Google Scholar

In the scan, we talk a lot about how research and the scholarly environment are changing, and here's an example of something that could make a huge difference. Google is introducing a new service, Google Scholar, that will allow users "to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research."

Yes, this will include results from the Open WorldCat program, which is particularly important since much of this material isn't available in electronic format yet. It will be even more useful after Google has harvested all 57 million WorldCat records, instead of the 2 million records in the pilot subset.

Being Blue and Seeing Red

As a Canadian with a green card that allows me to work in the US, I have two things to contribute to the larger debate about being in the US or being in Canada, post election.

Number one: Americans know that many people left the US during the Vietnam war rather than be conscripted....and Canada was a place that many "draft dodgers" went.

What many Americans don't know is that in the 70s there was a significant migration from the US to Canada of people who disagreed with national politics, not just the draft dodgers. My English department at the U of Waterloo, in Ontario, had perhaps 2/3 of its faculty--male and female--come from the US. And at the U of Calgary where I worked for years, most departments--including the library-- had a significant number of faculty with US citizenship. So, if there is a migration from the US as a result of this most recent election, it's nothing new.

Number two: Librarians are covered by the NAFTA agreement. We are on the list of professions that are allowed to cross borders based on a job offer. This is how I got my job in Alaska. In my opinion, it's all good! Cross pollination is healthy and the profession benefits.

We do not, as a rule, remark on politics here at "It's All Good" but I did want to remind librarians that we are one of the blessed professions that have official sanction to cross borders...the NAFTA borders at least.

RFID: Libraries on the Fast Track?

CNet News.Com had a very interesting story last month on what RFID will mean for the libraries, stores, and other customer service outlets. The article discussed the civil liberties implications of RFID tagging, and the concept that someday RFID could replace traditional cataloging.

But for all of us who spend long nights wringing our hands over the glacial pace of change in libraries, this quote is a tonic:

"Libraries are much further along with using RFID in a consumer environment than anybody else," said Jim Lichtenberg, an IT consultant to libraries. "They represent a wonderful test-bed in which to work through the issues of RFID because they have such a profound concern about the rights of their patrons."

Less thrilling, especially for those of us around OCLC, was this concept, which was not directly quoted but was attributed to Vinod Chachra, chief executive officer of Visionary Technology in Library Solutions (VTLS):

He envisions a day when libraries completely do away with the time-tested Dewey Decimal classification system, opting instead for a sort of organized chaos governed by the vigilant and unblinking eye of RFID ... With all corners of a library constantly monitored by a network of RFID readers, librarians could just toss a book on any old shelf. Finding it again would just require querying a computer that's linked to the RFID system and knows where everything is. The most popular books would end up in the front of the library while the less used get pushed to the back and reshelving would be a breeze.

So much for the serendipity of finding another book on the same topic that you weren't expecting, eh?

Find It in a Nearby Library

George, Alane and I have agreed to share our soapbox today with Andy Boyer, one of the creative minds behind the Open WorldCat program.

A bit of context about Open WorldCat
As you may have heard, OCLC and Yahoo! are working together to raise the visibility of libraries with a co-branded Web browser toolbar. The news release from one of our most faithful blog readers, Bob Murphy, explains the project.

Andy's guest posting

Want a quick way to find library resources online?

We [OCLC] have teamed up with the Yahoo! Toolbar folks to make it easier for you to access two million of the most popular records found in WorldCat, a central catalog of library holdings. The Yahoo!/OCLC toolbar is a project associated with Open WorldCat, a new OCLC initiative designed to increase the online visibility of libraries and their collections.

The toolbar lets you restrict your search to just the WorldCat database and locate libraries in your area that house materials you'd expect to find in libraries: books, movies, and historical archives.

To find WorldCat records, enter a search term in the toolbar's search box, and click
either the WorldCat logo or select "Libraries" from the drop-down menu next to
the "Search Web" button.

See the visual here.

The WorldCat bibliographic database was built by thousands of librarians over several decades, and maintained by OCLC. It has 57 million catalog records for items in nearly 1 billion locations.

We're busy making the rest of the WorldCat database available to crawl and if you're
interested in watching it grow (every 12 seconds, a new record is added to
WorldCat), check out: http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/grow.htm.

Also, if you're attending the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey this week, stop by the Yahoo! Search-sponsored Internet Café where the Yahoo!/OCLC toolbar will be on every computer.

--Andy Boyer
Open WorldCat Product Manager

The OCLC "Top 1000 in WorldCat" List

OCLC Research released this list a few days ago. It's visually pleasing and has a lot more features than just a flat list of titles. You can look at lists by predetermined subject, banned books, books that have been turned into films, and so on. You can also vote on your own "top titles."
What struck me, though, is the non-stuffy, light-hearted way in which the text was written, as well as the quotes chosen to accompany each page...one of my favourite Groucho Marx quotes heads the main page, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
So, I'd like to say thanks to Shirley Hyatt, the OCLC Research staffer responsible for the "voice", for making this new space a "sticky" place to spend some time. Because, remember, the "experience society" prefers learning that is fun.

Inviting money-changers into the temple of knowledge?

A great article from Beth Dempsey that puts the library as third place idea squarely in dialogue with how we (libraries) survive monetarily.

Get behind me, satan
Interestingly enough, she notes that a lot of the pushback for service enhancements do not come from mayors, city councils or users--but from the librarians themselves.

Passports with periodicals
Coolest thing from the article was reading about how Ferguson Public Library in Stamford, CT took on the overflow from the passport agency next door--and soon realized that people like coming to the library much more than they do a cold and boring passport office. And they'll pay for the convenience. I expect they'll continue to return to the library, long after their passport arrives.

And then there's Starbucks
They'll also return to the Ferguson Public Library because they've had a Starbucks since 1999. Love it or hate it, Starbucks is the Wal-Mart of coffee shops. Even my neighborhood grocery store has a Starbucks in it. And I see people trudging around--cart full, latte in hand. In fact, there are 14 "urban coffee opportunities" in my zip code radius.

"Cashing in on Service" from 11/1 on the Library Journal Web site.

Google results to my mobile phone

Okay this isn't a service I would expect to be provided by libraries YET--but it does fit in the "This is cool and I can see it in a couple of years" category:

Google can now send localized information to your mobile phone. You just text message what you're looking for and your zip code. I did pizza 43017 [the ZIP/postal code for OCLC in Dublin, OH] and sent it to 46645. I got back 4 results in about 15 seconds. They even filtered out my most un-favorite pizza place in Dublin, which will not be named. Is this Sheer Genius on Google's part or what?

It's a short step from finding the closest pizza place to finding the closest library. And then from finding the closest library to the closest book/CD/content available from the closest library.

So when can Open WorldCat move to my mobile phone? With Google's SMS, it looks like it's pretty soon!

E-Scan and Virtual Reference

As I blog today, I'm sitting at the registration desk at the 6th Annual Virtual Reference Desk Conference, which OCLC Member Services co-sponsors with the Information Institute at Syracuse University and ALA's RUSA (Reference and User Services Association). The conference opened this morning with a rousing oration by "Virtual Dave" Lankes on what reference wants to be when it grows up, and by Eva Miller from the Multnomah County Library who addressed the "Improvisational Librarian." I don't want to spoil this for you in case you ever have the great good fortune of hearing Eva, but suffice it to say she had the whole audience of 250 or so people riffing lyrics and music to the results of a survey she'd done. Dave Lankes has been one of the driving forces behind Virtual Reference Desk for the better part of a decade now. Dave, as I said in my introduction this morning, has the uncanny ability to be intense without being creepy. He is passionately committed to the future of reference, whatever that might be, but he doesn't make your skin crawl when he's talking about it.

The point I made during my very brief opening remarks is that virtual reference is a sterling example of what is driving the landscape at the moment. (OK, full disclosure moment: my portfolio at OCLC also includes responsibility for QuestionPoint and 24/7 Reference.) Virtual reference allows us to offer our services at the point of need (or, as I heard Lorcan Dempsey quote someone the other day, "the point of inspiration.") It allows us to disaggregate collections, making service available across a wide geographic area without necessarily having a large collection of materials close at hand. It allows us to collaborate in new and interesting and even challenging ways.

We have about 350 or 375 people here in Cincinnati (at the amazingly beautiful Hilton Netherland Hotel) for the conference, attendees, speakers, staff, and exhibitors included. There is a lively exchange of ideas happening in the meetings, the corridors, and (inevitably at a library conference) in the bar. If you want to know what we're doing, check out the previous conference proceedings on the Syracuse site, and Neal-Schuman will be publishing the proceedings in hardcover form next year.

"Communicontent"

I think we might have had a bit of a post-election funk. There didn't seem to be much to say.

But, this essay on "communicontent" from a fellow I've never come across before, Russell Beattie, is most thought-provoking, and really fits well with the "Content, Not Containers" report we released not long ago. Russ has a pretty strong copyright statement on his site that I'll honour by not quoting directly from his posting. But, go read it. He has some very interesting thoughts on blogging, the web, mobile devices, content and communication. I am going to quote one sentence because it should tempt librarians to read the whole thing.

"In order to create communicontent, pure content needs meta-data, and pure communication needs organization."

"If Things Seem Under Control, You're Not Going Fast Enough"

Apparently, Mario Andretti made the remark that is today's title. Makes sense that a race car driver would say this. I have driven on a racing oval once and at about 70mph, going around a tight curve, the instructor grabbed my steering wheel and yanked it hard to the right to make my cornering much, much tighter. To that fellow, 70mph was slow. It's all relative.

As a kid, I knew who Mario was, as well as Jackie Stewart, Emerson Fittipaldi, Sterling Moss and Jack Brabham. My brother Andrew had a pedal car designed like a racing car, with a number on the side. And if you look at the photo at this link, I sat with my dad sometime in the early 60s on the crest of the ridge watching cars come up the hill in an event called the "Rest and Be Thankful" hill climb. So, perhaps my penchant for speed, both in cars and in the pace of change is something I absorbed young.

OK, enough time in the past!

We've not been here much lately. We've been busy in the real world. As George mentioned, our Members Council delegates got to hear from 2 real gamers who are also real academics. I found Kurt and Constance's presentations fascinating as did many other attendees. I think it might be the first time I've heard "semiotic" said at an OCLC meeting. The video of their presentation will be up on the public OCLC web site soon as will the minutes of the other meetings and sessions. We'll let you know when they are.

Lorcan Dempsey, VP Research, passed this along over the weekend: "Computer games should be taught in schools because they are good for children's development, researchers said today. " The whole article is in TES (The Times Education Supplement), October 26.

Lorcan's until-now-internal-to-OCLC-only blog was released to the world on Friday. He's been posting to it for about one year so there's a lot of content there. It has the utilitarian name "Lorcan Dempsey's weblog" and you'll note immediately that he's much better than we are at the mechanics. And he's much more research oriented--no suprise there, he's supposed to be.

And I wanted to write a cogent little paragraph about manga and other graphic novels but have run out of time, so I am just going to link to a bunch of things that I think are interesting in and of themselves, and that all together make me wonder what this trend means.

• From The Economist, How to say a lot without a lot of words
• From AsiaInc, Lessons from a comic book
• From Inet-Too, a training company in Calgary, AB, Reading Between the Pictures: Graphic Novels, the Internet, and Your Library
• From Steve Raiteri, Green County PL in Xenia, OH, Recommended Graphic Novels for Public Libraries
• From The Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne, Mad for manga.
• From the Christian Science Monitor, 'Hamlet' too hard? Try a comic book

Rock the Burrito

This has nothing to do with the scan, libraries or OCLC.
But if you like Mexican food, read on:

Chipotle is giving away free burritos, to encourage Americans to vote. How cool!

Of course, I could speculate on the demise of democracy, about how our corporations must bribe people with marketing gimmicks to remind them to exercise their rights of representation...

Instead I'll just say, Rock on Chipotle!

Check it out.

A Friday Grab Bag

Finally, today I can take a breath and look about me. I have been working on a report due to our Members Council delegates this weekend and it's been a lot of work, but we're printing it right now.

My visit to Connecticut seems like really old news now. I was there on October 7 speaking to the attendees at the annual Connecticut Library Leadership Conference. It's sponsored by the Association of Connecticut Library Boards, (it represents public library boards in the state) the Connecticut State Library and The Connecticut Library Association. I was there at the invitation of Ken Wiggin, the state librarian.

The composition of this audience was at the opposite end of the age spectrum from my British Columbia visit. As is often the case with Board members, many were elderly. I ate lunch with two trustees of a medium sized town's public library who were pleasant company, and who clearly cared a great deal about their library and for whom most of the trends I was going to be speaking about were terra incognito. But they took lots of notes. And one fellow who is overseeing the building of a new library in his area told me he was going to have to rethink having permanently fixed desks in the main area of the library. He thought they may want more flexibility in how the space was used and set up.

And then there was the gentleman who wanted to have an animated exchange with me about the numbers we published in the Scan on how money was allocated to public institutions. In the scan, we have a graph of the aggregated worldwide total for expenditures in sectors such as health, social welfare, education, with military spending added for comparison. He suggested we had skewed the data by not presenting US spending separately. I pointed out that we normally get criticized for doing exactly that, and that we had aimed for a broader view than a strictly US one. He wasn't happy and repeated that we had skewed data. Not sure what part of the political spectrum he represented but there was some political point he wanted to make.

Lorcan Dempsey, VP Research and Chief Strategist at OCLC, and also co-author of the Scan is a guest columnist for CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) in the U.K. In his latest article he discusses "Three Stages of Library Search" in the CILIP Update Magazine.

"Hardly a day goes by without another arrangement between an information provider and Google or Yahoo to expose its collections for search on the web. Everybody wants to be ‘on web’. Google and Yahoo, in turn, are eager to find as many ways as possible of connecting their users to valuable material currently hidden in ‘off-web’ database silos. Most of the digital resources that libraries manage are currently off web: they do not offer themselves up to the Google user. Increasingly, ‘on web’ means available in Google."

And I noted this on Rafat Ali's PaidContent site: "What Amazon is creating, ultimately, is "pull" media -- entertainment as marketing. This is the kind of messaging that's going to succeed in today's niche-focused, consumer controlled environment. " What he's talking about is a blurring of commerce, content and entertainment. Go to the Amazon main page (at least, here in the U.S. it's the first page) and there's a little screen for a video clip of Jon Stewart talking about his latest book, America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction. I watched it immediately--it's funny and short. And perhaps it's no coincidence that the book is Amazon's best seller right now.

Could libraries add some of this "pull" media to their web sites?

And noted in "Above the Fold" from NewsScan Daily (here's their web site and subscription info--it's free): The Washington Post item being noted requires registration and as I haven't registered, I've not looked at the source.

"GOOGLE ON A GLOBAL MISSION
Google is reporting that sales and profit more than doubled in the third quarter, despite a one-time expense of more than $200 million. Explaining the company's success, co-founder Larry Page says: "We have the world's greatest engineering talent. Google has the means to innovate rapidly. This infrastructure is a competitive advantage to Google across all of our existing products." He says the company's business strategy "is about solving problems that matter to many people on a global scale. We have only begun work on our mission to organize the world's information to make it more accessible." ( ">Washington Post 21 Oct 2004)

Holy Hegemony, Batperson...doesn't this sound an awful lot like another organization's mission? Like OCLC's? OCLC exists to further access to the world’s information and reduce library costs by offering services for libraries and their users.

Bonjour from Boulder

Greetings from Boulder, CO--home of OCLC's NetLibrary eBooks and eContent development. A group of us from Dublin has been out here, learning about the intricacies of how to create audiobooks, eBooks and more.

It's been a steep learning curve, for sure. 77,635 eBook titles and counting. They load about 1200 new titles every month. And audiobooks come soon. The NetLibrary technology team has tested something like 40 different portable devices for the .wma playback for audiobooks through the Windows MediaPlayer, which has DRM capabilities built-in.

Non-English content is going to start happening in a big way in 2005, I hear--especially for Latin American Spanish.

As Jay Jordan, our CEO, likes to say, "It's a great time for libraries!"

Gaming the Members Council

This weekend, OCLC's Members Council will meet here in Dublin. One of the topics on the agenda is gaming. Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkueler from the University of Wisconsin - Madison will discuss "The Anatomy of a Gamer" on Sunday night, and three gamers on the OCLC staff will give a real-life demo on Monday morning.

As part of the preparation for this meeting, delegates and guests were assigned several readings. My personal favorite was "Gaming the System: What Higher Education Can Learn from Multiplayer Online Worlds," written by JC Herz. Here is a quote from that essay that seems particularly relevant to the Scan:

If a gamer doesn't understand something, there is a continuously updated, distributed knowledge base maintained by a sprawling community of players from whom he can learn. "Newbies" are schooled by more skilled and experienced players. Far from being every man for himself, multiplayer online games actively foster the formation of teams, clans, guilds, and other self-organizing groups. The constructive capabilities built into games allow players to stretch the experience in new and unexpected directions, to extend the play value of the game, and in so doing garner status (custom maps, levels, characters, and game modifications are all forms of social currency that accrue to the creators of custom content, as they are shared among players.) ... Of course, not all players roll up their sleeves and write plug-ins. But if even 1% contribute to the innovation of the product, even if they are only making minor, incremental improvements or subtle tweaks, that's ten thousand people in research and development.

This is the most fascinating thing about the whole gamer gestalt to me. The idea of creating new universes with their own social, cultural, and financial systems, just blows me away. A few years ago, someone who created his own universe was shuffled off to the laughing academy. Now, he is celebrated as a citizen of a "persistent multiplayer online world."

And, I suddenly realize in one of those Homer Simpson moments, therein lies the difference. The person who created his own universe in the olden days (say, before 1992) was the only inhabitant of that universe. Now, there are score of thousands of people living right there with him!

Catching Up, Period.

George has shamed me into doing a better job of recording where I've been, although I doubt I'll be as good at describing my travels. One reason is I've let too much time go by and although I still like to think my memory is as good as it once was...the truth is, it isn't and I should take a lot more notes than I do. And the other reason is I am not as good a raconteur as George.

I too went to talk to library school students--mentioned as an upcoming trip in this space a while ago. At the end of September, I spoke to about 35 masters and doctoral students, and some faculty, at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, which is where I received my own MLIS in 1986. The coordinator of my visit was Heather McNeil, once a student in the archival program at the same time I was in the library program, and now, a professor of archival studies. Truly, though, except for a drastic hair colour change (that was flattering), Dr. Heather looked, to me, much as she had 20 years ago.

This was my youngest audience yet....I am usually speaking to people who sometimes find the trends we focus on in the Scan terra incognito, but this crowd was one with the Borg. There were a lot of nodding heads when I spoke about seamlessness and gaming, and the clash of cultures in libraries. I did a pretty strong pitch for research by library school students on gaming and its relevance to information literacy acquisition, and I think a few eyes lit up.

I was travelling with Wendy McGinnis, the OCLC Director of Public Relations and Communications. We left Vancouver to travel to Victoria, capital of British Columbia, and on Vancouver Island, and did so in style on a very large BC ferry, Spirit of British Columbia. The ferry ride is about 90 minutes and these big ferries can hold hundreds of vehicles. Wendy and I wrapped up (it was sunny but windy) and found a good spot at the front of the ferry. This turned out to be a very good decision because as the ferry came into Active Pass (quite narrow and full of conflicting sea currents) the captain announced that the sister ferry coming through the pass from the sea side had spotted killer whales. I've seen orcas only once before, later in the year when they swim lower in the water, fins barely breaking the surface. They are big and I was truly glad I did not see any when I was kayacking off the west coast of Vancouver Island years ago. My friend Doug was almost drowned by a large salmon as he kayacked in a river once--imagine what a killer whale might do....I imagine me as an hors d'oeuvre.

Wendy and I had a premier spot for this sighting. As the ferry came abreast of the point of an island, around the point we spotted the spray of whales blowing as they skirted the edge of the island, heading for Active Pass where clearly there were a lot of fish, if the clouds of seagulls were any evidence. Five? Six? It was hard to tell because they swim in unison, three or four together, and you never quite know if you're seeing the same ones come up or different ones. We decided there were at least eight of different sizes in this group. As they passed the ferry, one came up out of the water and flopped back in on its back. Ooohs and aahs resulted.

But as this group passed by, all the watchers realized that there was another group coming around the point--another 6-8 whales were in this group and as they moved through the water, every now and then the black and white markings could be clearly seen below their tall, sometimes floppy dorsal fins. Well! At this point there were no blase observers. The woman beside us said "I've been riding the ferries for 20 years and I've never seen this many killer whales."

But wait! There were more! A third group came around the point with as many whales in it as the previous two. So, in all, we probably saw an entire pod of various ages, maybe 24 whales in all. It was an amazing event. Wendy, a talented photographer, managed to get some good pictures that she showed her three kids when she got home. They were much more impressed with the moose teeth she brought home. Another story for another day.

In Victoria, at the invitation of my colleague from the University of Calgary days, Marnie Swanson who is now the head honcho of the U Victoria Libraries, I did a scan presentation and then facilitated a strategic planning day. I was able to use some exercises I had done in 2 pre-conference sessions I took on futures planning at the World Future Society conference and they worked really well. No credit to me but to Peter Bishop and Wendy Schultz, faculty at the U of Houston-Clear Lake who taught the 2 sessions.

Wendy and I celebrated a successful day with martinis at the Bengal Lounge in the Empress Hotel. It hardly gets any better. And as I've run out of steam for today, the next post will cover Connecticut and the trip to Pennsylvania that didn't happen.

Catching Up with Friends, Old and New

Long time, no blog!

Anyway, this month I am fully engaged in doing presentations on the Scan, including three for different groups right here in Ohio. I love doing presentations in any location to which I can drive. Air travel is just such a hassle any more; my flight back from Tampa last Sunday was canceled, and I ended up being six hours late getting back to sweet home Columbus. I fared better than the poor guy who got rebooked the next day, though!

As I mentioned, I was in Tampa last weekend to do a program at the University of South Florida's School of Library and Information Science. I was part of a program with Greg Carlson and Courtney Deines-Jones on the role of futuring in planning library services. We used the Scan as one example of a way to think about what the future might offer (or, I guess, threaten). It was a special pleasure working with the faculty and students at USF. One excellent question came from a student, who noted that we had shown Google and the other search engines as potential replacements for library reference services, and at the same time, OCLC is working with those same outlets to get WorldCat broadcast. I said that I don't know much about martial arts, but the one thing I do know is that when confronted with momentum from an opponent, you don't resist it, but rather use it for your own purpose. Similarly, we can't beat Google; the best we can do is use the momentum the search engines have developed to further our own aims.

By the way, this was the first time I'd worked with Greg and Courtney. Greg said that the futuring program we did at Tampa was a test drive for one they are working on for a possible 2006 ASCLA preconference at the ALA conference. Keep an eye out for that, because Greg and Courtney really did a good job here, and it will only get better!

Today (Friday, October 15) I was at the 26th annual staff development day for the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library. (Isn’t amazing that anyone has been doing staff development days for 26 years?)

The director at CH-UH is Steve Wood. Steve and I have been friends for nearly 20 years. He was on the first committee I ever worked with for the Ohio Library Association, and he’s an inspiration in a lot of ways, most notably in that he is constitutionally unable to take himself too seriously. If he were cast as a Hans Christian Anderson character, he would be the one pointing out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

30 CH-UH staffers attended my program. They represented lots of different areas within the library, and ranged in position from pages to circ desk staff to children's librarians to Steve, who ditched the program he told me he was going to attend so that he could heckle me.

First, I have to say that this group had to have the youngest average age of any library group with which I've discussed the Scan. There were several gamers in the group, and they validated what the Scan pointed out about how online gamers compete, collaborate, and create. CH-UH is going into self-serve circulation in a big way, and we talked a lot about the social interaction that the library must offer. This led us into a discussion of the need of the library (especially the public library?) to continue to offer services that appeal both to their traditional, albeit aging, clientele, and to newer, albeit more fickle, potential clientele. When you have to go to the voters for an operating levy, you can't afford to alienate large blocs of potential supporters, right?

The discussion about how digital rights management will shape what services libraries will be able to offer in the future was quite spirited. I think library staff are gaining a deeper understanding of how the shift from copyright law to contract law in acquiring materials will come back to haunt them.

One of the CH-UH staffers asked a wonderful question about how libraries can know which formats or technologies are going to be dominant in the future. I said if we knew this, we could be investors in, rather than consumers of, these products, and we could all retire early. But it seems to me that the real goal is to do something. If we sit back and wait to see which search engine emerges as the winner, or if the much-rumored Google browser will challenge Internet Explorer's dominance, then we will miss the boat.

Because CH-UH is launching a major construction project shortly and space assignments must be made, Steve asked about the future of various formats. Micro formats continue to appear vulnerable as a widely distributed medium; it's important to have microfilmed versions of journal and newspaper titles, but does every library need to have a full run of, say, The New York Times, or is it more important to know that there are a few copies of this spread out in various collections in case something happens to the online version? There was a lot of discussion about the Open WorldCat program, but Steve pointed up that even though CH-UH gets its records into OCLC though their participation in CLEVNET, their records won't show up in Google or Yahoo until we can expose local data records, too.

The 60 minutes allotted for this program seemed to vanish in a few seconds, but afterwards, Steve and I and one of his staff members (whose name I carelessly mislaid) had a brief but intense (and friendly!) discussion about the future of the book. I think the paper book has a long future, although perhaps in more limited roles than what we have known to date (goodbye reference books, for example). Steve was less sanguine about this than I am, but his staffer was passionate about the long-term viability of dead dinosaurs on dead trees!

Next week, I will be doing a three-hour program with another group of Ohio librarians, this time a mixed group of public, academic, special, and maybe even school librarians brought together by CAMLS, the regional library system in Northeastern Ohio. For this program, I'll do much of the Scan stump speech (with whatever soapboxes I happen to be mounting next week!), but we will also do some work on how we can apply what the Scan suggests to the on-the-ground realities of running a library today. It should be fun. If it is, I'll blog it. If it's not, you won't hear about it from me!

Charging for Online Content

Vin Crosbie (another content pundit I read regularly) writes at ClickZ about the New England Journal of Medicine's model for balancing for-free versus for-fee content. Some interesting points and Jenny the Shifted Librarian would approve of NEJM's embracing of handhelds for acquiring content.

For any organization with content markets outside North America, the ability to deliver content to handheld devices will be crucial, given the preference in many countries for such devices over personal computers.

"Initially, we thought online-only would be most attractive to subscribers overseas. But we soon discovered that U.S. physicians found the online-only subscription option on their own, without any promotion," said Anderson. "So we accepted their choice and began promoting it domestically, overcoming the cannibalization fear."

NEJM recognizes the PDA is taking the place of the "fat little notebook" in the coat pockets of many physicians. A subscriber can use a wired or wireless PDA, or other handheld devices, to access full texts of the current NEJM plus the archive of all articles back to 1996, arranged in 51 topics. A subscriber can also use a PDA to request a PDF of an article (including medical imagery) be e-mailed to his PC.

"I'm very enthused about the future of electronic media in communicating medical research results and educating physicians and trainees," Anderson said. "The rate at which de facto standards like PowerPoint, digital video, and MP3 are propagating themselves hints at new forms of editorial expression emerging and being easily adopted. It's the best way to communicate rapidly with a large and growing audience."

"The habits of trainees show that they will expect completely linked information access for their entire professional lives. It sometimes makes my head spin, but then I get back to taking it step by step. That's the only way to untangle this future we're headed toward, I guess."

Trouble in blogland?

Blogger is acting up.

This is a test of the emergency blogging system.

This is only a test.

CML mi fe

So Monday saw Alane and I down at the Columbus Metropolitan Library's Staff Expo Day.

Alane gave a keynote session about the Environmental Scan, and then Jack Blount of Dynix gave an overview of their new ILS system. CML is in the process of migrating from their homegrown proprietary software system to an open-source, off-the-shelf modular system.

Questions ranged everywhere from people asking Alane about the Open WorldCat Program, "When are the full 56 million records going to be available through Yahoo! Google, MSN?" to broader questions of how we can help our users recognize that the materials they need are in fact on the shelf already.

An "oh yeah" moment
That was an "Oh Yeah..." moment for me. I had forgotten that perspective. Here at OCLC, we tend to think that the information world is your oyster--if materials are out there somewhere, you as a user should be able to get your hands on them.

Sometimes we (I) forget that everyday public library users would usually (maybe?) be just as satisfied with a similar book that is on the shelf right now, as opposed to the exact one they found on WorldCat that is half-way across the country. ILL is fantastic, but there's little need to request Fodor's 2004 Guide to Siena, when the Lonely Planet Tuscany 2003 Guide happily awaits you at 5 paces. For example.

Still, it's always good to hear what's on people's minds, when they have a chance to step back and think about the library profession as a whole and how they serve their particular clientele.

A funny side note
The CML Executive Director, Patrick Losinski, listed off a litany of improvements CML has made in the past year. They've opened a new branch, implemented a new call center with a new phone system, streamlined self-checkout, improved cataloging turnaround to a mere 48 hours...the list goes on. But what, you may ask, got the most applause from a roomful of CML library staffers? New photocopiers in all the branches.

So that just goes to show, all improvements are appreciated. Even seemingly small ones.

Friday I'm heading over to the Otterbein academic library, to learn more about a reference librarian who has teamed up with the MBA curriculum professor and team-teaches the classes. Through Blackboard. Or so I am given to understand. I will let you know what I find out.

Until then, I leave you with one of my favorite Dante quotations, vis a vis Ezra Pound, "Siena mi fe, e disfece mi Maremma." ("Siena made me, the Maremma destroyed me.")

Getting There vs Being There

A rich day for content discussions.

First, I am going to respond to Mr. Tivo Repairman's comments from yesterday. George, you don't smoke anymore, but you do still drink scotch. Take another role model for this problem: Amanda Cross's detecting academic Kate Fansler doesn't ever seem to have had a problem that a few Laphroaigs didn't help with. Or was it Lagavulin? (My favourite scotch, Scapa, from the Orkney Islands, is given a rather ho-hum review at scotchwhisky.com: "Scapa is interesting, but has never been considered a front runner." Oh well, that much might be said of many of us)

George and I actually had a lively exchange on email on the topic of Google Print. George had passed on a remark from someone else that WorldCat records better show up in Google Print results (if you're not familiar with why that might be the case, check out the OCLC Open WorldCat pilots with Google and Yahoo! Search here). My flip response was "why the heck would they?
Open WC doesn't link to content directly at the moment, just metadata. People don't want metadata."

At which point George replied:
"So we might as well not bother doing this [Open WorldCat] at all? If people don't want metadata, why bother with anything except book museums? No way all that text is ever going to be converted to digital content, at least not in our lifetimes."

At which point I mounted one of my herd of trusty hobby horses and replied:

"Well, it's all a bit more complex than that, isn't it? People do want metadata--they just don't know they do. They want it because they want a good 'findability' experience and they want relevant content, and we metadata mavens know that good content is enhanced, augmented, enriched etc by metadata. But to ask ordinary people to be excited by finding metadata not content is akin to expecting the traveler to be given a map at the airport and told to find their own way to Peoria.."whaddya mean you're not impressed? We've given you the map!" Not unreasonably, people want someone else to worry about the mechanics and physics of flying planes so they end up in Peoria without having to think too stenuously about wing flaps and fuel weight. The libraryland equivalent of air travel would have the entire crew and passengers crowded in the cockpit attempting to decipher the metadata guiding the trip to the destination--and yet only 2 people out of 157 are actually interested in and qualified to interpret the metadata.

To add to this, metadata dangles the destination in front of the traveller--"Find In a Library" suggest the traveller might be able to sit back and enjoy the flight--thanks for choosing WorldCat, operated by our partner Google--but actually has them change planes in mid-air without benefit of instructions or parachutes. The "Find In A Library" trip currently leaves them on the wingtip of the AeroFlot Library OPAC, expects them to find a way inside, and navigate an alien layout and language until they find the cockpit....and another map to Peoria!

And of course all content will not be digital but if there are 477 ways to Peoria then the easiest, fastest ones will be the most valued. If there's only one, difficult, unknown way to Shangri-la, then a map will be valued for that journey."

End of soapbox and I hasten to add --as my personal self and my OCLC self--I think Open WorldCat is an excellent step towards getting valuable library content out into the world, and it would be an even better step if we could pass searchers seamlessly from the Google and Yahoo interfaces directly into the OPAC but we can't at the moment because the local system vendors aren't exactly queuing up to work with OCLC to make this happen. Given we've seen really spectacular increases in the number of click throughs from Google and Yahoo, perhaps the ILS vendors will soon see there is a lot of interest in getting inside the OPAC from the Web. And many, many people are unabashedly enthusiastic about the results they ARE getting--imagine when we can streamline the "findability" even more!

George then posed good and hard questions:
"So what do we (the library community, that is) *do* with what we have? So if we do not compete with Amazon and Google, what is our niche?"

Well, that's the hard part, isn't it? And when we--you and me, George--do scanny presentations, aren't we pushing these questions into the forefront of librarians' attention? But we at OCLC have to think hard about this too. But I'm not going to today.

Here's some more very relevant food for thought. Over on PaidContent.org, Rafat has Patrick Spain, founder (and a past CEO of Hoover's) of HighBeam Research (used to be eLibrary) as a guest blogger for the week, Oct 4-8. All his posts are interesting but today's really resonated given George's and my conversation.

Here's the main points (if you have time, read his other posts too)

• Users don't care where the information comes from. They just want to know what is out there. So failing to include the free Web with your paid service is a big mistake.
• Failing to provide premium for pay information on your free search is just as big a mistake. If the answer to a question relates to health or wealth, people will pay.
• You have to be very clear and honest with users about what is free and what is paid. Don't try to charge for content that is free elsewhere.
• Users want a fast, intuitive interface to do their searches. Our typical users decide in a couple of seconds whether we are a useful service.
• Advertising on a for-pay site that does not interfere with the use of the site (as much of the advertising on free sites does) has no deleterious effects on sign up rates or retention. Done right, advertising enhances the attractiveness of a publication. Just ask The Wall Street Journal.
• Free search and free trials are essential to demonstrate to users that you can be useful to them.
• Enable the ability to save and repeat searches, store knowledge and convert that knowledgeable to usable form as a report, a contact, a spreadsheet or a presentation.
• You can't charge just for content. Charge for the convenience and delight of using your service. Why does Starbucks get 2-3 times what McDonald's does for a cup of coffee?

Why indeed?

I am thinking my librarian's skills would make me a natural for this job. Or that the forecasting aspect of my current job may lead me to this.

Happy Thanksgiving to Canadian readers.

Google Print

Well, Google made it official today: they are not going to take Amazon's advance into search engines (see A9.com) lying down. Google Print will, in the words of a USA Today article this morning, "lets users search through pages of books online."

The mission of OCLC, as originally enunciated by our founder, Fred Kilgour, is to further access to the world's information. According to their website, "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world's information isn't yet online, we're helping to get it there. Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in Google search results."

So how should we as librarians and library workers and library users feel about this? Should I be happy because this is the dawning of a golden age of information widely disseminated and enjoyed, a flowering of a new renaissance that will see every individual reach his or her greatest potential? Or should I be suspicious that is just another smash and grab job on the part of big business to cut into more market share? Or should I prepare to go to DeVry and learn TiVo repair, because the prospects for my profession have just become about as rosy as being a member of a Milli Vanilli tribute band?

As Sherlock Holmes would say, this is a three pipe problem. I wish I still smoked.

You don't have to love everything

Alane and I had an in-person chat today. Great things happen when I sit face to face with someone. Don't get me wrong--I love e-mail, chat, IM, phone calls--but they are no substitute for the real deal.

Which brings me to my post. As Alane was telling me about her University of Victoria adventures during her British Columbia visit--how the staff was wrestling with how to make changes in their library (she'll blog about the speed dating idea!) I started to realize that not everyone in your library has to love everything.

Now that sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but I personally have been in the "we love all things techno-hip" groove for so long, I had lost sight of the fact that we need all kinds of people in our libraries.

If we all jump to E-scan world where we're gaming with our users and doing micropayments for microcontent and thinking of the library as the 3rd place--then who does the preservation work, or children's storytime, or the myriad of additional activities that your library does and continues to do and will continue to do...?

In short, for the e-scan world to come about, you'll need some champions in your library. Change can be a looooong process. But you'll also need people who appreciate scan world and live fully in it, but prefer to support other activities.

That is to say, not everyone has to love everything. We need as much face-to-face time as we do digital.

Urban Libraries Council

I just finished an audioconference sponsored by the Urban Libraries Council (ULC) on the E-Scan. Titled "Thinking Forward: Trends Shaping Public Libraries," the conference also included Martín Gómez, the President of ULC, as the moderator; Ginnie Cooper, the director of Brooklyn Public Library; Mona Carmack, the County Librarian for Johnson County Public Library, just outside of Kansas City; Bob Martin, the Executive Director of the Institute for Museum and Library Services; and Mike Crandall, the soon-to-depart Technology Manager for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and soon-to-arrive educator at the University of Washington's Information School.

First, let me say if you ever get a chance to do an audioconference, do it. There's nothing better than being able to do a talk without putting on a tie or getting on an airplane.

Second, this discussion raised some really good issues about the future of public libraries. For example, Mona Carmack (one of the people we interviewed for the Library section of the Scan, and a former member of our Advisory Committee on Public Libraries) talked about the need to run "dual systems" as libraries morph into what they will become. Ginnie Cooper picked up on this as she talked about staff needs for training and understanding.

Martín Gómez asked Bob Martin if the people inside the Washington Beltway were saying that libraries are not going to be needed since everything is on the web. Bob said that this sort of thinking seems to have peaked several years ago, and as more people have experience with the web, and understand its limitations, the need for libraries becomes even more apparent. He stressed that the web is good for deluging the user with information, but libraries continue to have a role in the transformation of information to knowledge (and who knows, maybe even to wisdom...)

Mike Crandall talked about the various levels at which libraries around the world exist today, and spoke about what the Gates Foundation has learned in its interactions in Chile. Martín said it sounded as if we could learn from libraries outside the US, and Mike strongly agreed with him. Ginnie noted that one thing that we could learn is how to skip generations of unproductive or superseded technology to get right to the heart of what's needed now.

We had a lot of good questions from the 77 sites that participated in the call. One caller asked about how the library community could affect change with its suppliers. My answer was that you have to ask. I said that many of OCLC's new products and services came about because libraries asked for them, in RFPs, in meetings with sales staff, in discussion with network staff, when they stop by our booth at conferences. I also said that the best way to do this is to get state associations, regional cooperatives, and affinity groups to pull together to make these suggestions, to add weight to them. Another question that I wish I could answer dealt with how you can pick the trends from the fads; if I knew that one, I'd own my own blog. I did suggest that if enough of us pick up on a fad, it could become a trend if we reach the critical mass.

I'll be on the road a lot over the next few weeks talking about the scan (and tomorrow, a side trip to the Ohio Library Council conference to talk about WebJunction). I hope the rest of the programs are as interesting and challenging as this one, but without that cast of reactors, it's hard to see how they could be!

Blogging For or From OCLC?

Our esteemed colleague in blogland, Jenny Levine, commented a few days ago about her surprise that more news had not appeared in her mailbox about OCLC's acquisition of 24/7 or the recent deal with Yahoo, either by conventional means or this blog. Well, that caused a fair wee bit of soul searching at OCLC, and the end of the story isn't written.

OCLC has several means of officially disseminating news but we are not yet using an RSS feed to let interested people get product updates, press releases and technical bulletins. We're working on it. (I know, you're thinking, how hard is that?)

And as this blog is a George, Alane and Alice production, (with full approval from our bosses--most days) and not an official OCLC vehicle, we quite deliberately decided not to use it as a platform to, um, flog OCLC services and products. Perhaps we're being too hands' off?

I am in Vancouver, British Columbia...as I have mentioned before, my library degree is from UBC and it is always a great pleasure to come back here. I'll be talking to the students in the library and archival programs at UBC on Thursday. Wendy McGinnis, the OCLC Director of PR, will be with me and we're hoping a Newsletter article will be the result--what are those librarians/archivists-to-be thinking?

I know I am thinking that I'm older now than half of my library school professors were!

A Big Win in the Big Easy

George just pointed out: we got a mention in http://www.warriorlibrarian.com/. COOL.

Clearly, we must be doing something right.

And did everyone see the Information Week article last week, Media & Entertainment: From Games To Ads, Self-Service Works ? I admit, it's not exactly the kind of self-service we think of in the library space, but the headline alone caught my eye as being "scanny," as Alane calls it.

So where have I been lately?
Just got back from a weekend in New Orleans. The Big Easy, the Cresent City, NOLA. What other city has so many nicknames?

Ate at a great restaurant, Jacques-Imo's and went to The Maple Leaf, next door. Fantastic, both. Next time ALA is in New Orleans, save up for the cab ride out there. Or perhaps we can go together as one big group? The "It's all good," party of 1,442+3? Your table is ready. (Disclaimer: 1,442 is what A9.com reported as our inbound links.

Chaotic casinos
Dropped into Harrah's, in case Lady Luck was with us (assuredly, she was not). What surprised me was the information design (or seeming LACK of it) on the video slot machines. There were rows and rows of loud, blinking, flashing machines--all competing for my attention and all fairly enigmatic to the uninitiated. Each time I would bet my nickel, I would have to renavigate again (which button do I push now? What one makes the fruit spin? Why can I pull the lever or push the button and the same result happens?)

Good information design
Could the library ever be this bewildering? It made me remember once again that even an activity most people take for granted (playing slots, using an OPAC), can be disorientating. Calm, clear pathways of navigation would have helped. As an information consumer, I was happy to figure it out, myself. I just needed the basic clues to get me started. Eventually, of course, I was able to self-serve:

I was able to successfully lose all the money I had fed into the machine.

Doing The Numbers

A theme developed all by itself.

From the Hot Bytes E-Newsletter (this is put out by the E-Content Institute by-weekly). They do a poll every issue and these are the results from the question in the last issue.

When seeking to purchase content services or software where do you first turn for information?
Vendor's web site - 28 %
Contact local sales - 0 %
Colleagues - 72 %

Interesting....and those of you with perfect recall will remember we wrote this in the last chapter of the E-Scan.

It is human nature to seek information and advice as close to oneself as possible. This advice may live within a circle of family and friends, a personal library, and other reliable “close” resources, such as the Google search box that is so conveniently located on many browser tool bars. “There is a lot of groundwork libraries can lay that would be invisible, and we can stand at the ready as a trust circle when further service is needed. The unanswered question is how to move our circle closer, in a person’s network, at the level of their need.”
(The end quote is from Jenny Levine whom I interviewed for the Scan)

And finally, from September 25 The Hindustan Times.com, UK edition:

"A recent survey reported in newspapers last week revealed that the young in Britain have begun to believe in horoscopes like never before. Three thousand people were polled, and two-thirds of them said that they believe horoscopes are true. Significantly, only one-third believed the Bible to be true."

Recognizing A Few New Patterns

One of the things that Alane, Alice, and I have noticed is that exposure to the E-Scan starts you thinking of the news that crosses your path in different ways, all of which seem to lead back to the scan.

Today, for example, I received my weekly briefing from Outsell, a company that consults and publishes extensively about trends in the information content industry. Two items caught my eye. First, the briefing quoted a story in The Guardian that says Google is negotiating a revenue sharing agreement with Reed-Elsevier as part of Google's plans to create a premium content service. Reed-Elsevier would allow Google to index its proprietary material, and in return would receive a small royalty each time a Google user clicked through to Reed content. You don't have to be Jerry Fletcher to see this as another example of disaggregation, and, in theory at least, a way around libraries. Miriam Nesbit of ALA's Washington Office is quoted in the 2004 Information Format Trends Report as saying, "Sooner or later you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no going back." (Incidentally, in the interest of full disclosure, Miriam's quote originally appeared in The New York Times on January 25, 2004.)

The other item was a description of a presentation by Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Mr. Rainie noted that young people tend to underreport their internet usage, because they don't even think of IM, e-mail, or other tasks as being manifestations of the internet. It's just part of their lives, always on, always connected. Outsell concluded their all-too-short piece on his presentation by noting, "The implication...is to focus on the user's tasks and processes, not on the medium or the container." Hmm, sounds like a report I read recently!

Wikis and Taxonomies

In this morning's computer section of the Columbus Dispatch was an Associated Press piece (which means it likely is in your paper too) on Wikis. My husband brought it to my attention, and said that one of the development groups at his company is using a Wiki as a space to share and record information about work being done for a particular large customer. The Wiki allows people in the work group in Columbus and Dallas to share information quickly--but perhaps more importantly, to have a searchable record of their activities.

This isn't news really, but I am surprised more library work groups aren't using Wikis. They're a natural environment for the sort of consensus-based decision making processes that are common to library committees. And wouldn't it be a blessing to have a space to go to for committee work rather than having to wade through dozens and dozens of emails?

Although this article from InfoToday is 18 months old now, it does cover wikis and libraries, and Colleen Bell at the U of Oregon has a nice resource here. And already noted on this blog but with regard to the articles on gaming and higher ed is the September/October 2004 issue of Educause Review has articles about blogs and wikis in education generally, not libraries specifically. The lead article is by Stephen Downes who has a blog I read regularly and if you follow e-learning, you should too.

The second item this morning is a link to an interesting chart called 3000 Years of Information Science and Technology from a consulting company called Taxonomy Strategies. My colleague Eric Childress, from OCLC Research, brought it to my attention. The two principals have both been active in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative--neither come from library backgrounds.

What I found interesting was the bibliography of material these two guys consider to be core to taxonomies did not reference any libraryland writers (at least, that I recognize). And that OCLC and RLG are on the chart with closed dates--1960-1980--hmmm, I wonder if they see that twenty year period as the pinnacle of our place in the taxonomic universe?

All Worth Reading

A cornucopia of interesting things this morning.

I was going to note a bunch of fascinating items from Rafat Ali's great site PaidContent.org (sign up for the daily newsletter) about Audible going wireless, MLB offering 99 cent music downloads, using IM to get music, and a report of a conference "The State of Online Journalism" hosted by the Online News Association....but why don't you just hop over to PaidContent and read all this and more thought-provoking items yourself? It's one of the sites I read regularly as one of the best sources of content information from outside libraryland.

I will note that one thing in the ONA summary piqued my interest because it relates to the next item. Rafat commented: "CNET News.com is currently working on restructuring its inner story pages because they are the first point of entry for so many visits due to linking and RSS feeds. Smart...something every news site should be thinking about. "

When I do scanny presentations, I suggest the heretical: that libraries are spending too much time building elaborate portal sites and too little time making the information behind these portals easier to locate and use.

I say too much time because I suspect that just about no one in our community knows a lot about user behaviours and preferences with regard to web portals, and if we do have a gut feeling that people bypass much of the structure to get to the content, we're ignoring that in favour of indulging "ediface complexes". And, so I note the next item, an article published in this issue of FirstMonday, and listed in the September 23 issue of RLG's useful newsletter, Shelflife. Here's the RLG synposis.

THAT WEB SITE'S PRETTY, YES, BUT DOES IT WORK?
Many -- perhaps most -- museums nowadays boast full, sometimes elaborate and usually costly Web sites to augment their physical presence. But few conduct usability tests to see how effective and helpful those sites are, say library science
professors Paul F. Marty and Michael Twidale. To illustrate the importance of such testing, the two conceived their own "scenario-based evaluations" of 36 museum Web sites, then devised a framework that points out common usability flaws they hope museums will use to fashion ever-more useful Web sites and to conduct their own studies. They found, for example, that museum Web sites have large amounts of rich content. Eager to share their tremendous resources, museum professionals often offer thousands of database records and many pages with interactive features. But too much of a good thing can confuse and frustrate users, who find themselves unable to use the museums Web site to complete simple tasks. They also found that museum Web sites often have artistically designed graphical user interfaces. But beauty doesn't always go hand in hand with usability. Artistically designed interfaces may bring only confusion to the user who simply wants to know "what do I do now?"

(First Monday Sep 2004)
<http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_9/marty/index.html>

We're All in This Together

Sometimes, "It's all good."

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) today jointly announced the creation of a broad initiative to spark collaboration among local public broadcasters, museums and libraries, harnessing community educational resources in new and more meaningful ways.

Read the whole press release here.

And only a few weeks ago, Bob Martin, the Director of IMLS gave a talk at an IMLS-sponsored workshop titled "Charting the Landscape/Mapping New Paths:Museums, Libraries and K-12". Read the whole thing here.

The need for collaboration among publically funded cultural institutions was something we noted while doing research for the OCLC Environmental Scan. Two of the documents that are included in our bibliography were by George D'Elia and Corinne Jorgensen on behalf of the Urban Libraries Council: Collaborations Among Public Television Stations, Public Radio Stations, Public Libraries and Museums: The Results of a National Survey and National Survey of the Markets for Museums, Public Libraries, Public Television, Public Radio and their Engagement in Informal Learning Activities.

Dr. Martin closed his talk to conference participants this way:

In the 21st century environment of rapid change, schools alone are not enough to foster the ability of our youth to learn throughout the lifetime. We need to embrace a bold new vision of learning. We need to think beyond our institutional boxes. Libraries, museums, and schools are all important elements in this web of learning. This "Charting the Landscape" conference provides an opportunity for us to consider ways in which we can further a seamless infrastructure for K-12 teaching and learning. The time to do this is now.

Phone Habits

This definitely is a trend. Noted on Woody's Futures Lab blog, and from the Smart Mobs blog (which is a blog like this one--a more famous origin to be sure, it is about the trends and issues discussed in Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs) . The original source is an English-language compendium of news from Norway.

Seven Year Olds carrying Mobile Phones
"In 2002 only eight percent of 7-9 year-olds had cell phones, a year later this number had doubled to one in six having mobiles. In the age group 10-11 years 58 percent use mobiles, up 12 percent points in a year.
Nearly all older children have cell phones: 89 percent of 12-13 year-olds, 96 percent of 14-15 year-olds and 100 percent of 16-21 year-olds own and use mobiles. The survey measured habits at 1,500 households across the country."

This has nothing to do with phones or trends but is worth a chuckle...dog robs a gas station of its favourite chocolate candy, complete with photos from the security camera.

Sunny Days & Mondays

On Saturday, a lovely sunny day, about 25 OCLC staff, including your bloggers, George and Alane, along with kids, dogs, friends and spouses, participated in a 10K walk in support of the UNCF. According to the UNCF web site, this event in Columbus attracts over 65 companies and over 2,500 participants. As you can see, we had team t-shirts as did many of the other corporate teams. The morning was cool but, of course, this made for a very pleasant walk down and back along Broad Street which has many architecturally interesting buildings.

True enough, this doesn't have a whole lot to do with trends. But literacy and education are fundamental to a civil society and this event has a lot to do with supporting people in their quests to be educated.



Most of the OCLC UNCF walking team. George is taking the picture and his wife, Joyce, is in the front, leaning on her water bottle. Lillie, who organized the OCLC team is to Joyce's right. We're all very proud of Lillie as she was recently awarded a Phd. I'm in the middle--black cap and blue rain jacket.

Reading Habits

George seems to have listed most of his fav magazine reads and so, in the interests of full disclosure, I will tell you that one of my must-read subscriptions is Vanity Fair. It comes in print form to my house and I eagerly devour it monthly. The fact that Graydon Carter, the editor, is an ex-pat Canadian has nothing--nothing I tell you--to do with it.

I spent the afternoon on planes today. I had packed crossword puzzles to do in-flight, but I finished both the one I had in my purse and the one in the inflight magazine and as it was turbulent I needed diversion so I leafed through the Sky Mall mag. I was bemused and a bit horrified to find that I receive about 98% of the catalogs represented. I can remember the days when this magazine was terra incognito to me...elevated dog beds? Have I caught up with the world or come down to the level of...dog beds?

I had dinner with Robert Smith, the OCLC sales rep based in NYC. (did I mention I was in Albany?) He used to work at the OCLC mothership in Dublin and I miss him, so it was very nice to spend a few hours with him. Tomorrow I'll be at SUNY Albany doing a Scan presentation.

I know lots of you who are kind enough to read this blog have also read our environmental scan, and now, may also read the 2004 content trends report. We would really truly like you to tell us about stuff we missed and to point us toward trends you think will have an impact on the LibrarianShip. And while you're at it, if you have ideas about what OCLC should be going forward, we'd love to hear about them. As you know, OCLC has been around since the early 70s. Of the Fortune 500 companies only 20 that were on the top 100 in 1971 are in the top 100 on the 2004 list...so, OCLC is doing very well!

My Magazines

Alane,

Nice work on the new "Information Formats" pamphlet. (Is it a pamphlet when it's 18 pages long?) I can't wait to work it into my scan presentations beginning later this month.

I enjoyed your comments about magazines. I'm still one of those people who likes to read a magazine from cover to cover (pretty much). Weekly, I read Newsweek and The New Yorker thoroughly, except for the articles on religion and rap in the former, and fiction in the latter. I also read Information Week, but I have to admit that I don't read every article thoroughly. The only online weekly magazines I read are (embarrassed pause) The Warrior Librarian and The Onion. I also subscribe to and read Esquire and Smart Computing monthly, and American Heritage on the irregular schedule on which it comes out. I used to love Movieline, but it became a fashion magazine and my subscription has lapsed. On the newsstand, I'm likely to buy American Demographics, Premiere, Acoustic Guitar, The Utne Reader, Mental Floss, and the occasional graphic novel. (Art Spiegelman rules. In conjunction with Will Eisner.) I still miss Spy Magazine.

2004 Information Format Trends: Content, Not Containers

Finally, finally....we are done this update to the 2003 version of this content report. Hmmm...as you can see by the time on the posting it's latish and for some reason, Blogger or my computer ate the middle half of this post between draft and publish. And I am disinclined to reproduce--I am sure the world can go on without an extra 100 words from me.

But, do tell us what you are consuming--and how--content-wise. I think I may read as much stuff online now as I do offline. Aside from work trend tracking I read Arts & Letters Daily, Salon, The Writers Almanac and even though I subscribe to many print magzines I might spend more time with the online mags.

And the lovely thing about online reading is that serendipity is not confined to your own shelves. You have the shelves of the webby world to bump into.

Search for the King at the Junction!

This is a build on Alice's comment about the search for how to measure a library's return on investment. If you want information on how to show your community what your library is worth, don't forget WebJunction's "Focus on Demonstrating Impact," which appeared in February. There are excellent original pieces by WebJunction's master scribes Joe Anderson and Chrystie Hill, and links to material by Joey Rodger, Karen Burns, Steve Coffman, and others. Check it out!

Noteworthy cartoon

Why Johnny Can't Read

More statistics on literary, as relates to libraries:

• 75% of the Ohio inmate population does not possess a high school diploma


• 40% of individuals entering the prison system read below the 6th grade level


• Patients with a 3rd grade reading level or less have average health care costs at 6x higher than those with better skills


• 51% of hospital patients could not understand a standard informed consent document


• 42% of patients could not comprehend written directions for taking medicine

Wouldn't we rather spend tax dollars on activities that educate and empower our citizens?
Allocating money to libraries does that.

My source. (These are specific to Columbus, Ohio--but Columbus is generally considered a bellwether for national averages.)

Search for the King

But I'm not talking Elvis here. Le Roi.
That is, ROI.
Return on Investment.

George and Alane have been sending me lots of great links to materials.

Anyone read much on this topic? Fascinating research and methodology on how to calculate a public library's economic return on money spent. (The latest I read was that for every $1 spent on the library, the community/cardholders received $4 in return. Those are pretty good statistics! Even better results ($10 to $1 for some areas) on the results page.

They sent me studies from St. Louis (Glen Holt), Florida and Kansas City.
And I'm sure there are plenty more studies out there.

Anyone? ROI demonstrations you've done/would like to see done for your library?

Brand Lands, Hot Spots and Cool Spaces.

This is the title of an interesting book I am reading. It's subtitle is Welcome to the Third Place and the Total Marketing Experience.

The author, Christian Mikunda, suggests that “the experience society has grown up” and that we members of this society look for a combination of “entertainment with big, true feelings, with genuine materials and high-quality design, and help with our problems in everyday life.”

As I read, it struck me this could be a description of some of the more architecturally spectacular libraries that have been built in the past few years. The main branches of Seattle Public Library (Alice blogged about it on August 10th and there's lovely pictures linked), Salt Lake City Library, Vancouver Public Library (both designed by Moshe Safdie) to name only a few. I've heard people express puzzlement about these buildings in an age when the Web has become a replacement for many, for a visit or a call to the library. Why, they ask, would these edifices be built?

Back in May, Louis Rosenfeld posted to his blog from the Seattle Public Library: "I don't pretend to know anything about architecture, and I've never worked in a public library. But I do find this building fascinating. It's an interesting mix of utilitarian and whimsical. You'll encounter great finding aids, like call numbers prominently displayed on the floor next to each row of shelves...But what strikes me most is how social a place this is. Sure, many are here to enjoy an initial tour, but there are a wide variety of group-oriented seating areas. This is clearly a place to hang out and enjoy the view."

Pacific Northwest, the magazine of The Seattle Times, said in an article by William Dietrich in its April 25, 2004 issue: "Above all, the library is designed to be inviting and intuitive to people who want to find a book. Designers calculated that the downtown Barnes & Noble bookstore had 40 times the people traffic, per square foot, as the old library. Why? What was the public sector doing wrong that the private sector is doing right? They want to compete."

So, back to Mikunda and his notion of an experience society. He begins his introduction with a description of what a visitor to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice might do: have a look at the paintings and sculpture, go to the museum store, and have a coffee in the museum restaurant, all the time enjoying the particular ambiance of the location, above the Grande Canal. He describes the experience as being one of a place where one temporarily feels at home, that is emotionally powerful and allows visitors to recharge themselves. The museum is, he declares, a Third Place, one of three "staged habitats" (the others are Home and Work). Malls, theme restaurants, concept stores are all staged habitats too.

So, I am thinking that this trend of building and redesigning libraries to be impressive architecturally is a response to the need people have to spend their leisure time in staged habitats and be entertained at the same time they accomplish something--whether it's browsing books in a library or a bookstore, or visiting the Longaberger basket company which, in addition to having a head office that looks like a giant basket, also has a golf course, several restaurants and entertainers at its Homestead. All this to encourage the purchase of baskets.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the architect Rem Koolhaas designed the Seattle Public Library and the Prada flagship store in New York city—which, by the way, is in the former SoHo branch of the Guggenheim Museum

Creative Reading - Demos report

Just spotted this at the Demos site although it was published at the end of June. Demos is based in the U.K. and "is an independent think tank with a strong interest in culture and creativity."

Creative Reading is a 70 page report by John Holden in conjunction with The Reading Agency which is a "UK wide development agency with roots in the public library sector. Its mission is to inspire a reading nation by working with libraries and their partners."

Here's a bit of the press release.

Public libraries are the ‘forgotten players’ in the creativity debate,
according to a new report called Creative Reading published by Demos. Libraries can help the next generation develop the higher-order skills of creative reading needed to get the most out of cultural and social life and meet the challenges of the 21st century job market.

“Given the number and variety of creative activities going on in libraries, they should be seen as one of the primary means by which the government can fulfil the cultural pledge given in the white paper The next Ten Years, Culture and Creativity,” says the report’s author, John Holden.

The report recommends that libraries build on their role in developing ‘creative reading, encouraging young people to make connections between different ideas and information sources. They should create spaces where the flow of ideas stimulated by reading can be recorded using whiteboards or computers.

Demos reports are available under a Creative Commons license.

Gaming gets respectable -- or is it respect?

Here's some sources of articles on gaming and higher education.

"New Tools for Back-to-School:Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games"

"Redesigning Games: How Academia is Reshaping Games of the Future."

"Gaming the System: What Higher Education Can Learn From Multiplayer Online Worlds."

"What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" Click on book icon and then on the left bar, Learning by Design: Games as Learning Machines.

"The New Culture of Gaming"

"Second Generation e-Learning: Serious Games." This is a special issue of On The Horizon (vol 12, no. 1, 2004) and is available to subscribers at www.emeraldinsight.com/oth.htm or for FirstSearch subscribers, in the ECO database.

In the "Introduction to the Study of the Future" classes I took at the World Futures Society conference, the Life Cycle of an Issue was presented as one way to gauge the maturity of a trend. Here's some of the elements--think of the axes of the life cycle as time and degree of public awareness. In other words, the newer the trend, the less the amount of public awareness. Based on the list, I'd say gaming is moving to the mass awareness level.

Visionary (artists, scientists, radicals, lunatics)

Uninhibited (fringe media, underground)

Diffusion (specialists' journals, web sites)

Mass awareness (general interest magazines, websites)

History (doctoral dissertations)

Energy

So yesterday, all three of us (George, Alane and I) all got together in the same physical office. It may sound strange to think we all live in the same town and work at the same place--and yet we typically meet and greet online. This blog has become our communal, social place with each other--just like (we hope) it has for you.

A quick stage-setting: George is busy moving office, Alane is on a whirlwind wrap-up of a new report (stay tuned--our catchy headline is: The Content has left the Container--sounds like NASA should be telling it to Houston or something) and I am knee-deep in thinking about advertising on behalf of libraries, to the people who make funding decisions.

In short, we are all busy, tired, not-quite-ready to let go of summer. When we convened our meeting, all three of us felt a little brain-dead, scattered, low energy, blah--whatever you want to call it.

As we started to talk about possibilities, a curious phenomenon began. The more we talked, the more energy we gained. Silliness is a great restorative. By the end of the meeting, we were rockin' and rollin' and ready for more. It was a fantastic way to rejuvenate, refocus and renew our commitment to future OCLC adventuring. And it happened almost accidentally.

So the moral of the story is, when you're feeling overwhelmed, leave your keyboard for a minute and talk things through with a co-worker. Start with a joke, perhaps. But get the ideas flowing and soon you'll be ready to tackle the world again!

Trendwatching.com

If I've already discussed the following information here, please forgive me and write this off as one of the evil by-products of the dissipated life. Mine, not yours.

Anyway, I stumbled across a pretty interesting free newsletter recently called "Trendwatching.com." The current issue focuses on a trend it refers to as "Inspirience," which the authors define as the desire to replicate within the internal space some of the best features of the public space. So people have brand name products generally associated with retailers of one stripe or another in their homes: Starbucks cappucino makers, Westin hotels' Heavenly Beds (which as a frequent traveler I can aver are indeed heavenly), or draft Heineken beer in the entertainment center.


Here's an excerpt from the current newsletter:

So here's what TRENDWATCHING.COM suspects to be the next big thing in the world of domestic bliss: INSPERIENCES. Basically, in a consumer society and outside world dominated by experiences, preferably branded, designed, themed and curated to the nines, the INSPERIENCES trend represents consumers' desire to invite brands offering experiences exclusive to the (semi) public domain, to set up shop within their own domestic domain. Needless to say, before they're allowed to pass through the front door, some of these experiences need to be stripped from the dangers, annoyances, and unwanted interactions with strangers that normally come attached.

So what's driving the home-upgrading and INSPERIENCE trends? Well, try one or more of the below:
• Rampant individuality -- we are all Masters of the Youniverse these days, our homes turning into highly connected, sophisticated control and entertainment centers.
• Post 9/11 insecurity -- 'let's stay in and invite some friends' says it all.
• Unheard-of levels of prosperity for hundreds of millions of MASS CLASS members from Sao Paulo to Singapore to San Francisco, and ever-higher demands for comfort and quality from 'mature' and experienced consumers. (Americans alone spend more than 125 billion USD annually on remodeling their homes!)

Those references to Sao Paulo and Singapore incidentally are not gratuitous attempts at globalization. According to their home page, Trendwatching.com is the result of reports from more than 2,000 trend spotters from more than 50 nations and regions. I can almost hear the reaction now: "We're libraries, why should we care about what's going on in the consumer marketplace?" All I can say is to that is since those same consumers also consume library services, it behooves us to know as much as we can about them, right? Looking at the world through the prism of a different but related industry like retailing can help us gain new perspective.