Sandra Herber: Future Librarian

This week’s readings were a real pleasure and came at just the right time.  Most of us are now in the dog days of the semester – that back-breaking, disappointing (because there is never enough time to get things done to the level you’d really like) slog until the end – and the readings this week were a reminder to keep your eye on the big picture, not only in graduate school, but in libraries, businesses and in life.

Thoughts on Cognitive Surplus from Clay Shirky

I love talks like Clay Shirky’s given at the Web 2.0 Expo in 2008.  Whether you agree with him or not, you have to admire his ability to synthesize examples into an overarching theory.  Shirky believes that since World War II we have come to live in a world of greater leisure time, but our addiction to television has been masking a huge cognitive surplus created by that leisure time.  This cognitive surplus can be accessed through a new type of media – that which includes the user in not only consumption, but production and sharing.  His ideas reflected many of the (then) new ideas that Amanda introduced us to early in the course, and it’s great to hear about it again now that we’ve had time to experience some of the tools that are making this happen.  Shirky’s examples were interesting, but I think I have even a better one.  Jane McGonigal’s article Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming is a fascinating study of what the collective can do when it’s motivated and it uses its free time to do something rather than just being a passive consumer of media output.  It’s a long article, but I guarantee that it’s not boring and you will be amazed at the process she describes.

Take Risks

Again, it might be the time of the semester (or the time of the degree – I will be finished my MLIS next Friday), but Kathy Sierra’s Death by Risk Aversion resonated with me on both a personal and professional level.  Those of us who are graduating are finding that there are very few entry-level jobs out there (at least in academic libraries as that’s where I am looking) and one of the possible stances to take in this kind of situation is to play it safe, but Sierra’s point that “if you’re not doing something that someone hates, it’s probably mediocre” was timely for me.  Playing it safe (following what everyone says you should do or trying to make yourself generically appealing to all employers) is a quick road to a job where you’ll find frustration and a lack of fit.  Taking a risk in this situation involves sitting tight, gathering new experiences (through volunteering or self-directed learning) and waiting for the job to come along where you know you can shine – where your skills will be put to work meeting needs.

The Market is Speaking

Though it was directed more at for-profit companies, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles and David Weinberger’s article, 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto, has some vital information for libraries.  Their first point, that markets are conversations, of course reflects the growth of social software and the ability of the user to interact with, evaluate, compare and then tell everyone what they think of a company or product.  For my major project in this class I am looking at how academic libraries are using Twitter not just to push out information, but to connect with users.  A few libraries are doing just as Locke et al. suggest – “getting a sense of humour” and “sounding human” as they interact with users online.  This is a risky business, since users might not be comfortable with a kind of proactive (the negative term would be invasive) library presence on Twitter, but I have to admire these libraries for really trying.  They are taking risks and in at least one instance I found a student who included his university library among a list of people (the rest were his friends) he was asking for help, which means that the library, through dint of hard work and effort at making connections online is addressing point #85: “When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.”

Reality

All the readings were hopeful and I feel optimistic at what can be done with some of these tools (I will outline my own social software toolbox next week in my reflection blog) but the reality is that many academic libraries are still very traditional.  Implementing some of these ideas may be a slower process than we all might hope but with a combination of sensitivity to the corporate culture and a little risk-taking, I think that our generation of academic librarians will be making huge positive changes in libraries.

In the first week of this course, I scanned down the list of topics we would be covering and this one (Cloud Computing) was one I did not recognize. After this week’s readings, I realize that I have been using cloud computing for a while now without putting a name on it.  It just seemed to me to be a natural evolution of the properties of the Internet.  The readings, however, talked not just about individuals using cloud computing, but institutions and that was really interesting to me.

One of the things that was interesting about this week’s readings was that one of the drivers for institutions to use cloud computing is cost reduction.  7 Things You Should Know about Cloud Computing and Library Cloud Atlas: A Guide to Cloud Computing and Storage both mention that there are savings to be had for institutions that “rent” applications or space rather than spend large amounts of capital.  Some of the examples were of very small institutions, but I believe in this economy, large institutions should be interested in this, too (though their cost savings might not be so large).  These ideas were all new to me, but very intriguing.

Some of the articles brought up the major issues around cloud computing which, I think, might mean that we aren’t “quite there yet”.  In 7 Things they mentioned “concerns about privacy, security, data integrity, intellectual property manage­ment, audit trails, and other issues.”  Other readings also mention these issues and those are pretty serious issues!  One of the speakers in What is Cloud Computing? also mentioned the issue of bandwidth – you need a significant amount of it to move all your work to the clouds.  So, all in all, it might be a little while before all these things are worked out and we can all feel comfortable in the clouds.

This leads us to libraries.  How does cloud computing affect what we’re doing?  We will obviously need to provide “the fastest connections [we] can, and security measures that do not block access to what users want”, according to Michael Stephens.  And, on the related topic of mobile computing, we also need to encourage our users to access the library in ways that they are already using (texting, mobile websites).  I liked Steve Kolwich’s point that “college libraries should not be picky about how they are willing to communicate with students” – we should just be excited that they want to contact us at all rather than doing a Google search.

I must admit, like others of you out there, that I started the readings this week with some scepticism.  With some caveats, though, I have been won over.  When (not if!) I get a job in an academic library, I will give social networking tools (particularly Facebook which is the one used most by undergraduates) a try.  I’m already on Facebook, so I’ll have to figure out (as I mentioned in a comment on Amena’s blog post) whether to just use that profile or create an entirely new one for me as an academic librarian, but I do feel that there is potential here.

The Big Caveat

There are some caveats to using social networking tools in an academic library and the main one, I think, is to be very careful about the potential perception that students might have that you are “invading their space”.  At the OLA Superconference last week I went to a talk about Reference at Guelph-Humber and how they tried roving reference in the Learning Commons.  They did not get a good response at all.  In fact, one librarian said that when she was sitting at a table with students, one of their friends came up and said, “What is SHE doing here?”  I don’t think it would feel any different to students if we forced ourselves (with the best of intentions, of course) on them in another space they feel is their own: Facebook.  In Crossing Boundaries, Anne Hewitt and Andrea Forte found that one third of the students they surveyed did not believe faculty should have a presence on Facebook.  Now you might argue that librarians are different from faculty (they are not involved in evaluating coursework, only in helping), but I think we should be aware of this concern and it should shape how we plan to use these tools.

Popularity

A number of articles pointed out how popular Facebook and other social networking sites are.  We have to know that that is where our students (as academic librarians) are spending a great deal of their time.  As an article in Educause, quoted in Reaching Students with Facebook: Data & Best Practices stated, this technology has captivated our students and because of that, exploration of what they enjoy about it will allow us to incorporate such captivating material in our approaches to them.  Of course, here, too, is a caveat – it’s can’t be lame and done, as Amanda said, without authenticity.

Promotion

Promotion is going to be the key, if we want to avoid students feeling that we are invading their space.  Librarians at Penn State promoted their Facebook presence during subject-specific library instruction sessions: “the librarian explicitly stated that he often provided reference and research assistance via Facebook.”  By simply using Facebook as another way that students can contact you (albeit one on which they spend a lot of time and with which they are very comfortable) students can remain in control.  In this article (Reaching Students with Facebook: Data & Best Practices) the authors specifically said that they did not recommend friending students on Facebook: instead “let them decide when and where they need you.”

It’s What You Do With It

The last word goes to Meredith Farkas from her Libraries in Social Networking Software: “I do not think that there is anything inherently ‘cool’ or useful about having a profile on these sites. Just like any social software tool, it’s what you do with it that matters. And many libraries aren’t really doing anything with their profiles.”  This could be the motto of this class.  All these tools have huge possibility for utility, but we should be very wary of using them just because they are the new, shiny thing.

This week’s readings were thought-provoking.  Having tackled tagging and folksonomies through my group project and through the Crowdsourcing project, I admit that I still found myself struggling to see the benefits of folksonomies over traditional cataloguing and indexing techniques.  After this week’s readings, I gained a new appreciation for some of the more subtle benefits of folksonomies (aside from the obvious and most quoted one which is that folksonomies use the vocabulary that the user uses) and but I also found that my idea that there are applications where traditional cataloguing is better than folksonomies and applications where the reverse is true was reinforced.  Since I am hoping to work in an academic library I constantly apply the ideas of this class to that context and I am still left wondering if folksonomies have a place in the academic library.

Folksonomies – their benefits

Aside from some of the obvious benefits of folksonomies (one is mentioned above and others have been discussed in previous posts), some of the readings showed me new or more subtle benefits.  Liz Lawley in Social Consequences of Social Tagging explained how tagging is better for browsing (and serendipitous discoveries) than for finding: “browsing the system and its interlinked related tag sets is wonderful for finding things unexpectedly in a general area.”  This was interesting because I had been bemoaning the fact that folksonomies would not allow users to locate the best resources the way traditional cataloguing would.  But now I realize that that is like saying that a wrench doesn’t work as well for hammering in nails as a hammer does.  Folksonomies can help you find items, but they are really most appropriate for serendipitous browsing.

I thoroughly enjoyed What is Social Cataloging? the video of Tim Spalding speaking at LIANZA.  I had heard about LibraryThing but haven’t used it and he did a wonderful job of outlining some of the incredible benefits (from giving access to the library of Thomas Jefferson, to connecting with other people who share you reading interests) of his system.  Now, I hesitate to say that all this is due to folksonomies – more, I think should be attributed to Spalding’s vision and ability to see the new applications for social cataloguing.  I found his opinions about OCLC interesting – and agree that public libraries should be striving to be indexed in Google since that is where people are looking for information anyway.

Folksonomies – for the Web

I had mentioned in a previous post that when confronted with the huge, amorphous mass of the Internet, folksonomies are just about the only appropriate way of organizing information.  This idea was echoed in Adam Mathes’ Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata and by Emanuele Quintarelli in Folksonomies: power to the people who describes the information produced by the Net as “an enormous, ever-changing, time-sensitive, not-clearly defined corpus of items”.  When put like that, which cataloguer would want to try to apply LCSH to that?  Quintarelli says that “Well-designed metadata is better than folksonomies on traditional axes of comparison.”  This is what I believe.  The popularity of folksonomies and tagging on the Net is not going to stop librarians from using LCSH.  He goes on, however, to make this emphatic point which I think may have been missing from my (and other’s people’s) analysis of which system is ‘better’: “it does not matter whether we ‘accept’ folksonomies, because we are not going to be given that choice. The mass amateurization of Web publishing makes the mass amateurization of cataloguing a forced move. Folksonomies are a trade-off between traditional structured centralized classification and no classification or metadata at all. And they are the best we actually have.”

Folksonomies – for academic libraries?

So, we have now established that folksonomies cannot be avoided on the Net and are actually quite appropriate for that environment.  I agree with this.  The more tricky question for me is whether they are appropriate (and in what circumstances) in academic libraries.  Carol Ou in White-Paperish Thing (about distributed classification) explored one area: cataloguing of journals and decided that the benefit of getting users to tag these sources was that “it shifts that burden precisely towards a group with the greatest stake in certain resource discovery, relying on the concept that users are most likely to be willing to participate in a system that enables them to enhance their own access to those resources they themselves find most relevant.”  So, we are appealing to the personal interests of the users (somewhat following the idea that personal interest comes before community interest in successful social bookmarking enterprises such as Delicious and LibraryThing), but is there enough incentive to do this when traditional methods work ‘well enough’?  I look at the Encore system at UWO and I must admit that I have not found one item that has been tagged.  Is that because there is not enough personal incentive? Or that users feel that the catalogue of an academic library is sacrosanct compared to the Internet?  I know that no one is suggesting that academic libraries stop using LC classification or LCSH, but I just wonder about what added benefit could come from tagging in an academic library and if there is one, how we could get our users to engage in this process.

I’m in the group responsible for this week’s project and I’ll be posting our prototype and site soon, but since I’ve engaged with these ideas (both through the readings and our project), I thought I would do a blog post this week as well.

In Hammond’s article Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review it is pointed out that “to anyone familiar with top-down classification schemes, this approach [social bookmarking] could look like a fearful muddle.”  The “anyone familiar” are creators and users of traditional hierarchical classification systems – that is, us (librarians and librarians in training) among others.  Though I do see the benefits of social bookmarking, I am very aware of its drawbacks and I thoroughly believe that the hierarchical systems that we have been trained in are superior for giving access to bibliographic material (that’s why I wonder about the benefits of encouraging students to tag material in the new UWO catalogue).  But tagging and folksonomies are not being used to organize bibliographic materials (or at least they haven’t taken over from traditional classification systems) they are being used to ‘catalogue’ and ‘organize’ that great amorphous mass – the Internet.  The Internet cannot be catalogued by traditional means (I guess Yahoo tried that and look what happened to them when Google came along?).  The Internet has been created ad hoc and should be classified ad hoc.  But as Hammond says, “a free tagging approach to classification is a jumbled, hit-and-miss affair, and any system that it may throw up must be discovered, or learned, after the event” and that is where we are now: trying to understand the system that has been created.  The greatest benefit, to me, to this type of system is that it may tag material with the terms that users would actually use to find it – but as our group discovered, there are many, many ways to name the same concept.

I thought Rainie made an interesting point in Tagging: “some worry that folksonomies can be a type of ‘tyranny of the majority’, in which the prevalent group’s way of thinking about the world overwhelms the local and the quirky.”  This was interesting to me, since in the same article Rainie points out that taggers are mostly under age 40 with high levels of education and income.  They are the people determining what is noteworthy on the Internet and that is both good and bad.

I enjoyed Joshua Porter’s The Del.icio.us Lesson where he made the very good point that tagging works not because people do it for altruistic reasons, but because it will benefit them directly.  The network value only comes in when we aggregate what people have created.  Andrea Mercado, in Tagging on Flickr & del.icio.us, makes a similar point: “Flickr follows a ‘desire lines’ philosophy, letting people create their own metadata, laying paths where people are walking instead of trying to lay out paths and assuming people will follow them (like, say, structured classification)”.  This, I think, should be the strategy that we take when using social software tools in libraries.  We need to make sure that we aren’t laying out the paths and hoping that people will want to walk along them, but rather letting people create the paths because they see the use in them.  After they have done that we can find a way to create a network benefit from all their work.

I had never edited a wiki (let alone set one up or managed it as many people in this class seem to have done) until posting my book lists on the wiki Amanda set up for this course.  All the information in this week’s readings, therefore, was new and interesting to me.

While I understand that the main focus of a wiki is on collaborative work, I found some of the examples that used wikis in novel ways to be some of the most interesting.  For example Chad Boeninger’s Biz Wiki at Ohio University was a really useful site, though not technically a collaborative space, where he had leveraged the searchability and malleability of the wiki to keep his subject guides fresh.

Some of the wikis in the cases studies as well as the ones that came up in the readings were really well done and compelling.  One I liked personally was the Library Success Wiki (mentioned in Using Wikis to Create Online Communities).  What a great place to find vetted information on topics that are of importance to librarians!

A theme that came up (and I think will come up week after week, as it relates to social software in general) is letting go of control.  It’s clear that the person who creates and administers the wiki can control how much or whether people can contribute to it, and some have chosen to make their wikis less collaborative than others.  In a true wiki that lets everyone edit the work of everyone else (such as Wikipedia) rules seem to emerge as to what is acceptable and what is not, but I wonder if using a wiki in a work setting is as easy. I imagine that it must take some practice to get people to let go of the ownership of their work.  To me, this is one of the central issues in using social software.

Some interesting points came up in this week’s readings, one of which (photoblogging) I’ve already mentioned in a previous post (and I now have a new addiction – following photoblogs).

The Long Tail

In Blogs in Plain English, the commentator said that blogs appeal to a high number of small audiences, referring (without explicitly saying so) to the Long Tail (which also came up in last week’s readings).  If you don’t know much about the Long Tail here is an interesting article in Wired magazine by Chris Anderson.  In it, he uses the example of Amazon which combines “infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.”  I find this concept fascinating – that now people with obscure interests have ways of accessing the material they are interested in – think zip.ca (or Netflix) or amazon.ca.  As a marketing tool, it has amazing potential:  “the average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles” (that long tail of demand).  Now – you ask – how can we use this in libraries?  Well, honestly, I don’t know the answer because, unlike Amazon, we don’t have infinite shelf space (for the really obscure titles Amazon doesn’t even hold the title, they order it from the publisher when you request it – just in time bookselling).  Any ideas how we can take advantage of the long tail in libraries?

Blog Criticism

I also enjoyed Jill Walker’s article “Weblogs: Learning in Public”.  It had many interesting points but the one that intrigued me most was that many people have an assumption that they can analyze and criticize blogs just like any other creative output.  However, when we do, we come to realize that we (as bloggers) are on the same level as the material that we are reviewing (so different from the print book review), that we will often get a response and sometimes hurt people’s feelings.  Just another reason to tread lightly.  I am very aware of these things (although I have to say I am with her students who were very surprised that anyone outside their class might read their blogs) and I might be engaged in a kind of (what I consider sensible) self-censorship.  Does that mean that, as according to Lindy Dreyer and Maddie Grant (in their article on why people don’t comment on blogs) that I am creating one of those bland, uncontroversial, unengaging blogs?

Virtual Roving Reference

I loved Brian Mathews’ ideas in “Intuitive Revelations”.  He created a kind of virtual roving reference, but I was sorry that he didn’t describe in more detail how he actually did it.  For instance, he said he followed bloggers who had selected Georgia Institute of Technology as their academic affiliation.  Now, how did he do that?  Is there a way to search blogs by affiliation?  Another interesting idea would be to do this sort of thing on Twitter – where people are even more likely to express their frustrations with library services or resources.  I know that you can search people’s bios on Twitter with TweepSearch and so it would be easy to follow all UWO students on Twitter.  Take note, this might be a good idea for a final project in this class.

Case Studies

This is already getting too long, but I did want to comment on the case studies.  I looked at the academic libraries because that’s where I want to work.  I think we hope that the blogs produced by these libraries answer questions and spread information about key library resources or information literacy.  But it seemed to me that The Virginia Commonwealth University blog contained mostly technical questions: about computers, the bathrooms, opening hours.  Now, I’m sure this in not unlike the ratio of technical to meaty questions that come up at the reference desk, and it was clear that the blog also answered some meatier questions.  I don’t mean to make it sound like we shouldn’t answer these technical questions – our users need that information, but how do we get to those people who have meatier questions but aren’t asking them?

I have just finished the readings for this week and I think they were a great introduction to the course.  I feel much more comfortable now that I know what Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 are and, more importantly, something about their potential in a library setting.  Potential, I guess, is the key work.  I feel that libraries are transitioning (sometimes smoothly, sometimes with some resistance) into exploring the possible benefits of these technologies and the philosophies behind them.  I found some of the ideas (central and peripheral) in the articles were intriguing, while some I was not sure I agreed with.  So… some random thoughts:

Letting Go of Control

Jack Maness says that Library 2.0 “is a user-centered virtual community. It is a socially rich, often egalitarian electronic space. While Librarian 2.0 might act as a facilitator and provide support, he or she is not necessarily primarily responsible for the creation of the content”.  This is not an idea unique to this article: it came up in a number of the readings (the Kroski article, for one).  While on the surface this is touted as a benefit of Library 2.0, I think it is a great challenge to many librarians to think about letting go of control.  We come from a profession that has catalogued and controlled access to all sorts of information for at least a hundred years (or more, depending on how you define librarianship).  Now we’re being asked to open the gates and let the library users in.  Not only in, but in so far that they are creating the content.  For those of us new graduates, whom I think many older librarians expect to be comfortable with these technologies and ideas, this is a challenge worth keeping in mind.  Tread softly but assertively through the potential resistance!

John Blyberg also tackles this idea in his article.  He says, “If we are going to play host to non-authoritative content (which it is when it comes from our patrons), then how do we designate that? L2 ushers in an era where this becomes something libraries need to do. There is a lot of fantastic non-authoritative data–we just need to get off our high horses and decide to make it available. The matter of how to mark it as non-authoritative is still pending, of course.”  He gets at the issue in a much more direct way than I did in the previous paragraph (the high horses reference), but he brings up an interesting point.  First, user-generated information is not the same as information generated through a peer-review process and librarians know that.  We are not being asked to equate the two.  Second, we haven’t found a way yet of marking this information as non-authoritative.  When we have, it will make its integration into our offerings much more palatable.

We are the Vanguard (or maybe we’re running just behind the vanguard)

Henry Jenkins believes there is a kind of hidden curriculum in participatory cultures which are “shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace.”  While I know he was talking about students much younger than us, I thought about it in a personal way.  Over the break I spoke to the head of Human Resources at a large academic library.  He believed that new library grads were expected by current librarians to be comfortable with technology and especially with the technology and ideas around Library 2.0.  It made me glad that I’m taking this course, but also a little daunted.  I never thought that I would have to be the one spearheading the implementation of new ideas and technologies with which I was only vaguely familiar a year ago.  But, isn’t that why we come back to school?  To be exposed to new ideas and new paradigms?

Making it Easier to Get to the Information

Rick Anderson made an interesting point when he said, “We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning.”  It seems so simple when he puts it like that!  We spend so much time and effort trying to figure out how we can teach users to access information through the maze of databases and interfaces, but we (ok, I) have never stopped to think that maybe it would be so much easier just to make the information more accessible.  I know that that isn’t easy – we have large and powerful vendors to deal with, but I like it as a goal.  Whenever possible and wherever you can influence these things – try to make the information easier to access.  I imagine that this isn’t a priority for some librarians because they think it might lose them their jobs.  I understand that fear, but isn’t our primary focus to connect our users with the information they need?  If we make that so easy that they don’t need us any more we will just make ourselves relevant in other ways.