intros ------ Dinah Sanders (moderator): product manager for big company that develops library catalog software Liz Lawley: RIT prof. of Info. Tech., used to work at LoC. tries to slip in some of the knowledge librarians have built up over the years into her tech.-related teachings Cynthia Hill: librarian for Sun Computers. teaches at SJSU Tanya Rabourn: works on digital libraries, preservation. currently an information architect with MetLife. Jon Udell: was byte magazine's lead editor. currently works for ??? LibraryLookup: developed some bookmarklets to let ppl look up books in their local library catalogs. then librarians started contacting him about hacking their own library catalogs to support these new bookmarklets. discussion ---------- Lawley: libraries are brick and mortar reputation systems. shows off del.icio.us. librarians are good at authority control - managing emergent vocabularies of description. del.icio.us is seeing the emergence of a shared vocabulary. librarians spend a lot of time developing shared keywords and topic hierarchies. most people don't want to produce information. they want to consume it. this is also the problem with wikis: very few people to garden them. librarians are good at this and technologists need to talk to them about it. Rabourn: people don't have the skills to discern between the quality of different sources. which one is more authoritative, etc. before, librarians used to do research for ppl. now users do this directly. but they don't have the knowledge of judging sources. Sanders: some librarians are now offering "virtual librarians" where you can chat with a librarian and have them help you with research. this isn't scalable though. google needs to work with librarians to build "aggregated judgement of quality". more and more libraries are using the web as part of their collection. starting to catalog web resources just like books. Lawley: talks more about del.icio.us and emergent vocabularies. we get to see how people are describing and categorizing resources. how can we now use this to build a refined vocabulary? to learn how people gather and organize info? we also need to jump beyond this to being able to do recommendation on new info. Udell: how do you federate the skill and knowledge of librarians and use it in this more global web space? isn't del.icio.us similar to dmoz.org? Lawley: these are different. dmoz.org only has one view at any given time into the data. with del.icio.us you can compare how different users categorized the same thing. Sanders: there's a bottom-up process going on with things like del.icio.us, and a top-down process when we observe this and come up with a more refined vocab. Hill: would like to change the topic slightly: cooperatives of collective action. librarians are active in patriot act, banned books. Lawley: talks about the privatization of content that howard talked about in his keynote. libraries have created "proprietary silos of technology" and they can't hack these systems. (Udell: this is a general IT problem, not just libraries). but libraries are far behind the curve in adopting open, accessible systems. wikis have terrible access b/c ppl are busy building content and not access to the content. ppl need to go talk to librarians about these issues. Udell: what do we go to libraries for? how can we get more ppl to go to libraries? they need to be more inviting: wifi, coffee shop, new books table, etc. Lawley: we did some of this and library use shot up. ppl are seeing the library as a social space, as a space for connecting. as a talking space evenly! :) there are not a lot of libraries doing this though, so ppl now go to borders for this. we want spaces where we can sit together and consider ideas and libraries are the right place to do this. i want to talk to the real ppl who are geographically colocated with me and see what they're reading about and what they're thinking. Hill: libraries are seen as a neutral place. Sanders: libraries have been associated with publishing, the spreading of new works. now publishing is more widespread. what's gonna happen when the library patrons are the publishers? can the library actually be a publication of local content that people can read? Lawley: libraries need to provide local annotation. there's reasons to keep privacy, but we have so much to gain by seeing who's using what resources. del.icio.us is good, but it's global not local. patrons should be able to add notes about books, articles ("here's an article you'll like if you like this book"). we need different ways of filtering annotations. see annotations of everyone at RIT, those of colleagues, those of local users of this library. Sanders: there've been developments in different parts of the world relating to information access. patriot act in the US. britain has set the goal to become the world's biggest knowledge economy: enormous effort to increase education, "information literacy"; more knowledgeable librarians. Rabourn: when the patriot act was first enacted, librarians were very worried because they have so much data on borrowing patterns of their patrons. librarians worked hard to protect that data from the gov't. in contrast, corporations and isp's gave up info. freely when the p2p lawsuits started. Sanders: our customers don't want to hold on to customer information, but at the same time they want cool features like amazon's recommendations (which depend on user records). Lawley: i think librarians are doing a horrible job. they're not keeping up with technology. "libraries are in trouble. in general they've done a very bad job of adopting to new technology." if we don't fix this within the librarian profession, everyone will suffer. this impoverishes people who get access to information through their libraries. Udell: there's also political challenges here. libraries need to implement filters to keep their federal funding. questions --------- - why aren't libraries moving more online? i can use e-books on a computer inside the library, but not outside the library. the publishers limit where their info can get published. also, librarians don't have the knowledge/personnel for setting this up usually. copyrights hinder how e-books can be distributed. publishers are trying very hard to protect their revenue streams but imposing strict, artifical limits on access to their books. - i can get book recommendations from amazon, et. al. what do librarians bring to the table that can't be done with machines? librarians are non-profit. they're not recommending based on profit motives. libraries are also good at local approaches. what a reader at mit needs is not what a user in london needs. librarians do recommendations based on content analysis (what is similar in content to this book?), not just because someone else bought it. more notes ---------- http://www.metagrrrl.com/metagrrrl/2004/03/sxsw_04_notes_f_1.html http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/03/18.html#a947 http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/002502.html