New Technologies and Libraries
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New Technologies and Libraries
Sue Grey-Smith and Constance Wiebrands
Research Services
Curtin Library and Information Service
The Powerpoint presentation for this talk is available - Image:New Tech and Libraries 2006 CARCIT Presentation.ppt. It is brief, so it may be worth reading these notes in conjunction.
Making sense of the "Alphabet Soup"
There's blogs, wikis, RSS feeds
iPods and other MP3 players and podcasts (don't forget RSS feeds!)
Video online – YouTube
Mobile technologies: mobile phones, SMS, MMS, 3G phones, functions, wi-fi, Bluetooth, PDAs and tablet PCs
IM - instant messaging, or 'chat' "social software": MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us, digg, LibraryThing …
"Web2.0"? Library2.0…
Qarbon or Captivate …RFID
What does this all mean for libraries?
What we've done at Curtin
- Instant Messaging – chat reference
- View-It tutorials
- Services for PDAs
- SMS a Query
- RSS feeds
- Library Blog (and internal blog)
- Wiki (internal)
- Podcasts
Blogs
How do you define a medium that is used by teenagers, Nobel Prize-winners, car companies, rock bands and libraries?
- Meredith Farkas
“Harnessing the Power of Social Software in Academic Libraries”
When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, part of what he envisioned was giving people not only the ability to obtain information, but to actively create and share information.
As he said in an interview with the BBC in 2003, "The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information. The idea was that by writing something together, and as people worked on it, they could iron out misunderstanding."
In a more recent interview (2005), Sir Berners-Lee said that with blogs, web spaces have become simpler: “When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.”
For Tim Berners-Lee, "The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about."
Blog features
- Frequently/easily updated
- Reverse chronological order – newest first
- Minimal HTML knowledge needed
- Comments
- Archive/record
Wikipedia has a nice overview of blogs.
Why bother with blogs?
From the organisational perspective there is a lot of potential. For example:
- Presenting library news
- Showcasing and promoting services and resources
- Communicating with clientele – “build a community and start a conversation”
- Recording/archiving material
- Multiple contributors – share workload
- Content, not coding!
At Curtin we have been really pleased with some of the responses we have had to the library blog - comments from students, responding to information we have posted!
No really, why should I care about blogs?
From the personal or professional perspective there are other uses. For example:
- Networking
- Learning about new issues
- Discussing issues affecting our profession
- Writing
Finding blogs
A good way to start is to take a look at existing blogs. It is not difficult to find blogs, as there are so many of them!
Technorati is a site that indexes the content of blogs, and can be interesting to browse through.
Some interesting and useful blogs by library people include:
- explodedlibrary.info belongs to an Australian librarian in NSW
- blogwithoutalibrary on "libraries, technology, & everything in-between" by Amanda Etches-Johnson. She started collating a list of libraries with blogs which has now evolved into a wiki: The Blogging Libraries Wiki. This is a great resource - go and see what other libraries have done, and add your own library's blog to it!
- Feel-good librarian presents heart-warming stories about the people she assists in her public library.
- librarian.net belongs to Jessamyn West, one of the first librarian bloggers (in fact one of the first bloggers)!
- TechEssence.Info, "The essence of technology for library decision-makers"
An overview of the 'biblioblogosphere' in 2005: Investigating the Biblioblogosphere by Walt Crawford. Walt is working on a 2006 version of his survey as we speak!
RSS
What is it?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. (The varied names and versions indicate its chequered development.) These names don't really matter - what matters is what RSS is used for.
A way of being notified every time the content on a website (or blog) is changed or updated.
“Two parts make up RSS.
1. Feeds
Feeds bring only new content
2. Aggregator [or reader]
The aggregator collects the new content until you are ready to read, watch or listen to it.”
This definition is from Ewan McIntosh, a so-called "edublogger" (an educator/teacher who blogs) based in Scotland.
Finding RSS feeds
- Sites with RSS feeds often display small rectangular icons saying XML, RSS, FEED, or SUBSCRIBE.
- Most blogs have RSS feeds
- News sites (such as the ABC, BBC, newspaper sites, etc), government agencies, and increasingly journal publishers and databases are also providing their content using RSS feeds
Reading RSS feeds
If you've ever clicked on one of the RSS icons, you will have discovered that it looks like a lot of gibberish! RSS code is not very readable in a web browser - to read an RSS feed you will need an RSS reader, also known as aggregators.
There are two main types of RSS readers:
- Desktop - you install the reader on your computer. There are many RSS readers which can be downloaded for free. Take a look at this huge list of RSS readers.
- Web-based - you sign up at a website that offers you the service. Examples of web-based aggregators are Bloglines, Kinja, Rojo, and feeds.reddit. Con works on as many as six different computers every week, and prefers Bloglines (click to see what feeds she subscribes to).
Why bother with RSS?
- Up-to-date content in one place - no need to check websites or blogs; your aggregator will let you know if there are any changes or updates!
- Spam free (although there is some advertising)
- Easy to subscribe and unsubscribe - I'm sure we can all relate to the problem of forgetting what address to send the unsubscribe command to...
- Privacy – no need to provide email address
Wikis
You are reading this on a wiki!
The word itself is from the Hawaiian language. Wikiwiki means 'quick', or 'fast'.
Wikipedia is probably the most famous wiki. You may be aware of the recent controversy over the study published by the prestigious journal Science, comparing Wikipedia with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The study found that the levels of accuracy in Wikipedia were almost equivalent to Britannica! Wikipedia raises a lot of issues for librarians - we are no longer the 'gatekeepers' to information...
Wiki features
- Readers can make changes. You could, now, if you wanted to! With traditional webpages, only the webmaster or administrator can make changes to content. With a wiki, making changes is a matter of clicking [edit] on the page. This opens a page with the entire contents of the page you were looking at, displayed inside a text box. Change or annotate the existing text, then click 'Save Page', and that's it - yes, it's that simple.
- Simplified HTML. Editing or creating content on a wiki is done using a simple markup language.
- All changes are recorded on the server.
- Inclusion of a number of features such as fulltext search, discussion functions, RSS feeds, to name a few. (Depends on the wiki software used.)
Why wiki?
Some potential uses include:
- To collect and present information
- To record ideas and research progress
- To collaborate - on all sorts of projects. Depending on how the wiki is set up, the need for complicated log in or virtual network facilities can be bypassed.
- As a knowledge base - especially in technical areas where experiences and fixes to problems need to be recorded and updated and available for easy access. If everyone can make these notes (rather than just the poor overworked webmistress!), there is more ownership of the information; hopefully this means that the information is more up-to-date and correct.
Some possible problems or issues:
- Less emphasis on layout; may be difficult for beginners to create aesthetically pleasing sites!
- Access to administrative functions may be daunting for users unfamiliar with such options and capabilities.
- No editorial control - all can make changes!
- Lack of graphical tools (although this is slowly changing with many commercial packages)
- Wikis tend to be separate from other tools and need work to fit in with the work processes of the organisation and with the other tools used. We are used to email, the website, Word... wikis are very new.
Wikis to look at
Besides Wikipedia, you may want to take a look at these two great library-related wikis:
- Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. This wiki was started by Meredith Farkas who writes the Information Wants to Be Free blog.
- LIS Wiki
Web 2.0
So does it all seem like a lot of fuss and bother, just hype, still?
Is all this just a passing fad?
What is all the kerfuffle over Web 2.0?
Definitions
Hard to define because continually evolving (much-blogged!). The term has been criticised as being 'hype'.
The ‘2.0’ implies a ‘1.0’, and refers to a 2nd generation of services available on the Web that lets people collaborate and share information online.
Tim O'Reilly, the CEO of O'Reilly Publishing popularised the term and defines it as:
"Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences."
See also Wikipedia's definition.
Library 2.0
Some librarians have attempted to apply the concepts and technologies behind Web 2.0 to libraries, suggesting that we need to change our practices and services, to become Library 2.0. The debate is controversial and interesting, and raises a lot of questions about the role and place of the library. The term has an entry in Wikipedia (of course), mostly written by a proponent of the term, Michael Casey. (His blog is LibraryCrunch.)
If you'd like to read some of the raging debates, Walt Crawford has written a clear and somewhat critical overview (PDF).
Just recently (June 2006), OCLC released a discussion of Web 2.0 and libraries in their newsletter. Entitled Web 2.0: Where will the next generation web take libraries?, it consists of a series of short articles:
- Rick Anderson: Away from the Icebergs
- Michael Stephens: Into a New World of Librarianship
- Chip Nilges: To More Powerful Ways to Cooperate
- John Riemer: To Better Bibliographic Services
- Dr. Wendy Schultz: To a Temporary Place in Time...
Thanks to the Librarian in Black for the pointer!
Why should we care?
- The Internet - and these new tools - are changing the way we interact with each other, and with information:
"networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.” (See The Cluetrain Manifesto.) - Find interesting ideas and novel ways of doing things, to:
- Promote our libraries
- Improve services; add new services
- Make our libraries more accessible
- Many library users are using these tools:
- What do users like? (Why are these sites so popular? What are users' expectations?)
- How can we connect with our users?
- Many of these tools can even be fun!
Written by Con