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

A few events have me thinking about the long-standing academic library philosophy of building comprehensive collections for the purpose of preserving, protecting, and archiving our cultural heritage. I am wondering to what extent there might be a philosophical shift going on to move towards serving current needs and not worrying so much about being the cultural time capsule. This is an argument that’s been going on for years: access versus ownership. Aside from having the permanancy of ownership, however, there has always been a kind of archival approach in most academic libraries. Is it changing now?

1. A blog called Awful Library Books is geared mostly toward public libraries. It identifies (humorously) books that really don’t need to be in a public library collection anymore. Got me thinking. We often think that this “awful” stuff needs to be in an academic library for historical purposes. But how many of these do we really need to save? Can we really know if there is any “just-in-case” need? Maybe the fact that we don’t know says we should keep it in the collection, but can we afford to? Maintaining something in a collection does cost money, both in staff effort and in opportunities to add something else to that space.
2. An article by Faye Chadwell about how patron-focused collecting is becoming more and more common, even in academic libraries: Chadwell, Faye A.. 2009. What’s Next for Collection Management and Managers? User-Centered Collection Management. Collection Management. 34(2):69-78. < http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/01462670902731081 >. She talks about various purchase-on-demand projects and about how ebook collections with an on-demand component can give immediate satisfaction to the library user. No waiting. Click, read.
3. Wired had a blog entry entitled “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature” which really discusses how new technology is disrupting the processes of reading and canon-formation. But it got me thinking about how the demands of readers are really changing. That means libraries need to change to meet those demands. But does it also mean that we need to maintain our archival mission? How can we do both on limited resources?
4. I was giving a presentation recently about the need to augment our ebook collections in my library. The argument was mainly that there are many remote demands that can be more readily served by electronic collections. The collection that we opted to license is a “rented” collection. Our library patrons now have a huge number of ebooks at their disposal, but there is no “perpetual access,” as we say in the library world. We have it as long as we pay the rent. All goes away, if we don’t.
5. I was at my mother’s home recently. She’s moving into assisted living. My siblings and I were trying to clean things up to put the house on the market. She has TONS of books that none of the children really want. I know from experience that these will be a hard sell for a library donation. We’ve been taking them to “good will.” No telling what happens to them after that.
6. In a blog post entitled “Better Than Owning” Kevin Kelly point out the benefit of “renting” services in the cloud or on the Internet. He compares this remote service to a traditional print library. We don’t own the books in the library, but we can make use of them. I wonder about pushing that concept even further. The LIBRARY itself doesn’t own the resources, but it can make use of them and provide access to its own customers.

All of that to say that I’m obsessing about this conundrum. Is there really a professional groundswell moving academic libraries toward a “current use” versus a “future use” philosophy? Do we want there to be such a groundswell? I support the idea that my library should save many things, regardless of the current demand. But I also want us to serve as many current demands as possible. My management task is to figure out how to do this. Many questions. Few answers.

Thinking about the interlibrary loan of ebooks got me thinking more about the idea of normalizing ebooks, making them part of the standard practice for libraries, not something requiring all kinds of special treatment. But, of course, ebooks are different in many ways, some of which I noted in the previous post. We need to mainstream ebooks in our processes to make them more readily available to library users. But we also need to make sure we continue to exploit the unique features of ebooks. Publishers and vendors are not always on board with exploiting all that is possible with ebooks.

Tiffani Travis told me about a conversation with an ebook vendor in which they extoled only allowing one user at a time because it was just like a “real” book. The same vendor offered printing one page at a time as a virtue for the same reason.

From the other end of the spectrum (excluding ebooks from the mainstream), I read recently that the Madrid Book Fair (Feria del Libro de Madrid) had banned vendors and publishers of ebooks from participating in the fair. Somewhat narrow-minded. The fair organizers think of it as a print-only event.

I know vendors are frustrated with librarians because in the past we said we wanted pricing options that included  one user at a time, but the whole idea of making ebooks adhere to the functionality of a print seems more and more ridiculous. There is little reason for employing ebooks at all if we can’t exploit them for all they are worth.

We need vendors to allow printing, copying, and saving. We also need multi-user possibilities that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Some vendors talk as though we should have to pay for a book for each FTE! Well, every one of our customers doesn’t want to read your book. I’d like a system in which I only pay for multiple copies if there really is simultaneous demand. Otherwise a single user would be adequate.

Guess what? Ebooks are here to stay. They are “real” books. We need them in libraries and we need to make them part of our mainstream. But we also need to make their special features useful and available to library patrons.

In some ways ebooks are a curse.  Did I just say that? Well, they are more like the best of things and the worst of things. The goodness is that they can be delivered across space and time in ways that print books cannot. The distance education kid (or baby boomer more likely) 100 miles away can access our collections at 3:30 a.m.  on a Sunday…right now! Users of our ebook collections can also interact with materials in new or more effective ways: searching, bookmarking, annotating, and saving all that online.

The downside? Ebooks from most publishers and vendors take away some of the rights that inhere in print books. First-sale doctrine, for example. You can’t buy a Kindle ebook file from Amazon and then turn around and sell the file to someone else. You could do that, perfectly legally, with a print book, but the DRM of the Kindle book (or Sony book) prevents that. The same is true of ebooks on the kinds of platforms that libraries tend to license: Ebrary, EBL, NetLibrary, and OverDrive. First sale doctrine holds that the original seller’s claim on the individual object (book, record, painting) ends with their sale of the object. The next owner can do whatever they want with it, as long as they don’t make additional copies.

Our society has also determined that libraries are within their rights to lend [physical] materials to other libraries or library systems. Ebooks and other digital objects don’t enjoy the same interlibrary loan rights. Or, I should say, the rights are not necessarily forbidden, but the technology makes it impractical. The licenses libraries sign to gain access to the materials may also expressly forbid it. One’s head swirls reading it, but DCMA, by the way, offers various library exemptions for archival or replacement purposes, but interlibrary loan is nebulous. A lot of the talk regarding digital interlibrary loan is aimed at copying tangible materials into a digital form and transmitting them to the requestor. I’d like to see us talk more about enabling interlibrary loan of digital collections themselves.

From a practical standpoint, how do I offer an ebook we have on Platform A to another library that does not have the same platform? Most such platforms make printing or downloading difficult as well. It’s nearly impossible to print out the book and send that as an ILL. Who would want to anyway? And forget about saving and transmitting a PDF file! Horrors!

Transmitting a PDF of the book would be one of the simpler solutions. I wouldn’t even mind if it were a DRM-protected PDF. Expires after a given time period. Another practical method would be to pass temporary permission to the borrowing library, regardless of whether they have licensed the platform in question. That is something that makes most vendors’ skin crawl. They are going to continue to stand by their terms of service and license agreements. You’ve signed. Now you have to live with the conditions. Librarians need to start asking them for different conditions. We need some way to lend ebooks as ebooks.

I love the idea of library as place. Although I would encourage the place, more and more, to be something virtual, I also think the importance of a physical environment should not be under estimated. But I’m thinking about ways of reaching out to library users and meeting them where it would be most useful to them.

That is why I’ve become obsessed with this idea: put a satellite library in the student union building on campus. I’m thinking of a small storefront style library presence. In my ideal vision there is a service desk right up front, facing out onto a busy hallway. There are chairs for customers to walk right up and sit down with the librarian for a research consultation.  The library is about the width of two office desks, but it is much deeper: kind of shotgun shack or mobile home dimensions. It is only staffed by one librarian.

Customers (students, faculty, or staff) could also come in to the library (rather than just sitting at the consultation desk up front). Along one wall behind the consultation desk are 3 or 4 computer stations where customers can do their own searching. All the way to the back is a comfy seating area: a couch and a couple of overstuffed chairs. Along the other long wall is a popular reading collection: McNaughton or what have you. Students can browse this collection and sit down for a bit of reading in the comfy area. Everything can be checked out.

The consultation librarian has a small reference collection: maybe an encyclopedia or two, dictionaries, local phonebooks, style manuals. The idea of the place is to be right there to offer assistance. Perhaps the student has been meaning to come to the library to ask for help but has just never gotten around to it. As they walk through the student union, they are reminded of their research need and sit right down with the librarian to ask for help.  The librarian gives them ideas and then moves them to one of the computer stations in the satellite library. The librarian can then check back on the student’s progress. Eventually, the student feels confident enough to go off and work on their own. It all took less then a half hour. The librarian can also help with formatting citations and footnotes, or other parts of the research process.

The satellite is a good way to meet students where they are. It also helps form good will with the studentbody.  It is open virtually all the hours that the student union is open. A lot of students just come in to relax and browse the popular books. Eventually, they have a project the librarian can help them with. They never think of it as “going to the library.” It’s just right there all the time.

The last few months have been pretty exciting in the ebook world. Last Fall Sony released their latest reader, the PRS 700, with a touch screen. This February we have the new Kindle 2 as well. Since then the big developments come one after another:

• Amazon announces a Kindle books application for the iPhone.
• Sony announces a partnership with Google to make public-domain Google books available through the Sony Reader store for free.

Since Kindle came along, a lot of folks give the nod to Amazon as the most likely to capture the imaginations and pocketbooks of those who have been reluctant to adopt ebooks. The wireless feature of the Kindle does mean you can find, buy, and download books from virtually anywhere. Whereas, the Sony requires that you connect your reader to a computer in order to download ebook files.

Sony had always, in my opinion, had the lead as far as the aesthetics and usability of their reader were concerned. The first Kindle had a cheap, clunky ugliness about it. All the Sony Reader models have been pretty slick looking items. Some of that advantage is diminished with the Kindle 2, which has a sleeker look. A lot of pundits have been talking like all this means that Amazon has won the ebook reader wars. I think they’re just beginning.

One reason why I don’t think Sony is going to roll over and die is wrapped up in the idea of openness. The Google deal and Sony’s decision to enable use of the Epub standard on their more recent devices suggest that they realize the importance of interoperability in the race to capture as many eyes as possible. Amazon, on the other hand, apparently believes that it can corner the market and create a monopoly of ebook distribution. The Kindle, to them, is simply another storefront for their huge warehouse of ebooks.

Until the Google deal, Amazon clearly had the edge in titles available. They sell more recently published titles (about 245,000 to Sony’s 100,000). With the Google books, Sony now can boast a larger selection of ready-to-download titles. These aren’t the frontlist, mind you. Some folks think that means the Google deal is insignficant in the ebook war. Google and Epub together, however, mean that Sony may have access to a growing library of ebooks. Sony users will be able to get ebooks from a variety of sources. If, as is rumored, Sony eventually releases a wireless model, Amazon will have little advantage. Kindle ebook titles are cheaper now, but Amazon is subsidizing those low prices. They won’t be able to keep that pricing model going forever.  More evidence of Amazon’s desire to quickly corner the market and drive all competitors from the field?

This kind of competition is good for the market. It will spur the development of better devices. It will also improve the variety and quality of ebooks available in the marketplace and perhaps lower their prices. Sony is still the underdog here, but I think they are going to hang on for a good while longer. If the Epub standard becomes more accepted, Amazon’s proprietary format may begin to seem more and more cumbersome. Readers will simply want to get their ebooks from any source they desire, much like they can for MP3 files. I’m not sure monopolies can exist in that kind of environment.

I’m a Shover & Maker! It’s the Library Society of the World’s spoof of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers. They’re self-nominated, but all the shovers are pretty admirable folks. Kinda makes one wonder what the point of anointing movers, shakers, and emerging leaders is anyway.