userslib.com

Congrats to SPO for their release of the Ithaka report (”University Publishing in a Digital Age”).

It uses CommentPress from the Institute for the Future of the Book - so readers can comment on each page and each paragraph.

I was excited when CommentPress was released and thrilled to see it being used by our friends at SPO.

Facebook just released a interface specifically designed for the iphone. I don’t have an iphone, but I think it looks great in a regular browser and might start using instead of the default interface.

http://iphone.facebook.com/
(you must have a facebook account to view)

Sorry for the delay - here are some of my notes from last Tuesday’s MLibrary2.0 Gaming session.

Eli Neiburger: Gaming in the Library?

Eli is from the Ann Arbor District Library and you can find his presentation here.

Eli did an excellent job of describing and putting gamers in context. I think it’s an interesting area that is often overlooked when we think about what activities our patrons (and future patrons) are interested in and how we might use those interests to promote the library.

“Email is how you talk to old people” - AADL gamer

According the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the second most popular activity of those polled (ages 12-17) was gaming at 81%. [I also just came across this Trendspotting blog entry: 1 out of 4 online users are online game players: facts you should know so I think its quite clear that this is an area we ought to pay more attention to.]

• Gamers are very accustomed to dealing with complex interfaces like those used in online role playing games like World of Warcraft. They expect ubiquity. They expect everything to do everything - from water fountains to websites and wifi.
• Content from peers has a higher value than anything else. “Authority” has spent their authoritative capital.
• There are games that some faculty are starting to take an interest in as tools for learning. For example, SimCity and Civilization can be used to teach history, economics, city planning, etc.
• In a study by OCLC: College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, Libraries were rated more trustworthy and accurate than search engines but search engines were rated much higher than Libraries as being more convienient, easy to use, cost effective, reliable and fast. [oh my!]
• Establishing the Library as Third Place. Eric Frierson goes into some detail on this as well as the event in general.
• The Ann Arbor District Library has a blog on it’s front page to share info from the Director, about events, programs, and the collection. Eli said one of the great things about this is that it acts as a sort of focus group because they can get immediate feedback about what’s going on via patron comments.

Jane Blumenthol - Second Life

Jane is the Director of the University of Michigan Health Sciences Libraries where they are working on extensive plans to use Second Life in conjunction with the Medical School. They are planning a whole campus for medical school related events. There will be 3-D models that can be explored and simulations of patient consultations so med school students will have an additional way to practice their bedside mannor.

Her presentation isn’t available online yet, but see her del.icio.us account for many Second Life related links.

Lisa Hinchliffe

Lisa Head of the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Undergraduate Library and spoke about Library 2.0 initiatives. I found this to be an especially inspirational talk because she talked about the technology and being brave, passionate, decisive (just do it!), willing to change your mind, attaining a state of continuous evolution, funding the future, and saying “yes.”
UIUL developed a browser search bar for their catalog, website, and google. They were the first to develop a Facebook app for searching their opac, and they feed their twitter and various blogs into the library’s home page. They circulate games and hold tournaments.

Lisa also gave some great advice for when dealing with innovation: be careful not to put too much importance measuring success. It doesn’t operate like it might with circ & reference stats. Sometimes just trying something new is successful.

There’s a recent trend at our library: non-public service librarians volunteering to do reference. I think this is great! Since my “Interface & User Testing Specialist” position is a primarily HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) based job and doesn’t include any reference duties, I started volunteering a couple of semesters ago. Because it’s part of my job to understand library users - what better way to do that than to spend a couple hours a week helping patrons navigate the tons of resources available to them. Its one thing to look at an online resource and declare “this is so not intuitive!” and another thing to have to repeatedly try to explain to patrons the 20 steps required to find what they want. I feel very lucky to be in a position where I have the opportunity to interact directly with our users outside of an official usability context.

So back to the title of this post. Periodically the idea that librarians are going to become obsolete reemerges. Right, everything is going to be online and fully searchable. But there’s going to be exponentially more information every year. And much of this information will remain proprietary and subscription based. Of course I’m a big proponent of having easy to use interfaces, but interfaces are only useful if they themselves can be found. This is where librarians come in. They are the sifters, funnels, aggregators, and above all mediators between the people and the technology.

Another fantastic video from the TED conference.

In a follow-up to his now-legendary TED2006 presentation, Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software — which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats. (Ten days later, he announced a deal with Google to acquire the software.) He also demos Dollar Street, a program that lets you peer in the windows of typical families worldwide living at different income levels. Be sure to watch straight through to the (literally) jaw-dropping finale.

OCLC Worldcat just added list-making functionality. You have to create an account to use it - here’s the FAQ. This is great to see - especially since I’m currently working on something similar.

I’m curious how many people would use something like this if their OPAC offered it (I know some OPACs do have a “my shelf” type thing - but I don’t think they typically allow you to share your list with others).

I think this could be great for profs to make reading lists, or more social Amazon-like lists so you can create a recommended reading list on a topic.

In light of the recent CIC announcement of a shared repository, I thought it’d be a good time to look at some of the current systems that provide access to digitized books.

Museum of Fine Arts Boston - Hopper Sketchbook

There are a few pageturners that actually animate the action of turning a page. I think they are lovely but definitely only good for special items or exhibits.

Link to example item (click “Hopper’s Sketchbook”)

Princeton University Library Digital Collections

This is definitely one of the most attractive pageturners. I like the thumbnail view, image zooming (though I think the image area could be a bit bigger), and lovely collection browse page.



Link to example item

The Future of the Book - The Iraq Study Group Report

This one’s not quite a “pageturner” because the text was likely born digital so they have the luxury of starting with great text and complete metadata. I think it’s worth mentioning because I like the annotation functionality.



Link to example item

Penn State Digital Library Collections

I pulled this one out because it has more functionality than the average pageturner. It allows you to save favorites, compare 2 pages, order saved to present in a “slideshow” etc.



Link to example item

University of Michigan - MBooks

And I couldn’t possibly leave out MBooks (disclaimer=I work on this project). The Michigan Digitization Project is currently based on the books digitized through the Google partnership but will eventually include items scanned by UM.

About the project | Link to example item

My full collection of PageTurner interfaces

Here is a feed from my delicious for all the pageturners (or pageturner-like systems) that I know about.

Do you know of any others? Please let me know.

I am such a sucker for this kind of thing. I especially like the newspaper interface because it’s such a great solution to current “real estate” issues. And there’s just something really nice about how smooth the zooming is - similar to the iphone and the multi-touch interface.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo