Nearing the End--INFO 780

I am 2.5 weeks away from being finished with INFO 780 Special Topics in Digital Reference. There is still a lot to be done. I owe 2 new pathfinders and 1 updated one for the Internet Public Library. And, there is a group project that is due this Sunday. My part has been finished for a while but I missed some things in my draft and revised that this morning. All that is left is putting it together which is work but most of the thought and research work has been finished.

I am developing new Pathfinders for Choosing a Cat or Kitten and Finding Mystery Novels. I have drafts of both of them and am continuing to research the topics. The research is fun as always and I have found some interesting new sites to include.

I have been working this morning on updating the Celtic Culture pathfinder. The pathfinder that exists is good and well organized but many of the links are now dead and new ones need to be found.

We also have a couple of small things due such as an analysis of our own contributions. I find this somewhat difficult to write but have an idea of how to approach it that should work.

We had a discussion post due this week about technological and social changes that we think will affect digital reference in the future. I wrote about the utility of bibliomining for improving digital reference and also suggested that I think that notions of privacy are changing and that will affect digital reference and the services libraries offer. I expect the privacy part to be somewhat controversial and am interested in the comments that I will get.

The Fisher Boy by Stephen Anable

I just finished The Fisher Boy by Stephen Anable. It is set on Cape Code, mostly in Provincetown with some forays to Truro (although as the author notes, not a depiction of Truro that is geographically accurate) and Gloucester, MA. Mark, the main character, is part of a troupe of improvisational actors who are looking for bookings in the summer.

Bad things happen in Provincetown this summer, beginning with a dead dog deposited on the steps of the party that always opens the season and a murder of a friend of Mark that soon follows. Added to the usual crush of summer residents is a group called the Christian Soldiers and young blond-hair people who are pan-handling and claim to be from a Scandinavian ship. Added to this is the opening of an exhibit of the paintings of Thomas Royall that includes information about a utopian community that he founded in Truro and that ended badly.

All of this comes together to make a kind of Cape Cod-gothic novel. I doubt that it really conforms to the true gothic genre but there is something about the baroqueness of the plot that reminded me of gothic novels.

As a lover of Cape Cod and a lover of mystery novels, I enjoyed this book greatly.

Pathfinders

In my current course in Library School, Special Topics in Digital Reference, one of our assignments is creating Pathfinders for the Internet Public Library. Pathfinder is another word for subject guides which help the user find information or resources related to a particular subject.

I have chosen to update one pathfinder on Celtic Culture and develop two new ones: Choosing a cat or kitten and Finding Mystery Novels. I think that the current Celtic Culture pathfinder is well-organized by needs to be updated because many of the links are currently broken or the website has not been updated in the last few years.

The research for "Choosing a cat or kitten" has been pretty straightforward--there are so many good and active organizations that have published guidelines for choosing a cat. I even found one that includes a strategy for choosing a cat from a shelter with pretty specific guidelines for identifying the cat with the personality that you seek.

The mystery pathfinder is great fun to research but organizing it is another issue. There are so many types of mysteries and some many sites to choose from. Right now, I am listing them and annotating the websites but it will be interesting to go back and figure out the best method for organizing it.

Content Representation

I recently finished my 8th course in Library School, Content Representation. It was a truly excellent class. The readings were great, challenging and informative and the professor was superb. When you asked a question or introduced a topic, she was always able to provide more articles to read so that you can learn more about the topic.

The assignments were quite interesting as well. The major deliverable was a prototype mini-thesaurus and there was also a group project which involved indexing images that are currently held at the Free Library of Philadelphia. There were also two papers assigned to discuss the indexing process and the group process in which we set parameters and agreed on consensus indexing terms.

I found the projects fascinating, particularly the group one that involved agreeing on our indexing terms. It was a fairly difficult assignment, not because of complexity but because of the need to come to agreement. There were times when I thought that terms assigned were, in fact, incorrect, but the difficulty was in finding a way to challenge them that was not personal or did not cause greater problems in the group.

I am sure that this is a real problem in working groups so it was interesting to experience it in this setting. This was definitely one of the best courses that I took in the Library Science program so far. I can see myself referring to the readings later in my career.

Last week, we attended the annual Mayan Weekend and one of the first talks was about whose story or whose version is reflected in books, histories or museums. In many ways, content representation is like that--you determine what subjects best describe a book or image and that effects how a item is perceived and how it can be found.

Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

I just finished Londonstani, the first novel by Gautam Malkani. It takes place in London as you can tell from the title and is the story of 4 rudeboys. They are part of London's Asian community and refer to themselves as desis which the glossary in the book describes as "self-referential term for the Indian disapora that refers to people and culture." The four rudeboys, one of them is more an aspiring rudeboy than actual rudeboy join with Sanjay, an entrepreneur and former student of their college in a business deal that has tragic consequences. It also serves the vehicle to reveal the final twist that concerns the identify of one of the rudeboys.

The book is written in the jargon of the rudeboys and required much flipping back and forth between the pages of the novel and the glossary. I would have been totally lost without the glossary and found the book slow-going at first because of the constant flipping. As I got further into the novel, I picked up both the terms and the rhythm of Malkani's writing.

This is not a book for people who are offended by profane language.

No one would have believed...

Lee Gomes in his column, Portals, in today's Wall Street Journal lists his top technology trends of 2007 and one is flash memory which allows people to download and view movies on their mobile phones. He mentions that this is something that young people in particular and doing and it echoes something that Chris Anderson observed in The Long Tail and that is that many young people are growing up listening to music on iPods, watching movies on iPods or phones and generally reading most of their content on computers. In other words, while they are still listening to music, reading and watching movies they are doing this on none of the same devices that many of us used when we were growing up. And, further, these are devices that no one would have believed would either be available or used in this way even 15 years ago.

I think that this change is an excellent example of the pitfalls of inside-out design which I have observed in many of the discussions with my classmates in library school. I mean inside-out design to refer to the approach to design which overweights how the individual feels about the product or service. Reactions to electronic books have been typical of this inside-out approach. Many people will say that they love books, love the feel of a physical book and therefore reading books on the computer or on an e-book will never catch on. But, of course, people do read on computers and will certainly embrace e-books if they have certain features such as the ability to search and annotate and eventually decouple the devices from proprietary formats. I must admit that I am looking forward to such a device because I currently carry around several books that I may be reading and notebooks to record my thoughts. The thought of carrying around one device is very appealing and given the positive reaction to the e-ink displays I imagine that it will appeal to other people as well. Of course, maybe this is just another example of inside-out design because it is what appeals to me.

We must be more open to the opportunities that new technology applications bring to our users and even if we do not yet see a role for a device or technology we must become familiar with it and think about how it can be used. Perhaps, we should spend some time interviewing or shadowing the youngest generation of library users and see how they do things.

The dramatic increase in storage capability has made the iPod, digital cameras, powerful laptops and phones that can act as music players and video devices. In 1983, I visited a computer graphics company that did some of the first computer animations. According to Wikipedia, they did 27 minutes of animation for The Last Starfighter and at the time this was considered to be an astonishing amount of animation and this was done on a Cray X-MP supercomputer. I had my photo taken in the midst of the Cray and it was in a single room, incredibly large and shaped like a horseshoe. No one would have believed then that computer animation could be so ubiquitous and that we would now have incredible computer power available from such small and portable devices as our current laptops.

The Long Tail and Libraries

I just finished reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. He writes about how business has been transformed by the Internet and the availability of choices in a business not bound by bricks-and-mortar.

The three main forces behind the Long Tail are:

1. "Democratize the tools of production"--digital cameras, video recorders enlarge the field of content producers beyond the specialist or professional to the passionate amateur.


2. "Democratize the tools of distribution"--this is the role played by aggregators such as Amazon or Netflix


3. "Connect supply and demand" --this is done by filters such as recommendations in Netflix, customer reviews and list on Amazon. Essentially, a filter orders information so a user can find items.

A library would seem to be both an aggregator and use filters via the catalogs. Most libraries allow searching for subjects as well as authors and titles and one could certainly argue that the filters used in libraries could be more robust and some libraries are attempting that by adding patron reviews or linking to patron lists or even allowing tagging by patrons to help identify items using labels that are most meaningful to them.

In my former career in publications, we found that categorizing was, no surprise, the most difficult part of determining how to organize information and we used to have to mediate disagreements between the professional developers who would tell us the proper way something should be organized versus our need to make sure the readers would be able to find the information and the two were often in conflict. We tended to go with an information organization that the readers could understand (which tended to be task-based) because if the they could not find what they were looking for our work was not very successful.

While reading the book, although fascinated by the 80/20 rule and was reminded that we discussed the 80/20 rule in our collection development class--20% of the items circulate 80% of the time. We talked about the importance of user needs surveys to improve our collection practices and our services in general. I have been thinking a lot about user needs surveys and it is clear that while they are very important they are also extremely difficult to do well and I wonder whether we can get better user needs information from examining the circulation data of our own libraries and other libraries using the library's ILS data. Do our library systems collect data about searches that patrons make that are not successful? We could use that data to determine what items they are searching for that they cannot find and determine whether they cannot find them because the items are not available in our collections or whether there is a problem with their search terms or our categorization? That would go a long way to helping us refine our choices.

Anderson argues for the importance of the filter. Businesses such as Netflix are successful because they are able to distribute older films and less-viewed items such as documentaries. In fact, it is a large part of their success because they are able to distribute many of the older and lower-priced DVD options. Most importantly, people are drawn to Netflix because of the older and more obscure films. They simply have titles not found elsewhere and they make it easy to find them via their recommendations and terrific search capabilities. Right now, many libraries do not have the appropriate terms to search for CDs or DVDs; they do not have fields particular to those media, a director, or an actor or performer might get listed as author since that was the closest field available. I can understand that this might be necessary for older systems and older entries but I was quite shocked in a recent class, that many classmates seemed to think that listing a director or performer as author was just fine. Our patrons are getting used to the search capabilities of a Netflix or iTunes and we owe it to them to produce the best search experience that we can.