Posts Tagged ‘Web 2.0’

The Not-so-Perpetual Beta

Monday, 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?

Librarianship First Principles

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

The more I prep for my Library 2.0 course, the more I find myself thinking about what Library 2.0 really is all about. And the more I think about what Library 2.0 means, the more I return to what I think of as the First Principles of librarianship. I don’t mean Ranganathan’s Five Laws, though certainly those are true enough, and useful as a way of framing the philosophical underpinning of the profession. No, what I mean is this…

Most of the writing I’ve seen about Library 2.0 is in one or the other of two veins. Let me quote myself from another paper on another topic:

Literature on new technologies often appears in distinct phases. The first phase contains “gee whiz” types of presentations of the new technology and discussions of its potential. Literature in this phase is written primarily to introduce the technology to a new audience, and is often written by early adopters who have a vision of how the new technology may serve existing requirements, or how the new technology may be implemented in a new environment. … The second phase contains case studies: discussions of specific implementations of the new technology in specific environments.

Since writing that, I see these two early stages everywhere. It seems they’re universal. But I don’t mean to be disparaging; these are natural and useful stages in the evolution of the literature about new technologies. But I think these types of pieces miss the point of what Library 2.0 promises.

Because what Library 2.0 promises is nothing more than the opportunity to rethink what librarianship is and does. Miksa draws a distinction between the social organization of the library (the modern library as building, collection, management structures, etc.) and the social institution of the library (the idea that access to information is a social right). Miksa also argues that the modern social organization of the library is (merely?) an artifact of a particular period of history and technology, albeit a really radical solution for its time. He also argues that this social organization is changing again as times and technology changes. While Miksa does not ever mention Anything 2.0, I think his argument maps perfectly here: the promise of Library 2.0 is the opportunity to radically change the social organization of the library (again) while retaining the social institution, which is (I believe, and I think it’s clear that Miksa believes) the more important thing anyway.

So here we have an opportunity. Given the desire / need to preserve the social institution of the library, how can we change the social organization? How must it / will it inevitably change? And when I think about this, I keep coming back to the question that Shera poses of what it is that libraries do for the individual and for society.

So, what do libraries do?

  1. Libraries are curators of materials that they manage. The classic case of this is of course books. Though increasingly this includes electronic materials, as with data librarianship. I say “manage” rather than “own” because often the library does not own these materials — the researcher owns the datasets, for example — but the library manages it on the owner’s behalf. Digital libraries often fall into this category, because DLs often contain digital representations of materials in the library’s other collections. Though DLs compound the management problem, because once an object has a digital representation made of it, the library now has to manage two objects.
  2. Libraries are portals, or gateways, or whatever term you choose, to materials that they do not manage. The classic case of this is of subscription databases. Increasingly this includes ebooks and online periodicals. This may also, though as of yet it rarely does, include digital libraries maintained by other libraries.
  3. Libraries provide (and sometimes develop — Scriblio, etc.) mechanisms (by which I mean both tools and processes) to enable users to access materials: e.g., OPACs, etc.
  4. Libraries provide education and training in the use of materials and mechanisms. Sometimes this goes as far as using materials and mechanisms for the user, as in Reference work where the librarian provides an answer rather than sources.

So, how do libraries need to change, IMHO?

  1. Libraries do this better than any other social organization, largely because libraries are one of the few social organizations in existence for which this is a primary function. (Libraries aren’t the best at what they do; they are the only ones that do what they do.) There has been a lot of discussion in the past few years about the fact that libraries, museums, and archives — cultural heritage institutions, memory institutions, call them what you will — all perform this function. And that’s true. So what does that mean? We should combine these institutions? At least join forces to tackle common problems, like management of digital representations. But whatever joining of forces or mergers may happen, I think it’s clear that this is one function of libraries that will persist, regardless of technology change.
  2. I have one word for you: Google. Ok, I have many words for you: Google, LibraryThing, Delicious, Zotero, Connotea. I find library-based efforts like the OLE Project very encouraging: OLE is essentially trying to reinvent the OPAC from blank slate, as if OPACs were being invented now for the first time. I think this is a good approach, at least as a mental exercise: shed all your preconceptions and try to solve the actual problem, not try to build a better tool based on decades of assumptions about what the problem was throughout all that time. But let’s face it: when Google hit the streets, everyone else lost the battle to be the portal to the web. Libraries lost this battle worse than some. I know I’m not the first to say this, but… maybe libraries should just give up on OPACs and whatever else and accept that tools made by non-library vendors for non-library purposes are better at solving library problems than the tools we’ve been using all this time. We already have Google Scholar searching embedded in our websites… so it would be a gentle slide. Learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.
  3. We need to do more of this in libraries. I almost just want to leave it at that, full stop. But I can’t just leave a thing hanging out there. I think this falls out as a natural consequence of point 2, above. If we adopt tools developed for other (that is, non-library-specific) purposes, then we’ll have to tweak them. Or there won’t be tools to do what we want, so we’ll have to build them (a la libraryh3lp). What this means, of course, is that libraries need to hire more people who can program, or have professional development to that end. Plus spend less money on vendors and more money on internal technical expertise. This is beginning to happen anyway. Again, it would be a gentle slide.
  4. Libraries used to be about the only game in town here, but no longer: commercial help desks and social Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers have cut into that market. The edge that libraries have here is (1) that libraries have access to source materials (see points 1 & 2, above), and (2) that librarians care a lot about providing quality information and helping the user. Edge #1 is important, but less critical than it used to be, since see point 2 above. Edge #2 is critical, but librarians often trip over that one: as a profession we’re not very good at acknowledging that good enough is good enough.

I feel that I’m far from done here, but I’m going to just stop now and post this. I’ve been working on this post for either a week, or since 5:30 this morning, depending on how you count. Also, I realize now that I haven’t even addressed 2.0-esque technology in my list of how libraries need to change. I’ll leave that for a future post.

Membership has its privileges

Monday, December 8th, 2008

I’ve been doing some weird things to prepare for teaching the Library 2.0 course in the Spring: I recently finished reading Teaching As a Subversive Activity, I’ve become a disciple of Howard Rheingold’s pedagogical stylings, I upgraded our free LibraryThing account to Lifetime membership. I’ve also finally caved in to my CueCat lust: I asked Y to get me one as a stocking-stuffer for the holidays. (I mean, it’s only $15, big deal.) For some reason I feel like, if I’m going to teach a Lib2.0 course, I should start using LibraryThing more actively… I have a whopping 11 books in my LT library, which are the same ones I added a year-plus ago when I was just testing LT out to see what it’s all about. And while I admit to having the compulsion to catalog my own books, I know that I won’t spend the time to enter all that data manually… the only way I’ll do this is if I can enter books automatically. So that’s another silly thing I’ll be doing, ostensibly to prepare for teaching Lib2.0.

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.

EB Widgets

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ Is Now Free to Bloggers, from the Chronicle Wired Campus

The Great EB has gone Web 2.0: first, they have a new blog. And second, they’ve developed a widget that enables access to a topically-defined set of resources from the EB. Unfortunately the widgets are by registration only, but it’s a start.

I’ve registered for a widget, though I’m not sure I deserve one, as I’m hardly the most prolific (or interesting) blogger in the biblioblogosphere. Really I just used my registration as an opportunity to do what academics do best: tell other people what projects to work on:

I would love to get a registration for the WebShare program. However, even more important is this: I want to suggest that you should create a widget on the topic of libraries / information / library & information science. There is a huge “library blogosphere” out there, and an active debate among librarians & information professionals about the value of Wikipedia & other Web 2.0-esque information tools. I believe that if there were an information-specific widget, that it would get a great deal of use in the library blogosphere. In fact, as more & more libraries experiment with RSS and other lightweight info tools, it seems to me that there is some opportunity here for the EB for outreach to libraries.

My very own wiki

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Once again, I come late to the party, but once there I join in with abandon… I now have my own wiki! I’ve installed MediaWiki in my ibiblio space. I’ve been meaning to install MediaWiki for a while now, but I had no real reason to do it other than just wanting it, so I never bothered. But Paul and I have recently been discussing proposing a course on Library 2.0, and Paul has a wiki for his course materials (and other stuff). So in a fit of technological anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-ism (I’m not prepared to say “I can do better”), I just had to install MediaWiki immediately right now do not pass Go. I’m happy to say, too, that the install was almost unbelievably easy; way easier, I thought, than WordPress. (Admittedly, thanks to some timely help from Ken.)

Anyway, so Paul and I are planning this course on Library 2.0, to be a SILS special topics course. I’ve started a preliminary outline of a syllabus, reading list, assignments, etc., here. If you have any ideas for what this course should contain, please chime in. We’re making this up as we go along.

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.

Niches and filters

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

I’m reading The Long Tail (the book, not the article), and something struck me. On p. 119, Anderson writes:

As the Tail gets longer, the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse. Thus, the only way a consumer can maintain a consistently good enough signal to find what he or she wants is if the filters get increasingly powerful.

I wonder if this is actually true. It seems to me that a significant flaw in Anderson’s argument is that he conflates the mathematical power curve with the economic Long Tail. Not everywhere, but pretty consistently. A power curve is infinite. The Long Tail of products and consumption is finite, limited by the amount of stuff that’s available and the number of people available to consume it and the amount of time and money those people have to spend. All of those pools are large, but finite. Anderson writes about abundance, and how that’s changing economics. And I agree with him there: decreasing costs and risk in creation, dissemination, and selection of stuff will, I believe, deeply change how markets operate. Are in fact already, and will continue to do so. But the Long Tail of economics does not imply that there is suddenly an infinite supply of everything, nor an infinite number of consumers for it. Under ideal conditions, with free tools to facilitate creation and a completely frictionless market, even then, the Long Tail is merely unlimited, it is not infinite.

So, my question. Given that the Long Tail is finite (if potentially very very long), is it really true that filters must forever increase in power? Way way way down the tail, where there are very very narrow niches, will there ever be enough stuff to make a filter necessary? Of course I suppose this will change over time: as more stuff is developed, the need for filters increases. So I suppose my question is, where is the tipping point, so to speak, at which a filter becomes necessary in a narrow market sector? Or, since this is probably not a question solely of the amount of stuff available, what factors contribute to the need for filters in a narrow market sector?

Distributed Science

Monday, February 25th, 2008

After all that foofarah about purging my backlog of posts, here’s an actual new one.

Ever since living in Syracuse, Yvonne and I have participated in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which took place the weekend before last. I was thinking about the GBBC the other day, and realized that it, and Project FeederWatch, are examples of distributed data collection. Now all of you regular PomeRantz readers out there (can you be a regular reader of so bursty a publication?) know that I’m obsessed with and confused by the notion of community-created resources. And the GBBC and FeederWatch are certainly community-driven, though you couldn’t really call them resources. The data collection relies entirely on contributions from the public, though, which seems to me to be the salient point. And they’re quite successful projects, both having been around for several years. And they must generate good data, or presumably the Cornell Lab would have stopped doing it years ago. So why do these projects work? How do they generate good data? Do they have some kind of quality filter on the data? From the point of view of a data submitter, it seems not. But after all, we know that self-reported data is notoriously unreliable. Is it just that birders are a sufficiently committed (some might even say obsessive) community of interest, that they feel compelled to provide good data? If that’s so, does it imply that spam can be avoided simply by having a sufficiently civic-minded community? And, at what point does a community diffuse sufficiently that not all its members are sufficiently civic-minded? It can’t be size, since as of this moment the GBBC has collected 79,402 checklists, and presumably there is approximately a 1:1 relationship between checklists and contributors. Is it how well focused the community is? And define focus, anyway. I think I may have just proposed attempting to measure the geekiness of community members.

Communities on Delicious?

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

I recently ran into Aggie Donkar, a former student of mine, now graduated. We got to talking about her Masters paper, which sounded interesting and which I subsequently read. As an aside, I’d just like to say that a very large percentage of our Masters papers sound incredibly interesting, and I only wish I had the time to read them all! Anyway, Aggie’s Masters paper was indeed very interesting, though I had some questions regarding her methodology. But I’m not going to critique the paper here. My point is, one of these methodological questions led me to wonder about something.

In her Masters paper, Aggie looked at the tags used by a small community of del.icio.us users. She started with the community, or actually with a set of URLs, though the URLs were for sites that were pretty much only going to be of interest to a predefined community.

So I wondered, is it possible to identify communities within delicious by looking at who is using overlapping sets of tags? In other words, a community is defined as the set of users who use a specified set of tags. Would there be some “centroid” tag, like Aggie says sga is for her data? Are some tags more prototypical to the community, and some further and further out on the periphery, as Rosch says is the case for the way people actually create categories? Are there boundary object tags, that link communities?

This doesn’t sound too difficult to me, honestly… though I admit I don’t have to tools (intellectual or technological) to do it myself. It sounds to me like pretty straightforward network analysis. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if someone had done this already. Anyone know if this has been done, or anything like it? If not, will someone please do it?