I have had a few emails in recent weeks that began with something like “if you are still doing that LSW zine…” or “What ever happened to that LSW zine idea?”

The idea is alive and well. I still have every intention of having the first issue of the Library Society of the World zine ready for ALA Annual in July. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, try reading this earlier post, The LSW Zine: a Call for Rants, Manifestos, articles and artwork.)

Several people have already submitted finished contributions. For the rest of you, here’s a deadline: all submissions for the LSW zine are due on or before Monday, May 31.

In addition to the guidelines in that previous post there’s one other thing I’d like to mention. My wording in that post or people’s preconceptions about what a “zine article” would be may have made it sound like I’m just looking for snarky or satirical or “edgy” work. That’s really not true. I think most of us who work in libraries love libraries and library people, and if you have a story that is full of love and sunshine, I’d love to publish that story.

If you want to contribute, but aren’t sure what to write, I think what I’d most like to see right now are real-life tales of library work. What is it like to work in a prison library or to routinely handle manuscripts that are hundreds of years old or to have someone pull a gun on you at the circ desk? Think of something that is interesting about your work, and tell us a specific story about that.

Or don’t. Make a collage of 1970s punchcards found in the backs of old books. Interview people on the bus about their favorite librarians. Write the first scene of “LIBRARIAN!” the musical. I will exercise my discretion (such as it is) about what to publish or not publish, but I expect there will be room for just about everything.

Leave a comment on this post or email steve at stevelawson dot name if you want in. And get to work: you have a month.

Sean P Aune at SitePoint rounds up 30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media for those seeking audio, video, images, and text files that can be re-used free of charge under a CC license.

Of course it’s the Aarhus Public Libraries in Denmark. Pretty cool stuff. I especially like the line about making the library about what the youth need from libraries, rather than what libraries need from youth. [Thanks, Heather!]

Mindspot the Movie: The Library as Universe

Tags: aarhus, libraries, mindspot, youtube

Karlsruhe, Germany FIZ Karlsruhe and Max Planck Digital Library cordially invite you to register for the eSciDoc Days 2009 to be held on Monday, June 15, and Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany.

The eSciDoc Days 2009 are targeted at both existing eSciDoc users and people interested in digital libraries, repository systems, e-Research infrastructures,
and scholarly knowledge management.

Extensive information about eSciDoc, the open source e-Research environment will be featured. Keynote speakers will overview the current e-Research developments at an international level: Tobias Blanke, King’s College, London will present “Virtual Environments - How can infrastructure matter to research?” and David Groenewegen, Monash University, Australia will overview the national infrastructure “Australian National Data Service (ANDS).”

On day one the eSciDoc team and eSciDoc users  offer presentations and demonstrations of existing eSciDoc Solutions and the underlying eSciDoc
infrastructure.

The second day will feature three parallel tracks. The track “eSciDoc Scenarios”
will focus on real-world use cases and eSciDoc-related projects. There are two
tracks with hands-on tutorials for developers who are interested in creating their
own solutions based on the eSciDoc Infrastructure or intend to re-purpose the
existing eSciDoc Solutions.

The programme and registration form as well as information about venue and
accommodation is available at the website: http://www.escidoc.org.

DesignReviver gathers links to 13 Tutorials & Resources for a Perfect Twitter Background including:

• How to brand yourself with a Twitter background
• How to make a Twitter background picture
• Create a Twitter background using PowerPoint (I used this one to create my Twitter background, it was very easy to follow).
• Create a Twitter background with Photoshop

A couple of weeks ago at the Digital Dilemmas Symposium in New York I tried something new: using Twitter to replicate digitally the traditional “author’s query,” where a scholar asks readers of a journal for assistance with a research project. I believe the results of this experiment are instructive about the significant advantages—and some disadvantages—for academia of what has come to be known as crowdsourcing.

For those who didn’t follow this experiment live via Twitter, you should first read the two initial posts in this series. The experiment was fairly simple: I prepared followers of my blog and my Twitter feed (as of this writing I have roughly the same number of blog subscribers and Twitter followers, about 1,600 on each service) by noting that I would reveal a historical puzzle at a particular time. At the beginning of my talk in New York, my blog auto-posted the scan of an object found in a Victorian archaeological dig, which I simultaneously tweeted.

I asked those following me online to work together to figure out what the object was. Participants in the experiment could post live comments on Twitter, and others could follow along by searching for the #digdil09 hashtag. (A hashtag is a hopefully unique string of characters that enables a search of Twitter to reveal all comments at a specific conference or on a particular subject.) I encouraged everyone to talk to each other and leverage each other’s knowledge. In addition, I set up what in the age of the print journal would have been a ridiculous deadline: only one hour for the crowd to solve the mystery. For a bit of theater (”stunt lecturing”?) I flashed the Twitter stream behind me from time to time during my talk.

It took much less time than an hour for a solution: nine minutes, to be exact, for a preliminary answer and 29 minutes for a fairly rich description of the object to emerge from the collective responses of roughly a hundred participants. Solution: the object was an ornamental gorget from the Cahokia tribe.

What happened along the way was as interesting as the result (which I have to admit was rather satisfying given the possibility of a live crowd in NYC laughing at me for using Twitter). First, Twitter was remarkably effective in multiplying my voice. Indeed, in the first five minutes about a dozen others on Twitter retweeted (rebroadcast) my mystery to their followers. This “Twitter multiplier effect” meant that within minutes many thousands of people got word of my experiment; over 1,900 actually viewed the object on my blog. And I’m lucky enough to have a particularly knowledgeable crowd following me on Twitter, as you can see from the word cloud of my followers’ bios.

Once the race was on, solvers took two distinct paths toward a solution. The first path was the one I was trying to encourage: some quick thoughts about facets of the object, followed by scholarly debate. I mentioned that the object was made out of shell but was found far away from water in the Midwest (of the U.S.), which led to some interesting speculation about origins and movement of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. Others focused on the iconography of the spider; what could it symbolize and which cultures used it? These were decent lines of inquiry that one could imagine in the back pages of a Victorian journal.

Twitter is mocked for its almost comical terseness, but even the most hardened Twitter skeptic must admit tweets such as these are far from useless assistance. And the power of this crowdsourcing is even more evident as you look at the full discussion trail as researchers pick up information from each other to take their speculations a step further.

The experiment was not, however, an unalloyed success, partly due to a mistake I made in setting it up. In hindsight I gave away too much my original post, mentioning St. Clair and the fact that the piece was made out of shell. Alas, Googling keywords such as these (as well as the obvious “spider”) immediately gets one hot on the trail of the solution. It’s clear from the stream of tweets that a good portion of the solving audience took the “Google knows all” approach rather than the “scholarly discussion” approach.

I suppose even this aspect of the experiment is not uninteresting; I’ll leave it to others in the comments below to discuss the merits of the “Google” approach, as well as the merits (and demerits) of this experiment in general.

[Afterword: As many have pointed out on Twitter, the experiment would have been better had I not posted an object that could be found online. To be honest, I thought I had found an unusual object with no scanned version; it shows how much has been digitized, and how good search is even on a small amount of metadata.]

Yesterday I attended the regular UNFED group meeting, which was established some time ago to facilitate discussion amongst a University Network of Faculty Educational Developers. A range of topics were covered during the course of the session, but one conversation in particular has stuck with me as a recurring theme that I think needs to be fleshed out and explored a bit further.

The topic of “communication” arose, and with it an exploration of the different technologies that might support interaction, discussion, open reflection, and sharing of information. Some people offered their experiences on what they use to connect and engage with others - with the particularly plugged-in portion of the group (including myself) rattling off a fairly comprehensive list of tools.

At this point some people started to fidget, and my esteemed colleague Gus spoke to express a critical: “Oi! Don’t you ever get any work done!”

To me Gus represents an important perspective in the equation that shouldn’t be discounted. Time is at a premium for many people these days - both staff and students alike - and many people just don’t have opportunity or inclination to sit in front of a computer or hand-held device all day long, digesting and synthesizing every piece of information or discussion that comes down the pipe.

Learning as process or outcome

More than that though, it made me realise that there are (at least) two schools of thought regarding how information is dealt with, and what purpose it serves in the wider scheme of things.

For some, the significance is in the journey, or the process through which an outcome is achieved; and the learning occurs during the discussion, the reflection, questioning, and reading.  Essentially, learning occurs by engaging in the ongoing evolution of the idea. Each outcome then represents just one stage in an ongoing process of leaping from one node to another in a stream of endless connections.

For others, outcome is key, and information becomes valuable through its capacity to achieve a desired objective - and essentially to enable you to do something. Just give them the information and be done with it. They don’t want an in-depth explanation of how you reached your conclusion, the supporting arguments or logic that lead to its realisation - they just want the result.

Both of these are sensible positions to take I think, but it’s critical to recognise the differences in how they approach interaction and the seeking of information.

Implications

When looking at the implications of classroom or workplace use of social media (blogs, wikis, Twitter, etcetera), this is especially important to consider. In all likelihood we’re going to see a wide range of diverse preferences and opinions on how students and teachers would like to engage in the processes of learning and sharing. Equally likely, these views may not align with one another.

So how do you accommodate and empower both perspectives? This is an evolving conversation in which I currently have more questions than opinions or answers. So I’m quite interested in hearing the thoughts or experiences of others.

Complicating this discussion is the notion that new, social media is individually empowering. Conversations can occur anywhere, at any time, and pursuant to the conditions and locations desired and established by the participants. Blogs can be set up, forums created, Twitter or Facebook conversations occurring, YouTube videos posted, and Flickr images shared - all unbeknownst to the rest of the class or community of colleagues and indeed even in spite of policy to the contrary.

The issue then, can be summarised by two questions - a) how to become aware of the existence of these conversations, and then having done so b) how to organise and structure the information in a way that’s easily navigated, synthesised, useable - and indeed reusable.

Aggregation and Syndication

While they won’t immediately resolve the differences in viewpoint in the “learning/information as a process vs. outcome” discussion, aggregation and syndication have become critical, invaluable ways to deal with the flow of online information - and can therefore go a long way towards accommodating the needs of both perspectives.

Terms Defined

• Aggregation - the process of collecting or bringing together disparate, unrelated content sources into a single location, either for the purposes of consumption or syndication; most commonly incorporates the use of RSS feeds.
• Syndication - the process of taking content from one source and reusing it in another location; may (but does not necessarily) involve editing or remixing the structure of the information to suit a different purpose.

How it works

Both of these activities are most commonly fueled by the use of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. As invisible and perhaps misunderstood as RSS is, it’s an absolutely critical component in how information is acquired, consumed and distributed in the web today.

In the past, each page in a website had to be coded and maintained by hand. This meant that the content was static, and not easily reused. To view the information, or check for updates, you had to visit the page itself in order to see whether there was anything new there. This made the process of sharing and acquiring information very time consuming.

RSS has made such a difference because it makes information easily shared and reused in different locations and under different conditions and contexts. Significantly, RSS is becoming a standard component of webpages. Frequently, as is the case with blogs, it’s not something that has to be “set up” - RSS tends to already exist by default.

Commonly use of RSS this takes the form of subscriptions, in which readers/users of a blog or website “subscribe” to the site’s feed (in other words, they elect to receive its content) and receive updates automatically via their RSS reader - also known as an aggregator. This enables people to collect the feeds from many different, unrelated locations and have the updates appear in a single space. As a result, dozens of feeds (or more) can be quickly browsed from a single location.

Importantly, RSS feeds frequently exist for many different types of information - including videos, podcasts, blog posts, wiki updates, search results, and Twitter posts.

This enables people to set up customised spaces which feature all the content sources they want, formatted in the way they want. This serves to save a tremendous amount of time and yet does not involve degradation of the original content in any way, since the information is not being replicated, it’s being aggregated and syndicated.

Syndication

Syndication comes into play when you want to reuse a content source elsewhere. This post for example has been automatically submitted to two different blogs. The post was originally posted to the TechTicker, which is my main blog. However the information is equally relevant to the UNSW TELT blog, and I have included the post in a feed that is automatically syndicated there.

When using blogs in the classroom, the implications of syndication are significant. Through syndication a course instructor would be able to establish a single course blog or portal that was “fed” by the feeds of a collection of student blogs elsewhere. This would enable the students to maintain their own space - and therefore begin to amass a portfolio of their work - while reducing the number of disparate locations that had to be browsed to view the collection of student contributions.

Likewise the RSS feed of the search results for a certain term or phrase can be syndicated as well. For example I have subscribed to the search results of the term “UNSW” on Twitter in my feed reader. Anytime ANYONE mentions the term UNSW in a tweet (a tweet is a post to Twitter), their contribution shows up in my feed reader.

This sort of filtering would be literally impossible for me to do by hand and yet happens automatically through the combination of search indexing, RSS, and a feed reader.  As a result I’m automatically informed when relevant content becomes available - I don’t have to go searching for it.

Taking this one step further we could then syndicate these search results on a blog or portal along side the aggregated blog contributions of a cohort of students, and perhaps even a similar search result in YouTube and Flickr - thus creating a customised filter to act as a single port-of-call for the course’s disparate activities.

Renegotiating the concept of literacy

One might be tempted to ask what the relevance of this type of technical knowledge is to the wider community.  I would argue - as have others before me - that fundamentally this is an issue of information literacy, not just digital literacy or network literacy.  The concept of information acquisition and construction of knowledge is core to the way we develop as individuals and as a society - and how we interact with one another.  Increasingly this interaction is taking place in virtual spaces.  It stands to reason then that what is considered a core literacy should be re-negotiated and reassessed to reflect common practice - and importantly examine ways to interact with this information in effective and efficient ways.  If we fail to acknowledge these sorts of changes, we risk missing out on valuable conversations or their resulting outcomes.

Remember all that Domino’s Pizza craziness of a week or so ago? This video, originally from the Today Show, explains what happens after the fact when employees do stupid things online - in this case, the employees were apparently fired (among other things - watch the video to find out more).

Thankfully, that type of sheer stupidity towards customers would NEVER happen in a library, right? After all… we’re trained professionals. We paid for two years of grad school to be able to work with people! And we hire para-professional staff who ALSO love to work with the public. Right?

Well. Check these tweets out:

or:

… and one more:

Now, of course I realize these tweets weren’t meant for the actual patron to see - the librarians in all three screenshots most likely really DO have great customer service skills, and were simply frustrated … so they decided to vent via Twitter (in Twitter’s  public feed. Oops).

But still.

I think there’s a HUGE GRAY area right now in the online world. Many of us are using these tools for work AND for non-work stuff. And it’s confusing! Some people set up two Facebook accounts/IM accounts/Twitter feeds. Some (like me) blend them all together. My Twitter feed flows into my Facebook feed, sometimes with some unintended consequences (well ok - usually I just get something like “David, I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about” from an old high school chum).

But still.

What happens when said “dumba**” in the screenshot above decides to use Twitter, wants to connect with people … so he/she does that “find everyone within 20 miles of this zipcode” search, and discovers the librarian virtually hollering at him/her?

In some cases, these lovely little quotes can be found pretty easily … and can also be traced back to the owner of the words (and the library that person works for).

Then what? Does the library director have to issue a statement (like the CEO of Domino’s did)? What happens to the librarians above when their library director discovers Twitter?

What do you think? Do you vent about your patrons online? Do you keep separate personal/work accounts in the social networks you frequent?

Share:

In a fortuitous bit of timing for us here at the Library, Google released its Analytics API last week. We had already been discussing ways of exposing site usage statistics to NYPL staff, and the API makes that job a lot easier. This means that we can set about accessing our 18 months or so of Analytics data with some programming, and thereby turn that raw data into web sites and other visualizations. As soon as the API was announced, I hacked together a Ruby on Rails application to start digging in to the ungodly amount of cool data now exposed (side note: I’ll soon be posting a technical how-to for any Ruby-ists interested in exploring their Analytics). Within a couple of hours, we were pulling live stats data into a locally-formatted web application.

First came a tag cloud of search terms sized in proportion to their popularity. Next came a thumbnail gallery of Digital Gallery images ranked by popularity, and lastly a keyword explorer where we could enter a keyword (say, “dvd”, “military”, “japan”, “staten island” or “art deco”) and retrieve a thorough analysis of that keyword: where searchers for that keyword are located, what other terms they searched for, and what pages they visited the most after searching. (Click the thumbnails above for example results)

This is revolutionary for us. We’ve already been exploring lists of the most popular search terms, but to see them proportionally scaled in a tag cloud really drives home the relative popularity of different terms. And the keyword explorer is just amazing. We’ve long known that the Digital Gallery is extremely popular among military history buffs (to pick a random subject), but to see the follow-up searches for “military” on the DG really paints a picture of the breadth of topics and level of detail of these enthusiasts.

There is no doubt that we’ll be using the aggregate search data internally. For example, looking at searches containing “dvd” reveals a huge list of movies and DVDs being sought by our users whether we have them in stock or not, which can then be used by our Acquisitions department to meet demand. And searches relevant to divisions (e.g., “maps” or “manuscripts”) or locations (”staten island”) can help staff in those areas gain valuable insight into the needs and wants of their users.

But almost immediately, we also started thinking about ways of using some of this data to bring context to the Library experience of the end users. Could we display popular searches by location on screens in the branch libraries? Could we make maps of the country showing the most popular searches by city? Should we let end users explore other relevant searches by keyword? The API solves a big chunk of the technical hurdles, which leaves only the question, “Are we sure this is a good idea?”

We checked with our counsel’s office about whether our privacy policy precludes us from publishing this data or its derivatives, and to my surprise, they didn’t have any problem with it from a legal point of view. Still, it makes me nervous to start producing any public products using user search data in any form until we’ve had a thorough discussion of what current best practices are.

Just to be clear, this data from Analytics is always aggregate data. There’s no way to say that a particular search came from a particular person or computer. But it can potentially get pretty specific: terms that were searched a single time, for example, or the city from which a specific term was searched.

So I’d like to throw open the question to the library community and the public: what is the balance of rich context versus privacy? Should we make none of this data public, or all of it (that is, allow users to see the context of every search term)? Should we only make contextual search information public when it reaches a certain threshold of use (the “safety in numbers” argument)? If so, what is that threshold? Is it a case-by-case basis? Is it possible to generalize any guidelines? Have other institutions explored a similar policy?

We’re very interested in hearing from you in the comments.