I was fortunate to be there as I had been selected by LITA-IRC to be the recipient of the International Visitor Grant in memory of the late Professor Errol Hill. My children, living in London, could not picture their father in Nashville, home to the Grand Ole Opry and the legends of country music. I come from Trinidad and Tobago, the land of calypso and steel pan music. In Nashville nonetheless, is where I was, and I found the city and the LITA Forum a wonderful experience.

For me, it was an honour and a privilege to have been selected for the award, particularly as it was granted in memory of a great son of the soil of Trinidad and Tobago, Professor Errol Hill. I had been exposed to the work of Professor Hill early during my years as a high school student at Naparima College in San Fernando, Trinidad, when we studied his folk play/musical “Man Better Man”. I therefore felt that in attending the LITA Forum through this sponsorship, I was somehow reconnecting to this aspect of my past.

The fact that library services could be developed through the interoperability of web services programs along a continuum ranging from the very simple to complex sophisticated applications engaging the library user in highly interactive ways was the underlying thread of this conference. Throughout the conference venue, there seemed to be a sense of excitement in a future limited by our own imagination and creativity as librarians. There was also a sense that there was so much that the profession had to think about in order to meet the growing expectations of our ‘new’ users, that it simply boggled the mind.

As usually happens at any good conference, attendees were spoilt for choice when it came to the concurrent sessions. We wished that we could have attended all the sessions as they all had something important to provide in terms of expanding our understanding of how libraries could effectively use the Web to deliver added-value services.

The LITA Forum keynote speakers all provided serious food for thought. The opening session featured Alan Stoker, Steve Maer and John Rumber of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Although their presentation was not in the main about web services, they did provide some useful insights into the preservation and archiving of acetate and vinyl recordings. The conference was also privileged to hear digitized audio recordings of excerpts from some of these cultural heritage pieces. Incidentally the archive is using DSpace to manage its digital repository, a fact that I found particularly pertinent as we are also experimenting with DSpace at the library of The University of the West Indies where I currently work.

The second day’s keynote session was very interesting. It featured Thom Gillespie, creator and designer of the MIME program in interactive communication in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University. He maintains that in the twenty-first century libraries should be about supporting very active learners in the ways in which schools rarely support them, namely with books and video, software, training, and potentially, even a venue for publication Gillespie is enthusiastic about computer game design and sees gaming as a tool for creating user interfaces that libraries could tap into to teach information literacy and generally engage the user in ways that are relevant to their cultural and learning background in this new millennium.

Stephen Abram, the man with the really intriguing job title, VP Innovation, SirsiDynix, was the keynote speaker on the final day of the Forum. He stressed that there is a global conversation presently engaging many across the world about the next generation of the web. It’s happening under the name of Web 2.0, a concept that refers to a perceived or proposed second generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. Abram spent considerable time challenging the librarians in the audience to be introspective and to question what are the skills and competencies that they will need in the environment of the Web 2 and perhaps the Web 3 in the not too distant future.

The concurrent sessions were as interesting as the keynote addresses. Among those that I managed to attend were presentations on the following:

• innovative library instruction modules developed using web
based applications,
• improving library services with AJAX and RSS,
• exploring the use of podcasting and blogs in libraries, and
• developing database driven web sites using Cold Fusion.

All these sessions pointed to the fact that libraries continue to experience technological innovations as they strive to be creative in the delivery of content to their users and to create more dynamic, robust and interesting websites. It was also clear that librarians will need to continue to grapple with the question of how best to use the web’s communicative advantage to help library users find the most useful, relevant and authoritative information available. Should we as librarians distrust the web, or should we embrace its best characteristics and technologies in order to better treat with our users?

One of the highlights of the LITA Forum is the opportunity for professional networking during the unofficial meetings. Everybody likes to socialize during the breaks and the lunch sessions. It was really a pleasure to be able to meet and discuss issues with colleagues from all over the US and some from Europe as well! This international and multicultural aspect makes the conference so much more interesting and rewarding.

In conclusion, I feel that that the 2006 LITA FORUM concretized in my mind some of the ideas and concepts associated with the leading edge information technologies that are fast being adopted under the promise and potential of the Web 2. Perhaps more importantly, it served as timely reminder to us librarians of the tremendous responsibility to adapt to this new scenario. I now feel confident that I can help my librarian colleagues at the University of the West Indies to apply some of the knowledge of leading edge technologies that I imbibed at the conference to ensure that our students and faculty have a research and learning environment that is on par with international standards and best practice. It would be great if more librarians from the Caribbean and other developing regions are exposed to such ideas through this type of conference.

I think that the conference was a success and, for all of us who were able to attend, an unforgettable event. I would like to thank my sponsor, Mrs. Grace Hope-Hill for the grant which enabled my travel and participation in the LITA Forum, 2006.

2007-02-28

Frank Soodeen
Librarian III (Systems)
The University of the West Indies
St. Augustine
Trinidad and Tobago

Instructional Media and Library Online Tutorials

Li Zhang – Mississippi State University

• Online tutorials require far more than just duplicating print materials to the web. They currently have a large project to develop tutorials for both distance students and on-campus students. They’re trying to develop a single set of online tutorials that works for all of their audiences.
• Too many bells and whistles distract rather than inform. Their web committee found that including audio or video for too many pieces of a tutorial makes it unusable for people using older computers or dialup Internet access.

Integrating Library Services: An application proposal to enable federation of information and user services

Erik Mitchell – Wake Forest University
Article to be published in Internet Reference Services Quarterly, February 2007

• A “point-of-need approach is contrasted with the point-of-service approach utilized in traditional library systems.” Instead of creating a federated search, Eric is working on a sort of federated service. It will combine multiple data sources, and will also provide useful user services like item renewal — without the user having to step out of the interface into a separate OPAC/ILS interface. To this end, he is using an OpenURL link resolver + web services.
• RSS, relevance ranking, renewals: He’d like to reindex using, e.g., Google, for relevance ranking. He’d also like people to be able to subscribe, say, to an RSS feed of what they have out, and be able to one-click renew. Reindexing is the easy part; adding the circulation data is harder; and enabling the system to update live circulation data is the really hard part. He wanted to use NCIP for this, but it wasn’t supported yet by the ILS vendor (he may have to resort to a little screen scraping).

Information on the Go: A journey of incorporating portable media players into library technology

Amy Landon, Larisa Hart – Ozarks Technical Community College

• “Can’t take the lab home? Now you can.” They started putting course reserve materials onto iPods for students to check out. Their library has an interesting variety of materials for different course lab work — like a collection of rocks for one class. They decided to start adding pictures of these rocks, etc., to the iPods. This way students can study the rock pictures at their leisure. Since each iPod holds way more data than they have content available, they are putting everything on there including “How to study” DVD content.
• One iPod per thousand students: They have about 10,000 students total; they currently have 6 video iPods and 4 iPod Nano that circulate for a couple of days at a time. They’re ordering a few more iPods, but so far the number available is keeping up with the demand.

Scanning the Past: Central Florida Memory

Lee Dotson, Selma K. Jaskowski, Joel Lavoie, Doug Dunlop – University of Central Florida

• A “virtual place where visitors can discover what Central Florida was like before theme parks and the space program.” Central Florida Memory is a collaborative project of the University, the county library system, the regional oral history center, and other partners. The project started under an IMLS grant and they’re seeking new funding sources to sustain it.
• Digitization Spec Kit details their software, equipment, and procedures. See more about their project and browse their current digital collections at www.cfmemory.org.

Using Web Services to Advertise New Library Holdings: RSS library feeds in the campus CMS

Edward Corrado, Heather L. Moulaison – College of New Jersey

• Design decisions included:
  • What is a “new” item?
  • How to group feeds?
  • What data to display in feeds?
• About the only feed people actually add to their aggregators is the list of New DVDs The feed is created by a Perl script. One click from the feed takes the user to the OPAC. Feeds get incorporated by faculty into the course management system (the student doesn’t have to know that a list of new titles there is actually an RSS feed).
• See the October 2006 CIL and the College’s library web site for more info.
  

Continuing on with the program from Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) Update: Part 1…
(a teaser for this part of the session was as previously blogged on LITAblog, btw)

Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation
Joanne Silverstein (jlsilver@syr.edu)
Director of Research and Development
Information Institute of Syracuse (iis.syr.edu)

Information Institute of Syracuse was invited by the Office of Information Technology Policy at the ALA to write a White Paper about recent developments in Web-based innovations and their relationship to, and potential for use in libraries.

Background:

—Why call it “Participatory Networking”?

.The authors propose “participatory networking” as a positive term and concept that libraries can use and promote without the confusion and limitations of previous language. The phrase “participatory network” has a history of prior use that can be built upon.
.The phrase “participatory networks” represents systems of exchange and integration and has long been used in discussions of policy, art, and government. The phrase has also been used to describe online communities that exchange and integrate information. Implies a conversation between groups and people.
.For the purposes of discussion, we define participatory networking as digital, cultural communications and artifacts that are networked in technology, and that are collaborative in principle.

—Why not simply adopt the terms social networking, Web 2.0 or Library 2.0?

1. “Social networking” has negative connotations
.Social network sites (MySpace, Facebook) captured public attention. Proven very popular. Some attention, however, has been very negative.

2. the “2.0″ nomenclature is too vague
.Web 2.0: Ambiguity also dogs the Web 2.0 world. For some it is technology (blogs, AJAX, Web Services, etc.) For others it is simply a buzzword for the current crop of Internet sites that survived the burst of the .com bubble.

3. Web 2.0 implies more than just inclusion of users in systems.
.The term Library 2.0 is a vague term used by some as a goad to the library community. .this term limits the discussion of user-inclusive Web services to the library world. .when factoring in Dewey’s classification, Ranganathan, and the introduction of communications technology into the library, we would think the Library has to be on at least version 12 (beta of course)

—Libraries as Conversations

.“…treats information as a conversation” (Karen Schneider at www.plablog.org/2005/01/top-technology-trends.html)
.”the reason for a book is to afford conversation across space and time”(Jeffrey R., Young, Chronicle of Higher Education July 28, 2006)
.“Conversation is central to exchanging information.” (Klemm, 2002)

—Conversation Theory

Gordon Pask (1928-1996)
.relativist, constructivist theory, draws on cybernetics (flow on information). It derives from teaching and learning: learning is the quintessentially constructivist activity
.Intelligence resides in interaction, Conversation
.describes recursive interactions called “Conversation”differences may be reduced until agreement or “agreement over an understanding” is be reached.

Participatory Networking — the Study/White Paper

.Goals
.Library as Facilitator of Conversation
.Participatory Networking
.Libraries as Participatory Conversations
.Recommendations

Goals:
.Review what’s going on in libraries, describe it in context and present it to library administrators, decision and policy makers. Make them aware of the good work going on out there.
.We also want to present library decision makers with the opportunities and challenges of participatory networks as set in a context of conversation theory.
.Finally, we want to present a cohesive framework for libraries to not only fit tools such as Blogs and Wikis into their offerings (where appropriate), but also to show how a more participatory, conversational, approach to libraries in general can help libraries better integrate current and future functions.

Library as Facilitatior of Conversation:

.Conversations create knowledge.
.Some conversations span millennia. Others only a few seconds. Some happen in real time, some do not.
.In some conversations, there is a broadcast of ideas from one author to multiple audiences.
.Some conversations start with a book, or a video, or a Web page.
.Users need sophisticated processes to facilitate the conversation. The library serves this vital role for many communities, the implication is that libraries are in the conversation business.
..Bricks and mortar libraries: you can observe the conversations as library speaker series, book groups, and collection development processes.
..Online: library has fallen short of the ideal of conversation facilitator.
There is great opportunity, however, for online libraries to provide invaluable conversational, participatory, infrastructure to their communities online.

Participatory Networking

Participatory networking, at least the technological foundations of it, stem from developments in “Web 2.0”
What pervades the Web 2.0 approach is the notion that Internet services are increasingly, no surprise, conversations.
A core concept of Web 2.0 is that people are the content of sites.
Examples
Flickr (www.flicr.com) provides users with free Web space to upload images and create photo albums. Users can then share these photos with friends, or with the public at large. Flickr facilitates the creation of shared photo galleries around themes and places.
MySpace (www.myspace.com) lets users create rich profiles, including blogs, to link up to new people with common interests.

It may not be possible to narrow down a definition of Library 2.0. And perhaps we don’t need to.
But we do want to make clear the notion of Participatory networks comprises:
We use the phrase participatory networking to encompass the concept of using Web 2.0 principles and technologies to implement a conversational model within a community (a library, a peer group, the general public, etc.).

What if the user, finding no relevant information in the catalog, adds the information?
Possibly s/he adds information from their expertise (say through a Wiki),

Can your library functions be as easily incorporated into these types of conversations? Can a user search your catalog and present the results on his or her Web site? The point is that libraries need to be proactive in a new way. Instead of the mantra, “Be where the user is”, we need to, “Be where the conversation is.”

Eventually, blogs, Wikis, RSS, and AJAX will all fade in the continuously dynamic Internet environment.
However, the concepts of participatory networks and conversations are durable.

All in all a long presentation, at the end of the day too.  The Information Institute of Syracuse has a commenst and particiaption page and an about page.  Please feel free to explore their contenta dn leave your comments.

The basic appeal of the wiki is that it is a modern day example of “Many people make for light work”.

Wikis are designed to allow contributors to add to and revise the information on the site, so that the shape and scope do not have to be predetermined. In fact, wikis are a good choice when the shape and scope cannot be predetermined, and they can grow organically as new facts are added. They are good for dealing with “fringe“ items.

Potential problems with wikis stem from the lack of control. Duplication, lack of cross references, and eventual entropy can make mature wikis less useful.

Wikis vs. Librarians

Wikis are foreign to the systems librarians are used to. They lack a preexisting classification scheme, they are always being organized, absolute control is not necessary– in fact, is usually impossible. This lack of control can be a problem for librarians.

Other “Web 2.0” technologies (folksonomies, tagging, del.icio.us) are similarly unstructured, and allow for “emergent order”

Wiki options

There are three different types of wiki: server-based, hosted remotely, or installed locally (on a desktop, not available to he world).

Leading wikis

Mediawiki – free, open source, based on php/mysql, most popular wiki by far), has many extensions (e.g. maps, citations, mp3,
Example: jasongriffey.net/wiki

PBwiki – remotely hosted, is fast, easy. Potential downside: the hosted site could someday get advertising

Tiddlywiki – local on a pc, has no web server. It can be used to create searchable, free-form notes.

Great library wikis:

Ohio University Libraries Biz Wiki – like a research portal, it’s a controlled wiki – creator and faculty only can edit, but not students.

Library Success wiki – best practices for libraries

ALA Midwinter 2007 wiki

LITA wiki – very new

Lawrence Lessig’s collaborative book project on line – soliciting help in revising a book he doesn’t have time to revise on his own.

When is a wiki appropriate?

When the scope is big, but not too big (i.e. when the project has some focus, or scope).

When distributed creation is needed.

When you aren’t completely sure where you’re going with the project (i.e. when you are asking a fuzzy question).

Wiki best practices

Trust your users

Monitor the information

Seed your needs (make sure to include some content to invite input: a blank page is intimidating)

When Eckerd College decided to build a new library, it also decided to house the campus ITS department in the new building. The ITS department in turn decided to use the opportunity to install thin clients in the new facility to showcase the technology. This had both positive and negative ramifications– while the ITS staff was committed to making the project work, “buy in” by the library staff came more slowly.

Thin clients

Thin clients are relatively simple and durable devices that have no storage or computing power of their own but which can be used to communicate with applications running on servers. While old PCs can be reused as thin clients (removing or deactivating the hard drives), Eckerd decided to use “Sun Ray” thin clients from Sun Microsystems in their new library.

The Eckerd ITS elected not to use a Citrix or Microsoft terminal server that could have presented students with the MS Windows user interface, but instead chose to use the Gnome user interface (most commonly used with Linux) that was supported by their Sun terminal servers. They made this choice both because of lower cost and the desire to simplify systems management requirements, as well as the desire to make the thin clients stand out from the MS Windows PCs used in the library.

The Survey

When she heard about the project, Helene conducted a SurveyMonkey survey to discover library experiences with thin clients, and found that although few respondents were using thin clients, most of those using them were satisfied.

Negative comments elicited by the survey included software incompatibility, lack of CD-ROM support, frequent freeze ups, network bandwidth too limited make thin clients feasible, and finally, students were unfamiliar with the devices and needed more support (as compared with PCs). Notably, all the respondents of the survey were using the MS Windows interface (via Citrix or Microsoft terminal servers).

Positive comments included the space-saving and compact natures of the devices, energy savings (thin clients use 1/6 of the electricity of of PCs), centralized upgrades and management, longevity (can last 7-10 years, compared to PC lifetimes of 3-5 years), security (students login securely to the network and server security is far better than that of Windows PCs), no virus or worm threats, and also that the devices have virtually no value to thieves– they only work in thin client environments. Finally, there are no games or student-initiated downloads, and no chat.

From the Trenches

In her last segment, Helene shared insights from their day to day experiences with the devices:

Printing has proven to be a problem. The system’s Sun printer server did not play well with the campus’ Novell iPrint system, and after much work, the ITS staff eventually removed it and went with CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) instead.

The devices do not have CD-ROM drives (or even support external ones), and students needed to use language CDs have to be directed to Windows PCs elsewhere in the building.

Although the Sun Rays can support USB storage devices, other types of USB devices usually do not work.

Students who needed to use MS Windows applications (such as MS Office) access them off the network from a Linux-based CrossOver server from CodeWeavers which runs them on a compatibility layer. Although CrossOver has been explicitly tweaked to run in Sun thin client installations, Office access is still the leading source of student complaints and some of the steps students must take while using it seemed cumbersome. Saving a document, for example, was a six-step process.

As noted, the library was faced with the double burden of supporting students on both a new hardware and software platform at the same time.

Software that is intensely computational is not a good fit for thin client computing, because all users are sharing the processor(s) on the server(s).

Thin clients are also very sensitive to network bandwidth problems, again because every task, every keystroke the users are doing is 100% dependent on the network.

There is a lack of control with thin clients. They are centrally controlled by the systems staff, and there is little tweaking possible from the user level.

On a positive note, Sun thin client environments offer Sun’s “SmartCard” technology. Students can be issued a card that they insert into a slot on the machine, log in over the network on any thin client, then pull out the card and take it to any other thin client and rejoin their session. A sessions can remain open all week, allowing students a lot of flexibility in their work arrangements. Drawbacks include the cost of the card ($4) and confusion from students because it is a separate card from the campus ID.

The Set Up

Eckerd used two Sun 2-way servers with 4 GB of RAM each, and a single processor Dell server (with 2 GB of RAM) runs CrossOver Server under Linux. They have 30 thin clients currently.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Helene noted that planning is crucial in making a project like this a success. Who will control and implement the project? What are the needs of the users? Software compatibility issues should be carefully examined. What cost savings are anticipated? What is the projected return on investment?

Finally, does the library or the ITS staff have people with Unix experience? And does the library have a good relationship with its ITS staff?

Both the Library staff and the Systems staff need to work together on a project like this, and the earlier they get get together in the process, the better.

In the discussion that followed, the open source K12LTSP project (http://www.k12ltsp.org/) was mentioned as a free way to experiment with thin client technology.

The biggest cost for web-delivered library instruction is staff time. The software is cheap or free. Being able to use modules in different contexts (interoperability) or re-use structural pieces with new content (modularity) saves time and, therefore, money.

One of the things to know at the outset is your server environment, operating system, and who has control of the server. She had some things to say about various server and database products:

• Microsoft asp.NET is proprietary but there is lots of information available about it. It has some security issues.
• PHP5 has a large Open Source community but you need a programmer to do much with it.
• ColdFusion is good at running smaller things, and instruction modules do tend to be small. It is quick to build things using freely available scripts.
• Microsoft Access and MySQL. Microsoft Access is easy enough but is only appropriate for five or fewer people accessing it at one time. For more users, you will need MySQL.

She showed us several examples of web-based instruction. Some general advice:

• Maximize the use of images, like screenshots.
• Put no more than about 8 steps on a single page to minimize downloading time and because people tend to prefer shorter pages.

One example was static XHTML, but she had saved the structure in 2 different design formats (2 column and 3 column) with the “Lorem ipsum” text as a place holder. When someone else wanted a similar tutorial, she was able to pull it together quickly by just putting in new text and screenshots, all the design and coding work was re-usable.

Another example used ColdFusion to build dynamic pages that served up instructions for using EndNote and RefWorks with different databases. The librarian, back-end interface, allowed these modules to be easily built and changed using an interface that looked like a WYSIWIG blog or wiki interface screen, a simple CMS. The underlying database was Microsoft Access which worked because they never had more than a couple of students querying at the same time.

The third example used XML and XSLT to deliver repetitive content. The example was contact information for the librarian. If the phone number changed, the information could be changed in one place and then it would be fed out to the many places that information appears on the website using the same technology as RSS feeds.

The fourth example talked about storing all the instruction material, in whatever format, in a digital object repository. She listed a variety of options for doing this:

• DSpace
• Drupal/Plone
• Blackboard (although not as interoperable as other options)
• Ruby on Rails
• Greenstone

She was particularly taken with Greenstone which she says is underutilized because it was hard to use when it first came out. It has improved a lot in the last four years and can store all kinds of file formats including video and audio. It’s only appropriate for small depository projects, but a library instruction repository would likely only have 250 to 500 objects in it. It supports full taxonomies.

The Pew Center Internet and American Life Project published a report in 2001 called “Getting Serious Online” that drew a conclusion that as Internet Users become more experienced, they engage in more serious pursuits on-line, moving from games to banking, for example. As a project for a Ph.D. class, Rachel and Steve decided to use a General Social Survey (GSS) data set, taken from a survey in 2002, about “The Information Society” to corroborate the Pew report. Much to their surprise, it did not.

The GSS survey asked people which web sites that they visited in the last thirty days and how many times. Rachel and Steve divided those into recreation and serious web sites and found no correlation between how many years that a person had been using the web to what type of sites they visited. They also checked if the type of sites visited was a function of age and this also did not correlate. Instead, they found that as people gained web experience, they visited more of all types of sites—a finding that more recent Pew reports seem to corroborate.

Steve noted the “netizen” effect. People who have three or more years experience tend to become citizens of the Internet, using it for most information needs, serious and recreational.

Rachel’s personal theory, although she doesn’t have the data to back it up, is that people “get into grooves and kind of follow them along until something knocks them into another one.” An implication of this observation is that we can’t necessarily assume that what we teach freshmen in a one-shot library use instruction class during an English literature course will be transferred by the student into other situations, like a history or psychology class the next semester. We may need to expose them to new grooves as they have a need for that groove.

As spokesperson for this session, Hongbin covered the background of Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, tagging, blogs and RSS, and demonstrated how library websites can meet the needs of web users by providing customization and interactivity features.

About AJAX

• Asynchronous JavaScript And XML
• Originated in 1997, but was not popular at that time because browsers didn’t support JavaScript
• Not a technology in itself, but refers to the use of a group of technologies that provide interactivity (XHTML, CSS, DOM, XMLHttpRequest)

Pros

• Speedy browsing
• Updates information without the need to refresh the browser

Cons

• Complex, browser specific, requires JavaScript to be enabled, debugging is required, and poses a security risk (source code viewable)
• Browser back button will not work
• Difficult to track use statistics

Examples of services that use AJAX are:

• MyYahoo
• Google/IG
• Start.com
• Flickr
• Google Mail
• Google Maps

Why Personalize?
Web users who keep personlized webpages are more likely to come back to the site often and will surely visit everyday to check their custom homepage content. Sites listed above support drag and drop interfaces, RSS feeds, integration with search engines, and the ability to add and remove content. Statistics have shown that users prefer these features over many of the currently implemented MyLibrary sites. MyLibrary is currently used by a number of institutions, but has proven less desirable due to the burden of high maintenance and low usage.

Hongbin demonstrated examples of AJAX used for real-time data validation and auto completions in a number of different applications.

Examples included:

• Yahoo Finance – Streaming Stock Quotes
• Google Suggest – Predictive text entries listed in search box

AJAX uses for the Library OPAC
OCLC LCSH Live Search – Instant results list of subject terms
Univ. of Huddersfield Library Tag Cloud – Tag Cloud of catalog subject terms

As blogs have been one of the most highly praised features of the Web 2.0 era, Content Management Systems (CMS) that incorporate blog and other social/collaborative features are proving to offer more useful features for library websites. A great example of this technology in action is The Ann Arbor District Library site. AADL uses Drupal. Plone is another CMS with similar features that other libraries are using.

More library blogs

• Peter Scott’s list of library weblogs
• Yale University Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library blog

In conclusion, the goal of library websites should be to engage users with interactivity and personalization, and integrate library services into the customizable services that web users maintain regularly such as MyYahoo and Google/IG.

Questions

• Q: Why make an effort to use MyLibrary since we’ve seen it fail? Why not go directly with the Google/IG format?

A: Yale will no longer promote its Google/IG style Medical Library page, but will work toward integration with Google/IG and make the Medical Library’s RSS feeds available for users to insert into their existing Google/IG pages.

• Q: How many people pull the Yale Medical Library’s feed into their Google/IG page?

A: We haven’t collected statistics yet, but are working toward getting access to how people are using the feeds.

One of his first statistics was that libraries collectively ship and circulate more than Amazon.com every day. But we’re not like Amazon in a lot of other ways. We’ve decided we should be making decisions for our patrons, instead of letting them choose. Why don’t we have Amazon-style recommendation engines? We could at least give the user a choice of whether or not to keep their history private.

It all comes down to the user – we need to understand them better before we do something like charge in to fix the OPAC, convinced we know what is wrong with it.

Libraries do community better than Google – it’s our trump card, but only for now. We can’t cede that ground to the giants. Google Scholar has deals with about 200 database providers. What if they decide to parse your Gmail account and deliver scholarly articles targeted extremely specifically to you? In five years they’ll have 50 million books online to apply that methodology to as well.

Abram went on to talk about how students are going to use Google and the like heavily no matter what we do. We need to focus more on teaching them how to use the tools in Google well – advanced queries instead of just a couple words. We can also educate our high school and college age users about the reality of Google. How many students know just how extensively search engine optimizers manipulate the top Google hits on hot button issues?

Millennial users have higher IQs and more advanced brains, but ultimately believe their skills are more advanced than in reality. They’re format agnostic, and don’t want to have to deal with separate databases for their searches. Abram says we need to be constantly looking at realities like this, on a rolling five year planning horizon – who’s on their way to us?

And our future users really are changing – video games support a wide variety of learning styles beyond the traditional, and meanwhile sites like Facebook are allowing students to create a sustainable social network for life. Even if the definition of ‘friend’ on social network websites is different than what previous generations think of.

Abram showed an image of a giant swiss army knife with dozens of tools – no matter how useful each tool may be, you can’t tell what each one is until you unfold it. This applies to the tools in libraries as well, so we need to be more transparent to make up for it.

What we need to do is create an experience. Be the fabric of the community, not appended to it. To do this, we need radical trust – that’s what can create Library 2.0. But there’s no one step by step route to that destination. We will necessarily go through a process of trial and error. But don’t be afraid to experiment! It’s going to be required.

Ultimately, delivering information isn’t our job – it’s improving the quality of the questions.

To make these changes in how we deliver service and relate to our users, we’re going to need more time in the day. Productivity tools exist now to help us toward that goal, if we’re willing to take advantage of them. RFID and self service checkout, for example.

In conclusion, we need to rededicate ourselves to a focus on the end user. Not just today, but for life, taking into account how their needs change over time. How do we become that librarian 2.0? We play! Keep up with new technology, don’t be afraid of it. Try new things and see what happens. You can do it on your own, or even better institutionalize the change like the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenberg County’s “Learning 2.0″ initiative.

One of the big advantages of an institutional repository program to FSU was that it gave them something to highlight during the recent SACS accreditation process. Their philosophy for the project revolves around the idea of “Barrier free access”.

The structure involves three main tiers:
-The actual Institutional Repository (run on Bepress’ Edikit and PKP Open Journal systems)
-Outreach / Communication (blogs, web sites, wikis, etc)
-Finding Aids for the stored materials

EdiKit is a hosted service and easy to implement. Ex Libris’ Digitool service is going to be the main site for submitting documents to the repository.

The open source content management system Drupal is used to manage the respository’s web site. A big plus is that it automates the creation of a wide variety of RSS feeds. Robert considers RSS readers to be valuable real estate of our users, and any effort we can take to reach them is useful.

Implementing MediaWiki took more training than the organizers expected – fundamentally people just aren’t familiar with the edit it yourself model.

Future plans: get more faculty using the system, promote the basic ideas of open access journals, and work more on integrating everything together.

Robert’s presentation is online here: http://www.rmcdonald.info/presentations/lita2006

One main goal in the creation of UThink was to retain the content students are blogging elsewhere as a sort of cultural memory of the university. Additionally the system promotes intellectual freedom, changes attitudes about the library, and helps form communities of interest. The most popular blog the system ever hosted, for example, was all about the sports teams on campus.

Interestingly, only 60% of the blogs are run by undergrad students. Shane theorizes that a lot of undergrad students have existing blogs elsewhere already set up when they come to campus, and don’t feel a particular need to change systems. Anecdotally supporting this, grad students tend to have most of the personal blogs (as opposed to class blogs, for example). Once students graduate, they retain access to their blog as long as they log in at least once every six months.

Two main types of academic use have emerged. Either a professor uses a blog to start discussion, or a professor requires students to maintain their own blog on class related matters.

Unexpected uses have also shown up. For example, other official campus sites outside the library have used the blogs’ RSS feeds to populate their own content.

One of the biggest hurdles in maintaining the system is comment spam. UThink recently added a captcha system (they require a user to type in letters from an image) to combat it. Also, some students don’t use the service because it is not anonymous.

Plusses of running the Uthink program:
-An opportunity to defend intellectual freedom (as when a local business threatened to sue if a disparaging post wasn’t taken down – Shane stood his ground and they went away)
-An opportunity for education in the area of RSS, podcasting, design, etc.
-A massive cultural memory repository has emerged – imagine if something like this was running around the time of September 11th, for example.

Lessons learned from the program:
-Serve those who want to be served
-Work within the current academic processes
-Using UThink to enhance existing library services has been more difficult than expected, but it has opened doors for discussion.
-A committee is needed – this is time consuming! Shane did most of the work himself, but would do it differently a second time.
-In the end, intellectual freedom and cultural memory are the big winners.

Day 2 continued with discussions on the 9 areas of knowledge within project management.

Having a work breakdown structure (WBS) can be helpful in time management. This is a decomposition of all the parts of the project in a hierarchical arrangement.

Quality management is difficult because you can’t just expect quality to happen. The team needs to set specific and measurable goals to help achieve quality, and check the quality throughout the life of the project life cycle.

Human resources management is also difficult because of the nature of people. It’s crucial to have a competent and committed staff, and to provide training if necessary. To keep the “expert” staff members from getting burned out since they are often put on many teams, try having team members rotate, or have the expert staff member mentor another team member instead.

Each member on the team has a different way of leading and responding to leadership. However, “If no one seems to be in charge, then no one is.”

As mentioned earlier, it’s important to have buy-in from the team. Team members need to know what their roles are on the team, and the leader should know the motivation of the team members for being on the team. And it’s also crucial that project plans not be developed in isolation, and to have the project manager pick his/her own team. The team then writes the scope or charge, and does the planning.

There are three types of team members:

• Achievement motivated team member: These people set clear targets and provide lots of feedback.
• Affiliation motivated team member: These people allocate time for small talk, need time to process, and often need support or coaching.
• Power motivated team member: These people are concerned with getting involved, are usually very eager, and want to make sure people understand their responsibilities and key deliverables.

We discussed the various forms of pulling and pushing technologies (email, blogs, RSS feeds, bulletin boards, and websites) that can help increase communication within a project team. Frank said that he really liked the concept of the blog because you can have feeds coming from them, which gives people options.

Risk management is a systematic process for planning, identifying, analyzing, monitoring, and responding to and controlling risk. Risk is often seen as a negative thing, but could be looked at more positively, and might present new and challenging opportunities. The project team needs to do a risk analysis, evaluate contingency to be included, and carefully measure the risk.

How do you estimate time?

The presenters gave us a nifty equation that will help estimating how much time a particular activity within a project, or the project itself, will take.

O = optimistic guess of how long the project will take to complete
P = pessimistic guess of how long the project will take to complete
ML = most likely the time it will take to complete the project

O + P + (ML x4) / 6 = the time it will probably will take to complete the project

We looked at tools for helping manage the project parts. Microsoft Project or Visio are great tools, but an Excel spreadsheet can sometimes do the job just as well, depending on the size of the project.

Reasons why failure occurs:

• Failing to establish commitment
• Inappropriate skills
• Project isn’t really necessary, or it’s seriously misguided
• Premature commitment to a fixed budget or schedule
• Adding resources to overcome schedule slippages
• Inadequate people management skills

Why projects succeed:

• High user involvement
• commitment by all (including team and sponsors)
• cultural acceptance
• adequate time and resources
• Support from the management
• Clearly defined objective and requirements
• Excellent planning and project management
• Good communication
• Being able to stop a project when needed

We concluded by talking about how to introduce these ideas and tools into our own work environments. Frank and Grace suggested that these templates and ideas could gradually be introduced so they have higher potential to get integrated.

Grace Sines, Head, Information Technology Branch
USDA, ARS, National Agicultural Library
Gsines@nal.usda.gov

There were about 44 people in attendance, and there was an interesting breakdown from there:

• 30+ from academic libraries
• 0 from school libraries
• 2 from Tech processing areas
• 2 from collection development areas
• 1 from marketing

Day 1 began with an overview of what we’d be doing:

• Looking at project management in general
• Defining what a project is and is not
• Developing an understanding of what project management is primarily from the viewpoint of the Project Management Institute (PMI)
• Investigating the 5 process groups and 9 knowledge areas
• Examining dozens of project management templates, documents, examples, etc.
• Examining the best practices for IT projects

The objectives were to basically provide us with information that we can begin using now and to make managing projects easier. As the preconference went on, I began to feel overwhelmed but grateful for the numerous templates and examples they handed out to build a wonderful tool kit of proven best project management practices.

Information technology projects are hard to manage because they involve people of different skill levels, budgets, distributed leadership techniques, and getting people to understand what the project’s scope really involves. You have to deal with differences of opinions. Frank mentioned the “movement” toward evidence-based librarianship, where decisions are not based on opinions, but rather based on research.

What is a project? A project has a beginning and an end. It’s not a repetitive task, and the end result is usually tangible. A program, on the other hand, is operational an ongoing.

It was stressed multiple times throughout the preconference that “The people who must do the work should be in on the planning of the work.”

Successful project managers:

• Enable staff
• Are excellent, ethical communicators
• Have high administrative credibility
• Are sensitive to interpersonal issues
• Have political know-how
• Practice participatory management (not hierarchical management)
• Get buy-in from the team

Successful team members:

• See lots of options, alternatives, and possibilites
• Focus on things they can control
• Feel challenged, energetic, and WANT to be there
• Have clear and written goals
• Learn from mistakes
• Know themselves

Frank and Grace spent most of the preconference going through the project management blueprint outlined by the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). There are 9 Knowledge areas and 5 Processes to project management. We had several large and small group discussions about these things. For example, we examined a project where an IT department was upgrading the library to Windows XP, and looked at the scope of the project, what risks are involved, complications in training and dealing with people and levels of service, etc.

9 Areas of Knowledge

1. Scope Management
2. Time Management
3. Cost Management
4. Quality Management
5. Human Resources Management
6. Communications Management
7. Risk Management
8. Procurement Management
9. Integration Management

5 Processes to Project Management

1. Initiating
2. Planning
3. Executing
4. Monitoring and controlling
5. Closing

Most of the work is done in the planning stage, and it should always be done in groups or teams. The project scope seems to be one of the most important pieces, because if it’s not clear, then the project may not go well.

David Ruddy, from Cornell University Library’s Electronic Publishing Initiatives division, who has been involved with the project for a number of years, started by saying that the project had two main objectives:

• to allow publishers to organise and deliver both open access and subscription controlled content; and
• to give users the ability to navigate and access content.

The project came about because of a number of factors, including the disaggregation of the publishing industry (mainstream publishers often contract out their electronic services) and the rise in prices of conventional books and journals in the past 10 years. Other reasons for the project included a desire to offer publishing alternatives and offer a tool to allow others to become involved in scholarly publishing, and to support local initiatives in scholarly publishing.

Cornell University Library’s involvement in electronic publishing began as a result of Project Euclid, which started in 2000 and currently provides access to 45 journal titles in mathematics and statistics, involving 30 different publishers. Approximately 66% of the content is available as open access, and the remainder is subscription controlled. The Center for Innovative Publishing is involved with publishing several other titles, and has a number of other projects underway, primarily local initiatives.

The DPubS software began as a project in the Computer Science department, and was picked up the the Library in the late 1990s. Project Euclid provided the momentum for initial redevelopment of the software, and a Mellon grant (in combination with the involvement of Pennsylvania State University) funded further work in the last two years.

There was an ambitious development agenda. The main areas of work were the generalization of the software to support multiple document types, the development of different administrative interfaces, provision of interoperability with institutional repository software, and provision of editorial management facilities. In the first six months of 2006, 6 additional development partners were involved.

The system uses a simple object model, and the architecture is a distributed services model with clearly defined APIs. It supports different presentation options, which can be customized for each publication. It also enables content to be made available under multiple subscription and revenue models (not just open access). It is designed to have low maintenance and operating costs. The integration with an institutional repository means that the repository software can look after preservation and archiving, while DPubs focusses on presentation and access controls.

DPubS 2.0 was released in October 2006 on Sourceforge; it supports OAI 2.0, and can be used in combination with Fedora as an underlying repository.

Further plans include extending the editorial tools to support peer review, enabling it to work with dSpace as well as Fedora, enhancing the administration interfaces, documentation, and allowing contributions from the user community using the open source development model.

The challenges include finding others who are both interested in being involved and have the capability to contribute. David noted that it is a leap for libraries to move from being content consumers to being actively involved in content publishing.

See: http://dpubs.org/, http://dpubs.org/wiki/ and http://cip.cornell.edu for more information.

Mike Furlough, from Pennsylvania State University Libraries, then gave a user’s perspective on DPubS. Penn State has been a DPubS development partner, and their involvement has included testing alpha versions of the software, testing its integration with Fedora and dSpace, developing test cases for journal backfiles and conference proceedings, and refining and testing the editorial services.

At Penn State, the University Press is part of the University Libraries. The Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing wants to provide a scholar driven service, particularly for at risk literature. They hope to experiment with different business models; currently all of their content is available as open access, except for a print on demand facility. Their current project is Pennsylvania History, which has content available back to 1934. They expect to start publishing three other titles in 2007/2008. They are exploring ideas for publishing defunct journals, and setting up a conference publishing service, mainly for conferences hosted at Penn State. They will also consider new original content.

Outstanding questions they will be considering as they use DPubS are:

• Does the content management architecture align with their mission?
• How will their implementation contribute to the DPubS community?
• What staffing levels are needed?
• How can the publishing program be grown to support the teaching mission of the university?

See: http://dpubs.libraries.psu.edu and http://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/ scholarlycomm/ for more information.

Q: Is there a space limitation on the number of journals or the number of objects?
A: No. The intent is to keep growing and scale the software up as necessary.

Q: Can DPubS handle journal articles supported by rich data sets?
A: Yes, they have already had this feature requested, and it can be handled by creating another format in the repository.

Q: What is involved in keeping these publishing initiatives going?
A: The journal needs a committed editor and board; it is the responsibility of the content creating community. Preservation and affordability are still works in progress. As journals grow production will require more staff. Library expertise in routine work can help, and it’s a good fit — for example, technical services staff can prepare metadata for journal content. It provides a good opportunity for the library.

Q. What is the role of the subject librarian?
A: Project Euclid works closely with Cornell’s math librarian. Subject librarians can provide advice in particular fields and help with relationship development.

Electronic publishing projects are an ongoing challenge, and require a different mindset. Each project needs to be evaluated.

Gretchen Gueguen began the session by giving an overview of the work done by the University of Maryland Libraries. UM has identified four basic types of digital collections:

1. Thematic collections, sometimes containing multiple types of digital objects, tightly organized around a single subject (example: Documenting the American South).
2. Object collections, generally containing multiple object types not organized into topical collections (example: Indiana University Digital Library Program
3. Packaged collections, containing secondary source materials about a topic but few, if any, primary source digital objects (example: Romantic Circles)
4. After-the-Fact Collections, aggregating work from other locations into a single repository (example: NINES).

This is an unusual way of distinguishing between types of digital projects, but although the examples might be better, it might be useful.

Gretchen identified three building blocks of digital projects: metadata, vocabulary, and interface design. Under metadata she discussed what I would have called interoperability protocols, particularly Z39.50 and OAI-PMH. Under vocabularies, she discussed pre-coordinated vocabularies such as LCSH compared to post-coordinated vocabularies, which are more typical of the online environment. She also addressed local vocabularies, noting that lack of control may make them unmanageable. Hierarchical vocabularies also present opportunities for interface design, although she advocated the use of multiple hierarchies and multiple modes of access. She recommended the interface used in the Documenting the American South project, which includes browse lists based on LCSH.

Gretchen followed this discussion with a review of the Thomas MacGreevy Archive, a humanities research project originally intended to provide access to the writings of and about the Irish poet and critic Thomas MacGreevy (1893-1967). As the archive has grown, however, additional types of digital objects have been included, and the original system used for the textbase (TEI P4) has not accommodated these well. The need for a project redesign allowed their digital collections team to test some of their ideas about metadata, controlled vocabularies, and interface design. The team extended their use of TEI P4 to include other types of objects (which is possible, although not perhaps the easiest approach!) and adding additional terms to their locally constrained controlled vocabulary that will enhance the browsability of these objects. The team has also redesigned their search interface to make the site more user-friendly. Gretchen did note that if they were to start from scratch on this project, they would not probably use TEI, although she also commented that TEI P5 would be better suited to a multi-type digital collection because of its ability to handle namespaces.

Jennifer O’Brien Roper then spoke about the University of Maryland’s Digital Repository, which uses Fedora for the underlying repository with customized interfaces for each collection. During the question and answer period, it became clear that this is totally separate from DRUM, the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland, which is a DSpace installation. As part of the development of this repository, UM also developed a rich metadata standard, University of Maryland Descriptive Metadata (UMDM), which combines elements from Dublin Core and VRA into a custom DTD. Their system was based on one originally developed by the University of Virginia, who has since switched to MODS. The descriptive metadata is then embedded in a METS wrapper that adds metadata about file structure.

UM uses an ingest system to take metadata from disparate source and normalize it into UMDM. This ingest system is form-based and includes drop-down lists for controlled vocabulary items. Every item must have at least one subject heading from a common vocabulary; the UM Technical Services Department will create authority files as appropriate to allow the vocabularies to evolve. Additional terms can be selected from standard thesauri, including LCSH, the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, and the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials. The next step, beginning in 2007, will be the development of a system for browsing based on these common subject terms. This will not be a dynamic system; instead, the indexes will be generated weekly.

The presentation came in four parts three parts, with Ted’s introduction, Candy Zemon addressing problems and proposed solutions with NCIP, Jennifer Pearson describing an example of OCLC’s use of NCIP, and Candy Zemon, this time filling in for an absent Gail Wanner, previewing a browser plug-in being developed as part of the “Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative”.

Part 1

Candy Zemon of Polaris presented on “NCIP: Growing pains”, describing the protocol and how it came to be and also helped explain why the session had to be rejiggered.

NCIP (the NISO circulation interchange protocol, also known as Z39.83), was intended to help establish communications between disparate systems for use in Direct Consortial Lending (DCL), circulation ILL and self service circulation systems. Today, NCIP is an established standard up for a regular review soon.

The question presents itself- why has not this useful standard seen more success? First, NCIP is invisible to the user (when it works!). In many cases, it does what 3M’s SIP or SIP2 do.

While there have been many pilot projects, current uses for NCIP include bindery, self-check, self-sorters, and self-service finance.

The NCIP Implementers Group met to review how problems and perceived problems with the protocol problems, and plan ways to solve them. In part, NCIP came to be used in ways not originally intended, finding fewer of the new applications Ted mentioned in the introduction, and more use in self service circulation and self-sort situations (perhaps because of difficulties with the rather loosely maintained 3M SIP protocols). The sense was that NCIP was too complex for some of these uses. The solutions proposed include making the messages smaller, with fewer mandatory messages, and the the removal of some message elements in situations where a trust relationship between the communicating systems was already established.

Documentation was also felt to be a problem, and the existing documentation will be reorganized and additional documents will be created, including more targeted guides for specific uses, and some “Why use NCIP” guides.

Confusion has been caused by the overlap in functionality between the DCB (direct consortial borrowing) and C/ILL (circulation/inter library loan) profiles in NCIP. The solution: harmonize these profiles.

It was felt that NCIP needs greater extensibility, a major part of the appeal of the 3M SIP protocols. NCIP may incorporate the XML tag.

As NCIP has found increasing use in self service situations, bandwidth concerns have emerged. The solution will be to add the ability to batch or list in messages, as well as reduce the overhead in trusted partner situations.

Finally, a number of bugs are still outstanding. The solution: fix ‘em!

Part 2

Jennifer Pearson of OCLC described the use of NCIP in OCLC’s Worldcat Resource Sharing program.

OCLC is seeking broaden resource sharing from simply library-initiated “inter library loan” to patron-initiated “fulfillment” (i.e. to include purchase options). The hope is to keep libraries in the game in this Age of Amazon, and to keep OCLC in the game as a central, “neutral broker” of the whole process.

Authenticated and validated through NCIP, patrons could have borrowing capabilities from home (that might include home delivery), including purchase options, with all the disparate systems involved in such a process tied together through NCIP.

OCLC is working to make NCIP management less complex by serving as central broker and thus, fewer point to point setups are needed.

OCLC is currently partnering with SirsiDynix, Polaris, and a group of Montana libraries. Work with TLC and Carl are expected to start later. The system may debut in next calendar year.

Part 3

Candy Zemon, stepping in for original presenter Gail Wanner (of SirsiDynix and the “Rethinking resource sharing initiative”) presented “Rethinking resource sharing: getting what you want“.

Candy briefly described the history and goals of the Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative, which began with a white paper in February 2005, continued through several national forums, and updated white paper, developed a formal leadership, and now plans yet another forum.

Their goal is to create a new global framework to allow people to get what they want based on cost, time, format and delivery, and that is user focused (i.e. can both start and end outside a library and is not library-centered), vendor neutral, has a global context, and uses the concept of Resource Sharing (not just ILL). With ILL, scarce resources are allocated, but with RS, one picks from an abundance of resources.

They are currently working on a user-centric tool, the Get-it Button Project, an open source, cross-vendor, modular web browser plug-in that parses web pages to find published materials, performs an availability check, and displays results based on a patron’s profile. It may be previewed by ALA Midwinter.

The session concluded with a discussion of marketing options for he plug-in.

Whoa! I’m not a videographer! You don’t have to be a programmer, professional videographer or uber geek to use screen-capturing software and develop video tutorials. There are several options available to the novice tutorial developer. All of them are relatively easy.

A few examples:

TechSmith’s Camtasia
Adobe’s Captivate
Deskshare’s My Screen Recorder
Instant Demo

The price range on these software packages runs from just under $30 to around $300.
Instant Demo and My Screen Recorder are on the low end, Camtasia is in the middle and Captivate is on the high end of the price range. File size runs conversely to the price range listings.

The application chosen by the presenter was Camtasia. This was chosen because her university adopted it, because it was easy to use and because her remote users needed the tutorials it would produce.

Who are remote users?

MOST of today’s college communities are comprised of remote users therefore, assistance to users have changed. Nobody wants to ask questions face to face or on the phone (even with an 800 phone number). The ways to meet the library users has changed over time.

• 1986 – phone and paper handout packets
• 1996 – phone and paper handout packets, email and web pages
• 2006 – phone and paper handout packets, email and web pages, IM, e-reserves, CMS, social software, multimedia tutorials

Why did OSU choose video tutorial for there next step in remote user service?

Many of today’s learners are visual learners. They need to see what you are doing online. The video tutorial gives them that option without compromising the desire for anonymity. These tutorials are relatively timeless and repeatable (tutoring on demand 24/7).

What does it take to produce a video tutorial using Camtasia?

Video creation requires software designed to record and edit, hardware with minimum requirements to run the software chosen, a quiet space with microphone and computer, and a script (not absolutely required but recommended). The quiet space is required due to the audio recording process as well as the need to concentrate. A headset microphone combination reduces uneven recording by placing the microphone within constant mouth-to-microphone distance.

What tips can you give me?

• Don’t – ad lib, use verbal pauses such as ummmm, errr, or hmmmm, cough, sneeze or sniff or swear
• If you can’t talk and move the mouse at the same time, record the visual and audio separately
• Think about your computer setup before purchasing a combination headset/microphone.

There are good how-to tutorials on the Camtasia website at http://www.techsmith.com . Check them out!

Session presenter: Christina Biles, Digital Library Services Librarian, Oklahoma State University

CUIPID (pronounced “cupid”) is the University of Rochester’s Catalog User Interface Platform for Iterative Development. Built by their Digital Initiatives Unit, it serves as an experimental base for library catalog enhancements.

David Lindahl and Jeff Suszczynski were on hand to walk us through what CUIPID is, as well as some insight into the development process.

First we learned a bit about just what the Digital Initiatives Unit is. The staff of 8 (including a wide variety of non-librarian disciplines, such as an anthropologist) performs constant research into user needs via work practice studies and other methods. They just finished a 2 year comprehensive study of how undergrads write papers. We saw a video clip from interviews conducted at night in a UofR dorm, which was both informative and quite funny. Some interesting facts learned: Freshmen don’t stop at just the first three results of a search, and are not afraid of the reference desk. And most are less capable with technology than expected.

On to CUIPID, which has gone through a lot of changes. Version 1 used a small subset of records in MARCXML format, and solved 80% of UI issues they had previously identified. It collapsed similar editions via text matching, used the Google spellcheck API, etc. But unfortunately it wouldn’t scale up well – the license for the Verity indexing tool they used would be prohibitively expensive to use for the full sized catalog.

Next came SARA (I didn’t catch what the acronym stands for). It was a home made metasearch engine, covering all types of material the library holds – books, web sites, video, subject guides, databases, etc. It ran multiple concurrent queries to the catalog – no need to select author, title, etc. before the search. Users would narrow results by type later. Unfortunately, SARA had extremely debilitating performance issues.

CUIPID 2 was built on a trial version of TextML, an XML database product. It’s interface and features were similar to SARA’s, and also faced scalability issues. In addition, TextML would not have been free for the full version.

CUIPID 3 indexed more than 3 million records, using MS SQL server and ColdFusion for the interface. It was pretty similar to the current CUIPID 4, which was covered in more detail:

CUIPID 4′s features are going to be slowly integrated into the U of R’s existing Voyager catalog. The name has been informally changed to simply C4, “because it’s fun” to say. It follows the previously described faceted method of searching, letting the user drill down to the correct categories of results. Their inspiration for this system came from web sites like Sears’ and Home Depot’s.

It interfaces fully with the current list of student login information, allowing services like placing holds and recalls. There’s a number of relatively small features that are nice touches – displaying contextually appropriate metadata, for example. So for a movie result the director gets displayed, instead of the author for a book. The system makes extensive use of various APIs, pulling in external data like Amazon’s book covers and reviews, recent blog posts about a title via Technorati, etc.

Describing CUIPID 4 admittedly sounds sort of dry. But we got to see a live demo of the system, and it really blew me away. The interface is very intuitive, response time is fast, and it seems to be a pretty polished product even now.

Features to be added in the future include replacing the Amazon images with local copies, imiproved acceptance of unicode in catalog records, holdings records, and FRBR functionality (either homegrown or via OCLC’s system).

A separate project of the Digital Initiatives Unit was mentioned briefly – the eXtensible Catalog (XC). While still in early pre-planning, ultimately they hope to make the XC an open source catalog to hold all types of collections. It will be designed to be experimented with, and be compatible with your existing ILS and any form of scripting (PHP, ASP, CF, etc). Sounds like a very exciting project to me – more information is at www.extensiblecatalog.info.

This presentation had a huge amount of data for me to take in, but I’m glad I went. It was really interesting to see some of these catalog innovations in practice.

Whoa! I’m not a videographer! You don’t have to be a programmer, professional videographer or uber geek to use screen capturing software and developing video tutorials. There are several options available to the novice tutorial developer. All of them are relatively easy.

A few examples:

TechSmith’s Camtasia
Captivate
My Screen Recorder
Instant Demo

The price range on these software packages runs from just under $30 to around $300.
Instant Demo and My Screen Recorder are on the low end, Camtasia is in the middle and Captivate is on the high end of the price range. File size runs conversely to the price range listings.

Chieko Maene began the session with an overview of Web services, particularly the concepts of reusability, information sharing, and service orientation. She focused on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and its standards for Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS). The Web Map Service was first described in 1999 and became an ISO standard in 2005.

Some sample Web mapping services that Chieko pointed out have been developed by the U.S. Geological Survey:

• Elevation Query Web Service
• Gazetteer Query Web Service
• United States National Grid (USNG) Web Service
• Greeness Web Service

Chieko demonstrated two WMS applications developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago Library. The first, the Chicago Aerial Photograph Finder, uses digital shapefiles from the UIC’s digital index, combined with historical aerial photos from the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS) delivered over an ArcIMS layer and Digital Orthophoto Quadrangles for Urban Areas delivered as a WMS. The second application, the Digital Global Index Database, is a collection of online map indexes published as a WFS to share them with other users. It uses ESRI’s proprietary ArcIMS server and GeoServer, an Open Source Map Server. Chieko also recommended uDig as an open-source desktop GIS application.

Due to lack of time, John Shuler kept his comments short. He referred to the Geospatial One Stop (GOS) project, which is an attempt to provide a geospatial data and map services catalog for data collected across various government agencies. He described this project as a “dream,” one that he does not believe that the U.S. government can realize. He cited two concerns: first, that the U.D. government has withdrawn a number of aerial photos and geospatial data sets due to concerns about homeland security, and second, that the U.S. government has stated concerns about whether its services provide undue competition to the private sector.

Things not talking about (pretty quiet on these fronts at the moment?)

• Digitization project
• CALEA
• Telecommunications Act
• E-government

Talked about

• Research report
• New project: Connectivity study
• New project: State library E-rate training

Research Report: Public Libraries and the Internet 2006

• Key findings
• Public library connectivity is a valuable community resource
• Public libraries are improving their connectivity
• Challenges ahead
• Key findings – Qualitative
• What’s the most important impact on the community?
• Libraries and emergency service

New Project: E-rate Training

• Problem of complexity
• Our strength: state E-rate coordinators
• Our need: increased participation, better data collection, information sharing

New Project: Connectivity Study

• The next Internet revolution
• Are libraries ready?
• What’s actually going on in the field?

Things are generally “cooking” in DC, but mostly on simmer until the lame-duck session starts — then we’ll have to be on our toes for fast, questionable activity.

Part 2 will have my notes about the Participatory Networks portion of this presentation notes (this link is to the original LITAblog post about this)

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/office-for-information-technology-policy-oitp-update-part-1/feed/ 0 http://litablog.org/2006/10/putting-all-the-pieces-together-cyberinfrastructure/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/putting-all-the-pieces-together-cyberinfrastructure/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 21:55:50 +0000 Chad Haefele http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/putting-all-the-pieces-together-cyberinfrastructure/ Tim Daniels and Doug Goans from Georgia State University presented this talk.

I had never heard the term ‘cyberinfrastructure’ before this presentation, and am still not sure I entirely grasp the basics. But here’s what I picked up:

Cyberinfrastructure is really a mindset or an overall vision at an institution. It takes a more global view of collaboration – if we collaborate well with each other already, why not take it further?

An example of this mindset in action might be collaborating statewide on agreed metadata, or consortium catalogs. I felt like a lot of this session tied back into yesterday’s Death of the OPAC topic. It also fits well with the basic idea of economies of scale.

But first, cyberinfrastructure has to be set up within your own campus. According to a rough survey taken by the presenters only 43% of libraries have a defined technology plan, and that has to change.

Internal library IT workers should get out among the broader campus IT community more, and take advantage of those resources. Of course, there will be issues between the two levels such as funding priorities. But it can be overcome. Security is another issue, especially given recent breaches that get a lot of press.

Once a larger pool of IT resources is developed to draw from, take advantage of it! Add new services like virtual reference, multimedia tutorials, e-reserves, etc. These tools can often be transparent to faculty. Be sure to point out resources to them that might traditionally fall outside of their subject areas.

Perhaps most importantly, a concrete spelling out of the scope of a cyberinfrastructure helps leave things more open and accessible down the road.

The concept of cyberinfrastructure is still evolving – the presenters mentioned that it was a relatively new idea to them as well.

Presentation materials are online here.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/putting-all-the-pieces-together-cyberinfrastructure/feed/ 1 http://litablog.org/2006/10/library-guides-and-quizzes-how-they-can-help/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/library-guides-and-quizzes-how-they-can-help/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 20:22:54 +0000 AaronDobbs http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/library-guides-and-quizzes-how-they-can-help/ Ed Salazar, Web/Reference Librarian at Northcentral University in Prescott Arizona, covered some concerns which led to implementation of how they do it at NCU. Some of the reasons are few (3) librarians and a burgeoning student population, making face-to-face instruction a challenge.
Easy to understand guides, and quizzes to test and/or explain concepts, are helpful to students in their quest to find reliable informagtion. Some of the techniques used to build the guides are screen-captures, flowcharts, and other pathfinders.

The provision of these servcies over the web reduces in-person demand and better serves students by being available anytime the student wants them. To build these services, the library collaborates with the IT department for the backend, librarians collaborate on the quides and quizzes, and the feedback from faculty and students are used to enhance the services.

Quizzes and guides are built in a web-based environment, librarians can create or edit quiz questions and guides on-the-fly in a CMS type environment.

The library at NCU is more Open Source leaning than the IT department, OS is not supported by university IT. Still OS apps are used in the creation of these services.

For screen capture, CamStudio and Wink(Windows), Istanbul and Byzanz(Linux), and vnc2swf(all platforms) are used.
For Quizzes, PHP Web Quiz, SMS Studio Demo, WebQuiz, and Online Survey and Web Poll are used. (Links are my guesses, btw) Other software mentioned were: Camtasia, Captivate, Snapz Pro, and Qarbon Viewlet Builder. [We had a lively discussion after the presentation ended about various software that could be used for all this.]

With data created with the above tools, NCU rolled their own homegrown quizzes. Since these were housed on the IT departments (windows) servers, the code used was ASP and some JavaScript.

Tips to remember about screen captures, consider using smaller screen sizes (1024×768 or 800×600), ADA compliance is very important – make sure you check your material for this, keep it short & sweet – filesizes get big – fast, and the audio doesn’t have to be perfect the first time through – you can always edit later.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/library-guides-and-quizzes-how-they-can-help/feed/ 1 http://litablog.org/2006/10/unbundling-the-ils-ncsu/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/unbundling-the-ils-ncsu/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 19:47:28 +0000 Genny http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/unbundling-the-ils-ncsu/ Vendor Endeca is at Forum this year in case you’re thinking about doing the same thing to your OPAC that Emily Lynema and Andrew Pace described in this presentation.

Andrew Pace, head of IT at the North Carolina State University libraries, explained that Endeca enabled them to implement faceted search on their catalog.

The context:

Roy Tennant’s statement that the usual current OPAC “should be removed from public view.” NCSU decided to look into some of the “next generation” library search tools they might use to make their library search better. A list he showed included Aquabrowser, WorldCat.org, Georgia PINES, Koha, etc. He demoed a few: Clusty creates faceted-type display on the fly; dice.com uses Endeca for faceted search; Amazon.com has a faceted display; EBSCO databases have Grokker interfaces available.

Existing catalogs are hard to use. They grew out of backoffice processing systems. The vast majority of libraries are living with the OPAC bundled with their ILS. At NCSU, for example, they saw in their search logs a lot of broad topical searches being done which did not retrieve useful results (too many, too irrelevant); even known-item search didn’t support features such as spell correction or relevance ranking. The display of search results also had problems: users could not browse or link from valuable metadata like subject headings, at least not in a reasonable number of steps. Nor could they adequately filter on aspects of the item record like proximity and availability (is it in my branch, checked in?).

What is Endeca? Search and information access technology provider for Circuit City, CompUSA, Lowes, many other e-commerce sites.

Why Endeca for NCSU? Better subject access through facets, better response time, better natural language searching, true browse without any query at all.

Emily Lynema, systems librarian, demonstrated Endeca at NCSU, using general terms like “Java” and “Civil war” and clicking on the facet list at left to filter a search for more specific results. Also, she demonstrated browsing without any search term, and removing applied filters when a search was narrowed down too much.

They created their own customized algorithm in Endeca for relevance ranking. They prefer a heading containing exactly the query as entered, then a phrase match in the record; the phrase in the title is preferred over the phrase somewhere in the contents. They had to refine their algorithm after initial release, based on user responses.

The display includes a facet list at left, removable filters and category browsing at top, search results at right. I find the display cluttered, but I forget what their old display used to look like!

True browse is now available by any of the facets they have set up. The public interface currently only shows browse by LC classification, but they have the option to set up other ways to browse.

Automatic spelling correction means if a user enters “dictionary of organic compunds” and there are less than 5 results, the catalog will automatically also retrieve results for “dictionary of organic compounds.” The system also suggests “Did you mean?” and can do automatic stemming.

SirsiDynix Unicorn ILS and Web2 online catalog are still used. Endeca handles the keyword search, Web2 handles the authority search and the detail page display. They have to export MARC records nightly from the ILS into a format Endeca can use. The Endeca system indexes the data into its internal engine. The libraries’ web site can be completely controlled by NCSU; their web application interacts with the Endeca engine through an API.

Staff resources: implementation team of seven

• 5 IT staff, 1 cataloging librarian, 1 reference librarian
• Functional requirements: 40-60 hours total
• Java-trained IT librarian: full time about 14 weeks
• IT project manager: about 25% time for 20 weeks

Total timeline: about six months

Major decision points:

• What facets should be used (Endeca will help walk through)
• Designing the user interface: eliminate information overload as much as possible while providing enough information to enable navigation
• Toss the old OPAC or integrate it into the interface? They integrated (“Search begins with” box searches the old Web2 authority records)
• What type of relevance ranking algorithm, for author vs. topical vs. title searches

Working with a non-library vendor can have a lot of special challenges:

• Data formats that are library-specific
• Data consistency between ILS and Endeca (due to one-way export from ILS)
• Data issues especially with older cataloging practices still persisting in catalog records

Usage statistics

Request types:

• Search 68%
• Search + navigation (facet refinements after a search) 21%
• Navigation (true browse) 11%

They have a number of other statistics such as navigation types selected (mostly topical — either subject topic, subject genre, or LC classification).

Usability testing

Limited test group of 5 on new catalog and 5 on old catalog. The results showed that in general, completing tasks in the new catalog rated easier and took less time than in the old catalog.

For students, relevance ranking is key; only 13% continue past the first page of search results. Faceted browsing is intuitive. Library jargon continued to confuse students (“keyword anywhere”, e.g.). Users experienced with the old system were suspicious of features in the new one (they expected a simple search box to retrieve completely unusable results).

In general, they have found that the new system does retrieve more relevant results.

Andrew returned to talk about future directions, including:

• Experiment with FRBR
• Integrate the catalog with other search tools (like their website search) through web services
• Enrich the catalog with external web services
• Use Endeca to index local collections

The problem with data silos continues: vendor databases, serials lists, OPAC, etc. What needs to happen in the future is true interoperability among data stores. Our metadata needs to be more visible to other “storefronts” where users go for information. Their Endeca implementation not only creates a better search interface for the OPAC itself, but creates a more interoperable data platform for integrating their OPAC data into other services.

For more info: NCSU Endeca project site will contain the slides from this presentation.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/unbundling-the-ils-ncsu/feed/ 1 http://litablog.org/2006/10/blogger-soiree/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/blogger-soiree/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 18:35:59 +0000 Griffey http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/blogger-soiree/ If you are interested in learning about LITABlog or blogs in general, or have a blog and want to find other wackos like you, or would just like to know what the heck these blog things are: the LITA Forum Blogger Soiree is for you!

What: 2006 LITAForum Blogger Soiree
Where: The Flying Saucer, downtown Nashville
When: we will meet in the Sheraton Lobby at 5:30pm on Saturday and walk over together
Why: why not?
Who: I’ll be there, as will a number of other LITABloggers

Show up at 5:30pm in the lobby of the Sheraton, and I’ll see you there.

EDIT: As Zoe helpfully noted in her comment, Flying Saucer is at 111 10th Avenue South. Here’s a link to a Google Map with both the hotel and the restaurant marked and with driving directions…it IS walkable, but you probably don’t want to follow the google directions if you’re walking. Look at the map, and you’ll see how to walk it.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/blogger-soiree/feed/ 3 http://litablog.org/2006/10/pre-conference-open-source-installfest-day-2/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/pre-conference-open-source-installfest-day-2/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 18:32:29 +0000 Christina Hennessey http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/pre-conference-open-source-installfest-day-2/ Day 2 of the pre-conference was presented by Amy Begg De Groff and Luis Salazar of Howard Country Library (Md.). Amy and her IT staff of six (which includes Luis) have successfully switched their 279 public computers over to the “Groovix” operating system (www.groovix.com). Groovix is based on Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions.

Reasons for switching the public computers from Windows-based to Unix-based:

• cost. Amy only had a small budget for IT for the year. Buying new computers and new/upgraded Windows licenses was going to cost $250,000. Groovix is much cheaper and can be run on much older computers (instead of throwing out those old computers, they could continue to be in use).
• security. The security problems with Windows and Internet Explorer are well-known.
• capable staff. Amy has an exceptional team of programmers and computer experts on her staff that were up to the challenge. Two of the staff (Luis and Michael Ricksecker) had previously created their own version of Linux named “LuMix” that has been well received in the Linux community, and was used in the library for two years before the Groovix rollout.

Upper management was in support of the change, and the Groovix solution was completely deployed in September 2006. You can read the library’s press release about the change here: http://www.hclibrary.org/about/press_release.php?id=7.

Amy & Luis handed out bootable CDs to all attendees at the session so we could see Groovix in action. I would venture to guess that most average computer users could not tell the difference between this interface and the Windows interface; it looks that similar. Instead of Internet Explorer, the browser of choice is Firefox, but Opera is also available for those few sites (including Standard & Poor’s) that do not work well under Firefox. Instead of Microsoft Office, the OpenOffice products are available on these computers. Instead of AIM, Yahoo, or other IM products, GAIM is offered.

Regular library staff have not been completely in support of the change. Staff training on the new systems was mandatory, and was tailored to show staff exactly how to fix the top tech support problems they had reported in the past. This Groovix FAQ was created for staff and public alike: http://www.hclibrary.org/training/GroovixFAQ.htm. There is also an online staff bulletin board where staff can post technical questions and answers about the new systems.

Howard County Library is really doing inventive, cost-saving, clever things with computers at their library. If you are even considering doing anything like this at your library, I recommend that you contact Amy at degroffa@hclibrary.org. She is so enthusiastic about this project, and you will find her energy and ideas contagious and inspiring!

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/pre-conference-open-source-installfest-day-2/feed/ 0 http://litablog.org/2006/10/adding-bells-and-whistles-to-the-web-the-blog-and-the-pod/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/adding-bells-and-whistles-to-the-web-the-blog-and-the-pod/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 18:30:55 +0000 lcastillo http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/adding-bells-and-whistles-to-the-web-the-blog-and-the-pod/ Do library’s need to blog?

If you’ve thought of blogging your library, don’t dismiss blogging but don’t rush to embrace it, either. If your reasons are: administration says I should, everybody else is doing it or we’ve got to stay up with technology, think again. If, on the other hand, you see it as a tool to push information to your community or a marketing tool for your library or similar well thought out reasons, then BLOG!

Who’s blogging and why?

Over 90% of the attendees indicated they were blogging. Presenters from Western Kentucky University Library (WKUL) are blogging, podcasting and vodcasting (video podcasting). Haiwang Yuan in tandem with Rosemary Meszaros, tag-team co-presenter, led the audience through their process of developing library interactivity. Their reasons for this venture, policies developed, and basic good practices were covered.

Haiwang, a personal blogger carried the idea over into the library arena in an effort to present information to their audience, roughly defined as the University population and surrounding communities. Blogging is a forum for the library to showcase events, host tutorials, communicate with their community, and keep them up-to-date on changes in their services. This is available through RSS subscription as well, so you don’t have to continually log in to their site to see what’s new.

How do you blog?

According to the presenters, “blogging is as easy as 1,2,3”. WordPress and Blogger were the two named blog CMS (content management system) services with WordPress being their choice due to the more powerful hierarchical control system. The control system was part of their policy established in collaboration with university administration. There is no HTML or FTP to learn it’s like using a word processor and loading it to the web.

What about podcasting?

From blogging, podcasting and vodcasting were easy segues. These venues are used to showcase their programming. The recordings of library-sponsored speakers are the main fare of the pod/vodcast at WKU. If using these forums as material for pod/vodcasts, one needs to be aware of potential risks due to recording device malfunction. Using good equipment and the suggestions of redundancy through a second recorder will save you from losing the event.

Podcasting/Vodcasting take a bit more work, more software and more server space. Surfpack.com provides information on software and hardware needs. The how and what to podcast are the two variables to evaluate before beginning.
What does one need to pod/vodcast?

• Mini-recorder or mp3 recorder (for remote recording) (2 recommended)
• Podcast softwares suggested
o Audacity (free)
o Propaganda
o WebPod Studio
o FeedForAll
• Software for listening:
o iTunes
o Yahoo
• Hardware requirements for listening:
o Any portable MP3 player
o USB connect ability
o Synchronize with PC

What does one podcast?

• Library tours
• Special programs
• Train the Trainer
• Announcements

How successful are these ventures?

The team has not done tracking studies to determine WHO or HOW MANY persons are accessing these tools. It seems that most of the blogging responses are machine driven spam. The next logical step would be to obtain data to determine the progress of these information-dispensing venues.

To check out the podcasts, go to http://www.wku.edu/library
To read the policies and blogs: http://blog.wku.edu/library/

Presenters:
Haiwang Yuan, Associate Professor and Web Site & Virtual Library Coordinator, WKU
Rosemary Meszaros, coordinator of the Government Information & Law Library, WKU

Blogger: Laura Haynie Castillo, Alvin Community College Library, Alvin, Tx
Personal blog: beasilyscorner.blogspot.com

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/adding-bells-and-whistles-to-the-web-the-blog-and-the-pod/feed/ 2 http://litablog.org/2006/10/lita-pre-conference-open-source-installfest-day-1/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/lita-pre-conference-open-source-installfest-day-1/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 17:04:11 +0000 Christina Hennessey http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/lita-pre-conference-open-source-installfest-day-1/ Day 1 was presented by Gary Wan of the TAMU libraries. He showed about 20 of us how to install and configure the following library-relevant open-source products: Koha, Greenstone, Swish-e, and WordPress.

First, he explained open-source and the LAMP platform. LAMP is the software bundle commonly used for OSS products. LAMP stands for: Linux (the operating system), Apache (the web server), MySQL (the database management system), and either Perl, PHP or Python (the scripting programming languages).

Koha (www.koha.org) is an open-source web-based integrated library system (ILS). It includes modules for all major ILS functions (e.g. cataloging, circulation). Koha administration requires a Linux server (preferred, although other server installations are available), Apache, MySQL, Perl, root access to the server, and an internet connection. To run the Koha client, you just need a web browser. Gary walked us through the steps of installation and configuration, including how to uninstall if you mess up. He recommends installing the stable release 2.2.5, even though there are later releases of Koha. Koha has both a “public interface” (the OPAC), and a “librarian interface” (where all the staff modules are located). He showed us how to customize the Koha ILS and then let us loose on his installation of Koha! Paid support is available for Koha from Katipo and LibLime.

My impressions of Koha: I was struck by how “immature” the system was. Gary warned us that authority management was not very good, and as I looked through the parameters, I saw many places where I would have liked finer granularity of functionality than just on/off. The great thing about OSS is that if you don’t like something, you can re-program it yourself! Koha would not meet the needs of my institution, but I could see how it would work well for a small library that didn’t need much customization or granularity of tasks.

Other OSS ILS that Gary did not cover but did mention: Emilda, PhpMyLibrary, and Openbiblio.

Greenstone (http://www.greenstone.org/) is a suite of OSS for managing digital collections. System requirements are: Windows/Unix/Mac server, Apache or other web server, Perl, root access to the server, and a Java environment for the librarian interface (GLI). Gary walked us through the installation and configuration of Greenstone, both on the server and on the client, and showed us how to create a new collection, add documents to a collection, and add Dublin Core metadata for each document. The GLI must be run on every library staff computer that will be adding documents to the collection, and there does not seem to be a way to allow submissions from faculty or patrons without going through library staff.

I found Greenstone to be very easy to use and it looks good right out of the “box” (although there is no box here!). My institution will definitely be testing out this product in-house for managing documents.

Other OSS digital collection managers that Gary did not cover but did mention: DSpace, and eprints.

Swish-e (http://www.swish-e.org/) is OSS for indexing collections of web pages or other files. Swish-e can index plain text, email, PDF, HTML, XML, Microsoft Office files, and just about any file that can be converted to XML or HTML text. System requirements: Windows/Unix/Mac server, Apache or other web server, Perl, and root user access to the system. Gary walked us through the installation and configuration of Swish-e, including how to specify what files and/or URLs to spider.

I found Swish-e to be easy to use and configure. Our institution does not have a solution for searching our library web pages only (our pages are hosted on an institutional web server that has every page in the university), and this might just solve our problem!

Other OSS web-page retrieval tools that Gary did not cover but did mention: Nutch, and ASPSeek.

WordPress (www.wordpress.com) is OSS for hosting blogs on your own web server. WordPress can also be a host for your blog (no server needed), but Gary focused on the version that you host yourself. System requirements: Windows/Unix/Mac server, Apache or other web server, PHP, and MySQL. Gary walked us through the installation and configuration of WordPress on a Linux server. WordPress is well-documented and makes it easy to import entries from other blog software.

WordPress seems very easy to setup and would be a good solution for libraries wanting to host staff blogs or patron blogs.

Other OSS blog hosting software that Gary did not cover but did mention: bBlog and Simplog.

Other OSS software mentioned in the presentation but not discussed:
For ILL: OpenILL, ILL Wizard, and ILL ASAP
For Document Delivery: Prospero
For virtual reference: OpenAAQ

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/lita-pre-conference-open-source-installfest-day-1/feed/ 3 http://litablog.org/2006/10/improving-library-services-with-ajax-and-rss/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/improving-library-services-with-ajax-and-rss/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 16:43:42 +0000 Genny http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/improving-library-services-with-ajax-and-rss/ The room is full for this session by Hongbin Liu from Yale and Win Shih from University of Colorado — despite the number of other really interesting-sounding sessions in this time slot!

Hongbin had done a web site redesign project for both the public and internal sites at his previous job in New Orleans. The analysis included usability and information organization, and turned up problems including terminology (undergraduates not understanding the term “catalog”).

In the past web sites have been either static or database-driven. Now we have “Web 2.0,” about which people have different definitions, but includes high interaction/collaboration sites like Flickr, as well as advanced user interfaces that make a site highly responsive.

Look at a value co-creation matrix:

• Britannica Online – low personalization, low collaboration
• Personal web sites – high personalization, low collaboration
• Wikipedia – low personalization, high collaboration
• MySpace, Flickr – high personalization, high collaboration

Blogging is used in libraries for things like

• What’s new – promoting library events
• New books
• Course-specific resources

The advantage is that not only do you get the updates on the web site, but the user can also subscribe to the RSS feed and doesn’t have to go to the web site to get the updates. Blogs can also allow the users to comment on or contribute to the web site content.

Blogs + Content Management System: enables going beyond blog functionality.
At Hongbin’s library, access to the library web site has gradually dropped. Users don’t come to the library web site unless they have to. This means going closer to the user’s world: Google, MySpace, My Yahoo, MSN, etc.

More than three dozen libraries have implemented “My Library” services similar to My Yahoo. Hongbin asked the audience members involved with “My Library” services how their services have worked out. The response was that people have not actually used these services, and some have been discontinued. This matched up with Hongbin’s next slide, which said an irrelevant My Library is a burden and these services often have low adoption rates.

Google/IG allows you to personalize your home page. Hongbin asked the audience again about their use of Google/IG and the response was very positive. Start.com is a similar services from Microsoft. Why do companies set these up? If you keep users with your personalized home page, they will come back again. Can the Google/IG approach be used to improve My Library?

A look at what goes into Google/IG: An RSS aggregator that collects RSS updates. Ajax technologies to provide interactivity. (Ajax is not a technology but a set of technologies that work together: HTML, CSS, the Document Object Model, JavaScript, and the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with a server, using XML format.) Some uses of Ajax include: real-time form data validation and auto-complete; sophisticated user interface controls; and refreshing data on the page in real time.

Ajax pros: more interactive, seems speedier to the user, a rich web browsing experience

Ajax cons: requires JavaScript to be turned on, may need to be very browser-specific JavaScript, some security concerns, and standard browser controls like bookmarking and the Back button don’t work in most implementations

Ajax uses in the library:

Ajax-enabled Google/IG style Yale Medical Library site
Ajax-enabled OPAC from OCLC Research

“Getting the user involved” means, for Hongbin, not just usability studies or surveys, but creating interfaces that themselves directly involve the user.

Q & A:

Q: Why create your own Google/IG interface? Why not move toward making all your information accessible through people’s existing Google/IG or Start.com, etc?

A: We are moving in exactly that direction, discontinuing development of our own Ajax-enabled site, and making as much library information as possible available via RSS feed.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/improving-library-services-with-ajax-and-rss/feed/ 1 http://litablog.org/2006/10/libraries-and-public-interest-entertainment/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/libraries-and-public-interest-entertainment/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 15:23:54 +0000 Genny http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/libraries-and-public-interest-entertainment/ Thom Gillespie directs the Mime program at Indiana University. He told the story of how it started: When he was teaching in the school of library and information studies, he was interested in games and media: “I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t where the school was going.” His interest was in visualizing information, sort of a visual MELVYL. Initially he had students from fine arts, information studies, and instructional design. His classes morphed into games classes, which got him thrown out of the information studies department. At that point the telecommunications department was interested in his ideas about fun in the user interface, which was the start of the Mime program. Graduates have gone on to work for Lucas, Microsoft, etc.

Where did he get the Public Interest Entertainment idea? There is actually a Public Interest Entertainment Corporation, piecorp.org, which he thought was a great concept.

Why do people get their information from the Daily Show? It’s a myth that only young people watch it. It takes a comic to step beyond the boundaries the “real” news shows stay within, like asking Pervez Musharraf “Where’s Bin Laden?” In the Mime program, students concentrate on areas from political communication to games; classes cover a range from 3-D modeling to “citizen media” — using blogs, wikis, and other media to create public information on local issues.

Network scavenger hunts, like the original Internet Hunt created by Rick Gates years ago, have turned into alternate reality games like The Beast and Majestic. (See Alternate Reality Gaming Network). Instead of keeping computer games within the realm of the computer screen, people are “playing games into existence” as with Pacmanhattan. Now there are “boring gaming” genres like Food Force from the UN which have a social change/educational component.

Thom was struck by the efforts LITA people make to create tools for searching and learning — yet says none of these efforts are the ones that work. What is in Google? We are in Google. Why does Google buy Picasa, Sketchup, etc.? Google is becoming a game. If you create your own content, your information system is dead. If you work like Google, you create the information system and you let the content come from the people.

It’s all going to come down to citizen media. The public library, especially, is the place where the people can come in and not just browse the web, but come in and create media. Check Orange Blender for open source versions of a lot of media creation technology. Find ways to bring in the community and make them partners in creating content.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/libraries-and-public-interest-entertainment/feed/ 3 http://litablog.org/2006/10/the-impending-demise-of-the-local-opac/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/the-impending-demise-of-the-local-opac/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 13:10:32 +0000 Roger Hiles http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/the-impending-demise-of-the-local-opac/ Gregg Silvis presented his view of the not-so-rosy future of the local OPAC to a capacity crowd on the first day of the 2006 LITA National Forum.

Reviewing the origins of today’s OPACs in the card catalogs of yore, he focused on the duplication of effort that has always been a part of the tradition of the local catalog, in both card and electronic form. The development of cooperative cataloging greatly reduced this duplication, but the advent of local automated systems caused libraries to migrate redundant physical processes to electronic form and decades later, in a very different technological environment, libraries still largely operate the same way. Each library follows similar or identical steps to locate, load, and index copies of the same records, separately perform identical authority control steps, independently maintain, upgrade and backup thousands of servers to host their OPACs, devote massive amounts of staff resources to the design and implementation of thousands of similar, but different user interfaces, separately test each changed feature for browser compatibility, and provide support to users for locally customized systems each differing at least slightly from every other.

Silvis suggested that it’s time for a radical change, and that recent efforts by OCLC have created in OCLC FirstSearch WorldCat or Open WorldCat a potential replacement for the local OPAC. For most libraries, most of their holdings are in WorldCat, so a WorldCat search limited to their institution’s holdings already provides a lot of the functionality of an OPAC. But Silvis admits that for his idea to work, some key pieces are still missing (such as real-time links to local acquisitions and circulation systems, a way to handle location-specific links to electronic resources and contractually restricted locally enhanced table of content data, and big issues of scalability, reliability, pricing and loss of control). Still, OCLC has an active office of research and has taken the lead in incorporating a number of new technologies into its products, so it is quite possible these problems could be overcome. Such a step would put OCLC in a much more dominant position in the industry, effectively establishing a monopoly over one of the most important library functions, but he stated, in a sense, OCLC is us, and not concerned with corporate profits or maintaining its stock price. The money gets reinvested in more services to libraries.

Silvis concluded with a few “extreme ideas” that I had not heard from him before. Once cataloging and the OPAC are taken away, local systems would consist of acquisitions/serials and circulation/course reserves. Acquisitions/serials can be viewed as a redundant accounting system for many libraries, one that needs to be reconciled with the more general accounting systems often used by the larger institutions of which libraries are a part (such as a University or local government)– noting that that the University of Alberta has moved its acquisitions function to PeopleSoft. For academic libraries, student information in the patron records of the ILS largely duplicates what is held in student information systems. How much of the ILS could be replaced with added functionality in other programs?

Silvis closed by mentioning that the University of Washington is currently in discussion with OCLC to use WorldCat as its OPAC, and invited comments or questions from the 70+ people crowding the room.

A spirited and wide-ranging discussion followed, with many attendees expressing frustration with the current “state of the OPAC”, questioning how vendors could let their products stagnate, some suggesting that open source solutions like the Georgia PINES Evergreen ILS and Koha might provide relief for libraries, and several expressed interest in Silvis’ OCLC OPAC idea.

This was a well informed group painfully aware of specific new things they’d like to do (for example, someone wanted to open their OPAC to LibraryThing), but were unable to do with their current systems.

Some criticized the what they saw as a resistance by vendors to anything but incremental changes in the established automation systems, others stood up for system vendors, who always say these incremental changes are what libraries ask for. If this group is representative, vendors will find that this is changing fast. There was a sense that bigger changes are necessary.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/the-impending-demise-of-the-local-opac/feed/ 2 http://litablog.org/2006/10/sushi-the-niso-standardized-usage-statistics-harvesting-initiative/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/sushi-the-niso-standardized-usage-statistics-harvesting-initiative/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 13:09:58 +0000 bchawner http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/sushi-the-niso-standardized-usage-statistics-harvesting-initiative/ The full title of this presentation was ‘Building a Web Service for the Library World, from the Ground Up’ and that’s exactly what the three presenters covered. We heard about the project’s beginnings and current status, what it means for content providers, and how it affects vendors of ERMs (Electronic Resource Management packages). The presenters gave the audience a thorough introduction to SUSHI and its implications for libraries, and I left feeling much better informed about the project and its significance for libraries, publishers, and ERM package vendors.

Adam Chandler, Co-ordinator, Service Design Group, Information Technology and Technical Services, Cornell University Library, and also co-chair of the SUSHI Working Group, started by saying that retrieval of COUNTER usage statistics is currently a bottleneck. Most libraries currently do this by visiting individual publisher or aggregator websites, locating the desired statistics, and either displaying them or downloading an Excel file. The process is inefficient and time consuming. SUSHI (an acronym for Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) is a simple web service designed to offer an them a simpler alternative.

SUSHI began as a result of a conversation in November 2004 about the best way of entering COUNTER statistics into an Electronic Resource Management module. The concept was discussed further in June 2005, and work began in earnest with a range of vendors in July 2005. In October 2005, there was a recommendation to make SUSHI a NISO initiative. From November 2005 through summer 2006, SUSHI 0.1 was developed and tested; the vendors involved were Ebsco, Swets, and Project Euclid. Most recently, SUSHI 0.1 became SUSHI 1.0, and NISO and COUNTER have signed a Memorandum of Understanding saying that NISO/SUSHI will maintain the COUNTER XML schemas.

The SUSHI protocol is simple, supporting only two types of messages: Request and Response. The Request message include information about the requesting organisation, the name and release (version) of the desired report, and the date range. Messages are sent using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), which also provides security features.

Vendors who are (or will be) supporting SUSHI include III, Ex Libris, Serials Solutions, and Endeavor, and ScholarlyStats and Thomson Scientific are also interested.

Outstanding issues include extending SUSHI to cover the COUNTER books and reference codes of practice, promoting it with other vendors, and managing the expectations of libraries. The SUSHI Draft Standard for Trial Use (PDF format) was released on 9/20/06.

Adam’s presentation will be available from:

http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/alc28/sushi/lita2006AdamChandler.htm.

The NISO/SUSHI web site is:

http://www.niso.org/committees/SUSHI/SUSHI_comm.html

The second presenter, David Ruddy from Cornell’s Center for Innovative Publishing, covered what is involved in implementing SUSHI from a content provider’s perspective. David acknowledged Joshua Santelli’s work in Project Euclid’s SUSHI implementation. He began with an overview of Project Euclid, a Cornell University electronic publishing initiative in the field of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics. Project Euclid has a complex business model, involving agreements with commercial publishers of hard copy journals in this field.

Publishers first need to collect, store, and provide access to COUNTER usage statistics. Implementing SUSHI involves developing the capability to recognize and respond to SUSHI requests. This includes being able to recognise that an incoming request is a SUSHI Request and interpret the data about the desired report characteristics (report type and date range). They then need to prepare the COUNTER report, which may be static (i.e. already stored on the system) or dynamic (generated upon request), build the XML report, and return the response using a SOAP envelope.

Their experience was that implementation is fairly easy. David concluded by warning us that there are some challenges to counting usage of electronic resources, such as double-clicks and the effects of web harvesters. He also questioned whether it is possible to make cost per use comparison across disciplines, and what the most appropriate time frame is for meaningful analysis.

The third speaker, Ted Koppel from Ex Libris, gave us the ERM vendor perspective on SUSHI. He began by explaining that the purpose of an ERM is to manage the lifecycle of electronic products, including selection, trial, licensing, access, cost, usage, workflow, and renewing/cancelling. Usage statistics need to be available at a range of levels, such as all titles from a specific vendor or a specified title from all vendors. Usage statistics are available from content providers, subscription agents, licensers or resellers, 3rd party specialists such as ScholarlyStats, and link resolvers/metasearch engines (though he cautioned us that the last is by definition incomplete because many users bypass these tools).

The primary value of SUSHI is that it automates a manual system, and requests can be scheduled for appropriate times (such as the middle of the night). The process is simple, and there will be an audit trail.

As we move to a more disaggregated environment for service delivery, we will see more services such as SUSHI, which provide functional interoperability between vendors. He speculated that future developments might include the electronic transfer of license information from the vendor/publisher to the library, or on a more day-to-day level, information about resource availability/downtime.

Q. There is currently a spectrum of compliance, and COUNTER data quality varies. Is there a solution?

A. An auditing process will examine COUNTER compliance, and this should lead to improved quality. Third parties like Scholarly Stats can provide some quality checking.

Q. Can SUSHI be used outside an ERM?

A. Yes, but the library will need to be able to generate their own SUSHI requests and handle responses. An open source project might be the answer for people who can’t afford a commercial ERM.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/sushi-the-niso-standardized-usage-statistics-harvesting-initiative/feed/ 0 http://litablog.org/2006/10/archiving-preserving-the-web/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/archiving-preserving-the-web/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 13:09:33 +0000 Chad Haefele http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/archiving-preserving-the-web/ Kristine Hanna was the main speaker for this session, and Linda Freuh also contributed. Both are from the Internet Archive.

The session opened with a brief outline of the history of the Internet Archive. They were founded in 1996, and are a non profit organization dedicated to, well, archiving the Internet. They crawl two billion pages a month, plus other media files like audio clips. These snapshots are then stored and made available online. Currently the archive holds 55 billion pages from 55 million sites! To put this in perspective, Kristine estimated that if printed out the pages would reach to the moon and back 19 times.

IA makes no distinction between what should be archived and what shouldn’t – the web is so ephermeral that they’re focused on just grabbing the data for now. All software used in the process is open source and developed from partnerships between IA and other organizations. This includes their crawler, the “Wayback Machine” method of displaying the stored sites, a search engine, and the file format of the archives.

In my mind I had always pictured the Internet Archive as a giant behemoth of an organization. But in reality they have just forty employees! As someone pointed out, that means that 5% of their entire organization was here today. They are completely non profit, and even services that have a fee (such as custom archives for organizations like the Library of Congress) are done at cost.

I was also unaware of all the special projects IA takes on. They’ve branched out a bit from the general archive, and also create special collections around big events like Hurricane Katrina.

As I mentioned earlier, IA works with a number of clients on special projects as well. Users include the Virginia and North Carolina state governments. Others are much broader than just one state – Working with France, they crawled archived the entire .fr domain! Same with .au in Australia!

As a relatively small organization, safe backup of all this information is an important issue. IA follows the Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe philosophy, running mirror servers in places like Egypt in addition to the main California facility. Because this is such a huge amount of data and IA doesn’t have access to the higher bandwidth of Internet2, the backups are actually physically shipped around the world on massive racks of hard drives.

Both Kristine and Linda emphasized that they are not librarians. Instead, they say that the Internet Archive works only as “technical partners” to existing organizations and their expertise. And their services are “…only good because we get lots of user feedback.” In some cases entire projects are suggested by users, including a new archive of topographical maps of the United States.

During Q&A, the presenters noted that if any content owner would like their sites removed from the archive, they need only ask. Also, the IA crawler obeys robots.txt files and will ignore servers if directed to. Internet Archive isn’t large enough and doesn’t have enough money to get into the legal area necessary to clarify these issues. But, Kristine also mentioned that part of “archiving it all” means getting the “bad” stuff along with the good – pornography, ads, etc.

The Internet Archive’s book scanning project was also brought up during Q&A. So far they’ve scanned 80 thousand books, and the main barrier to moving faster is a lack of money to build more “scribe” machines to scan books. All books scanned so far are public domain.

The session closed with brief mentions of two upcoming projects from the Internet Archive:

• Searching the archive by a method other than a known URL is in the works.
• The archive of 1996-2000, the so-called “historical web”, will be broadened.
]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/archiving-preserving-the-web/feed/ 2 http://litablog.org/2006/10/lita-keynote-session-save-americas-treasures/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/lita-keynote-session-save-americas-treasures/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 13:09:09 +0000 Danielle Plumer http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/lita-keynote-session-save-americas-treasures/ “Save America’s Treasures: Preservation of Rare Acetate and Vinyl Recording Transcriptions”

Speaker: Dr. John Rumble, Senior Historian
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
(operated by the non-profit Country Music Foundation)

Dr. Rumble spoke about the history of the CMHFM, which opened in 1967. It new location opened in 2001, and the Bob Pinson Recorded Sound Collection now include over 200,000 recorded cylinders and discs.

Bob Pinson donated his personal collection of country music recordings to the CMHFM in 1972, when the library first opened. His collection of 15,000 discs, many of which had never been played, along with donations from record labels, forms the core of the current collection. Pinson followed the collection to Nashville and became the music librarian, a position he held for 26 years.

The collections of the CMHFM include many rare acetate recordings, which were recordings cut directly to disk, not pressed for mass distribution. Acetate discs have a metal base (glass was used in WWII) coated with nitrocellulose that was plasticized with castor oil. They were used for sound tests and home recording and were only intended to be played a few times. They deteriorate more rapidly than vinyl and are sensitive to environmental conditions. The nitrocellulose layer may flake or crack, leading to irreversible loss of content. Dr. Rumble showed several images of damaged discs, including one that was breaking down and producing acidic compounds.

In 2003, the CMHFM received a $213,000 grant from the NEA’s “Save Our Treasures” program to preserve unique acetate recordings, including some which recorded radio broadcasts that were otherwise ephemeral. The project originally planned to process and digitize 4,000 discs, but due to the nature of the metadata collected and the extensive restoration required before the discs could be played, this was eventually limited to about 1,000 discs. Recordings are digitized using a sample rate of 96kHz and a bit rate of 24. They are saved in Broadcast Wave Format and are also transferred to archival-quality analog tape for preservation. (Note: see the CoOL site for links to resources on audio digitization and preservation).

A custom database for capture of metadata was developed by the project consultant, Bridge Media Solutions of Nashville. The consultant also creates metadata headers for the individual digital audio files to link them back to the database. When the project is complete, this database and some recordings will be available on the website and to the 200,000 visitors the museum receives year; some recordings will also be broadcast via NPR, PBS, and commercial broadcast stations, while others will be reissued by the Country Music Foundation, as they did with some demos by Hank Williams.

In the question and answer period, Dr. Rumble and his colleague Alan Stoker made it clear that this was primarily a preservation project and that there were no plans to make even the out-of-copyright recordings freely available on the Internet. They also addressed their selection criteria, given the reduced scope of the project. The recordings in the worst condition were treated first, and unique or rare recordings were also given priority treatment. Identification of recordings is difficult, as many are unlabelled, though most have at least a date on the wrapper. In many cases, the performers are not well known and the only information about them is extemporaneous comments captured on the discs.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/lita-keynote-session-save-americas-treasures/feed/ 1 http://litablog.org/2006/10/many-users-one-computer/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/many-users-one-computer/#comments Sat, 28 Oct 2006 03:15:57 +0000 Genny http://litablog.org/2006/10/27/many-users-one-computer/ Eric Delozier of Penn State presented Many Users, One Computer, and Access to Web Services: Information Technology Risk Management in Libraries. I arrived a bit late, so I’m starting where I came in:

Liability issues: without adequate protection, patrons’ personal files and information might be lost or stolen; systems can be damaged.

Causes for loss:

• Hardware failure such as CPU or disk drives
• Environmental causes such as fire
• Software causes, either malware or software flaws
• Losses caused by user behavior: can be intentional or unintentional, by patrons or staff

After identifying risks, identify the potential consequences and the likelihood or frequency of occurrence. See Jacobson, Robert V., “Risk Assessment and Risk Management” in Computer Security Handbook, 2002, Wiley & Sons.

Risk mitigation: try to prevent losses, but also plan for recovery.

Hardware prevention & control measures include locks and alarms; software measures used at Eric’s institution include disk wiping (DBAN), backup and recovery (Ghost), integrity/restoration (Deep Freeze), malware detection (Symantec Antivirus), software updates (Microsoft Update), authenticationand authorization (Kerberos, borrower database), rights and permissions management (Active Directory), printing controls (Uniprint). Some software and policies are mandated universitywide; others are specific to the library. Administrative controls include policies, such as codes of conduct, and end-user agreements.

A new concept for me was the idea that risk management might include transferring responsibility to someone else. An example Eric gave was having the campus computing department take over responsibility for library computer issues after hours.

Risk management plan: have an overall policy and goals; assess risks; decide on objectives and the actions to meet each objective (such as objective “recover files and folders,” action “obtain and install backup and recovery software”).

Evaluate the results of your risk management process. In addition to quantitative measures like cost and frequency of incidents, also use feedback, suggestions, comments from patrons and staff.

Eric closed by urging everyone to consider getting some disk-wiping software.

Q & A

A lively discussion ensued about keeping logs of patron activity. Eric’s institution has a universitywide requirement for each student’s login to a computer on campus be recorded, so the library doesn’t have a choice to wipe logs. Public librarians in the audience want the logs to be wiped as often as possible to protect patron privacy, but also find they do get subpoenas and have to turn over computers to the police. One librarian mentioned she specifically has to budget for extra computers so they will be available if the police take some away.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/many-users-one-computer/feed/ 0 http://litablog.org/2006/10/evolutions-in-subject-searching/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/evolutions-in-subject-searching/#comments Fri, 27 Oct 2006 22:54:59 +0000 Genny http://litablog.org/2006/10/27/evolutions-in-subject-searching/ Slides are available here for Evolutions in Subject Searching: the Use of Topic Maps in Libraries with Steve Newcomb, co-founder of topicmaps.org and a co-author of a topic maps standard, and Patrick Durusau, on the board of TEI as well as involved in other markup standards organizations (didn’t catch them all).

I had assumed this session would be about things like AquaBrowser, but in fact, it was about an approach to representing knowledge in an expandable, shareable data structure.

Apparently topic maps and XML-based topic maps are big in a whole other context outside the library world, wherever people are managing industrial quantities of knowledge or documents. Basically, this talk addressed the structural underpinnings of one way to do a semantic map of a domain, and be able to construct a crosswalk to another domain using the same map. Sounds very labor-intensive.

One thing I learned is that in the world of topic maps, everything is a subject. This is not Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, here. Any data element of any kind can be a “subject” in a topic map.

Did you know there is a LITA Topic Maps IG? If you’re at LITA Forum, catch Suellen Stringer-Hye to ask about it. They will also be meeting at Midwinter.

Steve Newcomb

This speaker went through a number of slides that seemed to jump around the topic, as I adjusted to the fact that I’d walked in the room knowing nothing about this kind of topic map:

• The most basic thing about topic maps: one subject for each location
• The subject doesn’t need to be identified in any specific way, but must be identified
• Using topic mapping, you can create bridges or “wormholes” between heterogeneous information sources and representations, or universes of discourse
• A subject is defined by key-value pairs
• XTM: XML Topic Mapping
• Related organizations, companies, and conferences:
  • www.ieml.org
  • www.versavant.org
  • Atlas Elektronik
  • www.cit.de topic maps for municipal information for city of Stuttgard
  • US Department of Energy uses topic maps for asset management, weapons secrets classification
  • Dutch Tax and Customs uses topic maps to identify duplicate sources of publications and select the free or lower-cost version, rather than paying vendors twice for the same information
  • Extreme Markup Languages annual conference – primary industrial conference
  • TMRA Topic Maps Research and Applications – primary academic conference

Patrick Durusau

Different people define, or identify, subjects in different ways. How to capture different identifications? How to reuse mapping of identifications?

Where this problem may become critical is, for example, when medical terminology changes. Existing studies may become essentially unfindable, or hard to find without chasing down a trail of see-also references. A teaching hospital’s own study on a medical condition was too old to be found with current medical terms; the patient dies.

Subject identification by term or by unique identifier works within slow-changing areas and within a single area where everyone uses the same vocabulary or identifier set — otherwise, it breaks down.

Topic maps use a representative (proxy) for a subject that can contain multiple identifications for the same subject. (Example: Mark Twain and all his many noms de plume.)

All keys in a topic map are references to proxies. The topic map contains a legend. The topic map is self-documenting and therefore can be shared.

Q & A:
Q: Libraries already have such detailed subject indexing and cross-referencing. Why would it be worth it for a library to go to the trouble to create a topic map?

A: Because other libraries or institutions can contribute or share, especially when you are trying to provide a single point of access into multiple semantic tagging systems (such as LCSH and a museum database).

Q: Why didn’t you talk about the visual displays of topic maps?

A: This talk is not directly about the user interfaces; the topic mapping initiatives are concerned with both the interface and the underlying data representations.

Q: Does the topic map tell only about synonyms? What does it tell us about related terms, broader terms, narrower terms?

A: In topic maps, relationships themselves are also subjects, with properties identifying what kind of relationship.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/evolutions-in-subject-searching/feed/ 1 http://litablog.org/2006/10/saving-americas-treasures/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/saving-americas-treasures/#comments Fri, 27 Oct 2006 22:35:15 +0000 Genny http://litablog.org/2006/10/27/saving-americas-treasures/ Since we’re in Nashville, of course our first keynote is Saving America’s Treasures: Preservation of Rare Acetate and Vinyl Recording Transcriptions, featuring speakers from the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum.

John Rumble spoke, with Alan Stoker and Steve Maer to answer content and technical questions.

The Hall of Fame is run by the non-profit Country Music Foundation. Originally it just had a few costumes and instruments; a library was started in 1972. A record company and a collector donated the initial archive holdings, including never-played discs and rare recordings. Through judicious trading and selling of duplicates, the archive has been able to expand its collection on a shoestring.

Now they have records, CDs, tapes, and many old and rare metal-based acetate discs, even glass-based discs and cylinder recordings. Some of the oldest discs are chipped, peeling, cracked, even moldy. Some were never intended to last — they were recorded as temporary or demo discs.

In 2003 they got a preservation grant from the NEA. Preservation includes cleaning and repairing a disc as much as possible; playing it, and recording the sound into high-definition digital format and analog tape; entering a detailed description into a local database; and storing in an acid-free case.

The whole process is much more expensive and time-consuming than they had expected. They need to include detailed metadata about each recording — since often they’re the only source in the world for the information, and since their long-term intention is to make the data available to everyone from record companies to libraries to the general public. A big concern is continuing to get enough funding to preserve all the recordings before they are too far gone.

Q & A

Q: How do you identify the performers, songs, instruments, etc. to provide the detailed descriptions?

A: It can take significant research. Several of the people on the project have considerable expertise! But they also sometimes play the sound to other researchers, etc. It is harder to identify the session players than the well-known ones.

Q: How do you get current materials from the record companies?

A: On CD, but they expect to get them online in the future. Music distribution on CD is on its way out.

Q: Copyright issues?

A: They have ‘em. One thing they have to consider is, in many cases someone has copyrighted a particular arrangement — even if the original song is in the public domain.

Q: Prioritizing?

A: Items in worst condition and the rarest items. Sometimes the rarest items can wait because they’re in perfect condition, while if they have a slightly less-rare temporary disc, and its acetate peels off, that audio is lost forever.

Q: Do you have any fundraising program, in case you don’t get enough in grants?

A: Yes, a relatively recently added development department. Sometimes artists will donate the proceeds from an entire concert. They also take donations online on the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum web site

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/saving-americas-treasures/feed/ 0 http://litablog.org/2006/10/blogging-update/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/blogging-update/#comments Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:47:28 +0000 Griffey http://litablog.org/2006/10/27/blogging-update/ For those among us who are blogging the keynote presentations at LITA Forum, the row of chairs along the back row of the room have extra outlets scattered among them. As well, while there is no free wireless (boooo) there are evidently ethernet jacks randomly around the rooms which are live, so you can get Interweb that way, if you don’t pay for the hotel wifi.
]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/blogging-update/feed/ 1 http://litablog.org/2006/10/welcome-to-lita-forum-2006/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/welcome-to-lita-forum-2006/#comments Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:00:44 +0000 Griffey http://litablog.org/2006/10/27/welcome-to-lita-forum-2006/ Throughout the day today, and over the weekend, there will be a number of bloggers covering the various happenings here in Nashville at LITA Forum 2006. Be on the lookout for great content, and please join in the conversation.

If anyone has questions about LITA Blog during the Forum, I can be reached at jason-griffey at utc dot edu, or more immediately via AIM at utcrefJason.

EDIT: I just realized that without a formal blogger’s room, people might not find me, especially if you don’t know what I look like. So, if you need to know, here I am (thanks for the picture, Iris).

Have a great Forum!

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/welcome-to-lita-forum-2006/feed/ 1 http://litablog.org/2006/10/official-call-for-volunteer-bloggers-at-forum-06/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/official-call-for-volunteer-bloggers-at-forum-06/#comments Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:01:15 +0000 Michelle Boule http://litablog.org/2006/10/04/official-call-for-volunteer-bloggers-at-forum-06/ LITA Forum in wonderful Nashville is just around the corner. LITA Blog will be there to report the goings on and important conversations for those of us who will be stuck in less fun areas of the country. LITA Blog is successful because of the great volunteers we have for every conference.

Looking for new ways to get involved? This is a great opportunity.

You can see the entire schedule for Forum here. If you would like to volunteer, please email me, Michelle Boule, and let me know what sessions you would like to cover and if you are new to LITA Blog. I will be coordinating volunteers from afar this year and Jason Griffey will be the on-site blog coordinator.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/official-call-for-volunteer-bloggers-at-forum-06/feed/ 0 http://litablog.org/2006/10/participatory-networks-the-library-as-conversation/ http://litablog.org/2006/10/participatory-networks-the-library-as-conversation/#comments Wed, 04 Oct 2006 15:28:42 +0000 AaronDobbs http://litablog.org/2006/10/04/participatory-networks-the-library-as-conversation/ ALA OITP and the Information Institute of Syracuse have written a first draft technology brief on participatory networks and interactive social networking. Comments and participation by interested parties are welcome. (wiki and discussion forum)

For information about the project, please see the project’s About Page.

The draft document will be presented and discussed at the LITA NAtional Forum in Nashville at the end of October; the finalized document will be presented in mid-November.


]]> http://litablog.org/2006/10/participatory-networks-the-library-as-conversation/feed/ 2 http://litablog.org/2006/08/forum-early-bird-registration-deadline-extended/ http://litablog.org/2006/08/forum-early-bird-registration-deadline-extended/#comments Fri, 25 Aug 2006 19:46:53 +0000 zoe http://litablog.org/2006/08/25/forum-early-bird-registration-deadline-extended/ The early registration deadline for the 2006 National Forum in Nashville has been
extended to *September 1*.

Additional information describing the concurrent sessions and poster sessions, as well as the conference schedule, has been added to the Forum website: http://www.lita.org/forum06

Don’t miss this opportunity to network with fellow LITA-ites while taking in some informative sessions on facetted searching, updates on standards, blogs, wikis, podcasts, digital repositories, multimedia tutorials and more.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/08/forum-early-bird-registration-deadline-extended/feed/ 0 http://litablog.org/2006/07/update-on-the-2006-lita-forum/ http://litablog.org/2006/07/update-on-the-2006-lita-forum/#comments Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:45:18 +0000 zoe http://litablog.org/2006/07/21/update-on-the-2006-lita-forum/ Your 2006 LITA Forum Planning Committee and the LITA Office have been hard at work preparing for this year’s Forum which will be held in Nashville, TN from October 26-29. The Forum website has been updated with links to the online registration form and hotel registration in the Sheraton Nashville Downtown Hotel. Register now to save $50 off the regular registration rate; this offer ends on August 15th! A special room rate of $109/night for single or double occupancy is available at the conference hotel using the reservation link from the Forum website: http://www.lita.org/forum06.

More information on the concurrent sessions and the schedule will go up on the Forum website as we get closer to the dates of the Forum, so please check the website for updates. Content this year includes:

Two full day preconferences to provide opportunities for hand-on experiences and in-depth discussions:

Open Source Software Installfest
Developing Best Project Management Practices for IT Projects

Keynote sessions to enrich each day’s programming:

Stephen Abram, Vice President – Innovation, Sirsi/Dynix , Web 2.0 and the Library 2.0 in Our Future;
Thom Gillespie, Director of the MIME program at the Indiana University , Libraries and Public Internet Entertainment;
Alan Stoker, Tracy Landino, and Steve Maer of the Country Music Hall of Fame, Save America’s Treasures: Preservation of Rare Acetate and Vinyl Recording Transcriptions.

This year’s LITA National Forum includes 34 concurrent sessions and 10 poster sessions planned where you’re sure to find practical advice, new ideas, and tested solutions to technological issues you encounter every day. Networking opportunities throughout the Forum will provide ample opportunity for interaction with colleagues, including the ever popular networking dinners and a get together for bloggers.

]]> http://litablog.org/2006/07/update-on-the-2006-lita-forum/feed/ 0 http://litablog.org/2006/07/netville-in-nashville-lita-forum-2006/ http://litablog.org/2006/07/netville-in-nashville-lita-forum-2006/#comments Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:39:36 +0000 Genny http://litablog.org/2006/07/06/netville-in-nashville-lita-forum-2006/ Registration is now open for the 2006 LITA Forum.
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