Following on an earlier post Neal Wyatt’s recent article in LJ prompted me to think of Reader Advisory services (RA) as a way to facilitate collective reading…

“Library 2.0 applied to RA means that our core service—fostering connections and discussions about items in our collections—can be enhanced and adapted by social technology. Library 2.0 tools play to the strengths of RA work and can deepen and broaden the interaction, introduce new ways of connecting books to other items, and enable librarians to enlist the entire community of readers in the collaborative creation of RA services for everyone. This is happening most quickly through a revisioning of what annotations are, where they exist, and who creates and uses them. ”
“2.0 for Readers; Online innovations reinvent how we use a classic RA tool—annotations”
by Neal Wyatt — Library Journal, 11/1/2007

Using RA could help us return to the collective reading environment described by Junot Díaz (see my previous post).

Fred Stutzman over at Unit Structures talks about the “what’s next” problem in what he calls “ego-centric” social networks.

Of course, the problem with ego-centric networks lies in the fact network-reestablishment is the main chore. Talk to individuals joining Facebook today – what are they doing? They’re using inbox importers and searching to find their friends/ex-classmates/etc. It’s a game, it’s fun for a bit, but then (say it with me readers) “What’s next?” Yes, the what’s next moment occurs. This is not to say the network becomes useless: no, it’s very useful rolodex, and the newsfeeds introduce concepts of peripheral participation (or social surveillance), but the game is in essence over.

One of the big problems I see in trying to make the Library more “game-like” (see my earlier post) is sustaining interest, or avoiding the “what’s next” problem. Admittedly, this is a challenge not just for libraries, but for any game designer.

Amy Jo Kim, Creative Director of ShuffleBrain posted notes over at we-make-money-not-art about the “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Design to Mobile Services” session at last year’s Emerging Technology Conference in which she discusses five game mechanics that make the interactive experience more addictive:

1. Collecting: amassing and showing your stuff
2. Earning points: related but more sophisticated, its’ a very simple way to keep the interest alive.
3. Feedback but you have to use it creatively.
4. Exchanges are structured social interactions. They are the basic, primal form of social interaction. Social exchange can be very explicit or implicit (i.e. emergent)
5. Customization increases investment in the experience.

(Amy provides helpful examples of these five mechanics.)

One of the findings from the University of Rochester Study was that undergraduates want to be able to Customize the library’s web site to fit their own needs and preferences. Essentially they were describing a portal interface that allows one to Customize content in much the same way one is able to do with Google or Yahoo. While it would take a bit of effort, this could be accomplished in most libraries. UofR also discovered that students wanted to “customize” the physical library. Students wanted to move furniture, for example, to suit their needs. Students also defined some areas in the library as quiet areas and others as more collaborative areas in which a conversation and collaboration were more common. The difficult part of allowing customization of physical space, however, is that it is shared space. One can’t guarantee that it would remain the same for the next time the student came to study.

Collecting seems more difficult for me to imagine incorporating into the Library player’s experience. Amy talks about collecting friends in MySpace or Facebook, or baseball cards, or any type of collectible in the physical world. While it is a game, we want the game to focus on information, not simply gimics. One might, however, imagine a student collecting citations, even better annotated citations. Bragging rights go to those with the most citations.

And of course Points might be awarded based, at least in part, on the number of annotated citations one accumulates. One might also receive Points by means of a reputation system, a little like E-bay or Amazon. Points would be awarded not just on quantity, but quality.

Contributing these annotated citations to the social network that might grow up around a Library would be a type of social Exchange. A Library might implement a tagging or commenting facility directly into the online catalog. Penn Tags is an interesting model. Penn has implemented a tagging system for the opac that allows library users to add their own tags. (http://tags.library.upenn.edu/) “If you want to create interesting social dynamics you have to allow users to exchange gifts. It’s a very powerful social exchange.” (Amy Jo Kim)

Designing the Library game to encourage addictive library use is an interesting challenge, very focused on the user experience. Focusing on game mechanics seems like a helpful way to approach the challenge.

After the MIT Communications Forum on “gaming and civic engagement” a few weeks ago, I mused about the possibility of viewing the library as a game. Ian Bogost commented that one of the things he finds most fascinating about games is that they force the player to live in a world whose rules are constructed by someone else (see my previous posts). Librarians construct the rules (policies, procedures, physical arrangement of materials and furnishing, subject headings, indexing, etc.) and require players (those who use our libraries) to function within the world we construct to obtain the information they seek to complete their tasks. I still find this an interesting way to look at the Library. The recent University of Rochester Undergraduate Research Project suggested that students may already be interacting with the Library like a game.

Nancy Fried Foster observed about the trend toward a self-service model that we see in most young adults:

It is tempting to relate this trend to lack of time, but I think it resembles a pattern of information seeking that is evident in students’ recreational activities—gaming, for example—when time is not an issue. Video and computer games come with little by way of directions. Manuals are available but not all gamers want or use them. When a gamer gets stuck in a game, s/he commonly runs through a variety of information-seeking activities, starting with experimentation with the game itself (Gee 2003). If this fails, the gamer may seek an online site for the particular game to see whether there are any “tips” or “tricks” that solve the problem. The point is that the parsimony of the gamers’ information seeking is not related to time pressure. It is related to a view of life in which instrumentality trumps relationship.

So self-service is the preeminent model and strategy of the information-seeking student. But when the student cannot satisfy his/her own needs and turns to real-life service providers, what happens? In their drawings of ideal library spaces, students sometimes group librarians with technical support staff and baristas at service desks (see Chapter 4). When they do not differentiate between different kinds of service providers, it is in part because they do not know the service providers, having experienced few person-to-person service relationships. If they have a need, they want it filled. If they want a need filled, they want to go to a font of all sorts of service, a sort of universal service point, a physical Google. In other words, they want Mommy.
….
But “Mommy” is not the same as a real student’s real mother, a person with whom s/he has a complex and ever-changing, ever maturing relationship. When I speak of the Mommy Model of Service, I refer to a Mommy who is the provider of everything to the infant. (p75-76)

If we were to imagine making the Library more game-like, perhaps we might:

1. Make the Library’s Web site a place to go for Tips and Tricks to be used when the player gets stuck.
2. Think about creating different “levels” in the Library that can be entered when one has found the right tool or accumulated the right number of points to proceed.
3. Ensure that guides and wisdom figures (avatar-like or not) become visible to the players periodically, giving the player the visual queues necessary to them identify them as safe to approach.
4. Provide an easy way to “save the game.”
5. Develop and support remote, virtual and on-site playing areas.
6. Develop and support multi-user as well as single-user playing modes.
7. Develop and support interactive interfaces for players who play the Library remotely, virtually, as well as physically in the Library.

Foster, Nancy Fried, and Susan Gibbons. 2007. Studying students the Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. http://www.acrl.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/downloadables/Foster-Gibbons_cmpd.pdf.

My earlier post about using a feed from an OCLC web service to supply data to our web site exemplifies a principle that I’ve adopted for the Theology Libraries efforts. There are a number of companies and organizations with massive computing power, and even a few smaller ones, that are able to provide data to us if we can utilize it. We need to develop the ability to mashup the data that are available to us with our own data to better serve our users.

John Wilkin’s post about the Next Generation Library Systems nicely states the principle and its corollary. We need to develop ways to make our data available to others…

We must not try to do what the network can do for us. We must find ways to facilitate integration with network services and ensure that our investment is where our role is most important (e.g., not trying to compete with the network services unless we think we can and should displace them in a key area). For example, we have recognized that Google will be a point of discovery, and so rather than trying to duplicate what they do well for the broad masses of people, we should (1) put all things online in a way that Google can discover; and (2) because we recognize that Google won’t build services in ways that serve all scholarly needs, work to strategically complement what they do.

Following on my post from yesterday about Eric Lease Morgan’s paper on the “Next Generation” of the Library Catalog, Roy Tennant has an article in Library Journal calling for rapid change (as in: “fix them soon”) in the primary information discovery tools provided by libraries. Though uses the term “Library 2.0,” I see this as part of a larger movement that recognizes that traditional library models for information discovery, access, and use are inadequate for most users….

Library Journal – Fixing Library Discovery
Whether you are an early adopter such as NCSU of new opportunities, or are content to wait for library vendors to provide the next generation of finding tools, it’s clear that how library users will find information at a library is in a period of rapid change. This is a good thing, since library finding tools are mostly broken, particularly when compared to finding tools offered by companies such as Google and Amazon. We must fix them—and soon.

I did my presentation at the ATLA Annual Meeting yesterday and promised I would post the PowerPoint presentation to the our DSpace respository. The address is:

http://hdl.handle.net/2144/165

I presented an environmental scan for the RDB, including looking at the impact in changes in scholarly communication, information technologies, information searching behavior, etc.

Occasionally when I read something, it makes so much sense I wonder why I didn’t think of it…. (Read Don’t scar on the first cut – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals))

In the Theology Library, we’ve recently added several new staff members to fill vacant positions. More frequently than I had anticipated, I’m asked “policy” questions. What do we do when…? I guess I should have expected it. With retirements and resignations, we lost part of our institutional memory. A lot of “wisdom” has suddenly disappeared. I’ve been happy to respond to the questions. But at some level, I’ve resisted writing “policy” statements.

I’ve been trying to shift the Library’s focus to be more “user oriented.” When I’m asked a “what do we usually do?” kind of question, I generally respond based on an implicit policy: “Whatever best serves the Library user.” Naturally that’s tempered by the constraints of available resources. But, the reason we are here is to serve the “customer.” There are times when I think there should be only one policy: “Help the customer succeed in whatever they are trying to do.”

[Un]Fortunately that leaves the Library staff to determine how to answer the question every time we encounter a new customer. That’s what we should be doing, but it’s hard without either a well-developed policy (or decision chart) or a substantial body of wisdom to draw upon when making a decision. The
David Heinemeier (from Signal vs. Noise) suggests that we opt for wisdom:

When something goes wrong, have a chat about it, embed the learning in the organizational memory as a story instead of a policy. Stories have context and engage the listeners, so next time a similar situation arise, you’ll be informed by the story and act wiser.

Over at MaisonBisson.com Casey has been playing with a prototype of a WordPress plugin that would function as an OPAC.

This is not to replace the ILS, he argues, but to provide a public interface that allows for data to be pulled from multiple sources and to allow user interaction. In it’s current interation, it pulls data from the online catalog, Amazon.com, wikipedia, and I think, Flikr. Being a WordPress plugin, it allows for comments, and all the features of WordPress. Like Jenny, I would love to give it a try on our site.
I really like the idea. I don’t know that it’s ready for prime-time as the primary user interface, but I’ve been thinking of something like this for a “new books” list.

The other significant issue is that this holds the potential of removing the OPAC from the Librayr’s control. Lorcan Dempsey has been pushing libraries to begin developing ways of feeding data into the user’s system. This is an interesting example of what that might look like….

The Malleability of Content

Jeff Barry, over at Endless Hybrids, comments on David Seaman’s presentation in which he calls for malleable content. I agree with Seaman, though he is essentially just pointing to the next logical step. We needed to learn to digitize before we could imagine how to make the digital content more useful. Barry’s observation about the role librarians have played in the production of knowledge is a really helpful insight.

Research libraries, in particular, exist to support scholarship through the acquisition, management, organization, and preservation of scholarly materials. Is scholarship not the scholar’s ability “to enrich, re-shape, re-package, annotate, and contextualize�? the findings of other researchers?

One reason that libraries have not more actively pursued the development of tools that support the uses of malleable content in the digital library is that librarians traditionally have not been involved in the production end of scholarship. Libraries have tended to be consumers of printed scholarship, acquiring and preserving materials.

I still need to complete Sellen and Harpers’ The Myth of the Paperless Office, but I’ve had a few more thoughts about what I read (and wrote) yesterday.

First, the subjects of their research did not include academics. I wish it did. I think much of what they say probably is on target for academics. One of the things that I see that is different is that the collaborative community for many scholars is geographically disperse. The use of paper documents in an office setting makes a lot of sense. For scholars who are often distant from their collaborators, paper only slows things down.

Second, their statement that the affordances of paper have shaped the way people user and organize information raises the question about those who haven’t been “raised on paper.” I mentioned recently my experience in South Africa and the question it raised about the use of digital texts in a country where paper is scarce. Similar questions arise for me about young adults. Recent studies on young adults point to patterns of information discovery and use that aren’t paper based. Sellen and Harper may be looking at a user population whose patterns of information use have been so shaped by paper that they see everything through that lens. Does the same hold true for those whose culture is less paper oriented?