It was a wonderful conference!  Be sure to put next year’s dates on your calendar (notice that they’re a week earlier in 2011).

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator

Elizabeth Lane Lawley

Elizabeth Lane (“Liz”) Lawley returned to IL to give the endnote address.  Liz is Director of the Lab for Social Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and she also consults for Microsoft.  Her topic this year was Adding Value With Visualization.

Visualization is not new.  In 1992, Edward Tufte published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.  Most people are not good at visualization.  We are drowning in data; one of the best ways we can make sense of it is through visualization.  There are 2 views of the world;  one is with us at the center, and the other is other people in aggregate (the big picture).  Here is a good resource for this.

Data visualization is a new way for us to express concepts.  The best way for people to learn about visualizations is to make them.  But be sure your visualizations are not misleading.  Shaping data is hard.  It requires visual thinking.

The power of visualizing data is in the trend line, not the individual points. What feedback loops can we get out of our data?  Most library visualizations are about the large aggregate, but we are more interested in the details. There is also a move to treat visualizations as art, but the best visualizations are the ones where we can immediately identify with the data.

The Feltron Report presents data about a year in one person’s life. Mint is another system to generate visualizations of personal data.  Data on communities of people can be found at SparkPeople.

Visualization lets us see shifts immediately.  The New York Times has been in the lead in producing these types of fact-based visualizations.  Google also has some excellent free tools.  Eye tracking and click tracking are forms of visualization.

You can see Liz’s examples and slides on her blog.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator

Erik and Jaap

Erik and Jaap, the Shanachies, run the Delft Library (DOK) Concept Center. DOK won an award for the best library in the Netherlands, which is largely due to the staff working there.  The community is the most important part of the collection. For example, the pictures in DOK’s annual report are those of neighboring shop owners and their products.  Everything in the future will be mobile.  At DOK, for example, you can get audio books downloaded to your mobile phone by Bluetooth.

A library cannot be without games.  It’s all about people and what they want. If we care for them and allow them to share their stories, we have done a great job.  The library becomes the place to be.  DOK even has a download station at the Schiphol Airport library (the first library in an airport in the world).

The library was designed by 2 architects–one for the outside of the building, and one for the interior furnishings, etc.  The offices are directly connected to the library so the staff can see and hear what is happening.  Bookshelves are made of cheap material so that moving them around or shrinking the collection is easy.  In the youth department, the shelves are on wheels so the reading area can be transformed into an area for activities.  Bookshelves have no top shelves because those shelves tend to just collect dust.  All art works are digitized and can be borrowed for lengthy periods to decorate the borrower’s home.  Floors are brightly colored and are hard, not carpet.

The entire library is self-service.  Cards track loans, returns, charges, etc.  The ILS was built in-house in 8 months by 3 programmers.  It has been licensed to other libraries in the Netherlands.

There is always music playing in the library, but there are also quiet spaces for reading, research, etc.  Most of the staff move around mingling with the users, so there is only one small reference desk.

Signage runs on the Nintento Wii.  Branding is very important; the library has an old bus that is used around town.

Gaming has long been promoted in the library.  Large companies sponsor games in the library, with the result that sales of games at local stores increased.  A mobile game station can be put anywhere in the library.

We need more industrial designers of libraries.

4,000 people have come from all over the world to tour the library.  Here are some of the things they have seen.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator

Kendra Smith and Kevan Huston

Kendra Smith and Kevan Huston, Library Program Managers, partner with the Bing product group at Microsoft to influence development of the Bing search engine.

Three information access models:

• The iceberg with the tip and 90% hidden that librarians know how to access.  The user is intimidated, and there is lots of gate-keeping.  The epistemology is the known unknowns.  Users are aware they don’t have the information they need, and librarians are the enablers.
• The fire hose with huge amounts of information.  There is no gate-keeping and a highly democratic access model.  Overconfident users assume that if they can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.  The epistemology is unknown unknowns.
• The beehive with decentralized information.  Information is ambient and decisions are low latency and socially intermediated.  The epistemology is unknown knowns.  Users exist in space and time.  Social media, cloud services, the Internet of things, and mobile networks are there for the user.   The unpredictability and irrationality of users can be a benefit.

All 3 of these models exist, but the beehive is the prominent model today.  Drivers are low cost, location-based positioning, smart phones, etc.  Knowledge is about where you are, who you are with, and when.  Not all information is contextual.

Questions on critical thinking and verifying sources:

• What does the information access landscape mean for critical research skills?
• Has the explosion of information on the web changed the way we conduct research?
• Considering the “too much information” syndrome these days, how do you apply critical thinking to your research?

We always have a role in expanding people’s horizons.  How we do research has profoundly changed.  You must be sure you do not succumb to tunnel vision.  Humans are creatures of habit, but it’s important to push the envelope and consider how to frame the question differently.

At Microsoft, they always ask their users to look at the authors and their affiliation when they consider using information.  It is very difficult for end users to differentiate the quality of the information.  The best research tool you have is the telephone, which still works!  We are on a journey, not at a destination.

What research tools do you use at your job?  What special features make you a more savvy researcher than when you started your career?  Bing is a reference interview, but it’s about making decisions.  Commercial (paid) databases are still in use as well, but social networking tools are being used more frequently.  For example, news alerts now include blog postings.

Some content providers simplify the user interface at the expense of functionality.  Librarians should urge them not to mothball older systems (like Dialog Classic!).

Bing has tried to make searching more efficient by incorporating advanced features: saving search history by date; searching for a term in blogs; tabs for news, images, etc.; video previews by hovering the mouse over the thumbnail without having to click through to the video; categorizing most commonly searched entertainment areas and providing tabs to access them; etc.

Maps have turned into a research tool.  Some apps have been created by Bing; others have been submitted.  For example, data can be visualized on a map and mashed with photographs, street view, etc.

Advanced operators include intitle, site, domain, Boolean operators, language, location, and norelax (additional terms in sentence are not optional).

Lots of these features are improvements on pioneering systems.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator

(L-R) Daniel Lee, Qin Zhu, Amy Affelt

This panel described some innovative ways of providing value-added research for clients.

Amy Affelt

Amy Affelt said that we pull rabbits out of the hat all the time.  This is not so impressive to many users, but one thing that gets raves is a customized clipping service.  The benefits of alerts is that you are finding information people need to know before they see it themselves.  You read the news so that they do not have to.  The problem is that the more alerts you send out, the earlier you have to start!

The Amazon Kindle has changed her life because it allows her to download items because e-reader versions of papers and magazines are ready before they are on websites.  And the materials don’t get wet in the rain!  PDFs of articles can be downloaded from the Kindle to a PC.

Advantages of the e-reader:

• Size
• Headlines easily scanned
• Easy to highlight phrases
• Online dictionary can be used to look up unfamiliar concepts
• Read or browse content across platforms
• The Kindle becomes an ad hoc flash drive, so large files are easily transferred to the PC.

The Kindle has many advantages over the iPad.  It’s cheaper ($189 vs. $429), allows use of a Gmail account (the iPad requires a WiFi hotspot), can access content on a variety of platforms.

Daniel Lee

Daniel Lee provides information services to professionals at Navigator, a 20-person company.  He uses content analysis to find meaning from text or visual data, with techniques common to the social sciences.  Issue tracking, reputational analysis, and stakeholder analysis are examples of this type of analysis.  He tracks journalists and bloggers to understand who is writing about what and also what is being said about his company in the social media world.  Citation analysis is also useful to understand the flow of information through professional journals.

Skills necessary to do content analysis are similar those of catalogers.  You need to be comfortable with spreadsheets and databases.  Attention to detail, concise writing ability, and importantly, curiosity, are necessary.

Search analytics are available from many vendors, which are useful to get a better understanding of the retrieved data.  Some of the vendors providing analytics include Factiva, Canadian Newswire, and Karma.  More resources are available on his blog.

Qin Zhu

Qin Zhu spoke about putting information in context.  Working at Hewlett-Packard (H-P), a list of H-P researchers’ publications was required for the annual report.  Information discovery tools with broad subject coverage and advanced search capabilities were used. The retrieved information was consolidated, de-duped, and presented in different forms (plain text, HTML, RSS, and XML).  Links to the original publications were provided for full text viewing.  These different forms allowed distribution to a variety of publications.

The project was continued after the annual report task was completed, which has helped ongoing discovery, promoted colleague collaboration, and made information a service.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator

Keynoter Jody Turner Chats With Program Chair Jane Dysart

Innovation advocate Jody Turner has worked with several consumer companies, mapping strategic pictures of today’s world and helping them understand today’s culture.  She is a heavy library user and said that libraries are useful to help design at the beginning of the process, not at the end like graphic designers who makes things attractive to consumers.

Today we are feeding information to multiple generations and must tailor our approach differently for each one.  How do we curate the right people with the right information?  The new model is to be who you are, do what you love, and define what having the information means to you.

Data is the new social capital.  The big word today is empathy.  People want to be part of a culture and part of a community, no longer just in a neighborhood.  Our role is to bring people together in meaningful interaction. If my “town” does well, we all do well.  Use your words to capture what is going on, and make up words (she used “innoventors” as an illustration) to describe the use of information in new ways.

Companies have brands and mission statements.  It is important for you to have your own personal mission statement and for your family to have one too.  Small things can make a difference; for example, when you are doing a project, set up a Google Alert so you are aware of external developments.  A good book to learn about this is The Power of Pull:  How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set big Things in Motion.

Turner concluded with a list of trends and supporting resources.  They are all available at her website, Culture of Future.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator

[Technical note:  Why does the blog posting for Wednesday's keynote immediately follow the one for Tuesday?  Because there is no conference Wi-Fi access in the Monterey Marriott, so I could not write the postings in real time (grrr!).]

(L-R) Mike Ridley, Donna Scheeder, Jim Peterson

A panel of 3 CIOs, Mike Ridley from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Donna Scheeder at the Congressional Research Service, and Jim Peterson at the Goodnight Public Library in Franklin, KY, exercised our minds in the Tuesday keynote.  (Thanks, Jim, for agreeing to pinch hit at the last minute for the original speaker who was unable to come.)  Mike views his mission as maximizing the business practices of the university in order to change it; Donna said that information management goes hand-in-hand with technology; and Jim characterized himself as “The Geek In the Wallet” when new technology is being obtained.

Conference Chair Jane Dysart asked the panelists a series of questions relevant to today’s environment.  Here are the questions and panelists’ answers.

What are today’s significant changes and challenges?

Mike Ridley:

Although the CIO is all about the enterprise, everybody does their own IT today, which can be at odds with the enterprise.  We all have “tribal” identities–ways of thinking about what we do.  In a university, there are lots of tribes.

The information age is over, but we’re still holding on to it. Everybody is in the information business now, and we should let go of that metaphor.  This now the age of imagination.  We are completely ignorant of what the future will bring, what the toolset will be, and how it will evolve.

Donna Scheeder:

Each discipline has its own culture, so the challenge is to get an enterprise-wide approach to balancing resource allocation.  We add value by understanding our environment.  There is a big move to teleworking in the government which is affected by device proliferation.  We must align our content and deliver it to all types of devices.  Our biggest single challenge is security and asset protection.

Jim Peterson:

In the end we’re all the same with computers, servers, etc., but IT has its costs.  We need to have an organized way to get the information out at the most effective cost.  Increasing speed increases productivity because less time is spent waiting for it to be displayed.  One cost that we may overlook is the cost of power.  If a device produces heat, it is wasting power.  We must look at other power-efficient devices.

IT is more than the person you call when you have a problem; it is the facilitator to help you get the information you need.

About 35 billion items connect to the Internet today, and that will grow to 1 trillion in 3 years.  What will this mean to libraries?

Donna Scheeder:

Where do we want the library to be?  The library is the screen.  Why can’t we take it to where people already are, where they are in the mood to relax, contemplate, and read?

Mike Ridley:

The Internet will eventually get so big that we won’t notice it anymore. Libraries will be everywhere all the time, and the danger is that they will disappear.

Jim Peterson:

Libraries disappearing may be a good thing–who better to use Google for you than a librarian?

What tips can you as CIOs give us for our own environments?

Jim Peterson:

Show a solid business case for what you want to do.
Talk to your legislators so they will know your problems and requirements.
Help each other when your library is in danger of disappearing.  For ideas see this site.

Donna Sheeder:

• Figure out how what you want to do must be aligned to the greater goals of the organization.
• Think like the user.  What do they want to do?
• Think like decision-makers.  What is the economic reality of your organization?  Don’t think like the library–think like the enterprise.  Be able to frame the problem and work together to form the requirements.  Creativity must happen in areas important to the organization.  It is easy to create content and put it up.  How do we ensure it gets preserved?

Mike Ridley:

• Think like a participant.  How can you involve yourself?
• Make yourself visible in your organization as much as possible.
• Develop a level of tolerance for the various “tribes”.
• Have a skunk works to develop and explore new things.
• Central IT is your friend.

We need people who understand the technology but who can talk as users.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator

Rip Van Winkle

At conferences such as IL, one often finds sessions devoted to the future of libraries in 3, 5, or at the most 10 years.  But the organizers of IL 2010 went far beyond that with the Tuesday evening session on libraries 500 years(!!) in the future.  Well, at least nobody at today’s session will be around to validate the predictions!

The Audience Gathers

The Shanachies, Eric and Jaap, took us on a trip into the future.  They showed an interview with Ernie Ingles, Vice Provost and Director, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta.

Erik Interviews Ernie Ingles

Ingles likes libraries because they are very dynamic places.  There has been so much change in the last 40 years!  That was 5 years after the first photocopies were introduced into libraries.  What’s next and how do we start preparing for it?  Where will libraries go?  We must stop thinking that there is something called a library.  There are many kinds of libraries, and the differences will become more profound.  We are the keepers and curators of yesterday’s and today’s knowledge for tomorrow.  Our client 500 years from now needs to have available some of the things of today.  We have to deal with that future not only in print but also digitally.  There is nothing permanent about a digital file.  We must stop thinking about decades.  We have managed to inherit a heritage from our predecessors.  It will be that way in the future, but we must start thinking how we are going to preserve our heritage.  We have not taken preservation as seriously as we should.  The world has to understand that we have the skills to do it, but we need a general understanding.  We need leadership to give librarians the confidence they need to make the case that this is important.  I would like to see that people have come forward to take on those challenges.

Ernie comes back to tell us what happened

From a viewpoint 500 years hence, Ernie said that nobody cared about long-term preservation.  Something went wrong!  Metadata terrorists were creating app things.  They were creating dysfunctional taxonomies–even though the knowledge was there, you couldn’t find it.  They made everything digital and forgot about print.  We heard about a “Saint Steve A.” who had the ability to counteract what the terrorists were doing.

An old video of an interview with “Steve A.” was found.

Erik Interviews "Steve A."

He has no doubt that devices will be implanted so that we won’t have to worry about losing our phones.  People find it hard to imagine how much change will happen.  We are entering a period of very dynamic change. It’s not about desktop screens, products, or content.  It’s all about context.  We have gotten much better at communicating to transfer information.  We can move more information than ever before.  We need to understand better how information flows and how we can improve its context.

Unfortunately the video was damaged, but the body of Steve A. was found and unfrozen.

He got very passionate about reading.  We brought people together, and it was depressing.  They would say things like, “If we could only catalog the Internet…”.  We showed them that this would take 9,000 years with today’s technology.  We were worried that librarians have not leaped up to the next plateau.  I wondered how we could shock them out of their complacency.  How do we protect the world of discovery and culture for the next 500 years.  Some people actually said they couldn’t think more than 3 years in the future!  How do we get our passion to transcend our small world?

We will be totally interconnected, but there will be “opt out” places where you can do things yourself and have free thoughts without being connected.  Will our search for libraries be in vain?

Erik interviewed “The Librarian in Black”, a.k.a. Sarah Houghton-Jan.

We are trying hard to connect to our users using whatever device they have.  It’s really important not to be device-specific.  We use open access so that our information will always be available.

The "Librarian in Black" Becomes the "Librarian in White"

Is there hope for libraries?  There is, but all the data we have is so encrypted, we need a key to the internet.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator

Sarah Houghton-Jan described AR as a 3 layer system:  a cell phone with GPS, camera, accelerometer–where you are, what you are seeing, how fast you are moving.  The central feature is open layers:  combining a digital view of the physical world with digital objects of the virtual world.

AR could include QR Codes to connect a physical storefront with information and reviews about it.  SnapShop lets you take a photo of furniture and overlay it in your physical space and see what it looks like. Another AR application is Wikitude, which connects Wikipedia data with physical spaces.  Layar shows you places distant from where you are.

Cyberspace has leaked into the real world. What was inside the box is outside. This has potential to be useful for all of us, but it may be scary too.  What does it have to do with libraries?  The Univesity of North Carolina has created a historical walk of the campus, as has Ohio State University.  The San Jose Public Library has developed a concept for a Layar-based history walking tours of the city. It will be a mobile site with a locally created app. For example, yearbooks in the collection can be connected with the school, or past versions of present-day buildings can be shown.  These applications could be used as a teaching or history tool, using data that the library has stored in its collections.

Societal consequences of AR include ubiquity of connectivity, openness and transparency, privacy concerns, the danger that people will share less.

(L-R) Sarah, Eric, Jaap

The Shanachies (Erik Boekesteijn and Jaap Van de Geer), well known to Internet Librarian audiences, followed Sarah with videos on AR.  You can see the video clips at This Week in Libraries.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator

Lisa Thomas (L) and Holly Tomren (R)

Lisa Thomas, from Southern Connecticut State University, and Holly Tomren, from University of California, Irvine Libraries, gave a joint presentation on e-books in libraries.  Now that e-book readers have become more common people are trying to download them to their devices, with varying degrees of success.  Libraries have not moved past their old routines, requiring the user to come to the library, or declining to loan an e-book because “it is checked out”, even though it’s on their website.  Lisa and Holly have developed a poster illustrating the 6 features of e-book collections (see photo below):

Mobile E-book Considerations

Selection
Consider format, use and compatibility, mobile devices, apps and platforms, and publishers and packages.  The M-Libraries page on the Library Success blog has lots of good information.  Many devices are not set up for institutional purchasing.

Acquisition
It is difficult to implement point-of-need purchasing; best practices must be established.  Priority processing in institutions can be very slow, and many libraries are missing the opportunity to build e-book collections because of outmoded technical processing.  Libraries must find a way to purchase an e-book at the time of the user’s request and still comply with licensing agreements, which may limit the usage to only a single option.

Cataloging
Provide access points; consider record options and national standards. Identify metadata needs, and adapt the catalog display to reflect the availability of a mobile version of a title.  If your library circulates the device, consider whether each device should be shown separately in the catalog so the user will know which one is checked out.  There are no MARC codes to represent mobile devices, so locally developed codes will have to be used.

Access
It is important to understand how to access e-book collections using mobile devices.  Some devices can access much more of the e-book collection than others, which influences selection decisions.

Preservation
Be concerned about e-book preservation arrangements and share expertise about format obsolescence and data migration issues.  Consider the LOCKSS and Portico programs for preservation.  Preservation becomes important when we realize the rapid appearance and disappearance of mobile devices

Management
Teach staff and users about managing these resources over time.  Plan for advancements, and incorporate mobile into data management systems and policies (see the California Digital Library’s policy for an example).

Conclusions/Next Steps
Develop mobile collections as well as services, with the mobile reader in mind.  Know and prioritize local users’ needs.  Make sure you are considering the end user and what they can do with your collections.  Recognize that mobile is growing and even taking over.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today,
Conference Circuit Blog Editor, and
CIL2011 Blog Coordinator