, and many of the online crowd are surfing far from the seas of academe. Such is the conclusion of an article in the Ann Arbor News today: "As U-M Goes Wireless, Results Are Not Always Academic."
The University is adapting, slowly. The law school, for example, "now blocks individual students' access to its wireless network when they're supposed to be in class." And at least one professor, Ben van der Plujim, wrote software called "Lecture Tools" that enables a presenter to share slides directly with students, allowing them to follow along with the lecture, and take notes on their laptops -- giving idling hands something to do during the lecture other than click around the web.
It will be interesting to observe the evolution of in-class technology use -- particularly by students -- as network access becomes better integrated into the classroom.
If your answer to the above question is yes, go visit Wired magazine's Web 2.0 B.S. Generator for randomly generated -- and scarily plausible -- press releases for Web 2.0 services you never knew you wanted, let alone needed.
As a member of the editorial board for the just-launched Code4Lib Journal, I'm pleased to point the way to the inaugural issue. The Code4Lib Journal covers the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future. The idea for the journal came out of last year's Code4Lib conference, but the journal's content comes from across the spectrum of libraries.
The first issue of this OPENACCESS journal contains:
If you're interested in contributing to a future issue, please see the Call for Submissions. We're accepting proposals for articles, book & software reviews, code snippets & algorithms, conference reports, opinion pieces, etc.
The 2.0 world -- in libraries in particular, or the web in general -- is helping to address the information management problem of ambiguity. In his inaugural column in the May issue of KMWorld," Now, everything is fragmented," David Snowden notes: "The more you structure material, the more you summarize (either as an editor or using technology), the more you make material specific to a context or time, the less utility that material has as things change..."
Much of what the knowledge management world, and, for that matter, librarians more broadly, seek to accomplish is to get the right bit of information to the person who is looking for it at the right time. However, as we build systems to accomplish that task, we often run counter to both the defining characteristic of our age and what he describes as one of the defining characteristics of our species. Snowden writes:
First, we live in a world subject to constant change, and it’s better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs. We are moving from attempting to anticipate the future to creating an attitude and capability of anticipatory awareness. Second, we are homo sapiens at least in part because we were first homo narrans: the storytelling ape. Dealing with anecdotal material from multiple sources and creating our own stories in turn has been a critical part of our evolutionary development.
Information systems are typically built to remove ambiguity. They are tailored to the specific need at hand. Snowden notes that there is a risk to building systems that remove ambiguity by "chunking" information into discrete elements. This risk is shown through research (in national security, in particular) that indicates raw intelligence is more useful over longer periods of time than the reports based on that raw data. 2.0 environments, in which users of information build on the raw materials, mixing and matching sources in novel ways, are more flexible, allowing for changing needs to reflect themselves over time.
A mentor and twice-supervisor of mine described someone's ability to survive in an organization by saying that the individual either had or lacked a "high tolerance for ambiguity." Having a high tolerance was a good thing: if you could keep your relative sanity as organizational priorities and day-to-day exigencies changed, you were in good shape. As librarians, we need to develop a high tolerance for ambiguity in the information systems we design and provide. By this, I don't mean developing to wishy-washy specifications. I do mean that we need to build systems that enable our users to pursue information-seeking paths we don't, or can't, anticipate. Systems must be built to allow others to get to the raw data, manipulate it, and do what they will. As we today's information needs, we must also allow for flexible interpretation and serendipity of discovery.
Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch allow users to save "web clips" -- favorite web pages -- directly to the device's home screen -- so one tap of the finger on the icon takes you directly to that site. By default, the iPhone or iPod Touch use a nearly-impossible-to-read screen shot to represent the web clip; few web sites end up being visually identifiable on the home screen.
There's a great opportunity for branding here. Apple has made it very easy to create custom icons for your web site. There are 2 steps:
(Credit to The Primary Vivid Weblog for documenting the process in plain English.)
When you add a web clip to your iPhone or iPod Touch's home screen, it automatically (and unavoidably) adds a glow effect and rounded corners to the graphic you provide. To compensate for this, use this web clip Photoshop template (from iPhoneMinds) that shows just where the usable space in that 57 x 57 pixel square is and how it will look with the glow effect.
How easy is it? It took me (a truly novice Photoshop user) about 5 minutes to make an icon for RSS4Lib -- if you're using an iPhone or iPod Touch, save this page to your home screen to see it, or just view http://www.rss4lib.com/apple-touch-icon.png.
If your library has iPhone or iPod Touch users, why not extend your brand to their mobile desktop?
This page contains a reverse-chronological list of entries in the Non Sequiturs category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
RSS4Lib is written by Ken Varnum. Contact Ken.
