Posts Tagged ‘Conferences’

ASIST 2009 Wordle

Monday, 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.

worDLcat?

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

I want to start this by saying that this was completely Kathleen Kern’s idea. We were talking over dinner at LIDA last week, and she asked me, essentially, “Why isn’t there an equivalent of WorldCat for digital libraries?” I gave some lame answer: no standardization across DLs, complexity of dealing with item- and collection-level description simultaneously, cost, I don’t even remember what all I said. (In my defense, we were well into a rather good bottle of PeljeÅ¡ac red.) As I was thinking about it though, I realized that it would be completely possible to build such a database. All of the technology is in place, it wouldn’t even require developing new tools. It would just take time, money, and grad students. It’s a completely tractable problem.

And because I just can’t help myself sometimes, my first thought about what to call this database was: worDLcat. It’s a dumb name, really, and as Kathleen pointed out completely unpronounceable. Also maybe trademark infringement. But that’s what I’m going to call it here, because I don’t have any better ideas.

So anyway, this was Kathleen’s idea. But I’ve started to run with it a bit, at least in my head to start to think through what might be involved.

Point the first: WorldCat is based on MARC. But is there more to WorldCat than that? WorldCat’s search interface disguises the MARC back-end, happily for those of us who don’t think like a cataloger (i.e., most of humanity). Has OCLC added fields or values beyond what’s in MARC? I don’t know. I have an email out to a colleague at OCLC to see if I can get access to this info. I recently discovered the MCDU Project, for which Bill Moen (a fellow Syracuse alum… it’s a small discipline) analyzed a subset of WorldCat records. So that subset might be a place to start to answer this question.

Point the first, sub-point A: Would a database of DL items require fields and values not utilized in WorldCat? That don’t even exist in MARC? Maybe. I’d bet yes. It’s an empirical question.

Point the second: Item- vs. collection-level description. I think the way to go on this is the way WorldCat has gone: have a record for every item, and have each record contain a field that is essentially a pointer to the collection(s) that item resides in. In WorldCat, of course, each item is likely to reside in many (or at least a few) collections. There are unique items in most libraries’ collections, and those may have records in WorldCat, but on the whole there’s a lot of duplication between library collections. In DLs this is not so much the case. Projects like Google Books and the Internet Archive Text Archive are digitizing, well, books, which are going to held by many collections. But perhaps linking to those books is a job for the Open Library? At this point the Open Library does not list or link to the library collections that hold books, but this would be a useful future feature. Anyway, to date DLs have by and large been developed to highlight and disseminate unique materials held by libraries and other organizations. And that is as it should be, frankly. As the Library of Congress’ Final Report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control says: Enhance access to rare, unique, and other special hidden materials. So there is likely to be a much higher percentage of unique items in a database of DL materials than in WorldCat.

Point the third: Sustainability. Well, not really sustainability… let’s say updating. If a library is a growing organism, then a DL is doubly so (whatever that would mean). New items are added to DLs all the time, items change, etc. So how could worDLcat keep up? OAI-PMH is the obvious mechanism. Which means that all items in all DLs must be OAI compliant. I would hope that this would be a critical mass / tipping point thing: worDLcat would start with the low-hanging fruit, the existing OAI compliant stuff. Then as worDLcat gains use, there would be an incentive for more DLs to become OAI compliant, just as there’s an incentive for libraries to participate in WorldCat. When a new DL comes online though, its developers would have to submit it to worDLcat, as one submits a URL to a search engine to crawl. I’m not sure we could operationalize DLs well enough to build a specialized bot to go out & crawl the web & harvest only materials from DLs. I’ve given up trying to define DLs even in my DL course: I give my students some papers to read, have a discussion about definition, & then tell them that I think it really doesn’t matter how you define what a DL is.

Point the fourth: Accessibility & discoverability. If we want to enhance access to rare, unique, and other special hidden materials, then worDLcat should be freely available, not by subscription like WorldCat. Like the Open Library, or LibraryThing. Which suddenly brings Web 2.0 into the conversation. If WorldCat were suddenly opened up and Web 2.0-ified, what would / should that look like? Not quite like LibraryThing, since the assumption is not that you own these materials yourself. But some of the user-contributed and automatic features might be appropriate: tags, reviews, recommendations. Flexibility to define complex objects within, maybe even across collections? Functionality to save items in a shopping cart-like space: MyworDLcat? Oy, that’s even more unpronounceable.

Ok, I’ve spent enough time on this post, when I should be doing other things. If anyone ever reads this, I’m looking for feedback, thoughts, ideas, etc. This is a completely tractable problem, and I believe even grant fundable. So, My Beloved Audience, if you have any ideas about this, I’d like to hear them.

Thoughts on meeting Abby Blachly and reading The Long Tail

Monday, March 10th, 2008

I was on a panel earlier today at the LAUNC-CH Conference, which I think went well, though I killed the conversation at one point, never a good sign. Anyway, Abby Blachly of LibraryThing was the keynote speaker, and I had the good fortune to have some conversations with her during the conference, plus have lunch together. I’ve written here about LibraryThing before, and I fear that I came across as somewhat anti-LibraryThing, or rather anti-cataloging-one’s-own-books. Which I again admit has a lot of appeal (I have renewed CueCat lust), but which I know myself well enough to know could be about the hugest time-waster imaginable for me. But Abby totally sold me in her talk. I find now that I left my notes in the Friday Center… oops. What I did today, which is what I usually do during talks, is not so much take notes on the talk as write down interesting quotes from the speaker. All of those are lost now, sadly. (I’m tempted to call the Friday Center but I’m sure that would be futile.) But one thing that Abby said (paraphrasing, obviously) is that tags work only in very large numbers; 5 tags doesn’t do anyone any good, but when you get 500 tags then they start to become useful. I suppose I always knew this intuitively, but it’s still useful to hear it articulated clearly. Abby also said that “bad” tags tend to wash out statistically, and that in the aggregate tags tend to be really excellent at identifying the best of genres. Again, makes intuitive sense.

I also happen to have just finished reading The Long Tail (book, not article). Coincidence? Again, not new by any means. But my regular readers (all three of you) will know that I am deeply skeptical of Wikipedia and frankly all collaborative tools, folksonomies and folks-fill-in-the-blanks. I don’t understand the motivation of contributors. Or rather, I understand it intellectually (I’ve read plenty of research papers on what motivates Wikipedians, open source developers, etc.), I just don’t understand it viscerally. I think it’s a side effect of never really having had any serious hobbies except reading. (Could you consider having an insatiable need to look up random crap a hobby? Born to do reference work.) But again, I was completely sold by Anderson’s argument in the book. I think what did it for me was a quote (again, paraphrasing, because I can’t now find the exact quote) to the effect that we live in a statistical world, and in a statistical world natural phenomena follow power law distributions. Again, not exactly a novel insight.

So the point is, I’m sold. The insight that I’ve had today is that it doesn’t matter if I don’t get it. The fact is, collaborative tools work, and as Larry Niven writes in another book I recently reread, “nothing that works is silly.” So I am going to make a concerted effort to figure out how collaborative tools may be used in library services. Of course LibraryThing is already doing this, as are others. But to my knowledge no one is evaluating these services. What are the costs and benefits to a library of implementing collaborative tools and services? What core services can be made more efficient / more robust / more whatever by implementing such tools? What services can be offered that could not before? It seems to me that a tipping point has been reached (probably was reached a long time ago and I was just too slow on the uptake to notice) and Library 2.0-style services are mature enough that it makes sense to start evaluating them and looking at them critically with an eye to learning the lessons of these experiments. Now I need to figure out what the research and evaluation questions are.

A rude awakening

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

I’m at the ASIST conference now, and I had a realization yesterday. I attended the panel that Fred moderated, and by jove if it wasn’t the best session I’ve been to so far at this year’s conference. The research presented was interesting, the topics presented fit together in clear and logical ways, and the presenters were animated and enthusiastic, and had excellent presentation skills. I’ve been to other conference sessions over the years that met all of these criteria, but, honestly, sadly few. So that was point number one: well done Fred, on an excellent panel. Here’s hoping you do more at ASIST.

Point number two was that I realized, at some point during the session, that I was looking at the new generation of scholars in this field. (I believe everyone on that panel was a doctoral student.) I’ve spent the last five years (since I started at UNC), and maybe the last fifteen years (if you count my Masters and PhD years) thinking that I and my cohort are the new up-and-coming whippersnappers in the field. That it’s our job to challenge the “old guard,” take research in new directions, and starting soon (sooner than we’d like), start to take over leadership roles. But what I realize now is that that’s not us. We’re not the new blood: these folks are, the ones on that panel. We’ve had our day to take this field in new directions; it’s their turn now. And they’re wicked interesting and doing cool work. It will be our task to take over leadership roles, and soon… but when we do, we’re going to be the old fogies to these folks, if we’re not already.

Ich bin ein Stuhl

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

How cool is this? Tefko emailed me recently to invite me to be a program co-chair of the 2008 Libraries in the Digital Age conference. Every year LIDA has two topics, and in 2008 the topics are “Reference in digital environment” and “Education and training for digital libraries.” Tefko invited me to be the chair for the Education topic, since I’ve been working on the DL Curriculum project. I’ve accepted the invitation, of course. I’d have chaired the Reference topic too, if they’d asked, though I understand that Marie will be the chair for that. That should be fun, working with Marie on this.

To be fair, and in the interest of full disclosure, Tefko is on the Advisory Board for the DL Curriculum project, and we’ve also started collaborating with Tatjana. So it’s not like my reputation precedes me and they asked me to do this because I’m so famous. But still, I do consider it to be quite a complement that they asked. Even if it is because they know I’m staring down the barrel of tenure review and hungry. Though to be fair to myself, the DL Curriculum project has been getting some attention. Mostly because we’ve been publishing and presenting at conferences like mad. (Indeed, Barbara presented at this year’s LIDA, earlier this very week.) Dare I say it? It’s amazing how one’s acceptance rate goes up when collaborating with Big Names In The Field.

Anyway, I asked some of my senior colleagues if they thought this would be a good way to spend my time, as a junior faculty member. After all, conference planning is service, if anything, and as we all know, service is a distant third in the academic triumvirate. One of my colleagues suggested that I can frame (read: spin?) this as leadership. I like that. Another colleague was especially pithy, and made the comment that to get tenure you have to be good, and to get promoted to full professor you have to be good and famous. So hopefully this can be a start on the fame part.

As an afterthought, I suppose the title of this post should be ja sam stolica. But this is one of those cases where humor (if you care to be generous and call it that) just doesn’t translate.

NSDL RIP?

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

Sitting now in the Supporting Education session at JCDL. Carl Lagoze is talking now, & giving some lessons learned from the NSDL experience. They all boil down to:

  1. This was a lot harder than we thought it would be, &
  2. People satisfice.

Carl’s conclusion is that the NSDL was not a successful project. [Apparently I'm mistaken in writing this; see the comments below.] Chris Borgman says: “this is extremely depressing news.” Why not successful? Carl says: Smart people did good work & didn’t do anything wrong. So why? We don’t know. Carl suggests a conference session to discuss. (More study is required; we need more smart people to figure out why the last set of smart people failed. Will that work?)

Mimi Recker up now. She has a tough act to follow; we all want to throw ourselves out a window now. Talking about the Instructional Architect. What are teachers doing, when they are giving assignments & using resources from DLs? “Blogger meets del.icio.us.” Most requested feature: teachers want not to be limited to the NSDL, but want to be able to include materials from anywhere on the web. Most teachers do not fill out the checkbox set to indicate what the topic & grade level of their project, or the applicable core curriculum standards. 37% of resources used came from NSDL search, 43% of resources used are from domains under the NSDL… so a lot of browsing is going on.

I have to ask, does it make sense to build tools for packaging DL materials for teaching, around a perhaps defunct DL? Depends on how married to the DL the tool is, I suppose. So, an argument for modular tool development. I’ll be interested to see how much use the Instructional Architect gets, post-NSDL.

Word of the Day

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

The word of the day here at JCDL is: mash-up. Or possibly mashup? (Thanks to Monica for this observation!) Jonathan Zittrain started it this morning in the plenary session, and I’ve heard at least 2 other people use it during their presentations, & I think I used it myself during mine. (Half the time I don’t know what comes out of my mouth during conference presentations, seriously.) Zittrain of course used the term in (one of) the correct sense(s), as a copyright issue. But the rest of us have used the term in the context of our research projects, that we’re mashing up other people’s work. Before today I probably would have used the term munge. Which makes me think, what would a scholarly mashup be? And then I realized that all of scholarship is a mashup: we are all continually standing on the shoulders of giants, after all.

From JCDL

Monday, June 12th, 2006

I’m at the JCDL conference this week — or more accurately, I’m working at the conference. Somehow I let myself get talked into being the Student Volunteers Chair. But enough about me.

I actually managed to make the time in all of this chaos to sit in on most of the Augmenting Interoperability Across Scholarly Repositories panel session. About which Paul wrote some extensive and coherent comments, so I direct you to him.

During the session, Herbert Van de Sompel mentioned the idea of the overlay journal. According to this definition, it’s a low-investment form of a journal because it’s minimalist. Well, an even more minimalist form of overlay journal occurred to me: one that does not even perform peer review on the works in a repository, but simply links to them. The idea is that each issue would be a “virtual special issue.” The only value-add that the overlay journal would provide is (1) linking to a set of related materials all in one place, and (2) an introduction & overview written by the guest editor of the journal issue, providing some justification for why these materials are all presented together, some narrative arc, so to speak, etc. One of the faculty members I used to work with at Syracuse used to say that if you’re lucky enough to find a lit review article on your topic, that’s half your research done for you right there. I really like the phrase “virtual special issue,” so I’ll use it again: “virtual special issue.” The idea of the even more minimalist overlay journal would be that it would be similar to the many fine bibliographies on various topics that exist out there on the web, but more selective and deliberate, and with actual links to the articles.

Also, an amusing side note; something that Ellen, one of the student volunteers, pointed out to me. When Clifford Lynch was talking during this session, he was talking into the book light on the podium instead of the microphone. Somehow he managed to project to the whole auditorium anyway.

Croatia-versary

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

One year ago today Yvonne & I were in Croatia, for vacation & the LIDA conference. This year, Gary & I have sent Ron Brown to LIDA. Or I should say, Gary is sending Ron, in the sense that he’s paying for it. I just helped Gary select who gets to go. Ron will be going to Osijek first, & traveling with the conference organizers & students to Dubrovnik. I’m totally envious. But I have no doubt that Ron will do SILS proud.

I’m never going to live this one down

Friday, May 5th, 2006

Both Yvonne & I submitted proposals to the Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment, in Charlottesville VA, September 25-27. In a remarkably speedy turnaround, they got notices back today, after only about 3 weeks. Well, Yvonne got accepted and I got rejected. Harsh.