Scan, flick, and power browse

Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future is the title of very interesting and engaging study commissioned by the British Library and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). The work was conducted by CIBER (the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research), an independent publishing and new media think tank based in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) at University College London.

Focused on identifying how the next generation of researchers (i.e. the "Google generation" born after 1993) are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five years' time, the study combines original research drawn from the analysis of system logs and other data with a distillation of the available literature (including OCLC's College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005) [link] and Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World (2007) [link]).

Information Behaviour presents a frank, but remarkably clear and concise story of the library world’s mixture of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats vis-à-vis what this up-and-coming generation of researchers will possess (and lack) in the way of abilities and expectations.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The implications of a shift from the library as a physical space to the library as virtual digital environment are immense and truly disruptive. Library users demand 24/7 access, instant gratification at a click, and are increasingly looking for 'the answer' rather than for a particular format: a research monograph or a journal article for instance. So they scan, flick and 'power browse' their way through the digital content, developing new forms of online reading on the way that we do not yet fully understand (or, in many cases, even recognise)” p.8

This is definitely a report to read and share.

• British Library announcement
  
• PDF version of the report
  

(Spotted via an entry on Andrew Whitis' library+instruction+technology blog)

[Image: Biblioteca Vasconcelos (Mexico City)]

_____

Musical quote:

"Well, starting now I’m starting over (stop it)

To play the game, get even, act my age.

Tick tock, you’re not a clock,

you’re a time bomb, baby,

a time bomb, baby, oh."

"Time Bomb" -- The Format (AMG ; WCid ; Wikipedia ; Web site)

The Noblest Taboo

“If I tell you how I feel,
Will you keep bringing out the best in me?
You give me, you give me the sweetest taboo.”

“The Sweetest Taboo” -- Sade (Website ; WCid ; Wikipedia ; composed by Sade & Martin Ditcham)

A very happy Fair Use Day to one and all (and thanks to Aaron for alerting me via twitter). 11 July has been designated as Fair Use Day by the folks at Fair Use Day

Fair Use (Wikipedia entry) is a concept in U.S. law that effectively provides a limited, legal defense against liability for copyright infringement if the use of the copyrighted content is for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, and the use meets a four point test as specified in 17 U.S.C. § 107.

Like almost anything in the copyright arena, there are nuances, and one can expect to find significantly differing opinions about what does and does not constitute “fair use” under the provisions of U.S. law.

Here is a sample of potentially useful resources:
o Fair-Use: Overview and Meaning for Higher Education (Copyright Management Center)
o Copyright and Fair Use (Stanford)
o Highlights of the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia (Penn State) [ppt]
o AALL Guidelines on the Fair Use of Copyrighted Works by Law Libraries

Nice to see Fair Use Day earn a mention on several high-profile blogs including:
o boingboing
o ars technica

It should be noted that this general concept of educational and similar uses exceptions to copyright is also present in the law of other nations; for example, in Commonwealth nations there is a kindred concept called “Fair Dealing” (Wikipedia entry).

So, dear readers, know the law, and help your users make full use of the privileges it accords. And celebrate Fair Use Day every day!

One of the Wonders

“They say I must be one of the wonders,
Of God's own creation,
And as far as they see they can offer,
No explanation.”

“Wonder – Natalie Merchant (Website ; WCid ; Wikipedia)

I suspect many IAG readers may have seen references to a recent article in the New York Times (“A Hipper Crowd of Shushers” – [Note: may require registration to access]) that follows on the heels of a piece in the New York Sun (“For New-Look Librarians, Head to Brooklyn”) which also seems to have been picked up by the New York Press (“Too Cool For School”) and is garnering attention in various blogs and other outlets (see below).

The subject of the pieces is, in large part, a group founded by Maria Falgoust and Sarah Murphy, the Desk Set (myspace), "an informal group of librarians, archivists, library science students and other individuals who love books," which periodically has social events in bars in Greenpoint or Williamsburg (i.e. New York City area). The articles focus on the librarians being young, hip, technologically savvy, and contemporary-culture literate. It seems to surprise the press that librarians could indeed be cool, and this issue of journalists' persistently errant standing perceptions (i.e. librarians all wear hair buns and say “shush” a lot) is earning the press a bit of umbrage from libraryland – at least as I judge by reactions among my friends on twitter and in the blogosphere – no doubt for statements like:

“And, in real life, there are an increasing number of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology.” (NYT article)

Silly made-up words like “guybrarians” (I’m male and a librarian, but I’m not a “guybrarian”) aside, I find the overall flavor of the coverage rather pleasing. Librarians, archivists, and museum folks are cool – probably have been to varying degrees for the life of the profession, but it’s nice to see it recognized in words and pictures. And frankly, I think we are seeing a bit of a sea change (and yes, I was in library school in the 80’s – love my classmates, but Rick Block is right: the library science students then weren’t as interesting as they are now) – this new cohort is much more a “let’s try it” crowd versus a longstanding, well-entrenched “let’s wait till we’re sure” attitude that has pervaded the profession for too long.

Coverage in libraryland and the blogosphere I’ve spotted (oh, and you may want to follow some of the linked sites – interesting stuff):

librarian.net
LJ Insider
Suggested Donation
Gothamist

So, we each must be one of the wonders. (Myself, I wonder if IAG can get an invite to a Desk Set gathering and maybe try a few of those Dewey-numbered drinks? I’m guessing the drinks are all good!)

Canada Day

“I believe there is a distance I have wandered,
To touch upon the years of,
Reaching out and reaching in,
Holding out, holding in.”
“Elsewhere” – Sarah McLachlan (Website ; WCid ; Wikipedia ; Encyclopedia of Music in Canada ; myspace)

1 July is Canada Day (Fête du Canada) [Wikipedia] a national holiday [Canadian Encyclopedia] – formerly known as Dominion Day – that commemorates the establishment of Canada as a dominion (i.e. a self-governing country that retains close ties to the British monarchy) on 1 July 1867.

We extend warmest greetings and best wishes to all of our Canadian readers, the wonderful folks who work in the thousands of cultural institutions across Canada – with a special shout out to our OCLC participating institutions and the WebJunction institutions in Canada – and our colleagues at OCLC Canada. (For more information on libraries in Canada, see, for example, the “Libraries” article in The Canadian Encyclopedia, or do a search in the WorldCat Registry).

Happy Canada Day!

Farewell, Alane

“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,
And she’s always gone too long.”

“Ain’t No Sunshine” – Bill Withers (Website ; WCid ; Wikipedia ; Soultracks)

Alane Wilson’s final post on It’s All Good noting her departure from OCLC exhibits what IAG readers have come to expect from her posts, Alane’s audiences from her presentations, and her colleagues from her interactions – an admirable eloquence, openness, and irrepressibly forward-looking view.

Alane, we shall miss your insights and voice.

I suspect that Alice, Chrystie, George, and I singly and collectively are at best only partially aware of the full scope and value of Alane’s dedication and hard work at OCLC, but first to mind is her work on the award- winning The 2003 OCLC environmental scan : pattern recognition : a report to the OCLC membership, and her follow-on work on later OCLC reports along with her many presentations about key trends and the future of libraries in so many settings. Indeed, this blog arose from the process of following up on the 2003 report. Alane has also been pivotal in the organizing and delivering of the well-received OCLC Symposium event at ALA Annual meetings, and our popular Blog Salons.

Alane, we shall miss your organizational skills and counsel.

As Alane notes in her post, Alane, Alice, Chrystie, George, and I have had more collegial contact in the last few years than we did prior. This has definitely been a good thing, and though we’ll keep the IAG co-blogger fires burning, Alane’s absence will be keenly felt – I fear the sun will shine a little less brightly on our all too infrequent gatherings.

Alane, we shall miss your comradeship and humor.

And if Alane’s work has been instructive in no other way, she has taught us that transitions are opportunities, and transitions are also needful things. Moving a continent’s width away to try something new is exciting and invigorating. Bravo for you, Alane. We’ll look forward to reading what you have to say about what you learn perched as you will be on the Pacific Rim.

Alane, dear friend, we send our best wishes to you and yours.

And so it goes; in the end, it all changes, but ultimately it’s all good.

Lovin' the Legal Stuff

“Am I the only one who hears the screams,
And the strangled cries of lawyers in love?”

“Lawyers in Love” – Jackson Browne (Web site ; WCid ; Wikipedia)

In an thoughtful column, “Librarians and Licensing,” [excerpt] in the March 2007 issue of InfoToday, K. Matthew Dames (of CopyCense) discusses the surprising absence of offerings in library science programs of formal coursework in content licensing.

Dames laments “another yawning gap in contemporary information professional education: the lack of training in licensing electronic content.” (The “other” gap being a paucity of copyright education). Acknowledging that in the course of teaching independent content licensing seminars and a graduate seminar at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies Dames has never met a single librarian (other than those attending his seminars) who “has completed a class or seminar on licensing or content procurement as part of his or her library science education,” Dames asks:

“Assuming that the procurement mechanism for electronic content is a license, how can librarians fulfill the fundamental role of collection development in the 21^st century if they can’t read, understand, and negotiate those contracts?”

Overall he presents a well-rounded development of his theme, “Buying econtent is serious business.” Key points Dames makes:

• It is common for agencies to spend $ millions annually across their econtent portfolio
  
• Econtent procurement competence requires a varied skill set in privacy law, copyright law, digital rights management, and a grasp of the ever-changing publishing landscape and much more
  
• Expertise in e-content licensing is unusual as a procurement competence outside the information profession: for many institutions and companies, in-house counsel will not have this expertise – the responsibility for the institution’s legal and financial investment and risk exposure will often rest squarely with the econtent procurement staff member(s) at the library
  
• The position tasked with econtent procurement may have many names, but if “called a librarian, chances are it will not command the organizational respect, compensation, and resources it deserves.”

Dames offers suggestions for introducing the topic of procurement in far greater depth in library and information studies. I certainly commend the full article to your attention.

Thinking back on my own MLS, I had little graduate training in the legal end of librarianship. Yet looking forward through my professional work even unto now I have had to read, understand, and even help craft licensing agreements. Indeed, management of electronic products was assigned to me as one my first “duties as assigned” extras on my first day in my first professional job. From that point I have found myself studying and learning on my own by necessity, and I also have been fortunate to have persons with genuine expertise to coach me.

I think one might reasonably argue that librarians have long been “technicians of the intersections” – perhaps what distinguishes Librarian 2.0 from Librarian 1.0 is less the new tools applied and more the mix of new stuff. Econtent licensing expertise is surely one of the more richly textured intersections librarians must master. Are we giving the econtent procurement competency its due with respect to preparing professionals, or – as Dames asserts – is it something library science and information studies programs are failing to give the emphasis such deserves in a Web 2.0 world?

Side Streets

“Till then I walk the side streets home,
Even when I’m on my own.”
“Side Streets” – Saint Etienne (Web site ; Wikipedia entry) from the album Tales from Turnpike House (Wikipedia entry)

Turnpike House is a real building in the London area, and the songs on Saint Etienne’s concept album, Tales from Turnpike House, weave flashes of several fictional character’s lives set in flats in the building. Reviews (sample reviews: 1, 2, 3) offer more backstory than I’ll offer here, but let’s just say the reviewers and I concur: Tales is the exception to the rule – this concept album actually works.

And speaking of concepts that work: OCLC Research has been working on a project called WorldCat Identities. Chief Scientist Thom Hickey – my boss – has been the lead on a project to build the infrastructure to automatically generate one HTML page per identity (i.e. an identity being character, person, animal, or organization, etc. referenced in selected fields in a bibliographic record) in WorldCat – about 19 million unique identities at last count. The pages draw from bibliographic data in WorldCat which is used in conjunction with authority file data to provide information about and list works by the identity, reveal related identities, display publishing patterns, and offer whatever other information of interest we can mine and display. And the works listed link to – you guessed it – WorldCat.org.

Like many projects OCLC Research has undertaken in recent years, WorldCat Identities builds on prior work by OCLC and RLG.. WorldCat identities draws inspiration from RLG’s RedLightGreen and leverages FRBR (work clustering), Audience Level (surmising audience), VIAF (linking common identities in diverse authority files), NameFinder (user-typo-tolerant searching support), Dewey Browser (DDC made visual) and makes use of SRU, a protocol that OCLC has worked with the Library of Congress and others to develop. And, of course, WorldCat – the collective work of thousands of libraries and tens of thousands of librarians – is the key data source.

Thom’s various entries on his blog, Outgoing (see this entry and later posts) and posts by Lorcan and Walt have talked about the project. Tim O'Reilly gave it a nice write up on O’Reilly Radar. And WorldCat Identities has also been mentioned by a number of other blogs (see the end of this post for links to posts I’ve found).

The attention is gratifying and confirms the generally positive reactions and excitement face-to-face demonstrations of iterations of the project have engendered when Thom has presented WorldCat Identities in various settings. We’re also delighted to be working with our RLG Programs colleagues and several RLG partner institutions to get some early, expert feedback on WorldCat Identities.

As a fallen cataloger and recovering reference librarian, I’ve been impressed with WorldCat Identities in many ways. It leverages libraries’ investments in bibliographic and authority data. Each page is just the sort of by-and-about presentation to make undergraduate-doing-a-paper-about-a-person reference transactions go much faster than helping the user assemble some version of the same on their own. And the links to related identities offer a very addicting experience for the curious – the “side streets” are many and often quite interesting. Some nice examples of pages that work well:

• Victor Hugo
• Hayao Miyazaki
• Barbara Streisand
• Peter Pan (Fictitious character)
  

But all is by no means perfect. Searching the names listed above in WorldCat Identities returns search results that show variations in how the names have been recorded in bibliographic records – some differences in form of name no doubt reflect different authoritative forms of name adopted by various communities (and VIAF offers the potential means to link multiple authoritative forms efficiently), but more than a few the variations arise from errors in the underlying data, errors that keep apart things that should be put together or alternatively put together different persons and their works as a single identity.

There are also some not-quite-as-expected-by-the-user ordering and ranking of works associated with some identities (see for example Elvis Presley), but it’s not so obvious how to “fix” many of these unexpected results (the criteria applied make logical sense for most pages) – tinkering with ranking often fixes one case only to break many, many more. And, of course, for those music lovers among us, it’s wonderful to find so many persons involved with music, but at this stage in the project, WorldCat Identities does not yet include corporate headings so no musical groups are given their own pages (and yes, you may spot a few, but they’re not really supposed to be there – these reflect a small but visible corpus of MARC tagging errors). Note that corporate identities will be added at some point – it’s a research project, after all, and we didn’t put in every feature we’d planned on day one.

So I invite you, gentle reader, to try WorldCat Identities out and let us know what you think. And if you find some especially compelling side streets, please leave a comment on this post so we can all retrace your steps.

{Posts relating to WorldCat Identities in various blogs (feel free to add more references via the comments – apologies in advance to those I might have missed): English-language: Baby Boomer Librarian, Catalogablog, DigitalKoans, Family Man Librarian, Household Opera, Library Stuff, Notional Slurry, PersonaNonData, Thinking Out Loud, Tom Keags, Vacuum, Wikimetrics ; French-language: Figoblog, affordance.info ; Italian-language: Fermo 2003 ; Japanese-language: Current Awareness Portal ; Romanian-language: ProLibro. Wikipedia articles incorporating WorldCat Identities links: Bill Clinton, Brad Pitt}

Photo: Doorways in the French Concession area of Shanghai. (c2004 Eric Childress)