ITI Bloggers October 30th, 2007

Attendees had many questions for the presenters (L-R) Lori Bell, Shawn McCann, and Jeremy Kamp

One track of an entire day was devoted to virtual worlds like Second Life and how they are being used in libraries.  A show of hands by the audience revealed that such usage is becoming fairly widespread, and the presentations will certainly do much to increase the penetration of virtual worlds in libraries.  According to Lori Bell, Director of Innovation at the Alliance Library System, virtual world technology has become a new frontier for libraries and librarianship.  Second Life is attracting new users to traditional libraries through referral.  And librarians like Second Life because it’s fun!  The Alliance Second Life group on Google now has 600 members, and its virtual welcome and information center, staffed for 80 hours a week, answers over 200 questions weekly.

An interesting new trend is the establishment of positions in conventional libraries to investigate and develop virtual world technology.  Shawn McCann from McMaster University suggested that a suitable title for such staffers would be “gaming librarian”, and his job is typical.  Besides normal library duties, he explores games and virtual worlds and their intersection with higher education as well as devising ways for the library to support games and virtual worlds.  If you think this is a way to disguise the fact that he spends a large part of his day playing video games (and getting paid for it!), you’re right.

Why are these trends happening?  Formerly reactive libraries are becoming proactive and embracing new technology.  Games and virtual worlds have become important to higher education, and there is lots of research now available.  And, perhaps most important, gaming is an important part of student culture and has been widely adopted.  (For an article with market research data on gaming, see this report.

Shawn’s wish list for supporting gaming and virtual worlds includes a “gaming laboratory” with the powerful hardware needed to support this technology.  He also would like to offer a gaming collection of books and reports to his users.  And the best way that libraries can support this technology is to do what we do best.

Shawn was followed by Jeremy Kemp, Assistant Director of the Second Life Campus of San Jose State University’s School of Library and Information Science.  SJSU acquired a 16 acre island in  Second Life and developed a virtual campus.  He showed a fascinating video of an interview produced by the local radio station KQED, which explored the campus.  This is the next generation of distance learning and gives students the advantages of not needing to come to the campus but still have the feeling of a campus environment.  Participating professors have found that the education experience is enhanced; if they want to hold a class at the (virtual) beach, it’s no problem!  Jeremy also referred to an IBM report, Leadership in a Distributed World, which provides much helpful information on virtual world technologies.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and IL2007 Blog Coordinator

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ITI Bloggers October 30th, 2007

At the opening session this morning, Cindy Shamel, a representative of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP), announced the winner of the AIIP Technology Award for 2007. For eight years now, the award has been given to the company whose product “best assists independent information professionals with their day-to-day operations in locating, analyzing, organizing, and delivering information.” This year’s winner is XLineSoft for its ASPRunner Professional, a database management tool that provides easy access and manipulation possibilities for any database on the Web. Shamel said the product is designed to suit all users from beginners to experienced developers and thus is particularly suited to AIIP’s diverse membership and their various database needs.

I’m not familiar with this tool, but the press release said that ASPRunner Professional creates Active Server Pages (ASP) enabling users to add, search, edit, and delete data to Oracle, SQL Server, MS Access, DB2, or MySQL databases with its easy to use wizard-like interface. Sounds like it’s worth checking out.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief
Information Today, Inc.

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ITI Bloggers October 30th, 2007

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief
Information Today, Inc.

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ITI Bloggers October 30th, 2007

When I entered the session on Second Life this morning, I encountered this row of laptops in the front rows, all getting ready for a session on Second Life–how appropriate!  It’s another sign of the times!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today, and IL 2007 Blog  Coordinator

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ITI Bloggers October 30th, 2007

Josh Petrusa, Electronic  Resources Librarian, Norwich University, giving his first conference presentation (Congratulations, Josh!) outlined some of the characteristics and considerations of User Generated Content (UGC).  Meredith Farkas, Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University, an ITI book author and fellow blogger (Information Wants To Be Free) followed up with some examples of UGC.

With the emergence of Web2.0, the Web has become a community that easily allows sharing of content by users.  UGC is important because we do not know everything, and everyone’s knowledge can benefit someone else.  Stories that people tell about items are of value (reviews, etc.).  Interaction with materials creates a more personal communication.

Tags are a key element in the success of UGC.  They describe and organize the content and help users find things.  They allow people to make sense of content using their own vocabulary, and allow users to re-find their content after they have developed and posted it.  The problem with tags is that there is no control over them, so they are very inconsistent.  There is no disambiguation, and many people tag incorrectly.  Some systems such as Flickr and del.icio.us are help to improve tags by showing the user how other people have tagged similar items (using "tag clouds") and recommending appropriate tags.

Here are some of the sites that Meredith listed as good examples of UGC:

• Picture Australia Project
• National  Library of the Netherlands
• WesternSpringsHistory.org
• LibraryThing
• Bookspace
• PennTags
• RocWiki
• Denver Evolver

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and IL2007 Blog Coordinator

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ITI Bloggers October 30th, 2007

The topic of Wikipedia came up in a number of presentations yesterday.  While scanning my news this morning, I noticed an interesting new development–actually a new site based on Wikipedia. Here’s from the site:

"Veropedia is a collaborative effort by a group of Wikipedians to collect the best of Wikipedia’s content, clean it up, vet it, and save it for all time. These articles are stable and cannot be edited, The result is a quality stable version that can be trusted by students, teachers, and anyone else who is looking for top-notch, reliable information."

It has a small subset of content at this time but is continually adding. The improvements are done over at Wikipedia with updates imported into Veropedia. If an article has already been "verofied"  it will appear as a green link. If an article has not yet been "verofied," it will appear as a blue link, and direct you to the current Wikipedia version.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief
Information Today, Inc.

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ITI Bloggers October 29th, 2007

Richard Geiger introduces Susan Herzog and Aaron Schmidt to an overflow crowd

MySpace and Facebook are extremely popular topics, so it was no surprise that an overflow crowd gathered to hear about them from two experts on the topic: Aaron Schmidt, Director, North Plains Public Library, and a fellow blogger, and Susan Herzog, Assistant Professor,  Eastern Connecticut State Library,  Aaron’s presentation, WhoseSpace, is available on his blog.

The most popular sites on web have a social nature, and social networking is all about stories taken to the web.  They enable two-way communication and inject humanness into the web.  One of the problems Aaron focused on is how to get permission from library administrators to offer access to MySpace.  Important points to make are that social networking is an intellectual freedom issue, and there is nothing inherently wrong with MySpace.  A major concern is whether MySpace is safe or not.  Young people are becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of posting too much personal information online, and there are a number of YouTube videos illustrating this (go to YouTube and search on MySpace).

In her discussion of Facebook, Susan Herzog confirmed Aaron’s observation about young people’s awareness of the dangers of posting personal information on the Internet.  Facebook is growing rapidly, and some libraries are opening Facebook pages.  It has become a recognized part of many students’ culture.  Despite their awareness of the dangers, many students do not recognize that archives exist and can be viewed, even after pages are removed.  And those pages are being used by campus administrators and law enforcement authorities to trace illegal and inappropriate behavior.  Some students have been expelled after posting inappropriate Facebook pages, and others have been denied entrance to graduate school or have been rejected for jobs.  Other students have been victims of stalkers who used their Facebook pages to find them.  Herzog stressed that it is important to educate students on the dangers of posting personal information in the public domain.

I was impressed that these enormously popular social networking platforms have so many and far reaching unintended consequences.  Perhaps we in the information profession have always been aware of the need to guard one’s privacy, but these services have brought the issue to the fore.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and IL2007 Blog Coordinator

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ITI Bloggers October 29th, 2007

Darlene Fichter (University of Saskatchewan) introduces Jeff Wisniewski (University of Pittsburgh) at the start of his talk.

Web site designs don’t just come out of thin air!  There are some standards and best practices that should be followed, and some of the assumptions previously followed may not be the best ones now.  Jeff Wisniewski reviewed a number of issues to be considered and the rules that should be followed.    Although design is an inexact science, there are several decades worth of research in usability, credibility, interface design, and human-computer interfaces available, and they are highly useful in site design.  Here are some of the points that Jeff made:

• We often point to Google as a model of simplicity and good site design.  But it is a single-purpose site, and most library sites serve multiple purposes.  So we can question the rule of simplicity as we provide a rich user experience.
• Although content is king, site design is very important.  If users get an initial negative impression, it is likely to affect their entire experience with the site.
• All content may be created equal, but it’s important to emphasize some so that users have a clear starting point.
• Constantly make incremental changes to your site so that a complete redesign won’t be necessary very frequently.
• Support for all browsers is important for basic content, but it is not necessary to make value-added content backward compatible.
• The common belief that the top of the page is prime "real estate" is false.  Because of the wide proliferation of banner ads, the area above the main headline has become relatively useless.
• Scrolling is not necessarily bad; users will happily scroll if there is a clue that valuable information lies "below the fold".

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and IL 2007 Blog Coordinator

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ITI Bloggers October 29th, 2007

The Exhibit Hall opened tonight at 5 PM, and immediately a large crowd beseiged the vendors’ booths and food stands.  Here are some of the scenes:

The crab cakes were especially popular..

…as was the e-mail area.

Authors of recently published ITI books autographed copies for attendees.

Here’s a really innovative display.  EnvisionWare was showing an automatic book sorter.  Library users (here represented by Pat Hawkins) return bar-coded books in a slot.  The machine reads the codes…

…and directs the book to the proper bin for reshelving.  Neat!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and IL2007 Blog Coordinator.

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ITI Bloggers October 29th, 2007

That morning session on search that Don reported was a tame warm-up to what we had after lunch. We had to hang on to our seats to keep up with the fast pace of this dynamic duo touring the world of mobile search—Megan Fox and Gary Price. We can expect some 240 million U.S. mobile subscribers by 2010. There’s a ton of content out there being generated just for mobile devices—simplified, mobile-optimized pages—but it’s still just a small subset. So there are services (like Skweezer) that will squish down Web pages to fit. Mobile searchers are very goal oriented and their searches tend to be mostly one word. You can expect to see advertising in exchange for free services.

They said, don’t forget that we info pros are years ahead of some of our patrons—but we could be informing and leading them – for example, try msn.mobi. It’s one of the new crop of .mobi sites that are now available. Here are some of the big players:

• www.google.com/m 
• m.live.com 
• m.ask.com 

– note that there’s no search box on home page; it has a menu to pick the category first (weather, maps, directions, business listings, Web search, etc)

Here are some of the newer sites they mentioned:

• 4info
• medio – bills itself as an answer engine 
• http://find.mobi – a meta search engine to find mobi sites

 And this was cool– photo mobile search…use a phone to take a photo of something, like a place or a barcode, which then runs a search for you, e.g., mobot. Semapedia.org lets you connect Wikipedia knowledge with relevant places in physical space (a barcode type symbol will trigger the search).

Analysts predict that spoken/voice search is likely to be an $11 billion business by next year. They rattled off an amazing list of new companies and services – evoca, utterz, callwave, spinvox, etc…. And, for those who can’t afford Internet service on their mobile devices, text messaging to a phone is an option. Wow, this was a fun and eye-opening session. Many of these are companies I’d not heard of.

Links to the sites mentioned by Megan will be available on www.web.simmons.edu/~fox/mobile. Gary’s are at digbig.com/4twhh.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief
Information Today, Inc.

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