Fair use is one of the most important provisions of copyright law for libraries, and it is one of the most difficult to apply in practice. To determine whether a use is fair, a library must consider four factors, which is a complex and uncertain task. It's so uncertain that the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use website says: "Unfortunately, the only way to get a definitive answer on whether a particular use is a fair use is to have it resolved in federal court." No library wants to resolve its fair use questions that way, but every library must make fair use judgments whether there is certainty or not. Consequently, any expert guidance about how to apply fair use, such as this document provides, is very welcome. The editors of this new code have identified eight principles that describe general circumstances that library focus groups felt were likely to be fair. Each principle also includes limitations that describe the outer bounds of the consensus and enhancements that particularly risk-adverse institutions may wish to apply to strengthen their fair use argument. Topics covered include: electronic reserves; publicity and outreach; preservation; digitizing special collections; providing access to disabled students; maintaining institutional repositories; facilitating “non-consumptive” uses of library collections; and creating curated collections of web resources. Though written in part by lawyers, the report does not read like a legal brief. Nor will you find any "bright line" rules that say it is ok to copy 10% or keep material online for ten weeks at a time. Instead, the document can serve as a basis for discussion with administrators and legal advisors as to the level of risk each institution is willing to accept. Knowing what other librarians feel is acceptable behavior can inform that discussion. The associated FAQs and briefing papers on the project's web site are especially valuable.

Whether, when, and how libraries can lend e-books to their patrons has become a source of tension between libraries and publishers. As many commentators in both the trade and popular press have noted, publishers are understandably reluctant to enable a distribution channel that may compete with their ability to market e-books to customers. Brantley argues that if libraries want to be able to loan e-books, the service models they will need to adopt in order to convince publishers to participate will need to be radically different. Libraries, he suggests, could become marketing arms for publishers or could pay royalties on every individual loan of an item (in effect renting books on behalf of their patrons). E-book licenses would be best managed by a me! ga-cooperative on behalf of all libraries. Even legislative change may be needed if libraries wish to be a source for e-books from major publishers. While I doubt if all of Brantley's suggested innovations in library service will be implemented, his article does suggest that given the control publishers have over e-books, e-book lending libraries of the future are likely to be radically different from today's institutions built around library-owned collections.

In this SPEC Kit, the authors surveyed ARL libraries about digital humanities scholarship centers or services. About half of the libraries responded (51%). Only 8% had a digital humanities center, but 24% had a more general digital scholarship center that included support for the humanities. Forty-eight percent of respondents provided ad hoc digital humanities services. Thirty-five percent of respondents had dedicated staff for digital humanities support. Digital humanities support is still in an early stage of development, and the authors note challenges such as a "general lack of policies, protocols, and procedures has resulted in a slow and, at times, frustrating experience for both library staff and scholars" and support efforts suffering from "perennial library issues of underfunding and understaffing." The table of contents and executive summary of the SPEC Kit are freely available at: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec-326-web.pdf.

Hamaker looks at the current state of e-books and finds, from a library perspective, that it is sadly lacking. In a myriad of ways, from their malleability and lack of confidentiality to their higher cost, restrictions on lending and sharing, and artificial limitations on functionality, e-books suffer in comparison to owned (rather than licensed) content. Hamaker's description of the deficiencies of e- books and the way they are currently licensed makes one wonder why libraries have even bothered with them. He suggests that librarians and consumers need to unite and demand a different publishing/licensing model for e-books if they are to avoid contributing to the destruction of our cultural heritage. The alternative, he seems to imply, is "just say no" to the e-book licensing options currently available.

With the collapse of the Google Books Settlement, the issue of how best to foster access to and use of orphan works is back on the table for discussion. Earlier this month in its decision in Golan v. Holder, the Supreme Court acknowledged the "host of policy and logistical questions" associated with orphan works and concluded that it is a problem best solved by legislative action. Hansen's timely analysis explores how our understanding of orphan works has evolved since the original release of the seminal Copyright Office report and tries to provide a new assessment of the size of the problem. Hansen suggests that the original narrow concern with unlocatable copyright owners has morphed into a general problem of out-of-print books. While definitionally the two issues may be distinct, in practice both are united by a shared concern with how much effort (and expense) should be spent to secure permission to use works not currently available commercially. When we have a common definition of the problem, we may be able to determine its size. And when we know its size, we may be able to identify the most cost-effective solution. There is a lot of work that still needs to be done; Hansen's study is a useful introduction and jumping off-point for future research.

This is a pre-print of a piece slated to be published next year (January 2013), but the topic is certainly quite relevant now and waiting a year to heed Lewis' advice will do no one any favors. Kudos to C&RL for not making us do so. Lewis asserts that the advent of computer networking has fundamentally altered the value proposition of libraries and that our classic way of building collections must respond to this in various ways. After noting particular developments in recent years that "drive change and provide the building blocks upon which new library practices will be constructed," he provides specific advice that includes: 1) Deconstruct legacy print collections, 2) Move from item-by-item book selection to purchase-on-demand and subscriptions, 3) Manage the transition to open access journals, 4) Curate the unique, and 5) Develop new mechanisms to fund national infrastructure. Highly recommended.

This article presents four case studies on providing mobile access to digital collections. The authors conducted interviews with representatives from Duke University Libraries, Montana State University Libraries, North Carolina State University Libraries, and the Smithsonian Institution. Mitchell and Suchy allowed the interviewees' voices to come through loud and clear, providing some context and commentary on overall themes, but primarily presenting quotes from each respondent. (The exception here is the representative from the Smithsonian - fewer of her responses are included, but the authors link to the Smithsonian's Mobile Web Strategy wiki.) Overall, the takeaways are that flexibility, speed and nimbleness are just as important as taking the time to consider exactly what kind of mobile interface should be created, who will be using it, and what they will be using it for.

From a press release about this year’s free, online Library 2.012 Conference:

As information professionals from all around the world digest the wealth of information shared during the inaugural Library 2.011 Worldwide Virtual Conference, a second round of inspiration is underway with the announcement of the Library 2.012 Worldwide Virtual Conference! 

Save the dates of October 3-5, 2012, for an inspiring global conversation about the future of libraries. The fully online Library 2.012 Conference will be held in multiple time zones, available in multiple languages, and feature multiple tracks. The conference is sure to be brimming with knowledge as information professionals worldwide meet online for this free forum. Sign up for conference news and updates at Library2012.com.

In the meantime, if you missed one of the 160 presentations given at the Library 2.011 Conference, don’t worry. We understand that you had to sleep at some point during the 24-hour, two-day conference! All the presentations were recorded and can be accessed on the Library 2.0 website.

The San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science is a founding partner of Library 2.011 and Library 2.012 conferences. The nationally-ranked school offers two fully online master’s degrees, a fully online certificate program, and a doctoral program: Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS), Master of Archives and Records Administration (MARA), Post-Master’s Certificate in Library and Information Science, and the San José Gateway PhD Program. Learn more at: http://slisweb.sjsu.edu

 

AOL reported better than expected fourth quarter earnings this morning. The company, which owns TechCrunch, reported revenue of $576.8 million, which is down 3 percent from Q4 2010 revenue of $596 million. Earnings came in at $0.23 per share, or $22.8 million, which is down 66 percent from $66.2 million a year ago. Analysts expected $0.16 per share. AOL says total revenue decline was its lowest rate of revenue decline in 5 years. While global advertising revenue was 10%, subscription revenue declined by 18%. AOl also saw a 15% growth in global display revenue and a 20% growth in third party network revenue.

Doug Cutting (@cutting) is a founder of the Apache Hadoop project and an architect at Hadoop provider Cloudera. When Cutting expresses surprise at Hadoop's growth — as he does below — that carries a lot of weight.

In the following interview, Cutting explains why he's surprised at Hadoop's ascendance, and he looks at the factors that helped Hadoop catch on. He'll expand on some of these points during his Hadoop session at the upcoming Strata Conference.

Why do you think Hadoop has caught on?

Doug Cutting: Hadoop is a technology whose time had come. As computer use has spread, institutions are generating vastly more data. While commodity hardware offers affordable raw storage and compute horsepower, before Hadoop, there was no commodity software to harness it. Without tools, useful data was simply discarded.

Open source is a methodology for commoditizing software. Google published its technological solutions, and the Hadoop community at Apache brought these to the rest of the world. Commodity hardware combined with the latent demand for data analysis formed the fuel that Hadoop ignited.

Are you surprised at its growth?

Doug Cutting: Yes. I didn't expect Hadoop to become such a central component of data processing. I recognized that Google's techniques would be useful to other search engines and that open source was the best way to spread these techniques. But I did not realize how many other folks had big data problems nor how many of these Hadoop applied to.

What role do you see Hadoop playing in the near-term future of data science and big data?

Doug Cutting: Hadoop is a central technology of big data and data science. HDFS is where folks store most of their data, and MapReduce is how they execute most of their analysis. There are some storage alternatives — for example, Cassandra and CouchDB, and useful computing alternatives, like S4, Giraph, etc. — but I don't see any of these replacing HDFS or MapReduce soon as the primary tools for big data.

Long term, we'll see. The ecosystem at Apache is a loosely-coupled set of separate projects. New components are regularly added to augment or replace incumbents. Such an ecosystem can survive the obsolescence of even its most central components.

In your Strata session description, you note that "Apache Hadoop forms the kernel of an operating system for big data." What else is in that operating system? How is that OS being put to use?

Doug Cutting: Operating systems permit folks to share resources, managing permissions and allocations. The two primary resources are storage and computation. Hadoop provides scalable storage through HDFS and scalable computation through MapReduce. It supports authorization, authentication, permissions, quotas and other operating system features. So, narrowly speaking, Hadoop alone is an operating system.

But no one uses Hadoop alone. Rather, folks also use HBase, Hive, Pig, Flume, Sqoop and many other ecosystem components. So, just as folks refer to more than the Linux kernel when they say "Linux," folks often refer to the entire Hadoop ecosystem when they say "Hadoop." Apache BigTop combines many of these ecosystem projects together into a distribution, much like RHL and Ubuntu do for Linux.

• Big data market survey: Hadoop solutions
• Hadoop: What it is, how it works, and what it can do
• Get started with Hadoop: From evaluation to your first production cluster

Pros and Cons of Social Media in the Classroom

by Karen Lederer

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2012/01/19/pros-and-cons-of-social-media-in-the-classroom.aspx

PROS

Educational Tool

Enhance Student Engagement

Improve Communication Among Students and Teachers

Preparing Students for Successful Employment

CONS

Social Media can be a Distraction

Cyberbullying

Discouraging Face-to-Face Communication

 

Stephen

 

1. Cycles of Invention and Commoditisation (Simon Wardley) -- Explosions of industrial creativity rarely follow the invention or discovery of a technology but instead its commoditisation i.e. it wasn't the discovery of electricity but Edison's introduction of utility services for electricity that produced the creative boom that led to recorded music, modern movies, consumer electronics and even Silicon Valley. However, utility provision of electricity did more than just create a new world, it disrupted existing industries (both directly and through reduced barriers of entry), it also allowed for new practices and methods of working to emerge and even resulted in new economic forms - such as Henry Ford's Fordism. This isn't a one off pattern. The cycle of invention/commoditisation repeats throughout our industrial history, following a surprisingly consistent pathway. Understanding this pattern is critical to anticipating the changes emerging in our industry today - whether that's the web, cloud computing or the future changes that 3D printing will bring. Simon explains the Business of the Internet in one blog post. Simon is king.
2. Why Are Software Development Task Estimations Regularly Off By A Factor of 2 or 3? -- never a truer word spoken in parable.
3. Using the Full-Screen API in Browsers (Mozilla) -- useful! The older I get, the more I like full-screen mode. I found myself wishing my email client had it, then someone pointed out that was called "mutt in a shell window". Fair 'nuff.
4. File Formats in Javascript (GitHub) -- pointers to libraries for different file formats in Javascript.

One of my Applied Improvisation colleagues sent me to a Harvard Business Review article by Tony Schwartz called “Why Don’t We Act in Our Own Best Interest” which mirrors a conversation I’ve been having with many.  It relates directly to my previous three blog posts on creating a culture of “yes” and the value of practicing the skills [...]

The British Government has launched a beta of its GOV.UK platform, testing a single domain for that could be used throughout government. The new single government domain will eventually replace Directgov, the UK government portal which launched back in 2004. GOV.UK is aimed squarely as delivering faster digital services to citizens through a much improved user interface at decreased cost.

Unfortunately, far too often .gov websites cost millions and don't deliver as needed. GOV.UK is open source, mobile-friendly, platform agnostic, uses HTML5, scalable, hosted in the cloud and open for feedback. Those criteria collectively embody the default for how government should approach their online efforts in the 21st century.

“Digital public services should be easy to find and simple to use - they must also be cost effective and SME-friendly," said Francis Maude, the British Minister for the Cabinet Office, in a prepared statement. "The beta release of a single domain takes us one step closer to this goal."

Tom Loosemore, deputy director of government digital service at UK Government, introduced the beta of GOV.UK at the Government Digital Service blog, including a great deal of context on its development and history. Over at the Financial Times Tech blog, Tim Bradshaw has published an excellent review of the GOV.UK beta.

As Bradshaw highlights, what's notable about the new beta is not just the site itself but the team and culture behind it: that of a large startup, not the more ponderous bureaucracy of Whitehall, the traditional "analogue" institution.

.

GOV.UK is a watershed in how government approaches Web design, both in terms of what you see online and how it was developed. The British team of developers, designers and managers behind the platform collaboratively built GOV.UK in-house using agile development and the kind of iterative processes one generally only sees in modern Web design shops. Given that this platform is designed to serve as a common online architecture for the government of the United Kingdom, that's meaningful.

“Our approach is changing," said Maude. "IT needs to be commissioned or rented, rather than procured in huge, expensive contracts of long duration. We are embracing new, cloud-based start-ups and enterprise companies and this will bring benefits for small and medium sized enterprises here in the UK and so contribute to growth.”

The designers of GOV.UK, in fact, specifically describe it as "government as a platform." It's code that others can build upon. It was open from the start, given that the new site was built using open source tools. The code behind GOV.UK was released as open source code on GitHub.

Things like code for @govuk being on github is a pretty big deal. Proper bold statement of a new kind of culture. Respect #gov20

— Dominic Campbell (@dominiccampbell) January 31, 2012

"For me, this platform is all about putting the user needs first in the delivery of public services online in the UK," said Mike Bracken, executive director of government digital services. Bracken is the former director of digital development at the Guardian News and Media and was involved in setting up MySociety. "For too long, user need has been trumped by internal demands, existing technology choices and restrictive procurement practices. GOV.UK puts user need firmly in charge of all our digital thinking, and about time too."

The Gov.UK stack

Reached via email, Bracken explained more about the technology choices that have went into GOV.UK, including a platform diagram, below.

Why create an open source stack? "Why not?" asked Bracken."It's a government platform, and as such it belongs to us all and we want people to contribute and share in its development."

While many local, state and federal sites in the United States have chosen to adapt and use Wordpress or Drupal as open government platforms, the UK team started afresh.

"Much of the code is based on our earlier alpha, which we launched in May last year as an early prototype for a single platform," said Bracken. "We learnt from the journey, and rewrote some key components recently, one key element of the prototype in scale."

According to Bracken, the budget for the beta is £1.7 million pounds, which they are running under at present. (By way of contrast, the open government reboot of FCC.gov was estimated to cost 1.35 million dollars.) There are about 40 developers coding on GOV.UK, said Bracken, but the entire Government Digital Service has around 120 staff, with up to 1800 external testers. They also used several external development houses to complement their team, some for only two weeks at a time.

Why build an entirely new open government platform? "It works," said Bracken. "It's inherently flexible, best of breed and completely modular. And it doesn't require any software licenses."

Bracken believes that the GOV.UK will give the British government agility, flexibility and freedom to change as they go, which are, as he noted, not characteristics aligned with the usual technology build in the UK -- or elsewhere, for that matter.

Given the British government's ambitious plans for open data, the GOV.UK platform also will need to be act as, well, a platform. On that count, they're still planning, not implementing.

"With regard to API's, our long term plan is to 'go wholesale,' by which we mean expose data and services via API's," said Bracken. "We are at the early stages of mapping out key attributes, particularly around identity services, so to be fair it's early days yet. The inherent flexibility does allow for us to accommodate future changes, but it would be premature to make substantial claims to back up API delivery at this point."

The GOV.UK platform will be adaptable for the purposes of city government as well, over time. "We aim to migrate key department sites onto it in the first period of migration, and then look at government agencies," said Bracken. "The migration, with over 400 domains to review, will take more than a year. We aim to offer various platform services which meet the needs of all Government service providers."

Making GOV.UK citizen-centric

The GOV.UK platform was also designed to be citizen-centric, keeping the tasks that people come to a government site to accomplish in mind. Its designers, apparently amply supplied with classic British humor, dubbed the engine that tracks them the "Needotron."

"We didn't just identify top needs," said Loosemore, via email. "We built a machine to manage them for us now and in the future. Currently there are 667!" Loosemore said that they've open sourced the Needotron code, for those interested in tracking needs of their own.

"There are some of the Top needs we've not got to properly yet," said Loosemore. "For example, job search is still sub-optimal, as is the stuff to do with losing your passport."

According to Loosemore, some the top needs that citizens have when they come to a site in the UK are determining the minimum wage, learning when the public and bank holidays are or when the clocks change for British Summer Time. They also come to central government to pay their council tax, which is actually a local function, but GOV.UK is designed to route those users to the correct site using geolocation.

This beta will have the top 1000 things you would need to do government, said Maude, speaking at the Sunlight Foundation this week. (If that's so, there's over 300 more yet to go.)

"There's massive change needed in our approach to how to digitize what we do," he said. "Instead of locking in with a massive supplier, we need to be thinking of it the other way around. What do people need from government? Work from the outside in and redesign processes."

In his comments, Maude emphasized the importance of citizen-centricity, with respect to interfaces. We don't need to educate people on how to use a service, he said. We need to educate government on how to serve the citizen.

"Like U.S., the U.K. has a huge budget deficit," he said. "The public expects to be able to transact with government in a cheap, easy way. This enables them to do it in a cheaper, easier way, with choices. It's not about cutting 10 or 20% from the cost but how to do it for 10 or 20% of the total cost."

The tech behind Gov.UK

James Stewart, who was the tech lead on the beta of GOV.UK, recently blogged about and browser support. He emailed me the following breakdown of the rest of the technology behind GOV.UK.

Hosting and Infrastructure:

• DNS hosted by Dyn.com
• Servers are Amazon EC2 instances running Ubuntu 10.04LTS
• Email (internal alerts) sending via Amazon SES and Gmail
• Miscellaneous file storage on Amazon S3
• Jetty application server
• Nginx, Apache and mod_passenger
• Jenkins continuous integration server
• Caching by Varnish
• Configuration management using Puppet

Front end

• Javascript uses jQuery, jQuery UI, Chosen, and a variety of other plugins
• Gill Sans, provided by fonts.com
• Google web font loader

Languages, Frameworks and Plugins

"Most of the application code is written in Ruby, running on a mixture of Rails and Sinatra," said Stewart. "Rails and Sinatra gave us the right balance of productivity and clean code, and were well known to the team we've assembled. We've used a range of gems along with these, full details of which can be found in the Gemfiles at Github.com/alphagov."

The router for GOV.UK is written in Scala and uses Scalatra for its internal API, said Stewart. "The router distributes requests to the appropriate backend apps, allowing us to keep individual apps very focused on a particular problem without exposing that to visitors," said Stewart. "We did a bake-off between a ruby implementation and a Scala implementation and were convinced that the Scala version was better able to handle the high level of concurrency this app will require."

Databases

• MongoDB. "We started out building everything using MySQL but moved to MongoDB as we realised how much of our content fitted its document-centric approach," said Stewart. "Over time we've been more and more impressed with it and expect to increase our usage of it in the future."
• MySQL, hosted using Amazon's RDS platform. "Some of the data we need to store is still essentially relational and we use MySQL to store that," said Stewart. "Amazon RDS takes away many of the scaling and resilience concerns we had with that, without requiring changes to our application code."
• MaPit geocoding and information service from mySociety. "MaPit not only does conventional geocoding, " said Stewart, in terms of determining what the given the longitude or latitude is for a postcode, but " italso gives us details of all the local government areas a postcode is in, which lets us point visitors to relevant local services."

Collaboration tools

• Campfire for team chat
• Google Apps
• MediaWiki
• Pivotal Tracker
• Many, many index cards.

Related:

• White House to open source Data.gov as open government platform
• New open data initiatives in Canada and Britain
• Government IT's quiet open source evolution

Two things stood out from today’s webinar on E-Reader Policies and Procedures for Libraries:

1. The practical details of e-readers and e-books in libraries are multitudinous, generating an unprecedented number of granular questions from the audience;
2. A crowd (nearly 700) of library staff are their own best resource and have answers to a multitude of questions drawn from their collective experience.

In fact the guiding mantra in both David Newyear’s and Ming Heraty’s presentations was to avoid reinventing the wheel. With their own implementations of e-reader lending at their libraries sprouting from others who had already taken the plunge, they pay it forward with lots of why/what/how information.

Why start an e-reader lending program in the first place? It’s part of being a forward-thinking library that introduces patrons to new technology, or in the case of Ming’s community, keeping up with early adopter patrons in a “gadget-friendly community.”

Once the objective is clear and the administration is on board, the “what” and “how” questions flow in. David and Ming covered a lot of ground about what devices they chose, what content sources they used, what training they provided for staff, how they developed policies and user agreements, how they managed accounts on multiple devices. The presentation is so dense with information, it is worth an hour of your time to watch it.

The concurrent side chat is an explosion of knowledge-sharing in its own right—a revelation of the complexities of this e-reader lending venture. If WebJunction had a prize for most intense webinar question-and-answer chat dialog, this one would be a winner.

Relive it all through the archived resources:

• Watch the entire archived recording (yes, it includes the active chat).
• Peruse the chat log only.
• Find resources for policy examples, device guidelines, ebook providers, and a source for protective cases for devices.
• Robyn Truslow from the Calvert Library (MD) adds her experience to the mix in a guest blog post.

ILI 2012 Call for Speakers Open!

The deadline for submissions is 12 April 2012.

Internet Librarian International is the innovation and technology conference for information professionals. The conference attracts hundreds of library and information professionals from around the world.

Internet Librarian International 2012 will take place at Olympia in London 30-31 October (with pre-event workshops scheduled for 29 October). We invite participation from a wide range of professionals – new and established – from all over the world to share their experiences of developing and delivering innovative information services. We seek dynamic speakers from all types of libraries – public, academic, government, national or commercial – as well as those working outside a ‘traditional’ library setting.

Share your success stories. Tell us what lessons you’ve learned if things didn’t turn out quite as expected. This is your chance to help others to rethink and recharge, and to benefit from the insights of others.

Re-imagine, Renew, Reboot: Innovating for Success

This year the conference will focus on how information and library professionals are successfully delivering innovative products and services to ever more demanding customers in a fast-changing technology landscape. Library patrons, users and customers now expect access to information wherever they are, on a variety of devices. Budgets remain under pressure. Access to information, data and knowledge is becoming more open and transparent, with partnerships and new social media contexts expanding knowledge sharing in new and surprising ways.

With all this going on, librarians need to stay at the leading edge of service provision. What innovative and imaginative solutions can make a real impact on our ability to serve our customers and our institutions? Share your experiences with your peers at Internet Librarian International.

Possible topics fall under the following headings.

• Meeting the ‘everything everywhere’ demands of customers
• New and innovative uses of technology
• Managing and maximising resources
• Redesigning services and products
• Using the internet for research and reference
• Marketing the service and reaching new audiences
• Educating and mentoring users
• Career opportunities – new skills and new roles
• Ideas for full or half day workshops

But don’t limit your imagination - click here to see more ideas.

How do I participate?

If you would like to be considered as a speaker, please submit your ideas here. The deadline for submissions is 12 April 2012.

The advisory committee will review all submissions and you will be notified in May 2012. If your proposal is selected, the primary speaker will receive a free registration to the full conference, which includes lunches and a drinks reception.

We’re looking forward to receiving your suggestions and ideas.

Val Skelton, Programme Director

Katherine Allen, Conference Director

Please note that the expenses of attending Internet Librarian International (including travel, accommodation, and any other expenses) will be the responsibility of the presenter. By submitting your proposal, you acknowledge that you accept this financial responsibility.

Possible topics include:

• 21st century collection management
• Big data initiatives; open data
• Content management
• Creating new products
• Demonstrating impact; influencing management; working with customers
• Development and rollout of library apps
• Digital libraries; digitisation projects; digital curation
• E-learning, information literacy; training skills
• E resources; ebooks; ejournals; creating digital collections; ebook policies; acquisition management; contract negotiation
• Financial challenges; new sources of funding; innovative ways to manage costs
• Future planning; service redesign; mashups; marketing the service; raising the profile, collaboration and partnering
• Gamification initiatives; location awareness
• Information legislation; copyright; data protection; managing digital rights
• Leading edge technologies
• Librarians as agents of social change; community development and cohesion
• New ways of skills development; developing unconferences; managing tweetups
• New roles for information professionals
• Mobile, multiplatform information provision; working with tablet devices
• New ways of creating content; crowdsourcing; user generated content
• Managing information flows
• Open access; open source
• Open data; linked data
• Outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing
• Publishing trends
• Redesigning websites; usability; optimisation
• Semantic web
• Supporting the mobile workforce
• Taxonomies; ontologies
• Using social media tools to maximum effect; podcasting; Twitter/YouTube techniques
• Using the internet for research; search tips and techniques; new search tools
• Web publishing; web technology; the cloud
• Web scale discovery
• Sector specific case studies – we are interested in case studies from a range of settings including academic libraries, public libraries, corporate settings, government libraries, health/medical libraries, law libraries, and non-traditional information settings

I’m very excited to be leading a faculty development workshop at Dominican University of California  on February 24th. Here’s the draft abstract, based in part on a talk I gave at EDUCAUSE Learning Initiatives in 2010:

Creative Collaboration and Immersive Engagement: The Hyperlinked Campus

Emerging technologies for communication and creation of content afford the possibility of the connected, “always on” educational environment. The Hyperlinked Campus is a model of open communication, transparency, social engagement, guided exploration, and creativity. This session will explore how some tools can extend the classroom beyond physical buildings to engage learners with their peers and with the world. The session will focus on open learning systems for courses, Twitter in the classroom and virtual learning space, and the creation of  personal learning networks. Moving beyond the walled garden and into participatory networks of learning and engagement can benefit both faculty and students.

 

January 31, 2012
For Immediate Release

Dallas, TX — Amigos Library Services, a leading library membership organization based in Dallas, and the Missouri Library Network Corporation (MLNC), a similar St. Louis-based library membership organization, today announced that they have entered into a working agreement to explore merging operations. If the organizations merge, Amigos will be the largest library consortium west of the Mississippi River, comprised of approximately 1,000 libraries and cultural heritage institutions in 22 states.

Following lengthy exploratory discussions, members of the Boards of Directors of Amigos and MLNC have both unanimously approved a working agreement as the definitive guideline for further activities leading to merger. Member votes on the merger are scheduled for mid-April and early May. Pending member approval, the merger will be completed July 1, 2012.

Both networks bring unique services of interest to a larger member base and both have strong continuing education programs to share. Current MLNC and Amigos members will benefit from increased ability to leverage library resources for purchasing thousands of library products and services from leading providers.

“I am excited because a merger will enhance services to the collective membership,” said Bonnie Juergens, President and Chief Executive Officer of Amigos. “It will expand resource-sharing opportunities for both member communities and strengthen our ability to provide current and new services into the future.”

Tracy Rochow Byerly, Executive Director of MLNC, commented “I couldn’t be more pleased about this announcement! The prime motivation of the MLNC Board has been to meet the needs of MLNC’s members and fulfill our mission. The Board conducted a thorough analysis of options and concluded that this merger will help MLNC achieve that goal.”

About Missouri Library Network Corporation
The mission of MLNC is to organize and deliver to its member libraries and other contracting entities electronic services and content, and provide training in the management and use of information. Founded in 1981 to serve the needs of Missouri libraries, MLNC has grown to serve the needs of over 300 members in the Midwest region. Known for excellent customer service, flexibility and solutions that save members time and money, MLNC has shown itself to be an agile organization in a changing world. Members utilize the many continuing education opportunities; turn to MLNC for help in implementing change; and have supported the organization’s move into association management services.

About Amigos Library Services
For more than 35 years, Amigos Library Services has helped members obtain affordable services and share library resources and knowledge. With over 600 members, Amigos is one of the largest consortia of libraries and cultural heritage institutions in the United States. Membership in Amigos helps libraries gain access to the latest innovations and services in the library community; pursue opportunities for continuing professional education; leverage buying power; and preserve the region’s rich cultural heritage. This collaboration strengthens each member’s ability to serve and lead its community in the creative and effective use of information resources.

For information about the Amigos/MLNC merger exploration, contact Dr. Anne Prestamo, Chair of Amigos (anne.prestamo@okstate.edu); Dr. Sharon Bostick, President of MLNC (bosticks@umkc.edu); Bonnie Juergens, President and CEO of Amigos (Juergens@amigos.org), or Tracy Rochow Byerly, Executive Director of MLNC (tracy@mlnc.org).

Here is my column for SLA’s Information Outlook (Jan/Feb. issue).

10 ways to make yourself indispensable at your workplace

IOColumn_105 (MS Word format)

As always this is the pre-editing copy so please forgive any typos or errors.

Stephen

 

In conjunction with this week’s webinar, Developing and Maintaining E-Reader Policies and Procedures for Libraries, we asked Robyn Truslow, Public Relations Coordinator at the Calvert Library in Prince Frederick, Maryland, to share a post with their approach to managing policies and procedures for circulating e-readers, including keeping up with changes and needed revisions to the processes.

Thank you Robyn!

The short answer is to create a small team that includes someone on the front line and someone who really knows the ins and outs of the devices and meet regularly to tweak as needed.

Let’s be honest…once you commit to a certain ereader to circulate, you sort of get stuck with that particular device. The Kindle and NOOKcolor were the two hottest ereaders when we got our grant so that’s what we bought. It would be too complicated to add each new hot device as it was introduced. Nor are there many libraries that can afford to add devices as they come out. MANY man-hours went into the processing of the first set of 72 devices…we are not anxious to add more even though we recognize that those particularly devices are hardly cutting edge anymore. So, stuck with the Kindle and NOOKcolor, the process of purchasing books and processing the devices for circulation doesn’t really change.

However, ebooks are still coming out for them so I guess we need to keep adding to them…or do we? So many people are getting their own devices now that it might make little sense to commit money to putting ebooks on OUR device rather than ebooks that customers can put on THEIR device. This internal debate has left us sort of just waiting on this issue. We had actually pre-ordered some titles when the devices first started circulating and it was a bit of a pain to get those titles loaded when they finally came out. Each ereader has an average of 100 titles on it already so do we really need more?

Our biggest policy/procedure is our User Agreement. Though some grumbled, we asked staff to read the whole thing to customers at each checkout. There is a good bit of training info in the agreement and possibly some off-putting “Do NOTs” but we felt it important to protect the devices. We also knew that new situations would arise that might require tweaking of the user agreement and therefore the NEW information would need to be communicated to a customer that may have checked out a device before the change. For instance, we have decided that we need to ask that customers not use/store the device in an environment with tobacco smoke. We also realized, 12 broken cables later, the need to train customers how to plug and unplug the device.

We have 12 differently themed sets of ereaders and at this point, two of the sets no longer regularly have holds on them. Perhaps it’s time to weed a few copies from each of those sets and make a new set for 2011-2012 bestsellers? Easy enough…we just create a new Barnes & Noble account, deregister a few of the less popular devices and re-register with the new account. OK, we’ll also have to change the barcode and property label and add a new record. And then there are software updates…do we pull the devices so we can run the update?

You don’t want a big team discussing these issues, just two or three people that have front-line and technical knowledge and the capacity to move forward with any decisions.

From the New York Times. Folklorist’s Global Jukebox Goes Digital.  Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away … Continue reading →

A data scientist and a former Apple engineer, Pete Warden (@petewarden) is now the CTO of the new travel photography startup Jetpac. Warden will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Strata Conference, where he'll explain why we should rethink our approach to data. Specifically, rather than pursue the perfection of structured information, Warden says we should instead embrace the chaos of unstructured data. He expands on that idea in the following interview.

What do you mean asking data scientists to embrace the chaos of data?

Pete Warden: The heart of data science is designing instruments to turn signals from the real world into actionable information. Fighting the data providers to give you those signals in a convenient form is a losing battle, so the key to success is getting comfortable with messy requirements and chaotic inputs. As an engineer, this can feel like a deal with the devil, as you have to accept error and uncertainty in your results. But the alternative is no results at all.

Are we wasting time trying to make unstructured data structured?

Pete Warden: Structured data is always better than unstructured, when you can get it. The trouble is that you can't get it. Most structured data is the result of years of effort, so it is only available with a lot of strings, either financial or through usage restrictions.

The first advantage of unstructured data is that it's widely available because the producers don't see much value in it. The second advantage is that because there's no "structuring" work required, there's usually a lot more of it, so you get much broader coverage.

A good comparison is Yahoo's highly-structured web directory versus Google's search index built on unstructured HTML soup. If you were looking for something that was covered by Yahoo, its listing was almost always superior, but there were so many possible searches that Google's broad coverage made it more useful. For example, I hear that 30% of search queries are "once in history" events — unique combinations of terms that never occur again.

Dealing with unstructured data puts the burden on the consuming application instead of the publisher of the information, so it's harder to get started, but the potential rewards are much greater.

How do you see data tools developing over the next few years? Will they become more accessible to more people?

Pete Warden: One of the key trends is the emergence of open-source projects that deal with common patterns of unstructured input data. This is important because it allows one team to solve an unstructured-to-structured conversion problem once, and then the entire world can benefit from the same solution. For example, turning street addresses into latitude/longitude positions is a tough problem that involves a lot of fuzzy textual parsing, but open-source solutions are starting to emerge.

Associated photo on home and category pages: "mess with graphviz by Toms Bauģis, on Flickr

Related:

• Big data market survey: Hadoop solutions
• Before you interrogate data, you must tame it
• Big data goes to work

1. The Sky is Rising -- TechDirt's Mike Masnick has written (and made available for free download) an excellent report on the entertainment industry's numbers and business models. Must read if you have an opinion on SOPA et al.
2. Tennis Australia Exposes Match Analytics -- Served from IBM's US-based private cloud, the updated SlamTracker web application pulls together 39 million points of data collated from all four Grand Slam tournaments over the past seven years to provide insights into a player's style of play and progress. The analytics application also provides a player's likelihood of beating their opponent through each round of the two-week tournament and the 'key to the match' required for them to win. "We gave our data to IBM, said, 'Here we go, that's 10 years of scores and stats, matches and players'," said Samir Mahir, CIO at Tennis Australia. Data as way to engage fans. (via Steve O'Grady)
3. Data Monday: Logins and Passwords (Luke Wroblewski) -- Password recovery is the number one request to help desks for intranets that don’t have single sign-on portal capabilities.
4. QR Codes: Bad Idea or Terrible Idea? (Kevin Marks) -- People have a problem finding your URL. You post a QR Code. Now they have 2 problems. I prefer to think of QR codes as a prototype of what Matt Jones calls "the robot-readable world"--not so much the technology we really imagine we will be deploying when we build our science fictiony future.

1. Improvisation and Forgiveness (JP Rangaswami) -- what makes us human is not repetitive action. Human occupations should require human intellect, and there's no more human activity than making a judgement call when processes have failed a customer.
2. Kinect Tech in Laptop Prototypes -- "waving your hands around at your laptop" will be the new "bellowing into your walkie-talkie phone". (via Greg Linden)
3. Beautiful Web Type -- demo page for the best from Google's web fonts directory. Source on GitHub.
4. Ethics of Brain Boosting, Discussion (Hacker News) -- this comment in particular: in my initial reckless period of self-experimentation, I managed to induce phosphenes by accident -- blue white flashes in the entire visual field, blanking out everything else. Both contacts were in the supraorbital region. I ceased my experiments for a while and returned to the literature. And you thought that typo where you accidentally took the database offline was bad ....

Don’t miss:

http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=2045

TTW Contributor Justin Hoenke answers some questions about the library as a creation space for teens:

How do artists use your library?

Every day after school we get anywhere from 30-60 teens using our teen library space.  I see the teens making music, art, and videos on their laptops everyday.  A lot of them also sit around and doodle, and the almost always give me their finished products.  I’ve got quite a compilation of teen artwork created in the library that someday I hope to put together and feature in the library!

This image gallery is a collection of pieces that teens completed in the Portland Public Library as part of the Searching For ME program, where teens designed their own story in their image. The program was a collaboration with The Telling Room and The Maine College of Art. All photos are courtesy of Justin Hoenke.

 

The 2012 ALA TechSource Midwinter Tech Wrap-up was a huge success. We had great presentations from our panel, and great participation from our audience.

If you missed the event, or want to experience it again, you can view the video archive of the event here.

Again, the URL for the archive is: https://alapublishing.webex.com/alapublishing/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=EC&rID=4742212&rKey=1b36dc291d7a1f59 

The slides from all panelists are below.

ALA TechSource 2012 Midwinter Tech Wrapup: Jason Griffey

ALA TechSource 2012 Midwinter Tech Wrapup: Marshall Breeding

ALA Tech Source 2012 Midwinter Tech Wrapup: Sue Polanka

David Farber, a veteran of Internet technology and politics, dropped by Cambridge, Mass. today and was gracious enough to grant me some time in between his numerous meetings. On leave from Carnegie Mellon, Dave still intervenes in numerous policy discussions related to the Internet and "plays in Washington," as well as hosting the popular Interesting People mailing list. This list delves into dizzying levels of detail about technological issues, but I wanted to pump him for big ideas about where the Internet is headed, topics that don't make it to the list.

How long can the Internet last?

I'll start with the most far-reaching prediction: that Internet protocols simply aren't adequate for the changes in hardware and network use that will come up in a decade or so. Dave predicts that computers will be equipped with optical connections instead of pins for networking, and the volume of data transmitted will overwhelm routers, which at best have mixed optical/electrical switching. Sensor networks, smart electrical grids, and medical applications with genetic information could all increase network loads to terabits per second.

When routers evolve to handle terabit-per-second rates, packet-switching protocols will become obsolete. The speed of light is constant, so we'll have to rethink the fundamentals of digital networking.

I tossed in the common nostrum that packet-switching was the fundamental idea behind the Internet and its key advance over earlier networks, but Dave disagreed. He said lots of activities on the Internet reproduce circuit-like behavior, such as sessions at the TCP or Web application level. So theoretically we could re-architect the underlying protocols to fit what the hardware and the applications have to offer.

But he says his generation of programmers who developed the Internet are too tired ("It's been a tough fifteen or twenty years") and will have to pass the baton to a new group of young software engineers who can think as boldly and originally as the inventors of the Internet. He did not endorse any of the current attempts to design a new network, though.

Slaying the bandwidth bottleneck

Like most Internet activists, Dave bewailed the poor state of networking in the U.S. In advanced nations elsewhere, 100-megabit per second networking is available for reasonable costs, whereas here it's hard to go beyond a 30 megabits (on paper!) even at enormous prices and in major metropolitan areas. Furthermore, the current administration hasn't done much to improve the situation, even though candidate Obama made high bandwidth networking a part of his platform and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski talks about it all the time.

Dave has been going to Washington on tech policy consultations for decades, and his impressions of the different administrations has a unique slant all its own. The Clinton administration really listened to staff who understood technology--Gore in particular was quite a technology junkie--and the administration's combination of judicious policy initiatives and benign neglect led to the explosion of the commercial Internet. The following Bush administration was famously indifferent to technology at best. The Obama administration lies somewhere in between in cluefulness, but despite their frequent plaudits for STEM and technological development, Dave senses that neither Obama nor Biden really have the drive to deal with and examine complex technical issues and insist on action where necessary.

I pointed out the U.S.'s particular geographic challenges--with a large, spread-out population making fiber expensive--and Dave countered that fiber to the home is not the best solution. In fact, he claims no company could make fiber pay unless it gained 75% of the local market. Instead, phone companies should string fiber to access points 100 meters or so from homes, and depend on old copper for the rest. This could deliver quite adequate bandwidth at a reasonable cost. Cable companies, he said, could also greatly increase Internet speeds.

Fixed wireless ISPs offer Internet access to thousands of communities, mostly rural ones with no other access except dial-up. These ISPs face interconnection problems because they are distrusted or ignored by the incumbents carriers. Mobile wireless companies are pretty crippled by loads that they encouraged (through the sale of app-heavy phones) and then had problems handling, and are busy trying to restrict users'bandwidth. But a combination of 4G, changes in protocols, and other innovations could improve their performance.

Waiting for the big breach

I mentioned that in the previous night's State of the Union address, Obama had made a vague reference to a
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/26/legislation-address-growing-danger-cyber-threats">cybersecurity initiative with a totally unpersuasive claim that it would protect us from attack. Dave retorted that nobody has a good definition of cybersecurity, but that this detail hasn't held back every agency with a stab at getting funds for it from putting forward a cybersecurity strategy. The Army, the Navy, Homeland Security, and others are all looking or new missions now that old ones are winding down, and cybersecurity fills the bill.

The key problem with cybersecurity is that it can't be imposed top-down, at least not on the Internet, which, in a common observation reiterated by Dave, was not designed with security in mind. If people use weak passwords (and given current password cracking speeds, just about any password is weak) and fall victim to phishing attacks, there's little we can do with dictats from the center. I made this point in an article twelve years ago. Dave also pointed out that viruses stay ahead of pattern-matching virus detection software.

Security will therefore need to be rethought drastically, as part of the new network that will replace the Internet. In the meantime, catastrophe could strike--and whoever is in the Administration at the time will have to face public wrath.

Odds without ends

We briefly discussed FCC regulation, where Farber tends to lean toward asking the government to forebear. He acknowledged the merits of arguments made by many Internet supporters, that the FCC tremendously weakened the chances for competition in 2002 when it classified cable Internet as a Title 1 service. This shielded the cable companies from regulations under a classification designed back in early Internet days to protect the mom-and-pop ISPs. And I pointed out that the cable companies have brazenly sued the FCC to win court rulings saying the companies can control traffic any way they choose. But Farber says there are still ways to bring in the FCC and other agencies, notably the Federal Trade commission, to enforce anti-trust laws, and that these agencies have been willing to act to shut down noxious behavior.

Dave and I shared other concerns about the general deterioration of modern infrastructure, affecting water, electricity, traffic, public transportation, and more. An amateur pilot, Dave knows some things about the air traffic systems that make one reluctant to fly. But there a few simple fixes. Commercial air flights are safe partly because pilots possess great sense and can land a plane even in the presence of confusing and conflicting information. On the other hand, Dave pointed out that mathematicians lack models to describe the complexity of such systems as our electrical grid. There are lots of areas for progress in data science.

Last weekend I was delighted to head down to the University of Maryland for THATCamp Games, an instance of the popular humanities and technology unconference devoted specifically to games in education. It’s been a while since I attended an unconference — my last one was LibCampNYC in 2009 — and THATCamp Games reminded me how much I enjoy the unconference format. Capping registration at about 100 people and eschewing formal presentations means lots of opportunities for discussion and conversation among the participants, and lots of opportunities for learning. At this particular THATCamp the attendees were highly diverse, from faculty and staff in higher and secondary education to educational technologists to game industry folks to students. While there weren’t a huge number of librarians there, I wasn’t the only one, and of course the topics we all discussed are relevant to academic libraries as well as other educational organizations.

I’m an avid gamer and have long been interested in games-based learning, though it’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve begun to incorporate games and game mechanics into my own teaching. I’d like to use more games in my research and information literacy instruction, especially to leverage the research behaviors that are a built-in to so many digital (and non-digital) games, and I appreciated that the unconference began with a day of workshops called BootCamps which offered hands-on experience with thinking through and creating instructional games. I know of at least one library that’s used the application Inform to create a text-based interactive fiction game (Bioactive at the University of Florida), so I went to a BootCamp on Inform and had the chance to play around with the software, which doesn’t require much programming knowledge.

Two of the BootCamps discussed using ARGs — alternate reality games — in educational settings. I’ve always found the idea of using an ARG for education intriguing: ARGs are immersive experiences that incorporate many beneficial attributes of games, like asking students to take on a new identity, and scaffolding knowledge and skills. But many ARGs are long, detailed, and involved, and I’ve struggled with the practicalities of integrating something so time-intensive into my instruction, which tends to be mostly one-shots. During the two BootCamps we worked on specific activities that I found really helpful in thinking about strategies for my own teaching, one an example of a narrative puzzle, and the other an exercise in which we broke into small groups to brainstorm a subject-specific ARG. The facilitators emphasized that when designing an ARG the game objective and the learning objective must overlap completely, which seems like sound advice for designing any educational game.

I’m also interested in exploring ways that librarians can use games in collaboration with other faculty to strengthen students’ research competencies. During the unconference proper there were several sessions on adding game-like features to classrooms and courses. In a session on “Badges Done Right” we discussed using badges and other game structures like experience points for grading or other forms of recognition within a course. There was also a session about building gaming into the learning management system, with examples of both a commercially-produced and a home-grown LMS. There’s no question that the trend in “gamification” is complex, and we spent much time discussing the benefits of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. However, for faculty using game mechanics like badge or XPs I can think of lots of possibilities for librarians to collaborate. (“Wikipedia fact-checker” badge, anyone?)

Like any good conference there were lots of interesting-sounding choices at every timeslot (and a phenomenal number of tweets), so I’m grateful that a shared, public Google Docs folder was created early on. There are notes from nearly every session, and if you’re interested in games and education I encourage you to take a peek.

Part of using an open source library system is being a part of the community that builds it. To participate you don’t have to know how to write code or documentation, you can simply report bugs and make requests for enhancements using the tools provided.

This tutorial will show you how to use the Koha Bugzilla site to report bugs and request enhancements to the Koha ILS.

If you have an idea for a video, please just let me know and I’ll add it to my list of things to record.

Related posts:

1. Open Source ILS Library Technology Report
2. VALENJ: WALDO & the Koha Open Source ILS
3. Updates due to come in Koha 3.2

Please, TTW Readers, follow this link and sign the petition:

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/ensure-every-child-america-has-access-effective-school-library-program/tmlbRqfF?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl

Every child in America deserves access to an effective school library program. We ask that the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provide dedicated funding to help support effective school library programs. Such action will ensure more students have access to the resources and tools that constitute a 21st century learning environment. Reductions in school library programs are creating an ‘access gap’ between schools in wealthier communities versus those where there are high levels of poverty. All students should have an equal opportunity to acquire the skills necessary to learn, to participate, and to compete in today’s world.

Brad Pitt was recently nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane in the movie "Moneyball," which was also nominated for Best Picture. If you're not familiar with "Moneyball," the subject of the movie and the book on which it's based is Beane, who helped pioneer an approach to improve baseball team performance based on statistical analysis. Statistics were used to help find valuable players that other teams overlooked and to identify winning strategies for players and coaches that other teams missed.

Last October, when the movie was released, I wrote an article discussing how Moneyball-type statistical analysis can be applied to software teams. As a follow-up, and in honor of the recognition that the movie and Pitt are receiving, I thought it might be interesting to spend a little more time on this, focusing on the process and techniques that a manager could use to introduce metrics to a software team. If you are intrigued by the idea of tracking and studying metrics to help find ways to improve, the following are suggestions of how you can begin to apply these techniques.

Use the data that you have

The first puzzle to solve is how to get metrics for your software team. There are all kinds of things you could "measure." For example you could track how many tasks each developer completes, the complexity of each task, the number of production bugs related to each feature, or the number of users added or lost. You could also measure less obvious activities or contributions, such as the number of times a developer gets directly involved in customer support issues or the number of times someone works after hours.

In the movie "Moneyball," there are lots of scenes showing complicated-looking statistical calculations, graphs, and equations, which makes you think that the statistics Billy Beane used were highly sophisticated and advanced. But in reality, most of the statistics that he used were very basic and were readily available to everyone else. The "innovation" was to examine the statistics more closely in order to discover key fundamentals that contributed to winning. Most teams, Beane realized, disregarded these fundamentals and failed to use them to find players with the appropriate skills. By focusing on these overlooked basics, the Oakland A's were able to gain a competitive edge.

To apply a similar technique to software teams, you don't need hard-to-gather data or complex metrics. You can start by using the data you have. In your project management system, you probably have data on the quantity and complexity of development tasks completed. In your bug-tracking and customer support systems, you probably have data on the quantity, rate, and severity of product issues. These systems also typically have simple reporting or export mechanisms that make the data easy to access and use.

Looking at this type of data and the trends from iteration to iteration is a good place to start. Most teams don't devote time to examining historical trends and various breakdowns of the data by individual and category. For each individual and the team as a whole, you can look at all your metrics, focusing, at least to start, on fundamentals like productivity and quality. This means examining the history of data captured in your project management, bug tracking, and customer support systems. As you accumulate data over time, you can also analyze how the more recent metrics compare to those in the past. Gathering and regularly examining fundamental engineering and quality metrics is the first step in developing a new process for improving your team.

Establish internal support

If you saw the movie "Moneyball," you know that much was made of the fact that some of the old experienced veterans had a hard time getting on board with Beane and his new-fangled ideas. The fact that Beane had statistics to back-up his viewpoints didn't matter. The veterans didn't get it, and they didn't want to. They were comfortable relying on experience and the way things were already done. Some of them saw the new ideas and approaches — and the young guys who were touting them — as a threat.

If you start talking about gathering and showing metrics, especially individual metrics that might reveal how one person compares to another, some people will likely have concerns. One way to avoid serious backlash, of course, is to move slowly and gradually. The other thing you might do to decrease any negative reaction is to cultivate internal supporters. If you can get one, two, or a few team members on board with the idea of reviewing metrics regularly as a way to identify areas for improvement, they can be a big help to allay the fears of others, if such fears arise.

How do you garner support? Try sitting down individually with as many team members as possible to explain what you hope to do. It's the kind of discussion you might have informally over lunch. If you are the team manager, you'll want to explain carefully that historical analysis of metrics isn't designed to assign blame or grade performance. The goal is to spend more time examining the past in the hopes of finding incremental ways to improve. Rather than just reviewing the past through memory or anecdotes, you hope to get more accuracy and keener insights by examining the data.

After you talk with team members individually, you'll have a sense for who's supportive, who's ambivalent, and who's concerned. If you have a majority of people who are concerned and a lack of supporters, then you might want to rethink your plan and try to allay concerns before you even start.

Once you begin gathering and reviewing metrics as a team, it's a good idea to go back and check in periodically with both the supporters and the naysayers, either individually or in groups. You should get their reactions and input on suggestions to improve. If support is going down and concern is going up, then you'll need to make adjustments, or your use of metrics is headed for failure. If support is going up and concern is going down, then you are on the right track. Beane didn't get everyone to buy into his approach, but he did get enough internal supporters to give him a chance, and more were converted once they saw the results.

Embed metrics in your process

While there might be some benefit to gathering and looking at historical metrics on your own, to gain greater benefits, you'll want to share metrics with your team. The best time to share and review metrics is in meetings that are part of your regular review and planning process. You can simply add an extra element to those meetings to review metrics. Planning or review meetings that occur on a monthly or quarterly basis, for example, are appropriate forums. Too-frequent reviews, however, may become repetitive and wasteful. If you have biweekly review and planning meetings, for example, you might choose to review metrics every other meeting rather than every time.

To make the review of metrics effective and efficient, you can prepare the data for presentation, possibly summarizing key metrics into spreadsheets and graphs, or a small number of presentation slides (examples and resources for metric presentation can be found and shared at codermetrics.org). You will want to show your team summary data and individual breakdowns for the metrics gathered. For example, if you are looking at productivity metrics, then you might look at data such as:

• The number and complexity of tasks completed in each development iteration.
• A breakdown of task counts completed grouped by complexity.
• The total number of tasks and sum of complexity completed by each engineer.
• The trend of task counts and complexity over multiple development iterations.
• A comparison of the most recent iteration to the average, highs, and lows of past iterations.

To start, you are just trying to get the team in the habit of looking at recent and historical data more closely, and it's not necessary to have a specific intent defined. The goal, when you begin, is to just "see what you can see." Present the data, and then foster observations and open discussion. As the team examines its metrics, especially over the course of time, patterns may emerge. Individual and team ideas about what the metrics reveal and potential areas of improvement may form. Opinions about the usefulness of specific data or suggestions for new types of metrics may come out.

Software developers are smart people. They are problem-spotters and problem-solvers by nature. Looking at the data from what they have done and the various outcomes is like looking at the diagnostics of a software program. If problems or inefficiencies exist, it is likely the team or certain individuals will spot them. In the same way that engineers fix bugs or tune programs, as they more closely analyze their own metrics, they may identify ways to tune their performance for the better.

There's a montage in the middle of the movie "Moneyball" where Beane and his assistant are interacting with the baseball players. It's my favorite part of the movie. They are sharing their statistics-inspired ideas of how games are won and lost, and making small suggestions about how the players can improve. Albeit briefly, we see in the movie that the players themselves begin to figure it out. Beane, his assistant, the coaches and the players are all a team. Knowledge is found, shared, and internalized. As you incorporate metrics-review and metrics-analysis into your development activities, you may see a similar organic process of understanding and evolution take place.

Set short-term, reasonable goals

Small improvements and adjustments can be significant. In baseball, one or two runs can be the difference between a win or a loss, and a few wins over the course of a long season can be the difference between second place and first. On a software team, a 2% productivity improvement equates to just 10 minutes "gained" per eight-hour workday, but that translates to an "extra" week of coding for every developer each year. The larger the team, the more those small improvements add up.

Once you begin to keep and review metrics regularly, the next step is to identify areas that you believe can be improved. There is no rush to do this. You might, for example, share and review metrics as a team for many months before you begin to discuss specific areas that might be improved. Over time, having reviewed their contributions and outcomes more closely, certain individuals may themselves begin to see ways to improve. For example, an engineer whose productivity is inconsistent may realize a way to become more consistent. Or the team may realize there are group goals they'd like to achieve. If, for example, regular examination makes everyone realize that the rate of new production bugs found matches or exceeds the rate of bugs being fixed, the team might decide they'd like to be more focused on turning that trend around.

It's fine — maybe even better — to target the easy wins to start. It gets the team going and allows you to test and demonstrate the potential usefulness of metrics in setting and achieving improvement goals. Later, you can extend and apply these techniques to other areas for different, and possibly more challenging, types of improvements.

When you have identified an area for improvement, either for an individual or a group, you can identify the associated metric and the target goal. Pick a reasonable goal, especially when you are first testing this process, remembering that small incremental improvements can still have significant effects. Once the goal is set, you can use your metrics to track progress month by month.

To summarize, the simple process for employing metrics to make improvements is:

1. Gather and review historical metrics for a specific area.
2. Set metrics-based goals for improvement in that area.
3. Track the metrics at regular intervals to show progress toward the goal.

The other thing to keep in mind when getting started is that it's best to focus on goals that can be achieved quickly. Like any test case, you want to see results early to know if it's working. If you target areas that can show improvement in less than three months, for example, then you can evaluate more quickly whether utilizing metrics is helpful or not. If the process works, then these early and easier wins can help build support for longer-term experiments.

Take one metric at a time

It pays to look at one metric at a time. Again, this is similar to tuning a software program. In that case, you instrument the code or implement other techniques to gather performance metrics and identify key bottlenecks. Once the improvable areas are identified, you work on them one at a time, tuning the code and then testing the results. When one area is completed, you move on to the next.

Focusing the team and individuals on one key metric and one area at a time allows everyone to apply their best effort to improve that area. As with anything else, if you give people too many goals, you run the risk of making it harder to achieve any of the goals, and you also make it harder to pinpoint the cause of failure should that occur.

If you are just starting with metrics, you might have the whole team focus on the same metric and goal. But over time you can have individuals working on different areas with separate metrics, as long as each person is focused on one area at a time. For example, some engineers might be working to improve their personal productivity while others are working to improve their quality.

Once an area is "tuned" and improvement goals are reached, you'll want to continue reviewing metrics to make sure you don't fall back. Then you can move on to something else.

Build on small successes

Let's say that you begin reviewing metrics on production bug counts or development productivity per iteration; then you set some small improvement targets; and after a time, you reach and sustain those goals. Maybe, for example, you reduce a backlog of production bugs by 10%. Maybe this came through extra effort for a short period of time, but at the end, the team determines that metrics helped. Perhaps the metrics helped increase everyone's understanding of the "problem" and helped maintain a focus on the goal and results.

While this is a fairly trivial example, even a small success like this can help as a first step toward more. If you obtain increased support for metrics, and hopefully some proof of the value, then you are in a great position to gradually expand the metrics you gather and use.

In the long run, the areas that you can measure and analyze go well beyond the trivial. For example, you might expand beyond core software development tasks and skills, beyond productivity and quality, to begin to look at areas like innovation, communication skills, or poise under pressure. Clearly, measuring such areas takes much more thought and effort. To get there, you can build on small, incremental successes using metrics along the way. In so doing, you will not only be embedding metrics-driven analysis in your engineering process, but also in your software development culture. This can extend into other important areas, too, such as how you target and evaluate potential recruits.

Moneyball-type techniques are applicable to small and big software teams alike. They can apply in organizations that are highly successful as well as those just starting out. Bigger teams and larger organizations can sometimes afford to be less efficient, but most can't, and smaller teams certainly don't have this luxury. Beane's great success was making his organization highly competitive while spending far less money (hence the term "Moneyball"). To do this, his team had to be smarter and more efficient. It's a goal to which we can all aspire.

Jonathan Alexander looked at the connection between Moneyball and software teams in the following webcast:

Photo: scoreboard by popofatticus, on Flickr

Related:

• Moneyball for software engineering, part 1
• Data and baseball (and Brad Pitt)
• Process kills developer passion

An Introvert’s Guide to Networking

via HBR.org by Lisa Petrilli

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/01/the_introverts_guide_to_networ.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29

Book:

“The Introvert’s Guide to Success in Business and Leadership”

http://www.lisapetrilli.com/the-introverts-guide/

Stephen

 

US slumps in press freedom rankings

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/25/us-slumps-in-press-freedom-ran.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

Stephen

Our business at Google is rooted in STEM and CS, so we’re passionate about supporting organizations that are expanding access to these fields, especially for students who might not have the opportunity otherwise. The annual Google Roots in Science and Engineering (RISE) program supports organizations running innovative STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and CS (computer science) enrichment programs for K-12 and university students around the world.


This year, the Google in Education group received a record number of inspiring applications for RISE. We expanded the awards to include Sub-Saharan Africa, and in total, we’re awarding more than $340,000 in funding to 13 U.S., eight European and five African organizations.

Our recipients are diverse, ranging from girls robotics teams building high-tech machinery in Nairobi to after-school programs that have students configuring cluster computers in Salt Lake City. Below are just a few of the outstanding organizations receiving RISE awards this year for their efforts in advancing CS and STEM education:

United States

• Santa Clara Valley Society of Women Engineers, San Jose, California. GetSET is a program created for underrepresented ethnic minority girls in the San Francisco Bay Area to expose them to engineering while building self confidence through leadership workshops, tours of technology companies and participation in team-building exercises.
• Saturday Academy, Portland, Oregon. Saturday Academy serves 2nd-12th grade students from Oregon and SW Washington with high quality and creative learning opportunities taught by STEM experts, including hands-on, real world activities that create meaningful connections between academic content and practical application.

Europe

• Frauennetzwerk Informatik at Universität Passau, Passau, Germany. University students from Passau act as ambassadors for computer science, engineering and math by reaching out to juniors and seniors at their former high schools and running workshops on topics like robotics and mobile app development. Ambassadors go on to serve as mentors to the students throughout their high school and college careers.
• The Centre for Academic Achievement, Dublin, Ireland. This center runs free after school educational classes in a university setting for bright primary school students from disadvantaged areas. Each term, students from 32 local primary schools have the opportunity to study science, math and engineering subjects and are encouraged to pursue college degrees in the future.

Sub Saharan Africa

• Savana Signatures, Tamale, Ghana. Savana Signatures educates youth and women, building their capacity to access information for the benefit of Ghana’s social and economic development.
• Fundi Bots, Kampala, Uganda. Fundi Bots is a technology outreach program for students in high school and university that uses robotics to introduce young children to the endless possibilities of technology in both their day-to-day lives and potential careers.

Organizations interested in applying for 2013 funding can sign up for more information here. We look forward to hearing about all the great work being done in CS and STEM education.

Posted by Roxana Shirkhoda, K-12 Education Outreach

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So let me begin with a quote from a Project Information Literacy interview with Jeffrey Schnapp about the ongoing debate regarding the future of academic libraries:

As far back as the libraries of Pergamon and Alexandria, libraries have combined functions of storage, sifting and activation. They have been places of burial, preservation and worship of a certain past, where retrieval, resuscitation and animation of dormant/stored knowledge was integrated into the shaping of the present and future. It is the access, animation and activation pieces that are now moving front stage and center, while the storage and burial functions move offsite even as they remain just as essential as ever.

Back in November I held the first of three sessions of a Library Vision Task Force. This group (and do we have fun), composed of representatives from nearly every department on campus, is charged to develop a mission statement and then a vision statement for our library. This vision statement will play a crucial role in driving development efforts for a library that has largely not been “re-thunk” since construction completed in 1958.*

Some of the re-thunking can’t wait for The Vision Thing, most specifically our 10-year-old, heavily-used computer classroom that is receiving development attention as we speak. But the “bigger things” can and must wait for broader direction; as much as I and Team Library might have all the bright ideas in the world, and as eager as we are to move “forward,” it is crucial that the library reflect the will, direction, and zeitgeist of the entire campus.

(N.b. I adopt an air of Yoda-like mystery when I am asked if we should renovate or rebuild; honestly, until the facility assessment is funded, how the heck would I know? The building appears to have lovely bones, but I don’t have X-Ray vision or a degree in seismic engineering, architecture, or accessibility design.)

The pre-work for our meeting were observation exercises — their call whether they did them in our library or in a new or newly-renovated library (of any flavor). I left the observation activities wide open. All they had to do was observe.

Most of that first meeting centered on sharing those observations, some of which surfaced during a slideshow I presented , which was not so much a talking-head presentation as a call-and-response — my favorite and most unexpected moment was the sheer horror the Visioneers expressed at that suspended conference room in Brisbane, Australia; a thing of beauty, yes, but emotionally uncomfortable to people living in an earthquake zone–something that mirrored my initial reaction when I saw that room, though I thought I was being a sissy.

One key finding from the observations was that people often use the library out of context of library-owned materials. They bring their own books, or they tote laptops, or they simply sit and “be.” Some study in groups, some read, some meditate, some stroll. In fact, though I have incontrovertible proof this activity still takes place (and in our library is anomalously on the rise), the only recorded observations of users retrieving books from library shelves came from public libraries.

So I posed the questions: We observe all these people coming into the library with their own materials. Why don’t they just use the student center, the computer labs, or their homes? Do we still need academic libraries, and if so, why?

And from among the chorus of rational behaviors arose the word sanctuary. Not sanctuary as in a place that was always and for every use absolutely quiet (although the need for quiet space, group and solitary, came up repeatedly). But the idea of a place steeped in the symbolic behaviors associated with libraries, from quiet contemplation to cultural enrichment, resonated through our entire meeting. A place where people felt safe to engage in reading, research, and memory work. A place that was dedicated to the life of the mind.

After the meeting, one of the LVTF members even walked back to my office (where I had rolled the whiteboard so it wouldn’t be erased by accident), took a whiteboard pen, underlined the word “sanctuary,” and trotted away.

Perhaps it is no accident that Milton Pflueger designed the campus so that the chapel and the library face one another like balancing weights on a scale: the life of the mind and the life of the spirit. So many people comment on the library’s “right” location, without being able to articulate exactly what they mean (visibility and symmetry are two frequent terms).

Like the Visioneer’s reaction to the floating conference room, I believe what visitors are sensing when they talk about “symmetry” is not so much a rational response (the physical symmetry) than the harmony of spirit and intellect, a perfect reflection of our university’s values. (The chapel is at the top of a steep flight of stairs, so the mind “rises” to the spirit.)

It is interesting, then, that the accumulation of print materials in our library — so rapid in the latter part of the last century that new shelving added to the main level was not even bolted or braced (a problem we are addressing this spring and beyond if need be through what we call the Big Shift, which will also restore the spacious study areas of the original library design) — is actually interfering with “sanctuary.”

We do not have enough of the right zones (quiet, cultural, group) to simultaneously support all the activities we can and should be doing.  Noisier events have to take place in the first half of the semester (because we have no dedicated event space) and students who are trying to concentrate complain about the group studiers who leak out of the study rooms we carved from former AV rooms because there isn’t enough room for them.

Meanwhile, 6% of our print materials drive 100% of our circulation, and though we have had a major surge in circulation in the last two years (so far this year alone we have checked out more books than we did for any of the academic years from 2000-2009), we will never again see the numbers we saw before the e-resources arrived. We also have 26,000 uncataloged books (shelf zombies, I call them) — well, they were cataloged, but not in this era.  I would estimate 80% of our space is devoted to roughly 5% of our usage.

I am definitely print-plus, not post-print (just as I was in the late 1990s, when I began saying that the print-based book would be an anachronism in my lifetime), but any librarian paying attention has to conclude that the future of academic library design has to be predicated on what a library does, not what a library contains.

That doesn’t mean “no more books.” It’s back to Ranganathan 101: Books are for use. (I sure hope Schnapp and Palfrey used Ranganathan in their library design course. If they didn’t, I scold them.)  “Use” can even be decorative — the books in our south event space are more trompe l’oeil than anything else — or artifact-focused; is there a librarian who doesn’t appreciate a rare-book room? But with so much memory work charged into the digital landscape, the print book has to take its place alongside all other uses — and above all, not preempt them.

Because in fact we who are true librarians have always been about what a library does. It has never really been about the book as artifact, but about the ancestral homeland the book represents, the accumulated wisdom and history that like Ipukarea adds up to far more than its literal self. The book is host and wine for the intellectual transubstantiation that for thousands of years has drawn  humans into libraries to read, to dream, to study, to be taught, to imagine, to be alone, to be with others, to grieve, and to celebrate. We who love libraries can only protect and future-proof our homeland by holding fast to these ancestral truths.

###

* There were several re-thunkings: space carved out for a men’s room, after the school went co-ed; reorientation of the circulation desk, I believe so it would be adjacent to electrical power; a journals room turned into a classroom; and then the “rezoning” activities on my watch that have replaced periodical indices and thousands of reference books with student seating, event space, and gallery space. But overall, the library even has the same furniture it had in 1958, barring a few office chairs here and there.

So I’ve been spending my time making a few changes to my proof of concept cataloging application using my phone.  A couple of things that I’ve learned along the way:

1. No matter how good the OCR is, I’m not sure it ever gets to a point where you can just happily scan a catalog card and get all the data perfectly.  You can thank ISBD punctuation for that.
2. Setting holds data in OCLC is much easier than you’d think it would be, thanks to the Z39.50 Extended properties.
3. Adding a barcode reader really was easier than I thought it would be

Right now, the proof of concept allows users search (and set holdings) to OCLC (using their login credentials) or search and download records from US LC.  You can scan a barcode to get the record, or you can scan a library card and allow the program to attempt to disassemble the metadata to determine the best search profile.  Obviously, of the methods, this one is the most dodgy, but it’s interesting to see how it works and how OCR incrementally improves. 

As I’ve been working on this, it’s been making me wonder what are the real life implications for a project like this.  Obviously, one of the goals was to make taking catalog cards and making them easier to recon.  But the ability to use the phone as a barcode scanner and catalog on the fly also makes me wonder if a tool like this could be used while shelf reading or at point of acquisition of a text, or at a circulation desk when working with a book without a record. 

One benefit of this work as well, is that since this code is being written in C#, I’m starting to think about how I might co-op some of this work in MarcEdit.  The idea being that a user could upload a set of images to a folder and then MarcEdit could OCR those images and utilize the data from those images to automatically retrieve records for that content.  I’m not quite sure how reasonable of an idea this really is at this point due to limitations with OCR, but from a technical standpoint, I have all the components I would need to make this happen.  So who knows, maybe this work will spawn something new and innovative yet.  Well see.

 

–tr

The Millennials: Infographic

http://www.pewinternet.org/Media-Mentions/2012/The-Millennials-Infographic.aspx

Stephen

 

INFOGRAPHIC: Most Quoted Books of 2011

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/infographic-most-quoted-books-of-2011_b45960

Stephen

 

Recently, the Institute for the Future (IFTF) at the University of Phoenix Research Institute released their report – Future Work Skills 2020. IFTF is renowned for its work using advancing foresight methodologies and use a range of techniques, including using gaming to crowd-source foresights.

This report examines key drivers of change that will change the work landscape and offers up the 10 work skills that will be required to be able to successfully work in such a landscape.

The Six drivers of change are:

1. Extreme longevity – people will work until later in their lives, multiple careers will be common and lifelong learning will be a necessity
2. Rise of smart machines and systems – new tools will be available to use in every part of our lives, eliminating much rote type work
3. Computational world – huge increase in sensors and processing power giving us our world in data which can then be extrapolated in an amazing range of ways
4. New media ecology – a new way of communicating will become available, taking us way beyond text
5. Super-structured organisations – new technologies will change the way organisations produce and how things are created
6. Globally connected world – the world will be connected as never before and diversity and adaptability will play greater roles in design and production

The skills that IFTF sees as being required in such a work landscape are each related to at least one of the key drivers of change (as represented using colour in the summary map above). The skills are:

1. Sense-making – being able to discover deeper meaning in what is being expressed
2. Social intelligence – being able to connect to other people more deeply and directly
3. Novel & adaptive thinking – being able to come up with solutions that are outside the box
4. Cross-cultural competency – being able to work in different cultural settings
5. Computational thinking – being able to make meaning out of vast amounts of data
6. New-media literacy – being fluent in new media forms
7. Transdisciplinary – being able to work in multiple disciplines
8. Design mindset – being able to plan our workplaces and workflows to achieve desired outcomes
9. Cognitive load management – being able to filter information and focus only on what is required
10. Virtual collaboration – being able to work effectively as part of a virtual team

These skills, at some level at least, are being taught in our schools now, but I can think of one profession at least (and we all know which), has developed these skills in its most of its current workforce, just through environment and necessity. Librarians, according to this report, even if you only have a fraction of these skills (which you will), your future is assured!

There are a lot of popular assumptions people make in this profession that lead us to make classic blunders. These can be assumptions about the change process, assumptions about our colleagues, and assumptions about our patrons. We can go into developing a new service or technology with the best of intentions and fail spectacularly because of the blinders we put on due to these strongly-held assumptions. Sometimes things fail in libraries because they weren’t a good idea or fit, but sometimes the failure is caused by the approach taken to creating change. And those failures truly can be avoided.

As I work delicately and slowly at my library to build a culture of assessment, I’ve been thinking a lot about implementation failures and thought it would be nice to look at some of the classic blunders I’ve seen in both libraries and higher ed over the past seven years related to implementation. Here’s the first.

“Why don’t we try it and see what happens” is always a good way to approach new services

No, offense intended, Andy, but I have to disagree with you here (though I certainly would have agreed strongly with you when I was new to the profession). I am definitely not a risk-averse person in my work. I have experimented many times over the years with new services, service models, and technologies. Some have been successes and some failures, but I’ve always learned from the experiences. One thing I’ve learned is that while in some cases the “try it and see what happens” mantra is a very reasonable way to approach things, other times, it can be a disaster. This Fall, I did a pilot project with some colleagues to provide synchronous online workshops for students using web conferencing software. What we learned was that there wasn’t much need for general research instruction workshops, but grad students in particular were very interested in online instruction on specific topics, such as using Zotero and Mendeley. So, based on that information, we retooled for this term with more discipline-specific sessions and I continued offering my Zotero and Mendeley workshops. In that case, trying it and seeing what happened was a totally reasonable approach because whether we were wildly successful or a total flop, we could handle either eventuality.

Back in 2006, when I was the distance learning librarian at Norwich, I tried an embedded librarian pilot for our online Masters degree programs. Having been one of those students who never asked for help at her library, I wanted to make sure I was available as possible to our students as they started out in their program. I also wanted to try and put a human face on the library, which is even more critical in the online learning environment. The first term, I embedded myself in the first seminar of our two most research-intensive classes (both of which had several sections). I had an “Ask a Librarian” discussion board (that was front and center) in each classroom where I could both answer questions and proactively provide information literacy instruction at key points in the term.

The major issue was that I had to check each WebCT classroom separately to see if there were any messages from students — there was no way to get alerts when new content was posted. It took me 4-7 hours each week to monitor the boards and answer questions. This wouldn’t have been an issue if I’d been deluged with questions, but that was far from the case. Occasionally, a single class would have a lot of questions one week (if their prof asked them to check with me about their research topics), but for the most part, questions were few and far between and some classes never used the discussion board at all. And even when I (and the program administrators) strongly encouraged faculty to encourage their students to ask for help, only some chose to do so. I was basically routing traffic from the reference desk to myself and taking 4-7 hours/week to answer anywhere between 0 and 12 questions. Clearly not a great value proposition. Had I gotten a lot of questions, it would have been worth the time spent, but for so few, it clearly wasn’t.

The big problem was that the faculty and administrators thought this was a great service as did the students who used it. Even though I’d called it a pilot, no one outside of the library saw it that way. They wanted the program to expand, not go away. It was very difficult to pull out of providing this service, but it had to be done. Had I really considered the worst-case scenarios of either wild success or failure, I would have realized that this had the potential to be a HUGE problem. If a potential consequence of not being able to sustain a service means losing credibility with faculty and/or administrators, then it’s not a risk to take lightly. Building credibility with one’s faculty is a painstaking process. It often takes years to build their trust and to get them to see you as someone who can offer something useful to them and their students. You don’t want to risk that. As anyone involved in instruction can attest, it sometimes takes just one bad session to lead a faculty member to never request instruction again.

There are a lot of awesome services we could be providing at PSU, but we are constrained by our extremely small public services staff relative to our student population. In many cases, we have to worry about what it would look like to be the “victims of our success,” because we are already stretched to the point where everything we do is an essential service. I believe strongly that “try it and see what happens” is a great idea after you visualize potential outcomes and realize that none of them will be truly damaging. If we had tons of demand for online instruction, we could have handled it. That we didn’t (except in the Zotero and Mendeley classes) also wasn’t a problem. All we really were risking was our pride. But when the risk is alienating students/faculty/administrators or seriously overworking already stressed librarians, I think there needs to be a serious discussion about how to handle that eventuality and whether it’s worth risking without understanding the service population better.

I’m a huge believer in seeing service development as an iterative process. That part of perpetual beta appeals strongly to me. I believe in trying something, assessing it, and retooling based on those results. I see that as a continuous loop that should continue to happen even when you think the service/technology is mature (since populations and their needs change). However, I also think that in some cases assessment has to start before we ever offer the service. I think perpetual beta, whether in the tech world or in libraries, can sometimes be an excuse for putting out things that are truly half-baked. Putting out something (service, technology, etc.) that risks our reputation, credibility, or relationship with our service population requires more than a “let’s try it and see what happens” attitude.

The next classic blunder I’ll be tackling: the assumption that resistance to change is bad and something one needs to defeat.

I can never decide if I am geekier or nerdier. I am such a dork.

From: MastersInIt.org

Stephen

NASA’s New Satellite Captures Amazing Hi-Res Image of Earth

http://mashable.com/2012/01/26/hi-res-image-earth/

This is the newest and most high resolution image of our blue marble since 1972!

I love this!

Stephen

 

In this podcast, Michael Cart, Infopeople’s resident book maven, talks about the best books of the year 2011. Titles and articles mentioned: Best Books: Ann Patchett. STATE OF WONDER Stephen King. 11/22/63 Robert K. Massie. CATHERINE THE GREAT My favorite: Carol Birch. JAMRACH’S MENAGERIE Review in Booklist, 5/15/2011 George R. R. Martin: A [...]

Perhaps it was the initial threat of cancellation that made my ALA Midwinter experience so endearing. Regardless, it brought about a renewed love for libraries and for all the amazing work of librarians, ALA members and staff, and for the organizations that support and sustain that work. Wearing more “hats” than ever, I traveled through the conference with others committed to showcasing and sustaining rural libraries, public access technology, workforce development efforts, youth literature, and equity of access for all! The weekend was a poignant reminder of just how grateful I am to be in a profession committed to ensuring universal and equitable access to public resources and services. I’m sending this conference report/love letter out to all who share this commitment, but especially to those of you who were back at your libraries doing the great work you do so well!

Directly from the airport, I joined attendees at the OCLC Americas Regional Council Symposium unfortunately too late to hear keynote Sara Lacy (recording soon to be posted) but glad to have heard OCLC’s Cathy De Rosa, share a preview of librarian perception data collected in a recent OCLC Membership Survey. Thanks to Jamie LaRue for highlighting from his notes some of the very interesting librarian perspectives on their library priorities, how they stay connected, and where they think OCLC should focus efforts. With WebJunction webinars near and dear to my heart, I was particularly pleased to see confirmation of my gut feeling that library staff are more often using webinars to stay up to date and to connect with others. Of the public library responses, 43% of library directors, 50% of managers, and 52% of librarians use webinars to support their ongoing learning and development. We’ll be sure to let you know when the full results of the survey are released.

Day two began with a visit to the Office for Literacy and Outreach Services (OLOS) Advisory Committee meeting. I was very excited to hear from other committees that work with the OLOS office and especially looking forward to the upcoming release of a new toolkit focused on adult literacy. I also learned about an ALA grant project with Dollar General Literacy Foundation, the American Dream Starts @ your Library project, which has enabled libraries around the country to develop and implement programs engaging English language learners in their communities.

Later that morning, I led the ALA Rural, Native, and Tribal Libraries of All Kinds Committee (RNTLOAK) meeting where we shared an update on the distribution and promotion of the recently updated Small but Powerful Toolkit for Winning Support for your Rural Library revised in collaboration with OLOS, RNTLOAK and the Association for Rural & Small Libraries (ARSL). If you haven’t yet explored the toolkit and want to learn more, check out last month’s webinar. We also talked about our committee’s ALA Annual plans and are very excited to be co-sponsoring two programs in Anaheim with OLOS, ARSL and the American Indian Library Association (AILA). The two programs will explore Advocacy and Fundraising for your Rural or Tribal Library and Building and Sustaining Strategic Plans and Partnerships in your Rural or Tribal Community. And thank you to Stephen Matthews, our committee’s ALA Executive Board Liaison, for sharing the opportunity made available by Annual Conference planners for attendees to present or facilitate outside of traditional program presentations. Learn more and submit a proposal for a Conversation Starter or Ignite Session before February 19.

Following a lovely Saturday lunch with Texas librarians (at Cindi’s Deli, where I ate lunch on Sunday too! mmm), I attended a forum and group discussion on the Edge Initiative, a national effort to introduce benchmarks for high quality public access technology in libraries. The session included a “sneak peek” at a draft of the benchmarks and some insightful and engaged table discussions. Thanks to PLA’s Mary Hirsch and TechSoup’s Sarah Washburn who both provide a summary of their table’s discussions. WebJunction’s Kendra Morgan shared a bit about our involvement in the initiative in December and we’ll keep you posted on next steps!

Project Compass staff wrapped up the day with a state library focus group to share year-two outcomes of Project Compass and to get input on one final event we’re planning for the spring: a national convening of librarians focused on responding to economic impact on communities, supporting 21st century skills development and building sustainable partnerships. We’ll have more details very soon!

The OCLC Update Breakfast was, as always, very informative, even to this OCLC staffer! I just have to share one cool project from the OCLC Research folks, the WorldCat Identities Network, a new way to visually explore the interconnectivity and relationships between WorldCat Identities.

The climax of my love letter comes with Sunday afternoon’s Small but Powerful Forum, which brought together a small but powerful group of attendees representing state libraries, regional trainers, rural librarians, and my good friends from TechSoup for Libraries, to hear from Dr. Robert Martin about UNT’s powerful PEARL project, Tina Hager about her powerful Texas rural library collaborations with community partners and more on the Small but Powerful Toolkit for Winning Support for your Rural Library. But if you know me at all, you know the table discussions, world cafe-style, are always my favorite part of a conference. The all-too-short time to brainstorm the “core qualities of rural leadership” was a good start, but we’ll have to keep the conversation alive!

Early Monday morning, I felt honored to be invited to join in the great Midwinter tradition, honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at this year’s Sunrise Celebration, Honoring a Legacy that Still Inspires. On behalf of RNTLOAK and ARSL, I was invited to join many other association, committee and round table leadership in a presentation of quotes from King’s legacy, inspirational speakers, and always my favorite, some singing! I touched base with folks who are co-chairing this fall’s 2012 Joint Conference of Librarians of Color (JCLC) in Kansas City. I attended the first ever JCLC conference in Dallas, and similar to the ARSL conference, it is an intimate but powerful gathering, with a focus on exploring issues of diversity in libraries.

And since I was up at that hour, I was lucky enough to attend the Youth Media Awards, the “Oscars” of libraryland. You may not know that I came to libraries as a children’s bookseller with my first ever library job as a children’s services substitute. It was a real treat to sit amongst the thousands of youth librarians gathered for the exciting event, knowing they’ve probably read most all of the books and have already done the work of getting the outstanding books into the hands of readers. You can watch the webcast of the event or videos of the winning authors and illustrators. I have enormous respect for all who bring these works of literary and visual art into being and for the committees who award them the recognition they deserve.

I’m sorry I didn’t take pictures this time round, but I do recommend browsing the ALAMW12 pool on Flickr to catch a glimpse of the love in the air.

As Louie Schwartzberg says, “we protect what we fall in love with” and so, may we continue to protect what we love, including our libraries.

In love,
JP

In groups, people often approach suggestions as if the response needs to be a “yes” or a “no”.  Alright, we know that “maybe” is also an option but that’s really a show stopper without more conversation.  I’m wondering if now more than ever, the problem is that people are so stressed for time that the [...]

Scholarly Kitchen said:

“Libraries have a great potential role in marketing e-books, but if they continue to think of themselves as the preservationists of physical artifacts, the emerging e-book platforms will leapfrog them.”

To which I comment:

Libraries no longer generally think of themselves as the preservationists of physical artifacts, and most are keenly aware of the inadequacies and frustrations of e-book offerings currently available to them. Libraries and librarians are definitely struggling to find our place in the changing world, but increasingly, that means being a gathering place, a community place, in addition to a place in which or through which patrons access collections. Libraries do want to work with publishers (and are, in fact) and with Amazon; your consignment scenario sounds like a good one, except that the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library would probably stand to make Amazon a lot more money in the form of Prime sign-ups and Kindle book sales than it could with library co-sales.

Libraries that offer e-book checkouts to their patrons are offering the only deals that have been struck at this point. There are stand-out exceptions, such as Douglas County (CO) Libraries, the nascent unglue.it, and authors who license their works in Creative Commons, like Cory Doctorow. There are e-book champions, like Librarian By Day Bobbi Newman, and the Librarian in Black Sarah Houghton. As you mention, ALA is meeting with publishers and has task forces of smart people talking about the problems. Libraries stood by while music transformed from physical to digital and now offer download packages that must be minuscule in comparison to iTunes sales. Books, however, are a library’s traditional core offering; what will a library without books look like? More distressing is the question: what would the have-nots do if we can’t figure this out?

Edit: I left this (without links) as a comment on the above post, but it has not yet been approved.

Here are a few of the stories that caught my attention this week in the publishing space.

Two surveys indicate a bright future for digital publishing

Back in June, a survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed ereader ownership in the U.S. had doubled in six months. As impressive as those statistics were, the latest survey released by the company this week showed that both tablet and ereader ownership in the U.S. nearly doubled again, but in a much shorter time frame between mid-December and early January (the holiday season, of course).

The survey also indicated that "[t]he number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January." And ownership wasn't gender biased in terms of tablets: The survey showed that the same percentage — 19% — of both males and females own a tablet. Ownership of ereaders, however, skewed female: 21% of women in the U.S. own ereaders but just 16% of the men do.

Pew attributed the dramatic growth not only to holiday shopping, but to the timely release of devices priced in the double digits by Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Another survey released this week by RBC Capital indicated that Amazon may be making more bank per Kindle Fire device than initially thought — meaning it may not be losing money on each sale in the long term. Eric Savitz at Forbes quoted analyst Ross Sandler:

"Our assumption is that AMZN could sell 3-4 million Kindle Fire units in Q4, and that those units are accretive to company-average operating margin within the first six months of ownership. Our analysis assigns a cumulative lifetime operating income per unit of $136, with a cumulative operating margin of over 20%."

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt strikes a deal with Amazon

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Amazon Publishing East Coast announced a deal this week in which HMH will publish the print editions of Amazon's East Coast titles and, as Laura Hazard Owen pointed out, "will distribute them everywhere in North America outside of Amazon.com."

Owen astutely observed that this agreement may pave the way for Amazon to get its books in the hands of Barnes & Noble brick-and-mortar shoppers, a feat Amazon has yet to accomplish.

Also this week, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a feature piece on Larry Kirshbaum, the man behind Amazon Publishing East Coast's success thus far — or "Amazon's hit man," as Businessweek dubbed him. The feature also dipped into the history of Amazon Publishing and its relationship to traditional publishing and the Big Six. It's well worth the read.

A call to arms for libraries

Much of the current discourse around libraries centers around ebook availability. But the importance of the future existence of libraries goes way beyond whether or not the digital version of James Patterson's latest bestseller can be had with a library card. A Slideshare post by Ned Potter this week elevated the discussion to a higher plane. Some highlights from the presentation include:

• "The top 10 jobs of 2010 didn't exist in 2004 — who can provide relevant up-to-date information in areas in which none of us are educated? Libraries can."
• "There are three billion Google searches per day — libraries can provide access to the Internet and help people use it safely."
• "Librarians are information professionals — they can help sort, assess, collate and present information in our age of information overload."

Here's the presentation in full:

To stay current with the library discussion, other library experts to follow include Peter Brantley, Andrew Albanese, Justin Hoenke, and Sarah Houghton (to name just a few).

Related:

• The Library of Congress and Twitter: An FAQ
• The problem with Amazon's Kindle Owners' Lending Library
• The emerging marketplace for social data
• The Demise of the Public Library
• More Publishing Week in Review coverage

Here's a look at the top stories published across O'Reilly sites this week.

On pirates and piracy
Mike Loukides: "I'm not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven't paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity."

Microsoft's plan for Hadoop and big data
Strata conference chair Edd Dumbill takes a look at Microsoft's plans for big data. By embracing Hadoop, the company aims to keep Windows and Azure as a standards-friendly option for data developers.

Coming soon to a location near you: The Amazon Store?
Jason Calacanis says an Amazon retail presence isn't out of the question and that AmazonBasics is a preview of what's to come.

Survey results: How businesses are adopting and dealing with data
Feedback from a recent Strata Online Conference suggests there's a large demand for clear information on what big data is and how it will change business.

Why the fuss about iBooks Author?
Apple doesn't have an objective to move the publishing industry forward. With iBooks Author, the company sees an opportunity to reinvent this industry within its own closed ecosystem.

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Strata 2012, Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work. Save 20% on Strata registration with the code RADAR20.

'Tis the season for political infographics, what with the 2012 presidential election well underway as well as this week's State of the Union address. All of that speech-making provided plenty of opportunity for data visualization.

Following the State of the Union address, The New York Times posted the following visualization comparing "selected words used by President Obama in his State of the Union addresses and by Republican presidential candidates in their debates, television interviews and major speeches since May."

See the full visualization.

Although this example is just a "simple" bar graph, these sorts of visualizations are becoming increasingly popular in making political arguments — whether by politicians or by newspapers.

You can view the full visualization here.

Found a great visualization? Tell us about it

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We're always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there's a visualization you think we should know about.

More Visualizations:

• Visualizing SOPA tweets
• Visualizing your friends' Facebook likes
• AntiMap lets users capture and visualize their movements
• Mapping traffic casualties
• Visualizing Bach
• More Visualizations of the Week

Earlier this year, I chatted with Anna Lewis (@anna_cn) and Oliver Brooks (@cn_oli) about their new startup, ValoBox — a platform that allows readers to consume books by the page, chunk, or as a whole. The duo has been hard at work through the summer and fall, and ValoBox has launched. I got in touch with Brooks to see how the platform and development have progressed. Our interview follows.

How has ValoBox evolved since our interview in May?

Oliver Brooks: The product has stayed laser focused on keeping things light and simple. It has gone through a lot of tweaks to the user interface and system, to boil it down as much as possible.

ValoBox is really comprised of two applications, the publishing system and the ValoBox reader.

The changes to the publishing system have focused on ease of integration use and quality of output. The system can now create a ValoBox book automatically from an ONIX and EPUB file feed. A lot of effort has gone into making sure the content is presented perfectly, even when split into small, purchasable sections. We've also built a system similar to Google Analytics for books, which provides the publisher with information for each book, such as where on the web is best for selling books (Twitter feeds, blogs, etc.) and details about how each book is used.

In our earlier interview you discussed a "premium layer for the web." Is that still guiding your efforts?

Oliver Brooks: Absolutely. We believe books are just the start of our game — we see ValoBox as suitable for premium articles, audio, video, and even web pages. We think premium content should integrate with the web rather than be a separate ecosystem.

The existing book reader interface will be one of many portals into premium content. We have designs for interfaces that don't intrude on the design of a website at all. When you want to buy something, you will see ValoBox branding and have an easy way to purchase the content. As almost everyone is always signed into a system of some kind — be it Twitter, Facebook or Google — our vision is that you can always access premium content with just a click.

How does ValoBox work?

Oliver Brooks: It's an HTML5 application that runs inside any modern web browser. This means you can access it from any website, on any device wherever you are. Content is stored in the cloud and streamed securely from our servers on demand. A future enhancement will mean you won't even have to be online to read books you have read before; they'll automatically be stored on your device for later.

How does ValoBox help readers?

Oliver Brooks: The core benefit is accessibility to premium content. ValoBox lets you access an entire catalog, and you can choose which pages you want and buy them for cents at a time.

So, you might see a book reviewed on your favorite blog or hear about an interesting topic from a Twitter feed. A couple of clicks and cents later, you can be reading what they are talking about. We think it's ridiculous that books are locked behind lengthy and expensive checkout and download processes, and then require special applications to read when videos and audio are available with a click.

Another huge bonus is our social retail system. If you like what you read and think you know someone else who would like it, you can share it with an embed or a link. Anything that is bought from your share will earn you a 25% cut.

How does it help authors and publishers?

Oliver Brooks: Authors will have an awesome tool for promoting their books. Books can be integrated with their websites and social media promotions, providing the tip of the pyramid leading to many other shares and embeds. All the activity is tracked in real time to give an unparalleled level of knowledge about where books perform best. Don't forget that if an author sells the books, they will not only get their royalty but also the 25% ValoBox social retail cut.

As for publishers, they get a great way to empower their readership to create new and sustainable sales channels. Imagine thousands of innovative readers finding the right places for books inside their personal and professional networks. No traditional retailer could dream of going into places such as a university e-learning environment or a team management wiki, or of garnering sales from inside a full-scale social network. Just like authors, publishers have real-time, detailed analytics of how each book is being bought. They also have a view of how all of their books are read across the entire web.

I like to think of ValoBox as a way to realize the value of creating a symbiotic relationship between the content creation and consumption communities, rewarding each one for their efforts appropriately.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Related:

• A premium layer for web-based content
• Sneak Peek — 24symbols, ValoBox, Appitude, Active Reader and OnSwipe
• What if a book is just a URL?
• Which e-reader apps do you use?

It was 56 degrees in Boston on Tuesday. It wasn't a record (you need to go back to 1999 for that, when it hit 62), but it definitely is another page in what has been a very, very bizarre winter (so far, the largest snowfall occurred back on Halloween, for example). Call it climate change, call it elves, call it sunspot variations, but whatever you call it, call it weird.

Meanwhile, while we wait for the the great Northeast Football War to commence, a few notes on the week's events.

Sometimes, you need a button

I suspect that somewhere, once a day, a journalist is taking a pair of 20-sided dice and rolling on a table called "What product Apple might work on next." The latest incarnation of this madness is a rumor that Apple might enter the smart remote control market with a touchscreen product.

The problem is, there are already touchscreen apps for the iPhone and iPad that talk to remote control widgets. And they suck. As much as Apple hates buttons and clutter, remote controls need buttons, or at least a few. The problem is kinesthetic, and has to do with the fact that many activities that we do with a remote control involve looking up at the screen while using the remote, such as skipping through commercials. Touch screens, by their nature, don't provide tactical feedback, which means you need to look down to see what you're pushing.

This is a powerful reminder that as much as we want cool interfaces and minimal design aesthetics, sometimes it's more important that the darn thing does what we want it to do. The Apple crew has (to date) been great at paring devices down to their essential functionality, but it may meet its match in the remote.

Maybe Apple will come up with a work-around for this. One answer would be to have a duplicate of what's on the TV appear on the remote, so that you could see what you were doing while pushing buttons. But that would require DVR, Blu-ray and cable companies to adopt a universal way to get the video streaming to the controller. Of course, they could make it only work with the Apple TV (and rumored new Apple televisions), but that would be vendor lock-in, and Apple never does that ...

Time to invest in disk drive companies

Should you have any doubts that Big Brother is watching more and more, Australia is now proposing that telcos and ISPs be required to retain data about all emails and phone calls made in the country, and make it available to law enforcement officials. Apart from the privacy issues, think about the data management nightmare that would be — because it's not just a month or a year that they would be required to retain, but all records in perpetuity (or until the policy is overturned). This means that providers will need to figure out how to store this data in a way that will allow it to be accessed decades into the future.

Like SOPA and PIPA, this is an example of legislators writing checks that the providers have to pay. Add in the U.S. Patent Office, and you have a grand collection of bureaucrats and politicians trying to regulate technologies that they understand not a wit. Maybe it's time for all the technically adept of the world to form their own country, but I fear civil war would break out the first time they had to decide if Greedo shot first.

Open source heart code

Software operating in life-critical environments, from aircraft to medical devices, is nothing new. Unlike "Angry Birds," however, bugs in this kind of software come with a high price tag. Just this year, there were disturbing reports of hacks that allowed third parties to override the dosage delivered by insulin pumps.

Now, one lawyer has stepped forward to demand that she have access to the software that drives the pacemaker that was to be implanted in her. GNOME Foundation director Karen Sandler is spearheading a campaign to have the source code to implantable devices be open source so that it can be inspected for vulnerabilities and bugs.

As more software is embedded into high-risk devices (such as the autonomous vehicles Google is getting ready to deploy or software for voting machines), the potential for accidental (or intentional) disasters grow. How does society weigh the intellectual property rights of the manufacturers against the rights of the public to ensure that they are safe?

Got news?

Please send tips and leads here.

Related:

• The hijacking of an insulin pump
• More Developer Week in Review coverage

Create Your Own Luck

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I know it works.

Stephen

 

74% of book buyers have never bought an ebook

via TeleRead & InfoDocket

January 25, 2012

http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/74-of-book-buyers-have-never-bought-an-ebook/

“Last year was widely perceived to be a year of outrageous  e-book growth, but some new research suggests otherwise. According to  new data from Bowker and the Book Industry Study Group, the number of  book buyers who also purchased an e-book increased by 17 percent in  2011, compared to 9 percent in 2010 – well below the 25 to 30 percent  growth that some had hoped for.

E-books now make up 26 percent of adult fiction purchases, compared  to 11 percent of children’s book purchases and 3 percent of cookbook  purchases.

Seventy-four percent of book buyers have never bought an e-book (and  14 percent of those actually own an e-reader or tablet but choose not to  use it to read e-books).

Read the Complete Article”

Yes, the emerging book and reading environment will be a hybrid environment for a very long time.

Stephen

 

1. Data Jurisdiction -- information from the NineFold hosting company in Australia. Has some Aussie-specific content, but would be great to see this internationalized. (via Lachlan Hardy)
2. Anatomy of an Idea (Steven Johnson) -- people who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly. Lovely glimpse at how he works, chasing trails of ideas down and using Google and Twitter for research. (via Maria Popova)
3. Autograph Stickers for Kindle Books (Clay Johnson) -- clever solution to the "but I can't get my Kindle book autographed!".
4. TextExt.js -- Javascript to extend textboxes with tags, prompting, autocomplete, and more. (via Javascript Weekly)

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Pete Coco, formerly of Grand Valley State University, now Humanities Liaison at Wheaton College in Norton, MA.

With the continued improvements being made to web-scale discovery tools like Proquest’s Summon and EBSCO’s Discovery Service, access to library resources is reaching a singularity of sorts: frictionless searching. Providing a unified interface through which patrons can access nearly all of your library’s collection has an obvious appeal on all sides. Users get the googley familiarity and convenience of a singular, wide-ranging search box and, according to a recent case study done at Grand Valley State University, the reduced friction patrons face when using library resources correlates to an increase — potentially dramatic — in the frequency with which they access them. While these tools will continue to be tweaked and refined, it’s difficult to imagine an easier process for getting students to scholarly sources.

That’s the good news, and the story you’re likely getting from your sales rep. And while none of it is untrue, in my role as a teaching librarian I’ve seen more undergraduate students struggle to get what they need from web-scale discovery than I’ve seen benefit from its obvious conveniences. These students often know intuitively how to get to results from Summon’s search box; often they figure out on their own how to get to the item itself if it is available in full-text. In the library’s statistics, these might be counted fairly as successful searches. But when I ask the student whether the article at hand is what they wanted, I get one response far more frequently than all others: “Not… exactly.”

Web-scale discovery is doing about as much for these students as we could reasonably expect, and, in doing so, offers teaching librarians a challenge and an opportunity. Both are at root about our thinking, and they stem from the same fact: these tools offer an unprecedented convenience. For all the familiarity it allows students, our decision to make library tools more similar to commercial web search can reinforce the idea — primarily amongst students, but also, potentially, amongst administrators making personnel and workload decisions — that information literacy instruction isn’t necessary because students know how to get what they want from Google. If the new tool is like Google, then why does it require instruction?

There’s a lot to unpack in that question. First and foremost, what web-scale discovery borrows from Google does not make it Google. Searching Summon for scholarly articles will never be like searching Google — not because Summon cannot approximate Google’s user experience, but because scholarly communications will never be like the things students use Google to find.

Consider the freshman student looking for a pizza parlor that will deliver to his dorm. He comes to his commercial web search with a knowledge base and a self-defined need: pizza literacy, let’s call it. Having eaten and enjoyed pizza countless times in the past, he knows what it is and the range of forms it can take. Over time, he’s developed a preference for sausage, but tonight he wants pepperoni. Perhaps in this instance, he’s working under unique constraints — he saw a coupon somewhere, and is hoping to find it online. Whatever his specific pizza need, could there be any doubt that this student has the literal and conceptual vocabulary to effectively communicate that need to Google? In a way that will undoubtedly yield him with an informed pizza-choice?

Of course not. But consider the same student, his belly now full, turning to the research paper for his freshman composition course. Unlike his soul-deep craving for pepperoni, his need for “2-3 peer-reviewed articles” has been externally defined. If she is like too many of her peers, the professor assigning this requirement hasn’t done so in detail nor explained her pedagogical purpose for including it. She has given our hero but one bread crumb: go to the library website. Assuming his library’s discovery tool is featured prominently, it can potentially spare him the UI nightmare that would otherwise be the process of selecting a database to search. That’s quite a mercy, but it really only helps him with the first of many steps.

To find the scholarly articles that will meet the paper requirement, the student will need navigate a host of alien concepts, vocabularies and controversies that will, at least at first, drive his experience with peer-reviewed scholarship. And while some degree of anxiety is probably useful to his learning experience, there can be little doubt that the process would be easier and of more lasting value to the student who has support—human support—as he goes through it.

Put another way: good learning is best facilitated by good pedagogy. The tool is not the pedagogy and it’s hard to imagine how it ever could be. Because of all the concepts and conventions implicit to scholarship, the scholarly resource that is not improved for students by expert intervention is and always will be a chimera. The future of teaching librarianship as a profession will only demand more vigilance on this point.

But for all these caveats, with the right framing discovery can be an excellent pedagogical tool. Because it relieves so many searches of the burden of that first question — which database should I search? — we can use our time with students to construct, together, answers to questions we all find more compelling. What is peer review? Why does it matter? Why would a professor use it as a standard for student research? Each can be elegantly demonstrated with discovery, and best of all, students can demonstrate it for themselves and each other while my guidance focuses on the concepts and conventions underneath all the clicking.

Rather than giving in to the temptation to compare discovery to Google as a means of marketing it to students, we should go out of our way to contrast the two. What is the difference between the commercial internet search and the library tool? What is the purpose each exists to serve? How does the commercial internet search engine decide what to show you? How does discovery? You might be surprised how sophisticated students can be when they’re given a space suited to sophistication. Discovery can help to create that space in your information literacy sessions.

Even in freshman courses, I’ve found that I’m able to dive right in to activities that lead to genuine and rewarding discussion. In one, for example, I have students choose a search term — usually the name of a superhero — and ask them to search it in both Google and in Summon (with the box checked for “scholarly” results only). To the average student my sessions, the distinction between thedarkknight.warnerbros.com and Batman and Robin in the Nude, or Class and Its Exceptions is instructive on its face. Discovery makes juxtaposition like this one quick, fluid, and highly demonstrable. My students don’t need to read more than the title and abstract of the latter to have a sense of the distinction at hand.

Discovery is also a great tool for “citation chasing.” Projecting a full citation in front of the classroom, I’ll preface the activity with a brief discussion of the citation itself. What is this text Pete is projecting on the board? Why does it exist? What are its component parts, and what do they tell us about the object it describes? Then I poll the students: how many of you think you could find the full-text of the article this citation describes using the library website? Depending on the class, anywhere from none to a half of the students raise their hands. Without discovery, I wouldn’t be able to say what I say to them next: The truth is you all can. So please: do. Within three minutes, the entire class has the full-text article on their own screens.

Discovery is not the tool for every task. Controlled vocabularies don’t federate well, and the student asking very specific questions of the literature is better off going straight to the disciplinary index. Known item searches proceeding from partial information are a recurrent challenge. We must be careful with the way we describe the scale of discovery to students. In our attempts to market discovery as convenient and easy, we may in fact be selling them on a product that doesn’t exist. In the absence of a clear purpose, convenience is not convenient.

But really, has convenience ever really been our only goal as educators? The commercial web has no doubt rattled the profession, and we must respond decisively to the vast changes it has brought to the information landscape. But when we start to speak primarily in terms of convenience, the risk is that we turn away from the terms of learning and pedagogy. It’s a choice you can make without even meaning to make it. The librarian who is able to choose between user education and user convenience, certainly, has the easier job. But will it be a job worth doing? Will his users get what they need from him? The hard thing, really, is find ways to give our users both with the fewest trade-offs. This is the tension at the heart of information literacy instruction. Romantics, we want to have it all. And so we should.

Apple has decided to attempt yet another media disruption, this time focusing on reinventing the textbook market. This move was foretold in the biography of Steve Jobs, where Walter Isaacson wrote about Jobs:

“He wanted to disrupt the textbook industry, and save the spines of spavined students bearing backpacks by creating electronic texts and curriculum material for the iPad."

The details of the announcement should definitely interest anyone in libraries, but especially school libraries (and, I think, academic libraries as well). The first announcement was the simple fact that Apple is getting into the electronic textbook market, providing tools for making electronic textbooks with rich media embedded and selling them in the iBooks store for the iPad. Apple also announced that they had signed three of the largest producers of textbooks in the US to be partners in the project; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson.

There were three different software products announced as well: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTuneU for iPad. iBooks 2 gives you access to the textbook store, as well as adding features like highlighting and note-taking, definitions, lesson reviews and study cards. The iTunes U app is a shortcut into the previously iTunes focused iTunes U portal for free curricular content from a number of colleges and universities across the world. iBooks Author is the most interesting of the products, as well as being the one that’s generated the most discussion, almost entirely because of its end-user license agreement.

iBooks Author allows for the creation of media-rich eBooks for the iBook Store, or exportable to PDF or TXT files without the fancy media embeds. Unfortunately for everyone, Apple chose to not support the emerging EPUB3 standard for import and export. This is an Apple-Only playground for the time being, with no import facilities at all. You start from a template, and build out an ebook using tools that are reminiscent of Apple’s own Keynote presentation software...it’s by far the best interface I’ve seen for creating complicated ebooks. It’s a real shame that Apple chose to restrict the output to only working in iBooks...understandable from their point of view, but overall I think the wrong call.

The real controversy comes in the EULA for Author. Included in the agreement is a section that reads:

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;

(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

The commercial clause is the one that has most people worried, and seems to be unique in the world of EULAs. You’d be hard pressed to find another piece of software that limits your ability to sell the output of said program...they exist, but this is far more direct and draconian than any previous license that I’m aware of. For authors who want to use the tool, this locks them into distribution via the iBooks store, which means that libraries and librarians are going to be cut out of purchasing them for collections in any real way. On the other hand, it means that if libraries themselves want to use the tool to produce tools to help users and distribute them for free, they can easily and quickly do so with iBooks Author.

Apple is starting their textbook rollout with titles designed for high school (grades 9-12 in the US), which is surprising given the intense political and educational decision-making that goes into choosing public school textbooks in the US. I had expected them to start with College and University textbooks where the decision to use or not use is almost entirely up to the professor teaching the class. This is almost certainly just a preliminary trial, and I suppose if they hook the high schoolers then the expectation of iPad textbooks might trickle up to the world of higher education. 

These are far from a sure thing, but as the last 15 years shows us, it’s not a good bet to bet against Apple when it comes to selling things to consumers. Libraries should be ready to answer questions about these things over the next year or so as Apple tries to make textbooks into another conquest in their personal electronics and services empire.

We just wrapped up the second session of Sarah Houghton and Paul Signorelli’s workshop Library Analytics: Inspiring Positive Action through Web User Data. The slides for the event are below. Have further questions or comments? Whether you participated in the event or not, feel free to chime in via the comments area below!

Paul and Sarah’s Slides
How Libraries Analyze and Act