– Greg Notess

information landscape:
one constant is change
very noticeable in the area of search engines
showed how Google experiments with its search results (subsets within one result and suggested search terms after first three results)

commercial databases seem to change interface once a year
content changes are sometimes daily

The Internet Librarian: What are We?

Reinventing Ourselves?
– new skills vs. old skills

New(er) Technologies?
don’t want to lose the skills we already have

video
Sony ebook reader

Using all these?

Libarians as:
sponge (could have gone “black hole” but just sucks everything in and doesn’t share) – can be constant sponges for new information

what is our future?
– blogs, wikis, etc. only? no and yes

reinvention does not need to:
– ignore our strengths
– forget our skills
– or ignore our strengths

collection:
– print and online
– more to buy than ever before
- experiment with new offerings

organize:
– increasingly complex
– e-collections in catalog
 – or separate database
– OpenURL, CrossRef
– much still to solve

talked about using screencasting as a potential way to push instruction out

number of reference questions goes up when systems fail

potential and pitfall:
– blog
 – quick website
 – showed msu symposium blog – story about Lorcan Dempsey seeing a private post about him that didn’t get marked “private”
– “can’t find anything worthwhile” – asked how many people have said this about some blogs; from his perspective, it’s crucial to understand what a blog can potentially do, understand what it can’t do, and what happens when it fails

– RSS
 – alerts
 – news feeds
– showed Engineering Village’s RSS feeds and “blog this” button; none of his doctoral engineering students use aggregators or knew what RSS is

– Wiki Wake-up
 – shared editing
 – user contributions
 – conference wikis
  – issue of empty wikis; only the people interested in social software and wikis go to these and use them
– forums?

hype meter suggestion:
– how self centered are the discussions or the content?
 – blogs about blogging; goes mainstream when blogs stop talking about blogging; that’s when it becomes useful
 – Diggs about Digg; 10% of top Diggs are about Digg itself, although that means 90% are valid Diggs
 – wikis about wikis; see less of this there
– beware closed conversations

Web 2.0 Reality
– embedding content, in particular video
 – showed his library’s chat/reference statistics that are hosted on a different site (iRows) but are embedded in his intranet
– shared editing
 – showed Zoho online office suite; uses the planner, but couldn’t get his colleagues to register for the site to use it

Implementation Matters
– can we out-Google Google?
– Sirsi Catalog (absence of speed)
 – include cover screen shots
 – table of contents
 – summaries

Audience Matters
– can we out-Amazon Amazon?
– WorldCat
 – user contributed reviews
 – does WorldCat audience want this ability? kudos to OCLC for experimenting with this, but isn’t sure it’s going to work

New Technologies
– worthwhile to try
 – good tech PR if nothing else
 – find the winners
 – test with your audience, make sure it’s a good match

The Internet Librarian
– old skills and sources
 – side by side with the new
– continual learning
 – soak up new knowledge (conferences, reading, etc.)
– experiment and share

audience question: which Web 2.0 technologies have been most successful with students?
Greg: online chat, but no real traction with anything they’ve looked at up to this point; possible exceptions would be Facebook, MySpace; has yet to see one that’s a direct connection with the students at this point

audience question: takes point of triviality and ephemeral nature of blogs, but what our profession shows us is what is ephemeral today is not ephemeral tomorrow; today is a big day for blogging in the U.K.
Greg: agrees; gave example of older concept of “guestbooks,” which were precursors to comments today; much is ephemeral, much is fascinating

Tags: ILI2006