notes & links

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.

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.