Libraries/Info Sci

Thoughts and selected news updates on the Library Science/Information Science field(s)

There are 262 posts filed in Libraries/Info Sci (this is page 3 of 27).

Defining what I do: What makes a technology emerging or disruptive?

Up the Hatch!

“I’m the Emerging Technologies Librarian at UNC.”

“So what does that mean?”

Every time I meet someone new at work, that’s how the conversation goes.

My response usually consists of arm flailing and a disjointed summary of my duties. I’m working on that. But I think people mostly don’t know what my job defines as an “emerging technology”.

To be honest, as the years go by I’m less a fan of that term. “Emerging” is too broad. Any new technology emerges, just by virtue of being new. Solar power is an emerging technology, and even something as simple as seatbelts once was too. I can’t keep an eye on everything. Instead, I find myself looking at a new technology and asking: Is it disruptive to libraries? “Disruptive” does a better job of defining what I deal with on a day to day basis. The technologies I look at tend to be new and emerging, but as they emerge they also disrupt that context and the way we do things.

I tend to define things by removing what they’re aren’t, plus there’s a lot more tech that doesn’t disrupt libraries than that which does. Xbox Kinect is interesting and definitely emerging, but I don’t see a lot of immediate disruption coming from it in my academic library corner of the world. I also don’t see a lot of relevance for 3D printers in the core parts of my particular work environment, but they’re definitely emerging as technology. As sci-fi author Neal Stephenson recently noted in Arc 1.3, “…[3D printing] isn’t a disruptive idea on its own. It becomes disruptive when people find their own uses for it.”  It’s when an actual or likely use impacts libraries that I pay more attention.

So now I have to define what makes a technology disruptive for my purposes. My definition is a bit hard to nail down, but I think I’ve settled on something close to “a technology that could change the way academic libraries deliver services and information.”

Based on that, eBooks are an obvious disruptive technology in libraries. And in a general sense the web continues to disrupt everything in our core mission.

Now I’ve established criteria for which disruptive technologies I deal with in my job. But how do I spot disruptive technologies for evaluation in the first place? Disruptive technology arrives in two different flavors. The first kind does something new and interesting well, but misses a basic feature of an existing technology. The second kind creates an entirely new niche for itself, carving out existence without an obvious analogue anywhere else.

TYPE ONE

Google Voice is a prime example of the first kind of disruptive tech. It adds a number of very useful features to our venerable old phone numbers, but also doesn’t support MMS messaging or certain types of SMS shortcodes at all. I don’t use either of those features on my phone often, but it’s enough that I’d miss them if I moved over to Google Voice.

Later, the disruptive tech might fill in those gaps and be more fully emerged as a replacement. But I have real trouble coming up with examples of tech that successfully made this transition. Google Voice is still plugging right along, but shows no signs of fixing my dealbreakers. Other examples have been less fortunate; their feature gaps were important enough that they eventually faded away. Netbooks took off on their amazing portability and battery life, but their tiny keyboards and often limited processing power meant they peaked early and are now fading. Google Wave tried to reinvent email with a treasure trove of added features, but had an impenetrable UI and lacked a clear use case. It lasted 15 months. Uber’s car service is heavily disrupting the taxi industry, but is so far outside the box that it’s meeting significant legal pushback and sabotage there. Look at 3D printers again: they provide all kinds of disruptive challenges to traditional manufacturing. But the technology is also extremely fiddly and requires a lot of customization, expertise and constant adjustment to use. It’s future will depend on whether the printers can overcome those gaps and more fully emerge into everyday use.

In the academic library world, this first type of disruptive technology describes ebooks perfectly. They add new functionality to the traditional task of consuming text, but thanks to DRM and licensing we can’t share them as easily and have questions about long-term viability of the titles in our collection. Ebook readers fit too, for similar reasons. I’m obviously keeping a close eye on them and am involved with a number of ebook-related projects and programs on campus. The recent trend of massively online courses like Udacity and Coursera qualifies as this type of disruption as well, though for higher ed in general. Instant messaging continues to disrupt the way we provide service at the reference desk.  So those are three areas I’m focusing on lately.

TYPE TWO

Not all emerging technologies fit that first model. Instead of changing something we already have, the disruption a technology creates may carve out a whole new space for itself. The iPad is the obvious example here; Apple pretty much created the modern tablet market. But despite being a new market, tablets still disrupt laptops, ebook readers and smartphones. Cell phones in a general sense fit this second model of disruption too, incidentally. I have a harder time coming up with more examples here, especially ones relevant to academic libraries. Most of our disruptions come from modifications to existing technologies or systems, and very few spring forth into an entirely new niche. Still, iPads and other tablets have huge implications for desktop computing facilities in my library and on my campus. Even if the disruption isn’t obvious, it’s still important to recognize the difference in how it comes about. Libraries need to keep an eye on changes to both current niches and the emergence of entirely new ones.

PHASES OF DISRUPTION

No matter which type of disruption a technology fits, all of them go through early, middle and late phases of disruption. Early on, they’re pretty experimental with notable feature gaps. Google Wallet and their system of NFC payments fits the early bill right now. I think Google Voice seems to be stuck in this early phase too, and shows no indication of advancing beyond it. Before the release of the Kindle I’d also have put ebooks at this point. They were a niche interest at best.

By the middle phase, a technology has a foothold in the general public – not just among early adopters. In April we learned that 21% of American adults read an ebook last year, and 45% now own a smartphone. They’re not anywhere near universal adoption yet, but it’s significant and trending upward.

Eventually some of these technologies close in on finishing their disruption. By that point they’re into the late phase. I classify MP3s as a late phase disruption, for example. In many demographics they’ve completely replaced CDs, the technology they disrupted. Of course CDs, vinyl, and other music distribution methods do still exist. Not everyone has the technical literacy to make the change in their personal music collection, though an increasing majority do.

After the final stage of disruption, that ’emerged’ term pops up again. Emerging technologies go through phases of disruption, but ultimately must become fully emerged or at some point fade away. Blogs disrupted traditional web publishing (if there can be said to be such a thing), but are now a fact of online life. They’re emerged. Digital cameras and (non-smartphone) cell phones are emerged too.

FULL CIRCLE

We’ve come back around to dealing with emerging technologies. But on a day to day basis, I’m more concerned with following their progress through phases of disruption. If we can figure out which technologies with potential implications for libraries will make it through the phases, we can get ahead of the game. Or at least keep pace and stop anything from blowing up in our faces.

And that’s why I flail my arms when someone asks me what my job title means: I haven’t found a way to distill all this into a soundbyte yet. But as a collective institution, libraries are ripe for disruption. In my job I try to keep a practical focus on the horizon and do my part to keep us a bit ahead of the curve.

Format rot in ebook preservation

Electronic text is hard to preserve. This might seem counter-intuitive – isn’t it trivially easy to make backup copies? Yes, but accessing those copies is another matter.

I’ve been cleaning out the darker recesses of my office lately, digging through things accumulated by previous occupants back to the mid 80s. I knew I was playing host to a large quantity of floppy discs (both 3.5″ and 5.25″), but this is the first time I looked at what’s actually on them.

I found seven ebooks (the labels call some “Hypercard novels”) in that pile of 3.5″ floppies. Most were published by a company called Eastgate. Eastgate still sells copies of these titles ebooks to this day, but I’m not clear how they’re supposed to be read.

I’ve run into 4 barriers in trying to read these ebooks:

  1. They’re on floppy disks. Floppy drives are a dying breed. Luckily these are 3.5″ disks, because if they’d been 5.25″ I wouldn’t have access to the right-sized drive. Still, in another five years any floppy drive at all will be considered specialized legacy equipment.
  2. The disks are mac-only. No PC that I’ve found has been able to read them.
  3. Even on modern macs, they can’t be read. I haven’t had time to fully figure out why, but some preliminary research pointed out that they might be a special kind of floppy disk that only older mac drives can read. Modern ones won’t work.
  4. Even if I had the right kind of drive – what software will they need to be read? I have no idea, but I’d bet money that it’s nothing still in common use today.

Like I said Eastgate still exists, and sells copies of these ebooks. They were evidently were migrated to CD-ROM at some point. But even with those more modern copies, the Eastgate website says some of their titles require Hypercard to be read. Hypercard was mac-only software, and stopped working with current versions of OSX in 2005. And even if I was somehow able to get Hypercard to run, I’d still be forced to re-buy the content on CD-ROM.

I have no idea if these ebooks are any good, or hold any value at all beyond being curiosities of early ebook publishing. I’m not going to put any more effort into getting them running unless I’m given a compelling reason. But this is a real issue, and one that will only become more important in time. I think of the huge quantities of CD & DVD resources we still have at work, and I shudder a bit. Apple removed the CD-ROM drive from the latest imac, and other manufacturers can’t be far behind.

If anything, this experience has drilled into my head that I need to keep an eye out for mission critical resources on old formats. I’ll migrate them forward when I can, but that won’t always be possible. I’m bullish on ebooks in general, but when it comes to preservation paper still wins.

Side note: Here’s a list of the titles I have on floppy. Maybe these are crucially important to someone else. If you’ve got the means, I’ve got the media:

  • Ambulance: An Electronic Novel, by Monica Moran
  • King of Space – by Sarah Smith
  • The Perfect Couple – by Clark Humphrey
  • Quibbling – by Carolyn Guyer
  • Afternoon, a Story – by Joyce Michael
  • Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse – by John McDald
  • Its name was Penelope – by Judy Malloy (this disk appears to be signed)

Interesting things I’ve read this week – 10/19/12

Random House Says Libraries Own Their Ebooks

(Library Journal) I’m entirely surprised to read this headline and story, but Random House now flat out says that libraries own ebooks that they’ve bought from them.  That may seem like an obvious statement, but up till now libraries have only been able to license, not own, ebooks from the big 6 fiction publishers.  Of course, libraries don’t buy ebooks directly from publishers like Random House.  We’re still at the mercy of licenses we sign with vendors like Overdrive – and those licenses very clearly deny ownership.  Now it’ll be an issue of getting vendor licenses to line up with what Random House says here.  Plus trying to get the other big publishers to commit to the same thing, of course.  Those are still big hurdles, but at least it’s progress.

How We Lost the Future (Final Bullet)

In some ways I see this as a counterpoint to Louis CK’s “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy” bit.  Have we lost the capability to even think about and imagine what the future might be?  “To say ‘we live in the future’ is an expression of a predestination fantasy. This way of thinking is cheating us out of the exciting reality of growing and achieving a future.”

How Not to Talk to Your Kids (New York Magazine)

This is a bit old (2007), but as an expecting parent I find myself paying a lot more attention to issues surrounding child-rearing.  I’m trying to avoid drowning myself in advice & ‘systems’ of child-rearing, but this piece dealing with how styles of praise have huge effects makes a lot of sense to me.

Can Boxee reinvent cable with the help of a TV antenna? (The Verge)

At home we use an antenna to watch live TV, and a Hulu subscription to watch things later.  For the most part I’m really happy with the setup, but I do still miss having the ability to pause live TV.  Current solutions for that issue are largely homegrown and a pain to set up & maintain.  The new Boxee TV has a good chance to change that, though the thought of another $15/month subscription does give me pause.

The Humble eBook Bundle


HumbleBundle.com has a long history of offering wonderful independent PC games at a ‘pay what you want’ price.  They recently extended their brand into music, and this week took a step into eBooks.  For any price you want to pay, even just $.01, you get a bundle of DRM-free ebooks from a number of well known sci-fi & fantasy authors.  If you pay more than the average at any given time (currently $12.46) they also throw in books from Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi.

And it’s not crap either – all the titles look interesting to me.  I’ve read Pump Six before, and can verify that it’s amazing.

It’s nice to see more A-list authors willing to explore alternate sales models.  The Humble eBook Bundle has taken in just under $500,000 as I write this.

And here’s my obligatory side note: none of this helps libraries.  While I’ve been unable to find whatever license governs use of these eBook titles, I’d be very surprised if it allows libraries to lend them.

Tools from the edUi 2012 Conference

edui logoLast week I went to the edUi conference in Richmond, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s certainly the best conference I’ve ever been to for work.

In their words, edUi is “A conference for web professionals serving colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and beyond”. I think that’s the main reason I liked it – it brought in perspectives from outside libraries, but ones that are still relevant to our mission. Like any conference some sessions were better than others, but I came away feeling inspired and anxious to get to work. I highly recommend it for anybody who does any kind of web development in higher ed.

Here’s a list of some of the tools I learned about:

PaLA Northwest Chapter presentation.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be presenting a workshop for the fine folks at the Northwest Chapter of the Pennsylvania Library Association. Aside from being a good excuse to get back and visit my old stomping grounds, I’m quite excited about my presentation and the afternoon hands-on session.

Here’s the handout of links I mentioned in the talk, and the slides themselves:

(As usual, my slides may not be entirely useful without my narration. But here they are anyway!)

What happens to your iTunes library when you die?

This turned out to be a hoax, but yesterday Bruce Willis was supposedly going to sue Apple for the right to leave his iTunes music to family in his will.

Again, it was a hoax. But the story still highlights some very important questions. It’s all very grey: the lack of DRM on most music purchases means I can in practice give my mp3s to someone else, but the license I agreed to when I purchased those files still says I can’t. That was the first red flag to me that this might be a haox – why would someone sue over this when it would make no practical difference?

It would make more sense to go after Amazon for similar rights for ebooks (they’ve still got DRM preventing an easy transfer) or iTunes for movies.

(This also highlights just how weird internet rumors can be.)

A post-scarcity world

Last week I watched a printer spit out a skull. While I worked on a project at our local TechShop, another member was testing their new Makerbot. Bit by bit, a flawless four inch plastic skull grew before my eyes. I’ve read and thought about 3d printers before, but seeing one in action pushed some buttons about the future of physical items. In particular, I got thinking about what role libraries might play in a world with commonplace 3d printing.

Musician Jonathan Coulton was somehow thinking about the same ideas at the same time. In his reaction to an NPR blog post about young people’s attitudes toward paying for music, Coulton took his analysis in a fascinating direction. He theorized heavily about what might happen to many industries in a post-scarcity world.

What happens when a product can be reproduced by consumers with marginal effort? The music industry and the publishing world are facing early signs of that reality now, but won’t be the last. Coulton goes on to talk about the imminent rise of 3d printers, and the pile of industries they stand ready to disrupt. (There’s an especially fascinating look at a man who printed his own adapters to connect legos, k’nex, and lincoln logs)

Coulton’s post should be required reading for anybody in the library world. While he’s not talking specifically about us, his vision of a post-scarcity world is right up our alley. Libraries have built our business on reducing scarcity – we took a relatively uncommon item like a paper book and made it available to more people than would have access to it otherwise. Now we face the possibility of scarcity itself dropping off a cliff.

Let’s pretend for a minute that the post-scarcity world is upon us. Physical objects which can be easily digitized (books, music, etc) have become virtually obsolete. Most other common 3d goods are now printed at home. What industries or services would be left with viable business models? Here’s a few off the top of my head:

-Support systems for the printers. Raw materials to print with, repairs, etc.

-Food services like restaurants and grocery stores would probably be largely unaffected.

-Other services based around the human body would likely survive relatively unaltered as well. Travel, salons, massages, gyms, etc.

-There will likely be a boom in services related to information management.

I want to focus on that last item a bit, because I think that’s the only place for libraries in a post-scarcity world. If scarcity dies, we would no longer need to be a place to distribute most books, music, or movies. In some ways, that excites me. We’d be able to stop focusing all our efforts on these physical and digital objects! Those objects’ shortcomings have always been something we routed around.

Remove those roadblocks, and we could focus our services on what we’ve always done very well: organizing information and helping people access it. With scarcity gone, the resulting glut of information would be paralyzing if left unsortable and unfiltered.

Libraries which solely manage a flow of non-scarce digital information would admittedly be unrecognizable compared to their current form, but it would still represent a way forward for the profession and a valuable service to society. We might actually be better off than many other industries in the long run, but only if we can convince ourselves to get past the lending of physical objects as the way we justify our collective existence.

OK, Sorry, I went kind of sci-fi crazy there for a minute. I’ll reel it back in: I don’t know if we’ll see society dispense with most scarcity within my lifetime, but I do know that we’ve already seen it decrease in some sectors. Many libraries (both public and academic) face questions from their users here and now: why is a library necessary in an ebook and netflix world? We’re tied to distribution of objects which face an impending removal of scarcity. Can we shift away from them, while we still can?

(Eli Neiburger made very similar points almost two years ago in his “Libraries are Screwed” presentation. It should be required viewing for every librarian everywhere.)

Seeing a 3d printer in action, I noticed something that I’ve never seen mentioned about them before: They’re musical. Think of the noise an old dot-matrix 2d printer made, but somehow more tuned to random notes. So as a musical skull appeared out of thin air in front of my eyes, that’s what triggered the sci-fi thinking. I couldn’t help but wonder about a future in a post-scarcity world. As a group, libraries understandably fight today for ways to lend digital items. But will that even matter in the long term? What if we’re barking up the wrong tree entirely?

The good news is that we stand a chance for survival in a post-scarcity world. The bad news is that we might have to let go of a core part of our identity to get there.

Is Udacity the future of higher ed?

I’ve spent the last two months enrolled in Udacity‘s Computer Science 101 course, and I’m happy to report that I scored 100% on the final exam! But what was it like?

Udacity is a Higher-Ed Startup, as odd as that term seems. That’s a crowded category lately, with startups offering college-level instruction for free. Of course there’s one important caveat: Udacity is unaccredited. I’m not working toward a degree here, though I will get a snazzy certificate of completion to print out.

Was it academically rigorous? Yes, though I don’t think it’s quite equivalent to the CS 101 class I took as an undergrad. There were some more advanced concepts missing from Udacity’s class. Instead, I found it roughly equivalent to the AP Computer Science class I took in high school. We started with foundations of what a computer is and how it works, and got all the way up to some trickier concepts like data structures and recursion. Portions of the final exam were quite challenging, and one of the questions stumped me until almost the last minute.

But I think evaluating Udacity’s CS 101 as a course should boil down to one question: Do I know more about programming than I did in April? Yes, I absolutely do. Professor Dave Evans (who also teaches at the University of Virginia) is a great teacher who capably broke up complex concepts into understandable nuggets. I’ll admit this was somewhat of a refresher course for me, but my original CS 101 class was over ten years ago and much of the knowledge I retained was quite faded. It was helpful to come in with some basic level of programming experience, but I think I could have done well even without that baseline.

What’s more interesting to me is Udacity’s course structure. I probably spent 3 or 4 hours per week on the class in total. The learning experience is broken up into seven units, each designed to take a week to complete. Each unit is in turn broken up into short (usually 1-3 minutes) videos and automated quizzes. It’s simple to rewatch the more complex portions of a video, something I did quite a bit. At the end of each unit there’s a set of automatically evaluated homework questions. Units built on each other, slowly teaching us how to build an actual functioning web crawler and search engine. I’m quite impressed that such a seemingly complex task could be taught so well to programming novices in just 8 weeks.

While the work was rigorous, I admit the promise of instantly available solutions for the homework made it very tempting to give up on a question earlier than I would have otherwise. Homework didn’t count toward the course grade, but in retrospect I wish it did.

Like any class, Udacity’s offerings will only be as good as the instructor teaching it. While I was quite happy with Dave Evans’ teaching style, I grew somewhat frustrated with one of the TAs. Explanations and clarifications were often confusing and hard to follow. But this was where the class discussion forums came in handy. Another student was often able to clarify things much better than the actual TA. I’ll admit I never actively participated in the discussions, but I was the recipient of much wisdom from reading along.

So my overall Udacity experience was a positive one. I refreshed/enhanced my basic programming knowledge and got that snazzy certificate. I’m happy enough that I’ll be signing up for more courses in the next session. I’m going to attempt both CS253 (Web Application Engineering) and their new Intro to Statistics offering at the same time. I might drop down to just one, but I’m optimistic that I can handle both. The next course session is the first time Udacity has expanded beyond Computer Science, with these new offerings:

  • Intro to Physics: Landmarks in Physics
  • Intro to Statistics: Making Decisions Based on Data Statistics
  • Logic & Discrete Mathematics: Foundations in Computing
  • Software Testing: How to Make Software Fail
  • Algorithms: Crunching Social Networks

I’m very interested to see if something beyond CS can be taught well in such a CS-aligned platform. Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun has said that in 50 years there will only be ten providers of higher education in the whole world. I don’t think he’s right about that, but I do think there’s a place for offerings from Udacity at the table.