Why I heart Carolina BLU

February 9th, 2010

For some reason, I have this bad habit of mostly writing blog posts, never finishing them, and then ignoring them for months. This one, I started writing the better part of a year ago, and I’ve only just stumbled across it again. I am hereby finishing it:

Chip GrawOzburn and I were having a conversation in my office a few days ago [read: months ago], when some student library worker came to my office and handed me 3 books that I had requested via the Carolina BLU campus book delivery service. I expressed surprise at the delivery to my office, and this poor student said that he didn’t know where the SILS main office was. I told him, for future reference, but honestly I was thrilled by the personal delivery. And let me just say: I totally love Carolina BLU. I have put in many many requests since it was started. I tell my students about it. I tell every librarian who will hold still for long enough how much I love it. I love it.

Anyway, Chip and I then got to talking about the service, and I said something along the lines of, please don’t tell your colleagues, but I’d be perfectly happy if I never had to set foot in the library, I’d love it if I could get everything electronically or delivered. And Chip said, don’t worry, that’s pretty much common knowledge. I suppose Chip was referring to my little can’t-find-the-books-I-want electronic-or-bust snit, embarrassingly documented in living color here on this very blog, parts one and two.

Anyway, I found Chip’s comment a bit embarrassing. I don’t want our excellent librarians to think that I’m not giving them the love. It’s not personal. It’s that I’m busy and lazy, a bad combination. If I don’t have to spend 20 minutes walking to Davis, getting items off the shelves, checking out, and walking back to Manning, I won’t. Not to mention that I might — gasp — actually run into someone I want to talk to, which on one hand is great, but on the other hand just takes all that much more time.

Now: new content. I’ve been using the Carolina BLU book delivery service for a year or more now… I’ve forgotten exactly when it was rolled out. I still love it. I have one further thing to say about it: it has increased my use of library materials. I’ve opted into the library’s Reading History service, so I suppose I could do some actual data analysis of my circulation volume, but I haven’t done that. So, anecdotally: it seems to me that my use of library materials has increased, and increased dramatically. Prior to the BLU service, I would jot lists of call numbers on post-its and other slips of paper, & walk to Davis once a week or less to, essentially, run a checkout batch job. Now, any time I have even the slightest interest in a book, I put in a request for it via BLU. This has led to the unfortunate side effect of my having more library books in my office and at home than I can really read, probably ever. It’s just a good thing that the checkout period for faculty is roughly forever: six months, with, as far as I can tell, unlimited renewals. But my point is, my method for acquiring print materials from the library has changed: it has become more convenient for me to acquire said materials, so I do it more often. I imagine I personally must cost the libraries a fair bit: after all, someone has to pull those materials off shelves, process them, & deliver them, and those someones are getting paid something. But I am filled with love for the Carolina BLU service, and I tell everyone about its existence at even the slightest provocation. I am a satisfied user. I experience customer delight. I hope that makes up for my temper tantrum.

#iconf2010

February 8th, 2010

I returned from the iConference a few days ago… after changing my flight to one earlier in the day, which I’m very glad I did, as others got stuck in Urbana-Champaign on account of the weather there. But that’s neither here nor there (so to speak). I’m writing this post to document some of my impressions and thoughts about, and to generally debrief from the conference.

Up front, I need to admit that, as with most conferences I attend these days, I didn’t actually attend many sessions: most of my time, outside of the sessions in which I was a speaker, I spent talking to colleagues and having pickup meetings.

My first comment about the iConference is really kind of a meta-observation: about the conference itself, rather than about the content of the conference. Let me expand on something I tweeted the other day. The iConference needs to find its identity. It’s currently somewhat schizophrenic, trying to be two things simultaneously. On the one hand, there were sessions that explored the identity and branding of the iSchools, the scope of information science, and the appropriate content for iSchool curricula. On the other hand, there were sessions in which just straight-up LIS research were presented — presentations that would have been perfectly at home at ASIST. Personally, I think it would be a mistake for the iConference to compete with ASIST as a research conference: ASIST is better-established and has a larger attendance, not to mention that ASIST isn’t the only research conference in the field. To compete on that front is to be merely one more player on a fairly broad field. We don’t need another research conference in the field… but on the other hand, a conference that attempts to be agenda-setting for the field would be a unique contribution.

To be fair, I’ve seen this pattern before. JCDL seemed — to me, anyway — not to have a unique identity for its first few years. For its first few years it wasn’t so much about digital libraries, as it was about information retrieval in the context of digital libraries. It wasn’t until JCDL 6 that it seemed to me that the conference really came into its own. And, to be fair, this is only the 4th iConference. So I’ll give it 2 more iterations before I come to any conclusions. But I think it’s worth watching.

My second comment about the iConference is that — since I think this is part of what the conference should be doing — it got me thinking about teaching, and what a curriculum for the iSchools should look like. Stephen Wolfram’s plenary talk got me thinking that we need to address computational thinking in a direct and deliberate way in our curricula. I’ve been saying it for years: at every turn, information science gets scooped by computer science on the developing tools front. We need more courses that address systems analysis and systems design. We need more courses where students do actual development. I don’t necessarily mean really hard-core development, in C++ or Ruby on Rails or whatever… building things in Yahoo Pipes would be enough. Anything to get students into the mindset of thinking about content as data, and data as manipulable.

We also need more courses on copyright and intellectual property law.

We also need more courses on information economics.

We also need more courses on program evaluation.

And finally, it strikes me that the beating heart of information science is user needs assessment. That is hardly a novel thought, I know. But it was brought home to me very clearly by one session after another at the iConference, as technical and curriculum and policy and coordination problems ultimately boiled down to user needs problems.

I’ve been working lately on two distinct and unrelated curriculum development projects, one for digital libraries and one for reference. And now I’m wondering if I’ve been thinking too parochially. Developing curricula for DLs and reference implies that the traditional “silos” of the LIS curriculum still make sense. And I increasingly think they don’t. And now I’m wondering what an LIS curriculum would look like if we developed it from scratch, right now, tabula rasa. User needs assessment über alles. A core course on information seeking behavior and question / information-related problem negotiation. A core course on copyright. A core course on assessment and evaluation of information services. A required internship / residency / paraprofessional gig. A required dual-degree with some subject area specialization. This is just off the top of my head. My megalomania apparently knows no bounds.

My adventures with Social Media Classroom

January 14th, 2010

I’m using Social Media Classroom for my Digital Libraries course this semester. Why? Why not. Yes, it’s a new tool to learn, my students aren’t familiar with it, so it will be a learning curve for all of us. But one thing I’ve learned about myself is that I have a need to always be doing something new (a personality trait that got me into some trouble as a younger man, though probably also in part what pushed me into this profession), and I love shiny new toys. I started participating in ITS’ now-interminable Sakai pilot in its second semester — and as much as I like Sakai, the novelty has worn off for me, so I’ve been dabbling in other tools. Paul and I used Ning for our Library 2.0 course. I used Blogger and Google Groups for my undergrad Retrieving and Analyzing Information course one semester. Plus, in the context of my Digital Libraries course, a new tool provides an opening for a discussion of application architecture and design. And, as an aside, Sakai does not provide that opening in quite the same way — it might have a few semesters ago, but not any more. I asked my DL students on the first day of class how many of them had used Blackboard and Sakai: all of them had used Blackboard, and more than half had used Sakai. There are several instructors using Sakai in SILS — I know of 2 other faculty members, and 4 adjuncts or PhD students — but still, I found that interesting.

So anyway, I’m using SMC for my DL course. I’ve had a hosted version created, rather than setting up an install — though Don has started an install on ibiblio, and Paul and I have discussed doing our own SMC site hosting on ibiblio in the future, if this semester goes well. The course site is here, incidentally.

Yvonne told me that some of her colleagues would be interested in hearing about SMC, so she convinced me to blog about my experiences and thoughts on using it. So this is the first of what I plan as an ongoing series of posts throughout this semester on the subject.

Here are my first impressions. SMC basically contains 5 tools: a wiki, a discussion forum, a blog, a chat environment, and a social bookmark tool. The wiki is, well, a wiki, and basically what you’d expect, except that it uses a rich text editor rather that the more familiar (to me) MediaWiki syntax. That took some getting used to. The discussion forum is also about what you’d expect: I have the ability to create multiple fora, which I have done for various aspects of the course. The blog is also about what you’d expect in a blog: create posts, comment, etc. There is a “my blog” feature of the blog, which lists all of the posts I created — since so far I’m the only one who has posted anything to SMC, I’m not sure if there’s more to that feature. Stay tuned for more on that. The chat environment allows multiple chatrooms to be set up. I’m not very fond of chat as a tool — I’m a light IM user; I only IM with Yvonne with any regularity — so I probably won’t use that tool much. I will encourage the students to use it for group meetings, though. I may set up chat office hours if the students want it. Finally the social bookmark tool is like Delicious, in that it has fields for title, URL, abstract, and tags. In fact, most things can be tagged: wiki pages, blog posts, social bookmarks. Only chatrooms and forum posts can’t be tagged — though that latter surprises me a bit, and I wonder if I’m missing something.

The only thing I want to add at this point is that SMC is remarkably feature-rich. I suppose this should not come as a surprise, since it’s built on Drupal. I don’t know much about Drupal, but my understanding is that just about everything is configurable. What’s interesting as a design choice for SMC is that Rheingold et al. chose to leave all of the configurability visible. To be fair, most components of SMC have the minimum required shown by default — the social bookmark tool, for example, shows fields for URL, title, description, tags, and log message — and the rest of the available options are folded up. But they’re there. It took me some time to figure out how to filter what I was seeing, and what to pay attention to. Given Howard Rheingold’s concern with attention literacy, that’s either cruelly ironic, or as it should be.

ASIST 2009 Wordle

November 2nd, 2009

Inspired by KT’s excellent wordle image of her Pharmacy Librarian blog, I decided to create a wordle of — don’t ask me why — the session titles at the upcoming ASIST conference. Note that this is just session titles, not abstracts, and does not include the titles of pre-conference seminars, social events, governance, or the plenary sessions.

Wordle: ASIST 2009 Session Titles

I don’t know, do you think this conference might have something to do with information? Come on people, demonstrate a little more creativity in naming your presentations, please.

The Not-so-Perpetual Beta

November 2nd, 2009

One of the tenets of Web 2.0, according to Tim O’Reilly’s seminal article, is “the perpetual beta.” That is, “the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.”

Well, Web 2.0-ish applications seem to be shedding beta-ness fast and furious lately: first Gmail, now Remember The Milk.

I know, I know: two datapoints does not a trend make. Also, I’m not really sure you could reasonably call Gmail a Web 2.0-ish application… I mean, email is about as Web 1.0 as it gets. But it’s Google… so gets some 2.0-ish cred somehow.

Also, just because Gmail and RTM have dropped the “beta” label, doesn’t mean they’ve stopped rolling out functionality rapidly. Or that they’re developed any less in the open.

But I just wonder what it means for the whole concept of 2.0-ishness that two of the best established web-native applications have abandoned the beta label. I suspect they won’t be the last, either. Does this mean that the label “beta” isn’t as cool anymore as it was once upon a time? (”Once upon a time” being a phrase which here means, two short years ago.) That calling something beta won’t give you cred any more? Or is this just the natural progression of the End of the Software Release Cycle that O’Reilly predicted? That calling something “beta” isn’t even necessary any more; it’s just assumed?

Genealogy

July 14th, 2009

I recently installed PhpGedView, an open source genealogy application, and am learning to use it, with some help from Terrell. Yvonne and I got heavily into genealogy research back when we were living in Syracuse, probably 7 or 8 years ago now. But then we got sidetracked by, you know, finishing our graduate programs, and put it aside & haven’t picked it up again until just recently.

In the last few days, though, we’ve been making spectacular progress on our genealogical research… largely, I think, due to the fact that Ancestry.com has increased its holdings dramatically in the past 8 years. It also helps that we have some relatives who have done some genealogical research of their own — in Yvonne’s case, one relative has done a huge amount of work.

Anyway, Yvonne has found that one of her ancestors — her great great aunt, I think — wrote a book, A Steele Tribe of Virginia. And moreover, the author, Eva Belle Steele, worked at Duke. And moreover, the book is in the Duke library’s collection. Small world. And I’ve put in an ILL request for another book about a different branch of Yvonne’s family. That book was in the Syracuse library’s main branch, and come to find out it’s one of only 7 copies in existence. We had no idea how good we had it back then!

Anyway, as cool as this is, it kind of bums me out that none of my ancestors ever wrote a history of their families. In my family, we get a lot of “We left the old country to get away from all that, why would we ever want to talk about it” from my grandparents’ generation. So I’m able to track my ancestors back to their immigration to the US, between the 1880s and 1920s, and then all trails go cold.

Ifrane Itinerary

June 19th, 2009

As I’ve mentioned on Twitter, I’m going to Morocco tomorrow, to Ifrane. Actually it’s me and Javed, and we’re going to have initia meetings to establish a distance librarian-training program at Al Akhawayn University. We just received our itinerary for the first 2 days of our trip. And since I have nothing else to say at this point, I thought I’d feed your envy by posting that. I’ve deleted the names of the people who we’re meeting with and will be giving us tours.

Stay tuned for photos, and hopefully video. We’ll see what the connectivity situation is like. Ifrane is a university town, obviously, so I’m hopeful.

Sunday, June 21th

8:45 Arrival to Casa airport and pick up by a University driver

14:00 Arrival to AUI campus – Ifrane

14:10 Lunch – AUI Restaurant

15:00 Campus tour (by a Library Assistant)

Free afternoon

Monday, June 22th

8:30 Breakfast with our host

12:30 Lunch

Location: AUI restaurant

15:00 Meeting with our host and another academic officer

16:00 Visit of Fez City with a Library Assistant

Markets, Research, and Ethics

June 10th, 2009

More musings induced by my Econ course…

My textbook states that “market transactions are characterized by voluntary exchange coordinated by prices.” Except that there’s a big difference between “voluntary” and “well-informed.” One can do something voluntarily that is extremely poorly informed (examples abound), or one can be actively misled and misinformed.

One of the arguments that my text makes for why advertising exists, and works, is that it increases the information available to consumers. Which maybe it does, and maybe that was the original intent of advertising, but I would really debate that that is it’s primary function nowadays. But that’s not the point. The point is, market transactions are engaged in — purchases are made — voluntarily, by people who are more or less well-informed about goods, substitutes for them, their costs and value, etc. But I’m used to operating in an environment — that is, getting IRB clearance for research studies — in which participants must be fully informed.

But what if research were subject to the same criteria as markets? Anything you could convince your subjects to do would be fine, because it’s “voluntary.” Tuskegee-like studies could abound. Enough said, I think.

And what about the other way around, if markets were subject to the same regulation as research? Before you buy this pack of cigarettes, read this informed consent form and sign here. Do you have any questions? Do you need a translator to help you understand? If you’re under 18, a parent will need to sign for you. You can return your half-smoked pack at any time and we’ll give you your full money back. That would be a hell of a regulatory burden, but honestly I’m not sure if markets wouldn’t be more efficient for it, at least in the sense of having better information flows. They’d certainly be more ethical. Businesses would really have to identify all costs, including the costs to their customers and even to society at large, including non-customers.

Economics questions

June 9th, 2009

I’m currently taking an Economics course, EC 205: Fundamentals of Economics, a self-paced correspondence course through the Friday Center. Why? Because over the past few years economics has become an increasingly major part of my evaluation-related research: return on investment, cost analysis, etc. And for most of the time I’ve been working in that arena I’ve relied heavily on Lori’s Econ chops. But now that she’s moving onward and upward to a dissertation proposal, I figured that if I want to continue this line of research (and I do), I’d really better know something about Economics myself, beyond what I’ve absorbed by osmosis.

While I’ve been reading the textbook, I’ve been making notes about questions and ideas that occur to me. I’ve been making these just for myself, in a Word file, for a while now. But it occurred to me that this blog is a better place for these. Partly because I’m trying to contribute to the blog more. And partly in the hope that I may get answers, or at least comments, in reply to some of these questions, which will help me understand these issues better. That said, dear reader, please bear in mind that this is an introductory Econ course that I’m taking, so these questions may be incredibly stupid or naïve. Give me credit for being brave enough to potentially look foolish in public.

First, demand curves. The textbook discusses the hypothetical of a perfectly inelastic demand curve: where demand is constant regardless of price. But what about (the hypothetical?) of a perfectly elastic demand curve: where price is constant regardless of demand? Actually, since I first jotted this note down, I’ve since read about price taker firms, which have a perfectly elastic demand curve at the firm level (the firm must take the market price for its good), though the demand curve at the market level is subject to more normal price elasticity. So I suppose I’m asking about perfectly elastic demand in a market. Wouldn’t this basically be the model of filesharing? Wouldn’t price necessarily be driven to 0, & we’d be in the environment of Chris Anderson’s Free? A perfectly inelastic demand curve would converge on price = infinity, a perfectly elastic demand curve would converge on price = 0.

On a related note: demand elasticity. Under what conditions would demand be less elastic, or even equally elastic, in the long term than in the short term? Only, it seems to me, when substitutes for a good disappear over the long term. Which seems pretty unlikely.

Next, equilibrium. Buyers can go out & purchase stuff more or less in an instant. But it takes some time for producers to acquire or build new stuff, longer for more complex stuff. So supply always lags when demand increases. But this is only the case when the market is for physical goods or services. When the market is for information “goods,” producers can duplicate as many copies as demand calls for. Take, for example, the iTunes store: if suddenly a song becomes popular, 80 jillion users can download it as easily as one. So I would hypothesize that markets for information should reach equilibrium faster than markets for other types of things, in fact instantly. In fact, markets for information should never be out of equilibrium.

Taxes. My textbook (as I imagine most textbooks do) discusses taxes as if they’re a sum of money. Which I suppose is how people usually think of taxes. But it seems to me that a tax can be any force that is a disincentive to trade, “friction” as it was called in a study I was involved in as a PhD student. I’m thinking specifically of the difficulty for the buyer of reaching the seller: distance, time to close the sale, aversion to smarmy salesman, etc. So anything that increased friction would have the effect of a tax, while anything that decreased friction would have the effect of reducing the burden of taxation. The internet, by making both buying and selling easier, should reduce the burden of “taxation”, even if online sales were monetarily taxed. And the fact that many online sales are not taxed should reduce it even more. Are there any studies on this?

I have more, but that’s enough for now. Back to actually reading my Econ text.

Thoughts on the DuraSpace Press Release

May 15th, 2009

I’m sure everyone who pays even a small amount of attention to digital libraries has already seen this press release: Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation Join Together to Create DuraSpace™ Organization

I have to admit that when I first saw this announcement I thought it was a late April Fool’s joke, you know, like those “announcements” that Microsoft and Yahoo are merging and will change their name to Microhoo, or something. I mean, DuraSpace? Doesn’t that sound like a joke?

(On reflection though, DuraSpace is more than a bad portmanteau of DSpace and Fedora; the use of the root “dura” is a nice touch where digital libraries are concerned. Though obviously too subtle for me.)

That said, this is a very interesting development, and one that I plan to follow very closely. I wonder if it’s a statement about the difficulty of sustaining open source projects, even large & well-established ones. I’d love to know what was said in the conversations that led up to this merger.

And here’s where I start to pontificate. While the press release says that “DuraSpace will continue to support its existing software platforms, DSpace and Fedora,” I predict that they will merge the two platforms eventually. I give it 2 years, max.

I’m also looking forward to seeing how the DuraCloud service pans out. As far as I know, Greenstone is the only DL platform for which there is a hosting service available. If DSpace & Fedora were hosted, that could be huge; it would open up digital library development to tons of cultural heritage institutions that can’t afford CONTENTdm and/or don’t have the skillset on staff to install and maintain an open source DL app now.