Ideas….

First, for those of you that don’t know I’m getting married.  That’s cool right?  I just announced that to the entire internet.  So my favorite part of getting married so far is the registering for things.  I mean you go around and you pick random appliances and stuff that you want others to buy you.  A materialist’s dream.

So now you’re wondering what this has to do with anything…well hold on I’m getting there.  So the other day I was in the grocery store buying chicken and garlic.  I personally like to do all my checking out at the self checkout out because there are usually fewer people there and I can move pretty quick.  So I scan my chicken and enter in my garlic.  Then I swipe my Shaw’s card to get the garlic for cheaper and finally I pay.  So the little machine tells me to take my items and not to forget my coupons and receipt.  So I grab my coupons and I pause…

The coupon says: “buy personalize M&Ms for your wedding at a discount”.  And I wonder:  How the heck does the grocery store know I’m getting married!

Well simple really.  Crate and Barrel, Macy’s, and Bed Bath and Beyond sell my registry and other information to marketers.  The marketers sell my information to Shaw’s.  Shaw’s matches it up to their rewards card database thingy.  The rewards card tells the coupon machine what targeted coupons to spit out at me.  This is why I get coupons certain times of the month for certain items, its like the coupon/reward card knows I’m out cause it can see my shopping behavior, and presumably I’m somewhat predictable.

Scary right?  So I actually think this is cool (once I got over the weirdness).

Well my targeted information advertising experience didn’t stop there.  The other day I was at a faculty workshop on social networking and one of the professors here, Josh Stenger showed the workshop that you can go into Facebook and buy an advertisement.  Of course the cool thing isn’t the buying of the ad (and you don’t even need to make a purchase to get to the cool stuff), its the information Facebook supplies you when you get to step three of buying the ad.  Below is a picture of the coolness:

Step 3 when buying a Facebook Advertisement

Essentially Facebook allows marketers to find the exact number of people on Facebook that fit my criteria.  And of course, if I were buying an ad, I could sell it to my targeted audience.  That’s how I (personally) got the ad for Lost (the TV show) on my Facebook page, and how I then became a fan of the show and why that’s the only add that comes up (which is annoying).  At anyrate, its kind of cool to play around with.

Another really cool tool Josh showed us was the Facebook Lexicon.  This allows you to see what words people are interested in.  So below you can see the buzz around Obama which of course spiked on election day.

the buzz around obama as seen from the facebook universe

So my question is this.  Why aren’t libraries using this stuff?  Why aren’t we looking at the buzzwords our users are typing in to search interfaces and then trending them on graphs?  Why aren’t we using profiles to keep track of their research interests and then pushing them targeted articles.  Or even easier than all that, why aren’t we putting ads on Facebook for research assistant appointments or the like?

How cool would all that be?

Marshall Breeding is the:
Director for Innovative Technologies and Research at Vanderbilt University
http://www.librarytechnology.org/

What is Happening Now in the ILS World?

• Marshall created a self published library survey on the satisfaction level of different vendors and ILS systems.

Thoughts From Me

While the survey is interesting it doesn’t get at why people are satisfied/dissatisfied. Since Marshall focuses on innovation, I was curious to know if those that are unhappy with their ILS are more innovative than those that are happy with their ILS. So I posed the question to Marshall, he responded that its hard to get at they why people are dissatisfied since it can be for a variety of factors. for example, one library may be happy with their ILS because they came from a significantly older ILS. While maybe small libraries are happy with the same vendor because of the service the company provides.

But i think my retort to that would be (if there had been enough time), don’t those examples all come down to innovation. If you just implemented a web opac, you’re not innovating. And small libraries can’t innovate like large libraries due to money, staff, etc., restrictions. After all Wheaton College doesn’t have the same number of systems staff that NC State has. Its not possible for me to do all the projects that NC State’s library can do because I’m only 1/20th of the department.

He also indicated that to add more questions would be problematic since people don’t fill out long surveys; however I think adding the question “How innovative would you rank your library on a scale of 1 to 10″ isn’t going to make or break the survey.

• He also discussed the great number of companies merging, and wonders when we’ll end up at ALA just going to one big booth. He mentioned that innovation at the companies is lower than expected. I was unclear as to whether or not he felt companies merging are causing less innovation. He indicated that vendors are inevitably moving toward just having one product.

Thoughts From Me

First, I would like to say that I may be a bit biased; I used to work for a library vendor. That being said I think mergers force vendors to become more innovative, that’s right I said more. Having lived through a merger, I know that when Ex Libris and Endeavor merged, Ex Libris took a long hard look at Endeavor’s practices and adopted quite a few of them, a lot more than most people might be aware of. Training and implementation (the department I worked in) began taking a good hard look at web based training because Endeavor was doing it and customers really liked it. Support, which was all web-based took a good long look at phone based telephone support, because again Endeavor did it and customers really liked it. Ex Libris was forced to innovate (in terms of its services) because of the merger.

As for products, we took a good look at each of the products Endeavor had and found the best parts of their products so that we could merge them into Ex Libris’ existing products. Now Marshall is right, to a degree, vendors that merge are looking to only own one product, but I would like to say that prior to the merger, Endeavor’s parent company Elsevier had made the decision to axe a number of their products, so some of them were on their way out anyway. But I think indicating that all merged companies want to have only one type of product makes fear rampant. Ex Libris is NOT getting rid of Voyager anytime soon. And if you disagree, then I’ll ask the question: do you want to migrate the Library of Congress to ALEPH?

So I would like to see some proof that there is a lack of innovation in merged vendors, because I haven’t witnessed it. But I have seen a lack of innovation in companies that have never (or rarely ever) merged with another, it allows them to become stagnant and avoid growth outside of their comfort zone.

• Integration of social networking is hung off to the side of library websites.  He’s hoping to see libraries making it an integral part of the library website.
• open source v. open system
  • open source: lots of interest in moving toward it
  • open system: different than open source, this is a proprietary software with the ability for you to muck around.
    open api — allows you to get to the data without having to get into the code
    “depth of openess” — translates into the usefulness you need. does you vendor have it?

What will Happen Next?

• right now we’re using systems and interfaces to “fix” the problems with the traditonal ILS by:
  • placing a burden on personnel
  • constant procurement/installation/configuration/maintenance cycles
  • inadequate interfaces for what our users need/want
• we are moving away from metadata and toward deep searching.
• we are using SOA (service oriented architecture) to create a usable model
• some of the new models out there are:
  • Ex Libris URM
  • OLE (Open Library Environment)

Thoughts from Me

First, I’ve heard a lot of flack from the library community about the OLE Project (not from Marshall…he’s working with it).  Many people think that its just another open source catalog.  I’d like to emphasize here that it is NOT a new open source catalog.  Instead they are trying to make our processes easier by creating a system that follows those processes.  For years libraries have been adapting their workflows and business to work with the system, but that’s not what software should do.  And to be honest, I think libraries are so ingrained in these awful business practices, they don’t even see how bad they are anymore.

But the OLE Project does; it seeks to make software that works with the way a library should function.  Hopefully such a system will allow libraries to be more efficient and more productive in the future.

Additionally, the OLE Project isn’t focused just on print materials, it seeks to create a system that will incorporate all materials and mediums, not just print.  And let’s face it, every catalog (whether open source or not) is based on the antiquated print catalogs of yesterday (don’t get me wrong…I used to love it, but it doesn’t work in today’s society…just look at my post below about David Weinberger’s talk).  In essence, the OLE Project seeks to create a system that replaces all the systems a library currently uses for its daily business practices.

Second, Marshall pointed out that this is 2-3 years in the making before we begin to see anything at all out of these projects.  I’d like to point out that prior to working for Ex Libris I thought I had some great ideas, but when I started there, I realized the ideas I was just beginning to formulate were products they were already developing.  And the difference between Ex Libris and the OLE Project, is that Ex Libris has people dedicated just to organizing and developing the URM, while the OLE Project is still trying to figure out what it will look like.  All I’m trying to say is don’t underestimate the innovation level of a vendor.

Author and Professor

http://www.evident.com/

I’d like to say that David was a phenomenal speaker.  Everything that appears below is my shorthand notes of his talk.  I’m not this smart.

Libraries in an Age of Abundance

We are now in an economy of abundance when it comes to knowledge, when it comes to content.  But we are also in an economy of abundance when it comes to crap, but we know how to deal with that.  There is so much good stuff that we’re having problems trying to figure out how to wade through all the good stuff.

We don’t have a plural form of knowledge, and its the same for everyone.  There is only one truth and that makes knowledge binary.  Knowledge is scarce, we came up with this in Athens because of all of the “voices”.  So we decided that knowledge was what we believed and had proof to believe it.  Knowledge is a system and everything in it has a single place.

The second principle is that of division into species according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might. –Phaedrus by Plato

The Aristotelian taxonomic tree is that everything gets one place. But this isn’t real, that’s not the way the world works, but this insistence keeps us from understanding the world.

The world has clustered attributes.  And this is why digitized information is closer to reality than the real objects because real objects can only go into one place.  However with digitized information everything can be linked to each other, making messiness OK, because order doesn’t scale well.

Metadata is changing.  When you search you’ll get back everything related to the data, not just the thing you search for because metadata helps you pry up knowledge.  This makes content connected.

We’ll do it ourselves.  When you own the stuff, you own the organization of it, but online you can get the information and organize it the way that you want.  He used a great example of a flickr photo from the Library of Congress that was tagged and reorganize it because of the tagging.

We are now making a giant pile of leaves, where as before we were creating taxonomic trees.  The old ideas was including and excluding, and you exclude more than you include.  But on the net you include everything because you can’t know what people are interested in.  We can postpone organizing, classifying, and taxonomizing to the very last moment.

Knowledge is being commoditized.  This is what Google and Wikipedia are doing.  One of the good things about this is that now we are living in a knowledge ecology.

Many of our techniques for navigating is based on social networks.  There is a hidden homogeneity that we need to fight against.

Wikipedia teaches us four things:

• we can do more than we think we can — Wikipedia should not have worked, but it did
• our motives are more complex than we thought
• the old way of knowing doesn’t scale
• knowledge is a human architect — there isn’t one human knowledge

We are ceasing to take knowledge as the highest human function.  Knowing things is good, and we’re good at it, BUT something else is swarming around it and that is understanding stuff.  We are understanding thing far better, more quickly, and less deeply.

“there exists a realm of knowledge that grows through individual contributions, is transmitted from generation to generation such that its existence is thought to be continuous and is capable of being examined.” — Francis Miksa of the U of Texas at Austin