One of the groups I'm really enjoying working with at ALA is the folks at American Libraries. This video gives you a good sense of why. Much more to come from AL in regards to video (which I find very exciting). Applause goes to Dan Kraus - writer, producer, director, grip, and best boy extraordinaire.

Magnum, A.L.

Addendum: I meant to note that this is a tip of the hat to Nick Baker for the inspiration. We've been talking about video for a while, but he certainly helped us get enthusiastic about jumping in and getting our feet wet. Behind-the-scenes photos here.

american+libraries, ala, american library association

- John Riedl, University of Minnesota, GroupLens Research

going to take a fun tour through the web and think about the implications for us! :-)

Community
- LoC: founded in 1800: 280,000 headings and references applies to 18 million books
- Flickr - founded in 2004 with 25 million pictures

Web 2.0 is all about the social web, which means people connecting to people
we're going to have to think a bunch about applied social psychology
will look at the long tail

of everyone in this room, he knows the least about library science, so his goal is not to tell us how libraries will be influenced by these changes but to stimulate, interest, and entice so that we come back to him in a year and tell him how we are influenced

top 10 websites by traffic as analyzed by alexa
thinks we'll be amazed at how important the social web is to these 10 sites

1. Yahoo - picked Flickr
showed tag cloud
power is that it leverages the power of individuals to react to pictures and say what they think about it
write for me a query that finds a picture of a baby in a search engine in the three clicks it took him
showed visual map of term "library" - no connection between "tag" and "library" in del.icio.us
how do people find information in this new world?
showed geotagging in Flickr
"is that cool or what?" :-)
value of factual tags - people are tagging like crazy
a surprising phenomena

for the tag "anime" for "spirited away"
taggers agreed that factual tags are:
- useful overall (56% agreement)
- useful for learning about movies (60%)
- useful for finding movies (59%)

factual tags vs. subjective tags - "surreal" doesn't tell me anything

personal tags - "My DVDs" for "Dawn of the Dead"
17% agree personal tags *were* useful but
87% thought their personal tags helpful in organizing for the taggers themselves
personal and shared is new

showed some papers about tagging (sorry - I was enjoying his talk too much to get more detailed than this)

open questions:
- is tagging selfish (creates social good)?
- how can a system distinguish between "good" tags and "bad" tags?
- can folksonomy be encouraged? (showing users more tags leads to more vocabulary reuse
- is convergence valuable?

2. Google - it's about search but it's social search
value of a page is the value of the pages that link to it
recursive
fight for attention: The Shoe Store example of a business whose fortunes depended on google's pagerank
tied this to the long tail in the blogosphere
The Rich get Richer

NetFlix is giving $1 million to someone who creates a recommendation engine for them

3. MySpace - showed an entry from a young girl who is going to jail for admitting online that she was driving a car in which two people were killed

4. MSN - too boring to talk about so skipping

5. Ebay
gaming the system - buyers that receive negative ratings will punish you later, so not providing honest feedback
two papers about this

6. Amazon
most important resource is customers
customers "selling to" customers
showed the "clean underwear" example from when Amazon started selling clothing (customers who bought this bought clean underwear)
more gaming the system

7. YouTube
video by amateurs?
copyright issues
- CBS agreement
- music videos
why did google buy youtube?
paid so much for the community

8. World of Warcraft
a virtual world focused on combat - 8 million users
showed a video of Fayejin's funeral

9. Craig's List

10. Wikipedia
mentioned Stephen Colbert, wikiality, and the African elephants episode

movielens is a recommender site from John's research group
one external user added 5,000 movies to their database
he threatened to go on strike if they let others add content
added an interface for others to contribute for the scale, speed, robustness against change, and community participation it would give them

when to review - editing after, rather than before
the overall expected quality by a user of the system was higher for the Wikipedia model
the eventual equilibrium is the same

11. Facebook
study found that 90% of users thought peers would look at their page
only 3% thought professors would

12. CNN
now doing real life news for Second Life
Reuters has a live news bureau in Second Life to report back to the real world

Questions
- are these social interactions going to play out in real life, other than just games?
- John: millions of people going crazy and doing work for free...if we can harness just 1% of that.... doesn't know this and it might be useful just for games, but he'd like to get out in front of this interesting phenomen

- where is the economic motivation and what is the business model that makes sense in this environment?
- John: first, talked about economic theory but it didn't have anything to do with money; people are often motivated by things other than money; if you give people evidence that the work they are doing makes other peoples' lives better in concrete ways, they will be happy - unless you're making money off what they're doing, in which case they want a piece of it; how do you create incentive models without altering the previous model of involvement?

- what is the degree to which a world created by young people is overrun by the outside, will it no longer be cool and they will leave? does research show communities want to be with people like themselves?
- John: thinks we will see a crossing the chasm effect; the first wave will leave, but the reason they are going away is that all of us are here

Frank Menchaca, Thompson-Gale

TG is like libraries in that some pieces of the organization are agile but others are in a horrible state of atrophy

how are decisions made in companies that affect products

TG takes into account:

1. the end user
no longer look only at librarians for input and feedback; librarians are one part of the spectrum of people they talk to for market research

2. business models
they are in a perpetual mode of change and transformation
continually looking for new business models, which affects the projects they do
have to think through new business models where they didn't digitize or originate material
increasingly need to think about the user experience, not the product - that's what creates the stickiness of anyone's material
Wikipedia succeeds at being accessible; in the information world, we have ridden the authority horse too much and we've talked ourselves into the greatness of authority at the expense of accessibility

3. access
integrating 18th century newspaper collection into a collection of 18th century books
hope it is a different experience than the pay-per-view or free versions
better that they find out if this is true by trying something than by not trying anything
making our metadata and parts of our collection accessible out on the internet
includes micro sites ("Goliath" that sells business content to business professionals for $19/month)
putting some one Google
placing content in the pathway where users are asking questions

4. the question of people
Gale is like a library - employee people who have been cataloging and indexing for 45 years
but this is no longer at the center of what they do (east of the periphery now)
need people who ask different kinds of questions of users now - no longer recruit from publishing or libraries when looking for these types of people
increasingly, his editors have a charge to go out and be in the market 50% of the time in which they need to sell their products & use that time to understand the curriculum, understand the needs of the institution

what the future means for them is:
- spending more and more physical time with customers and end users
- becoming a hybrid organization where the people harvesting that knowledge are bringing it back to the organization to spawn new product ideas

his job is pull people along and hire others to push
little fish in the big pond have to keep moving in order to avoid being eaten up

Christopher McKenzie, John Wiley & Sons

killing the sacred cow of textbooks and libraries
textbooks are broken - how do we know? no one is happy
- students
- faculty
- librarians
- administrators
- publishers

currently:
40/40/20 - an increasing number of students are not buying textbooks at all, new or used
faculty don't recognize this
used book buying affects textbook publishers and students
ebooks not taking off

legislators are promoting solutions

his solution: digital
- always current
- lower cost
- improves student outcomes (for enhanced products, not just replications)
- reduces faculty workload
- easier fulfillment
- no used book/importation

new models:
- course-by-course adoption
- all adopted courses
- "Big Deal" lite (open all titles to anyone that wants to use them)

went through some statistics for the economics of course materials

Libraries' Role
- libraries are at the center of the stakeholder
- issues
- budget
- logistics
- selection by faculty
- expertise
- licensing
- implementation
- user training
- expansive knowledge of worthwhile content
- leverage investment in other content
- leverage Course Management Systems

Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Alexander Street Press

scary:
- loss of control
- a lot of content not created by publishers
- expensive, new technologies
- loss of proprietary gateways to content
- large new players with enormous network advantages

Alexander Street's response: create the best product in a discipline
need to behave in a way that advances the following:
- seek out areas that are currently ill-served
- research, find, link, and license the best content from all possible sources
- find previously unpublished materials
- license and co-publish archives, authors, and publishers
- provide outstanding functionality through indexing and technology

noted Dialog was put out of business by its business model, not by technology

- don't compete or duplicate; they'll link to any website and will help you publish something
- add real value; don't see themselves as owning spaces; they are part of the community
- want to be fast
- want to be efficient

aggregating disciplines and creating the best collection they can in these niches
- e.g., history, performing arts, literature, women's history, music, sociology, religion, black studies, psychology
focus on niches and deliver exceptional value

first person narratives as a new way of looking at history
- contemporaneous
- diverse
- personal
- multiple viewpoints (more from women, etc.)
- stamped in place and time (parallel versions of history)

building a parallel historical universe to complete newspaper archives
not trying to do it uniquely - part of the community of reviews, music, films, google, etc.
==> free database at http://inthefirstperson.com
added semantic indexing for value
try to organize results better

music - "Music Online" portal

develop specific expertises to focus in an area
deliver a level of value
database of streaming music plus scores, all searchable from one place
offer playlists and now have thousands of academic professional creating thousands of playlists; academics will be able to publish their playlists
tag cloud coming!
don't want to perpetrate silos as more and more use will come from outside of their interface

need to translate all of this to their video products

wants to stress that by actively publishing in a particular discipline, they can stay ahead of the other fish swimming around

looking at local archives of music - pilot program this fall, looking for partners to test the service
- looking for material that has been produced locally or where copyright has been secured

Questions

- cultural shifts in the way we do and think about things; how do you make that happen? what do you think is critical for us to do to facilitate those types of shifts
- Frank: libraries have to solve for access the same way publishers do; need to be accessible the way Wikipedia is
- Christopher: the will is there in some quarters (including some lofy corners like presidents and provosts), but need a top-down and bottom-up approach to get over the hump

- publishers take a great deal of pride in what they produce, but end users are much less interested in knowing the publisher in the discovery phase; how do you allow us to get over the hurdle of the silos of your own publications?
- Frank: convince them to sell us their companies :-p ; as a publishing community, we need to make a decision to make our content discoverable and accessible on Google where you can search and get snippets; then it becomes up to the publishers what kinds of licensing agreements they want to have with libraries
- Christopher: don't you think that's already happening with SDI?
- Stephen: certain basic behaviors that make content discoverable and certain ones that don't (such as pages without permanent URLs, no authenticity or context for some collections, etc.), both are propagated by libraries and publishers

Side note for the day - check out Lorcan Dempsey's post about A Book Cloud in in WorldCat! I love this.

I have witnesses that Andy Havens said he would do karaoke at the American Libraries/TechSource booth at the Annual Conference, so maybe we can get him to sing the Latin book cloud, too. ;-)

Diane Dallas - Indiana University Libraries

use Sakaibrary tool
formalized making pages for classes in course management software - "oncourse"
make these pages based on unique course ID; instructors can request these pages or librarian can make them

- took this approach because it is easy and fast
- highly relevant
- integration of library resources into the course management software
- subject/discipline specific instruction
- multiple access points
- high impact for relatively low effort

worked at IU because:
- seamless integration with little work required on the part of the faculty
- created within the library web environment
- contextual instruction is viewed as a value-added feature

demonstrate the value of libraries in these environments

problem right now is that students and faculty cannot modify or add to these pages

Susan Hollar - Michigan

also implemented Sakai, but call it "ctools"
- sending their library reserves into ctools via an RSS feed
- developing a module to add their virtual reference tool into the software so that instructors can just turn on that functionality
- have created a new "role" within the software for "Librarian" so that the instructor can add their subject librarian to their course to give them access to relevant modules (not grading)

working with Indiana on a Mellon Grant 1/06-6/07 to integrate licensed library content into the software

citation list tool
goes to SFX resolver
still dealing with openurl and broadcast search problems

did some usability testing to learn about the value of this effort:
- faculty: easy way for students to create and share citation lists within Sakai
- faculty: "do it yourself" e-reserves
- students see it as helpful in writing research papers
- librarians: prefer native search interfaces and valuing the investments made in library websites

Next Steps:
- citation list in next version (Sakai 2.4)
- identify ways to break down access barriers further
- free the citation
- subject research guidance, next level
- leverages citation list functionality
- provide students resources beyond pathfinders
- save canned and constrained searches, embed RSS, audio, annotations
- information about Librarian and a method for identifying librarian and contacting them

actually funding a Sakai developer

recommendations:
- talk to your CMS developers
- work with vendors
- strive to understand work cultures
- take the long view, but take baby steps
- get the right people involved
- take risks

John Butler - University of Minnesota

have done many in-depth assessments during the last few years
portal aggregation for undergraduates
forced them to think about which services and resources they would privilege for this audience
- moving from a paradigm of inclusion (everything we could ever provide to them) to one of exclusion (what *should* we provide to them)
- blogging, metasearch, etc.

scaled development:
- personal information management (PIM) tool deployment
- enterprise-level portal; my Campus Portal

personalizable at the demographic level
customizable at the user level

has 140,000 registered users with:
- more than 47,000 unique logins monthly
- 34,000 unique logins weekly
- 9,600 unique logins daily
includes incoming freshmen and alumni

"in the flow" opportunities
myLibrary tab = myLibrary on my
http://www.myu.umn.edu/
showed different views

affinity strings - tc.grad.gs.anth.phd
suggests things we can do at the social networking level
brings up questions about how they create prefabricated views
- librarian/subject liaisons pushing content based on "what's best" principles
- content pushed on basis on an affinity population's use behavior in the overall library web environment
- users' explicit content choices (for individual portal views) are aggregated and reflected back to the user community
- hybrids of the above

want to balance the push and the pull
want to feed back group-assembled views based on aggregation of different levels

in heart of phase one of building the prefabricated views
phase two - end user gets some control over the space
phase three - building community views

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe - University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

going to talk about an environment that isn't ours at all - Second Life
what does it mean to participate in but not own this environment

immersive environment:
- a simulated/created environment (real life is immersive)
- interact with these worlds/environments through devices
- avatar as representation of individual
- controlled (game) or free-form (world or reality) - two types

not many of us in the room are our avatar every day (based on a poll)
noted the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference at the end of this month

metaverse is another phrase for a virtual world
quote from conference that they see many metaverses in the future

noted There.com but focusing on Second Life

a lot of identity management going on

University of Illinois' mWorlds: Games, Cyber-Physical Systems, Synthetic Worlds
- mWorlds are synthetic worlds
- I missed a few of the points
- now a class on building metaverse spaces

showed video of Second Life Library
a library gardens group is doing the landscaping on InfoIsland
"getting yourself dislodged from concrete is occasionally a problem"

UIUC GSLIS Change Management Course met in SL - had to meet at the Kansas State Library building because there was no UIUC library where they could meet
Lisa is excited to figure out SL and library services *before* there are 50,000 users
UIUC also has a class called "Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World"

the Library is trying to figure out what they are doing
want to take the lead; they don't care about Second Life per se, but rather about the opportunity to see what an immersive environment is like and what they can do there
will take lessons they learn and move on to other worlds if SL isn't where everything goes in the future

7 Levels of Change book by Rolf Smith
1. Effectiveness: doing the right things
2. Efficiency: doing right things right
3. Improving: doing the right things better
4. Cutting: doing away with things
5. Copying: doing things other people are doing
6. Different: doing thing no one else is doing
7. Impossible: doing things that can't be done
she would add #8: doing things people tell you you shouldn't be doing

strategies for immersion:
- environmental scan, which meant just getting avatars and playing together in the computer lab
- engage
- explore
- experiment
- envision: set aside some money to hire a graduate assistant to try things out
- establish

Questions

- sees SL as like the early web where usability is horrible and not really utilizing the opportunities presented to us
- Lisa: SL is great for bringing together librarians in-world from around the world to discuss this very thing; meeting in the next couple of weeks; looking at an exhibition for a cooking collection in-world & build a virtual kitchen for it in a way you can't in real life

- her campus is looking at the role of the librarian in the CMS, too and only being allowed to go into certain areas, especially if they are also teaching in the system
- Susan: instructor can override defaults to give librarians access to grading or administration if necessary; when they teach full classes, they are the "instructor" and have the full role

Beyond the Walls of the Academy - Glenn Peterson

1. Presence
not forcing people to come to your website
showed Hennepin Library news and catalog search box in Google Reader and MySpace
"add Hennepin County Library Catalog search to your MySpace" because kids like to collect gadgets for their MySpace page

2. Search Autosensing
showed OpenSearch with HCL catalog in Google search box on a toolbar (Firefox and IE7)
- lets you put the library's catalog directly into the browser for searching

3. Pushing to Users
email alerts for titles by authors the user has self-identified interest in
RSS feed for forthcoming fiction, what you have checked out, etc.

4. Blogging in Public Libraries
showed Ann Arbor District Library
HCL has a blog for Catalog News

5. bookspace (yay!)
branded website (like Lorcan said)
a librarian in Kansas owned the domain bookspace.org and gave it to HCL (yay librarian in Kansas!)
bookspace has a blog; "win prizes" inaugural post has 26 comments on it, most of which have nothing to do with the prizes; people started talking about books there
bookspace integrates with the HCL catalog

showed comments in HCL catalog
comments link appears on individual detailed records and in booklists and in bookspace
showed a user-created booklist - "Cold Enough for You?"
very Amazon-like; lets you see other booklists by the creator

6. Scratch
using MIT's Scratch software to teach kids how to create games
is very subversive - has kids creating open source software!
showed the Scratch interface and did a demo of how you build a game
user-friendly environment and you can build in complexity as you learn it

Takeaways
- look for opportunities to extend your library's presence
- look at PL blogs for ideas that might work for you
- consider adding social features to your website that llow users to share their experiences using library resources

(Conference blog is at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/CICLib07/.)

In the Flow: from discovery to disclosure - Lorcan Dempsey

personal learning landscape image
construct a digital identity out of a variety of tools & interact with a full range of people
no library in the picture, but that might not have been part of the digital identity
how do we drop the library in there? must have a URL right now; RSS ties this type of environment together

peoples' work, communication, the way they want to interact with others changes when they enter a network environment
a single website is no longer the focus of attention but workflow
database --> website --> workflow
"getting things done" in effective ways
prefabricated workflows (e.g. CMS)
also a big focus on self-assembled digital identity
- RSS aggregators, toolbars, bookmarks (not just the desktop but beyond that, too)
supporting workflow is the issue now, helping you get things done

showed PictureAustralia on Flickr
put themselves into the flow of what people do (which also had the added benefit of driving traffic to the PA website)

Then: users built workflow around the library
Now: the library must build its services around user workflow
So: get into the flow, disclose into other environments

Attention
Then: resources scarce, attention abundant
Now: attention scarce (surrounded by opportunities to find what we want), resources abundant
competition for attention; simply being there is no longer good enough, simply making an offer is no longer good enough

Long Tail Information Providers
networked environment = flattening, integration of many things, participation

hubs emerging online (IMDB, etc.) aggregate supply and demand

Aggregation of supply (e.g. iTunes):
- unified discovery (want to reduce the steps you have to go through to make it easier for you)
- low transaction costs

Aggregation of demand (e.g. Google):
- mobilize users
- brand

libraries:
- do not aggregate supply very well
- do not lower the transaction costs of using things
- limited number of users available
- what is the brand of the library?

so the long tail argument is that you are pushing down demand
it's not enough to manage it - you have to aggregate supply and make it easy for people to use it

Collections and Scholarly Information Flow

a major issue for libraries over the next few years
manage collections in a very fragmented way

print - found in the catalog
licensed content - found in the metasearch resolver
digital, research & learning outputs - found in repositories (home-grown solutions for the most part)

one side is how you manage these things, the other is how you present them
range of approaches to managing these various resources
from the web presence point of view, have a range of offerings to people which may or may not be integrated into the website (usually confusing to users - where should I go for what?)

have to get away from the here is this - here is this - here is this approach and move to an integrated interface

how does one make resources available where people are, in their workflow

in the last few years, more work has moved onto the network
a variety of other things then need to be managed
the way people are doing research changes
aggregation at a higher level

opportunity for libraries to assist users in finding and managing resources
these types of services are no longer centralized in the library

The Network Rewrites the Library: The Catalog, Discovery, and Disclosure

Chris Bekect - bypassing on-site navigation
increasingly, what people want to do is get to the target content (articles)
publisher wants to make sure target content is visible to search engines, aggregators, link servers
the bulk of navigation is useless and not used because they are looking for target content
we design our websites as if they are the single point of attention for users
how are machines consuming your content?

1. Local discovery environments
focus on "next generation catalogs"
"make data work harder"
integrate consumer environment
escape from ILS limitations
examples: NCSU, Rochester, SOLR, Worldcat 2.0, Primo, Encore
showed their FictionFinder beta product of fiction by tag cloud

issues with this approach:
- unified?
- how does MARC data play with other data?
- subjects, authors....
- duplicate cost?
- relationship to metasearch?

2. Shared Discovery Environment
try to increase the impact by moving the discovery environment up in the network to create more gravitational pull and more brand

example: Libraries Australia (reduces transaction cost by letting you request, buy, etc. the item)
- also provides code to put a search box on your site to reduce transaction costs

OhioLINK
code to add search box on your site shows the value of the network
aggregates supply by letting you find something in any Ohio academic library
also aggregates demand by making it available to everybody in all institutions
from a brand point of view, once people know about the network, it is easier to find than individual institutions

- integration of discovery 2 delivery becoming essential
- a move to shared environments seems more likely with increased ability to 'view' different levels
- increased gravitational pull; a greater use of collections
- discovery at the group 'network level'

3. Syndicated Discovery Experience

putting data in places where it can be discovered and then pulling people back into the library

syndicating services
- RSS
- portlets
- APIs, protocol-based

syndicating links in places like Wikipedia
catalog data in RSS aggregators

- routing issue for non-unique materials
service disclosure is less common
making the library's resources available elsewhere via toolbars, HTML fragments - search boxes, widgets, extensions, etc. will become more important in the future

4. Leveraged Discovery Experience

use another discover resource to connect back to yours
e.g. Greasemonkey script to add library holdings to Amazon website

may become more common

So....
the library website is not the front door anymore so painting it and putting ornaments on it is of little use
need to connect multiple discovery environments to library fulfillment options
need to put library resources in users' workflow