Ontario Library Association Conference, Day 4

Saturday, February 4th, another good day at the conference for me. One hightlight was definately meeting vonjobi (Vernon Totanes) of Filipino Librarian. He's in Toronto doing a PhD at the University of Toronto. It's always a lot of fun meeting bloggers face-to-face after only ever reading their words.

Another hightlight was the Ontario Engineering Librarians meeting. This informal meeting looks like it's going to grow into a more structure for Ontario Engineering librarians to meet regularly and share our experiences. Looks like there's even going to be a blog. I'll post more here as things develope.

The last bit I want to mention is the closing luncheon. The rubber chicken was decent, but I really had to pass on the mushroom sauce (I hate mushrooms) and the salad was about 50% mushrooms too. Just bad luck. At least the carrot cake for dessert was extremely good -- Carrot cake is one of my favourites. The entertainment was Canadian comedian Jessica Holmes of Air Farce fame. She was pretty good, doing some of her signiture impressions like Liza Minelli, Belinda Stronach and Celine Dion.

The only real session that I attended was the Top Tech Trends panel with John Blyberg, Amanda Etches-Johnson and Michael Stephens. This was a good panel with lots of excellent ideas, a great way to condense a lot of trendwatching into a very short period of time. All three panelists took very different takes on the subject, which was interesting.

Amanda Etches-Johnson was up first, and was brave enough to speak without slides; something I wish a lot more of us would do. She identified three main trends we should be watching. First, the growing importance of RSS as a delivery mechanism for all kinds of content. Related to this was the increasing amount of browser integration of RSS amongst the various options. She pointed to the standardization on the little rss icon we all see on blogs and the lower right corner of our browsers. The next trend is a new focus on library websites. She noted that library websites are in trouble and not much real progress has been made on a lot of them since the early days of the web. If we're getting more web traffic than foot traffic in our libraries, then maybe we should think of ourselves as virtual branch managers. We should concentrate of facilitating access to all the great tools that are buried deep in our websites. Finally, Etches-Johnson pointed to the "mindful application of social software" as a trend to watch. By this she meant that we should use social software to be useful in those online social spaces that our patrons inhabit. This involves not having a blog that tries to be everything to everyone, but to target a specific audience and to make sure our social presences have a human rather than institutional feel.

John Blyberg was next. He emphasised the trend towards openness and cooperation: open access, open souce, open spaces, open processes. Libraries are comfortable in our old niche but how to we know we are successful in a new world of collaboration and cooperation. Are we collaborating and cooperating in our own organization. He pointed to Linux as an example of a successful project in the new reality. A world class operating system that was created completely by volunteer effort that has no licensing cost. But, will all this openness lead to something? How about a layer of artificial intelligence on top of all the data on the web, giving us the semantic web where the web can just figure out what we want from what we tell it. We need to check our priorities, open our organizations, initiate content, offer help, cooperate and share.

Last was Michael Stephens. We live in the social web, people live part of their lives online now. Mass collaboration will change everything, people want to talk to each other. Old and new media are converging. The first trend is content: youtube, generate your own Absolut bottle, all these things mean we can generate our own content. Trend: redefine the LIS job, train people to be user experience librarians, web librarians, gaming librarians. Trend: citizen journalism, everyone can be a news reporter or photographer and what does this mean for libraries. Trend: openness and sharing, but remember that open source software is free as in kittens not free as in beer. Trend: participatory culture like tag clouds and library thing, everything is tagable. Trend: experience and play and the new world, like what we can do in Second Life.

There were also quite a few questions, on libraries sharing the content their patrons create; sharing vs. protection; net neutrality; how to trendspot on your own; why there aren`t any open ontologies and what we`re doing now that we can stop doing in order to free up resources to do cool new stuff. One question in particular was kind of telling. A member of the audience suggested that since all aspects of librarianship seem to be permeated with technology these days, to just call this session Top Trends and be done with it. This suggestion prompted some uncomfortable applause. It sounds like a good idea, but seems a bit presumptuous. After all, there are still a lot of areas of librarianship that aren`t dominated by technology issues, like IL, like services for young children and a lot of others too.

Ontario Library Association Conference, Day 3

Friday, February 2nd, another busy day, with three sessions and one plenary on the agenda. The plenary was by Glen Murray, former mayor of Winnipeg and now well-known as an urban advocate. His plenary was quite interesting, making a very good point that we have to nurture all our cities, big and small, encouraging artistic and research-based activities which bring jobs and increase the quality of life. In turn, if you increase the jobs and quality of life, you actually bring more jobs and investment as the city becomes a good place to live. He particularly stressed the importance of libraries as centres of culture in any community. You have to make your city unique and worthwhile and avoid the could-be-anywhere syndrome of so many North American cities.

The morning session I attended was Windows of Opportunity: Faculty SDI in the 21st Century by Heather Matheson (slides, reading list). This was a fantastic, inspirational session which was criminally poorly attended, probably due to other 2.0ish speakers at the same time, and a slightly misleading title. For me, what this session was really about was not using an open source content management system to create a subject based portal to engage your faculty and grad students, feeding them content and in turn getting them to return the favour and contribute to the system (although it was that too). I was really about taking control of our online lives from our IT departments and bringing it into the control of subject specialists, letting us control what we show our patrons, on our time, at our pace and giving them what we think they need, not what we can squeeze out of one-size-fits-all opacs and websites. Want to integrate RSS, blogging, wikis, RefWorks, reviews and the whole kit in your subject portal? Take charge and get it done yourself. Heather used Joomla as the CMS for her project, which required using some of her own server space and getting her ISP to install it for her. I'm pretty sure plain old WordPress would get you about 60-75% of what Heather has done without the sneakiness or expense. I'm inspired, check out her presentation and you'll be inspired too.

Next up was Information Literacy: Program or Process? A Reality Check by Karen Hunt (not actually present), M.J. D'Elia, Marilyn McDermott and Melanie Boyd. This was quite an interesting session, with a lot of thought-provoking points raised in our group discussion. We split up in to two groups (about 30 each). Each group met with one of the presenters for 15 minutes. Then the groups switched moderators. Each moderator told a quick story about some of their anxieties surrounding their IL performances in the class room and then asked some questions to get our reactions to their stories. At the end, we all discussed our interpretation and reactions to the stories. It was a good session and we all had a chance to probe our own feelings about various parts of our instructional lives. On the other hand, the whole thing bore almost no resemblance to the advertised abstract.

We will explore the pros and cons inherent in attempting to structure information literacy around a program model, and the pros and cons inherent in a more process-oriented approach. It will unearth pressures steering us towards one path over the other.

It wasn't about that at all. The facilitator kept saying the words "program" and "process" but they didn't really have much connection to the stories or any of the discussion that was going on. The session was an interesting idea, but I think the organizers went off track at some point in their preparations and weren't able to get back.

The final session I attended was ILS, The Next Generation: Modularity and Outward Integration by Karen Calhoun. Another outstanding session in what's turning out to be a very enlightening conference. This one focused on what the next generation of Integrated Library Systems are going to look like. They're going to be modular and plug and play, like legos, they're going to decouple the discovery system from inventory control and they definately and are to be standards-based and interoperable. Calhoun talked a little about what users want the most -- to use stuff off campus, to use the library as only one element in their research toolbox, more online resources, seemless linking. Our objectives are integrated access, simplified resource management and to become visible in the user's environment. The tools were going to use to get there include federated searching, reference linking, portals and CMSs.

Next Calhoun talked about federated search and it's weaknesses, including slowness, limits on the number of databases that can be searched, incomplete search results and poor relevance ranking. One option is to just forget federated search and just use Google Scholar, but GS isn't really there yet. She also discussed some of the limitation of reference linking, primarily incomplete or inaccurate metadata. Federated searching and reference linking are fundamentally short term solutions for libraries.

One version of the perfect dream system is a unified library system with a very hierarchical set up with integrated interfaces, metasearch and all the content bound together. This is a difficult dream to realize because all the content to so widely scattered and isolated, many not under the library's control. Another way to look at it is to strive for outward integration, allowing us to use library components in new ways. This vision sees library managed collections found using a wide variety of discovery tools, most not managed by the library in any way. Libraries will concentrate on building the digital special collections that make them unique. Library systems will be interoperable and take advantage of the Amazoogles of the world. External discovery of library based collections.

ola2007

Ontario Library Association Day 2: Me & John Blyberg

The first full day of the conference, day 2 was Thursday and it was a good day overall. Since I was presenting at 10.40, I didn't go to any of the earlier sessions and just decided to relax.

My session, Using Weblogs as a Professional Development Tool, went pretty well, with about 40 people attending. Considering that the time was changed since the original program went out, I'm pretty happy with the turnout. The OpenOffice slides are online here and I've also prepared a pdf version here. This is the first project where I've used an OpenOffice module start to finish and I was very happy with the results. It's just as good as PowerPoint for basic presentation usage.

I also convened John Blyberg's 3.45 session, Not So Confidential: Exposing 2.0 Web Sites. It was a pleasure meeting John and I really enjoyed his session, which was thoughtful and provocative yet full of practical advice and commentary.

It began with a discussion of our love/hate relationship with the opac, with the fundamental questions we ask about our opac: what does it serve and what forms should it take. It's always been the way it is, we don't know where to begin changing it and even if we did, we don't have the resources to really transform it. We have to find a way to use what we already have. So, what are some of the opac's shortcomings? It really hasn't gotten any more effective over time, it's not very customizable or extensible or even very attractive visually. And it can't accomodate user-driven improvements.

And what about our websites? They are also visually unattractive, outdated, static, non-intuitive and basically look like they were made by somebody on their lunch hour in a few weeks. (Ouch! -jd) Now, why should we focus on our web and opac? Because first impressions are important. The opac represents the library to patrons, it's the front line of a lot of patron service and the opac meets people where they are.

How can we make web 2.0 work for us? Hincliffe has a post on "10 ways to take advantage of 2.0" (I'll find it later. -jd). We should encourage social contributions with individual benefit, letting people do something for themselves and the larger community. We should make content editable, encourage unintended uses of content and provide a continuous interactive user experience. We should make sure our site has content feeds, let users establish and build reputations, allow remixing of content -- build small pieces loosly joined. This will allow us to identify our keenest, most active users, people we should engage with to make our systems better. We should also remember not to build systems that deny service to users who are less tech savvy or have older software or hardware.

Some fundamentals. We should have single sign-on, open standards, open source, integrated/seemless opac+website, social software to tag & review opac. We should design for innovation: use APIs, community development, mashups, personal apps, encourage elite and energized users. We should allow and exploit gadgets & IPv6, take advantage of cellphones, PDAs and other devices; we should incorporate other services like Google Books and Maps.

We should also step beyond the opac. We shouldn't get hung up on search but should also encourage serendipity and enjoyable discovery, we should test new technologies, stay aware of new trends and just be creative. We should strive to create excitement in our communities. We need to promote and market ourselves wtth outreach and staff and public education, to retrain ourselves and our patrons to a new set of expectations. We need to foster a culture of innovation and lower the barriers to collaboration.

On the other hand, we also need to make sure our social software is appropriately secure and that it protects the privacy of our patrons. We need to get real -- money, staffing issues, vendor issues and the challenges of ongoing maintenance are all potential challenges. We should do more than complain about our vendors -- we need to open the lines of communication and challenge them as much as we challenge ourselves.

So, what are some first steps? We need to make a committment to change. We need to realize that we, as librarians, are not necessarily professional-quality web designers/developers and hire professionals. We need to use our patron's feedback. We need to get to work.

ola2007

Ontario Library Association Conference Day 1: Cory Doctorow Opening Plenary

I just got home from the first day of the OLA Super Conference. I registered, hung out a bit in the speaker's lounge, went to the opening plenary and they hung around a bit at the opening reception for a bit of free food and booze (Dewar's -- Yay!). And bought a book in the OLA Store. I'm a sucker for books, which should come as no surprise, being a librarian and all.

Anyways, to the topic at hand. Cory Doctorow's plenary. I'm not usually much of a conference plenary kind of person. They're usually just an excuse to get all the attendees in front of the sponsor's logos for an hour or so, usually just hired guns, from outside the library field. Well, Doctorow was something different. Famous sf novelist, BoingBoinger, Craphound, activist. I was a little wary that he'd be a bit too strident, but he was great. The title of the talk was "Bits Will Never Get Harder to Copy" and his focus was on copyright issues and protecting the free flow of information from those that would unduly restrict and prohibit, mostly avarous corporations and their government cronies.

Doctorow began by recounting his days as a library page at the North York Central library, remembering in those days that librarians were doing fairly basic things like recommending books to patrons. Now, however, he praises librarians for striving to place information in context, for being the "war heroes of the information wars." As networks get faster and storage cheaper and more plentiful, he imagined a world where all of human creative output could fit in a sugar-cube sized device.

In fact, search is already solved in our world. Finding good stuff to click on or read is hardly the problem anymore, the problem is finding time to read all the incredibly great stuff that you can find with no effort at all. The idea of the Long Tail means that no matter how specific your desires and preferences, you can easily find the good stuff.

The other great thing that's happened recently is that the barriers to collaboration have all but disappeared. He gave the example of Project Guttenberg, where people all over the world can collaborate on proofreading an etext, one page, 10 minutes at a time. How Flicker can create virtual coffee table books using photos from countless people all over the world. How Google uses simple links that everyone creates on their web pages to basically catalogue the web.

On the other hand, some bad news too. Organizations like WIPO and laws like the DCMA conspire to prevent people from taking advantage of the vast cultural resources at their disposal; the music and film industries are at war with their most ardent fans. The American Association of Publishers is fighting Google Book Search when they should realize that the publishers worst enemy isn't piracy, but obscurity. Laws must adapt to meet new technology and circumstances, the genie can't be put back in the bottle, but the incumbents, those that favour laws based on status quo technology, never favour progress and evolution. As well, the legal process must happen in the open, with due process, with no filtering or hidden censorship. Doctorow's closing words were quite inspirational, that librarians must be the moral authorities to stand up for fairness in access to information.

Phew. Enough summary. Did I drink the Kool Aid? Mostly. There were some things I didn't really agree with. For example, the idea that search is solved. It's easy to find stuff if you're just looking aimlessly, eager for diversion or amusement. It's still not easy necessarily to find exactly some piece of information or some particular document, the deep web still has many mysteries and dark recesses. It's also not easy to understand and evaluate the social context of the information. Saying "Search is solved" is too simple. As well, Doctorow more or less dismisses any complaints by rights holders that they should be the ones that decide what uses their works should be put to. It's a bit too facile to just day that obscurity is a bigger problem than piracy, that 90% of stuff is out of print or not available for sale. If you're a rights holder and your work is readily available, there may be a part of your career path where piracy is just a bigger concern that obscurity.

But in the end, quibbles aside, I really enjoyed Doctorow's speech. It was fast & funny and thought provoking and very, very entertaining.

ola2007

Ontario Library Association Annual Conference

I'll be at the OLA Super Conference this year, starting this Wednesday evening until Friday for sure. I'll probably go on Saturday morning for the Tech Trends session but that's not sure yet.

The conference web page is here, the conference blog is here. Oddly, the blog doesn't seem to be linked from the conference home page.

In any case, I hope to post daily summaries here every evening. As for my schedule, I tend not to be one of those people who decides well in advance what he'll attend, so if you are want to catch me at the conference, just watch for me in the halls. I will be at Cory Doctorow's opening session on Wednesday evening.

I am both presenting and convening at the conference so that will be an opportunity to track me down.

I'm presenting session #429: Using Weblogs as a Professional Development Tool on Thursday Feb 1 at 10.40am. I'll let everyone know here when I post my slides.

I'm convening John Blyberg's session #610: Not so Confidential: Exposing 2.0 Web Sites on Thursday Feb 1 at 3.45pm.

ola2007