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Archive for the 'Past Conferences' Category

Wanna Do A Mashup?

ITI Bloggers April 8th, 2008

I have wanted to learn how to do mashups for a while, but it always looked like some  complex programming was involved. So I was really glad to attend a presentation by Jody Condit Fagan, who made it seem so easy.  She illustrated Yahoo Pipes and said that it’s for NON-TECHIES.  And indeed all it takes is the ability to drag and drop various elements on to a workspace, then join them and click "Run Pipes".  (Well, it can be a little more complicated if you want to get fancy!)  Ignoring Murphy’s First Law of Online Demonstrations (The more important the demo, the more likely the connection will fail!), Jody created a mashup of several RSS feeds from some libraries, sorted them, and annotated them to show which library they came from.  Jody’s presentation is available on the CIL Wiki.  She also provided a handout and a "homework assignment".

All of Jody’s examples involved RSS feeds, so I asked her how to do a simple Google map with addresses plotted on it.  She said that Google Maps can be used with Yahoo Pipes, and afterwards, a helpful attendee showed me that if you go to Google Code, you will find a tutorial on how to do it.  I’m looking forward to trying it out!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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Shanachies: Roving Library Storytellers

ITI Bloggers April 8th, 2008

 I was just one of many people who were delighted to see the roving Shanachies again. And what a keynote they gave this morning!

Showing their innovation yet again, these Dutch library evangelists decided to forego the usual podium and instead had a couch and coffee tables on stage to give their presentation the feeling of a cozy living room chat.

They explained their 2007 U.S. Shanachietour and how they drove across the country visiting innovative libraries and asking about best practices. This morning they showed some great video clips from their road trip and also brought some attendees up on stage and did mini interviews.

You can read more about DOK, the Library Concept Center where they work in Delft, The Netherlands, in the latest issue of Marketing Library Services newsletter. It’s all about librarians trying new things, being excited about their work, and serving their customers well. Nobody tells the libraries’ stories like these guys! Long may they roam.

If you’re interested in having them stop at your library on a future Shanachietour, please Friend them on FaceBook. Become part of the library revolution!

~Kathy Dempsey

Marketing Library Services editor


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ITI Editors Gather

ITI Bloggers April 8th, 2008

Four editors of ITI publications gathered in the Exhibit Hall for a "Meet The Editors" session:  (L-R) Barbara Brynko, Editor of Information Today, Dick Kaser, VP of Content, Bob Berkman, Editor of Information Advisor, Marydee Ojala, Editor of ONLINE, and Paula Hane, ITI News Bureau Chief.  Not shown and attending by phone was Barbara Quint (a.k.a.  BQ), Editor of Searcher.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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What Are Libraries Good At?

ITI Bloggers April 8th, 2008

At last year’s Internet  Librarian conference, three visitors from  Delft in The Netherlands gave a memorable account of a tour they took across the USA interviewing librarians about the future of libraries and related topics (you can find the account of that by checking out this blog’s archives–just click on IL2007 as a category).  They came again to CIL, and here are Erik, Jaap, and Geert (I won’t attempt their last names!) giving us an update at today’s keynote.  You can see the videos they showed and read the detailed account of their trip, the Shanachie Tour, on their web site.  Some of their interviewees were in the audience, and they were invited up to the stage to join them as the clip of their library was shown.

Here are a few of the impressions I gained:

  • Libraries should not be mausoleums for old books. Paul Holdengraber of the New York Public  Library wants to make the famous lions roar and "oxygenate" the library by making the building less formidable and daunting. Libraries can take over the role of what the schools are doing. We need inspiration everywhere.
  • (Charlotte-Mecklenberg Public Library); Books are containers for information and culture. What is the best way to transmit that culture?  It depends on the genre. The role of library will change to a community area—community innovation centers, a place where people learn about new things. The book is one of the best technologies ever invented, but it is a technology. Economic forces will determine the future of books. There are still generations that love to hold books. E-books will change things, but books will still exist and have different uses. The most provocative thing we can do to convince policymakers to fund libraries is to tell stories about what people do there. Show them what people are doing. The big thing we do is to make open environments. Technology is getting so much cheaper and smaller that you can do a lot in a small space.
  • Library students at Dominican University:  Make sure libraries provide material for people of all ages. Create a place for everybody so they will want to come to the library.  The library of the future will inspire me. Make your visions happen—break down barriers and provide access. Help the library evolve so it doesn’t die out in the age of the Internet. It’s something we can use to better the library’s position in society. Skill for librarian of the future: ability to adapt to change.
  • Delft Library Concept Center: Everybody will be mobile, so information must be capable of delivery on mobile phones. The library can’t be without games because more than 1/3 of the population plays games. It’s all about people, how they share their stories. If we care for them, keep their stories, and share their stories, then we have done our job.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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Who Is That Interloper?

ITI Bloggers April 8th, 2008

Getting ready for today’s keynote, Dick Kaser, ITI’s VP of Content was spotted on stage with one of the speakers.  I wonder if they were conversing in Dutch??

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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The Changing Federated Search Scene

ITI Bloggers April 8th, 2008

If you’ve been confused about the federated search landscape, I hope you were able to catch the presentation Monday afternoon by two experts in this area—Jeff Wisniewski of University of Pittsburgh and Frank Cervone, formerly at Northwestern University and now the director at Chicago State University. We’re in a period of rapid change and transition, moving away from discrete federated search products. Indeed, the vendor landscape has changed drastically as some have simply dropped out of the market (too hard to make money at it) and others have been acquired and merged with other products.

Here are some of the key trends the two outlined.
The number of choices from commercial vendors is rapidly shrinking (not much diversity of choice) while open source options are increasing.
We’re seeing progress on the standards front (‘nuff said on that).
We’re seeing increasing use of visualization features in some of the products, which provide users with more entry points to content.
We’re seeing movements toward more holistic content discovers. Federated search is becoming one module of larger efforts to integrate all content into a single discovery tool. Today’s Track A will continue this line of thought in looking at some of the next-gen library interfaces.
And, we’re seeing more affordable turnkey solutions being offered, with greater possibilities for off-site hosting and SaaS.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief, ITI


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How Students Do Research

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

When I hear the term "native habitat" I usually think of animals, not college students. Tho some might argue that they can be one in the same… Regardless, the talk "What Do Users Really Do in their Native Habitat?", which featured two different studies on how students do their research, was interesting and enlightening. Both studies (one from the University of Guelph and one by ProQuest) found similar results.
Among the many findings was this one from Guelph: Students wanted librarians to fix the research services they already had before offering new ones. (In this case "fix" usually meant "make it more user-friendly.") Pascal Lupien said of that message, "It sounds kind of obvious, but that’s not how it usually happens."
John Law discussed the ProQuest study, which revealed that one great way to get students to understand the resources and to use the appropriate ones for their assignments was to have instructions give them names of resources to use. That, Law said, was the "golden endorsement" that helped them do good research.
To share and learn from these study results, watch for them to appear online. You can server your students much better by asking what they want rather than assuming you already know!
~Kathy Dempsey
Editor, Marketing Library Services newsletter


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Happy Exhibitors at Opening Reception

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

The opening reception in the Exhibit Hall was very well attended, making most of the exhibitors very happy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author book signing at the ITI booth

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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Overflow Crowd Hears Tennant on UGC

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

 An overflow crowd (including an overflow of the overflow room!) turned out to hear Roy Tennant of OCLC on User Generated Content (UGC) in libraries.  Tennant said that UGC comes in two flavors:  "real" content (documents, photos, etc.) and "descriptive" content (tags, descriptions,  ratings, etc.).  UGC is becoming more widespread in libraries as the realization grows that more content is better because it can help them provide more personalized service.

Tennant pointed to kete.net.nz, a New Zealand community repository as a good example of UGC.  The site was envisioned as a genealogical repository as well as a digitization of the Cyclopedia of New Zealand, but the tone of the site quickly changed as advertising (houses for sale and professional services) began to appear on it.  Other UGC sites offer a chance to tap into the knowledge of the community to supply missing data (for example, the Halton Hills Library in Ontario was able to identify some sailors in a photograph based on input by a user).

Perhaps the most well known of the recent UGC projects is that of the Library of Congress which put 3,000 photos on Flickr.  The experiment was hugely successful; there were 5.5 million views of the content in the first month and 10,000 unique tags were generated by users. Over 3,500 comments were posted by 1,400 users, and from these, 68 records were enhanced or corrected.  Through this experiment, the Library achieved a higher profile for its collection, community engagement, corrections and additions to the metadata, and sparked some discussion by users relating to the photos.

A number of third-party providers are entering the UGC space,  including Springshare, LibraryThing for libraries, and ChiliFresh.  Tennant said that this shows that UGC has an interesting future, and librarians must be aware of several issues:

  • Our idea of content may not be the same as the users.
  • The tagging will be messy, but that’s OK.
  • There are ways to increase effectiveness through intelligent usage.
  • Libraries need to set goals for UGC and make sure that they can deploy staff effectively to manage them.
  • Will it be necessary to moderate the content?
  • Is the potential impact worth the investment?

Tennant concluded that UGC offers libraries a great potential for content and service enhancement.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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Mobile Trends

ITI Bloggers April 7th, 2008

If you want a quick case of information overload, just go and listen to a presentation by Megan Fox, Web & Electronic Resources Librarian at Simmons College. She is an expert on mobile platforms and trends, and that’s an exciting and fast moving field, indeed. There are now three times as many mobile phones as TVs in the US, and many people say that it would be extremely difficult to give up their mobile phone.   The future of mobile devices is very bright, and it has been greatly enhanced by Apple’s iPhone. 
 
The iPhone has radically changed the market, and it has brought many new online users into the market. It has high quality audio and sports a new user interface that responds to gestures or hand motions. It can even sense the orientation in which it is being held and change the screen orientation accordingly. The iPhone is the first in a whole new generation of mobile devices. 
 
Many mobile devices incorporate a wealth of new features, such as keyboards, larger screens, voice recognition, improved cameras, and video. Battery life is also being improved. New GPS features allow users to take a picture and then receive more information on the subject of the picture. And 2 dimensional barcodes
(such as those on the back of CIL attendee badges)
will be able to hold a greatly increased amount of information. 
 
Web content is increasingly being optimized for viewing on small screens, and there is even a new domain, .mobi, for this kind of content. Services such as skweezer and Google’s Web Toolkit can automatically transcode content (i.e. repurpose it for mobile platforms). Find.mobi is a directory service to find transcoded websites. 
 
Text messaging applications are becoming more popular. “Text friendly” buttons similar to “print friendly” are starting to appear on many websites. You can now make purchases from Amazon using text messaging, and in Japan, gift certificates are sent by text messaging. Search results can be sent to mobile phones as text messages. 

Fortunately, Megan will shortly be making her slides available on her web site, so that you can explore the exciting details about these new advances in mobile platforms.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today, and CIL 2008 Blog Coordinator


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