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Future forward for the library

Page history last edited by katieday 3 yrs ago

Future Forward for the Library

 

"What if overnight your library became perfect, what would it look like?"

[Inspired by the 'miracle' question of Meredith Farkas: If a miracle occured one night and all of the problems with your library were gone (or we miraculously reached library 2.0 overnight), how would you know that a miracle had occurred? What would be different? What would the library be like? Once you have that vision for what your library/Library 2.0 should look like, what specific steps do you and your colleagues need to take to get there (how do you get to 1.3, 1.6, etc.)? Once you have your answer to those questions, you should have a clear roadmap for reaching your goal. And it’s a roadmap written specifically for your library.

 

The Library of Babel by by Jorge Luis Borges

Library 2.0

 

Library 2.0 is a big enough meme to warrant an entry in Wikipedia, though its definition is still very much under discussion. The following snippets were taken from the Midwinter 2006 issue of Cites & Insights which Walt Crawford devoted to trying to uncover just what Library 2.0 could possibly mean.

 

  • "The idea of Library 2.0 ... is about allowing user participation through writing reviews and tagging in the catalog and making their voice heard through blogs and wikis.
  • "Library 2.0... is the library version of Web 2.0: lightweight, social computing applications to meet users' needs when, where, and how they need it.
  • "Web 2.0 is about building a platform for a conversation where the voices and information flow freely... To me, Library 2.0 is about crossing that same threshold -- from the library as a one-way conversation to the 'read-write' library."
  • "Library 2.0 is a conversation, where the information, expertise, knowledge, resources, and materials available are just as likely to come from the patrons as they are from the shelves."

 

A wonderful resource related to both Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 is WebJunction.

 

WebJunction is a "one-stop-shop" online resource for libraries and other organizations that are providing public access to information technology. Our members include library staff, library technology consultants, Gates foundation trainers who have been working with public libraries to provide access, and staff at other community technology centers.

 

For example, they have a page on "Social Software" listing articles and websites on topics like:

School Library 2.0.

 

Christopher Harris on his Infomancy blog has explored what School Library 2.0 can mean in several postings, e.g., SL2.0: Examples of a Vision, SL2.0: Visioning the School Library 2.0, and SL2.0: Setting the School Stage.

 

Some of his points include:

 

  • The School Library functioning as a Platform -- that extends beyond the walls of a room -- and where the real power and purpose lies with the tools that can exist because of this platform -- with the librarian being an important one!
  • Enhancing access to resources from and through the platform via Web 2.0 applicaitons like blogging, RSS, social bookmarking, and wikis -- and taking advantage of the lightweight programming tools available on the internet to easily generate applications to support teaching and learning.
  • __Harnessing the collective intelligence of students and teachers__ -- e.g., through using blogs and podcasting for book discussions and book talks, and by getting students and teachers to identify and tag books using social software sites like del.icio.us and LibraryThing, etc.
  • __Marketing School Library 2.0 as "the Next Intel Inside" -- meaning "showcasing the value added that school libraries and school librarians bring to learning". This means effectively mining the data from our catalogs and elsewhere -- finding out
  • __The School Librarian serving as "a curriculum and pedagogy consultant to help teachers help students learn" -- which means getting completely away from playing host to fixed library sessions (what he calls "the weekly release cycle") and promoting multiple access to the library at all times, whether physically or virtually.

 

The Look of Learning Spaces in the Future

 

Two sites, JISC Designing Spaces for Effective Learning and AMA Spaces for Learning conceptually explore the future of learning spaces with diagrams and photographs that can be applied to school libraries.

OPAC 2.0

 

OPAC 2.0 will be designed for the "read/write" web.

 

  • An OPAC that looks like a blog?

Casey Bisson has been experimenting with combining the social software functionality and flexibility of blog/wiki writing tools with the basic functionality of an OPAC. You can play with his prototype, called WPopac (as it's based on the popular blog management application, WordPress) online here. Note how you can bookmark entries, leave a comment about them, and search inside books (via Amazon), etc.

 

As Bisson says, "Web 2.0 isn’t driven by technology, it’s driven by that critical mass of users."

 

  • An OPAC that looks like Amazon?

 

OCLC's Open WorldCat "Find in a Library" function now allows registered users to enhance the records -- or, as they put it, add user-contributed content via social networking tools. Have a look here and note the Details and the Reviews tabs.

 

  • An OPAC that allows users to tag books for their own purposes?

 

This blog posting reports that UPenn now allows users to add their own tags to OPAC entries. As the blog comments:

"The UPenn library has always been one to watch with new social tools. They created their tagging system a while back and, if you look at the dates under the tags, it is heavily used. With the addition of this new feature

-- Students can rely on their trust networks to locate materials that they wouldn't otherwise see.

-- Professors can assign books and tag each one with the course number.

-- Librarians can easily create online subject oriented reading lists.

How exciting that a library is helping to make the catalog a two way street."

 

 

  • An OPAC that lets you scribble notes on virtual yellowed card catalog images?

 

John Blyberg at the Ann Arbor Michigan OPAC has implemented a new experimental feature allowing patrons to add marginalia to images of old-fashioned catalog cards -- which all users can see. (If more than three comments are added, they are displayed in random rotation.) Here's the "card" for Thomas Friedman's book, \"The World is Flat\".

 

Blyberg sees existing OPACs as empty vessels waiting to be filled and looks forward to the social OPAC.

 

By inviting participation in the stewardship of a community resource, we can begin to build unique meta-collections that slide value, pertinence, and humanity into the search process. It may be that in that moment when a patron is about to turn away from the library, something catches their eye–a tag, a comment, some marginalia, perhaps, that puts the patron in front of the material they truly need.

The key component in growing social OPACs is community. Once you put the community you service into the process of delivering content back out into the very same community, you initiate a loop that will become exponentially richer over time as those neural connections glom on to each other. Findability is not the goal, but the activity and the experience which is why I say that OPACs have the potential to be fascinating places to visit and browse.

 

Christopher Harris would also like to see these kinds of features in school library OPACs:

 

"What if the student could then rate the book with a level of success they felt they had reading it? What if we involved them in tagging the book with some keywords or if we let them choose to “adopt” the book onto their own bookshelf? Just imagine the output from this: we know what they are reading during each attempted intervention, we know what level of book they were reading, we know how they felt about the level of the book (their self-confidence as a reader), and we can see what kinds of books they like by glancing at their bookshelves. That’s all Library Powered right there!!!"

 

Other Thoughts

 

-- The 21st Century Library

  • "The most daunting problems libraries face today is twofold. First, the profession is divided between those who see the new information age as a threat to old ways, and who stay focused on old formats and old methods of delivering them, with grudging lip service to new technologies, versus those who see the new information society as a great opportunity--one that might liberate us from our role as curators of dead-tree collections and move us toward the more dynamic, vital, and timeless role of cultural leaders."

 

-- If a Library Is Bookless, What's In It?

  • Searches more complicated
  • Story Jar--transmit it to the storyjar (Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, N.C.)

 

-- Students Just Say 'No' to Library Books, and Librarians Listen: Stacks Are Going Digital

  • "Alire says the one thing she sees happening, as a result, is that students want their undergraduate library to become more of a social space than a stuffy building filled with books. “They want library as place,” she says. “Before, the library was a repository for books and printed material and a place to get help from librarians—and we’re still as busy in reference as we’ve ever been—but when they come in [to the library] they come in because they want to work together. They still want quiet places . . . but they also want dynamic group-study places.”"

 

-- Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space

  • "The library needs to be the place for the production, not simply the distribution and consumption, of knowledge."
  • "In the age of cyberspace, real space and compelling architecture will matter more than ever."

 

-- from The end of cyberspace by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang:

  • "Libraries, which sit at the intersection of the material and social dimensions of information, have survived...[because] they're social spaces in which users interact with each other, and with librarians, to create new knowledge."

 

Telling the New Story about the Future Library

 

David Warlick's presentation on \"Telling the New Story\" -- offered in a wiki

 

It's not a future of security, so we shouldn't be preparing them for one. Instead we should prepare them for a future of opportunity... and that's done differently.

 

-- The 21st Century Library -- a blog posting by Karen Schneider, Techno-Librarian

"The most daunting problems libraries face today is twofold. First, the profession is divided between those who see the new information age as a threat to old ways, and who stay focused on old formats and old methods of delivering them, with grudging lip service to new technologies, versus those who see the new information society as a great opportunity--one that might liberate us from our role as curators of dead-tree collections and move us toward the more dynamic, vital, and timeless role of cultural leaders."

 

-- If a Library Is Bookless, What's In It?

Searches more complicated

Story Jar--transmit it to the storyjar (Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, N.C.)

 

Metaphors of the Library

 

The librarian as a verb is a useful image, I think, because it implies movement. In the past the librarian, unlike most professionals, has been associated with a place, the library, a building. In the future, the librarian will be a vector, searching for and establishing connections. The library in which this librarian works is more a state of mind than a location. It is a set of neural connectors. And that is why the place called library is not the sentence in which the electronic librarian dwells.

 

-- Libraries as Temples of Thought

 

-- Libraries as a public park for your brain

 

-- Libraries as gardens

 

-- Libraries as laboratories

 

What metaphors can you come up with?

The Experience Library

 

The Experience Economy is a business concept popularized by Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore in their best-selling book: __The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business is a Stage__ (1993)

 

"Just as the Industrial Economy supplanted the Agrarian Economy and was in turn supplanted by the Service Economy, we are now shifting to an Experience Economy. Good and services are no longer enough; they’re becoming mere commodities. The developed world’s predominant economic offering is fast becoming experiences – memorable events that engage each customer in an inherently personal way."

 

The Cerritos Library in California has taken the idea on board, while other states, such as Rhode Island, consider it.

 

Read this blog posting on the Experience Library by David King.

Ten Techie Things for Librarians 2006 (Updated)

 

(article explains them in more detail)

 

1.User Centered Planning & User Perceptions

2.Building Resources & Comments Enabled

3.Open Source Software & Shared Development

4.The Future of the ILS

5.Devices

6.Electronic Resource Management & DRM

7.Mash Ups & Playlists

8.Content & Experience

9.Web 2.0

10.Librarians & the Heart

 

-- The 10,000-year Library

by Stewart Brand (see also The Long Now Foundation website)

 

Richard Lanham -- Libraries in the Attention Economy

 

In terms of preparing for the future, one theorist few people in librarianship seem to be paying attention to is Richard Lanham.

 

In an information-rich world where human attention is the scarce commodity, the library's business is orchestrating human attention-structures.

 

Okay, he's not a librarian, but he has a strong vision of the role librarians should be playing in the Attention Economy. Over ten years ago he addressed the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) and outlined "The Economics of Attention", a concept he then turned into an article in 1997, and now a book is due out in May 2006 from the Univ of Chicago Press.

 

He was also lamenting the closure of university library schools back in 1997 ( see his essay \"A Computer-based Harvard Red Book: General Education in the Digital Age\") precisely because he feels librarians are ideally placed to become the architects managing the convergence of content, delivery, and manipulation of information.

 

 

Read More and Explore...

 

Here's a bibliography from Michael Stephen's "Planning on Technology in Libraries" workshop at Computers in Libraries 2006. His blog Tame the Web: Libraries and Technology is one to watch.

 

FictionFinder

The prototype is based on a 'frbrized' subset of WorldCat records representing fiction. These records are from a snapshot of WorldCat and do not reflect up-to-the-minute bibliographic or holdings information. (projected to up and running next month)

 

Santa Monica Public Library screencast illustrating integration of OpenWorldCat.

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