Or a Life of Technophilia

Convergent vs dedicated is an endless question when we talk about digital devices. Specialization or jack-of-all-trades. Roy Tennant said recently that the single-purpose e-book reader was “dead, dead, dead.” Convergent devices are often seen as “killers” of the specialized. But over the past 10 years I’ve found that not to be the case.

I’ve been hunting the convergent device since I first started shopping for a PDA in 1999. I didn’t want a Palm device of the time, because I wanted to sync and use my Windows Office documents. I also thought it would be nice to store and play my mp3 files. It took a few months of comparison shopping. By then the Compaq (later the HP) Ipaq came on the market as the most powerful PDA available. I grabbed one up and even moved to the second generation model.

Before long it was clear that the iPAQ didn’t really do everything I wanted. I was still carrying a cellpone, and wishing I had a digital camera. I did read books on the iPAQ, many books. It was, in truth, kind of a crappy experience. I used Microsoft Reader. Nice interface, but not really enough screen real estate to come up with the ideal combination of font size, line length, and page size. (Those things are perfectly realized in most print books.) After my last iPAQ began to have battery problems, I switched to a Treo 700w (Windows Mobile model, so I still wasn’t a real Palm customer).

Now I had a PDA, cellphone, and digital camera all in one device. Life was good. Again, I used Microsoft Reader to read books,  but, in fact, there was even less screen real estate than on the iPAQ. I read, but it wasn’t good. I took a lot of photos with the Treo. It was handy for that, but all in all, the photos were really quite bad. I’ve since purchased two digital cameras: a Nikon Coolpix L3 (compact point-and-shoot) and a Nikon D40 (low-end digital SLR).

I think cameras are a good example of how the do-everything device doesn’t always win. Virtually all cellphones now days have a built-in camera. Yet people continue to buy single-purpose digital cameras. That is because they have functions and features that are difficult to cram into the small space of an all-in-one device. And people sometimes want to take a picture that is better than the fog and blur of a cameraphone photo. Performance matters. Video cameras like the Flip also continue to be successful despite the ability of many phones to do video. Televisions are another single-purpose device that continue to sell, even though people can watch TV on their computer. A big television screen is better.

After my cellphone  reading experience, I began to think about what kind of computer I could get that would function as an e-book reader. A laptop didn’t really seem like the right thing for the job. Oddly, two solutions came available in the same year. The Sony Reader and Microsoft’s secret new tablet form factor the Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC). I got my library employer at the time to buy a Sony as a test platform for the staff and I bought a UMPC myself, the Samsung Q1. That’s the Q1 pictured at the upper left of this post, being used in e-book mode.  I bought it specifically because I thought other tablet PCs might be too large and bulky to function as an e-book.

The Sony  Reader, you’d have to say, is a single-purpose device. The Q1, because it is a Windows PC,  is a convergent device. I did a bit of a product comparison on Google video back in the day. In truth, they both function nicely as e-book readers. Sony works quite well with their own proprietary format and with EPUB files. The Q1 displays PDF better than the Sony, and can work with other file formats that are more at home on a PC.

The Sony clearly is not a multifunction device and it has some drawbacks as an e-reader: poor typographic versatility, lack of network connectivity (solved in newer models), no color. All of those will likely be improved as e-readers mature. The Q1 has problems as both an e-reader and a convergent device: backlit screen, which produces eye strain, poor battery life, lack of multi-touch screen. Text input with a stylus is not really a very pleasant operation. The fact that tablets have never really taken off suggests that people like keyboard input for many things. Most people who have a tablet (even the convertible models with a keyboard) probably have some other computer.

Lots of people are eagerly awaiting the new (fabled?) Apple tablet and calling it a “Kindle Killer.” But tablets have been around since 2001, well before the Kindle. Is there any reason to believe the Apple entry in the field will be any more murderous? Is there reason to believe that people will give up all their other computing devices to adopt the Apple tablet as their convergent device? I don’t believe so. It too will be a special-purpose tool.

The new (but not yet released) Microsoft Courier tablet model looks very promising as an e-book reader as well. (I want one!) Its two facing screens look very book-like. It looks like it might be a very nice enterprise tool, but enterprise tools don’t always appeal to every sector of the market.

Lots of elements figure in the success of a  product in the market. (Something Tennant eludes to in his article.) Price-point, style, and features battle it out for the heart and pocketbook of each individual consumer. Some people want more functions for $400 than they get with an e-book reader. Many folks, on the other hand, don’t want to (or can’t) pay the $1,000 or more pricetag on a more powerful device. I would be very surprised if either the Applet tablet or Microsoft Courier enter the market at less than $900. That alone will make them specialty devices. I’d also be surprised if either has the battery life of a Sony or Kindle. If you want to spend a day untethered from the power grid reading a book, I don’t think these devices will get you there. In short, I don’t see these devices being so market dominant that they drive e-book readers from existence. I’d be willing to bet (a cup of coffee) that Sony, Amazon, and several of the existing manufacturers will still be making reading devices in 10 years. (I find some irony in Tennant’s post when he says single-purpose readers are “dead, dead, dead” and links to three of his previous posts going back over a year… and yet e-book readers are still around!)

A lot of the features  the e-book doomsday folks admire in a tablet are desirable to have in a reader: connectivity, integration with our other networked tools, note-taking, writing, and other computing functions. We shouldn’t have to give those up because we now want to read a book. But many features of an e-reader are desirable too: non-backlit screen, long battery life, book-like form factor. When we talk about convergence, I don’t think we are talking about one form “killing” the other. We’re not talking about death, we’re talking about merger or reproduction even. I think there will be devices in the future that perform the functions of both the tablet PC and e-reader, but it won’t be because one form killed the other. One could just as well talk about the telephone being dead, since most phones now do something more than make calls, but we  never talk about the PDA or the camera “killing” the phone. (Ironically, you can still buy a phone that does nothing but make calls.)

I think there will be many sectors of the computing market that will have continuing success. Three types of devices I see hanging around for a long time: a multi-function communicator that fits in a pocket or purse, a larger device I can do more with but still move around with readily (tablets, netbooks, AND e-readers), and a workhorse that has a lot more power and storage than any of the mobile devices. Not everyone will have each of these, but they don’t really compete with one another either.

The e-book reader is clearly a specialty device, if for no other reason than not all people read books now. But the people who do read won’t be giving it up any time soon. Whatever Steve Jobs thinks, there is still a significant market for books. Many of those readers are still very attached to print books, but as the market pushes publishers to adopt e-books as a viable format and the reading devices themselves improve, many readers will happily make the transition to e-books. Many of those readers won’t find it necessary to have an e-reader that can create spreadsheets, or send a text message, or take a photograph. They will be content to have a device that just lets them read books.

Postscript

I should say that I now own an iPhone, a Kindle (1st generation), and a netbook (Asus Eee PC). The iPhone is the best convergent device I’ve ever owned. It does a great job of functioning as a PDA, keeping me connected with my social media, and snapping the odd photo.

I knew that I wanted an e-book reader of my own after using the Sony Reader at my place of employment. Now that I have changed jobs, it’s good that I don’t have to fret about leaving the Sony behind. The Kindle is functionally pretty much the same as the Sony, with the added benefit of wireless connectivity.

Because I can buy Kindle books on the iPhone, I can read anything in my collection on either the Kindle or the iPhone. The iPhone, however, suffers, in my opinion, from the same problem as all other cellphone-sized devices: not enough screen space to create a truly enjoyable reading experience. It is handy to have access to the collection to read a bit when I don’t have the Kindle nearby, but it doesn’t replace the Kindle at all.

The netbook, well, it functions primarily at a mobile outpost for the home computer. It doesn’t have the functionality to really be an e-book reader. This is mainly because I can’t rotate the screen to read in a portrait kind of mode. In landscape mode the screen is too short to display a page-sized window. Some applications like the Adobe Reader have rotating ability, but many don’t. Even though the rotated screen is a good size for reading, having the keyboard hanging out there to the side doesn’t really aid the reading function.

So, this post has been like a catalog of all the gadgets I’ve bought over the years. I have had an urge to buy devices that do more than one thing. There is, however, a limit to that convergence. Maybe one day we’ll have devices that perform all functions equally well and still fit into a small package. Until that time, I anticipate that people will buy whatever device best performs the task at hand.

I’m a fan of electronic content, which, I suppose, includes ebooks. I like ebooks, but I’m not a big fan of most ebook platforms and purchasing models that are out there now in the academic library market. One of the things that I especially don’t like is the idea of making ebooks another subscription+license kind of product. As we’ve been looking at our library materials budget this year, we see that almost 80% is taken right off the top for subscription products. That doesn’t leave us much leeway to buy discretionary things…like BOOKS!

Some of the ebook packages we have are based on a subscription model for a large and growing selection of titles. But if we ever cancel our subscription, we have nothing to show for it. No perpetual ownership. For one of these packages, I was looking at the use recently. There are about 42,000 titles available to our users. In the first 3 months about 2,700 of those had any use at all. I’ve ranted often about how “just in case” collections of library books don’t circulate very heavily. Typically, between 50 and 80 percent of a library book collection may never circulate at all. It’s only 3 months, of course, but it seems like the ebooks aren’t doing much better. 6 percent? Even if it goes up 4 times, that’s only 24 percent.

One of the solutions might be a purchase-on-demand program. Pay for what gets used. Keep those forever. Have ownership. Which, I think, only works if your users continue to have access to the large mass of un-owned titles. If you want to drive purchasing based on demand, there has to be a wide selection of materials to choose from.

But as I start to think about the math of purchase on demand, I’m not sure this is an economically viable option. We are paying annually about $40,000 for our subscription plan. If, instead, we paid only for the items that got used (2,700), we’d probably be paying in the neighborhood of $250,000 to $400,000. Assuming something like $75-$150 per title. Even with the number-of-use thresholds that are typically offered in purchase-on-demand (only pay after 3 uses), we’d still be shelling out around $170,000. (Again, I’m only looking at a few months use. Could be much higher.)

When do I need to say ownership of these titles is necessary? And how much are we willing to pay for them? Or, even if I don’t own anything, is $40,000 to $50,000 a year a good deal on all these books to which we have access? I think I need a mixed approach. Pay the subscription model. Buy a few of the most used titles. But I don’t think we could actually afford to pay the price of a total on-demand kind of model. That might change if this was the only way we were acquiring any books. But we’re not ready for that yet. My brain hurts!

We had some faculty at my university express some concern about e-books in our collection. Why do we have them? Are they taking the place of print books? I wrote up these talking points to be used by library staff as they interact with customers. This is not to say that I don’t see certain drawbacks to e-books, but this is where we are philosophically. I didn’t plan that they be distributed publicly, but what the heck! In case you might find them useful.

E-Books: Issues & Philosophy

Since the Zimmerman fire in 2006, the University Libraries at UNM have had a goal of converting as much content as possible to electronic format. Up to now, that conversion has primarily involved journals, indexes & abstracts, and reference resources. A few e-book collections have been acquired in specific subject areas. We are now moving forward with adding more e-book collections for all subjects. Students, faculty, and staff on campus may have questions and concerns about e-books in general and about UL plans to add more e-books. These points may help address those questions.

Rationale:

• Electronic resources are in high demand. Use of e-resources is, almost without exception, greater than for equivalent print material.
• E-books transcend limitations of space and time:
  • Can be accessed day or night, even when the libraries are closed.
  • Can be accessed by users who are distant and cannot readily get to campus, including branch campus and Extended University students and faculty.
  • Do not require storage space in the library, which is at a premium right now.
• For many e-book collections more than one user can read it at the same time, which can be valuable for reserve and other high-use material.
• Enhanced functionality: E-books enable users to search for specific words or phrases, make and save annotations online, export citations, and perform other tasks.
• Some of our e-book packages provide lower cost per volume than buying the same print books.

Publishing output and UL collections:

• The University Libraries (UL) is not giving up on print books. We anticipate that print books will continue to be important information sources for years to come.
• In the past fiscal year, e-book purchases only made up 2.5% of our total materials expenditures. Even for books alone, e-books were only 10% of our expenditures.
• E-books will become a larger and larger part of publishing output, especially for scholarly and university presses. The UL will need to keep up with that conversion to provide up-to-date and useful information to UNM.
• We will analyze use and usability with the idea of selecting e-book collections that are most valuable to UNM. This may mean that we change collections or vendors over time.
• Some of our e-book collections have records for individual titles listed in Libros. Others are only accessible by browsing the collection website.
• Our collections require users who are off campus to log in with their NetID and password.
• Many factors can affect accessibility: internet service provider, campus IT, NetID, publisher.
• In some cases, it may be appropriate to have a print and an electronic copy of a book.

E-Books: Issues & Philosophy

Current UNM E-Book Collections:

• ACLS Humanities Collection – humanities and history from scholarly publishers.
• Books 24×7 ITPro Collection – technology, computer science, and programming.
• Credo Reference – dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference works from many publishers.
• Early American Imprints – based on the Charles Evans American Bibliography and the Shaw-Shoemaker supplement: works printed in North America, 1639-1819.
• Ebrary Academic Complete Collection – over 42,000 titles from scholarly and trade publishers in many subject areas.
• EEBO Early English Books Online – based on the Short-Title Catalogues of Pollard-Redgrave and Wing: works printed in Britain or works in English published 1475-1700.
• Gale Virtual Reference Library – directories, encyclopedias, and handbooks on a variety of topics published by Gale.
• Knovel K-Essentials – selected handbooks in science and engineering.
• MIT Cognet – books from MIT Press primarily in psychology and brain science.
• NetLibrary – books on a variety of topics from many publishers. Not as current as ebrary.
• Patrologia Latina – comprises the works of the Church Fathers from Tertullian in 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216, compiled by Jacques-Paul Migne, 1844-1855.
• Springer Mathematics – includes Lecture Notes in Mathematics and other books.
• Springer Computer Science – includes Lecture Notes in Computer Science and other books.

Bibliography:

• Marilyn Christianson and Marsha Aucoin, “Electronic or print books: Which are used?” Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services. 29, no. 1 (2005): 71.
• Dennis Dillon, “E-books: the University of Texas experience, part 1,” Library Hi Tech 19, no. 2 (2001): 113-125.
• Dennis Dillon, “E-books: the University of Texas experience, part 2,” Library Hi Tech 19, no. 4 (2001): 350-362.
• Jonathan Bunkell and Sharon Dyas-Correia, “E-Books vs. Print: Which is the Better Value?” The Serials Librarian 56, no. 1-4 (2009): 1-4.
• Ellen Safley, “Demand for E-books in an Academic Library,” Journal of Library Administration 45, no. 3/4 (2006): 445-457.

I served as moderator for a program at the ALA conference recently. My introductory comments kind of serve as my justification for the term “2.0,” at least as far as it is applied to libraries.

Collection Development 2.0: The Changing Administration of Collection Development
Moderator: Steven R. Harris
Saturday, July 11th, from 3:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
[speakers' slides]

[My introductory comments]

Welcome to Collection Development 2.0. Everybody wants to be 2.0, right? Well, maybe not. Maybe it’s gone by… time to be replaced with 3.0!  I had something about 2.0 on Facebook the other day and someone posted a note that said, “2.0 is SOOO 2007.” There IS a danger, which I think we should try to avoid, a danger in keeping up with the latest trends, of seeming to be hipper than thou. Or 2 pointier than thou.

But is 2.0 something that is enduring, much less REAL? I think so. Whether we call it 2.0 or something else. What is it then? In it’s most basic and mundane usage, 2.0 just means doing things in the library in ways that are new and innovative. But that’s not the kind of enduring idea I have in mind.

2.0, to me, is all about listening to library users, engaging them in a conversation about what library services and collections should really be, designing services around real user needs. Some might say we’ve always done that. But I think it’s never had the potential for immediacy that we see now.

2.0 is also about exploiting digital technology and social media to enhance that conversation. Technologies now enable libraries to reach more information, but also to reach more users. 2.0 is about tying those two abilities together.

From the collections perspective, I think 2.0 is about either changing the manner in which we develop collections or about developing collections themselves that are new and innovative. Or specifically about developing collections that users can do things with, do whatever they need to do or whatever they find meaningful and significant. It’s about putting the power of information truly and actually into the hands of the user.

Our speakers today have all demonstrated a skill at innovation and at putting library user needs at the beginning of the conversation. Today we are going to hear about innovative collection development practices and inspired ideas about how we OUGHT to be doing collection development.

I am going to introduce all of our speakers now and then just call each in turn to the podium to speak for a few minutes. We’ll leave all questions until the end of the presentations. Then we hope to engage all of you in a conversation.

Jonathan Nabe is Collection Development Librarian for Science and Technology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.  He is also Coordinator of the institutional repository there, OpenSIUC.  Prior to his arrival at SIUC, he worked at the University of Connecticut, Brandeis University, and SUNY Stony Brook. SIUC recently underwent a complete change in the way collection development is handled, which we will hear about.

Martha White is Director of Library Experiences at Lexington (KY) Public Library. Her very title suggests a focus on customers and, as she told me, “on making sure that the customer has a great experience at the library, real or virtual.” LPL also recently underwent a reorganization that focuses more library staff on user experiences. Martha is going  to describe that.

Rick Anderson is Associate Director for Scholarly Resources & Collections, University of Utah. Rick is also the current president of NASIG. You may know him from his work on CD Hotlisit or columns in Against the Grain. There and in other publications, Rick has long advocated an overhaul to our library collections practices. He will present more of those ideas today.

[speakers' slides]

ALA Annual Conference, 2009, Chicago

Thursday and Friday (additional reports to follow)

I arrived in Chicago earlier than I really needed to on Thursday, July 10. So, I made my way  to Millennium Park before checking into the Palmer House Hotel. There is a really cool fountain there made up of glass blocks. The blocks actually have lighting elements behind them, even as water cascades over the outside. So, the blocks are like large pixels on a computer screen, a 40-foot high computer screen.  My photo doesn’t capture this, but there are interesting motion images displayed on the two fountain towers. I sat in the park with my netbook computer and broadband card catching up on email.

Later in the afternoon, I was able to check into the Palmer House. This hotel has a pretty extravagant lobby, with lavishly painted ceilings. People often come in and just sit looking up at the ceiling.

My conference really began on Friday morning. I spent the morning in the conference center writing up my introduction for a panel program on Saturday. I then ran into a friend from Utah just as I was about to catch the conference shuttle to an afternoon program. We ate an expensive lunch in the overcrowded food court. We made our way to the shuttle pickup about 25 minutes before the program we both wanted to attend, an ebook standards session hosted by NISO. Big mistake. Not enough time. The shuttle attendant told us our shuttle had just left and another wouldn’t be there for 20 minutes. We decided we would ride a different shuttle and then walk over to the scheduled hotel. Another mistake. We didn’t realize there was only one stop on the alternate shuttle route. We thought we were going to a particular hotel, but the shuttle made one stop and then headed back to the conference center. Yikes! We finally got on the right shuttle and got to the program an hour late. It was a 3 hour program anyway, so we still saw a lot.

The NISO/BISG Forum had a variety of speakers discussing ebooks. (See the slides online.) We came in during Michael Smith’s presentation about the EPUB standard developed by the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum). EPUB is interesting because it can be an end-user format, or it can be transformed into other formats like PDF or Mobipocket. EPUB is a platform agnostic, reflowable ebook format, which means that it is not designed to represent a page. The text will reflow to any page size. This was the most interesting part of the program. The other parts I saw did not present any new material. Michael Healy from BISG (Book Industry Study Group) talked about the BookDROP program (an ebook online archiving platform developed by publishers); Suzanne Kemperman of NetLibrary talked about DRM (largely from a publisher’s perspective); John Cox (John Cox Associates) talked about ebook publishing models (from a publisher’s perspective) pretty much those that already exist; and Sue  Polanka (Wright State University Library) talked about library ebook delivery models, pretty much those that already exist. I was disappointed that there wasn’t more “visioning” going on, but I suppose a program about standards will be pretty rooted in the here and now.

After the ebook forum, I made my way to the Collection Development Committee meeting of the Greater Western Library Alliance. The discussion here was largely about how troubled these 30 university libraries were. Many places are cutting as much as 20% from their acquisitions budgets. We also discussed vendor relations and the long awaited Wiley journal offer. The alliance is also working on a distributed print repository of journals. Having worked on one of these in another consortium, I’m not all that optimistic about success.

The highlight of the day for me was the ALA Open Gaming Night held at the Chicago Hilton. There were a variety of board games and card games. But also lots of video gaming stations: Wii, Xbox and whatnot. I like a little Dance Dance Revolution, but I didn’t play that.  I was there for one thing: to sing on Rock Band, a Guitar Hero variant with guitar, bass, drums, and singer. Players are scored on their ability to hit the right “notes” at the right time. Karaoke with a whole band. They didn’t have my favorite “White Wedding” by Billy Idol available, but I had a go at a Ramone’s song. Failed miserably. Later I tried “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden and did better. I also did pretty well on “Creep” by Radiohead. Can’t hit the high notes, but it’s generally more my thing than the Ramones. I then did a duet with “Jen” on Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So.” We kicked it on the chorus, but didn’t do too well on the verses.

The gaming was also a tweetup with some folks I knew on Twitter. I met Jen, Leah, and Michelle, who I had not met in real life before. I also saw lots of folks I knew from previous jobs and oodles of folks I know in Second Life, including “Veronica,” “Valibrarian,” and “Abbey Zenith.” Good times.

Rock Band photo courtesy of Valibrarian

Coming to you from the Metra line on the way to Elburn, IL after the ALA conference in Chicago

I’ve been reading and listening to several things recently that have me thinking about some aspects of my manifestos (1.0 and 2.0) about digital collections and user-driven collections. One of these is the Educause publication “The Academic Library in a 2.0 World” (Wawrzaszek, Susan, and David G. Wedaman. Research Bulletin, Issue 19. 2008. http://www.educause.edu/ECAR/TheAcademicLibraryina20World/163206) This report is a good summary of the changes happening in libraries because of the explosion of digital information. A couple of sentences capture the essence of these changes:

“We see a growing emphasis on information creation, including collective intelligence, tagging, and individual empowerment. Group study, social learning, experiential learning, online learning, and multimedia learning are transforming higher education and student expectations.” [emphasis mine]

Saturday, I also participated in a program for ALCTS at the ALA conference. (I know, alphabet soup: American Library Association, Association of Library Collections and Technical Services.) I was the moderator of a panel that discussed the changes they envisioned as necessary for collection development in the future (Collection Development 2.0). Martha White (Lexington, KY Public Library) and Jonathan Nabe (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale) discussed patron outreach efforts and the reorganization of collection development, respectively. Rick Anderson (University of Utah) talked a lot about how we really need to change our collection development behavior, especially to give up just-in-case collecting in favor of patron-driven and just-in-time collecting.

Both of these items (the Educause reading and the ALA program) focused on the changes digital information is causing in libraries and librarianship. But neither of these events really get at what I think is the heart of collections 2.0: the ability of library customers to use and repurpose information however they like, to make mashups, as it were, that serve their needs and interests.

I recently read a chapter by G. Sayeed Choudhury and David Seaman that more closely represented these views:

“There is a growing realization that in order to encourage the innovative uses we as librarians want to enable in our users, we need electronic content that is not simply available on a website but which encourages innovation by being easily gathered, personalized, re-purposed, and delivered out again to an audience. This malleability goes to the heart of much scholarly endeavor…” (“The Virtual Library” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/)

This is my new manifesto! It remains to be seen how amenable commercial information vendors will be to this kind of mashability. Stay tuned.

(Library selection was one of the big themes for me at ALA. Lots of thoughts to come about that.)

I’ve looked at WorldCat Identities a few times since it was announced. Initially, I thought, MEH no big deal. You got a nifty little biography site for authors. But as I look at it more, I begin to think differently about it. My biggest revelation about it: it’s not really a biography site at all. It’s an aggregation of metadata about authors who are listed in the Worldcat database.

The metadata comes from WorldCat itself, the bibliographic information about the books by an author, but also information about how many editions are available, how many libraries own copies, which are the most widely held books. That’s the power of the Worldcat database. They’ve developed a public interface to plunder all those bits of info in the MARC records of WorldCat. It functions somewhat like an authority record for an author, but designed for a general audience instead of for librarians. Each author’s entry is nicely organized and easy to read.

This is another step in OCLC’s movement toward 2.0-ness. The subject headings associated with an author are even displayed as a cloud, more like a folksonomy than a controlled vocabulary.

There lots of other nifty bits, including book cover images, links to Library of Congress and Deutsche Nationalbibliothek authority files, and related identities (other authors, that is). Two graphics that I especially like are:

A timeline that graphs when works by and about the author were published:

And a bar showing the average audience level for the author’s books:

Identities is not perfect. It’s only as good as the WorldCat data itself. There are often multiple records for a single author because there are bibliographic records in WorldCat that are not properly associated with a particular author. Sometimes the links between the graphics and the WorldCat bibliographic records generate odd results.

Although Identities looks like it was designed with a general user in mind, I am thinking that librarians can make great use of this data. Identities could be an effective selection tool for librarians who want to learn more about an author and her works before making the decision to buy books by that author. It could also be used to quickly identify books by an author either on a particular subject or within a certain time period. Those are activities that can be accomplished with effective searching within WorldCat itself, but this visual display can make that process go more quickly and easily. Librarians often rely on book reviews to make selection decisions, but WorldCat Identities may actually present more extensive and useful information about an author than most book reviews would. I’m going to begin using it more myself.

A book I’ve been working on for a while is finally seeing the light of day. Kathy Johnson and I have been editors on this project for what seems like forever. The whole thing got rolling in 2002 (or more like 2001 with the initial planning) at the ALA conference with a program for ACRL and the Literatures in English Section. (Do I even remember WHERE that conference was? Well, it was Atlanta, I see from the ALA website.) We had a great panel talking about methods of doing library instruction for literary research. A recording of the program was made, which unfortunately didn’t turn out so well because all the speakers didn’t speak right into the microphone. I’m still quite proud of my introduction for that program though.

The panel included luminaries of literary bibliography like James Harner, James Bracken, Helene Williams, and William Wortman. Naturally, we thought afterwards that it would be nice to preserve the program in book form. We didn’t quite get all of the speakers to contribute to the volume. So we decided to put out a call for papers, including both literature faculty and librarians. That call generated a lot of submissions and kind of expanded our idea of what the book was about. Working with all the authors was a great experience thoughout.

Once we had submissions for the book, however, things began to slow down. In 2004 I changed jobs from being the English librarian at the University of Tennessee to being the head of collection development at Utah State University. That was a big move for me professionally and geographically. The book got delayed. I was finding it really hard to take on my new duties and work on outside projects. Then (in 2008)… I moved AGAIN! To be Director of Collections & Acquisitions Services at the University of New Mexico. More delay. Mostly my fault. It wrenches my heart to think that people may have been counting on this publication for their promotion and tenure!

The editorial folks at ACRL and for the series Publications in Librarianship were really great to work with as well. Thanks: Craig Gibson, Tony Schwartz, Kathryn Deiss, Dawn Mueller, and all the unnamed editorial reviews. We outlasted at least one series editor! But finally we got the rewrites done. The I’s dotted. The T’s crossed. And the book, according the ALA store, is available for purchase. I still haven’t received my copies to verify its existence. Maybe I should have held this blog post until that time. JINX!

Through all of this, I’ve experienced so much professionally that I don’t seem (to myself) like the same person at all as the English literature librarian who started this process. Ironically, due to some frozen positions and retirement at UNM, I’ve volunteered to take over the English librarian duties: the greatest job in librarianship! So now I get to be head of collections AND a literature librarian. What’s this going to do to my next book project? Oh well. That one is just me. No co-authors to annoy.

Thanks to everyone who contributed in some way. It’s been an educational process. The long and winding road is over!

PS: we’re on ACRL Flickr and Worldcat!

In my previous post, I embedded a video of Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrating Microsoft’s Seadragon and Photosynth at a TED talk. Seadragon is a project to get large amounts of visual data to display on a computer screen with tremendous capacity to zoom from small thumbnails in to very close views of a digital image. As Aguera y Acras says, it shouldn’t matter how many megapixels we’re storing, only how many are displayed on the screen at a given moment.

I have the mobile version of Seadragon installed on my iPhone. There are several demonstration collections. One of them contains images of archival images from the Library of Congress. One can begin zoomed all the way out looking at thumbnails that appear to be small tiles. But as one zooms, different types of images appear. Drawings, paintings, and lithographs. Maps. Text documents. The zooming ability just seems endless. You just keep going and going, moving in to see amazing details of the images. I’ve included a few screen captures from my iPhone, but these really don’t show the wonderful smoothness of using the zoom on this software.

By contrast, I’ve been looking at a commercial product that offers digital images of newspapers, intended as a replacement for newspaper microfilm. As far as that goes, it is quite a lot better than microfilm. But the images are not reproduced with very much detail. One of our librarians commented about how the digital images of photographs in the newspaper were not very good. I think a microfilm replacement ought to skip over low-resolution reproduction of pages in PDF and go right for a high resolution solution that utilizes the kind of zooming abilities of Seadragon.

I understand that there is a significant cost consideration for creating and storing high-resolution images. It would, no doubt, have to be born by libraries if such a product were on the market. But I’m not sure a digital product that simply replicates the same level of quality of microfilm is enough of a benefit to justify the cost. In any digital collection, I like the ability to provide access to remote users. And I like the ability to copy and save information digitally. But I also want there to be another level of functionality that goes beyond analog. How can we do something that we haven’t been able to before? How can we utilize the data and metadata of digital objects in new ways? That’s what I look for in a 2.0 kind of library collection.  I hope one day we can bring Seadragon-like function to all kinds of digital data.

Seadragon Flickr set

When I was a kid we had a Sunday morning family ritual. After breakfast we would all take coffee or  tea  and adjourn to our favorite spot, 2 adults and 4 kids lounging around the livingroom and kitchen with sections of our  Sunday newspaper and a hot beverage. (Yes, we drank coffee and tea from a young age. I’m sure it stunted my growth. I’m only 6 feet tall.) My brother was usually on his belly on the livingroom floor. I was lounged on the couch with my legs draped over the arm. Mom and dad in chairs. Sisters here and there.  Sometimes the dogs would have a lick or two of coffee from a cup sitting on the floor. It was a good time. And we learned about the world, as reflected in our local paper, which wasn’t all that good, mind you.

As I reflect on this experience, though, I have to say that the format of the paper wasn’t what made it pleasant or an effective means of gathering information. Nostalgia aside, it was kind of a crappy reading experience. I’m thinking about this after reading a couple of Slate articles by Fahrad Manjoo about how print newspapers are better than electronic ["Why I miss the dead-tree newspaper" and "Why newsprint still beats the Kindle"]. I must say, I disagree pretty strongly. There are certain activities that are enabled by the form and structure of a newspaper, but many characteristics of newspapers serve an economic rather than a reading purpose. I am no historian of newspapers, but their history, it seems, is a confluence of two goals: cheap distribution and quick reading.

Distribution:

• Newsprint is a light, thin, and cheap paper that can be delivered with little cost or effort.
• The large page size of newspapers accommodates lots of information on a single page.
• The text size and column width also allow the inclusion of more information per page, which I argue, came from economic rather than reading considerations.

Reading:

• Because the economic considerations were already in place, newspapers invented reading mechanisms that were compatible with the physical format at hand.
• Headlines and variations in headline size enable quick scanning of topics and a pick-and-choose reading method.
• The importance of an article is, however, somewhat driven by the editor. They choose placement, headline size, and length of article.
• The journalistic method of “inverted triangle” aids skimming and quick reading. Read a little bit and move on to something else if you are not interested.
• Economic considerations notwithstanding, the text size and column width do enable skimming as well.

So, newspapers are a cheap way of dispensing news that also facilitates a skimming and scanning style of reading. But if we throw out the economic considerations of the physical paper, is this really an effective way of distributing and reading the news? I hold that the physical form of the paper is, in fact, kind of an unpleasant and ineffective reading experience. We may not have yet invented a better method for that distribution, but the attachment some people feel for the form may have more to do with nostalgia.

Problems with the physical form:

• The size of the newspaper page is, in fact, not ideal for reading. Some people manage the spread-eagle form adequately (to the annoyance of their subway mates), but others have to modify the paper to read comfortably. My brother would lay the paper on the floor and then lie down on his belly in front of it. Others fold the paper into smaller and smaller bits. (You might argue that this flexibility is actually a plus.)
• Fahrad Manjoo talks about the scanning properties of the page, yet any single news page only has 5 or six stories on it. If you want to scan other stories, you have to change pages, which, in fact, is rather slower than paging through a Kindle.
• All of the modifications and adjustments noted in my first bullet mean that the scanning abilities are also compromised. Unfold, unfold, adjust, adjust…and THEN scan. It’s not as quick as we seem to remember.
• Stories that span more than one page (another artifact of journalistic practice) require that you find the continuation in order to read the rest of the story. This is often, even in the “best” newspapers, a process that is prone to human error. The “continued” reference on the first part of the story bears no relationship to where the rest of the story actually resides. Then you’re on a wild goose chase to complete the story.
• If you’ve ever used a newspaper after someone else, you realize what a mess the pages can become. The paper can literally become unusable without a bit of remediation.
• The cheap paper and ink make for messy hands.
• What do you do with all that accumulation of newsprint throughout the week?
• Despite Nicholson Baker’s objections, the large format of newspapers is actually quite problematic from a library storage perspective. The large size requires special, inefficient shelving arrangements and the cheap paper is not very durable (sorry Mr. Baker).

I will grant that perhaps we have not yet created a news distribution method that is ideal. Although the number of people getting their news from the web would suggest that we’re pretty close. The layout of the New York Times (and many other papers) on the web actually aids the scanning and skimming process, in my opinion, more than the print counterpart. The navigational links are always visible no matter where I am. Mr. Manjoo finds that he tends to read each story through to the end on the Kindle DX, but I find that on the web I can follow links and scan articles much more quickly. Plus, I can always search. Something my mortal eyes and brain cannot effectively do in the print version.

I do feel that the equipment requirements for web or ereader access are somewhat problematic. But as Mr. Manjoo himself and others have shown, the cost of equipment is pretty quickly recouped with the cancellation of the print subscription.

My views on the benefit (and future) of ereader access to newspapers:

• Electronic delivery to a Kindle, for example, is superior to the rain-soaked paper sitting on your porch (or lost in the shrubbery).
• The Kindle DX may be the ideal size for reading news. It is easier to hold and page through a newspaper on an ereader than with the print model.
• Current readers like the Kindle are not ideal because of the lack of color.
• A multi-touch screen like that of the iPhone would really enable skim and scan reading.
• The benefits of e-ink (non-backlit) screens will one day be combined with color, multi-touch, and massive and efficient storage to create a news reading experience that will make nostalgia for print more ridiculous than it now is.
• Mobile devices should (will) one day have the zoom and pan functions that we see in Microsoft’s Seadragon prototype (see the TED video below). Newspaper reading will be quite an adventure then. Imagine the fun and funny things that could be imbedded in the comics page then!

image credits:

• newspaper: ElvertBarnes (Flickr)
• Kindle DX: tuexperto (Flickr)
• Double Fold: WorldCat