Libraries/Info Sci Archives - Page 7 of 27

Ride The City

Ridethecity.com is one of the coolest Google maps mashups I’ve seen lately. It centers on NYC, and is dedicated to finding bike routes around the city. It combines Google’s automatic pathfinding routines with the site’s creators’ personal knowledge of biking around the city. There are three options for planning a route: safest route, safe route, and most direct route. Direct will stick you mostly on roads, while safe and safest stick with varying degrees to bike paths and greenways. The safest selection will often take riders out of their way to find bike-friendly routes. I wonder – with topographic data now in Google maps, could a site like this also calculate bike routes with the least uphill distance possible? I’ve been riding my bike around Chapel Hill quite a bit, and Ridethecity makes me wish there was a similar site for my area.

This is a great example of making refined automatic routines even more useful by injecting a heavy dose of personal human expertise. It makes me wish we could get more open access to the inner workings of the databases that libraries pay so much for. What fun and useful mods would result?

ALA 2008: Twitter’s killer app

I’m now convinced that Twitter’s killer app is conferences and other large scale in-person gatherings.

In Anaheim we organized meetups, kept tabs on concurrent sessions we couldn’t all attend, helped each other navigate the buildings, pointed out overlooked sessions, discussed sessions while they were going on, and even played a game.

I’ve conversed with a lot of the people I saw at ALA via twitter for a while now, and it was wonderful to put faces with names! And having a pre-formed group of people to coordinate with took a lot of the stress out of the conference for me. I spent less time wandering aimlessly and more time being productive.

The coolest example, for sheer scale, was when we organized a 10 person meetup at Disneyland on the fly, converging from tons of different locations, using nothing but twitter.

If twitter can get their stability issues under control before everybody jumps ship (which could unfortunately be any day now), it’ll be a wonderful thing. None of the replacement options out there seem to be quite as right for this kind of environment. So I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll be using twitter at ALA ’09.

ALA 2008: What is the future of face-to-face reference?

This was another panel presentation, each member spoke for a bit about the topic. I neglected to write down the presenters’ names, unfortunately, but did get their home institutions.

UC Merced’s setup was particularly interesting to me – as a new university, they were able to build their library’s policies and functions from the ground up. They do not have librarians regularly on the reference desk, instead relying on student workers to refer patrons to specialists as needed and emphasizing contact via digital means whenever possible. We’re moving a bit toward this model at UNC, and I liked seeing what a reference department could look like after a full transition to that model.

Appalachian State University has been experimenting with providing service via ActiveWorlds. I’m not sure that virtual worlds are the place to go just yet – I don’t think there’s enough concentrated population of our users there for it to be worth the effort of widespread implementation. But, that said, I’m glad that somebody is experimenting with it. They emphasized that we can’t create and abandon a service point – we must be fully committed to new projects.

Ohio University has experimented with reference service via video chat. Kiosks were placed in the stacks and connected to librarians via skype. They went unused. The kiosk was then moved near the main entrance, where it has generated about 1-2 questions per day. Being close to in-person access points limits its usefulness. They may try to come up with a better location later. The presenter pointed out that video chat is a new technology, just hitting the mainstream, and users may not be ready to use it in a non-personal fashion. This turned out to be a proof of concept project, and not a full success. It’s a very good example of how to develop and revise a new service method, and I’m very glad that ASU was so willing to share about something less than fully successful.

ALA 2008: SF & Fantasy: Info rights of the individual panel

This panel drew me in just on the basis of the author particpants’ pure geek factor:

Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing.net and many novels)
Eric Flint (of the 1632 series)
Vernor Vinge (of the seminal True Names and many Hugo awards)
Brandon Sanderson (of the yet-to-be-finished conclusion to Wheel of Time)

Each author spoke on where they think info rights will be going in the near future. Some highlights:

Vinge:

Once stated that pre-2000 years may later be viewed as a dark age due to a lack of digitization and a ‘disinclination toward books’
Now he thinks even that was too optimistic – will today’s data be caught and retrievable in the future?
Emphasized the importance of open standards.

Sanderson:

It’s much harder than in the past to be a layman scientist – much specialization required
Instead, we can explore new ideas and rules via science fiction and fantasy
What ideals are dealt with in a fantasy world can be a time capsule of the writer and society’s attitudes.
We should teach students to love information first, above all else, and then they’ll seek it out on their own.

Flint:

Like Vinge, sees a dark age brewing
Unlike Vinge, Flint blames it more on our current copyright system
70 years + life is far too long, he favors a 40 years or life (whichever is longer) term instead.
People want both e-books and print books, and use them for different things. Publishers should provide both in a package.
The electronic era provides a dangerous excuse for wiping out fair use, we need to be vigilant to preserve it

Doctorow:

The internet is best at facilitating collective action
We build culture online around arbitrary things
Again the possibility of a dark age if information isn’t shared
The internet is a “perfect enlightenment machine”
Copyright laws’ importance cannot be overemphasized – “the future of civilization is at stake”

There was a Q&A session afterward, which I felt was a bit of a wasted opportunity. I think a lot of people were there only to see Doctorow and overlooked the input of the other panelists. But each author was very generous with their time and stuck around to do signings afterward! Meeting each of them was a thrill for me.

ALA 2008: Social Software Showcase

I got more out of the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase than any other session at ALA this year.

Regular sessions at ALA have to be planned so far in advance (often a year) that they are very rarely about cutting edge topics. The showcase sidesteps that issue nicely by basing itself on the relatively new ‘unconference’ idea: a bunch of people show up and talk about what they’re interested in. I believe the agenda of what topics would be focused on wasn’t finalized until a week or two before the event!

Each topic had a featured coordinator, who claimed a table or area of the room. People then rotated around, dropping in and out of discussions as they liked. Offhand I can remember a partial list of topics, the ones I gravitated to: APIs, facebook, and streaming video. The format lends itself nicely to a more conversational approach than most conference events – everyone had something to share, and and asking questions flowed much more naturally into the setting.

The room was sized to seat about 75 people, and more than 100 showed up! I have a feeling this will be an even bigger deal next year in Chicago.

ALA 2008: Distance Learning Panel

My presentation is online here: http://www.hiddenpeanuts.com/ALA08.ppt

It may not mean much without my accompanying narration, but I wanted to put it up anyway.

The panel went well! We had some great speakers and the audience was really engaged and asking questions. I came away with a much deeper realization about how important adapting to distance learning environments is to the future of our profession.

Lauren Pressley, one of the panel’s organizers, posted a few notes about my talk: http://laurenpressley.com/library/?p=544

Speaking in Anaheim

Things have been quiet on the site lately, but I wanted to point out that I’ll be speaking on a panel at ALA’s annual conference in Anaheim this weekend:

If We Don’t Call it Distance Learning, Does it Exist?
8:00 AM – 12:00 PM on 06/28
Location: Disney’s Paradise Pier in Redondo

In particular, I’ll be speaking about my experience as a solo distance learning librarian and what I learned from it when I worked at UAH. Hope to see you there! The lineup of speakers is a great one.

My inner Disney geek is mostly just excited that I get to be in one of their hotels on official business. 🙂 I’ll of course be around the rest of the conference too, and am really looking forward to it.

Building Iron Man in the Basement

This post comes from watching Iron Man this weekend. Wait, wait, bear with me! In Iron Man, eccentric billionaire Tony Stark builds himself a suit of powered armor to battle the forces of evil. The key words in that phrase are “builds himself”. Take away the film’s pretend advanced technology, and what we have is a story of a lone man tinkering around and building something revolutionary and amazing in his basement. Stark also happens to be a bona fide super-genius, which got me to thinking: is being a super-genius now a requirement for success in the DIY world?

To clarify: I’m talking about inventing, about building or coding something new; I don’t mean fixing things around the house or building yourself a deck.

Once upon a time in science, major discoveries could be made and work done by making simple observations about the world with basic equipment. Today, that doesn’t feel true anymore. The low hanging fruit of science has been taken. Discoveries today require much more advanced technology and know-how, neither of which are commonly found among the general populace.

Similarly, in the early days of the web it was possible to build something revolutionary with a very basic knowledge of HTML and scripting. Building any search engine is massively impressive when none existed before. Those first steps were easy pickings, and quickly snatched up. Through the wonder of widgets and other embeddable content, today we’re abstracted several layers from the base code which makes the magic of the web possible. And developing those widgets from the ground up is something requiring a fairly advanced knowledge of techniques and tools. We do still have one advantage over the science example – these tools are available to everybody almost free of charge. Anybody can learn AJAX techniques, the only limiting factor is necessary time. Still, the playing field is not entirely level.

I recently had a conversation with a co-worker about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Could that book’s opening take place today? Would a modern man be able to recreate basic elements of our society in the middle ages like gunpowder or the telephone? Or a computer? We’re all much more connected, more dependent on specialized compartmentalized knowledge of others to get something done.

I think it is crucial that we keep a fundamental focus on the basics of web coding and scripting. Doubly so in the library world, where so many workers come from other careers and non-technological educations. It is one thing to be cut and paste an IM widget into your page. It is quite another to have the ability to fix it when inserting that widget blows up other pieces of code on the page. I have yet to come across a WYSIWIG HTML editor like Frontpage or Dreamweaver that doesn’t require at least a small amount of tinkering in raw code to get a site 100% correct. Understanding how each piece works is very important in making divergent systems play nice together. Without such an understanding, I never would have been able to get a Meebo widget working in Facebook.

I also worry about an over reliance on widgets. It is certainly possible to build a useful website almost entirely out of widgets. But what happens if a widget provider goes out of business? Or changes how their widget works? In addition, a widget is never custom built for your task. Sometimes it takes considerable effort to force one into doing what you want. And even then, results are not always ideal. For example, I really wanted to use a Goodreads widget on my site to display the books I’m reading. But ultimately it didn’t offer me enough customization. I just couldn’t make it work in my site’s design.

I’m not saying that widgets are inherently bad, or should be avoided entirely. Use them when it would be time or resource prohibitive to replicate the same functionality with local code. And they’re wonderful things for building a proof of concept model, of testing something out before going with a full blown local programming effort. Basically, just widget wisely.

(Yes, I used widget as a verb! I like verbing words.)

Widgets and other abstracted tools have lowered the barrier to entry for many elements of website development, and that’s an amazing thing. But don’t be afraid to metaphorically build in your basement

The Unsearchables

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing Colorwar on Twitter lately. The most recent event is a scavenger hunt run in Google Street View. GSV is made up of pictures taken from a car driving around various cities, and you can pretend you’re driving around as well. It comes in handy for getting a view of what a storefront looks like before going there, and similar simple tasks. But it also inadvertently captured people on the street and random events around town. Finding some of these events has been a real challenge for the scavenger hunt. For example, we needed to find a crossing guard. The presence of one relies on sheer chance that school was getting out just as a GSV truck drove by. Pretty slim odds, really. But there is absolutely no way to search for something like this other than simply checking every school in existence.

Some third party sites have stepped in and tried to fill that gap a little. Google Street View Gallery allows users to post links to specific images, which they can then tag. The tags and descriptions are then searchable. This system is handy, but still relies on a user randomly stumbling across something, thinking it is interesting, and then taking the effort to post it to the gallery with an adequate description. A very long chain of events, and something most people won’t deal with.

Google Street View represents a massive database of public images. All privacy issues aside, I would love for Google to test out some kind of image-recognition search in it. That would reveal a huge wealth of usable data. Or, with Google Maps’ APIs, maybe it’s possible for someone else to work on this. I don’t know.

But what I do know for sure is that we’ll only see more massive chunks of image data as time goes by. There will simply be too much for human eyes and minds to process – organizing it all will be a big challenge, and not something I’ve heard a lot about currently. I expect development in this area to explode in the near future.

Link Dump

-I’ve been playing with Twitter recently: http://twitter.com/HiddenPeanuts

In addition to just being plain old fun, twitter has been more useful than I expected; I’ve managed to get help with some issues at work very quickly. But even so, I’m fast approaching my limit on how many people I can mentally follow there. There’s a fine line between keeping Twitter a productive tool and letting it become a time waster.

-I’ve got an account listing all my books at GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/901545?view=main

I think I like Librarything better overall, but: Goodreads has the advantage of being better designed to accomodate books you’re reading but don’t own.

-Netvibes, my homepage/RSS reader for the last couple of years, has had too many stability issues lately. Today I took the plunge and dove into Google Reader. I’m pretty happy so far.

-Lastly, on a fun note: the ARG/viral marketing/game promoting this summer’s Batman movie is a lot of fun. Currently, Harvey Dent (he who eventually becomes Two Face) has a site up for his election campaign: http://www.ibelieveinharveydent.com/

And, a random question: Does anybody have experience building iGoogle gadgets? I’m interested in stories dealing with library applications in particular. I’m going to be putting a lot of time into them at work, and would love to have someone to bounce ideas off.