Libology Blog

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a report (Pdf here) that you should read. Really. It will likely challenge assumptions that we make regarding who uses libraries and why. Here are a few of their findings as examples:

Problem Solving Behavior (from Major Questions and Findings):

• 58% of those who had recently experienced one of those problems said they used the internet (at home, work, a public library or some other place) to get help.
• 53% said they turned to professionals such as doctors, lawyers or financial experts.
• 45% said they sought out friends and family members for advice and help.
• 36% said they consulted newspapers and magazines.
• 34% said they directly contacted a government office or agency.
• 16% said they consulted television and radio.
• 13% said they went to the public library.

Public Library Use, by Generation (from Chapter 3):

• After Work (age 72+) - 32%
• Matures (62-71) - 42%
• Leading Boomers (53-61) - 46%
• Trailing Boomers (43-52) - 57%
• Generation X (31-42) - 59%
• Generation Y (18-30) - 62%

Regarding the second set of statistics, this is a dramatic turnaround from a survey in 1996 (from Chapter 9) which showed 18-24 year olds being the “least supportive” of libraries.

Another interesting note is that those with broadband access to the internet are more likely to use a public library than those with lower or no access to the internet (from Chapter 3). This finding surprised me.

Read the report; there is a lot more there to catch your attention. What surprises you? What confirms your circumstances? What does it all mean?

We are in a time of great change for libraries. The internet, social networking, wireless access, and broad access to computers are all radical forces that are going to alter our jobs and environments in ways we still cannot fully imagine. Understanding and implementing Library 2.0 concepts is only a start (but a necessary one).

We need to understand that this is a revolution in information. Storing, seeking, accessing, using, and understanding information is going to be different. Different is not necessarily good. Different is not necessarily bad. It will simply be… different.

We in Libraryland need to be on top of this moving colossus, and to be doing our best to anticipate and understand where it is going. This is not only important for ourselves, but for the good we can do for society as a whole.

found on Search Engine Land

Open Source Living is a directory of open source software. Directories are nothing new, with SourceForge and FreshMeat leading the lists.  However, most directories are chock full of software not fully fleshed out, or with so many choices that the average user cannot determine what will work best.

Open Source Living presents software that is widely used, and is considered to be of high quality. And that makes it very useful for all of us.

Special additional note about an Open Source Software directory that I still think is fantastic: Damicon.

found via Wired Blog Network

A somewhat rambling essay, but one that is important nonetheless:

Joe Wilcox has posted an interesting essay at Microsoft Watch regarding Google’s merger with DoubleClick, the internet advertising company.  I strongly disagree with some of his interpretations (he tries to have it both ways, and by defending Microsoft and chastising Google, he simply muddies the water), but the essay has me thinking about the good and bad of monopolies in libraryland.

First, is the love-hate relationship I have with “monopolies”.  Oftentimes a monopoly reduces choices for the user/consumer, and oftentimes the litmus test for this is whether the company/organization channels its energy towards preventing competition, rather than out-performing competition.  Efforts towards providing a better product/service than one’s competitor are rarely in vain.  Even if a company fails, the level of product/service is usually improved across the board.

Next, the concept of open standards is, for better or worse, tied up with monopolies.  A group with a monopoly is able to set standards much more effectively.  If the standards are set in a fair manner, i.e. not simply to prevent competition against one’s own product/service, then the monopoly can actually be more efficient.  If not, it isn’t truly an open standard, as much as it is a proprietary standard.

Libraries, then… we are swimming in a sea of standards, and companies that create them.  We are living with standards that work only for us, such as MARC, and aren’t of much (if any) benefit outside libraries.  The bibliographic information contained within them is of great benefit and value, but the standard is not very useful.

However, so much of our energies are tied up in this standard (and others, if we think about it), and it is dragging us down.  It is important to understand that the information is what has value; the value in how we store and access it is reflected in the ease of use, and the interest in using that storage/access method.

MARC has lost it’s luster, and we should move forward.  The information, however, is more valuable than ever, and we need to figure out how to maximize this value.  Making it easy for everyone to use, not only libraries, should be our top priority.  When Amazon or Google (or companies/groups like them) really want to access our bibliographic records, and use their structure, this will be when we know we have fixed the worst of our problems.  Is FRBR/RDA the answer?  I suspect not, simply because a new way needs to be much easier to describe and apply.

Google is, and has been for a while, the 800 pound gorilla in the search business.  This came about because their search tools were, and are, simply better than their competitors.  I don’t think this will last forever, but there are many benefits to their dominance.  They are able to set “standards” for web design that encourage compliant web site design and discourage  link farms and spam sites.  They have mastered, to a large extent, the art of interpreting the keyword search.  People now think in keywords when they search (which is why the natural language search engines are languishing in obscurity).

In libraryland, OCLC is our 800 pound gorilla.  When they come out with something new (and the last couple of years have been fantastic, with WorldCat leading the way), libraries pay attention.  If they set a particular course, it makes a great deal of sense to follow that same path.

Is this the best way, though?  Should the 800 pounders lead the way in information discovery?  How might they prevent innovation from happening, or are we doing that to ourselves already?  Is the slow pace of FRBR/RDA a reflection of the size of the beast as it slouches towards Bethlehem to be born, or simply the complexity of the solution?

One thing I have noticed on many blogs and listservs is that we love to talk about what is wrong and right about libraries and technology and search, but it is usually individuals and small groups taking the lead and deciding to blaze a new trail.  Open-ILS and LibraryThing are but two examples of dozens where people saw a need and decided to take charge of fulfilling it.

Why haven’t we come up with a new way to deal with bibliographic information?  Does one person, or a group, need to simply decide to do it?  The library community seems to be spinning its wheels on the issue, so perhaps this is the case.

Who wants to take on the challenge?

Larry Ferlazzo’s blog is titled appropriately : Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day for Teaching ELL, ESL, and  EFL.   What caught my attention is that he is compiling lists of web resources that contain great sites that should be kept in mind not only for a variety of reference questions, regardless of the English language ability of the person asking the question, but for the many great tools and resources that we can use in library training and education.

A few of his 2007 lists:

• Best Web 2.0 Applications for Education
• Best Science Websites for Students and Teachers
• Best Online Learning Games
• Best Social Studies Websites
• Best Search Engines for ESL/EFL Learners

There are more beyond these, and his blog is a constant review/overview/discussion of web sites and resources.

found via TechCrunch

I have always liked humorous comments during brainstorming sessions - they loosen people up, encourage participation, and sometimes lead to ideas that work.

found on MetaFilter

An interesting video of a graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands.  Enjoy!

found on LISNews

LENS is an AquaBrowser online catalog installation at the University of Chicago library that has just gone live, albeit in beta.

It is an impressive catalog interface, showing what can be done with our existing cataloging, good software, and an eye towards good layout.  I especially like the Library of Congress Classification links that reside above the search results… each time you narrow your search, you get additional options for narrowing it even further.  Try it and you will see what I mean.

Pretty much the only things I don’t like on first look are:

1. I have never really liked the “starburst” tag cloud that is part of the AquaBrowser installation.  It doesn’t really add to the ease of use, and isn’t very accessible (a text-based tag cloud is more user-friendly, I feel).  No big problem, though, as it isn’t an integral part of the search, and can be ignored fairly easily.
2. When you turn off page styles, the resulting page is very unfriendly, especially the search results box, which is sized quite poorly.  Their high accessiblity version of the site (called “text only”) is a great improvement.  Web sites should handle styling much more naturally, imo.

These minor points aside, this is our future, and UofC has done some fantastic work.  Kudos!

from a post to NGC4LIB

ReadMe is a wiki containing Ask MetaFilter questions along the lines of “What should I read… ?”

This can be a great resource for book clubs, reading groups, and for anyone looking for book recommendations for nearly any topic.  I should note that the MetaFilter crowd can get a bit snarky at times, as with nearly every online community (and are sometimes nsfw) but they are nearly always interesting, and even if you ultimately don’t agree with them, thought-provoking.

found via Librarian.net

Issue 1 of the Code4Lib Journal is now available!

The journal is an open-access journal dealing with, well, the more techie aspects of libraries. Even if you aren’t into systems and web coding, you should still look this over. The articles give a snapshot of creative technical solutions for libraries, and include:

• Beyond OPAC 2.0, an overview of CatalogWS, an application programming interface (API) for library catalogs. The idea behind the software is to create a universal way to access library catalog information across different Integrated Library Systems (ILS).
• Book Review : The Success of Open Source, by Steven Weber, which is actually a fantastic brief overview of what Open Source is, from a library perspective.
• 700 Dollars and a Dream, which is a column about a small library that installed and implemented Koha, an open-source Integrated Library System (ILS).

Even if you aren’t into the tech aspects of libraries, check out this journal. It never hurts to look into the leading edge of the profession, and you might encounter a new solution for your own library!

found nearly simultaneously via Catalogablog and a Web4Lib list posting by Tom Keays

Kind of an interesting application of the Zotero add-on for Firefox : the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (no relation ) and the Internet Archive are working to create a storage for scholarly annotation of online documents.

The annotation would work through added functionality (in the form of a new button) on the Zotero workspace, and could create an entirely new means to access scholarly critique and commentary. Simply put, this will make one of the most interesting and promising add-ons even better by allowing the user to collaborate with other researchers.

Research 2.0 anyone?

from Open Access News

Additional:  note that this will also create an option to save an archival copy of an electronic document on the Internet Archive servers.  This centralized storage will also provide benefits beyond the initial commons concept.

additional info found on Dan Cohen’s blog

The Definite Article : Acknowledging ‘The’ in Index Entries (pdf) is this years’ winner of the IgNoble Prize in Literature. Note that the banner of their site includes the phrase “Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK”, and note that the winning essay fills that criterion well.

By the bye, how does anyone find out if a library has any music by The The via an OPAC… simply wade through titles between “thazzz” and “thea”??? An Inter-Library Loan staff member pointed that out to me years ago, and it still highlights one of the challenges of significant articles in titles.

found in LISNews

Read this post on Thingology, the blog for LibraryThing, then check out the OpenBibliographicData petition on the Open Knowledge Foundation Wiki. If you agree with the petition, I urge you to create an account and add your name to the list.

How important do I think this is? I was online only to get a phone number to call in to work, and checked my overnight e-mail messages. I decided that it needed to be blogged, and that it couldn’t wait (especially since I seem to have misplaced the original e-mail - my apologies to the person not getting credit for passing this information along).

Zotero is a fantastic example of how open source can transform not only software development, but organization of information as well.  The potential of this citation management web-browser add-on to transform learning and research is tremendous.  If you haven’t tried it out yet, I highly suggest doing so.

OPAL is offering a program on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 (list is organized by date) from the South Carolina State Library on using Zotero, presented by Chris Strauber, Reference and Web Services Librarian at Wofford College.  Mark your calendar!

encountered on the Web4Lib list

I have run into two essays by Eric Lease Morgan this week that paint an excellent picture of today’s challenges for library technology and possible future solutions within our reach:

Catalog Collectivism : XC and the Future of Library Search (Pdf from E-LIS) ["Collections without services are useless, and services without collections are empty."]

Today’s Digital Information Landscape from Infomotions, Inc. ["It is not so much about the what we are doing. It is more about the how."]

Watch for Eric’s name on library writings… he often offers well-phrased and insightful comments on whatever issue he addresses.

found via LISNews and ResourceShelf, respectively

As a follow-up to the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control report, which discusses Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) quite a bit, I thought I’d pass along a link to a site that not only has the full text of FRBR, but a collection of introductory readings on the topic, as well as discussion lists and translations:

IFLANET : Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records

found on Catalogablog

I just now finished my first reading of the Draft Report (Pdf) from the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. I will be re-reading parts of it, as there is a great deal to be pondered, but here are my first impressions:

• The group seems to have wrapped their collective brains around the issues quite well. They address many of the future issues that will hurt libraries greatly (and we are being hurt already, like the proverbial frog in the slowly warming pan) if they are not dealt with. I am impressed with the report’s breadth.
• The group stresses the interconnectedness of our future — bibliographic information should be gathered from diverse sources (publishers, booksellers, other libraries, etc.), as well as distributed widely. I think that our understanding the implications of this is holding us back. If we address this, we will not only solve most of our bib control issues (the two are inseparable, solving one involves solving the other, I feel), but solidly position ourselves in the information age.

One aspect I feel may be missing is the next generation of bibliographic cataloging. FRBR is a fantastic step forward, but it still doesn’t address the most fundamental issues that we face. How do we catalog our collections (and this includes everything we can access) so that we don’t have to use millions of hours doing so, and in such a way as to be able to adapt quickly and effectively to the changes coming in 5, 10, 50 and 100 years?

I think our solution needs to be as flat (non-hierarchical) as possible, and as granular as we can make it. Small chunks of data can be gathered and assembled in countless ways to serve the myriad of needs we will encounter. If we create an “uber-catalog” now that can be easily converted to MARC or FRBR or whatever system is developed. And not just our systems: we need to realize that we need a system that everyone and anyone can tap into for bibliographic information. Amazon has no use for MARC. We should have a system that everyone wants to use. That’s when we will know we have it right.