PVLD Director's Blog

Social media and music - the YouTube Symphony Orchestra

Following my last post on the legitimization of social media I was fascinated to come across information about the YouTube Symphony Orchestra - an example of how social media can be used to connect performing artists in surprising ways.

Musicians around the world were invited to submit YouTube videos of themselves performing a piece written by composer Tan Dun specifically for this event.  Thousands of submissions were received from around the world, out of which a panel of professional musicians selected the members of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Symphony members were flown to New York where they practiced together for several days and then performed Tan Dun's "Internet Symphony, Eroica" last night at Carnegie Hall.

Not being musical myself I have no idea whether the Internet Symphony and/or the performance are good, bad or indifferent but I was fascinated by the idea of using freely available social networking tools to create an orchestra from scratch...and this mashup of the individual performances is pretty cool too!

I wonder how many other ways this idea can be applied?  Maybe performing a play via a mashup that stitches together video of cast members who might be scattered across the globe, or assembling a dance troupe via YouTube auditions...libraries could even do programs where they invite community members to submit videos of themselves reading poetry or performing music and then assemble the videos into a mashup and show it on a big screen or via the library website.  Fun to think about!

Legitimizing social media/"Web 2.0"

How do you know that social media are now truly maintstream?  When use of social media is recognized by academic institutions as a valid criteria for gaining tenure.  The University of Maine (my husband's alma mater) recently adopted guidelines for giving academic recognition for contributions to social media  - a sign that even tradition-bound institutions like universities are recognizing the legitimacy of social media.

Another sign?  Encyclopedia Britannica's decision, reported in the Boston Globe, to allow subscribers to edit its contents along the lines of Wikipedia.

When even tradition-bound institutions like universities and 241-year-old encyclopedias (which, by the way, makes Britannica much older than our treasured Dewey Decimal system!) are using social media to transform concepts at the heart of their institutional identities it's a pretty clear signal that libraries should do the same...

The "Sixth Sense" - the future of information

PVLD volunteer extraordinaire Gene Roeder forwarded me this video from Ted.com.  It's a stunning example of how the way people interact with information may be transformed in the not-too-distant future, and has profound implications for libraries. 

Watch the video, and then imagine a world where people go to the shelves, pick up a book, and immediately see how closely it matches their personal likes and dislikes.  Or where there is no such thing as a "computer" that sits on a table because everyone is wearing all the computer capacity they need.  Or where no library cards are needed because people's account information is automatically transmitted to our systems when they approach the Circ desk.  Or where micro-GPS information enables people to select an item from our catalog by typing it into the catalog screen projected on their hand, and then be guided to exactly where that item is located on the shelf.

 

Amazing!  Now let your imagine run free and think about what libraries will need to do to serve people in the world of the "sixth sense"!

Web 2.0 and Government - a study in contrasts

I spend a fair amount of time reading and thinking about how libraries can use technology to expand our range of services and our reach into the communities we serve.  While the use of "web 2.0" technologies by libraries is growing, the topic is not without some controversy as we wrestle with how to balance the open-ness of the social web with our professional commitment to individual privacy, whether gaming or using social networking sites are appropriate uses for library computers, and even how to provide adequate bandwidth to support streaming video.

That's why I was interested to read about two very different situations and approaches regarding the use of technology by government entities.

First, this article from the Washington Post about the current state of the technology in the White House (thanks to librarian Michael Barb for sharing).  While the description is shocking in its own right, its even more shocking when contrasted to the smart and aggressive use of web 2.0/social networking tools by the Obama campaign, to Obama's obvious reliance on technology-based communication as evidenced by the great Blackberry controversy, and to the Obama teams' obvious intent open up communication between the White House and citizens as evidenced by the new www.whitehouse.gov website and  Office of Public Liaison. 

What a contrast to how the Air Force is harnessing social media to engage all 330,000 Air Force personnel in communicating with the public as described in this post from the Web Ink Now blog.

If the Air Force with its security concerns, classified information, and military secrets is willing to empower everyone from the newest recruit to top brass to use You Tube, Twitter, and other social networking tools to communicate not just with family and friends but with the world at large you've got to wonder what the White House, or for that matter libraries, have been afraid of! 

That said, discussions like this give me hope that the Air Force won't be alone in its efforts to use social technology tools to transform the way government communicates! (Thanks Michael Sauers at the Travelin' Librarian)

The library website as virtual branch....really?

We've invested a lot of time and effort (and a not insignificant amount of money), developing the PVLD website as a "virtual branch" of the library with library services available 24/7 from home or office.  I'm really proud of what our Digital Services team have accomplished in terms of the look and feel of the site, the shift from traditional "databases" to online services such as Value Line, Mango Languages, and Brainfuse, the use of tools like Wordpress blogs and Flickr to both deliver content and make it available via the wider web and not just the library website, and the inclusion of social networking concepts like user reviews and ratings and instant messaging.

And then today I read two blog posts by David Lee King that made me realize how far we still have to go!  The first post asks whether our online question-answering services discriminate against "a growing, younger, web-savvy customer base. Customers who *almost* have all the tools in place to simply ignore you and your grad-degreed, professional information-retrieval services. Especially if they are treated like second class customers when they ask a question using their preferred, and handy, means of communication." when we don't have easy fast ways for them to communicate with us and get timely responses via the web.

David lays out some terrific, but painful (because they hit close to home!) examples of how libraries do this - e.g. by allowing people to email in reference questions, but only committing to answer within 48 hours; by only providing online reference during "normal business hours", etc.  Ouch!  PVLD is guilty as charged -

We don't offer any email reference/question answering service other than via a generic "contact us" web form on our "Contact Us" page that goes to our webmaster regardless of the type of question...and we don't give any indication of how quickly questions submitted via that form will be answered.  My guess is it could be days given that the staff who check the page work mostly Monday to Friday!

In addition to the generic web form the "Contact Us" page gives people the option of emailing the Library Director, or emailing the "website".  Otherwise people can contact various library departments by telephone - definitely not the best option for a generation used to email and text-messaging.  Reviewing this page also made me realize why I get so many questions about overdue books emailed directly to me....I'm pretty much the only option for someone who wants to email a question!

We do offer a "Chat Service" on our home page, but its only available Monday-Thursday from  1-4PM (exactly the hours when our tech-savvy younger customers are in school), and when it's offline there is no obvious alternative way to contact the library.  No wonder it isn't used very much!


That bit of reflection was painful enough, and then I read this companion post on "Doin Stuff At the Library's Website" in which David lists some of the things you can do at the physical library and asks if you can also do them at the library website.  PVLD's website capabilities are noted in italics.

• check out a book  - yes, a limited selection of audio and e-books are available for online checkout, but the process is cumbersome and requires installation of special software
  
• read a book or magazine - books no, magazine articles yes via databases that aren't very easy to use
   
• take notes and do research - no notetaking capability via the website, you can do research using the library databases but it isn't intuitive or easy
  
• put a public PC on reserve for later - no - our software is capable but we only allow reservations to be made from kiosks within the library. Something to revisit.
  
• pester the reference librarian with questions  - see my comments above
  
• check stuff out when I’m done - apart from the downloadable audio and e-books, not really.  You can put things on hold, but you need to come to the library to get them.
   
• attend a training session or a fun program - again, not really.  You can learn a language using Mango Languages or get live homework help from Brainfuse but these aren't really "programs" in the sense David is talking about...we've talked about online video tutorials, webcasting story times, etc. but these remain future dreams

Again, Ouch!  Is our website a great resource - absolutely.  And we actually do offer some of the things David mentions further in his blog post -  you can browse large parts of our collection online, and we do offer RSS feeds - but to call the website a true "virtual branch" is an overstatement.

As I thought about this I realized that the problem is not with our Digital Services team - two guys who have way more on their plate than is reasonable, and who really get what it means to compete in the web 2.0 world.  The real issue is an entire library organization that (understandably given the roots of our profession) is built around delivering services within our buildings.  Interacting with customers online is treated as an "extra" ...something to do after we've made sure the reference desk is staffed, the physical collection is maintained, and the in-library programs are developed. 

While I absolutely believe that the physical library is both important and in no danger of becoming irrelevent any time soon, like David Lee King I also worry that if we don't find a way to stretch our resources to serve people as effectively using the Internet as we do in the library itself we run the risk of becoming irrelevant to new generations of potential customers.  I'd hate for the library to be having trouble like Borders is having at the same time its online competitor Amazon.com had its best holiday season ever.

This year PVLD will be creating a new 3-year strategic plan, and I can see that figuring out how to truly make our website a virtual branch without diminishing our physical library services is not only going to be essential, it's going to force us to rethink how we do almost everything we do.  Now there's a challenge for 2009!

Connected Learning

Michael Stephens posted this video on his Tame the Web Blog last week:

It's a fascinating description of the new world of learning.  While the focus is on a college student taking a formal class, a lot of the concepts resonated with me because they reflect how my own experience of learning and professional development have changed as I have become more comfortable using some of the "Web 2.0" tools.

It was interesting that the only mention of libraries was a brief reference to conducting research using "Google Scholar and the library's databases" while at the same time talking about how the "connected student" needs to learn to evaluate information and verify its validity (what librarians often call information literacy) and to develop skills in the "organization of knowledge"...both subjects that librarians think of as core to our profession.

What is the role of the librarian in a world of connected learning?  Is it merely, as the video implies, to be a research source? (And you have to wonder how long that role will last given all of the alternatives to proprietary databases accessed through libraries). 

The superficial reaction is that maybe librarians aren't needed in this new world of learning, but I think that's wrong! 

In a public library setting we could play the role that the college professor plays in the video -teaching, coaching, and guiding people in our communities to become networked learners by exposing them to and helping them use social networking tools, teaching information literacy skills, and  providing mechanisms to connect people with other community members with similar interests.   An example of this is PVLD's current project to build a social networking site for local busineses, which will enable them to use web 2.0 technology to share information and learn from one another.  The work some of us are doing on developing social catalogs is also a way of facilitating networked learning by enabling people to share learnings via the library catalog.  Of course to be effective in these roles, we also need to be effective networked learners ourselves, which is why efforts like the Learning 2.0 initiatives that we and other libraries have undertaken are so important. 

One thing's for sure, though - providing library services to support networked learning will require fundamental changes in how we do things.  Certainly staking our professional identity on answering "reference questions" would be a big mistake.....

Literacy in a Screen-based World

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine was headed "The Screen Issue" and dedicated to an exploration of how screen-based media are changing our world.  I was particulary intrigued by Kevin Kelly's essay "Becoming Screen Literate", in which he describes his view that "We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality."

He is not alone in this view, and there has been much written about how new screen-based media are transforming the very way we think.  Wht struck me about this article was Mr. Kelly's description of literacy as requiring a rich set of tools far beyond the basic building blocks of the ability to comprehend the meaning of a word on a page:

But merely producing movies with ease is not enough for screen fluency, just as producing books with ease on Gutenberg’s press did not fully unleash text. Literacy also required a long list of innovations and techniques that permit ordinary readers and writers to manipulate text in ways that make it useful. For instance, quotation symbols make it simple to indicate where one has borrowed text from another writer. Once you have a large document, you need a table of contents to find your way through it. That requires page numbers. Somebody invented them (in the 13th century). Longer texts require an alphabetic index, devised by the Greeks and later developed for libraries of books. Footnotes, invented in about the 12th century, allow tangential information to be displayed outside the linear argument of the main text. And bibliographic citations (invented in the mid-1500s) enable scholars and skeptics to systematically consult sources. These days, of course, we have hyperlinks, which connect one piece of text to another, and tags, which categorize a selected word or phrase for later sorting.

All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, quote experts and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.

He then goes on to propose that rapidly advancing computer technologies, including the use of technology to harness "the collective intelligence of humans", are enabling the application of the building blocks of textual literacy described above to be applied to visual images so that they can be searched, sorted, organized and retrieved much as words and text are today.

"As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words. Fluid images­ made up of bits flow rapidly onto new screens and can be put to almost any use. Flexible images migrate into new media and seep into the old. Like alphabetic bits, they can be squeezed into links or stretched to fit search engines, indexes and databases. They invite the same satisfying participation in both creation and consumption that the world of text does." 

 Unwritten, but implied, is a sense that this new "visuality" will supplant text-based literacy as the primary means of communicating ones thoughts and ideas.  I have to admit that as someone who loves the written word this makes me a bit apprehensive.  Ispend very little time watching movies, television, or YouTube because I prefer to read instead; and while I love the new Web 2.0 and social networking tools I am drawn to those that are primarily based on the written word, such as blogs and written status updates from my Facebook Friends.

One of the things I love about reading is that the words on the page are transformed through my own experience and imagination into images of my own making, and I avoid seeing the movie versions of books that I have loved because the visual images on the screen rarely live up to what I have imagined.

I can't help but wonder whether something will be lost when communication is via a visual depiction in glorious technicolor that leaves little to the imagination, rather than words (whether spoken or written) that demand transformation into an image of my own making....but what do you think?

The future of the World Wide Web...and what might it mean for libraries?

It's a quiet Friday at the library, which means I have some much appreciated reading and thinking time.  A few weeks ago I came across the following video of Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine talking about the "next 5,000 days of the Internet", and ever since many of his comments have been floating around the back of my mind.  I've been a fan of Kevin's ever since I read his New Rules for the New Economy nearly 10 years ago.  He was the first person I encountered who could explain (in language even I could understand!) why the Internet was not "TV but better".  

In the video Kevin notes that the World Wide Web (not the Internet, which has much older roots, but the system of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that allows us to find and link to documents and pages in the vast sea of digital information that the computer era has spawned)as we know it today is not even 5,000 days old!

After giving a mind-bending account of the current state of the Web in terms of its storage and processing capacity, Kevin gives his view as to what the next 5,000 days and beyond will bring, and as when I first read "New Rules" a decade ago I had several jolts of recognition.  When he talked about shoes as "chips with heels" I couldn't help think about how much I love my Nike+ Ipod - essentially a chip you insert in your shoe that tracks your walking/running and uploads the data to a personalized webpage...heaven sent for someone with obsessive compulsive tendencies like me but also a wonderful example of not only the convergence of the physical and the digital, but of the evolution of the web to a "me-centric" network of information.

On a less frivolous note, however, some of the concepts and issues he raises are things librarians need to really think about. 

How will we deliver services in a world where the digital and the physical converge? What will our collections look like?  (I'll write another day on some interesting ideas put forth by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive related to this topic.)

If "web 3.0" moves us from a network of "pages" to a network in which every item, idea, and word can be linked what does that mean for an organization like PVLD who sees its core mission as "Connecting People, Information, and Ideas"?

How will we meet people's growing expectation of personalization of services and products?  And what does Kevin's assertion that "the price of personalization is transparency" mean for our deeply held values and beliefs around privacy?

Important questions, and I don't pretend to know the answers.  I do know, however, that this thing we call the "web" has to large degree taken on a life of its own as more and more people, devices, and bits of information are caught up in it....so trying to change its course is almost certainly impossible.  I don't know whether all of Kevin Kelly's predictions will come to pass.  He is, however, someone whse intellect and perspective I respect.  With that in mind, watch the video and let me know what you think!

Online Social Networks and Your Career

Regular readers of this blog know that I firmly believe that public libraries (or to be more precise - the staff of public libraries) need to understand and be fluent in "Web 2.0" - the online systems that are transforming the way people connect and interact with one another.  That's why we have links to social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr on our website, why we had our "Learning 2.0" staff development program, and why I personally participate on networks like LinkedIn and Facebook.

It turns out that being able to effectively use these sites is also an important career skill.

According to an article in the New York Times on August 13th , "The old business adage that it’s not what you know but who you know takes a twist in the Internet era: it’s what you know about social-networking sites that can get you ahead."

I had first-hand experience of the potential career value of social networking sites when, within the space of 48 hours, I had two requests from members of my LinkedIn network for me to write recommendations for their LinkedIn pages to assist them in their respective job searches.

Our staff is stretched pretty thin right now, but when things settle down I think we'll be talking about how we can help our library users and our community develop the skills they need to enhance their careers using these new tools....

Micro-Interactions

I was cleaning my computer desktop today and came across this slideshow presentation by David Armano, who blogs at Logic + Emotion. ( Be patient - it has 80 slides and takes a while to load!)�

Micro-Interactions in a 2.0 World (v2)

view presentation (tags: web 2.0 experience design)

�It is an interesting overview of how technology is changing how people interact with businesses/brands (and libraries!)�This quote from David sums up why this is important -

"We live in a world where the little things really do matter.� Each encounter no matter how brief is a micro interaction which makes a deposit or withdrawal from our rational and emotional subconscious. The sum of these interactions and encounters adds up to how we feel about a particular product, brand or service.� Little things. Feelings.� They influence our everyday behaviors more than we realize.”

As David notes, this means we need to "treat everyone like an influencer, make every interaction count."

I think at one level libraries have long been aware that micro-interactions are important - the reference interview, the�"readers' advisory" individualized book suggestion, the conversation between the clerk at the Circulation Desk and the customer.. At another level the decentralization of authority and responsibility that engaging with customers at a micro-level demands is at odds with our seemingly innate tendency towards control.�

...And now we face the challenge of adding technology-based micro-interactions to our toolkit when many of us still face a steep learning curve when it comes to "Web 2.0".� I'm proud of how far PVLD has come in meeting this challenge - our many blogs, links to social networking sites from our website, Twitter presence, and Instant Messaging service being just some of the examples��- but we still have a ways to go�to truly leverage these technologies in ways that are meaningful to customers.