The Horseless Library

The neatest mashup I've seen in a long time was highlighted today over on If: Book,
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/11/book_as_terrain.html

What kinds of stories, narratives, navigation, use, and instruction might result from turning book pages, both image and text, into maps? I don't know, but I like thinking about it. The actual tool is at http://www.maplib.net/index.php

Idle playtoy or something a bit deeper? Only time will tell.

I'm all hopped up on Kim Duckett's and Scott Warren presentation to the NCSU Librarians Association. Kim and Scott rock! They talked about how explaining the economic role of the library is a good way to teach students why to use the library.

Their talk and an observation by our colleague Josh Wilson got me to thinking about how truly weird the library's economic role is in one particular scenario -- patrons Googling journal articles from on campus. They go from Google (or Yahoo, or a link on some random web page) straight to full text articles. I'm not talking about open access journals. I'm talking about articles in big-money journals published by Elsevier, Springer, et. al. If patrons are on campus, they get to the text seamlessly, no cost, no hassle, no need to use library databases or Journal List. The weird thing is that not only is the article free, there's no notice that it cost anyone, anywhere a dime. This works because Springer et. al. treat an NCSU IP address like a "paid in full" receipt. (Off-campus versions of this story are more complicated, and I won't get into them here.)

I'm all for seamless access, but it sure seems like we, the library, should drop a note in the middle of that process that says "Paid for by NCSU Libraries" Or, to borrow an idea from Andrew Pace, a discount sticker that says "This cost $___, you pay $0, you save 100%." The way we do it now is like an auto mechanic sneaking into a customer's garage at night, silently providing a free tune-up, and deliberately not leaving a "Free tune-up by ACME Garage" note. The car owner is left thinking that his car is never needs servicing. Credit, in the customer's mind, goes to Honda. In our journal article case, credit in a patron's mind goes where? Google? That Springer outfit that provides all the free stuff?

Note that my prescription, dropping a "Paid for by NCSU Libraries" notice in the Google-to-Springer path, is not something we can do. Our servers are not in that path. We would have to ask Springer to do it. And Elsevier, and Wiley, and Nature, and ...

One of the valuable parts of Kim's and Scott's presentation is that it opens students' eyes to something they don't know about. "Lifting a veil" is Kim's metaphor. What can we do systematically to make the economics visible without interfering with the easy access that we also value?

Every recommendation tool I've ever seen is trying to put the patron in contact with things that he or she will like based on prior consumption. This morning I saw a post on LibraryThing's blog that did the opposite.
http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester

You can read all about it at
http://www.librarything.com/blog/2006/11/booksuggester-and-unsuggester.php

Put in a title and see what other people who own or have read a work likely will never read, buy, or consider. Several examples are provided too (we learn that people who read The Confessions of St. Augustine do not like to read Night Pleasures (though perhaps based on the title they should in order to better understand just what the young Augustine was in fact confessing to)). And likewise. The algorithm is explained and it is quite fun for a few minutes to put in titles and quickly conclude that yeah, I'd never read those other things in a million years and whomever is reading them just has markedly different interests and tastes. It seems trivial at first glance, but it's worth pointing out that Tim Spaulding, the LibraryThing guy, posted earlier on NGG4LIB that

"I plan to use it to calculate "diversity" metrics
for users, and later various "levels." Basically you take a list of
books, eg., twenty top "academic" books and use their associations as
the touchstones that order all other books. I'm hoping it can produce
something like OCLC "Audience level" stats.
"

Data's fun.

Tim

Nowt that's interesting. And I wonder what will come of it.

On a personal level, LibraryThing seems quite neat, but I still haven't found it at all useful for professional work. The stuff I buy with my various collection funds is never found there. If I were in the public library world or possibly buying for the humanities, then I think the relevance might be higher. For my own reading, I already have so many things to read that honestly, the last thing I need are new recommendations (well, I'll take recommendations, but likely won't act on them). What I believe I enjoy most about LibraryThing is the FRBR-ization; seeing all the different covers and editions collocated in one place.

I'm left with two conclusions when reading the blog and Tim Spaulding's post. 1) A nagging sense that OCLC just missed the boat here. and 2) That I agree wholeheartedly with Tim Spaulding. Data is fun.

At this year's Educause conference Dr. Edward Ayers (University of Virginia) and William Thomas III (University of Nebraska) gave a great presentation about digital history projects they are working on. You can watch their presentation on the Educause conference website. It's very engaging and informative.

They reported on some very interesting digital projects including visualizations to explore the movement of ex-slaves across different areas following the end of slavery and to trace how the development of the railroad system impacted communities in Nebraska and other western states.

One of the most interesting projects they describe focuses on how they worked with groups of students to use the UVA library's special collections to research social history issues. The project is called The Southern History Database. The students were assigned different geographic areas in the South, researched themes in social history, wrote narrative accounts, and populated the database with content. Students then used the entire collection of narrative histories in the database to look for commonalities in social issues across different geographic areas. The project is designed to grow over time with students being the central researchers. It sounds like an incredible opportunity to engage students with historical documents while deepening their connection to the materials through digital technologies.

Carol Vreeland, NCSU Librarian for Life Sciences, forwarded me this link about Zotero, a new extension for managing citations through the Mozilla Firefox 2.0 web browser. Zotero is still in beta development and definitely has limited capabilities. Most noticeable and unfortunate is that it does not yet work with NCSU Libraries' Endeca-powered online catalog. But I thought Zotero was still well worth mentioning because it already does some interesting and useful things.

When Zotero is enabled in your browser, it identifies citations on the webpages you visit and signals you with a small icon in the location bar at the end of the url. Clicking this icon opens Zotero in the bottom half of your screen and automatically adds the cite to any Library you create. This feature seems to work very well in Google Scholar, and also inside some of NCSU's general/multi-purpose databases such as Ebsco's Academic Search Premier and JSTOR.

As you're surfing the web, you can also manually add citations to your library with a few clicks and some text entry. You can also add webpage snapshots, full-text documents, and presonalized notes to your entries. All your Library documents are available both online and offline.

Zotero allows you to import records - a workaround for NCSU Endeca users - and it can export in several formats. It also has the ability to generate a bibliography with items that you highlight, formatting them in either APA, MLA, or Chicago style.

Here is an interesting story recounted from a presentation by Bruce Sterling at the PopTech conference:

"Bruce also related a story told to him by an engineering professor friend of his. The prof split his class into two groups. The first group, the John Henrys, had to study and learn exclusively from materials available at the library...no internet allowed. The second group, the Baby Hueys, could use only the internet for research and learning...no primary source lookups at the library. After a few weeks, he had to stop this experiment because the John Henrys were lagging so far behind the Baby Hueys that it is was unfair to continue."

Subsequent Googling indicated the experiment occurred at Harvey Mudd College. It would be nice to read a full write-up of this experiment. If the library print collection fares so poorly in this context one might ask several hard questions about the role of print collections in academic libraries.

(via kottke)

Grazr, http://grazr.com, is a tool that seems both interesting and potential useful. I found it when looking for information on OPML files, which are ways of creating sets of RSS feeds. ResearchBuzz has a review as do many other sites. I started thinking about this after seeing discussions about using RSS for TOCs for researchers. Subscribe to several of these, or in different subject areas, and things could get messy fast in most feedreaders.

I have to admit that the number of blogs I subscribe to can be counted on both hands and the number I actually read on any kind of regular basis on one hand, but for people who subscribe to a lot, this could be useful. I bookmark frequently and fairly indiscriminately because it is so trivial to do so (a keystroke for all intents and purposes). If blogs, social network stuff, YouTube channels, mashups, and podcasts, all of which Grazr handles, were one keystroke things (and if I had oodles more time to actually view, read, participate, listen, etc.), then I think this tool would be pretty useful. Or it might end up like a fancy version of my bookmarks lists: dozens of things of which I have no idea why I actually have them there and only a handful that actually are useful much less used.

I'm just curious - for those reading this, do you subsribe to lots of blogs? Or channels, podcasts, etc? I have no idea what sort of norm, if any, yet, exists for these numbers (and those norms for particular segments of the population too). Are you good about organizing your bookmarks? If so, maybe Grazr is for you. Finally, anyone know of a library doing something with this? Or like this?

Hey, y'all, long time no see. Haven't been by Horseless Library for awhile, because I've been busy teaching.

Just wanted to say that I am really loving using the blogs in my two graduate classes. And I'm sure I wouldn't have used blogs if the library hadn't taken the initiative to set them up; a course on Blogger or Typepad seems almost as unprofessional as one on Facebook or MySpace.

I missed Kim Duckett's session on how to use blogs in teaching, so I had to come up with a way myself, but what I'm doing seems to be working well. I post an assignment every week, and the students submit their work as comments weekly or twice-weekly (depending on the class). I grade these on a pass/fail (1 point or 0 points) basis, and that, I think, is important, because the major limitation of the blog as a technology for managing assignments is that there's no way to use it to give the students grades.

I tried to use Vista for my undergraduate class, which can be configured so that the students can see each others' work, and which allows students to track their grades, but frankly I found it to be a nightmare. Everything took SO LONG to set up! There were a million different toggles for creating an assignment, and it wouldn't allow me to copy assignments, and even just the molasses load speed drove me NUTS. I kicked it to the curb and began using a majordomo e-mail list instead so that my undergrads could submit a weekly response that I actually grade (though only on a 0, 1, or 2 point scale).

Even the majordomo list has its problems, but it has two features that I liked: it is distributed to the whole class, and I can submit grades that go to the students individually. Still, I really really really wish that I had set up a blog with pass/fail weekly assignments for the undergrads, too. They'd be reading each other's work more, I'm certain, which I think is enormously valuable -- they don't usually bother to open the attached essays their classmates send, they've said -- and they'd have that sense of writing in public that writing for the web provides.

One last little cute-ish story about using the blogs that I think Emily Lynema already knows about. We were reading Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," which features a marriage between first cousins. One student asked about this, and another attempted to answer, but her comment was flagged as porn spam because it contained the word "incest"! She posted her answer on her own blog, and Emily very kindly commented on that post and explained what had happened.

So what I'm trying to say is this: Thanks! Thanks to the Libraries for adopting the blogs, and thanks to all of you (especially Emily) for supporting them so well. I'm convinced they've seriously enhanced my teaching and the students' learning, which I would not say for Vista. (Though I hear that Vista is a blessing for enormous lecture courses.)

My course blogs can be seen here:

Two competitions designed to encourage innovative use of library data have recently announced winners.

The Talis "Mashing up the Library" Competition first prize went to a Google gadget suite for integrating library content in the Google personalized homepage. You can see a full list of winners and entries on the Talis website.

The OCLC Software Research Contest prize went to an OpenURL link resolver tool called The Umlaut.

Unfortunately, the OCLC contest entry submitted by Emily Lynema and myself did not win, but you can learn more about it here: Catalog Availability Service.

Library competitions are fun and encourage new thinking around library services. I hope to see more competition opportunities in the future.

Recently I stumbled on some really great examples of software that visualize change over time.

Gapminder presentation

First, I would like to draw your attention to this highly entertaining presentation by Hans Rosling as he demonstrates the use of his Gapminder software to bring decades of world health data to life. This is a full presentation so you may want to advance two minutes into it to get to the good part. What you will see are scatterplot charts that animate by using time as a third dimension.

Tag history

Second, here is a very clever tool for seeing of how a community created tagcloud changes over time. Move the slider to the left to see how the tagcloud looked at different periods in the last year. I find this interface particularly effective because of the bottom-up nature of tagging. The tag distribution matures over time as certain tags become more popular within the community.

I would image that a similar approach could be being used to visualize shifting focus in scholarly research over time. For example within a given research area specialized topics become more or less represented in the scholarly literature over time. Anyone know of an application that does anything like this?

Three recent posts on other blogs dealt with digital librarianship and issues that have been written about by several of us here over the summer including networked books, Google's digitization program, and digital presses in the academy. All three are better written than the average blog post, are not rants (imho) and make for decent reading.

At If: Book a rare post was put up that actually deals with physical books. It challenges academic libraries to stop handing over the keys to the store, so to speak, in making deals with Google's book digitization program. http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/08/librarians_hold_google_accountable.html

Here's an excerpt:

That's because no sane librarian would outsource their profession to an
unaccountable private entity that refuses to disclose the workings of
its system ? in other words, how does Google's book algorithm work, how
are the search results ranked? And yet so many librarians are behind
this plan. Am I to conclude that they've all gone insane? Or are they
just so anxious about the pace of technological change, driven to
distraction by fears of obsolescence and diminishing reach, that they
are willing to throw their support uncritically behind the company,
who, like a frontier huckster, promises miracle cures and grand visions
of universal knowledge?

"Still, when one filters out the soul-deadening jargon about ?authentic
learning opportunities,? ?self-reflexivity,? ?mediated environments,?
etc. that permeates their posts, it?s clear that the blog?s authors and
readers are thinking creatively and earnestly (although rather
pretentiously) about the prospects of the digital age in transforming
academic writing."

"the emphasis that contributors to if:book seem to place on
the ?transparency? of scholarship and ?immediacy? of publication made
possible by digital delivery misses a very important point...One can build a convincing case that, in the current age of instant
analysis, self-absorbed ?experts,? and ubiquitous 24/7 live blog feeds,
the last thing that the academy needs is to embrace transparency and
immediacy."

"But will urging university presses to think more seriously about blogs
(and other new media forms) really offer a solution? Or does it just
compound the problem? Hearing from readers over the past week, I?ve
started to wonder."

OCLC's WorldCat.org search service in now live. The search response is super fast, the interface is very clean, and they even have faceted search refinement functionality across five dimensions (Author, Content, Format, Language, Year). For an initial release this is impressive.

The ability to search across the collections of 18,000 libraries is impressive. The Find in a Library feature allows you to check to see if your local library has a copy of the item. I am interested in the evolution of WorldCat localization services. For users with a known library affiliation (e.g. undergrads), can WorldCat do more than Find in a Library?

Two interesting articles about the Chris Anderson's Long Tail phenomenon showed up in the last week. In the Wall Street Journal, Lee Gomes critiqued Andererson's methodologies:

"By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of
Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional
retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers -- an analysis that Mr.
Anderson argues isn't meaningful -- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles
produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive."

Indeed, so far, the winners in the long tail scenario aren?t
publishers but the online booksellers and the databases that aggregate their
titles, making books stranded on the dusty shelves of local used-book stores
readily available to buyers around the world. Online used-book sales rose 33
percent between 2003 and 2004, to $609 million, in a $2.2 billion used-book
market, according to the Book Industry Study Group. But publishers don?t profit
from used books. Even Anderson acknowledges this. Online retailers may have unlocked the fuller potential of
the used-book market, but ?that doesn?t benefit the authors or the publishers,
because the revenues don?t go to them,? he said in a recent telephone
interview. ?But it does benefit us as consumers.?

Meanwhile, in a great example of irony, Mr. Anderson's book, The Long Tail, sits at #10 on the NYTs nonfiction best seller list, enjoying all the perks that come from blockbuster publishing, bookstore placements, and extended media coverage. It makes me wonder if the best thing to do to help Chris Anderson out might be to not buy his book , but rather find and buy something way down the long tail list, say #100,000 or lower on Amazon. Surely he'd rather be correct in his economic analysis than rich off a blockbuster, right? Right?

But a real question, more pertinent to me, is where are libraries in all this?