Gaming the Keynote: The Last Chapter

This is it. It’s the final presentation. Liz “The Lady in Purple” Lawley, hailing from the Rochester Institute of Technology, is gonna blow some minds with Gamification.

Gamification

She don’t like the word. But the application of game mechanics to non-game environments is prety important and awesome. People say “it’s the big trend”. There’s gonna be some video clips. I’ll try to sum them up, but Liz’s slides should be available.

Video 1:
Gamification has issues because they’re not being done by skilled game designers. Gives exp instead of grades to level up grades. It worked. But so many points… but what if they can be really designed. He’s excited in a good way.

Video 2:
Bullshit is used to conceal or impress.. used to hide ignorance. Gamification is, therefore bullshit. Gamification is marketing bullshit as a means to capture video games and domesticate it. Bullshitters aren’t stuped. The term makes games accessible to business. It’s reassuring to VPs and marketers.

-ification is bullshit and makes things seem easy and “proven”. Sebastian Deterding is talking about Scrabble and says that points or leaderboards aren’t bad, but it matters what you’re using them for. If all it matters is jumping through a hoop, it’s no good. If they allow you to reflect on your own successes and feel good, then it’s powerful. In scrabble you feel good getting a lot of points because you did something difficult and someone recognizes it.

“Achievements should be given for being awesome”. We should get achievements for the cool stuff we do. It sounds easy, but it’s tough to do well. To do it without making people feel manipulated or being just one more thing to do for the professors.

So students arrive with a sense of what they want to accomplish. They want to slay the dragon and get the pot of gold. They have to do a lot of stuff, aren’t sure why, and resent having to do it. They started to think of college as a heroe’s journey. All of the unnecessary obstacles on a journey have a point in the end. More of a point then the goal, even. Games show the map and tell the stories about getting there. How can we use games to tell the story.

There are tools students need, but school is so broken that by the time students get there, students don’t trust the college. It’s tough to explain that what they’re being taught is really necessary. How can you help them hear the stories about how necessary and helpful school is.

They looked at gamification that really works. what it does is allow you to reflect back on what you’ve done and think about the accomplishments and feel good about it. It’s about recognizing what students have done and allowing them to remember and reflect on it. Reflexive feedback loops help people. They enable people to modify behavior in a way that feels empowering.

What do you want students to do? Badges alone aren’t enough.. and could in fact break their intrinsic motivation.. because they EXPECT rewards. Paying for chores makes them want more money… they’re not dumb. They didn’t want to break the intrinsic motivation to do things.

It’s the autonomy, stupid. They shouldn’t feel like they have to do it, it should be a choice and something that fits into the day-to-day life. Nudges are okay, but pushing and pulling are bad. The “experience of competence” is important. What should they feel good about?

-What behaviors should be rewarded and encouraged?
-What feelings of competence could we engender?
-What did we want our students to remember and reflect on?

In K-12, helping others is cheating.. but in the real world, working together is how things get done.

Started with Bartle’s Player Types. An advisor said it was too generic and lazy and doesn’t necessarily reflect students. Thought about history and natural tensions in RIT. RIT started about the combination of an Athenaeum and a mechanic’s institute.. and the Archives saved her freaking bacon. Yeah. That’s what we do. Represent.

There’s a neat graph they came up with, but I’m not going to describe it.. just look it up on slideshare. At Master level, students can contribute achievements which can give alum and grads a sense of ownership of the system and make it better. A problem: Nobody understands Athenaeum. Labels got in the way, so vocabulary redesign! Focus not on labels, but on balance.

It has to be an active game. The site is just a reflection site. The game happens with tangible things. Every faculty and staff member got to make and pick an achievement. If you get the card, you get the code, and you redeem the code to get the achievement. Why making a faculty member lol? Making human connections with faculty are important.

RFID readers are hidden on campus, each student gets an RFID fob that students have to wave over a reader and get credit/counted. “Activate the environment”. They’re embedding them in the environment to make it engaging.

Social Exploration: participation in at least one flash mob, etc… do something new
Individual Exploration: More individualized exploration tasks..
Mastery: more about making things or developing habits. Things they would be doing anyway, but getting recognition.

Some of them may be mistakes, but iterating on them is good. You have to take risks and try things.

When they submit for an achievement, tell a story and share a picture. Share the lore and collect it. Feed it into the bloody archives. It would be really interesting, I promise.

What happened? They got a grant to do it right.. but it was in June, so a September launch was unrealistic. So they did October which was ridiculous. I’m jealous of their money… and production values.

It took some extra work.. had some stumbles, but it did launch, if a little late.

Started with a group of 720 students. (Make a difference between if/then and “now that”). Had to register the keyfobs. What are they doing? Had some very good initial anecdotal evidence. Because faculty members get to invent the challenges, they might actually enjoy it, too. :O

It’s a way to create experiences to remember… good god, this could actually create a community. Assuming we had the capital (which we don’t) it could possibly solve some of the coherency/community issues at CSUEB. It’s a way to make connections. It’s only just started, but the initial indications are good. Even though there are tons of bugs, students still seem to love it and want more content. It was not easy, but it’ll become open sourced this summer. Github, babeh!

Could form local consortiums of schools. Testing in an urban law school environment next. I’m jealous and want. Want. Want. Want.

But it’s more than the platform. You need to think about the nature of the students, the nature of their challenges, and what properties will engage the students. The content and experience is necessary. It’s about it feeling magical. What works for RIT won’t necessarily work for students at another university. It has to be modified for content even for different schools in the same University.

It’s the Power of Play! (Slides at slideshare.net/mamamusings )

Storytelling Tools on Multitouch Solutions

stephen Abrams appears to be “in the house” so to speak. As well as them there, This Week in Libraries dudes from abroad. Apparently this is some kind of hot topic. I’m hoping to get some good information out of it as our two (replacement) touchtables are shipping out on Friday.

Stepen Abrams Moderates

Ohshit, they’re running the whole thing. Jaap and Erik are doing it. Awesome. They’re looking for practicality. I’m happy to hear that.. they’re a public library, but we can always adapt it. Let’s roll!

Shanachies

What is that? It’s a library road trip across America. Or perhaps it’s a–having technical difficulties, apparently. It’s a storytelling thing, apparently.. or something. The slides moved pretty fast. We’re listening to sound from their laptop put through their mic. Hella. Fucking. High Tech.

They were in New York… and they asked people what they thought about libraries. To create stories. (They really do have far too much money…) In Delft they’re all about the storytelling, community-style. They wanted to see if there was a different way to share stories beyond books and connect people to them. They went all over the world. I–really can’t believe the money. I’m jealous. I admit it. Everyone is, don’t deny it.

They got their video podcast called thisweekinlibraries.com. I’ve watched a few episodes and it’s neat to get an international perspective. They have a lot of different speakers from all places related to libraries, especially people with entrepreneurial interests. They have a freaking Microsoft Surface… which you can’t even buy anymore, last I knew. When we get our new touchtables, I’ll bump that company. They’re a startup from New York who makes them to order at half the price.

Holy crap they have an amazing library in the Netherlands. Open invite, you guys. Let’s all jump on a plane. There’s all kinds of neat stuff… I can’t really describe it all. Check out the slides to see, even though you won’t get the captions. They have a thing that lets you download content to your smartphone with a bunch of different content. It’s also a touch-interface so you can play with it while you’re in front of it, too. There’s apparently one in the airport and the airport has it’s own library.

They have a fucking wall of screens.. as in 32 LCD screens, as in the ones that are thousands of dollars. For crying out loud they have an insane amount of money. Why donesn’t the American government care about libraries as much as the ones in the Netherlands? I mean, maybe nobody loves anything THAT much, but still… a bit more support would certainly be nice considering how we’re learning to do so much more with so much less. It looks… so very shiny. They have neat events they do with it.. but I was busy ranting. Sorry.

DOKLAB is a new company they started to help develop solutions for libraries. And one of them is multitouch solutions. They created a thing called the Heritage Browser that they think has been pretty successful. They act as consultants and talk to all kinds of people. Even an architect who’s building a library in the desert of Saudi Arabia. I–I really don’t know what to think of these guys.. they have it so well. Is it really so different in Europe?

Okay, finally…

MULTITOUCH

They think of multitouch as a way to bring outside traffic into the library. eBooks are selling libraries short, and we need to expand into eContent as much as possible and find ways to push the content out. They’re working with local heritage institutions and found that they are willing to give content to the library as a way to reuse their content.

Multitouch: think big iPhone. Only hopefully not iOS, because it’s too restrictive. The big difference with the tables is the ability to handle and interpret the touches of multiple individuals at the same time. I’m super excited to work on the tables when they come in. They really can’t come fast enough. And another good thing is that the tables bring people into the building. The physical space is still important, especially in community building. (They can also be walls, but it’s crazy-expensive.. there was a company in germany that did it)

The Surface 2.0 isn’t freaking out yet. It’s been delayed. Unsurprisingly. The new one is supposed to be cheaper. But we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the damn thing. Like I said, I’ll plug the company in New York that is filling the gap that Samsung is missing out.

The tables have object recognition which can be used for all kinds of fun stuff. But yeah… still not out yet. Stephen is holding it up with his questions.. way to go, Stephen.

They can be used for informative purposes, social purposes, and it’s really attractive and shiny. Everyone likes shiny things, as the tablet bar (or whatever it was that UNR did was called) showed. Unfortunately, the mTouch has it’s own operating system.. we’re thinking of putting Android on the touchtable.. though that may not work as well for the multiple users. So, we’ll see.

The Heritage Browser

The Cultural Heritage Of Delft Project. Screw those guys, our archive is gonna be AWESOME and blow their nordic asses away… but I’m not competitive. Nope. I’m calm. But having shiny things and getting the content out there is a good idea. They connected patron zipcodes to pictures of their street and it links to old pictures going back 100 years. They got a movie (so many movies) showing it in action. It even allegedly uses check-out information of patrons to show them more interesting content.. and it recognizes it through QR codes (a bit low-tech for them, I’d think). It even pulls up the metadata (essential). They can also use the physical google map to find the street they like and the photos are geotagged and can be pulled up by selecting a street from a map. This is what can be done with an enormous budget..

They have tons of user research, work with the Technical University, and do lots of prototyping.. Gosh, I wish I could work with them. Find out what the users want. We need to have a user-centric outlook. Project P is looking into an easy way for people to add photos to the archive… or I would hope the archive, though it’s probably being added to the library… knowing how people think. It scans the photograph FROM BEHIND. That’s right, from the back of the photograph. It’s NUTS. And they want to use handwriting recognition to add the metadata (even if it’s only basic stuff like broad location, year and subject). Handwriting recognition is notoriously shaky though.. they have a slider to give a date, even approximate ones. They get to iterate. They’re considering a recipie database with stories attached to it, perhaps.. it’s really cool and I’m crazy-jealous.

They also have a multitouch flickr viewer which makes life easier for other people implementing it, basically using the same kind of metadata collection. One of the best things about touchtables, since they are so cost-prohibitive, they don’t date as quickly as smartphones. Maybe pulling photos from phone could be done as well. But pulling from iOS and Android could be different… having a programming team and money to iterate would be nice.

That’s DOKLAB. I’m Jealous, reporting from Monterey.

Data Management, Preservation, Curation, and Repositories

Let’s see what these librarians have to say about what is, essentially, digital archiving. Will thaty have reached out to the archival community? Do they have anyone on campus who voluntarily wears the mantle of “archivist”? Did they read up on current archival theory and methodology?

Probably not.

But here’s hoping I’m proven wrong.

Assessing Data Management Needs at the university of Houston

Christie Peters and Anita R. Dryden

A pilot study conducted last year to assess data managment needs of researchers. Got an article coming up in Science and Technology libraries.

The project was concocted in the summer of 2010, but there was concern that people on campus would think that data could be managed, which it can’t be there at that time becuase they lack the resources. There’s issues all over, though.. mostly because lack of adminstrative support, qualified personnel, infrastructure, campus relationships, and/or faculty relationships. It’s a bit overwhelming, but obviously worth it.

How’d they do it? They had an NSF Data Management mandate, and a call for Tier One Project proposals within Liaison services in that summer, which was a plan for national recognition. (I have no idea what that means, but hopefully you do) There was a science focus and having a mandate helped things out. Pilot studies.. a nice safety term, in case things don’t work.

Work with other units such as the division of research, so they established a connection with the director of contacts and grants within that division and they were, unsurprisingly, overworked and understaffed, concerned about preparedness, and they were eager for the help and more than willing to support. The DOR provided a list of NSF and NIH grant-funded projects for 2010 that were large, invdvidual and group projects, and across a wide cross-section of disciplines (different folks got different needs).

They targeted 9 NSF and 5 NIH funded projects, got 10 interviews, and got additional interviews with 1 co-PI, 1 post-doc, and 1 RA that were affiliated with some of the projects where the PI was interviewed. They got lots of engineering, mathematics, and chemistry departments… but it’s all heavily STEM focused. No social sciences. But it was a good opportunity due to the decentralization of the campus. Even if it’s just telling people where to get data support services, it’s still successful.

Anita time:
They did data curation on Saturday? Hmmm… depending on how they define “curation” I wonder what the focus was on. Shame I couldn’t afford to get in on the weekend. So expensive.

They used instruments adapted from Georgia Tech’s Data Asset Framework. They did face-to-face interview, provided paper copy of the instrument, guided the subject through the questions and recorded responses, advised subjects to be candid, avoided offering specific services or solutions, and compiled responses and team member notes. The faculty were a bit reticent to have their responses recorded, perhaps out of guilt at their lackluster practices.

The overview of the instrument: project information, data lifecycle/workflow, data characteristics, data management (theirs), data organization, and data use. There’s a chart, it’s in their slides… I can’t read it from back here even with the glasses on.

Preliminary findings: the researchers are NOT looking for server space or data storage (which is good, because that’s not what the library is looking to do). They did need, however, assistance with funding Data Management Plan requirements, grant proposal process, identifying data-related services on campus, publication support, and targeted research assistance attendant to data management.

They’re looking to establish a data working group, host an event to introduce data service providers to each other, and expand the assessment across the STEM stuff and into the social sciences and humanities (because, you know, they were left the hell out).

I really gotta look at their published article… because data management seems to mean different things to librarians.. or maybe I’m overthinking things a little… I am a bit tired.

Susan Perry from UC Santa Cruz

The Great Wave

What are people going to do with all the freaking data that keeps being collected? 80% of the people said that there wasn’t enough funding for data management, and most of them were looking to store their data permanently… but who knows what they mean by “permanent”. Digital humanities people aren’t working across-campus and getting support… nobody is thinking of the data lifecycle or how things can be used or re-used.. or really anything about the future of the data.

The digital humanities people don’t know what the hell they’re doing with their data and standards or anything. They want to get a bunch of resources in (including another librarian) but hiring people in is out of the question. Co-op and collab are important to make more with less.

So what’s the plan?
Start small and take advantage of working with the California Digital Library and their DMP tool. They’re also using Merritt, also from the CDL. It’s some cool repository service for the UCs. They’re using Merritt for the Greatful Dead Archive… which is odd.. hopefully they also have another solution.. it’s weird. (Fun fact: special collections is not archiving) Though apparently the best practices are the same.

Best practices:
-File formats
-Standards
-Metadata

Even if the faculty members just get consistent file naming practices, it would make everyone’s life a lot easier and it’s not too hard.

They have to know that the library (or archive) plays a role in preserving the data and understanding that data can be re-used. Macroscopic data analysis can do some pretty awesome stuff (See the Google Ngram Viewer).

Non-proprietary formats are awesome, being consistent with even a small amount of metadata and getting faculty to embrace it makes life easier. Crowdsourcing also has potential. Yale’s repository has a somewhat crowdsourced way of ingesting and adding metadata… check my posts from early February about that stuff. But bringing in volunteers to transcribe and identify people is good, too. Or social media, yo. Naturalist.org is also trying to get citizen scientists to find and identify frogs through social media.

Your data can be repurposed! So keep that in mind.

William Gunn: a biomedical researcher

The data management plan of Tulane was abysmal, but Katrina taught them a lesson (unfortunately the hard way), and he’s glad to hear that librarians, who are uniquely qualified, are taking the initiative and thinking about their data for them.

He doesn’t want the data repositories to be like institutional repositories. They crowdsourced the upload of academic documents and got 120M of documents in less than 3 years. They don’t start with a form because they want to improve the user experience. Researchers are a bit idiosynchratic but can be led. user experience can be used to lead them down a path to giving up the information. They make a catalog automatically, so it’s got a few problems, but it’s got stuff in it! They have tools to enhance the discoverability and findability of the data.

What can you do with it all? Since documents and researchers can be connected… there’s a thing where they can gather together all of a researcher’s publications into one place into a neat little profile.. I think. I’d have to really look at it.

They are in it for the long haul and wanted Mendeley to have a free-flowing relationship with the institutional repository. They have a pilot that launched in Cambridge in July. Their business is a freemium model and put an API on the data so that the academic community can use it to make cool things. They think librarians are good candidates to help faculty members thrive in the developer ecosystem. (I think that’s what he’s saying anyway.. he’s moving pretty fast). All open data!

Yay for open standards and making a very helpful repository for both data and institutional papers.

Notes: Simple file formats are better. Keep it simple and use things that are already there.

Thesaurus & Folksonomies: Manage that content, babeh

I have no idea how this is going to go down, but I’m excited for it nonetheless. Hopefully I won’t type my fingers off keeping up with a panel discussion. That last one was… difficult to keep up with.

It’s Totally Not a Panel Discussion

The moderator is from the Natural History Museum from Los Angeles.

Aubrey Madler

Controlled vocabularies and closing the gap between user and indexer terms to make serching more successful.

40% of search failures are blamed on the difference in terms used by providers and users. There are 4 types of controlled vocabs (CV): the list, synonym ring, heirarchy, and thesaurus. Choosing one depends on your collection.

The list is usually organized alphabetically by topic which facilitates general browsing. Could be all you need. Byt synonym rings could be useful on the back-end. So if someone searches car, you get automobile, motorcar, and you still get what you want.

The heirarchy is easy to spot by the indentation. Broader, narrower terms and such come into play here. Thesaurus are pretty complicated. Creating a thesaurus takes a lot of forethought.

Step-by-step
-Generate wordstock
sources: Users, subject experts, organization, publications, etc.
a combined approach: top down is using exizting thesauri into their framework, the bottom-up is a bit more real to the collection. (use a little of both)
-Decide on format, choose preferred terms, and identify synonyms
be consistent in capitalization, pluralization (usually use the plurality), use one word for one idea and let the users combine them for a compound idea. Be consistent. Only capitalize proper nouns
-Choose heirarchies and facets
facets are just ways to refine the search (by brand, type, size, etc) same for BT and NT
-Add associative relationships (related terms, see also)
Not synonymous, but just related while still being distinct enough. Such as emergency medical services (RT emergency preparedness and response & trauma) Reciprocal relationship
-Select thesaurus design and display
Electronic/print, external/internal, facets/BT, NT, RT; topical/alaphabetical

And THEN… new terms happen and you have to decide whether or not it’s necessary to add, you’ll notice gaps, the collection grows, the world changes and you have to decide how you’re going to handle these situations.

What then?! Re-indexing? Planning and maintenance is ongoing. Document everything you do so you can keep track of the changes and why you did it so when you come across it again, you actually remember what happened (useful for continuity, as well)

Do you even want a controlled vocabulary in the first place? Do you have the resources to do this (usually not, to be frank). Think about the content (go as broadly as possible). Always think about the users both internal and external.

Melissa and Andrew

The Melissa bit

Folksonomies: socially constructed classification system. If you’ve used tags, you’ve used a folksonomy. It’s an impromptu bridge between traditionally controlled vocabs and user word choice. Quick n’ dirty. Consumer demand and society creates genres that aren’t in traditional vocabularies. She’s more willing to trust a power-user who may know more about a subject that she does. Democratizing. (maybe one day slides will move)

…? We appear to have a snag…? There we go. Umm, yeah, right.

Tags! Right. They identify what or who it’s about, what it is, who owns it, refines categories, identifies qualities or charactetistics, self-reference, task organization. They’re, obviously, very versitile. It’s very user-friendly.

Trade off…

The Andrew bit

Serendipity: It’s a thing. How do you do it in the digital space? It tends to be a little more active than analog serendipity because you have to be in those spaces in order for it to happen. Aggregators help. But.. transtion time. (I’m kinda zoning out.., sorry)

Tags and shelf browsing aren’t the same. Tags requrie it to be a little more pointed. You have to set up an alert or find the tag you need (not to mention that tags are HUGELY varied, I can’t even keep my own vocabulary consistent). Things to which tags link can also disappear.

Tool showcase:
-Delicious replacements:
Diigo, pinboard.in (I use it), Folkd (Germanic), ZooTools (apparently more visual), and a bunch of others.
Delicious got a lot more visual and emphasize “stacks” as collections of bookmarks around a single theme. Annotated and descriptive and.. such.
ZooTool… has stacks, but with a different name. It’s mostly for pictures. But also bookmarks.. there’s tags and stuff… bluh. It’s a different mode of organization with a more visual element. Which is good, but… I kinda would have liked a bit more discussion than just listing tools. There are so many damn tools out there,

Back to Melissa

One word tag generation… it was handled with word collapse (webdesign), or camelling (WebDesign), or punctuation (Web_Design). [This poor girl looks terrified] There’s problems with polysemy or synonymny, basic level variation. Users tend to tag in the singular (which is different from traditional controlled vocabularies).

And well… I guess that’s kinda it?

Keynote 3: The Revenge of the Keynote

So, I’m a little on the cramped side (through no fault of my own), but I’m pretty excited about this last day of the conference. Should be some good sessions today in the information management arena. (Good heavens, everyone is cramming these tables… go use a bloody chair).

TrendWatch 2011 Smackdown: Featuring Roy Tennant and his Panel

No bloodshed? I’m honestly disappointed. Dammit, Roy.

James Whirly(?)

The way information is presented and consumed has changed more in 15 years than the previous 160 years. Bandwidth will ultimately determine how effective libraries are at consuming information and producing innovation in the future.

In 1996, 28% of libraries offered public access to the internet and most of them had dial-up. Whaat. And the average time people were online was only 30min/month. So little. But information technology is accelerating at a breakneck pace.

Global internet traffic is expected to quadruple by 2015 driven by:
-more devices connected (avg. 2 devices/person on earth)
-Additional interenet users
-Increased broadband speed
-More video (it’s apparently a big deal and a HUGE bandwidth hog)

Cisco forecasts that by 2015 a million minutes per second of video. Madness. But not really super surprising.

Advanced applications require advanced connectivity. And more media and bandwidth-heavy things are going to be routinely used by people in the library in the future, and we gotta have some damn-good broadband to get by.

In 2011, nearly 50% of libraries reported that their connection speed was insufficient some or all of the time. And 75% reported that they weren’t able to increase their connection speed. Comcast, ATT, anyone else.. get the hell on this! Get the lead out.

Access to internet and innovation is essential to library success. How can they affordably scale bandwidth to meet user demand?

Important: There is a national fabric of non-profit networks connected by Internet 2. Internet 2 was created in the 1990s. It started with connecting big universities and have begun to expand to connect the education community (K-12, community colleges, libraries, science centers, and museums and stuff).

Check out bit.ly/pFcfRp and see what this stuff is all about. It’s a report that was recently commissioned by the Gates Foundation. The community should be considered an ally in the fight for greater bandwidth. [Does that make it segregated from the Internet at large? do they overlap and intersect? I'll have to look at the study and find out]

Smackdown Bit

It’s question and answer time. Hosted by Roy Tennant (for better or worse).

What keeps you awake at night?
Stephen Abrams: Polarization of discussion, nobody is for anything (everyone is against stuff). Shallow opinions about things.. fanboyism is more like religious fanaticism and stephen Abrams is worried about censorship, especially in the Apple space. And he worries about people DEFENDING the censorship of apps and books in the iOS space, and advertising in books. You are Google’s product to the advertising community. Content spam is bad, mmkay? He’s taking Demand Media to task and demands that Librarians get their voices in on this problem with advertising and improving the learning community. “I don’t want to be the product”.

Woman in Purple (Liz Lawley) : Response to bandwidth piece. Internet is becoming a utility that needs to become ubiquitous and limiting it should become not-okay. Net neutrality isn’t being talked about enough. Where are the rules coming from? “What is worth sending across the bandwidth”. Is… is she serious? Elitism on the internet? Really? She worries about cloud-based content… (I’ve never had google go down), but worries about things going wrong and not being able to access it in the cloud. She’s more worried about the content or, the political and policy issues surrounding things (?). She wants more lightweight technology and worries about tech-heavy stuff.

James: He says the question for him is: can you afford the internet? With it fast becoming a duopoly, it’s a serious question, especially with limitations in coverage (I didn’t get an option where I live, that’s for damn sure).

Woman in Purple (Liz) : “freemium” services. She wonders why she pays for some apps and not others. Some things should just be there and shouldn’t have to be paid for. The Free mentality should be monitored because of the ads that make things free. She wants local copies of everything (get your own server, yo… I did. ). People are willing to pay for a good experience. It’s not “all about the content”, context trumphs content, often. The experience and, surprise surprise, user design can make more of an impact. Delivery is important. “How they feel about the experience at the end of the day is important”. This is likely why apple gets fanboys. You have to make people feel really great as opposed to thinking that your services is really great. User interaction is necessary to think about it. Gotta get on the UX bus.

Stephen: The point of freemium services are about segmenting power users from non-power users. Google+’s real identity is all about creating a consumer market. He’s really hung up on on-demand content and spam stuff. I mean, it’s important, yeah, but still. He does worry about letting amazon into library catalogs without looking at privacy policies. Because the customers will be served up to the advertisers and commercial entitites. He’s not against it, but he is against it being done so cavalierly. Start yourself a discussion. He doesn’t want everyone to be a product, but rules are necessary (Canaians.. lol). Within reason, of course. Excesses need to be managed in the information marketplace and how are our voices going to be that and inform the discussion? (breaking into song? Hmmm… hawkward)

James: Is the unified foice best found through ALA or the state libraries? What is the best way to deliver the message.. assuming everyone can agree or even HAVE a collective voice?

Stephen: Not suggesting a unified voice, just suggesting that consumer voices shouldn’t be drowned out by the advertiser voices. We should be able to buy books wihtout ads. Free is good, but at what point does the ads change the dynamics of reading?

Roy: Policy stuff.. if you could pick the single-most disruptive tech, what would it be?

Liz: She’s watching gamification (doesn’t like the term) because the underlying concepts are disruptive and important. Games and play can disrupt the way we think about things in a good way. More and more tools to play, and it’s difficult to do these things well. Return to love of tangible things is disruptive as well. People are starting to care about quality of tangible items, now. 3D printer technology is good as well. It’s gone from off the wall, to freshmen showing up with 3D printers in the dorms. Cost and accessibility have plummetted recently. (I’d like to do that). It’s more exciting to students that they can print out a 3D figure than be one online. “We’re really good with artifacts”

Stephen: He finds printing skin very exciting. Whoo. In-app purchasing, QR codes, NF communication,… and stuff. Seamlessness and adoption of micro-virtual things. Seamless integration and purchasing is exciting.. we have to reduce the friction between people and their products. Libraries have to be a part of that.

Liz: RIFD and Near Field communication, she thinks it’s all RFID.. is that the same thing? I’m not sure. Don’t forget your faraday cages, kids. Malicious and shady persons will steal your information. People want things to feel like magic.. we want to live in a science fiction universe! There are risks, but the potential outweighs it. The Internet of Things is super disruptive to her.

Stephen: Look at the technologies now and think about the behavioral consequences of them. We are shifting the choice to not be something that people consciously make. I make a choice because I don’t need to think. Change the dynamics of the choosing environment. Micropayments can shift the behavioral change. It’s important to think of who is going to pay to promote that content to the top. Frictionless isn’t free. End users need to be aware of when information is quality and when it’s biased.

James: Are public libraries part of the evil corporate world? It’s completely owned and operated by the education community (internet 2). Most of them are libraries and such.. it’s not a commercial space. There are commercial partners, it’s for the research and educaiton community.

Stephen: Pearson partnered with google. Is that commercial or educational? What’s going on there?

Liz: Researchers are inserting virtual objects into static images. The researchers used her creative commons photograph from flickr. They inserted a dragon into a room without even getting there, and got the lighting just right. It has huge reprocussions for what people think of as photographic evidence. Real and not-real are becoming harder. It’s fascinating and disruptive how real it has become.

Stephen: The beginnings of that was the logos on the football field changing every quarter.. seamless product placement. “You could show photos of Mit Romney saying he approves social medicine”.

James: He’s interested in video conferencing. The star trek idea of being in the room with someone across the world. Some of the fully-developed rooms of teleimmersion stuff. He doesn’t know if it’s practical, but being able to bring communities together in a physical space and could approximate the experience virtually and bring the world to the library.

Stephen: very close to the merger of second life and 3d printing (scanning) and becomming 3 dimensional in a single space.

Liz: It’s a mistake thinking that because the technology is here, people will use it. Google Hangouts work because it’s frictionless. It just works. Skype is frustrating to her. It has to work in a way that is easy and frictionless for the user. Interface is super important. It’s not enough that it’s there, you have to make it accessible and relevant.

Stephen: The behavioral impact is important to libraries. Video chat changes the nature of virtual reference interviews. Interpersonal interaction will change.

Liz: Why are you here? There’s no content here that you couldn’t find on the internet. But there are thousands of people here because there’s real value in being in the same room as other people. [Human psychology goes crazy-slow.. physical interaction and interpersonal relation is still of really high value to people]. If you’re going to do immersion, you can’t do crappy immersion [*cough*secondlife*cough*].

stephen: As much as I’m not a fanboy, if you put video conferencing in your pocket and add Siri, he’s fascinated by the ability for the phone to do things just by talking to it. And it’s just a first step. What does it mean for people who care about improving the quality of quesitons as we talk to other people.

Roy: Is there any final thoughts?

James: Get on the Internet 2 and video conferencing is something worth experimenting with even though it’s not perfect yet. It’s still a step forward, especially for rural and remote areas. Video conferencing in libraries is a way to extend the world all the way to the rural environment.

Stephen: 1. Be more radical, find out voice and be comfortable being radical. 2. Spend more time hearing the other point of view. Don’t demonize opponents. The next 10 years is going to be more important than the last 250.

Liz: Remember what it’s like to be a kid. Spend a lot more time thinking about whats playful, delightful, and magical and not dismiss it as frivolity. And think about ways to make technology fade into the background. “Hangouts” work because you can set it up and leave it and let people drop in. It’s informal and creates a spontaneous space.. because the best things happen when you don’t expect it. Magic, delight, technologies that can be a background platform to do other things.

And it’s done!

Tablets, Social Media, and Outreach!

Time Donahue: Montana State University

State universities using tablets for instruction. Yissss. Tablets are viewed as the median between smartphones and tablets (I will only agree that they are content consumption devices). Tens of millions of tablets are sold, and many predict that it will top 100 million by the end of 2012, but as Lee pointed out earlier, it’s still has a pretty low penetration rate among American adults. So.. this would be, at best, planning ahead.

What’s a tablet? Handheld personal computer, 5″ to 10″ rectangle measured diagonally. Typically all screen. No peripherals (except for the iPad which has a keyboard, children.. not that I’m grudging or anything.. and it is an optional extra.. just saying).

There’s the iPad and then there’s everyone else (I’m seriously waiting for a good Android tablet to come out soon… maybe I’ll hack a Kindle Fire when that becomes available…). The Samsung Galaxy S is supposed to be really good, but it’s pricey last I knew.

What’s new about a tablet: It’s like a giant iPod touch.. so a smartphone without the phone (unless you have a data plan, in which case it’s like a phone without the phone calls… unless you count Skype..). It is ALL media consumption, unless you’re a crazy-person. He listed more things… but smartphones do all the same things, just smaller. Seriously, like 90% of the things he listed are already smartphone things. Not good for production, only consumption.

Implications for libraries: More users with tablets (maybe). Cost size and portability will make them more popular. Ereaders subsumed by tablets (likely, with Kindle’s move.. though I still hold out for an eInk revolution because it’s just so easy on the eyes). Users will expect to check out books on and for the tablets. Tablets excel at merging physical and digital and are ideal for library content consumption.

Web design? Are they “mobile”? Do they need a third website (vanilla, mobile, tablet)? Do we redirect to mobile sites? Do we alter to accomodate tablets? I think that’s not a library-specific problem.

Ideas: tilting through results/digitized microforms, virtual travel through 3D maps, steering through things, memory palace (?) navigation [What the hell is a memory palace?].

What’s goin’ on at MSU:

-Purchased for staff use ane experimentation
-Think tank
-Teaching in workshops
-Using tablets at the desks and roving with them
-Exploring uses for hands-on teaching
-Created a guide
-Tested on primary and mobile site (Primary is fine)
-Optimal for QR codes

Allan Cho at University of British Columbia

Chinese Canadian Stories. Community-driven project but federally funded (Canadian Socialism in Action!). Collaboration between library and faculty.

Designed to create a bilingual website for collecting, archiving, accessing and distributing info about Chinese Canadian history. To engage with with communities for preservation, connects to younger generations and–ohgod he’s going too fast!

Part of the Community Historical Recognition Program. Got a full-blown government apology. Damn. The Chinese have always been in Canada. Why you gotta hate, Canada? You always seemed so nice.

Why U of BC? They got $1,000,000 from the CHRP project. Wow. Because they have a rockin’ archives. If only America was so supportive. They have good digitization facilities, strong outreach programs and a bunch of other projects and a very multicultural campus. Good for them.

BC has over 77% of the Chinese Canadian immigrants. The more you know, right? They have a searchable database for migrants. I assume that by last name or all names? They all had to pay a head tax, and because of that, meticulous records were kept and they have apparently digitized them all. You have basically a police report on all of the Chinese immigrants. Yikes. And you can also view a scan of the page where the entry was made. That’s really cool, in a horrible kind of way.

The metadata is community-created. Yay for volunteer work and a passionate community.

They offer community workshops where they consult with elderly immigrants to help decipher and translate old letters in regional dialects. So, they’re doing all they can before the resource dries up, so to speak. They’re working with historians and interviewing community members who are elderly and who can actually read the things and trying to get their help. And it’s going on all across Canada (27 groups across the nation).

There’s tons of community groups.. I’m not going to try to list them all.. I couldn’t anyway. There’s also video interviews with oral histories and digital storytelling! Get interested in your cultural history, kids! They even made a game around the damn thing.. I want $1,000,000 CAD. D:

They’re using Dspace, CONTENTdm and Drupal. Archiving, library folks. It’s srs bsns. You should really give it a gander.

Arlene Keller from Multnomah County Library

Make facebook pages awesome. Not the usual when it comes to big social media pushes, but hey, whatever works for you.

How to make it work:
-Define goals and strategy
-Staff apropriately
-Choose a voice
-Appropriate content for your audience
-Experiment with big campaigns
-Ongoing campaigns
-Have clear policies for staff AND patrons

This gal is gonna run over on time. She’s rambling a bit.

They got a bunch of social media goals. Most of it has to do with creating connections, promoting the library, etc. Mostly you want patrons to engage with you.

UPDATE REGULARLY. Update daily unless there’s something huge that is going on. Monitor comments and questions and engage with them. Seriously, contribute back. People respond to that. Watch for and delete spam. But that’s kind of a no-brainer, no?

Your voice: Keep it informal, friendly, conversational, keep it consistent. You’re talking to people, this isn’t a press-conference. Be human and people will be human back.

Content: Events, services, library in the news, staff spotlight, ask questions, contests, anything to engage you users within the context of your organization’s mission. Know your audience. Give your institution a face. People want to talk to people, not a nameless institution.

What makes the library somewhere patrons want to be? Build up buzz, make it fun, set expectations, and follow through! Are there any best practices to build buzz and set expectations? No, not really. At least not here.

Their idea: virtual custom recommendations. They got 100 the first time in 6 hours, and 130 the second time. So, that’s quite a few that were on during the 6 hour period and were willing to engage with the library. And they got something in return for interacting. You have to give rewards, even if they aren’t physical or material.

They got huge increases in number of likes and comments, daily page views, daily wall posts and new likes to the page. So it was wildly successful from a promotional standpoint.

Patrons learned about a library service that they may not have known about before. Plan is using recommendations for gift giving during the holidays.

They got a big ROI (though I’m not sure how they’re measuring it except in squishy responses), dedicated staff, monitor every day.. so it’s a pretty big investment.. so, I’m not sure where she’s getting her ROI values from.

But hey, apparently it works. More engagement is good, even if you can’t measure it or put a monitary value on it.. though administrators may not think the same way.

Partnerships, Relationships, and Internships for Impact

Looks like we have a pretty small turn-out, but this should be fairly interesting.

Anne Price and Kathy Harden

There are prizes? I don’t know what they are… it looked like a box. But hey! Free is awesome. What are they talking about? Doing more with less. Everyone’s having to do that.

So what did they do? They made partnerships, cultivated internal and external relationships, and molded work/study positions into internships to meet their needs and the needs of their users (yay free labor!).

They’re from Townsend Memorial library serving 3100 students and 6 librarians w/5 staff members. They are departments of one, and proud of it. Everyone has their own job to do and nobody can really rely too much on other people in the department. Work studies students are their greatest assets.

Who benefits? They do, the work studies students benefit, the departments benefit, and smaller libraries will benefit, too.

They created relationships within the library by sharing students and crossing over. They also created external relationships with other departments across campus to try to share resources and help each other out (not to mention the publicity across campus). Their library director is, luckily, very supportive.

Public libraries should look for students at local colleges and universities who are interested in graphic design to get either pay or credit to get some cheap/free design for the library. The students learn to deal with real clients early, which would actually look pretty good on a resume once they graduate and make their way into the field. Plus good personal publicity for their portfolio. So, that’s good.

Give the students freedoms to create, learn, grow, express, fail, play, and succeed. But for the love of god, give them something for their work. Don’t do pro-bono, that’s just unfair. Offer some pay or at the LEAST credit for their work. They deserve it.

Working with the students and leveraging their passion and skills, this little library gets to redo their website every three years! I don’t even think Cal does it that often. They have a lot of success stories where by allowing the students to do meaningful and real-world work in fields about which they are excited, they get some damn good results and the students reap huge benefits.

Not getting enough people coming to the library looking for internships? Contact Career Services! They know who can do what and who needs a job.

Encourage creative competition between students. Use capitalism to its fullest advantage!

As a student assistant, I never got to do shit like this. These kids got it SO GOOD. They get to make maps, business cards, redesign a website… and they look GOOD. Not to mention that they become passionate advocates for the library in the university/college because they’ve poured their heart and soul into it. They even created promotional campaigns, planned and implemented! On the super-cheap! And can you imagine having some of these things under your belt on the resume right out of college? “Yes, I’ve already designed the library website for my colelge as seen here…” That would bowl me over if I was looking at hiring a kid fresh out of college.

The students bring a perspective of the people you’d actually like to target!

Unfortunately… the good students graduate. Sometimes students don’t work out (in which case, move them on out). You’re at the mercy of the work-study program, which isn’t good. And they’re not really internships, they’re work-study programs, so they get paid, but it doesn’t come out of your budget! They can be headhunted, though.

Really awesome implementation of work study students. A seriously under-utilized resource for a small library.

John Samowski

Scan Day! Whoooooo! ResCarta creates digital objects with METS and MODS in full, uncompressed TIFF. They distribute through the website. To get smaller institutions to embrace the technology in Wisconsin, (and by small, under 1400 population-small with a crazy-small staff).

So they came up with Scan Days. They offered to bring the scanners, train volunteers, and set up the website. They invite patrons to bring in locally important materials to be scanned, metadata would be gathered, and the patrons would get a digital copy! This is awesome! Also there was a website made. Patrons said that the next day after going, they’d be able to show their friends.

Results? Patrons connected to the library. Items came out of the woodwork. Families shared and ran into friends and used the technology. Nobody knew it was there.. lots of hidden gems.

What did it take? Marketing the idea. The librarians had to get the word out. And you gotta seriously get the word out and let people know exactly what the deal is. Stress that they get to keep a digital copy and that it’s FREE. The library had to staff some volunteers. But there were never enough people. Most of them didn’t show up.. which sucks. But scanners aren’t difficult to use. They literally trained people that day.

They had a greeting/registration station, flatbed scanning, rotary scanning, slide scanning, disc production, web production. People will discover things, and bring back MORE. They had a paper registration form because it was just easier at the time. Each person gets an individual ID number and signed a very simple deed of gift (gave option for donation). The flatbed scanner scanned the worksheet, saved it to a separate directory, and scanned the items and put them into the directory and saved them as JPEGs (for the CD rom) (Convert to higher-resolution image?). Simple flatbed scanners without needing much training.

They got a lot of slides.. including ViewMaster slides, so you STILL run into compatability issues. Ha! The photography booth was for physical objects… which seems kinda silly to me, but hey, the more stuff you have online… They got promotional monies for ad space on the disc. Neat way to make money.

After everything was done, the post-production people took care of the cropping and rotating. Documents were OCR’d and put into PDF, then they added metadata (likely minimal from the look of the worksheet and the size of the collection) after the fact. Each patron got a separate collection, so that’s pretty cool. Much as it should be. Good for them for keeping it archival. They used a rescarta web application (though if you have more resources, you could probably do this using other software).

Pre-plan and market it. They had a hard-wired network to spare interruptions (hub it, babeh). They used a lot of scanners.. and only had 11 people on staff at any one time. :O That’s… so very tiny. Word of mouth marketing was apparently incredible. And they still didn’t get everyone!

Between the two cities, they had 2100 images scanned.. and in one of the towns, they almost got one scan PER PERSON on the city. That’s amazing! You really can not imagine the kinds of things that people have. And this is an awesome way to get it digitized because they’re getting something in return that is tangible. I really want to do this. Like really really.

Should they have an archivist to handle all of this stuff? Yes. But I’ll be damned if that doesn’t look like a seriously effective project.

Saving the Wild eBook

More preserving it, really. But this sounds super-interesting! Especially if, against all odds, eBooks really do take off, this could be a serious issue for the burgeoning field of Personal Digital Archiving (a field in which I am becoming increasingly interested, truth be told). DRM issues, annotations, preserving devices… apparently men in suits are going to tell me all about how it’s done! Or at the least, give me some good ideas. So…

A Librarian, a Publisher, and an Aggregator Walk into a Bar…

Sue (An Iowa academic library), Rolf (from Sage), and Ken (EBSCO rep) respectively, are here to talk about ebook preservation. Let’s get this show on the road!

Sue (Librarians)

Sue is up first, representing the library profession. Looking like it’s a worry-session… will there be solutions? Someone she knows is looking for a 500-year access plan. She’s talking about archives… why is there no archivist on this panel? They’d probably have some good information, but such is life. That’s why I’m here. She defines digital preservation as the ability to keep usability, authenticity, discoverability and accessibility over time. So… questions are being posed, but will there be any good answers? Hopefully some, but more of a conversation starter post.

So, what is being preserved insofar as eBook is preserved? Just the text? Added content? In what format? Will it be around in the future? (.txt will last forever!) Who really owns them? That’s still up for debate with things that are being sold right now. Does the library own the ebooks they buy? Does Amazon? Who knows?

An example license agreement:
“Purchased books in raw digital format are not suitable for redistribution to end users… must be provided to the end users through the use of content hosting software… not included with purhcased books but is instead listed in the order form as a distinct product with a separate fee.”
“…archived digital copies do not include functionality…”
“Nothing contained in the agreement shall be construed as granting the end user any ownership rights in or to the licensed content.”
Who should archive this stuff??

What are the trigger events? Are they same for everyone (publisher, aggregator, librarian)? May I move titles to a different interface? Can I get an open source interface? [Personal opinion: when in doubt, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, folks. Rogue archiving!] In the license agreement, you need to go through the content owner to even move to another service provider.

Can titles be weeded? How permanent is the deletion? [Personal note: I'd treat it like a physical book, gone is gone] Who pays for preservation? Who’s responsible? Can we trust the providers to care enough to archive it for later? News providers couldn’t be trusted. Why should we trust publishers or aggregators to care as much as we do?

Rolf (Publisher)

Can a publisher put themselves in a librarian’s shoes? Librarians can’t seem to put themselves in a student’s shoes. What happens if iTunes inexplicably goes down? You lose a huge investment, obviously. Ownership: perpetual. Publisher owns copyright, but the library owns the title… but the copyright IS, more or less, the product. There’s no physical product.. and the copyright is the idea… so what did they REALLY buy? Not everybody will win because there are so many limitations. They worry about loss of control.

Resourcing preservation. He thinks that publishers have the “basic” responsibility to participate in the preservation issues (LOCKSS/CLOCKSS, etc..). They want to protect the version of record. But they can’t even agree on what the version of record is. Is the XML? Should we think in a print analogy? What about errata? Comments? Notes? It requires infrastruction investment for automated delivery of metadata. Even the publishers aren’t equipped to do LOCKSS properly. Which… is really lame. I’d kinda like a breakdown of WHY they can’t do it and whether that’s true, or they’re just whining. Backup files are NOT archived files. Is the PDF the same as the original eBook?

Aggregators: A growing and preferred purchasing sector. Let’s bog ourselves down in proprietary software. Blurg. It’s crazy fragmented and there are always new aggregators. So we gotta figure out who is protecting whom. How valuable is the aggregator and what responsibilites do they have? There’s contractual challenges and issues. Digital preservation never comes up. Nobody thinks about it and it NEEDS to be kept in mind. NOBODY reads the fine print! Not even publishers, who may even be the ones creating the fine print. D’oh.

Preservation before dissemination. For publishers, preservation means tightening control [if that means more DRM, then what happens when your company goes under?! What are we to do then??]. They have to think strategically, plan for change, collaborate with customers and partners, get over the resources as an expensive proposition (because it shouldn’t matter. It’s important. MAKE it feasable.) and standardize to protect the content,

Ken (Aggregator)

Ken the middle-man steps in. What does it mean to preserve ebooks? He brings up light vs. dark archives, so he at least did his homework! Light archives are the aggregated databases and can be accessed by many users (though… still not REALLY the same as an archive… they’re aggregators). Dark archives are a repository to get at the content even though something happened to the company [Personal note: this is not the definitions that archivists really use, but, you know... that's fine.]

Is the text all we need to preserve? The aggregators create different experiences, but they think it should be the publisher’s decision. Two solutions: portico preserves the publisher’s original file and creates a normalized file; CLOCKSS they take a capture of the last UI version prior to a trigger event and save that with the same branding and everything.

Who is responsible? Publisher owns the rights to the book and grants rights to an aggregator to also sell it, they can also grant rights to a preservation organization. But rights can be transferred, and if that happens, a library who got perpetual access still gets it, but the publisher and aggregator can’t keep selling it. But where does the library’s copy come from if it was hosted by a freaking aggregator?! Shoudl they self-host? Is that allowed if the rights been transferred?

Trigger events: published on the preservation company websites, but if the ebook is no longer offered, that may trigger, but the publisher has to approve the trigger [So... there may be some really weird one, so keep an eye out]. But if the aggregator leaves, that’s not a trigger and you may have to find a new aggregator, and if the library stops paying for access to a platform, that’s not a trigger event either. So a library may have to pay for multiple copies of a book because an aggregator goes out of business, which could cost a lot. Not to mention that access models could be different.. they think that “still having access” is enough, but it’s not! It’s not the same.

The only way this is really going to be solved is cutting deals and everyone involved talking and working together. [Personal thought: why are libraries buying books from other libraries (aggregators)? Why is this even allowed?]

Nobody has really thought about weeding the collection. Would you want books to be hidden just in case you wanted it later for historical purposes? Would you want to permanently delete it? [P.S. archives, don't check out items] And what about post-trigger event with deletion?

Who pays? The aggregator says “Everyone”. Publisher should have copies in two places just in case. Aggregators are looking for redundancy. Librarians should have an upfront or access fee for preservation support. And these preservation initiatives: are they scalable or sustainable?

NOBODY HAS CONSULTED ARCHIVISTS ON THIS! HOW IS THIS HAPPENING?! Archivists, and I mean that as broadly as possible and to anyone who has voluntarily taken up the title, we need to get in on this conversation. These people don’t know what they’re talking about insofar as long term preservation is concerned. If this thing is going to take off, we need to be a part of the conversation. Don’t be left out!