Don't panic! Or, further thoughts on the mobile challenge

Two weeks ago, I posted some notes on the CILIP executive briefing on 'the mobile challenge', where I presented the effort of my library, the quick-wins 'UBA Mobiel' project. Those notes concentrated on the talks on the day. Now that it's had time to simmer (and a quick autumn holiday), I want to add some reflection on the general theme.

Which basically boils down to Don't Panic (preferably in large, friendly letters on the cover).

Is there really such a thing as a 'mobile challenge' for libraries? Well, yes and no. Yes, the use of internet on mobile devices is growing fast, and is adding a new way of searching and using information for everyone, including library patrons. The potential of 'always on' is staggering. And it is a challenge.

However, it is also just another challenge. After twenty years of continuous disruption, starting with on-line databases, then web 1.0 and web 2.0, change is not new any more. Libraries are still gateways to information, rare and/or expensive (the definition of expensive and rare depending and varying on the context, also changing of course). And the potential of the paperless office may finally come to fruit with the advent of the iPad, but meanwhile printer makers are having a boon selling ever more ink at ridiculous prices.

So, what to do?

There are three ways to adapt. On one side are the forerunners, with full focus on the new and shiny. Forerunners get the spotlights, and tend to be extroverts that make good presentations. However, not everyone can be in front - it would get pretty crowded. It takes resources, both money and a special kind of staff. Two prominent examples given at several of the Cilip talks were NCSU and DOK Delft. Kudos to them, they're each doing exciting stuff, but they are also the usual suspects, and that's no coincidence.

On the other extreme, there's not changing at all. For the institution, a certain road to obsolescence. For a number of library staff the easy way to retirement. Fortunately, their number seems to be rapidly dwindling, but nevertheless, finding the right staff to fulfil the jobs at libraries or publishers when the descriptions of these jobs are in flux was a much talked about topic, both in the talks and in the breaks.

In practice, most libraries are performing a balancing act in between. And it is perfectly acceptable to be in the middle. Keep an eye on things. Stay informed. Make sure your staff gets some time to play with the toys that the customers are walking around with, and if they find out what's on offer in the library is out of sync, do something about it.

[from tuesday tech]

Which is pretty much what we did with UBA Mobiel. Nothing worlds hattering, not breaking the bank. We're certainly not running in front, but we're making sure our most important content (according to the customers) is usable. This way, when the chance comes along to do Something Utterly Terrific (Birmingham) or merely a Next Step Forward (upgrading our CMS) we know what to focus on.

The response on our humble little project has been very positive. We may have hit a nerve, and I'm really glad to hear that it is inspiring others to get going. Go-Go Gadget Libraries!

Becoming upwardly mobile - a Cilip executive briefing

Cilip office in Bloomsbury, London

On September 15, Cilip (the UK Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and OCLC held a meeting on the challenge that mobile technology proves for libraries, called Becoming upwardly mobile Executive Briefing.

The attendees came from the British Isles (UK and Ireland). Some of the speakers however came from elsewhere. Representing The Netherlands, I presented the UBA Mobiel project as a case study, which went well.

The mere fact that I was asked to present our small low-key project - which in the end cost less than 1100 euro and 200 hours - as a case study along the new public library in Birmingham with a budget of 179 million pounds sterling shows how diverse the subject 'the mobile challenge' is.

Thus the talks varied widely, and especially the panel discussion suffered from a lack of focus. It was interesting nevertheless.

Attendees were encouraged to turn their mobiles on and tweet away, and a fair number of them did. See Twitter archive for #mobexec at twapperkeeper.


1. Adam Blackwood, JISC RSC

A nice wide-ranging introduction in a pleasant presentation, using lots of lego animation. In one word: convergence. To show what a modern smartphone can do, he emptied his pockets, then went on from a big backpack, until the table in front of him was covered with equipment, a medical reference, an atlas and so on. "And one more thing…".  The versatility of the devices coming at us means not only that current practices will be replaced, but also that they are going to merge in unexpected ways. Reading a textbook online is a different experience from reading it on paper, for instance. Augmented reality (in the broad sense of the word, not just the futuristic goggles) is a huge enabler that we should not block by sticking to old rules (such as asking to turn devices off in the library or during lectures).

As for the demoes, it's a bit unfortunate that it always seem to be the same that are pointed to (NCSU, DoK), though they're still great. Using widgetbox to quickly create mobile websites was new to me, worth checking out further (the example was ad-enabled, hope they have a paid version, too).

All in all, a great rallying of the troops.

2. Brian Gambles, Birmingham

A talk about the new public library in Birmingham. An ambitious undertaking, inspired by amongst others the new Amsterdam public library. The new library should put Birmingham on the cultural map, and itself become one of the major touristic attractions for the city, opening in 2013. It's also meant to 'open up' the vast heritage collection (the largest collection of rare books and photography of any public library in Europe). And to pay for it, they'll have to monetize those as well.

A laudable goal, great looking plans, I wish them luck in these difficult times.

The library is not just the books (the new Kansas city library sends all the wrong messages). The mobile strategy comes forth from the general strategy: open up services and let others do the applications. Open data, etc. They are working with apple to get on iTunesU for instance (partnership with the uni). Get inspiration from cultural sector, many interesting & much downloaded apps have come from museums. Notable especially is the Street museum of London (flash-y-website, direct iTunes ap link)

Also, can't afford to hire enough cataloguers for the special collections - open up this as well, let crowdsurfing as a helpful tool. Surprised that there are people that like to correct OCR texts, which he thinks is a dreadful chore. So let's use it.


3. Panel discussion.

This wasn't as good as it could have been unfortunately, due to the wide range of the topic. Still some interesting points:

Adrian Northover-Smith from Sony of course very much pro e-ink devices and against the iPad. It's a cultural challenge for the company that their e-reader customers are female and older, most of their wares are peddled to young males. In a way, not dissimilar to libraries adjusting to the new 'digital native' generations, especially those catering to students.

Q: mobile use for people with visual impairment? A: epub format allows for more formats, larger letters, reading aloud. In some studies (art, fashion) up to 30% of students are dyslectic, and they're helped greatly by different presentation from the content. (DH: this is yet another field in which rights are the big hurdle, given the skirmishes over audiobook vs text-to-speach rights...).

Simon Bell from the British Library talked about the challenge of mass digitization. The definition of availability is shifting, and digital born data is especially volatile. Mobile access is just another form of presenting content, the content comes first now.

Jonathan Glasspool from Bloomsbury Academic talked about the publishing point of view. He presented a new platform for online publishing, using CC licenses to allow non-commercial use online. I'm curious how this compares to the European OApen project in which our uni participates.

In his view, the main challenge today is that the industry needs a new type of people. Bloomsbury has weekly voluntary 'elevenses' sessions, where staff can brief each other on new ideas and online uses they found, which seem to work well as a motivator.

Simon Bains and bevanpaul noted via tweets that there seems to be a big divide between those focussing on generating content versus those interested in new platforms, and I agree. You can't have one without the other, it's a chicken & egg situation. On the other hand, the reality is that the size of the problems are so big that to get anything done, focus is needed.

Brian Gambles mentioned that railway ticket machines were recently redesigned to deal with the visual impaired, resulting in a design that's much better for everyone. Better to incorporate it from the start: "accessibility should be in the DNA of new products".


4. Jeff Penka, OCLC worldwide

As I was preparing for my own talk, only a few notes. The main point of technology is barrier elimination for the user. We tend to think in systems, in details, jargon and acronyms: ILS, OPAC, SFX. The user just thinks a button should be "Get it". See also the importance of 'one-click' shopping in the Amazon and iTunes stores: such a seemingly small step key to dominance.

The worldcat mobile interface is very 'beta' - every 2-3 days a new release, to try things out. Expected to stabilize in spring 2011 though. An interesting remark: OCLC believes that a mobile interface should not come as an extra, at a high cost. Rimshot! Too many vendors are trying to squeeze their clients by doing exactly that.

5. Driek Heesakkers on Uba Mobiel

Download the presentation (licensed under creative commons BY-NC-SA).

Then it was my turn. I presented our small 'agile' project. See the presentation. It will be described in more detail in the upcoming book 'Catalogue 2.0' - A little ironic, as one of the themes of the day was that the catalogue is much less important to the users as it is to library professionals.

To summarize: by giving space to enthusiastic early adopters amongst staff, in the form of a low-overhead, fast-moving project that focuses on possible quick wins, a library can bridge the gap for the current transition period. In the long term, vendors will come up with solutions that present content (whether a catalogue, website or digitized objects) equally well in a mobile content as in others. This will take a while though, and in the meanwhile we can't afford that our services are (nearly) unusable on a mobile device.

Basically, the message is "just do it" - it will be easier than you think!


6. Benoit Maison on Pic2shop

A highly specialized topic. The pic2shop application offers an interesting way of merging functionality that web apps can't access (in this case, barcode scanning) with regular web apps. In the case of their worldcat enabled scanner, a user can scan a book (in a bookstore I presume), the app then passes the code on to an external website which does something useful with it (looks it up in worldcat) and the app displays the result from this website inside the app interface. To the user it's transparant, for the developer it's relatively light-weight.

It's an elegant concept. Might be useful for other specific device functionality that can't be accessed via web apps as well, though there are currently no plans for that.

The day ended with a session on augmented reality by Lester Madden, who did a good job I heard. Unfortunately my flight connection was too tight to stay for this one. The flight experience was pretty bad anyway... next time Eurostar for me!

Finally, for a little balance: on the same day, Aaron Tay wrote A few heretical thoughts about library, which deals amongst other things with the relative unimportance of mobile use at the moment. To a certain extent he has a point. It's not bad to stop for a moment and check if you're just following the pack.

Notes from CNI Spring meeting 2010

I was fortunate to attend the CNI Spring 2010 Task force meeting in Baltimore, USA. This was my second time at a CNI, the first one being 2007. Compared to my previous experience, it struck me how policy has come to dominate the program, where it used to be technology. Maybe it’s because the direction where we’re heading is clear - complex objects, enriched publications, open access - and the question is now how we to get there.

Because the fragmented setup of research and academia in the US differs greatly from the situation elsewhere, this made the meeting more US-centric, which was a tad disappointing. However, it remains an interesting, intense pressure-cooker, of which afterwards it’s hard to believe it barely lasted a day and a half. Worth the jetlag.

Two sessions stood out for me. First one was a presentation by Jane Mandelbaum from the Library of Congress on a collaboration with Stanford Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (iCME), to create “Metadata remediation tools” (great name!): generating summaries, short titles and geographical data from wads of text.

iCME is located in Silicon Valley, has close ties with companies there - Google, Yahoo, and small start-ups - and deals primarily with algorithms to understand text, especially with taxonomies. (which seems to be exactly what Google is trying, too, according to Steven Levy’s april 2010 article in Wired).

Interesting, as we’ve tried this in my organization, and failed miserably. This was made to work, though it took two years (!) to iron out the wrinkles between two very different cultures.  Also, it’s not an equal partnership; most of the coding takes place in summer jobs, paid for by LoC. Main reason is the nature of LoC’s metadata, in which collections exist that differ greatly but are internally consistent, which makes them good candidates to refine algorithms on.

Results for LoC: apart from the code (rough around the edges, scripts rather than applications) and the generated geographical and other metadata, insight in the usefulness and value-for-money of metadata.

Software via the projectsite: http://cads.stanford.edu/

Example of unexpected results, visualization of keyword patterns: http://cads.stanford.edu/lcshgalaxy/more.html

The other session I want to mention was on Cornell’s LoL approach. Taking the Library Outside the Library: A Light-weight Innovation Model for Heavy-weight Economic Times.

An incubator-approach, outside regular channels, to quickly respond to trends. This presentation struck a chord with the audience, at moments there was an audible roar of keypresses as dozens of people typed in notable phrases in their twitter, blogging clients or notepads. One of those was when a quote from The Simpsons’ Krusty the Clown came up: "It's not just good, it's good enough!", another was the motto “there is no blame in trying something that doesn't work”. Clearly those struck a chord.

I like the setup: a small group, consisting of staff from all departments, including circulation and rare books, that spend max 5% of their time. Membership is limited to two years. The group runs 3-5 risky projects, categorized as “from trivial to easy”.

Examples: putting PD image collections on flickr and youtube, POD books from those flickr streams with Blurb, maintaining Wikipedia pages, iPhone app (made by a CS student). For mobile devices they use Siruna. Some projects were successful, some not. When projects finish succesfully, they are transferred to the regular organization; if that doesn’t work, they are killed off rather than letting them languish or peter out, as that would be discouraging.

Very pragmatic and useful - and worth copying!

Finally, the lively Twitter traffic is archived at twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/cni10s

Social Academic referencing: a trial

At the Library of the University of Amsterdam, we've done a small trial to investigate the merits of using a 'social referencing' service. In the trial, scientists from a specific research group used such a service for several months. With a panel discussion before and after, and logs during, we hoped to get some measurable results on the impact on their work of this. Not all went as we hoped, but the resulting report (url below) offers some useful insight in what this group of scientists found useful.

I'll highlight two points that may be of wider interest. First of all, our test group felt strongly about privacy. They liked to not just add cites to a system, and tag, rate or even comment them heavily for themselves. For sharing however, it was felt essential to have control over who could see what. Rating an article negatively could be helpful for direct peers, but who knows whether the author might decide over a grant in future? The participants wanted a clear, fine-grained control. Sometimes it would be fine to share the citation, but to limit the rating or tags to a certain group; some comments are meant private, some are for the whole world; and so on. Because of this, they voted to use BibSonomy at the start of the trial.

However, it turns out that ease of use is even more important than features, and the group considered the system not easy enough. To save the project, we switched to Citeulike, and extended the use period.

I'm curious what others think of this demand for detailed control over privacy-settings. In researching next generation research collaboratories, again I found scientists consider it paramount to be able to set the privacy level for each item themselves. Not through a helpdesk, ticketqueue and a sysadmin - themselves. The two main contenders to build such systems on top of, Sakai and Sharepoint, provide such a detailed rights-structure out of the box. So it's not pie-in-the-sky thinking: it is already out there.

The project page

Download report (pdf)

BTW: yes, we're working on a proper publication.

Linking social networks

Thinking further about social networks and the need to link them, I rememberd the classic post from Jason Kottke: Being your friend is hard. This was written in the heyday of the first generation of general social networking sites, before a clear winner had arrived - at least for specific areas, such as geographic (bebo for the UK, hyves in .nl), thematic (facebook) or generational (myspace).

The fact that these 'winners' have indeed arrived is an indication that users flock to communities that are large enough - with large enough being pretty damn big. Too big for individual libraries, that's for sure.

Maybe Aquabrowsers' interoperability might be good enough so that it becomes a de facto standard, like RSS became. For this to work, they need to solve the problem of unique identifiers for any item in the system, whether ILS item, internal digital asset or digital from an external source. Ideally, this would be the first step towards a generic DOI for objects.

Of course, let's hope it won't be like the tangled mess that RSS became. As the library community, we'd better keep an eye out! Interesting times, interesting times.

Notes on the Stroomt Library 2.0 workshop

Stroomt, a company specializing in 'information optimizing', organised a Library 2.0 Theme day (though actually an afternoon) this Friday.

A small impression first. I only took my camera out at the guided tour of the museum where the afternoon was held, at which the attendees expressed polite interest - until the tour finished at the old library room of the observatory, and the ooh-ing and aah!-ing commenced...



On to business. A theme of the talks, and the discussion, was how to make social networks work. Folksonomies depend heavily on scale: the more participants a network has, the better. But in reality, networks are isolar, divided, split... For example, you could leave a comment on this picture both here, on the blog, or on its flickr page. Two different networks that do not connect.

Kudos for Moqub for full transcripts. These are a few remarks that piqued my interest.

Liesbeth Mantel (Moqub):

Observation: 75% of internet users does not know the term web 2.0 - but uses it all the time (leaving comments, using ratings and 'trust' on eBay, etc.)

Example of a (public) library that has embraced content: Gail Library

I somehow missed Librarything for libraries - that's cool! Even though it still is an insolar community (only libraries), it packs more users than a single library has patrons.

Menno Rasch (UU):

As port of portal strategy, they actually have a working portlet for the catalogue, showing books ready to be picked up, and books already borrowed with a renew link! It should be nothing special but no way we could build this with our ILS... (yes, our vendor is a four-letter word). Good for them that they chose Aleph.

And yes, they get it: the portlet can be integrated in other portals, *outside* the uni's domain, such as netvibes! Way to go.

But alas, they don't get it as far as user-contributed content for Omega is concerned - they're very hesitant in adding that. Pity. They doubt if the 25k users would be enough to make it useful - and 'long tail' does not count as such.

Alexander Blanc (SURFnet):

Rather specialised talk on the Surfnet video portal and their plans for that. Much still unclear. Much relies on material from the (rather expensive) academia license. They would like to become a youtube, but it'll be an organisational challange as the whole model right now is based on institutional use. Also no plans for supporting CC-licensing yet, though he's not ruling it out either.

Taco Ekkel (Aquabrowser):

Aquabrowser has 250 library installations worldwide. Their idea: add usercontributed metadata to these and link them. That's smart. They promise to do it using open protocols for exchange of such data, that alas have still to be developed. There'll be an open API though. If that works out, it'd be terrific.

Interesting approach: no special tools for librarians - they can make lists, rate items and all that jazz, but librarians' accounts are in principle no different from patrons'. Wonder if that flies with the professionals, might be a hard sell to let go of the specialness. Hope it works - I'm sure the pros will still come floating on top, simply by the quantity and quality of their contributions, but that way the 'trust' those accounts build up will be based on actual accomplishments.

The charts of Aquabrowsers' internals look a lot like Primo's. They hint at full support for integrating federated search sources. Unfortunately, nothing's even planned for bringing all the Library2.0-goodies that the internal sources get to these. Technically I understand, but how am I going to explain this to the average researcher? And why?

Finally...

Interesting day. Good to see that Library2.0 is very much alive in the dutch library community. Also good to see that this is only the beginning. We've got a long road ahead - thinking on linking social networks together is only just starting out, and collaboratories and new forms of use and re-use of information objects weren't even mentioned in the discussions. For which their was, BTW, not enough time - the biggest drawback of this afternoon.


Famous last words

impromptu business cards - another use for MOO cards!

A workshop on library 2.0: the next step

In december, Marco Streefkerk and yours truly organised a workshop on Library 2.0. What started as a small meeting, then grew into quite a gathering, with participants from three Dutch universities, two overview lectures on the challenges that we've come to call Library 2.0, and three possible scenario's to get there.

Certainly an interesting afternoon, with much food for thought. Therefore I'm glad that most presentations are now available online:

http://www.uba.uva.nl/library-2.0-workshop