• how to create an IM account
• intro to IM presentation
• IM tips
• IM canned messages

I finally got to meet Michael Stephens, after years of reading his blog and admiring his work! I was pretty-well sitting back and enjoying his talk for the most part, so this is mostly summary stuff.

Update: Michael’s presentation materials are here.

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- blog as tool, CMS, software, to generate web content.
- brief history of blog: hand coding began it, then Blogger and Livejournal in 1999
- 2000-2005: the tools made it easy to publish to the web, no html needed, no ftp; dozens of features, dynamic, quick, easy to develop

Taxonomy of library & librarian blogs:
- library-sponsored blogs (marketing, topical, internal, organizational, etc.)
- independent librarian blogs (frontline, innovator, commentator, etc.)

Newer trends in blogging:
- photo-blogging, flickr, podcasting, etc.

Rrecent research in weblogs & libraries:
- lawley, blanchard, clyde
- blogs as virtual communities
- trust in blog communities: high degree of self-disclosure, bloggers with internal evaluation system, medium of publishing in progress

Conversations and the cluetrain
- aadl
- talk to users, allow comments, get interactive, share book reviews, thoughts, more…
- cluetrain: networked conversations going on and we need to learn from them; speak with a human voice, see the face of the library, make the library human, transparency, communicate with market directly.
- catalogue as blog
- library wikis – great for subject guides. At SJCPL, librarians use MediaWiki to create and edit subject guides and patrons can “discuss” the pages.

Questions for further research:
- how have blogs changed communication between librarians?
- how does blogs serve the social purpose of the library?
- who comments on library blogs and why?

Beth worked with Ranganathan’s five principles to frame her talk (which provided great context, but I only got notes on four of them! Bad, bad conblogger). She also worked in some examples of work that’s being done on the Oakville Public Library’s website redesign (which is not live yet, although we saw a couple of teaser shots and it looks excellent!) and results of surveys and interviews done with OPL’s patrons. The survey and interview questions peppered throughout the notes below refer to this.

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Two questions:
- is there room for user-created content in OPACs?
- is it worth the risk (the risk of both doing it and not doing it)?

1. Books are for use.
- patrons depend on browsing for serendipity
- one interview question was: while in the library how do you usually discover new materials? Browsing was #1, looking at stuff on the return cart was #3, asking the librarian was #7. People are already collaborating in a way — it’s the notion that if someone else checked this out, it must be worthwhile! (Ed note: we saw a screenshot of OPL’s new site that is going to capture this in the web environment, but I won’t give anything away! Trust me, it’s cool!)
- the opac the way it exists now is like closed stacks – you have to know the author or title you’re looking for!

Interview question: if you could provide one piece of advice for your library, what would it be?
- improve the website. A patron noted that they start their search in amazon, see what people like, and then go to the OPAC!

Interview question: do you ever read reviews ratings and recommendations from other users?
- almost 75% said yes

Consider: what do patron’s library collections look like?
- library thing
- delicious monster
- bookcrossing
- building community around collections

2.Every reader his book.
- how do we find the right book for the right person at the right time?
- the democratic principle, every citizen his/her opinion
- how do we allow and make connections between different voices? Libraries have an interest in stewarding this where commercial providers don’t.
- amazon.com’s listmania: peer sharing of opinions
- it’s really about trying to find ways to allow those individual voices to connect.

3. every book its reader
- an idea of exposing the collection, ensuring that everything gets read.
- it’s not about taste elevation or being cultural gatekeepers.
- if we give them possibilities, they will choose possibilities.
- serving the long tail – but the long tail might concentrate demand through less and less choices.
- too many choices? We need “curators”. That’s what amazon.com does so well.
- interviews at OPL – searching a topic in the OPAC got way less than an amazon.com search, and the survey participants liked that. They felt that the library was curating for them.
- Cyber-balkanization: how do we think about this tradeoff vs. community?
- the Netflix business model is very much like libraries – ways of presenting people with choices and options.
- bestseller trap – reinforcing and perpetuating the cycle. We’re not changing it in any way.
- “the modern librarian is only happy when his readers make his shelves constantly empty”
- discovery: cross-referencing and showcasing – not just new, but old treasures too.
- building connections: per Ranganathan, it was all about subject classification. Maybe that doesn’t really work anymore.

Interview question: showed survey participants amazon.com tags and 50% of them thought tagging a book in amazon.com meant adding it to your wish list or shopping cart. If you look at the tags, they really aren’t meaningful. E.g.: harry potter is tagged with “harry potter”. Is this meaningful?
- it’s still early days for tags, we need to explore this in the long term. Tags need to be:
- evaluative: numeric, semantic
- descriptive: aboutness, offness
- associative: also recommended

4. Save the time of the reader.
- Jakob Nielsen (usability guru) says users spend most of their time not on your site, but on other sites. So figure out how to make your site like others!
- radical trust and smart system design go together.
- if you build it will they come?

Wrap-up:
- the only way it would work (i.e.: user-created content in OPACs) would be for library systems to work on it together. The only way to get critical mass, especially on books and resources that aren’t mainstream bestsellers, is if you get lots of users creating that content (user-reviews, etc.).
- user-created content management systems are far less forgiving of the need for constant ‘redesign”.
- bottom line? We all need to do this together!

A talk by Stephen Abram is seriously difficult to blog! His talks are engaging, entertaining, and provocative, and apart from living in fear of not doing him justice, I also just can’t type that fast. Here are just a few of the nuggets I managed to jot down.

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Examples of innovative stuff going on in Canadian libraries:
- the Alberta Library Online
- OCUL’s Scholars Portal
- knowledge Ontario
- ASIN portal

A question we should be asking: what is the best future for libraries? Lots of big questions to think about:
- when we get ubiquitous broadband, how are we going to be able to deliver? To smart phones and other devices? Are we ready?
- they are connected but they don’t have info literacy. That’s what we’re all about and where we come in.
- be creative. Think transformation.
- what impact will the millenials have? What about the post-millenials?
- we need to sacrifice things to innovate
- library 2.0 – user-centric, not library-centric

librarian 2.0 is…
– the guru of the information age!
- doesn’t shy away from non-traditional cataloguing and classification – tagging, folksonomies, etc.
- understands the long-tail and serves it
- catalogues people more than content
- understands the user at a deep level

How do we get more innovative?
- stop being afraid of success!
- continue to be critical thinkers, butdon’t let that stop us from embracing change
- when someone is doing something well, we need to support them
- seek experiences, not necessarily inside the library
- challenge our assumptions
- try something new everyday
- lead and share. If you’re leading, tell people.
- stay positive
- learn. Information does not become knowledge without learning.
- unlearn.
- listen. Especially for what’s on the fringes.
- have a vision.
- no puny visions.
- work from the customer in, really put the customer first. Don’t try and create mini-librarians, create mini-learners, mini-citizens.

innovation attitudes:
- passion, preparation, intuition, play, flow, radiate, find the pattern, trust, look at the disparities and try and solve them, stand back and look what’s going on, believe in yourself, question everything, have a vision, be a good noticer, empathize, focus,

Are we innovatve enough? Not by a long shot. Can we be? Yes!

“A year from now you may wish you had started today” – Karen Lamb

Update: Doug’s presentation is available here (ppt).

- Interested in user behaviour and how to use it for services
- syndication of info is at a pioneering stage
- it’s a fad – overblown by the media; misunderstood; content is 90% fluff; based on a cool toy.
- It’s relevant. It’s going to be something of a revolution; exciting stuff that’s happening underneath.
- Not about iPods at all; not about Apple; not about personal broadcasting;
- Why does podcasting matter? Why should it matter to libraries? It’s one example of something bigger that’s going on that’s really interesting.
- It’s the syndication that makes it simple and magical!
- RSS and XML and enclosures (the data) – what podcasting is all about.
- Podcatchers: a device to receive a podcast. iTunes is probably the major one, when they added podcasts to their system, podcasts pretty well exploded.
- Finding podcasts: iTunes, podcast alley, indiepodder.org, ipodder.org, podcast.net, etc. none of them are comprehensive, none of them are the be all and end all. You end up having to look in various places to find what you want (similar to the early days of web browsing).
- Podcast directories – reviews and tags.
- Creating podcasts: audacity is an easy application for recording and editing.
- Creating an RSS feed for podcasts: all you need to do is create an xml file. Sites out there can do this for you.
- Part of the appeal of podcasting is their low-fi nature.

Who is podcasting in the world of libraries and education?
- Many trying it out.
- Anything that makes sense as an audio file or movie clip can be turned into a podcast easily. Some public libraries are doing it for their “meet the author” events.
- Learn Out Loud – educational podcasts indexed by topic or subject.
- Duke University – well out in the lead on this. Giving away iPods and doing a lot of content too, commencement addresses, announcements, etc.
- US govt. – governments have lots to talk about so it makes sense! Including the president’s weekly radio address.
- U of Missouri: LIS school is producing them on all kinds of things
- Thomson Peterson’s – really getting into podcasting too.
- Carleton U doing lectures as video podcasts. The idea of timeshifting your education. This makes so much sense and is a great idea.
- Recap.ltd.uk – experimenting with podcasting for K-12.
- Stanford on iTunes – lectures, books & authors, music, news, etc. Anyone can subscribe.

So what’s so interesting about podcasting?
- There’s more to it than the discreet technology (it’s really not all that revolutionary).
- What’s going on that makes it so different and exciting?
- What does podcasting represent as a technology in terms of it being part of a whole suite of technology?
- Answer: web 2.0
- Yes, it’s jargon. So, let’s call it The Semantic web.
- It’s about the web getting better, smarter, about knowing who you are and what you’re looking for.
- Library 2.0 is not about changing everything. It’s about libraries doing what they do well and thinking about this new web.

The thing about this new web is that it’s all application-based.
- Aggregation
- Filters and ranking (tags)
- Syndication
- Mash-ups
- Tagging and folksonomies
- Radical trust – people become authorities because other people have decided that they know what they’re talking about
- Community-building: probably started in file sharing and peer-to-peer
- Meg Hourihan: time-shifting, time-travel, mobility, democratization, ease of production

Examples of the semantic web:
- the ones we’re familiar with: Wikipedia, del.icio.us, flickr, 43 things,
- shadows.com
- digg.com
- netvibes
- frappr
- meefedia
- amazon.com
- last.fm
- technorati
- bittorrent

Great, but what does this have to do with libraries?
- Self-publishing
- Authorities
- Open systems
- Participation
- Sharing of output
- Remixing
- Non-traditional classification
- User habits and expectations
- Value of community
- Find potential in new technologies
- Demanding that your ILS/OPAC has an API

These social tools are not about searching, they are about finding. Isn’t that what we want to happen in libraries?

Session focus:

- to provide a broader pic of information organization
- what’s going on in the non-library world & what we can appropriate for our own uses
- where we need to go in the future
- blogs, wikis, etc. and libraries – fad or future?

- three main ways to understand a network: centrality, betweeness, closeness
- Gladwell & The Tipping Point – how information travels across a network to become a fad. Three main concepts:
- Connectors: people who have connections
- Mavens: aren’t passive collectors of info, proactive finders and sharers
- Salespeople: communicators, sellers

- Gladwell’s small world phenomenon: study done in 1967 (published in Psych Today, Milgram) to prove that not everyone is connected to everyone through 6 steps; rather that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else through a few steps.

- The corporate ladder: this is one of our networks; artificial network to get work done
- LCSH: another network, this one of subjects; hierarchy of UF, BT, NT; sometimes putting ideas into containers they don’t always fit in.
- The Internet as network: no real hierarchy, hyperlinks, distributed network, a whole lotta see also references
- Social software: wikipedia, for example. Fascinating to looks up the history of a term and watch its transformation (especially new concepts). Why does it work? It’s self-correcting.
- In libraries? What if we allowed our users to edit our subject guides through wikis? Decentralizing the library’s authority & building community.
- theyrule.net – investigating major corporations, mostly in the US. Search for any major company and find connections between them. Brings social networking concepts to find linkages between corporations
- CSA’s Scholars Universe – similar idea, using social network concepts to investigate scholars and their various connections
- Photo tagging: using tags and RSS to build those social connections; also, adding notes – anecdotal bits of information added by people.
- Flickr tags: an organic folksonomy (tag clusters, etc.) No hierarchy, as in LCSH; no BT, NT, etc. no vocabulary control or authority, but Flickr users don’t care.
- Visual Tag Browsing – taking Flickr tags to the next level. Type in a keyword or tag and see just the image results (querying the Flickr database). Zoom out from the images and see the other tags. Allows you to zero in on what you’re looking fo; rotate your network and find exactly what you’re looking for.
- In libraries? How about institutional repositories? Oral histories? Community histories?
- For these specific collections, you could create your own thesaurus, or your could employ tags.
- Using a technology like flickr notes: art history classes, medical classes (medical drawings, etc.)
- Social bookmarking: del.icio.us to tag sites rather than images. The aggregation is what makes it powerful – my tags + your tags = helping each other find information. Benefiting from where other people have been before – as opposed to general search engine searching (nothing social about that… yet)
- Tag clouds: a snapshot of what people are finding and saving.
- Shadows: takes del.icio.us one step further. Tags and comments. Create communities around interests.
- MOG – millions of games. Gaming. Combination or reviews, tags, advice.
- Connotea – in the academic world. Tag academic references. More scientific emphasis. CiteULike too. Store and share academic resources.
- User Commentary: amazon.com reviews, for example. Good example for libraries. What do reviewers gain from adding their reviews to the catalogue? Sharing, mostly. If you love a book, you want to tell people about it; same if you hate a book! Great for the fringe stuff that doesn’t make it into major review journals. Also, amazon.com’s recommendation engine. It’s business, yes, but it works. Why can’t we do this in our OPACs?
- Epinions: same, user commentary. Community building and interaction.
- Ebay has taken this to a whole other level.
- Gmail: search, don’t sort. No folders, use the search engine instead.

- challenge: we’re experts in the information field. Are we willing to give up this control? How about collaboration? Can LCSH live harmoniously beside tags?

Audience Questions:

- these concepts are great, especially for services. But when we start using these tools, we’re opening marketplaces. And marketplaces are only as good as the activity. There are blogs and wikis out there that are failures because there’s no activity. How do we ensure the marketplaces we create actually work?
- Make it attractive
- Make it meaningful for people
- Make it cool!
- Make sure people get something out of it – coming to the marketplace and getting involved

- What if you’re not a code jockey? How can we incorporate these tools into our OPACs?
- Talk to our vendors!
- Share our successes!
- Learn from each other