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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.

This morning was the Gaming & Social Networking, A New Direction for Libraries session, a presentation that was part of the MLibrary 2.0 event series.

The speakers were Eli Neiburger from the Ann Arbor District Library, Jane Blumenthal the Director of Health Sciences Libraries here at UM, and Lisa Hinchliffe, Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Brian Mathews (Information Services Librarian & Distance Learning Services Coordinator, The Georgia Institute of Technology & the Ubiquitous Librarian Blog) was also supposed to speak but couldn’t make it due to flight cancelations.

All the presentations were excellent and I’ll write more about them soon.

For now, I’ve just uploaded some pics of Librarians in action – trying out a few gaming options offered at the AADL. Photos for this event and other MLibrary 2.0 events can be found on the Flickr MLibrary2.0 group page.

Just released yesterday, The Internet Archive’s Open Library project now has an extensive wiki-ish book site. Their goal is for users (anyone) to populate it with every book. Some books already have some full-text and some link to the scanned images via their old pageturner. I think this will be interesting to follow since most of the content is user-generated and I’m wondering how well this will take off. Lots of people already use LibraryThing, but thats more about making your own collection – so there’s (maybe) more incentive to tag and comment. The Open Library is about making one big collection.
Link To Open Library Beta

I’ve just updated the MLibrary 2.0 website to include a link to a few podcasts (thanks to Dave!) from the “MLibrary 2.0: The Future is Now” event we had back in June. There are podcasts of the session introduction from our Associate University Librarian Brenda Johnson and presentations from Kristen Antelman from NCSU and Peter Morville. Here’s a link to the feed.

An article I co-authored just came out in D-Lib Magazine. Its mostly technical, but does touch on some interface issues.

Enhancing Search and Browse Using Automated Clustering of Subject Metadata by Kat Hagedorn, Suzanne Chapman, and David Newman. D-Lib Magazine
July/August 2007, Volume 13 Number 7/8.

Abstract:

…The University of Michigan and the University of California Irvine joined forces to test automatically enhancing metadata records using the Topic Modeling algorithm on the varied OAIster corpus. We created labels for the resulting clusters of metadata records, matched the clusters to an in-house classification system, and developed a prototype that would showcase methods for search and retrieval using the enhanced records. Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources.

As a result of this post, Eric Frierson, Donna Hayward and I bought a poll question on facebook to find out how facebook users prefer to contact their librarians.

Here’s how the poll question appeared in the News Feed of selected Facebook users in the Michigan network:

See the results below

The first thing that stands out is that only 1 out of 200 said they’d prefer to get research help from a librarian on facebook. I don’t suppose this is too surprising because I don’t think people quite yet consider social networking a research tool. I hope this isn’t disconcerting to librarians on facebook because I think there’s still potential here… What I do find really encouraging is that only 38 out of 200 said they weren’t at all interested in contacting a librarian – that’s pretty good! And it looks like in-person interactions are still tops. On a side note, I think it’s really unfortunate that the oldest age range option for the survey is 35-49. So there’s no one over 49 on facebook!?

Yesterday during Scott Martin & Eric Frierson’s MLibrary2.0 Social Networking workshop, Eric mentioned that the UM Usability Working Group has used Facebook to find user testing participants. So here’s a little more information on that…

The Usability Working Group is currently preparing to conduct usability tests on various Library services and finding willing participants is always difficult, even when we offer incentives like we are for this test. We decided to advertise 3 different ways: a news item linked to from the main library homepage, a Facebook marketplace ad, and a Facebook Flyer.

The marketplace listing is free and from what I can tell, the ads only appear on the marketplace listings page. The Flyer is not free and the least amount you can spend is $5 for one day and the ad will be shown to 2,500 users (within the network of your choice) and the ad is larger and appears on the left side of various facebook pages.

We only had the flyer for 1 day, but had the marketplace ad and library website ad for a few days. So, in 5 days we have received 22 total responses. Unfortunately, since we put all our ads up at the same time, it’s difficult to tell where the respondents saw the ad. Perhaps as part of the actual usability tests, we’ll ask them how they found out about our call for participants. What I do know from looking at the web stats, is that there were 45 hits from the marketplace ad and 8 from the flyer. Granted, the marketplace ad was up for much longer, but still I think it turned out to be more successful (and you can’t beat free).

Facebook also offers a poll service. For $6 you can ask one question to a target audience of your choice. Hmmm. I wonder if this could also be useful for getting a quick response about some library issue – like “If your librarian was on facebook, would you add her/him as a friend?”

I (with help from some others) am planning on polling University of Michigan Library users about what library resources they use, what web 2.0 resources they use (and how often), and their perception of the library’s online resources. Does anyone have any suggestions for questions they think would be interesting to include?

A recent British Poll asked internet users about their most hated web terms. Unfortunately, the actual survey report is no where to be found but according to the Communication Overtones blog, the top 10 hated words are (in no order): Folksonomy, Blogosphere, Blog, Netiquette, Blook, Webinar, Vlog, Social Networking, Cookie, and Wiki.

Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

Yahoo Article

13 Book Hacks from LifeHacker. I haven’t tried the 3 library integration tools they mention, but I have used the libX firefox extension (click the link “56 academic and public libraries” to see if there is one for your school) and think it’s pretty useful.