The future of the library- articles

Yesterday an article entitled “Digital library opens door to paperless collections” published in The Age caught my eye. It wasn’t that the information in the article was particularly radical or surprising, libraries throughout the world, including Australia have been changing for a long time. It was that The Age copied it from The Denver Post and included a subtitle ``In the US, shelves of bound books are giving way to electronic means of delivering text,’’ no mention of this being a world wide issue, or even adding an Australian context. It just seemed really lazy to me. Why would anyone in Melbourne be interested in the Denver Library unless the same thing was happening here? But the article does not mention Australian libraries at all. I figured I could rectify this. The below articles were recently found for a university assignment I submitted last semester on the future of libraries. They are really interesting in their overview of how libraries have, or can adapt to, the changing nature of information, and I think they are much more newsworthy/relevant than The Denver Post article. Details of these are below.

1. Saw, G, Lui, W & Yu, F 2008, `2010: a library odyssey’, Library Management, vol. 29, no. 1/2, pp. 51-66, viewed 28 May 2010, Emerald database.

2010: a library odyssey offers a case study of the University of Queensland Library’s recent transformation and the processes now in place to meet the next decade of challenges facing Australia’s higher education sector. The article provides a good case study for research into the future of academic libraries while offering valuable lessons for other academic libraries in their strategies for the future. Note: This article is Australian and was peer reviewed.

2. Veld, JVD 2006, The impact of technology on professional roles in the library of the 21st century: concepts and context, National and State Libraries Australasia Discussion Paper, Office of eStrategy and Innovation, Melbourne, viewed 29 May 2010, < http://www.nsla.org.au/publications/papers/2006/pdf/NSLA.Discussion-Paper-20060809-Impact.of.technology.on.professional.roles.in.the.library.of.the.21st.century.pdf>.

In this article The State Library of Victoria provides a useful case study as a Library 2.0 that has met the challenges of Web 2.0 by focusing on the development and access to digital collections, improvement of people spaces and acknowledgment of the impact of these changes on librarians roles, skills and the library’s organisation structure. Challenges to the Library and Librarian 2.0 are identified and outcomes and recommendations are provided. Note: This article is Australian.

And from overseas:
3. Corwin, S, Hartley, E & Hawkes, H 2009, `The Library Rebooted: Even in an era when you can ``Google'' just about anything, many libraries have remained vibrant and relevant by redefining the business they're in’, vol. Spring, no. 54, pp.78-83, viewed 29 May 2010, .

This article suggests seven imperatives for libraries to stay relevant into the future. Written by three experienced organisational strategists this article does lean towards libraries becoming more commercially aware. However its practical recommendations regarding operations models and user needs may be significant for many librarians faced with the challenges outlined in this article.

4. Hawkins, D 2009, `Google Meets Publishers and Librarians’, Information Today, vol. 26, no. 8, pp.27-29, viewed 10 May 2010, ProQuest database.

In providing an overview of the discussions held at a recent conference entitled Google, the Web and the Future Roles of Publishers and Librarians, this paper explores Google’s effect on the future of the information industry. Presentations given by Stephen Arnold, president of Arnold Information Technology and Roy Tennant, senior program officer at OCLC Programs and Research are referred to.

Web 2.0 reflections

There was a turning point in this assignment that I will forever be grateful to the subject for. It was when I realised that those linked into web 2.0’s potentials weren’t the ones out of sync with the real world. I was the one not in sync. The way information is gathered and disseminated has changed and whether I work in the field of information management or not, if I want to understand and engage in our world it is important that I explore the potential of web technologies. The Internet and its applications are also incredibly exciting, once you get into them, and this is what this assignment has forced me to do. I am now excited about the world online.

This does not mean that I am not still cynical about this online world’s ability to improve our lives on a grand scale - and I still don't trust it enough to forsake pen and paper altogether. But I can certainly appreciate the value of web technologies. Though searching for information can be faster and easier with the range of web 2.0 tools available, it requires time to set these tools up. Also, many sites just enable me to search for information that is completely useless and often incorrect. I also tend to do an awful lot of printing, but perhaps that is just me being old fashioned. I can see the potential of Twitter but I need to log onto it more often. I don’t have Internet on my phone (I know, so 2008) so I don’t really feel linked into the short, regular, instant-information, message world yet. But I am determined to make more of an effort on that front.
What I can no longer be ignorant about is the web’s ability to spread information faster than anything before it. I am eternally grateful to my RSS feeds for the range of information I receive on a regular basis and to my group members for introducing me to new concepts and resources.

I have realised with this assignment that to get the most out of my own little digital world (and with my own bookmarks, RSS feeds and blog it does feel like my own) I need to set some time aside to organise it more efficiently. I need to bookmark more often and more effectively. At work I need to log into my sites (Delicious, Twitter, Google Reader) and keep them buzzing away to tap into when required. It is a new way of working for me and is going to take some time to get used to. But at least I now feel connected to the other (very real it turns out) digital world.

Throughout this assignment is was also easy to get caught up in the small stuff (I spent an hour creating my Twitter wallpaper) and there was a lot of frustration along the way. I fiddled around with my bookmark icon for ages trying to work out how to move it from the top of the page where it had been sitting for days. Only tonight have I found the .html script gadget on the side bar, the time I would have saved if I had noticed that earlier! I also seem to be following fellow group members as a Gemma Walsh on Google Friend and WalshGemma the blogger, which seems convoluted and strange. I have obviously done something wrong there…

Working as part of a group has also been a rewarding part of this assignment, though I fell like we are all just starting to get to know each other. The six weeks has flown by, there was a lot to cover and I know I didn’t communicate with others as much as I wanted to. It has been great to share our experiences and I certainly feel less alone doing this assignment when linked with a group.

Though this is the end of this assignment it is certainly not the end of my Web 2.0 adventure. I don’t think I could have imagined I would learn so much in six weeks. The adventure has only just begun.

Mashing continued...

Music lovers have known about mashups for a while and there are some hilarious examples of overlaying the music from one band over images of another to create something new ( great examples here). But Web 2.0 programmers have taken this mashing idea to a whole new level. Entire websites can contain no original content of their own, instead luring data from a variety of applications into the one site. In terms of disseminating a range of viewpoints on a particular topic, this is a wonderful advancement in the development of the Internet.
Already libraries in their physical realm are a mash of information as various books, magazines, the Internet and newspapers can be found in the one location. It is no wonder then that Librarians are investigating web 2.0 mashups for their digital content, particularly as they continue to search for ways to manage information. One book will be particularly helpful for librarians, "Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data," edited by Nicole C. Engard.
As Annie Armstrong (2010) reviews more succinctly then I can paraphrase:
“Once a librarian or developer discovers the key to extracting and combining data from myriad websites, s/he can transform static, lifeless library web pages into dynamic, interactive user-centered experiences by incorporating such features as interactive maps, book suggestion services, video and image collections, and OPAC or federated search widgets.”

There is one website that is the epitome of dynamic in its mashup makeup and that is Mashpedia. I love this website. It takes Google to a whole new level, incorporating the one word subject search tool the site locates a range of information from different web sites and brings them to you. I Mashpedia'd information management and videos from YouTube, Tweets from Twitter, a definition from Wikipedia as well as related news from a variety of journals was all brought to the one page. Though some of the results were not useful, some were and the fact that one search could cross all different websites using different applications was amazing.
As our tutor John Tyrell has noted, local communities have also benefited from mashups as groups share information about local events, trails and tours. I couldn’t get onto Localhero.biz but my friends and I have been talking about organising a bike ride while the weather is warm and Bikely.com has already been useful in researching where to go.
So, mashups. Before this assignment I had never heard of them. Now I’ll be noting them wherever I search, they seem to be everywhere!

Map Experiment- The Great Ocean Road

This week I have been battling with GoogleMaps and Blogger applications to effectively share my recent holiday with the electronic world. There was so much to experiment with I decided the project needed its own page. Click here to view details of my recent Great Ocean Road Adventure (also linked at the top of my Home page).

As I had already used Flickr in the past I thought I would try a different photo program for my album and inevitable slideshow. I chose Photobucket because it was mentioned on this Blogger site so I figured they would be compatible. Photobucket works the same as Flickr with its options to upload photos and give them tags and titles to make them easier to find. Though it was very user friendly it does have advertising on its homepage, which Flickr seems to do without.
I also uploaded some of my photos to my markers on my GoogleMap and imbdeded the map into my blog. As I am fairly new to all this it has taken me a long time to organise my data (maps, photos, slideshow and video) to then embed into other programs. I can only admire the programmers of sites like Mashpedia from afar. That site is so amazing that needs an entry of its own. I think I'll leave that for tomorrow.

Bookmarking revisited

In the last couple of days I have been thinking more and more about Flickr. One of the tools that we didn’t use while travelling was the tag tool. So I hopped back onto my old Flickr site and tagged a few of the more obscure photos. I then started investigating their usefulness. When you search for photos you can search by full text or by tags, all users or your own photos. I added the tag Faenza to my photos taken in Faenza, a small town in Italy. When I did a search of all users via the Faenza tag, no photos came up. When I did a search of all users full text, there were 10,074 photos. That means more than 10,000 photos of Faenza, and none of them were tagged to locate them more easily. I understand tagging if you have 10,000 of your own photos and you want to be able to find them again. But as long as you give each photo a title, this shouldn’t be a problem. I also ran this experiment with a more general tag. An all users full text search for Iran found 351,908 photos, all users tag search for Iran located 267,847 results. So a huge number and the photos were not more relevant, there were just less found. Maybe if everyone used tags it would be more effective. Or maybe I have missed the point. I need to look into this further.

What it's all about

Social Beings

BEFORE
This time last year I had just returned from a nine month journey, mostly overland from the UK to Australia. Throughout the trip I regularly used Flickr, Tripadvisor and Couchsurfing sites as my social networking and/or bookmarking tools.
Flickr enabled me to look up the areas we were going to, photos were labelled for other travellers, and friends and families were kept up to date as to where we were (2littlehobbos). Tripadvisor helped us avoid stinky hostels and couchsurfing enabled us to stay with local students throughout Iran.
But the trip is over and I have not looked at any of these sites since. The photos are still up so some people may be looking at them, but I am no longer interacting with the site. All the accounts are linked to my Hotmail account, which with new work and RMIT accounts I now rarely check. It’s amazing really the short-term value of so many subject specific social networking sites on the internet.

NOW
Since returning home though I have discovered that broad social book marking sites are much more useful for the long-term. Delicious will continue to grow with my interests and now that I am home and using the internet regularly the site has helped me to categorise sites as per their use. Delicious has also helped me find an array of interesting blogs via their tags so it feels like the internet world is much easier to navigate. Fellow group member nuggen also writes of the benefits of Digg which manages to tag particular passages- it’s incredible really.
However, the marketing potential of social bookmarking is probably the real reason for the success of sites like Digg and Delicious.
According to Internet Marketing Melbourne utilising social bookmarking sites is the cheapest marketing tool around (accessed 2010).
Ben Zimmer from the New York Times (March 2010) has also written an interesting article on the meaning of being social today, how the word as a verb has changed the internet and social bookmarking’s ability to popularise a web site. View here.

And so I have realised that the little blogs I thought I had stumbled upon were actually being raised above all others by authors utilising a range of social bookmarking tools available to them. How much information am I missing out on simply because their authors are not into social bookmarking? Would anyone be reading half the number of blogs they do without them? And maybe I should go back over my Delicious tags and rename them more effectively. Surely management would be a more useful tag than mgmt?

Oh, and not to be left behind I also have to figure out how to add the Delicious link to this blog. Web 2.0 maintenance never ends!

Twitter?

I have nothing to tweet! For the past three hours I have been immersed in Google Reader, absorbing articles about the libraries of today (more like a kitchen than a grocery store was one interesting comment), the technology of today and the opinions of seemingly everyone in any related profession about both. And then I became engrossed in a feminism thread (Madonna yesterday, Lady GaGa today), and a cabbie blog before deciding that I really should try and find my log-in details for an old Twitter account, long forgotten, now revived- Finestrino. . .
I am now following several information professionals but so far their tweets are strangely similar to the what are you doing now strand of Facebook. Only a few of those I am following have tweeted anything of professional interest- eg. Librarything and RTennant are both worthy tweeters. Links to articles of interest seem to be the most useful tweets and this is where tweeting could come into its own as an information dissemination service in 140 characters.
The problem I have is that there are so many posts I feel like I have to be logged in every minute to not miss an interesting tweet amongst all the mundane postings. And amongst all these thoughts is the realisation that the professional association I work for is not using Twitter to its full potential. We could be doing so much more for our members through Twitter, linking them to their colleagues, informing them of professional developments, academic articles, upcoming events, the list goes on! But do I have this dedication? And what can I tweet on behalf of myself that will not be put in someone's mundane folder?

RSS & Wikipedia

I am new to RSS feeds. At the moment via Google Reader I have subscribed to six different feeds regarding Information Management and Information Technology. In just two weeks this has resulted in 56 articles pouring into my virtual world and I am afraid to say, most of them are irrelevant. Research Buzz seems to have a lot of advertising for Google products which while interesting is not so academic. I had high hopes for Information Management White Papers through Bitpipe.com but the papers do not really analyse information management technologies in the detail that I am looking for.

Today I added some new feeds that I hope are targeted more closely to the Library Technology sector, including the previously mentioned Connecting Librarian blog.
My RSS feeds are definitely a work in progress, hopefully the next 56 items will be more relevant.

Today I have also updated a page on Wikipedia and it is amazing how much your past influences present. I have not lived in Brisbane for seven years yet found myself searching for the suburb I grew up in. Sure enough the information on New Farm was brief. The History section began in 1885, not even a mention of the Aborigines who lived in the area long before us.

So I did some quick research and added a short paragraph, thanks mainly to the New Farm and Districts Historical Society. Though I referenced the organisation I felt a little guilty for mentioning them on Wikipedia without their knowledge. So I also sent them an email letting them know. I also added a reference to Venero Armano's novel to the existing mention of the areas Italian community. He is a good writer and deserves a plug.
The actual editing of the site did not take long, the hyperlink a bit longer but it is incredibly easy to edit. No wonder there is such a range of information on there!

A Brilliant Blog

Today I found my favourite Information Librarian blog.

Site: http://connectinglibrarian.com/
Author: Michelle McKean

After scanning lists of librarian blogs both here and overseas, I finally settled on this site to explore and follow on a regular basis. There were two main reasons for this.

1. The author is Australian (lives in Victoria actually) and interested in analysing information technology within Australian libraries and overseas. This was evident by her post on web 2.0 updates spoken about at the 2010 VALA (Victorian Association for Library Automation) Conference. In 2006 she was also granted a scholarship that then led to a study tour of virtual services in US public libraries. Her postings are therefore relevant to Information Management studies.

2. This blog is kept up to date, many others seem to have stopped posting months, even years ago which seems less useful when we are on a web 2.0 adventure.

I should also note that Michelle writes in a fluid and interesting manner that has kept me on her site for longer than intended. Already I am armed with new topics to research (including Metadata, Semantic Web and Open source) and I have linked into two recommended wikis which I will shamelessly add here for fellow RMIT bloggers:
http://readersadvisory.wetpaint.com
http://wiki.libraries.nsw.gov.au/index.php/Reference_excellence

This I think is what blogging is all about. Sharing ideas and tips on a topic that interests you and will hopefully interest others enough to find the information useful. Initially I thought that an overseas blog would be more constructive in gathering information that I would not otherwise receive. However I feel like I have so much to learn about this profession in Australia that local is a good place to start and my RSS feeds and further reading will no doubt encompass the wider world.

By the way, a blog according to the Oxford Dictionaries' web site (2010) originates from web log - and I cannot believe that I never knew that.

Background

This is not the first time I have forsaken a pen and a notebook for the electronic medium to document some thoughts.

When I was nine I started to write my journal on our new home computer. For two years I swapped the notepad for the keyboard, relishing in its ability to delete words without trace. My enthusiasm remained until the day we bought a new computer...new smaller discs were acquired and while important family files probably made the transition, my electronic journal was never upgraded. The thoughts were lost forever.

Since then my opinions of this medium have remained jaded. Countless times I have not saved properly and lost important information, or the computer has crashed and files disappeared. While reading about electronic documents I always wonder...where will all this information be when the technology changes? Surely if in twenty years my pre-mouse WordPerfect journal has become obsolete, in the next twenty years so too will all these blogs?
While I appreciate the fast, flexible, efficient aspects of electronic information I am wary of its ability to replace the paper form in its reliability and longevity.

I find the Internet fascinating, RSS feeds amazing and the amount of information available through a laptop to someone living in a remote community extraordinary. These are exciting times for information, but they are changing times.

This then is my electronic experiment, a journey of discovery of electronic information, how it can be used effectively and where it is heading in the future.