How Can Libraries Help People Begin Research with Library Resources?

This is the second of several posts summarizing the more interesting or relevant sessions I attended at the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference.

In “The Problem of Where to Start,” Mike Buschman of Proquest discussed problems people encounter in the use of library e-resources and several approaches that libraries can use to help. These findings and recommendations were based on the results of research of academic researchers’ information-seeking behavior, which included, in part, studies described in the Ithaka Report.

Mike summarized the problem this way: researchers don’t know what library resources are available, have a hard time choosing which ones to use, and just don’t know where to start. As a result, they usually don’t begin their research with library resources. At the same time, they still trust libraries and think that the content they offer is more credible than general Web resources. To preserve their role in the research process, Mike indicated that libraries need to provide training in information literacy, market their resources, place access points in context, and use a “unified discovery” service.

Now came what ended up being the primary focus of the session – a description of Summon, a unified discovery tool under development at Serials Solutions. Unlike federated search products, which send user queries out to different databases, Summon indexes library resources from Summon partners (like EBSCO, OCLC and Elsevier) and subscribing libraries (our OPACs for example). A user initiating a search from a library website through Summon can search the index, review relevant results, and access resources in the library’s knowledge base through a single interface. Because one index is searched, some of the problems typically encountered with federated search (such as speed) should be improved.

But Summon may not tackle all problems users face. One of the session attendees, for example, pointed out that the different indexed resources will use different subject taxonomies. And at this point, I think I recall Mike saying that Summon’s index doesn’t include terms found in the entire article text. The response of session attendees was very positive, but a little guarded.

Mike indicated that Summon should become commercially available this summer. People asked about cost. Mike replied that economies of scale should make Summon affordable. I hope so, for libraries of many shapes and sizes.

Here are links to a recent articles on Summon in Library Journal and Information Today. The latter article indicates that the primary target market for Summon is academic libraries and that Summon does not “know enough yet about other libraries.”

--Katie Fearer

Keynote: Communities and Communication in a Social and Mobile World

I really enjoyed this keynote by author Howard Rheingold, who wrote Smart Mobs. The themes were of trust and communication over time. Rheingold noted that when he had written other books, he researched them, wrote them, and then put the topic away, but this topic has stuck with him. His presentation was lively, interesting and relevant, with visuals reminiscent of Flat Stanley or Where's Waldo. I've stuck pretty closely with my notes from his presentation:

Cell phones are changing the way the world looks at time, children, and each other. In Finland, the word for cell phone is the diminutive of “hand.” In Tokyo, people were walking around looking at their cell phones instead of around themselves or at each other. Rheingold heard the saying, “kids flock like birds” and noticed a softening of time, where we don't meet at a pre-specified time as much, but rather plan to meet in the afternoon and work out the details of when and where later, on the phone. Protests, meetings, etc., have all been arranged by cell phone (for example: "everyone show up at this time in this place wearing black"), lowering the threshold for cooperation. Oh My News (Korea) tipped the election on election day via social networking, and there are many more examples of this type of thing from all over the world: high school kids in Chile, Basques in Madrid, violent radicals in Denmark, Nigeria, Australia, and more.

This isn't new. Way back when, hunter-gatherers needed protein every day. They gathered together in extended family groups and managed to drive all large mammals in North America to extinction more quickly. These were big, so hunters could provide for more than themselves and their families. Communication was key for hunting and sharing.

Later, big civilizations grew in the river deltas. Writing began from record-keeping: accountants started it all! Reading and writing was limited to the elite until the printing press. New forms of collective action emerged from new forms of communication. Science becomes collective intelligence instead of personal genius. Luther wasn’t the first priest to protest, just the first to protest after printed broadsides. There were similar advances in politics with the founding of this country. There were huge advances in banking and commerce because people could transmit currency with paper – keys are trust and worldwide communication system. This sharing allowed people to build on each other’s discoveries. Looking forward, we are on another cusp with toward near universal use of small communication/computer devices.

Markets are changing. Open source is growing out of self-interest. Opening proprietary source software, letting people use it, has been key to development, growth, and financial rewards. For example, Lilly created a market for solutions, like eBay. Amazon, Google and others have opened up their programming interfaces and ads to let others make a little money and them make a lot of money. Getting people working on problems across firms and fields has been huge and successful. Prisoner’s dilemma stopped trading with unknowns, but eBay helped increase trust with seller information and power sellers. The internet is allowing us to communicate and share, which is allowing development that never could have happened otherwise, for example: Wikipedia, ThinkCycle (cooperative design for developing world), Swarm Supercomputing Collectives (SETI @ home, Folding @ home, and more), Amazon Mechanical Turk (crowd-sourcing), Cocreation of culture (p2p and many to many) blogs, YouTube, and more. Success comes to those who provide powerful platforms that enable individuals. This is leveraged self-interest. It looks like altruism but enables their self-interest to help others.

We are in a multimedia world, with technology as mind amplifiers, used by people who never used to use computers. From small subcultures to large portions of population, people are, well, participating in participatory media…blogs, wikis, rss, mashups, podcasts, file sharing, tagging, and more. We have broader, faster, cheaper, social communication. We need to take risks with experimentation! Most learning is happening when the teacher isn’t looking, on evening and weekends, in the back of the class. Learning is self-guided, but needs more guidance from others, especially in how to apply skills. Librarians can help. There is a social media classroom available: http://socialmediaclassroom.com, a combination blog, wiki, forums, chat, social bookmarking, how-to and more, which we can use to help people figure out what’s appropriate for their use, and the appropriate rhetoric to use there. This is currently available as a free Drupal download, but will soon be available in a hosted IT-Free version for educators, including libraries.

This is not all just fun. Social media can be used to make the world work better (when Rheingold couldn't get Comcast to respond to an emergency repair request, he got quick help by contacting Comcastcares on Twitter, and wikis and blogs have been effectively used to coordinate worldwide emergency response, as in http://cooperationcommons.com). However, in this rapidly changing world, we need to keep up with the literacies, not the technologies. In searching: how do you get an answer, but also, how do you know the answers are true? This is key for librarians. We can help with the information literacy piece!

Seeing clearly?

Google's Gmail has a new service, just rolled out Monday: Google Goggles. It basically serves as an optional filter for those times when our internal filters aren't quite as strong. This nifty service aims to help prevent users from emailing when they're not thinking clearly, by requiring completion of some simple math problems in order to send an email at night on the weekends (or whenever you specify). I've seen the sorrow that can result from emails sent unthoughtfully, even if the person was not actually incapacitated by too much alcohol or too little sleep. Sometimes, just an extra step to make us think about what we're doing can be really helpful.

Of course, sometimes it's just annoying 99% of the time, so we end up turning it off right before the one time it would be helpful.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

In a post called Homer Simpson is the patron saint of innovation, Australian communications blogger Lee Hopkins makes the important point that communication tools tend to live alongside one another. This means that while experimentation isn't a bad thing, we should use the tools that we are most comfortable with.

Or as Lee puts it much better than I:

Just as there’s no point trying to get a non-communicative CEO to start blogging, there’s no point trying to use a tool and channel that uses skills not ordinarily part of your personal repertoire.

Naturally, there is nothing wrong with stretching, growing, developing, and adopting new skills. But be honest with yourself — if you don’t have the time and the self-esteem to vidblog (bearing in mind that video blogging can take ages to get right, far longer than text blogging or audio podcasting) then don’t commit yourself to it and your audience to expect it.

Something to think about. What are you comfortable with and how you using that to connect with your patrons?

Ketchikan PL Tries MonoMouse

Back on July 18th, the Ketchikan Public Library announced it was doing a three month trial of the MonoMouse for visually impaired users. What's the MonoMouse? Let Rainbird Librarian explain:

The MonoMouse is an electronic magnifier that is light, quick to install, easy to use and very portable. Slightly larger than a standard computer mouse, you simply plug one end into an electrical outlet, the other into the VCR jack on your television, press the button and voila! It will magnify any print onto your TV screen; you simply slide the mouse across the page. You can use this to read books, magazines, newspapers - even your mail! Our device magnifies type 13x, so that it is larger than the standard Large Print format. It's designed to be ergonomic and lightweight, so even if you suffer from arthritis it will be easy to use. The instructions are even in a large print font!

If it works as advertised, it should be a boon to readers with vision difficulties. I know our library will be watching this experiment. How about yours? Are you using something similar already?

Cuil. The new Google?

A friend just told me about Cuil (an Irish word pronounced "cool"), a new search engine that her middle-school-aged son said was "the new Google." I don't know if it is, or not, but it claims to have crawled three times as many pages as Google, and has an interesting layout for results. Personally, I'm kind of impressed that it launched yesterday and already a teen in Juneau knows about it.

So far, I haven't been able to find the advanced search operators, although they claim that they are especially good for complex queries. But I like their privacy policy, and see no ads, yet.

Will Cuil knock Google off it's pedestal? I don't know, but it seems like it might at least be a good one to watch.

E-Books: Still not ready for prime time?

In a May 2008 American Libraries article titled The Elusive E-Book, author Stephen Sottong argues that aside from reference titles, e-books (the kind meant to be read off a computer screen) have no future for the foreseeable future.

Part of his pessimism comes from experience:

My own experience with computer- based subscription services was as a librarian in the California State University (CSU) system. From March to December 2001, all but CSU's smallest campus participated in a pilot e-book project with NetLibrary. In that time, there were 17,473 accesses to the e-hook collection. If that number were annualized and each access assumed to be from a different person, then, at best, only 5% of students and faculty would have accessed the e-book collection--and many of the accesses during this period were actually by librarians demonstrating the new system. Each access during the pilot project cost the university more than $5, This is not to fault CSU's implementation of e-books. The trial was well-planned, with most campuses integrating NetLibrary's e-books into their catalogs and providing a spate of publicity for the new service. Our students--who should be a group that readily accepts new technologies--just preferred paper books.

And part comes from ergonomics analysis that seems to indicate that reading off a screen is intrinsically harder than from a book:

Because both convergence and accommodation occur at a further distance when looking straight forward, monitors must be placed further from the eye. Since monitor resolution is less than print, the text on a monitor must be made larger to convey the same amount of information, which means that the width of the monitor must be wider to handle the same amount of text. As the eyes cans across text on a monitor, the distance between the eye and the monitor varies: closer to the eye in the center, farther at the edges. This means that the eye must constantly adjust for both accommodation and convergence as each line of text is read.

The consequences of these differences are enormous. Most computer users try to keep their eyes in the center of the screen, ignoring information at the edges. They skim text rather than read. When confronted with blocks of text longer than a couple screens, users either print the text or ignore it. This strategy works well with journal articles: Users can skim for relevant entries and print the ones they want to peruse in detail. But it doesn't work for book-length manuscripts or other lengthy text forms that require detailed reading.

My spouse likes to use our XO Laptop to read fanfic stories and it seems to work for her. But stories are sort of like journal articles. I've tried using our XO Laptop for reading some book length works and I can attest that it's a more tiring experience. Although my main issue with using my laptop is that there isn't a good way to bookmark your place. I have to make a notation in another file or on paper to get back to the page where I left off. On the other hand, the laptop is a great and comfortable tool for getting through my personal RSS feeds.

Does your library offer e-books for reading? What has your experience been with them? Are any more popular than others?

-------------------
Cited Article:

Title: The Elusive E-book.
Authors: Sottong, Stephen
Source: American Libraries; May2008, Vol. 39 Issue 5, p44-48, 5p, 1bw
Full text via Digital Pipeline: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=31872775&site=ehost-live

Primer on Digital Preservation

More and more, libraries of all sizes are faced with the problems of digital media - library photos taken with digital cameras, town meetings recorded in MP3, finding aids and library brochures in Word, WordPerfect, etc.

If you're interested in a quick and general overview of the challenges involved in preserving digital materials, check out this one page article from the May 2008 issue of American Libraries:

Title: Digital Defense.
Authors: Caplan, Priscilla
Source: American Libraries; May2008, Vol. 39 Issue 5, p38-38, 1p
Full Text via Digital Pipeline: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=31871877&site=ehost-live

Does your library hold digital materials -- either in your collection or on staff computers? What sort of stuff do you have? And do you have worries that you won't be able to pull it up in a few years?

Wiki options

AkLA's Continuing Education committee is looking at Web 2.0 tools for use with next year's conference. As part of this, we're researching wiki options, and decided to post the results here, so that anyone else who is interested in implementing a wiki can take advantage of our efforts.

Robyn Russell, of Rasmuson Library at UAF, suggested starting our comparison with WikiMatrix. Using their wizard, I came up with 13 wikis, to which I added MediaWiki, which AkLA already is planning on implementing for other uses. I narrowed this down by removing those which lacked features important to me, like the ability to export to PDF, to use CSS, and more, and ended up with.

	BrainKeeper,	PBwiki,	SamePage,	Socialtext,	MediaWiki

Of these, my top two are PBwiki, because I'm the most familiar with it and I know it's easy, and MediaWiki, because AkLA has access already and because I'm somewhat familiar with it and know that it's fairly easy and has some really useful features.