In addition to the video, there is a skills list and a collection of essays. (David and Michael kindly asked me to contribute one, so if you’d like to read mine, it’s here.)

This is a huge project, that no doubt took monumental levels of planning and organization to pull it all off in time for the unveiling presentation at Internet Librarian. It’s also a great example of how using tools that are available in the mainstream you can have a massive, collaborative project spanning the globe. If you are a fan, too, say it on Facebook!

Here are the slides if you’re interested:


As is typically the case, you can’t tell exactly what I said based on the slides, so if you were there (or not!) and have questions, please let me know!

Elizabeth Lane Lawley
RIT Lab for Social Computing
Her presentation is on SlideShare.

• What if computing stops meaning being behind a screen, but rather improves our experience
• iPhone as tangibly appealing. A companion. We carry it and pet it.
• Showed emotionally tangible technology
• Botanicalls twitters you when it needs watering.
• Arduino board connects physical world with the virtual.
• Showed Make and Craft magazine
• Lots of techy people are crafty. Showed a picture of people at a conference. People knitting still look at the speaker, laptop users look at the screen.
• Object Oriented Sociality: Ravelry (I LOVE THIS SITE)
• Knitting: objects important, and the metadata is really important, too. Can look up by yarn type, pattern type, etc.
• Etsy: selling hand made, quality goods.
• Moo Cards: tangible part of the cards, very nice to hold, sense of quality crafted goods
• Social hardware: small power strip, allows you to share a plug at a conference
• If you try to chase your users, you’ll never catch up with them. Create a place they want to be and they’ll come to you.

Picture the Impossible: A Technical, Tangible, Social Game

• Game: Picture the Impossible
• ARG, but really a city based adventure game
• Moved RIT Lab to the library because it made sense: interdisciplinary, center of campus, neutral space (though each person still has ties to their department)
• LL: loves games, loves tangible things like crafts, knows about social and hosting events
• Verbs associated with the game: Learn, Explore, Give, Socialize
• Made list of amazing people from the town, places in town, local festivals, the local things that made it really Rochester: put a lot of information out there before designing the information architecture.
• To draw in young professionals, have a big game at the end.
• Developed a narrative for the game: a secret society in town, starting to fragment, young professionals not joining, three factions are fighting over it. When join the game, you join a faction. If you play the game and find your way through it get an invitation to the party.
• Gain points (by revisiting sites), charity with the most visits get a weekly donation.
• Games are more successful if people make meaningful choices right when they join.
• Got lots of donations for small amounts. Fine for pilot, but not great for an ongoing project. Lots of donated time and money works once to prove a point, but not after that.
• Guerrilla marketing
• Showed videos associated with the game.
• Made a FaceBook page about it.
• Parts of the game only takes place in the newspaper.
• Local charities, local venues, local people, local events
• Five webgames, multiple newspaper puzzles.
• Have documentary quizzes, can try again and again, so people are watching the documentaries over and over again.
• Embedded learning, engaged/active learning, iterative, doesn’t feel like learning, feels like fun!
• One part of game: had a list of firsts, had people incorporate all three into one picture.
• Smart phone based scavenger hunt. Send answer to short code, get next clue.
• Recipe contest using five ingredients you can only get at the local public market. Public market ran out of ingredients by 10am.
• Challenges: huge investment, need early connections with local groups, selection of charities needs to be balanced and they need to be fully on board, different organizational cultures makes collaboration hard, selling sponsorship and advertising in something so new is really hard
• Showed forums and really positive results.
• 2000+ players. Committed to game.
• Over 300 scavenger players a week, huge participation in each part of the game.
• Many of the most active participants in the game are women. Many are mothers. 3 of the 4 most active developers of the game are women. When more women involved in game design, design a game they want to play and more women will play. (Even those who aren’t typical game players.)
• See learning, exploration, giving, and social behaviors already happening, and the game isn’t over yet.

• OPAC silo…
  • Hasn’t kept up with Web, users’ expectations
  • Limited customization
  • Antiquated, rigid search technologies
  • Designed for known-item searching
  • Libraries have set expectations, learned to compensate accordingly
• Ejournal and database silos
  • More every year in multiple packages
  • More alternatives, more confusion
  • Multiple A-Z lists to maintain, use
  • Interfaces change regularly
  • Query syntax varied, requires instructions???
  • “The version of ____ I teach is ______”
• Showed screenshot of full text options page, so many choices to click on…
• Cross-silo federated search
  • Allows some general, discipline searching
  • Mixed, incomplete results
  • As slow as the slower silos
  • If local, very network-inefficient
  • Many different metadata schemas, less sophisticated searching
• Changing Marketplace
  • Vendor acquisitions, consolidation, catch-up
  • Open source options are emerging
  • Some products are still years away
  • All of the above leads to great FUD
• Discovery as a way to gain sight or knowledge of
• Discovery layer
  • Searching for the 21st century
  • Built on 21st century technology
  • Highly configurable interfaces
  • Puts our metadata to better use
  • Works for OPAC and other silos but relies on federated search, through evolving
• Next Generation Catalog: what does it do?
  • Provide simple, easy access to the library’s local collections
  • Supplements “classic” OPAC
  • Refines searches with “facets”
  • etc
• Opensource: VuFind, Blacklight, eXtensible Catalog
• Commercial: AquaBrowser, WorldCat Local Primo, Encore, Endeca
• VuFind
  • Mellon award for Technology Collaboration in 2008
  • ILS-agnostic, runs alongside OPAC
  • Libraries of all sizes
  • Feature rich
• Today’s students aren’t afraid of iteration. They iterate again and again (like a game) until they get their answer.
• VuFind implementation at WMU
  • Themes from usability testing: fewer failed searches, user less likely to give up searching, users curious about things like tagging.
  • VuFind lets library define relevancy and set of indexes
  • Some users don’t get facets or how to use them
  • Recall -> huge adjustment from librarians
  • Takes only good records; prompted rethinking of approaching work from r
  • Includes a “spot an error” link in the catalog results to point out when shouldn’t get the result from that page (maybe a bit different from our general feedback link)
• One compelling starting place
  • Presearch in Amazon, Google, del.icio.us
  • Then they use the library catalog to find things
• Services we could provide to enhance this
  • incorporate everything they need to search in a simple interface
  • Local index of collections: MARC, OAI, etc
  • Customizable
  • Mashups
  • Tuned relevancy ranking
  • Facets
  • Citation management tools
  • Links to value-adds like ILL, recommenders
• Discovery can go further
  • Why only local collections?
  • What about article content?
  • What if users want to discover items outside their discipline-specific databases?
  • Can’t we do better than federated search?
• Web-Scale Discovery aka “Unified Discovery Service”
  • Unifies local and subscription content
  • Web-scale repository
  • Highly tuned relevancy
  • Pluggable API for “shopping mall” access; access it from a number of places on the web
  • Software as a service rather than a product
• Summons from Serials Solutions
• In use at WMU
  • Even bigger adjustment for library staff
  • Has reminded the library of record problems
  • Shows known OpenURL target problems
  • How to present it along with VuFind?
• Keep NGC for collection and summons for everything else.
• At WMU: when search VuFind with no results, offered Summons as an alternative.

• Library Users and their Expectations: fairly typical summary of millennial students and new breed of library users. They have high expectations.
• Had done research comparing strategic plans. Found basic outline and themes in library strategic plans.
• Presentation focused on these similarities and themes.

• Conducted a survey of 240 future leaders with a 72% response rate
• Their questions: Are future leaders satisfied with org style? How impact effectiveness?
• Maloney, Antelman, Arlitsch, Butler. “Future Leaders’ Views on Organizational Culture.” College and Research Libraries, May 2010.
  Preprint: http://bit.ly/futureleaders
• What they learned:
• Librarians prefer more flexible and externally focused culture.
• Looked at competing values framework
• Participants distributed points among questions representing this framework.
• Showed image of what people prefer and what they currently believe to be the case. Very different.
• Librarians feel thwarted by current organizational cultures.
• Some might leave, make less of a contribution than their potential might indicate.
• 31% say a lot, 50% say somewhat, 19% say not at all thwarted by organizational culture.
• Those who say not at all mostly in adhocracy environment, those who say a lot are in hierarchy cultures.
• Looked at concerns…(conducted 20 video interviews. used open ended questions)
• Over develop processes
• Don’t deal on a scale basis, focus on niches
• Don’t always value risk taking
• Lack of technical proficiency among librarians
• Continued to focus on low value functions
• Too much of a consensus culture
• What should we do more of?
  • “The web… will never decrease in importance, and we’ve never staffed ourselves for success here.”
  • “1)Leverage the massive amounts of data that we have available and build innovative services that reveal research collections to patrons 2) hire technologists”… to make them available
  • Academic libraries not providing best access. Very good at one-on-one face-to-face, but we’re losing other patrons.
  • Users tell us and demonstrate to use  they use tech, but we don’t staff for this.
• What should we do less of?
  • Our confounding systems and then instruction to unconfound them. Put half the instruction energy into design, and we wouldn’t have to instruct as much.
  • “Traditional reference services need to end.”
  • “AACR2-MARC-OCLC Cataloging”
  • Move staff from traditional to eresources. Make print the specialty and eresources the locus of most of our energy.
• We are a deeply conservative professions and have been slow to react to new technological service demands of users.
• We don’t employ technologies intelligently, and we fail to develop technically-proficient professionals.
• We don’t invest enough in areas of future growth, and we continue to invest in low-value functions.
• The organizational culture and management style that IT staff find productive is the same type of organization all librarians want to work in.
• Traditional hierarchies and management styles thwart younger librarians’ efforts to make an impact. They might leave the field (esp. IT and instructional technologists) though MLS might keep them tied to the field a little bit longer.
• Strong reaction (at some presentations) against these results. First step: to admit there might be a problem.
• Comment from the audience on how in many libraries, library IT push forward, library staff maintain, and campus IT is the most conservative (re: change). Discussion about is it security among IT? That library staff is more service focused?
• Someone pointed out this conversation has been happening for the past 30 years. Presenter pointed out that 30 years ago patrons still had to come to us. Today they don’t.
• Question about IT skills and libraries. Do we really need MLS degreed IT people? DO we really need to teach IT skills in library school? Small level stuff, it’s good to have one person who can take it from concept to prototype. Bigger projects need more IT skills.
• Lots of comments on lack of project management in libraries and library school.
• Question asking if people who feel thwarted don’t have consensus building skills. They asked everyone if they did things like: blog, present, write, get grants, serve on committees, etc. Most did about 6/8. Presenter says this suggests they’re good at consensus building, but still feel thwarted at work.
• Need a radical approach to continuing education. People don’t want to stand in the way of progress. What skills can people develop and how can we provide educational opportunities? Gap for mature professionals to get back in and not feel thwarted themselves by lack of available ways to update their skills.
• Some librarians waiting on a class from IT, but that’s not how you learn this type of information. You learn it by diving in and trying things out or buying a book if you need to.

• Ebooks increased more than 110% in four years (until 2009)
  Asked what percentage of ebook collections can be accessed using mobile devices? (Kindle 2.0, Sony Reader PRS-500, iRex Iliad 2nd edition, iPod Touch)
• Tested: could you access ebook using the device? Could you use additional method to access Yale licensed ebook (for example, bookmark, email, etc)? What was the format type? Rate of ability to access using the following scale?
• iTouch could access 84% of  Yale licensed ebook and do something useful with it. The other 3 could access 24 percent, but needed additional work arounds.
• Beginning of examination, must build local knowledge, expand research, improve services.

Little Budget, Big Sandbox
Sean Fitzpatrick, Editor with American Libraries

• Soft launch of American Libraries Magazine, looking for beta testers
• Not on ALA official site
• Spends $10 a month for the space, used free software, develop now & ask forgiveness later, googling for answers works, has a supportive boss
• IT nervous about support contracts, etc, but self supported the project with Drupal forums

Open & Mobile Equipment
Tim Rowley from Utah Valley University

• Library inherited old administrative building
• Moved into a new building to be called the Digital Learning Center
• Have a catalog of equipment they check out to students.
• 3 netbooks: students can check them out and take them to class to take notes. buy 8 or 9 of them for the price of a toughbook.
• Check out plastic bag with barcode. Barcode has list of all items in the bag (item, cables, instructions, etc).
• Demoed a tiny projector. I want one!
• Showed images from their library illustrating technology areas of the library.

Can Cloud-as-infrastructure solutions work for production library systems?
Erik Mitchell from Wake Forest University

• Needs:
  • Simple Hosting
  • Development platforms
  • Custom production environments
• Issues:
  • Persistence
  • Cost
  • Backups
  • Speed/access
  • Security
• Options:
  • Software services (SAAS)
  • Platform (Hosted server)
  • Infrastructure (AWS)
• Opportunities
  • Scalability
  • Customization
  • Distribution of IT
• Talk about using Amazon cloud space for library services
• Using Amazon for Bib App implementation

Research Description and Access
Deb Shapiro from the University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Began rewriting AACR in 2003
• First called AACR3 then RDA
• RDA organized around FRBR
• Goal: simplify rules, more principle based
• Encourage use of library standards outside of library world
• Catalog content rather than carrier
• Deconstruct catalog record
• Linked by identifiers to show relationships
• Different groups could maintain the disaggregated bits
• Aligning rules with FRBR makes them very complex
• Controversy: RDA does not go far enough
• RDA & linked data

Carmen Library Link
Jim Muir from Ohio State

• Librarian built pages associated with college, department, or courses
• The Editor aspect of the application is the powerful part
• Page is built of widgets that have many items
• Librarian can easily and effectively creates consistent looking pages without HTML knowledge
• Drag and drop widgets
• Hoping to release as Open Source for the whole community
• Librarians can build content for students quickly and easily

Of the Web, Not on It
Matt Goldner from OCLC

• Web is about scale, finding ways to attract larger audiences as tech more capable (Chris Anderson)
• Major theme of Web 2.0 is about who gives best access to a class of data (Tim O’Reilly)
• 3 Quick Examples
• Ebay (reviews of sellers is the added value, and can be done at a huge scale)
• Netflix (goal is getting movies to me, not controlling how long I keep them; huge scale and great recommendations)
• iGoogle (take all kinda of data and remake the page; lots of kinds of data simply)
• Web sites on the web, web scale of the web
• Successful web services leverage data and cooperation around the data. They are of the web because of this every user can add value for all users and to the platform as a whole.
• How to make libraries of the web?

Visualizing Data!
Will Kurt from University of Nevada

• Showed org chart
• Switched to a graphic using data from both help desks and committees people served on; all public services in same area
• Showed that some people didn’t connect on the map. Maybe those should have coffee sometimes, connect communication gaps.
• Showed another map of tools (databases, journals, titles) and how they connect (or don’t).
• Was able to illustrate contested area from Google Scholar and Web of Science
• Can use this to show what should be kept or can be cut when faced with budget decisions
• Does this for subject areas, too

A New Approach to the “Library Game”
Jason Battles from the University of Alabama

• Gaming in Libraries
• Libraries in Games
• Library Games (focus)
• Highlight resources and collections: special collections, ejournals, ereserves
• Incorporate online media and internet research tools
• Encourage critical thinking of participants
• Showed World of Warcraft, can’t compete with budget
• Incorporate game environment with where they are. Using ARGs.
• Their game is running now at projectvelius.com
• Will have an end of game event

Job Help in Public Libraries
Maureen Kearney & Jennifer Caldwell from Pima County Public

• Grant, hiring people to teach in community member’s own languages
• About six computer instructors in general, part time, shared between branches. This cross fertilized across branches.
• Laptop labs that are portable
• Teaching basic computer skills classes for job hunters

The talks were great, and Susan did a great job of running the show!

& 4 ways the Internet is  making us dumber (though overall it’s making us smarter)

• Information abundant, but also abundance of crap.
• Organizations premised on the good stuff having to redefine.
• Age of information: finding out information, narrowing down to good stuff.
• Today: abundant information (showed a profile page to demonstrate)
• Exited age of information.
• Information is about reduction, web is about abundance.
• Western culture: one knowledge, one world, same for everyone. If two disagree, at most one can be right. We assume knowledge is basically simple. We assume knowledge is relatively scarce, we assume knowledge is settled. Can cluster information. With clusters, people can become experts in parts of them.
• This translates well to a traditional library.
• Andy Clark: we do our thinking in our head, but use the physical world as scaffolding.
• We’re digitizing our physical world.
• It changes our world, and how we can think.

• From knowledge by authority to hyperlinks
• We find an expert, ask a question of an expert, believe their answer.
• Opposite of transparency; gives us stopping points.
• This system of authority makes a virtue of this classification and footnote system. We require a lot of work to track down the answer. It’s not a system of transparency.
• Kindle doesn’t fix this. They’re also a disconnected medium and you can’t follow the footnotes without a lot of motivation.
• Hyperlinks as a new form of punctuation. Instead of where to stop, an invitation on where to go.
• Links express any relationship the author wants, author just has to explain the links.

• What does this do to knowledge?
• Knowledge traditionally built on driving out differences, system of sameness.
• One knowledge, same for everyone, settled, rare, independent of voice, single order.
• Showed slide of lecture, smartest person in the room is the one in front. But the smartest is the room and the connections.
• Used to managing things with metadata. Metadata is reduction of the data. Reduce what’s in a book to what’s on a catalog content.
• Separate metadata from data, use metadata to find data. Doesn’t scale well because it insists on separation of metadata from data.
• Faceted classification, semantic web, social searching, folksonomies, crowd sourcing, social tagging, mechanical turk: new ways of finding information that work pretty well.
• Good enough is good enough. In an age of good enough for information. It’s the only way this stuff scales.
• Very little chance of getting the best answer out of the trillion pages, even if we agreed on what the best answer is.
• The skills necessary
• Digital divide and skills gap: minimal set of skills and access makes a big difference. Reducing gap: that’s what teachers, educators, librarians do. This gap will always be with us, but we can work on it.
• We stay within our comfort zones online. Some say internet = diversity, some say internet = staying within our comfort zone. Something might be wrong with the formulation. The premise is that really good conversation changes your minds. People rarely do that. Most conversations aren’t about changing minds. Enlightenment ideal that has very little to do with what we’re doing. Most conversations are about reiterating our own ideas. Finding and forming alliances are what conversations are about so that we can go out and do something. This is the system: that we find people we agree with and go out to do things.
• Human understanding works by assimilating the new into what we know.
• We’re pretty lazy.
• Talked about talk page (transparency) in Wikipedia. You can use it to find out why something is included. But most people don’t know about it or use it. But that’s how knowledge scales, you ignore things.
• More words in Britannica (for some topics), less in Wikipedia (for some topics), but a LOT of links, so you chose where you’ll read more.
• It’s a survival strategy that we can’t follow every link. So we don’t.
• Talked about if Jefferson and Hamilton blogged. Look out at the world, link to their opposing views. Following link would allow the reader to see the other worldview.
• You blog because you care about the world and want to say something about it.
• Web mirrors the fundamental architecture of morality.
• Compassion and curiosity are our bulwarks.
• We are better able to actualize this because our way of thinking and tools have changed.
• The main thing the web is teaching our children: The world and its people are far more interesting than we were told.

Q&A:

• Someone recommended a General Theory of Love. DW also recommended Wealth of Networks.
• In the west we assume individualism
• Libraries deal with tension of skill building and good enough. DW: Libraries do both, and push people beyond what they might have thought of on their own.
• If everything is digitized, how will it be organized? DW: Google, multiple organizational schemes, things we haven’t invented yet. All these different ways of organizing add to our understanding of the world.
• Someone asked if this is a liberal perspective. DW: Knowledge is unsettled. Wikipedia, etc. allow us to commodity it. Pointed out that the french version of a Wikipedia article might say something different than the English version. We don’t agree on everything. Maybe it does change your politics once you realize you aren’t the only one possessing the truth.
• Audience member pointed out that your idea of good enough might change over time. Freshmen might take the first one, graduate students might want to find five sources that agree. DW: Pointed out a universe of wrong answers on what started the Civil War, but many answers that are right or being discussed among scholars. A fifth grader would only need to give the three most known ones, but a college student would need to address the differences. But that wouldn’t be good enough for a published book.
• DW: we are what we are because we’re in communities of people who see things similarly, yet we also realize that there are differences. We embrace sameness and differences at the same time.

I wanted to write up a more cohesive post, but I was entirely wrapped up in the talk, and it was all I could do to get notes on the page.  It was fabulous.  I came to this conference because of the keynote speakers, and I certainly feel like this session was worth the trip! Great way to start the day!

The talk was about using small scale, localized repositories to meet specific community needs and to make the objects within them more findable. Good reception from the folks that came! Now that this part of the conference is over, expect more notes and updates!

• Shift from desktop to laptop is almost complete for college students
• 80.5% college students own a laptop (don’t always bring it to class, though)
• 66% college students oen an internet-capable cell phone
• 71% of teens owned a cell phone in 2008
• Discussion of cell phone plan pricing and apps stores changing how people use cell phones
• Kindle sales of a recent bestseller by Dan Brown topped print sales at Amazon for a short period of time (still notable)
• Twitter is being used by more people of all ages; highest update in age group 45-54
• Mainstream press is producing mobile-compatible versions of content
• What are libraries doing to meet mobile challenge? Content configured for devices? Services for mobile users? Promotion of content and services so people know they’re available?
• Moving from communication to information devices: using cell phones for a lot more (alarm clock, watch, music collection, email machine, etc)
• Talked a bit about iTunes U
• Nielsen reports a 52% increase in mobile subscribers watching a video on a mobile phone
• Kids “consider their mobile phone to be their best friend”
• Survey of US and UK kids: if you had to give up all but one device, which would you keep? Choose phone.
• Will do more and create content with devices (though skills vary widely among students)
• 67% students in high school maintain a website
• 27% of K-12 said they regularly create slideshows, videos, or webpages for schoolwork
• K-12 express frustration when they can’t use their own devices for course work
• Harvard Medical School in 2007: 52% owned PDA, mostly for reference info
• More jobs will be in these environments when they graduate, how are we preparing them for this?
• Reminded us about Studying Students and Informing Innovation.
• What do you think when you hear the words “mobile” and “library”
• Often hours, catalogs, etc via mobile phone or maybe SMS text message reference
• But there can be more:
• bringing together general library information
• patron records
• reference transactions
• information literacy podcasts and videos
• access to services–booking group rooms
• access to catalogs, indexes, abstracts
• Access to digital content configured for mobile devices (library owned or licensed, freely available on the web)
• Geo-spatially linked information
• Loan of devices
• New Technologies–what’s next? Social networking and QR Codes for mobile devices
• Need cohesive strategies for mobile library information/content/services
• Many libraries are prototyping services or trying things in specific departments
• Pointed out U.Va Library Mobile site
• Is your mobile information easy to find from library homepage?
• Scholarly resources are emerging: arXiv is available for the iPhone
• Libraries are using institutional content in creative ways: Digital images from Duke special collections and NCSU location aware campus tour uses images from special collections
• There are a number of mobile-accessible resources that can fit into your plan:
  • WorldCat
  • Google Books Search
  • Refworks Mobile
  • Blackboard
  • Audiobooks
    
  • IEEE Explore database
  • J. American Chemical Society
  • iTunes U
  • Podcasts from research and educational institutions
• QR Codes can link locations, books, etc to web pages with additional information, links to social networking, or phone numbers.
• Some libraries also serve as main campus resource for device information: comparison of mobile devices, workshops, help desk support
• Lockers with built in outlets so students could leave devices charging up
• Discussion of importance of marketing and placements of links. Cross marketing using YouTube, etc.
• Pilot services in the context of an overall plan
• Partners within the library: IT or Systems, Reference, departmental liaisons, special collections, access services, administrators (planning process, acquiring or reallocating resources, seat at institutional table)
• At Indiana U. business grad students are offered discounts on Blackberries
• At U. Missouri, journalism students are required to buy an iPhone or an iPod Touch
• Partnership: Academic/Library/IT at Quinnipiac University physical assistant graduate program. 3 key applications including the Merck Manual
• Is the overall institution developing a mobile plan?
• ECAR study on core campus activities that might make use of mobile tech, but left out libraries. However, many campuses do include libraries: MIT, U. San Diego, U Illinois UC, and others
• Now is the time: study local environment and users, pilot projects, participate in institutional planning, plan promotion, disseminate information about successes and problems, fully participate in mobile revolution
• Q&A
• Bandwidth necessary for mobile video users
• Different mobile platforms
• Adoption of twitter, podcasts, etc
• What different people are doing here at the Forum
• Carts with large monitor that people can push around to create collaboration spaces

Update: Thanks for the link correction, Andy!