Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog

Phil Bradley recently posted a list of Library 2.0/Web 2.0 books. There are a lot. I’ve recently read several of them,  and I’ve been left wanting more. Not because the writing was bad or the content was bad or wrong or anything like that, but because none of them really told me much that I don’t already know. Sure, I picked up a few things, but overall I’ve read four books that basically told me the same things (blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, gaming) in slightly different words, with slightly different emphasis.

Again, I want to stress that it’s not that the content was poor; more that I felt I knew 80-90% of it, and so would anyone who reads the same sort of blogs as I do. Clearly, then, the books are targeted at a different audience, one more comfortable offline, but (presumably) interested enough in learning about new technologies to read a book about them. A target audience of outsiders, not insiders.

So that’s my problem: I’d really like to read a book that was written for people who already have some basic knowledge, who don’t need to read a two-page explanation of what a blog is*.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

The books I’ve read would all make useful reading for your non-blog-reading colleagues/managers. I’m thinking they’d be good to pass to a busy manager, to give them a brief idea of what you’re talking about when you discuss these technologies.

The books:

 
Phil Bradley: How to use Web 2.0 in Your Library
Meredith Farkas: Social Software in Libraries
Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk: Library 2.0
Susan Gibbons: The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student
The first three do a good job of summarising the state of play in the sort of subjects that the authors write about on their blogs. I found the third gave an interesting and clear summary of the authors’ model of Library 2.0, but I felt like I wanted more detail on how to do some of the things suggested.

Susan Gibbons has a fascinating book to write about ‘Net Gen’ students, but this isn’t it, unfortunately. Her library took the innovative step of hiring an anthropologist to study studetnt behavior, and inform planning. A book-length write-up of that project would have been incredibly interesting. What we have instead is a very good initial chapter which discusses the characteristics of ‘Net Gen’ students, followed by several more which discuss gaming, blogs, wikis, folksonomies etc - and unfortunately present little evidence that ‘Net Gen’ students specifically are using these technologies (the gaming chapter cites research from 2001, showing the average age of gamers as 26, which would make those gamers Gen X, not Net Gen).

I do want to stress that I found the first couple of chapters to be highly worth reading (Gibbons is making me want to read Howe and Strauss’s work, whereas I’d previously been turned off even by their supporters). I also liked the way Gibbons stressed that her arguments applied to American college-age library users only; too often there’s a tendency for American writers** to talk about “libraries” when they really mean “some American libraries” - not all of us worldwide are in the exact same situation.

So, if you’re reading this, my recommendations? Have a quick read through either Phil Bradley’s or Meredith Farkas’s book (or maybe both). Don’t read it word for word, but pick out the websites and the software and the examples and use them to inform your own work. Hand the book to your less tech-oriented colleagues for a more in-depth read. Read the first couple of chapters of the other two books, they contain a lot of food for thought.

For the authors? I’d love to see the sequels to these books, with advanced tips and tricks, and with lots of examples and case studies of libraries who’ve successfully implemented these technologies.

I’d also love to see more bloggers writing about the books they’ve read.

*I was amused to see that one book, quite by chance, had included text from this very blog - Phil Bradley’s illustration of a blog was a screenshot of The Shifted Librarian’s homepage, on which Jenny Levine was quoting me.

**Not necessarily the writers I’ve mentioned here.

John Blyberg argues that Library 2.0 has been debased by (some) librarians and by vendors looking for a quick technology fix. This is really one of the best posts (and comments threads) that I’ve read in a long time. Really. Go read.

John’s post has sparked some intelligent reactions across the biblioblogosphere, which I’ll be noting in this and a few subsequent posts. I want to break my response up, because I think John makes a number of excellent points.

Firstly, I think John deserves enormous credit for the following:

How and where we interface with our users is where the rubber meets the road and should merit a little more thought then simply thrusting a MySpace page in their face or building a new library in Second Life–a service our users overwhelmingly do not use and, which seems to me, like a creepy post-apocalyptic wasteland. I’ll even turn the tables on myself and admit that I was wrong about local tagging in the OPAC. SOPAC was by-and-large a success, but its use of user-contributed tags is a failure.

How many of us are willing to admit, publicly, that a widely-lauded initiative that we introduced, is “a failure” (even partially)? Not many, I’d imagine. Well said, John.

I’d like to suggest that John hasn’t really failed though - what he’s done is found a method that hasn’t worked (or hasn’t worked yet, or didn’t work in his particular case). That’s a good thing! Now he (and we) know that we need to try something different. The original idea was good (IMHO), but the execution failed, because (John suggests) a small group of taggers, with an interest in one particular area (manga) contributed most of the tags. There weren’t enough tags contributed by readers with other interests.

OK, how can we react to this? One way might be to increase the number of people providing tags. How can we do that? Easy - aggregate data from LibraryThing or WorldCat or Amazon, all of which contain user contributed tags (though not always good ones - the first example shows tags used to make a political point, the second that some of the most frequently-used tags on the last Harry Potter were things like “Harry Potter” and “Deathly Hollows”).

Thanks to John, we’ve discovered that a single library system might not have enough users who care about tagging to build a meaningful collection of tags. Now we know that, we can try a different approach.

I’m somewhat late here, but these are worth reading if you missed them…

Meredith Farkas links to a couple of interesting posts on libraries in social networks, by Kate Sheehan and Andrea Mercado: both argue that librarians often don’t understand the cultural context of social networks, even if they understand the technology.

Librarian in Black’s Top Tech Trends for 2008 (the presentation from ALA also blogged by Lauren Pressley).

Also via Librarian In Black, Trailfire, basically a tool for people to create pathfinders to websites on a particular topic.

The Library of Congress is now making its images available via Flickr, enabling users to contribute additional information about the images (The Shifted Librarian; librarian.net).

Michaels Casey and Stephens on how a transparent library should cope with anonymous online criticism.

Micheal Stephens links to a Read/Write Web article on 10 common objections to social media - with answers.

The Google Generation may not be so good at Googling, after all (via LibraryStuff). Some food for thought here for libraries (the article discusses a report (PDF) sponsored by the British Library and JISC).

Meredith Farkas has a long, interesting post on her project to develop her library’s online subject guides:

You could hardly call these things subject guides; they were just a bunch of Web links in different areas. Some were more useful than others. The guide for “science” had three links. In addition, a very high percentage of the links were dead, because it wasn’t anyone’s job to check them.

Meredith wanted to develop guides that were easier to update than static webpages. She considered del.icio.us (worries about relying on a 3rd party site led her to reject this option),  LibGuides (a subscription service that looks to have some very useful functionality - not all needed in her case),  and some open source guides (looked useful, but would her successor be able to maintain the software?). She finally settled on using a wiki, for its flexibility, ability to give colleagues only the rights they need, ability to include student/faculty contributions if desired, searchability, and ability to be assign pages to categories.

I’ve also been thinking about the subject guides I maintain. They’re a fairly long list of static pages. I think the content is reasonably good, but it does take a fair amount of time to check the pages - URL-rot is still a major problem on the web (which surprises me, I would have thought that most organisations have settled on their site layouts, and wouldn’t be changing URLs much -but obviously they do - and don’t leave re-directs).

I’m still quite interested in the idea of using del.icio.us, while noting Meredith’s concerns about the effect on our guides if the site went down. The advantages I see are that del.icio.us incorporates tagging, meaning a site can sit in more than one place in the subject guide (sure, I could do that now and manually add a site to several pages, but that gets clumsy and clutters the guide).

The other key advantage, of course, is seeing sites that others have tagged with the same tags that I used. This is maybe less useful when considering more generic tags (”intellectual property”, “human rights”) but when I looked at very specific tags I could see a real benefit: see my pages tagged CISG*, and all pages with that tag - several of which I was unfamiliar with, and which looked useful.

The third advantage would be that faculty or students with del.icio.us accounts could ‘friend’ the library’s account, and each other, and add useful sites to their own accounts, which would then be linked to the original subject guide.

I’m not sure I’m quite ready to push this forward yet, but I think it’s an idea that’s worth looking at more closely.

*Convention on the International Sale of Goods, an important document in international trade law.

It’s been a while since I played around with Google Books, and I have to say I’m impressed. When it first launched, it was lousy - the search engine was basically broken,  so that (for example) a search on the famous opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities would return hits from books that discussed Dickens’ work, but not the original book, even though it was in the database.

All that’s changed, the search engine seems to be working fine, and the presentation of the site is much, much better. The front page gives you a random selection of books (with cover pictures) in categories like interesting, classics, highly cited, and a random subject (science, etiquette, sisters…).

Clicking on an individual book and then ‘more about this book’ gives you links to web pages, other editions, citations in other books and scholarly works, the text of frequently quoted passages,  links to related books, even a Google Maps mashup showing the location of places mentioned in the book. And an option for you to write your own review of the book. It looks, frankly, great. Take a look and compare to any given library catalogue - we do not come out well.

Now here’s the kicker. I was doing some research earlier this week on Thurn und Taxis (the originators of the European postal system; Thomas Pynchon fans will understand why I was interested).  I tried our library catalogue (and WorldCat), but no good - there were only a few books on the subject, and mostly in German. I turned to Google Books, and found a free-text search returned a number of relevant books, including one that was held in the VUW library. I’d never have found it via a library catalogue (not even with subject searching; check the LC headings). What’s more, over the weekend many Wellington organisations, including VUW, lost their internet connection due to an ISP fault. So I couldn’t access the OPAC, or any VUW databases. I wrote my whole paper based solely on scholarly sources I’d accessed through GBS.

Given that this thing is only a few years old, what does that say about the future relevance of libraries? I’m well aware of Michael Gorman’s argument that books need to be read through from cover to cover, to follow the author’s argument. I agree with him that such reading is currently better done using a physical book. But not all scholarly reading follows this pattern. I didn’t need to read every book cover-to-cover. I didn’t even need to read whole chapters. I needed the very specific parts of each book that discussed Thurn und Taxis; and that I could get from GBS.

Karen Schneider has some comments about the dangers of jumping into bed with Google, and I’m sympathetic. At a rational, long-term level, I don’t like the fact that so much of my data is with Google, and that we’re ceding them (anyone) control of these resources. But at an emotional level, and  in my day-to-day life, I love the fact that Google’s services are where I am; and that they work.

So it’s a wake-up call. If they’re doing this now, what will GBS be like in 10 years? Why would anyone come into our libraries, if they can access the collections of some of the world’s top libraries via GBS? (OK, I know that GBS theoretically only makes part of each book available. It took me about five minutes to work out how to bypass that, without using any special software or doing anything illegal. I would be surprised if most vaguely tech-literate teens would take longer).

Phil Bradley was not happy with Google Books’ My Library feature, pointing out its poor import functionality, and stating that he much prefers LibraryThing. I agree, but My Library is quite useful and easy to use as an adjunct to GBS. I wouldn’t use it on its own, but as a means of bookmarking interesting books that I’ve found via GBS, it’s incredibly easy (one-click AJAX goodness) and does exactly what I need it to.

In an interesting move, the NZ Police have launched a wiki open to anyone wanting to edit and make suggestions to the Police Act as part of a wider revamp.

Police Act Wiki here. From Stuff via BoingBoing.

From the blog of my new(ish) colleague, Timothy Greig:

[quote]I encouraged the students to stop by and visit me in the library, and handed out my business card with links to the 50 Books list, my LibraryThing catalog (which is very DMDN heavy), and my contact details.[/quote]

I love the link to the LibraryThing catalogue.

Last year at the National Digital Forum, Horowhenua Library Trust demonstrated a new product called Kete. It’s since gone live on their website.

Kete is “a community built digital library” that enables people to upload and share their stories, memories and images.  It’s designed for people with little or no computer experience, and it’s an open system, meaning that other users can edit the topics, add pictures, audio/visual material, tags, or links to other pages. Users can also comment on each story/topic. It looks (to me at least) rather like Wikipedia, but with multimedia content, and focused very much on the Horowhenua community and its stories.

Kete won a special mention at the World Summit Awards, and won the 3M Award for Innovation at LIANZA 2007.

Horowhenua Library Trust is also responsible for Koha, the open-source ILS.

The word ‘Kete’ is a Maori word meaning ‘basket’. It’s often used as a name, or part of a name, for a collection of resources, like a database.