October 2007 Archives

The NYTimes reports today on Google's new platform, called OpenSocial. I believe that this is the effort scheduled to debut on November 5 (which I previously blogged about).

Essentially, what OpenSocial will do is allow the authoring of individual applications that will work on a variety of different social platforms. Currently, developers have to write an application for each platform they're interested in using (i.e., Facebook, iGoogle etc...) OpenSocial sounds like a terrific thing, but, of course, it excludes Facebook. (How very strategic of Google.)

Can Google out-app Facebook? We'll see. In the meantime, more information on OpenSocial is available on Google Operating System and at the Google OpenSocial Facebook group.

The LibrarianinBlack and Aaron Schmidt gave an interesting presentation on online outreach at Internet Librarian. Many of the ideas in there seem to have more utility for public libraries (i.e. the suggestion to market your library on local community web sites), but I think there is lots in there for academic libraries to consider.

Marketing digital content online, via Wikipedia, YouTube, etc... is one of the best things an academic library can do. I am still taken with the University of Washington paper, Using Wikipedia to Market Digital Collections. Every academic library should be strategically and systematically linking their content from freely available, highly accessible sources.

A while back, I made some edits/ additions to the Libraries Wikipedia entry (my pal Amy in Altoona also worked on it, and brought it to my and others' attention in the first place.) Compared to other library Wikipedia entries, it's not bad yet isn't as good as others.) In addition to expanding this page, linking digital content to other relevant pages (such as linking this Fred Waring video to the Waring Wikipedia entry) would be a great marketing strategy.

One final Wikipedia marketing idea---take a look at the TAMU Libraries Wikipedia entry. They've made an effort in the primary article about their library to market their electronic resources and digital repository heavily.

I downloaded the new Radiohead album yesterday. This is not noteworthy in itself, but perhaps you have heard about how Radiohead is letting fans download it off an independent website and decide the price for themselves. (fwiw, I paid $10, and this was before Andrew informed me that the audio was substandard. Still sounded good to me.)

Downloading the album on an arcane, user-unfriendly, stark web site made me think about the experience of buying music--what it used to be, and what it has become. Do you remember when music could only be purchased at record stores? When I was growing up, the sole outlet in our burg for music was the Musicland store at Kennedy Mall.

I spent many hours in that store (a lot of it pining for things they didn't have) and there were some albums that I bought simply because they were available and marketed nicely in the store (like the original 3-disc soundtrack to Thank God It's Friday--what was I thinking, and how did I have enough money to buy that as a 9 year old?!?)

Ahem. Anyway, even today, iTunes has an online ambiance of its own. Entering the iTunes store is not unlike visiting the Musicland of my youth (except it has more music and no shag carpeting or earth-toned walls.) It was a little disconcerting to buy the Radiohead album in a veritable vacuum, throw it into my iTunes, and upload the album onto my iPod, all by my lonesome self. Perhaps I am so used to having my marketing with my music that completely disconnecting that part of it takes some getting used to? Maybe so.

When it comes to the consumer experience, there are parallels between buying music and finding information. Back when you only had your local library as a resource, it was use what they had (and what your librarians could find for you) and forget about the rest of it. (Not unlike me pining for Rapper's Delight back in 1979 but knowing there was no way a Musicland in Iowa would regularly carry it.) From the mid-90's until just a few years ago, it was use the library web site as a central portal, and hope it connects you to what you need. Now, content is distributed everywhere. Access points are everywhere. And everything is miscellaneous.

With use of the traditional library web site dwindling, it seems we might yet again be like the Musicland store owner back in the mid-90s. User behaviors change as access points increase. But do we lose something when content becomes so disconnected that there is no atmosphere or environment to connect the users? Do we depend on social connectors like Facebook to wholly supply that environment now?

Thanks for letting me share these questions. And now back to what I am really supposed to be working on.

OCLC released a new study, "Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World." It is a must read on many levels. Lots of information in there on how students use social networking resources (what they expect from libraries in this area) a fascinating conclusion on the future of libraries, and much more.

I'm highlighting one area of the report: findings on use of the library web site. This is a topic I've been interested in and tracked via other reports in the past.

According to the new study, 38% of students used the library web site at least annually.(P. A-2)

This is drop of more than 50% in just the last two years, from 86% of college students reporting annual use in 2005. (P. 2-10)

Could we really have experienced that precipitous of a drop in use in just two years? I do believe there was a decrease in use, but I'm going to hope there was some sort of difference in the respondent pools for these two studies that would explain that huge discrepancy. Of course, only 56% of the 2007 college student respondents report using a social networking site, and we know those numbers are much higher at Penn State. So perhaps these numbers do not have as much relevance at a large institution like ours.

However, the report notes that this trend is not only occurring in college students. Among the general public, the percentage of Internet users that have used a library Web site has decreased signficantly.

Library Web site use declined from 30% of respondents in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. in 2005 to 20% of the general public in these same countries in 2007, a 33% decrease.(Conclusion; P. 8-2)

Turns out Michael Wesch released two videos last week--A Vision of Students Today, and another video (similar to the Machine is Us/ing Us) looking at changes in the ways we create, access and categorize information. (see below for the embedded video)

This video reminded me of how I used to teach web searching (back in 2003, to be exact). I emphasized using directories, and within directories, categories, to strategically find the best information on the web. Remember Yahoo!'s Directory? (Heck, remember when Yahoo! was basically nothing but a directory?) Did you know that Google has a Directory? Remember when LII was a go-to source for many topics?

In this video, Wesch looks back at that time period, stating of Yahoo!:

Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back.

That they did. And we librarians dutifully taught it.

Wesch adds:

Since then, the Web has been challenging our most basic assumptions. We learned that we might not need complex hierarchies to find information.

I'm sure this will become fully realized someday. I still utilize subject hierarchies, such as when I'm teaching students how to search in ProQuest. It works in that environment--ProQuest is a select pool of resources that tends to be pretty narrowly categorized, and the categories can sometimes help users ferret out the best information on more arcane topics.

But will there come a day when we no longer need subject headings? When, as Weinberger says, "Everything is miscellaneous"? I think it's closer than we think. Certainly closer than I could have visualized just four short years ago.

I have Lifehacker in my Reader list, but I rarely read it. Sometimes it has very interesting, useful posts, and sometimes it has posts on how to make clear vs. cloudy ice and clean your stove with ammonia. Whaa?

One of tonight's posts (along with the ice and ammonia) was on the benefits something I've been teaching a lot lately: WorldCat.org. Lifehacker refers to it as "a ginormous network of libraries, library content, and library services." OK, then.

I use WorldCat so heavily that it is easy to forget that it has only been live since August 6. 2006. I use it so heavily that I have nearly forgotten the older, clunky FirstSearch interface.

Lately, I am often teaching WorldCat over the CAT. I know that I should be emphasizing the local. I know that perhaps not all of the CAT's holdings are in WorldCat. I know. But I can't stay away from it--especially when there are grad students in the room. :)

I think this instructional change, favoring WorldCat over the CAT, is happening for a reason. When it comes to library research, a shallow pool as starting point no longer make sense. And when I say shallow pool, I mean something like the CAT, or even a subject-specialized database. Why would I start my search in something that only contains a little sliver of the resources available on a topic, when I could jump in deep (using WorldCat or Google Scholar) and more expansively see the ocean of available resources? (ok, maybe I'm taking the water metaphor too far).

And of course, perhaps WorldCat or Google Scholar will lead me back around to the more focused, more specific resources in the end. That almost always happens. But there is a definite advantage in using one of these more broadly-focused resources as a starting point.

When you think about where libraries will be in five years, do you think about things like UWashington's WorldCat Local? Do you find it conceivable that we'll be working almost solely from shared databases that consolidate content from different databases and libraries around the world? I sure do.

Until then, stop by one of my classes, and share in the WorldCat love.

I have been sick for the last week, and when you're sick, blogging slides by the wayside (everything else, unfortunately, does not.)

Anyway, I saw a video today that inspired me to brush aside my malaise and pick up blogging again!

Michael Wesch's new piece (you may remember his amazing Web 2.0 video, The Machine is Us/ing Us from last year) is inspiring...and depressing...and ultimately enlightening. I like how Wesch always ties together the use of the very oldest technologies with the newest ones (his reference at the end to the blackboard as a classroom innovation).

Anyway, the video, Enjoy:

Hey, I taught my first class on Zotero tonight! It was a learning experience.

Tip #1: When you are teaching a class that involves downloading a Firefox plugin, have the class begin their work in Firefox. Why is it always the simplest things that elude me?

Tip #2: Do not expect Zotero to behave the same way across databases. Not an easy thing to manage and troubleshoot when nearly everyone in the class is in a different database, but I tried my best. So far, I think Zotero works best in ProQuest. It's not bad in Ebsco too. Taylor & Francis' Informaworld? Not so much. In some databases, you can download the entire results list at once (always a showstopper), in other databases, you can only download to Zotero from the article view. Oh well.

Tip #3: Do not underestimate graduate students' enthusiasm for bibliographic management software. They will enthusiastically try anything that you show them, particularly if it is free.

Tip #4: If you email the Zotero developers with questions or perhaps the URL to your link resolver, they will send you a free Zotero t-shirt! Hooray!

I got into the Beta test for FriendFeed. It is a great idea at first glance---a site that serves up a feed of all your activity on different services, like YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, personal blogs, Netflix, etc...

You can see my resulting feed here. (Be warned, it probably won't be up for long.)

This is too public for me. If I favorite a video in YouTube, do I intend to then broadcast that preference to the world? (I know this is still visible on the Web, but it's not going to show up on the first page of Google search results for you, like a Twitter feed does.) Makes you think about every single thing you do online, and how transparent it all really is. Seeing it all drawn together in one place really emphasizes it. And to me (at least as far as personal, non-work-related stuff goes), that's a negative.

I didn't go into FriendFeed feeling this way. I thought, "Wow! How cool! All of my online activity in one place!" And it seemed terrific as I looked through the first eight listings on my feed---all posts from this blog. Just peachy. And then the ninth entry was from Flickr---photos of my daughter's back when she was having allergy patch testing done. Not good. Must delete.

In some ways, the best part of FriendFeed is the warning it provides for the online naive---no matter how scattered and seemingly buried your online activity is, it can easily be brought together in ways you never intended for the world to see.