We're Number 931! We're Number 931!

Granted, I live in Columbus, Ohio, where the state religion is OSU football, so being number 931 isn't exactly going to make headlines here. But worldcat.org, OCLC's public version of the library database, is now #931 in Quantcast's list of most visited websites. (They currently rank about 20 million sites.) This is a dynamic rating, so when you click on that link, the number may have shifted. The best part is we beat oprah.com!

Free Lewis and Clark Map Sets for Libraries

Regular readers of "It's All Good" know that I've been working with the good folks at Adventure Cycling Association on marketing the Underground Railroad Bicycle Route to and through libraries. Now, Adventure Cycling is offering a special gift for libraries. This information is courtesy of Julie Emnett, the Associate Development Director for Adventure Cycling Association.

GET A FREE COPY OF OUR LEWIS AND CLARK MAP SET FOR YOUR LIBRARY

In 2007, Adventure Cycling received a grant from the National Park Service to update, reprint and distribute our Lewis & Clark bicycle route maps, originally created to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the epic journey of Meriwether Lewis & William Clark.

Our maps give information about cultural interests and natural history, interpretive information and the location of bike shops, grocery stores, camp sites, motels and libraries and more — all services cyclists look for while on a bicycle tour.

Thanks to the National Park Service, Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Program, Adventure Cycling will be giving away 275 of the eight-map sets.

Adventure Cycling Association would like offer the members of WebJunction an opportunity to order one of the free Lewis & Clark Bicycle Trail route sets. Simply follow this link and complete the form by including the code GT-0001 at check-out and we will send you your free Lewis & Clark map set.*

*Limited to stock hand of the 275 original map sets. Only one per library. No exchanges or refunds will be offered.

Second Life to Have a Third Life?

The Library of Congress announced a $590,000 grant called "Preserving Virtual Worlds." In the words of the news release issued by Rochester Institute of Technology (one of four universities in the project), "The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore developing standards for preserving digital games and interactive fiction such as virtual worlds like Second Life. Second Life is an interactive multiplayer game in which people take on personas known as avatars." Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, is also participating in the project.

"Preserving Virtual Worlds is part of the Library of Congress's Preserving Creative America project, launched in August.

Time to update my avatar...

School Boards Report

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) has published a short but fascinating report on how students are using social networking sites. If you're expecting a hatchet job, you'll be sadly disappointed!

The NSBA report provides an overview of statistics compiled by Grunwald Associates for a longer report, which is available commercially from Grunwald. The report documents the high level of usage of social sites by students. OK, that's not headline news, but what might be is the frequency (59%) of students who say they use social networking to discuss educational topics, "including college or college planning; learning outside of school; news; careers or jobs; politics, religion or morals; and schoolwork" (page 1 of the report).

Even more interesting to me was the research into what the report calls "Nonconformists." These are the students who, according to the report, are more likely to influence other students about what software and sites to use; to recruit new users; and to organize events online. These students also tend to have score Bs and Cs in school, probably because they'd rather be networking than learning about the Peloponnesian War.

It seems to me if libraries (all types of libraries) made a concerted effort to recruit these kids to work in libraries, and actually empowered them to do what they do best instead of just having them shelve books, we might be on the cutting edge once in a while, instead of always playing catch up. Just a thought...

R.I.P., Times Select

Another experiment in paid content on the Web bites the dust at midnight tonight (Tuesday, September 18) as The New York Times discontinues its two year old experiment, Times Select.

Instead, the Times will open the last 20 years of its archive, and will also put its pre-1923 content online. The newspaper of record has been published since 1851. Selected articles from 1923 to 1987 will also be available.

See the official announcement here. The Times also issued an open letter to its subscribers here.

Ohio Library Council Conference

Here's a shameless plug for the upcoming Ohio Library Council (OLC) conference. The conference will be held October 10-12 in Columbus.

OLC frequently takes a different tack in its conferences, and this year is no exception. For one thing neither of the keynote speakers are from libraryland. Bill Strickland has developed a successful model for arts, education, and training organizations. Judson Laipply’s illustration of change in America, “Evolution of Dance,” is one of the most viewed videos on YouTube.

The conference has some interesting tracks, too, including "Organizational Redesign" and "Market and Products." When I was working for the Ohio Library Association (as OLC used to be called) in 1991, the president, Steve Wood, nearly got impeached for using the theme "Let's Hear It for the Customers!"

On Thursday during the conference, I will be introducing a program about the Underground Railroad Bicycle Route. The speakers will be OCLC's own Chuck Harmon, who got me interested in this thing in the first place, and Mario Browne, Project Director, Center for Minority Health, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.

I hope to see you there!

A Sheepish Apology

The other day, the unthinkable happened on my personal "My Yahoo" page. Under "It's All Good," I saw the message: "No items in past 7 days." How could we have let this lie fallow that long?

It's not like there isn't anything happening. IAG colleague Alice had her baby last week, for example. Mother and child are doing fine, Dad is doing well too, apparently. I had my first chance to be on a program with Jay Jordan, Cathy De Rosa, and library rock star Lorcan Dempsey, courtesy of Pam Bailey and the OCLC Western Service Center's Directors Days programs in the Seattle and Los Angeles areas. My wife and I hosted a visiting Ukrainian social entrepreneur for two weeks. Walt Crawford had a birthday. I've read a pile of great stuff recently. The one thing I haven't done is blogged about any of it.

So, faithful readers, please accept this apology, with the promise I'll try to do better. Several posts will follow shortly!

socializing is fundamental

When I was in library school, I read The Social Life of Documents (published in the first issue of first monday, May 1996) and it changed me.

[from the introduction]: Seeing documents as the means to make and maintain social groups, not just the means to deliver information, makes it easier to understand the utility and success of new forms of document. This social understanding of documents should better explain the evolution of Web as a social and commercial phenomenon.

I started to think about librarians (as people) and libraries (as institutions) not only as archivists, collectors, organizers, retrievers, and deliverers of information, but also as facilitators of social engagement; building capacity in individuals (not just knowledge) and building communities (local and otherwise) through connection between those individuals.

My colleague Andy Havens recently reminded me where it had all started for me when he pointed out some very interesting historical data on library circ numbers (his words), recently published (in Book Circulation Per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856) by Douglas Galbai, a senior economist at the FCC. Mr Galbai's research indicates that "historically established institutions (libraries) significantly stabilize borrowing behavior." But why?

[from the conclusion]: Borrowing books from public libraries is well-connected to a variety of institutions and values. Much of the pleasure from reading may be derived from discussing a book with friends who have also read the book. The desire to discuss books among friends may constrain the rate at which individuals will read books. At the same time, persons may value going to the library as an activity in itself. Borrowing library items may be in part a by-product of interest in those visits.


Coincidentally, our upcoming survey investigating privacy and information sharing on the web indicates that people who engage in social networking actually read more than those who do not. Really? Coincidence?

Could it be, asked Mr. Havens, that social networking could be one reason that people read more? When I have people with whom I have enjoyable book and reading discussions, would I tend to read more?

Ya think??

More than a decade has passed since the publication of The Social Life of Documents. But discussions around the social nature of our work seems to only recently be getting recognition in the professional library discourse. Sometimes I'm encouraged and engaged by the conversation. Sometimes I think to myself: why are we disconnected from this history? And why is this taking so long?

BookSwim

For months, I've been suggesting that libraries adopt the Netflix model to get rid of their overdue fines: library customers can keep out a certain number of books or other materials for as long as they want, no fines required. If you want another item when you are at the limit, return something. The library could recall the book when it's needed by someone else.

Instead of a library offering this service, welcome to BookSwim, "the Online Book Rental Library Club Netflix-style," to quote their banner. For about $24 a month, you can have up to five books on loan from the club for as long as you want.

How many libraries get $288 per capita annual support? As the person who pointed me to this site noted, "Like a library. But less free. Possibly more convenient..." Time is the new currency, even in this topsy-turvy economy. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Sweet Smell of eBooks

At least, if you get them from CafeScribe.

Apparently they plan to issue scratch-n-sniff stickers with their eBooks?
Read all about it in Wired Campus.

Also in today's NYT. If you think library fund-raising is bad, at least we're not cleaning bleachers. (At least, I hope you're not having to clean bleachers to keep the doors open!)

And good news for Jackson Conty, OR: looks like the may get to re-open after all. With shorter hours and less qualified staff. Hmm. What I didn't realize, was that Jackson County would be joining a group of libraries already under management by LSSI:

Arlington, TN Bee Cave, TX Calabasas, CA Chatham College, PA Collierville, TN Fargo, ND Finney County, KS Germantown, TN Hemet, CA Jackson, TN

Lancaster, TX Leander, TX Linden, NJ Malcolm Pirnie, Inc., NY Millington, TN Montgomery College, MD Moorpark, CA Red Oak, TX Redding, CA Riverside County, CA San Juan, TX

Anyone from these places want to comment on your experience?

Greetings from South Africa!

This week, I am attending the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions World Library and Information Council meeting in Durban, South Africa. This is the premier annual gathering of librarians with an interest developing the international library community. More than 3,000 people are registered, and there are about 100 exhibitors.

Sunday morning, the opening session was nothing short of amazing --- an exciting amalgam of music, dance, video and two outstanding speakers. Dr. Z. Pallo Jordan, South Africa's Minister of Arts and Culture, spoke on the growth of education and libraries in the country since democratization in 1994. Dr. Jordan is an intellectual and writer, who served the ANC in exile during the 1960s and 1970s. Justice Albie Sachs, of the Constitutional Court (roughly equivalent to the US Supreme Court), spoke movingly about how books helped keep him emotionally whole during his solitary incarceration in the 1960s for fighting apartheid. He also lost an arm and an eye in an assassination attempt.

It occurred to me as I listened to these men that South Africa is in a unique position: its George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are all still alive. The men and women who moved South Africa from its racist roots to a progressive democracy are still here and active, in many cases. (South Africa is the only place in the world where two Nobel Peace Prize winners live on the same street.)

It will be libraries and archives and museums that will preserve their memories, their artifacts, and ensure their impact on the future. I've never been quite so sure of the importance of the library mission as I am on this trip.

Books on your iPhone

I don't have an iPhone yet, although it's way cool they want to hear from me about it if I did have one. I would love to have one, but so far the price is too high for my budget.

I'm sure there will be library users in your area--yes, even your small, rural public library--who have them and are intensely devoted to them.

Here's another reason to love them: now the phones enable eBook excerpt-browsing. Called HarperCollins Browse Inside, you'll be able to see it at the Frankfurt Book Fair Oct. 10-14.

In the meantime, it might be worth checking out the LibreDigital Web site to check titles and see if you have the full title available--whether in e or p form.

Related note: I did see, in the July/Aug 07 print issue of Information Today, that eBooks are making a comeback. New technology like the iPhone and Sony's Reader is credited with some of the renaissance...of course, libraries have been there, all along!

Libraries are Getting Cool Points

It's not just my rose-colored glasses. Libraries and librarians have been getting GREAT press lately, in terms of shifting the general public's perceptions of us being irrelevant, old, dusty, bun-wearing, shushing places or people. Name your stereotype and the mainstream press is starting to help shift things. See my latest case in point (thanks , Eric) from the San Francisco Chronicle, "San Francisco libraries have become neighborhood best-sellers."

And you know the funny thing about it. Whether or not it is *actually* true in your particular library, you can start living it like it's true (not that you haven't been already, for years) and it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Hope you are having your own "running of the bulls" each morning as you open the doors of your public library. You academic librarians, enjoy the back-to-school bustle that's starting up!

My Hero!

Chuck Harmon finished the Underground Railroad Bicycle Trail ride last weekend, and he has written a series of blog entries about it. I really admire Chuck for his determination in completing the ride, as well as for his work in planning the Ohio section of the route.

He also had the inspiration of tying public libraries into the trail, so you have to love the guy!

Crazy Guy on a Bike

Several months ago, Chuck Harmon got me interested in the Underground Railroad Bicycle Route, a bicycle route that runs from Mobile, Alabama, to Owen Sound, Ontario, following one route used by escaping slaves to find freedom in Canada. Chuck, a colleague at OCLC, is an avid cyclist and he laid out the Ohio section of the route. He is also an avid library user.

Chuck and I fleshed out ways public libraries could be involved in the route as "conductors," helping individual riders with a place to get out of the weather, find information about the area through which they were traveling, maybe even check their e-mail or read the day's newspaper. He and I started a message board on WebJunction about the route. One excellent entry from this site traces how the Erie County (Pennsylvania) public library has incorporated the route into their outreach.

Now, Chuck is on a one-week ride of the final lap of the route, from my old hometown of Buffalo, New York, to Owen Sound. His journal is on a site for cyclists called "Crazy Guy on a Bike," and he's doing a wonderful job talking about the ride. (Full disclosure: Chuck invited me to ride along, but my schedule at work has prevented me from getting away. Besides, I am bone idle.)

The route is a collaborative effort of Adventure Cycling Association, The Center for Minority Health, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, the National Park Service's Network to Freedom, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and WebJunction.

Is listening to a book cheating?

The New York Times seems to be on a tear with articles of interest to librarians recently. Today's entry, "Your Cheatin' Listenin' Ways," focuses on the controversy in some book clubs over listening to audiobooks as opposed to reading the text.

Before I go any further, full disclosure: NetLibrary, an OCLC division, currently markets Recorded Books products to libraries.

That being said, I am an unabashed fan of audiobooks. I was an audiobooks reviewer for AudioFile and Booklist for many years (until OCLC, NetLibrary and Recorded Books got together), and I find them to be a wonderful way to find new material, gain new insights on the written word, and hear wonderful performances by terrific voice artists and actors. Hearing Frank Muller read Pat Conroy, or Jim Dale read JK Rowling, or Barbara Rosenblat read anything this side of a grocery list, is a transcendent experience.

But stay away from the abridged books, OK? Even a pragmatist like me has to draw the line somewhere!

socializing the social

I was at the Dublin office all of last week and although I was working rather hard, I had a lovely, lovely time. I spent my time there in three ways: first, working on wireframes for the new social networking features that will eventually show up on WebJunction; second, doing a series of meetings with other OCLC product managers and their friends to find out which, if any, of those features might be useful to their services and/or community building efforts; and three, working closely with my WJ colleagues Dave Ungar, Michael Porter (libraryman), Clayton Wood, and our Seattle-based colleagues on the future direction and strategy for social networking at WJ. LMTU, jam-packed fun and excitement.

First night, libraryman and I were blessed with the opportunity to connect up with Jasmine & Bob (OCLC Social Networking) along with Lorcan, Thom, Stu, and Eric (OCLC research) over dinner. The bulk of our conversation fell on the topic of the relevance of emerging social tools to OCLC services and the cooperative at large. Later, over a makeshift bar (with contributions from Stu) at Lorcan's house, we meandered around current implementations and process, as well as discussed the im/prudence of "disruptive" technologies and "subversive" processes in the context of a much larger organization. We left with varying degrees of agreement on the extent to which both patron and library staff services should be "socialized" but we sure had fun dreaming up new ways to get stuff done that's not just cool, but ultimately supports the cooperative on the whole. BTW: Lorcan pointed to this cool list of tools yesterday. you may have already seen it, but I was wowed by it and wanted to pass it on here, just in case.

Next few days we rocked the WJ wireframes process, although we didn't quite get them into full draft (yet). As soon as they and initial design drafts are finished, we'll take them out to our community for initial review and feedback. Preview: what are you and your friends doing (in libraryland)? ;) Please leave comments, email, directmail, or whatever your preferred method of contact if you're not a regular WJer and you'd like to be involved in this feedback!!

Mid-week I spent a (too brief) lunchtime with George, whose careful leadership and trusted mentoring are always welcomed. If only he'd move to Seattle. This in between non-stop (literally) meetings with everyone from WorldCat.org to Delivery and Collection Analysis. I know there are those who like to refer to us as the "Anchor People" of libraryland (nice!) or to our OCLC headquarters as "the Deathstar" (not so nice, but funny!), but when you take a step back and think about it - we do some fairly mind-blowing things together as a cooperative.

By the time Friday rolled around, having spent nearly every waking hour in conversation with one or another of my colleagues about social networking, some things started to gel for me that hadn't before. Ideas are still marinating, but so far, here's how it goes:

-social tools are useful because they connect people around shared information, activities, or interests
-social tools might be efficient augments to online delivery of both tools and content (or data) because they can facilitate support, deliver news and documents, and connect people who work w/ the same stuff
-depending on what my role is in libraries, or how broadly I like to get involved or connect, I might want to have a fully integrated social experience (lots of people, lots of tools, lots of content) or very narrowly defined social experience (only people I work with, only content I care about, only the tools I use)
-if we could all get together on a shared platform (a single portal?), we could deliver the range between these extremes to "everyone" without their having to move from place to place on the web, and according to their preferences
-although i think primarily in terms of services to library staff, since that's where i spend most of my work time, consumers probably could benefit from exactly the same sort of thing - everything you can do with libraries, all in one place, and it's social

ideas are cheap, i know, but this is where my big giant dreams are starting to settle.

Encore t-shirt contest

Innovative Interfaces has a fun Flickr contest up, to see where their Encore t-shirts have gotten to. If you have an Encore t-shirt, upload your photo! I like the way they're using Flickr's ready-made tools to drive their own customized marketing campaign...

New study about youth and tech assumptions

Andy has again ferreted out more interesting stuff. This time it's a new global study from MTV, Nickelodeon and Microsoft about how kids and young people interact with digital technology. The study "challenges traditional assumptions about their relationships with digital technology, and examines the impact of culture, age and gender on technology use."

The press release is a good summation...if anyone can find a link to the real study, post it in the comments. Here are the highlights of the study, from the press release:

     -- Technology has enabled young people to have more and closer
     friendships thanks to constant connectivity.
  -- Friends influence each other as much as marketers do.  Friends are as
     important as brands.
  -- Kids and young people don't love the technology itself -- they just
     love how it enables them to communicate all the time, express
     themselves and be entertained.
  -- Digital communications such as IM, email, social networking sites and
     mobile/sms are complementary to, not competitive with, TV.  TV is part
     of young peoples' digital conversation.
  -- Despite the remarkable advances in communication technology, kid and
     youth culture looks surprisingly familiar, with almost all young
     people using technology to enhance rather than replace face-to-face
     interaction.
  -- Globally, the number of friends that young males have more than
     doubles between the ages of 13-14 and 14-17 -- it jumps from 24 to 69.
  -- The age group and gender that claims the largest number of friends are
     not girls aged 14-17, but boys aged 18-21, who have on average 70
     friends.

Also, Microsoft has pulled out a few verbatim quotations on the study.

There were also really interesting global differences noted. One that stuck out for me was China. Because of the one-child rule in China, many kids reach out to online friends for companionship much more than in other countries where they may have siblings at home. It's such an interesting mix of culture, social norms, tech and gender!

If you remember our Symposium from ALA MW 2007 (scroll down), some of the privacy/parental controls situations that danah boyd described are now evident in the research.

New Metrics of scholarly authority

Did I mention we are suffering under summer's mandate to slow down and enjoy the view, here at IAG? I have spent the past three weeks in hectic report-writing and budget-reconciling land, but have emerged relatively unscathed now that both have been submitted to higher powers.

I have been attending to civic matters, and busy catching up on correspondence. One of which was a message from (gulp) more than two weeks ago about an interesting blog topic. I flagged it at the time and now am finally returning to it.

Andy suggested it from a Chronicle article about Web 2.0/3.0 methods of establishing relevance and authority. Here the draft list the author, Michael Jensen, presented that Andy circulated as brain food with commentary:

• Prestige of the publisher (if any).
• Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any).
• Prestige of commenters and other participants.
• Percentage of a document quoted in other documents.
• Raw links to the document.
• Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered.
• Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion.
• Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted.
• Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status?
• Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community.
• Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s).
• Significance of author's other work.
• Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc.
• Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read.
• Length of time a document has existed.
• Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations.
• Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

The items I noted in red are ones where social networking systems would play a fairly obvious role in establishing or enhancing authority under these systems. The things noted in green/italic are somewhat secondary qualifications; i.e., the other social-y stuff will contribute, over time, more and more to, for example, the "prestige of the commentors and participants." That is, if I don't do the other things, my prestige will go down. They are (again, over time) likely to become effects as opposed to causes.

So... from a library perspective, does this mean that:

A) There should be a way for libraries to catalog/reference/rate scholary authority in some way? If the "old way" was to provide access and metadata for materials that had been conferred with authority by being in certain publications or by certain authors... how do we provide discovery/delivery for stuff where the authority is vested in a much less central way? And...

B) Should libraries seek to influence this "new authority" in any way, or simply promote its effects and/or best-in-class systems. That is, should librarians seek (in an organized fashion, and/or more than other users) to impart authority on various materials? Or should the task be to provide access based on authority.

He's asking great questions. What do you think?