notes & links

The three keynote addresses at Menucha this year were presented back-to-back, and even though the speakers did not prepare together at all. Jessamyn West gave her “sensible technology” talk - which she always adapts and changes and updates so even if you’ve heard it before, there will be something that’s new. I should also mention that there are some speakers who, while interesting and effective, come across just as well in an audio-only environment like a podcast. Jessamyn West is not one of those speakers; she’s definitely worth hearing in person. Anyway, what I like about Jessamyn is that she is an advocate for libraries and for library users first, and a technology advocate second. So her work is always very well grounded in the impact that technology has (for good or ill) on libraries - particularly resource-poor, small, or rural libraries. This gives her perspective a certain relevance and significance that goes beyond “isn’t this cool?”

Rachel talked next about the impact of social software on knowledge creation, particularly on academic knowledge creation. This is a topic I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about (frequently with Rachel, natch) so it was great to hear it presented out loud, and in some sort of order, instead of here and there in my email and IM. She focused on the questions that open access, web 2.0 and open data pose for academic libraries, given our key role in the knowledge creation process. The resources she used are tagged on del.icio.us as - menucha06.

The next day was the panel that Shaun and I spoke on. We were joined by Eliz Breakstone from UO, who spoke for herself, and also for Annie Z-K from UO who was too close to having a baby to risk coming to Menucha. Annie’s project (as channeled by Eliz) was an interesting podcasting project focused on the history of the Willamette River in Eugene. It seems there was an oral history project that captured people’s stories and memories about the river. The project team wanted to find a way for people walking the river to hear the stories as they were moving along. They initially though of using a series of voicemail boxes that people could call - figuring that everyone would have their cell phones with them. That idea was rejected because it would be expensive, and the audio quality would be poor. Annie suggested that they let users download the audio content to their mobile devices as a podcast, so that each episode would correspond to a different spot on the walk. I thought this was a great example of how librarians can use their expertise with what is possible technologically to contribute to projects.

Eliz’s project was the UO implementation of IM reference. This was kind of interesting because in many ways it paralleled ours, without the same experience with LNET first. Their numbers are promising - She showed October numbers - with a little less than a week to go in the month they had had 72 IM questions. What she didn’t do was break down those numbers by week. Given that I have had 5 questions in my last 3 hours at the desk, and that’s just me, I would have thought their numbers would be increasing as more students became aware of the service.

Shaun talked about his experiences as a teacher (and token faculty member at library conferences) using blogs and social bookmarking in the classroom. He has been using blogs since 2002 or so in all of his writing intensive courses, and he just started using blogs and del.icio.us in his co-taught introductory social science seminar. He talked about the pedagogical benefits, things to be careful of, and other types of issues (like campus structures, digital divide issues, etc.). I talked about our use of Wikipedia in our Writing 121 research log assignments. I have been wanting to talk about this for a while with other librarians, so it was a talk I was looking forward to giving. It went well, and I got some good questions. Unfortunately, I ended up having to talk about Blackboard as a vehicle for the assignments as well as their content - and I am by no means a blackboard expert.

After the panel, all six of the speakers participated in a free-for-all question and answer session, which I have to say was VERY ably moderated by Robert Hulshof-Schmidt from the State Library. I don’t know what makes some moderators very effective and others … not so much. He was definitely in the first category, though.

All in all, I enjoyed Menucha every bit as much as people told me I would and I expect I will return in two years. Lots of people who are not me took pictures - you can see them on Flickr - tag = menucha06.

David Binkley Emerging Technology Award Presentation: Experimental Interfaces for the Dynamic Visual Grouping of Data During Browsing (link to podcast)
Dr. Stan Ruecker (U Alberta)

This was my favorite talk of the day. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot to say about it. It was very research-based and academic, which is probably why I liked it - I’m odd that way.

He also demonstrated a lot of different ways of visualizing information that again got back to the importance of browsing and serendipity in the information seeking process. We spend a lot of time thinking about search, and that’s valid and important. But I did find it interesting how many people were talking about ways to make the browsing experience more robust or meaningful. Pedagogically I think this is a really interesting and really important development. All of us who teach undergrads know that they are really not very good at choosing keywords. And in the decontextualized world of the keyword search, they are often at a loss - they don’t have the experience with a topic to understand how the concepts they’re interested in might fit together within the discourse so they have trouble with everything from searching to finding to reading to taking notes to writing.

Browsing addresses some of these issues. Ruecker’s talk really showed how the browsing experience depends on connections between ideas - visual, thematic, metaphoric, etc. It was interesting to think about how a dynamic browsing experience might help students explore a topic or concept in a way that also lets them experience the context and the discourse that produced the idea.

I’ve already showed some of the projects he demonstrated to students who were just brought to the library to “see what academic libraries are like” — it has been fun.

Access to Inforamtion in an Age of Social Media (link to podcast)
Nora Young - CBC

Nora Young used to host CBC’s Radio One program Definitely not the Opera, and there were definitely a lot of people in the crowd who had very fond memories of her tenure as DNTO’s host. Her talk was really everything that you would want in a keynote - it was well-written, well-read, opinionated, thought-provoking and occasionally controversial. That said, I didn’t like it all that much. It touched on a lot of issues about the epistemological significance of social media that I find very interesting and important. But as is always the case when a keynote speaker talks about something that I’ve been thinking a lot about - they can’t get into it as deeply as I want and I just get annoyed.

In this particular case, I thought that she was talking about really interesting issues about what the social aspects of social software technologies mean for discourse. She talked about the impact of social and collaborative publishing tools on the authorial voice, and asked whether these tools result in a lack of responsibility for ideas and understanding. If we create knowledge togehter, then who is responsible for what is created? And do all of the rough edges get smoothed out under some kind of majority- rules scenario. Where is the individual point of view?

The problem is, that she blasted right past the point where the discussion was interesting, and spent most of her time at the apocalyptic end-of-knowledge end of the spectrum. Personally, I just don’t find either end of the extreme all that interesting. I prefer to stay in the - “okay, this is the world we have, what can we do with it” - area. And I suspect that Nora Young would be a really great person to have that conversation with, when she wasn’t doing a keynote address.

LibX (link to podcast)
Annette Bailey - Virginia Tech
(and Godmar Back, Computer Science @ VA Tech - he didn’t present, but was a partner in the project)

More information available at: http://www.libx.org/

I was interested to see this talk, because LibX is one of those things I’ve seen referenced all over the Internet, but haven’t had a chance to really look at or play with myself. The talk-and-then-demonstration structure of most of these technology talks was really helpful. The tool itself was very cool. After highlighting text on any webpage, the user has a variety of search options available to them. Links to library resources can also be included in search result lists, or on Amazon pages.

The overwhelming question I had, however, at the end of the talk was “how do you get your users to install the extension.” That question didn’t get answered immediately, but it came up more than once as the conference continued. In fact, in his multi-topic Thunder Talk, Dan Chudnov argued that applications like LibX, that users have to install, aren’t the right direction for improving the users’ experience. I was also interested to hear that this tool was developed on the developers’ own time, on a short deadline, and that this is why it was developed for Firefox. That part itself wasn’t all that interesting, but the fact that the VA Tech library doesn’t have Firefox on its computers, so this tool isn’t useful to students working in the building at the school for which it was created, was. As a matter of fact, one thing I found striking throughout the conference was how often people were most excited to talk about things that they were working on on their own time, or in their spare time. That suggesed a couple of issues - first the need for library work environments that support innovation and change, and also the extent to which there is a potentially awesome developer community in libraries being shut out of working on the systems that control much of what we do - they’re working around the ILS’s, not with them.

That said, I do think that library staff and librarians would find LibX excessively useful - especially those staff in acquisitions or ILL who have to spend a lot of time repeating searches between search engines and library tools. And the way the user numbers skyrocketed after MIT went live with their LibX version suggests that there are users out there motivated enough to install an extension.

Library Chatboxes in Electronic Reference (link to podcast)

Link to slides (ppt)

Anne Christensen (Hamburg U)

Anne was sitting next to me at the conference, so I was very glad to see her do so well with this talk. The people in the Code4Lib chatroom all around us were starting to get a little on the silly side after several long days of work at this conference, and she seemed to completely win them over.

Anne presented Stella, a way to provide reference FAQ’s in a dynamic, interactive way. She pointed out first that several commercial enterprises use chatboxes - for example, Ikea’s Anna. This grant-supported project built and tested an interactive avatar type figure to provide help on the library’s homepage.

They named their chatbox “Stella” and worked very hard to give her a personality that would fit the culture of Hamburg, and the University in particular. Her personality is described as kind and discreet, with a sense of humor - or hanseatic. They were very firm that they did not want her to be a virtual version of any of the U Hamburg librarians. They wanted it to be obvious that Stella is a computer, not a person. She is supported by a knowledge base with 3,000 rules, and building the knowledge base was (of course) one of the most complicated parts of Stella’s creation.

The library’s goal was to provide a resource that would allow students to ask FAQ type questions in natural language, that would make the web-based resources provided by the library more visible, and that would be available to explain some of the complicated access-related processes related to electronic resources more clearly than a long list of text-based instructions. The finished chatbot can “follow” the user as they navigate the website, and she also refers questions to human librarians when her knowledge base doesn’t help her. By doing assessment and tweaking the knowlege base, they have been able to improve her performance from 30% “wrong” answers to 15% (and all of the interactions that conclude with her referring to her human colleagues get counted against her - so the 15% number is deceiving).

I was really interested in this talk because I thought some of OSU’s undergrads would really like an option like this. Anne said that one of the unanticipated outcomes they found was that there was a group of students who used Stella because she was a computer - the relative anonmyity of asking their question to the computer made them a lot more comfortable asking a question at all. That resonated with me; I think a lot of our students would have similar reactions. I also like the idea of a help devide on the homepage that can point students to resources they probably wouldn’t find on their own.

John was right that Terry and Jeremy represented for OSU very well in these talks, which were really interesting (even if Jeremy says they will be better next year, when people here are used to the format). We heard “Lucene” some more times, from some more people.

Here are Jeremy and Terry preparing to speak:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26803869@N00/289954173/

and here is the full panel:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26803869@N00/289954177/

Improving the Catalog Interface with Endeca - Tito Sierra (NCSU) (link to podcast)

Additional Information available at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/

This was the first talk where we heard the word Endeca, and by far the most comprehensive discussion of its capabilities. Tito Sierra said at the start that this talk would focus on the discovery portion of NCSU’s catalog. Their goals were to improve the user experience and make the MARC data work harder. They chose Endeca specifically because there were lots of commercial examples to look at, and they thought it would improve the users’ relevance rankings, improve their browsing experiences (both faceted browsing and true browsing), and give them faster searches.

This talk was especially useful coming so early in the conference because it provided a quick, visual introduction to a lot of the major concepts that would recur throughout the two days: faceted browsing, search “comforts,” the interactions between the presentation interface and the backend, etc.

Better relevance, better speed, a locally built and managed presentation interface and persistent parameter based encrypts (which allow persistent links to searches that can be embedded elsewhere) were described as postiive outcomes. Less positive were some things not supported by Endeca: personalization, folksonomies, etc.

This talk was also interesting to me in its specific discussion of the process of building and launching the product - Sierra argued for small teams and launching before the product is “done.” The team responsible for this project had only 7 people, with the charge to launch something when it was good and then improve it after launch. These two factors seem to be necessary to creating the kind of nimble and flexible organization that can stay ahead of changes to the information technology landscape, and they might suggest why NCSU so frequently is out in front of the curve with trying new things — it can’t be that they have better resources than everyone else. Last year at ILI one of the most worthwhile talks I saw was also from an NCSU librarian who argued for a similar approach - small teams, and trying new approaches (which sometimes don’t work - another thing that can be difficult in many libraries).

I’m taking a page from John’s book and keeping these notes here. Not so much because it is helpful for me today, but because in the future I may be able to be as efficient as John and Terry about getting these done at the conferences themselves.

I agree with Terry that it should be very interesting to see the reactions different people had to the same talks at Access. I’m only going to write about the talks I liked or talks I found useful (with perhaps one exception)

2nd session - Our Ontario: Yours to Recover (link to podcast)

Link to slides

Walter Lewis
Art Rhyno

This talk focused on one of the six services included in the Knowledge Ontario project, Our Ontario, which focuses on community content. They defined community content as all of that ephemeral content generated by community newspapers, newsletters, etc. that is captured by historical societies and community groups but is hard to access and sometimes disappears when people die, or move out of the community. So they are collecting a lot of stuff, in a lot of formats, with a lot of different kinds of metadata that needs to be attached.

They’re hoping that Lucene is the technology that will make the project happen underneath the presentation layer. This talk was notable in that it was the first time we heard the word “Lucene.” They described a variety of challenges: including stuff that’s really big, and stuff that’s really small, and bringing that stuff together in a coherent way. They also have to manage the metadata behind the scenes - and they have a lot of players and organizations participating. Sometimes they need to provide ways for those players to manage the data as well. So they have to consider their presentation layer, indexing layer and (for those institutions that need it) a content management layer.

What was interesting to me is that they’ve built in a lot of participatory features - like comments - so that users can add additional community information/knowledge to the objects and items included in this resource. They showed digital photographs that had been enhanced by user-provided content explaining where and when the photographs were taken, and identifying the people in the pictures. I have already found these examples to be a useful way to show non-library or non-technical audiences why these kinds of participatory features are useful and exciting for libraries and archives, even as they pose challenges of their own.