Luddites, Trumpism and Change: A crossroads for libraries

“Globalization is a proxy for technology-powered capitalism, which tends to reward fewer and fewer members of society.”
– Om Malik

Corner someone and they will react. We may be seeing this across the world as change, globalization, technology and economic dislocation force more and more people into the corner of benefit-nots. They are reacting out of desperation. It’s not rational. It’s not pretty. But it shouldn’t be surprising.

Years ago at a library conference, one of the keynote speakers forecast that there would be a return to the analog (sorry my Twitter-based memory does not identify the person). The rapidity of digitization would be met by a reaction. People would scurry back to the familiar, he said. They always do.

Fast forward to 2016, where the decades-long trends toward globalization, borderless labor markets, denationalization, exponential technological change and corresponding social revolutions has hit the wall of public reaction. Brexit. Global Trumpism. Call it what you will. We’re in a change moment. The reaction is here.

Reacting to the Reaction

People in the Blue Zones, the Technorati, the beneficiaries of cheap foreign labor, free trade and technological innovation are scratching their heads. For all their algorithms and AI, they didn’t see this coming. Everything looked good on their feeds. No danger could possibly burst their self-assured bubble of inevitability. All was quiet. It was like a clear blue, September 2001, morning in New York City. It was like the boardroom in the Federal Reserve in 2006. The serenity was over in an instant.

Since Brexit, and then Trump’s election, the Glittery Digitarians have initiated a period of introspection. They’re looking up from their stock tickers and gold-plated smart watches to find a grim reality: the world is crowded with people that have lost much ground at the expense of the global maelstrom that has elevated a very small, lucky few to greatness. They are now seeing, as for the first time, the shuttered towns. The empty retail stores. The displaced and homeless.

Suddenly their confident talk of personal AI assistants has turned from technolust to terror. Their success suddenly looks short-sighted.

Om Malik wrote in his recent New Yorker op-ed, that Silicon Valley may soon find itself equated with the super villains on Wall Street. He posits that a new business model needs to account for the public good…or else.

I recently read Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff. If you haven’t read it, now would be a good time. Like Bernie Sanders and others, Rushkoff has been warning of this kind of reaction for awhile. The system is not designed for the public good, but only around a narrow set of shareholder requirements. All other considerations do not compute.

My Reaction

Let me put this in personal perspective.

In my work, I engage the public in “the heart of Silicon Valley” on what they want from their community and what’s missing. What I hear is concern about the loss of quiet, of connection to others, of a pace of life that is not 24/7 always a click away. This is consistent. People feel overwhelmed.

As one of the chief technologists for my library, this puts me in a strange place. And I’ve been grappling with it for the past few months.

On the one hand, people are curious. They’re happy to try the next big thing. But you also hear the frustration.

Meanwhile, the burden of the Tech Industry is more than inflated rents and traffic. There’s a very obvious divide between long-time residents and newcomers. There’s a sense that something has been lost. There’s anger too, even here in the shadow of Google and Facebook.

The Library as a Philosophy

The other day, I was visited by a Eurpean Library Director who wanted to talk about VR. He asked me where I thought we’d be in ten years.

I hesitated. My thoughts immediately went back to the words of despair that I’d been hearing from the public lately.

Of course, the genie’s out of the bottle. We can’t stop the digital era. VR interface revolutions will likely emerge. The robots will come.

But we can harness this change to our benefit. We can add rules to heal it to our collective needs.

This is where the Library comes in. We have a sharing culture. A model that values bridging divides, pooling resources and re-distributing knowledge. It’s a model that is practically unique to the library if you think about it.

As I read Rushkoff, I kept coming back to the Librarian’s philosophy on sharing. In his book, he contends that we need to re-imagine (re-code) our economy to work for people. He recalls technologies like HTTP and RSS which were invented and then given away to the world to share and re-use. This sounded very ‘librarian’ to me.

We share knowledge in the form of access to technology, after all. We host training on new maker gear, coding, robotics, virtual reality.

Perhaps we need to double-down on this philosophy. Perhaps, we can be more than just a bridge. Maybe we can be the engine driving our communities to the other side. We can not just advocate, but do. Have a hackathon? Build a public alternative to the Airbnb app to be used by people in your town.

Know the Future

In the end, libraires, technologists and digitarians need to tell a better story. We need to get outside our bubbles and tell that story with words that resonate with the benefit-nots. And more, we need that story to be backed up with real-world benefits.

It starts with asking the community what kind of world they want to live it? What obstacles keep them from living that way? And then how the library and technology can help make change.

We have the philosophy, we have the spaces and we have public permission. Let’s get to work.

The State of the Library Website

T’was a time when the Library Website was an abomination. Those dark days have lightened significantly. But new clouds have appeared on the horizon.

Darkest Before the Dawn

In the dark ages of Library Websites, users suffered under UX regimes that were rigid, unhelpful and confusing. This was before responsive design became a standard in the library world. It was before search engine optimization started to creep into Library meetings. It was before user experience became an actual librarian job title.

We’ve come a long way since I wrote The Ugly Truth About Library Websites. Most libraries have evolved beyond the old “website as pamphlet” paradigm to one that is dynamic and focused on user tasks.

Public libraries have deployed platforms like BiblioCommons to serve responsive, task-oriented interfaces that integrate their catalogs, programming and website into a single social platform. Books, digital resources, programs and even loanable equipment are all accessible via a single search. What’s more, the critical social networking aspects of library life are also embedded along the user’s path. Celebrated examples of this integrated solution include the San Francisco Public Library and Chicago Public Library. Queens is also hard at work to develop a custom solution.

In the academic realm, libraries have turned to unified discovery layers like WorldCat Discovery and EBSCO Discovery Service to simplify (Googlize) the research process. These systems put a single-search box front and center that access resources on the shelf, but also all those electronic resources that make up the bulk of academic budgets.

And while there are still many laggards, few libraries ignore these problems outright.

The Storm Ahead

While the general state of online library interfaces has improved, the unforgiving, hyperbolic curve of change continues to press forward. And libraries cannot stay put. Indeed, we need to quicken our pace and prepare our organizations for ongoing recalibration as the tempo of change increases.

The biggest problem for library websites, is that there is little future for the library website. That’s because people will get less and less information through web browsers. Indeed, consider how often you use a web browser on your phone versus an app. Developments in AI, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality will compound that trend.

If you’re like Chris Milk, videographer and VR evangelist, you see the writing on the wall. The modes of how we experience information are about to undergo a fundamental revolution. Milk likens the current state of VR to the old black and white silent films at the dawn of motion pictures.

I’d extend this line of thinking to the web page. Within a decade or two, I expect people will look back on web pages as a brief, transitory medium bridging print information to linked data. And as our AI, VR and AR technologies take off, they will liberate information from the old print paradigms altogether.

In short, people will interact with information in more direct ways. They will ask a computer to provide them the answer. They will virtually travel to a “space” where they can experience the information they seek.

Get Ready to Re-invent the Library…again

So where does the library fit into this virtualized and automated future?

One possibility is that the good work to transform library data into linked data will enable us to survive this revolution. In fact, it may be our best hope.

Another hope is that we continue to emphasize the library as a social space for people to come together around ideas. Whether its a virtual library space or a physical one, the library can be the place in both local and global communities where people meet their universal thirst for connecting with others. The modes of those ideas (books, ebooks, videos, games) will matter far less than the act of connecting.

In a sense, you could define the future online library as something between an MMORPG, Meetup.com and the TED conference.

So, the library website is vastly improved, but we won’t have long to rest on our laurels.

Ready Player One? Put on your VR goggles. Call up Siri. Start rethinking everything you know about the Library website.

 

 

Virtual Realty is Getting Real in the Library

My library just received three Samsung S7 devices with Gear VR goggles. We put them to work right away.

The first thought I had was: Wow, this will change everything. My second thought was: Wow, I can’t wait for Apple to make a VR device!

The Samsung Gear VR experience is grainy and fraught with limitations, but you can see the potential right away. The virtual reality is, after all, working off a smartphone. There is no high-end graphics card working under the hood. Really, the goggles are just a plastic case holding the phone up to your eyes. But still, despite all this, it’s amazing.

Within twenty-four hours, I’d surfed beside the world’s top surfers on giant waves off Hawaii, hung out with the Masai in Africa and shared an intimate moment with a pianist and his dog in their (New York?) apartment. It was all beautiful.

We’ve Been Here Before

Remember when the Internet came online? If you’re old enough, you’ll recall the crude attempts to chat on digital bulletin board systems (BBS) or, much later, the publication of the first colorful (often jarringly so) HTML pages.

It’s the Hello World! moment for VR now. People are just getting started. You can tell the content currently available is just scratching the surface of potentialities for this medium. But once you try VR and consider the ways it can be used, you start to realize nothing will be the same again.

The Internet Will Disappear

So said Google CEO Erik Schmidt in 2015. He was talking about the rise of AI, wearable tech and many other emerging technologies that will transform how we access data. For Schmidt, the Internet will simply fade into these technologies to the point that it will be unrecognizable.

I agree. But being primarily a web librarian, I’m mostly concerned with how new technologies will translate in the library context. What will VR mean for library websites, online catalogs, eBooks, databases and the social networking aspects of libraries.

So after trying out VR, I was already thinking about all this. Here are some brief thoughts:

• Visiting the library stacks in VR could transform the online catalog experience
• Library programming could break out of the physical world (virtual speakers, virtual locations)
• VR book discussions could incorporate virtual tours of topics/locations touched on in books
• Collections of VR experiences could become a new source for local collections
• VR maker spaces and tools for creatives to create VR experiences/objects

Year Zero?

Still, VR makes your eyes tired. It’s not perfect. It has a long way to go.

But based on my experience sharing this technology with others, it’s addictive. People love trying it. They can’t stop talking about it afterward.

So, while it may be some time before the VR revolution disrupts the Internet (and virtual library services with it), it sure feels imminent.

AI First

Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the “device” to fade away. Over time, the computer itself—whatever its form factor—will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world.

Google Founder’s Letter, April 2016

My Library recently finalized a Vision Document for our virtual library presence. Happily, our vision was aligned with the long-term direction of technology as understood by movers and shakers like Google.

As I’ve written previously, the Library Website will disappear. But this is because the Internet (as we currently understand it) will also disappear.

In its place, a new mode of information retrieval and creation will move us away from the paper-based metaphor of web pages. Information will be more ubiquitous. It will be more free-form, more adaptable, more contextualized, more interactive.

Part of this is already underway. For example, people are becoming a data set. And other apps are learning about you and changing how they work based on who you are. Your personal data set contains location data, patterns in speech and movement around the world, consumer history, keywords particular to your interests, associations based on your social networks, etc.

AI Emerging

All of this information makes it possible for emerging AI systems like Siri and Cortana to better serve you. Soon, it will allow AI to control the flow of information based on your mood and other factors to help you be more productive. And like a good friend that knows you very, very well, AI will even be able to alert you to serendipitous events or inconveniences so that you can navigate life more happily.

People’s expectations are already being set for this kind of experience. Perhaps you’ve noticed yourself getting annoyed when your personal assistant just fetches a Wikipedia article when you ask it something. You’re left wanting. What we want is that kernel of gold we asked about. But what we get right now, is something too general to be useful.

But soon, that will all change. Nascent AI will soon be able to provide exactly the piece of information that you really want rather than a generalized web page. This is what Google means when they make statements like “AI First” or “the Web will die.” They’re talking about a world where information is not only presented as article-like web pages, but broken down into actual kernels of information that are both discrete and yet interconnected.

AI First in the Library

Library discussions often focus on building better web pages or navigation menus or providing responsive websites. But the conversation we need to have is about pulling our data out of siloed systems and websites and making it available to all modes like AI, apps and basic data harvesters.

You hear this conversation in bits and pieces. The ongoing linked data project is part of this long-term strategy. So too with next-gen OPACs. But on the ground, in our local strategy meetings, we need to tie every big project we do to this emerging reality where web browsers are increasingly no longer relevant.

We need to think AI First.

The L Word

I’ve been working with my team on a vision document for what we want our future digital library platform to look like. This exercise keeps bringing us back to defining the library of the future. And that means addressing the very use of the term, ‘Library.’

When I first exited my library (and information science) program, I was hired by Adobe Systems to work in a team of other librarians. My manager warned us against using the word ‘Librarian’ among our non-librarian colleagues. I think the gist was: too much baggage there.

So, we used the word ‘Information Specialist.’

Fast forward a few years to my time in an academic environment at DePaul University Library and this topic came up in the context of services the library provided. Faculty and students associated the library in very traditional ways: a quiet, book-filled space. But the way they used the library was changing despite the lag in their semantic understanding.

The space and the virtual tools we put in place online helped users not only find and evaluate information, but also create, organize and share information. A case in point was our adoption of digital publishing tools like Bepress and Omeka, but also the Scholar’s Lab.

I’m seeing a similar contradiction in the public library space. Say library and people think books. Walk into a public library and people do games, meetings, trainings and any number of online tasks.

This disconnect between what the word ‘Library’ evokes in the mind’s eye and what it means in practice is telling. We’ve got a problem with our brand.

In fact, we may need a new word.

Taken literally, a library has  been a word for a physical collection of written materials. The Library of Alexandria held scrolls for example. Even code developers rely on ‘libraries’ today, which are collections of materials. In every case, the emphasis is on the collection of things.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we move away from books. Books are vessels for ideas and libraries will always be about ideas.

In fact, this focus on ideas rather than any one mode for transmitting ideas is key. In today’s library’s people not only read about ideas, they meet to discuss ideas, they brainstorm ideas.

I don’t pretend to have the magic word. In fact, maybe it’s taking so long for us to drop ‘Library’ because there is not a good word in existence. Maybe we need create a new one.

One tactic that comes to mind as we navigate this terminological evolution is to retain the library, but subsume it inside of something new. I’ve seen this done to various degrees in other libraries. For example, Loyola University in Chicago built an entirely new building adjacent to the book-filled library. Administratively, the building is run by the library, but it is called the Klarchek Information Commons. In that rather marvelous space looking out over Lake Michigan, you’ll find the modern ‘library’ in all its glory. Computers, Collaboration booths, etc. I like this model for fixing our identity problem and I think it would work without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

However, its done, one thing is for sure. Our users have moved on from ‘the library’ and are left with no accurate way to describe that place that they love to go to when they want to engage with ideas. Let’s put our thinking caps on and puts a word on their lips that does justice to what the old library has become. Let’s get past the L Word.

Library as Digital Consultancy

As faculty and students delve into digital scholarly works, they are tripping over the kinds of challenges that libraries specialize in overcoming, such as questions regarding digital project planning, improving discovery or using quality metadata. Indeed, nobody is better suited at helping scholars with their decisions regarding how to organize and deliver their digital works than librarians.

At my institution, we have not marketed our expertise in any meaningful way (yet), but we receive regular requests for help by faculty and campus organizations who are struggling with publishing digital scholarship. For example, a few years ago a team of librarians at my library helped researchers from the University of Ireland at Galway to migrate and restructure their online collection of annotations from the Vatican Archive to a more stable home on Omeka.net. Our expertise in metadata standards, OAI harvesting, digital collection platforms and digital project planning turned out to be invaluable to saving their dying collection and giving it a stable, long-term home. You can read more in my Saved by the Cloud post.

These kinds of requests have continued since. In recognition of this growing need, we are poised to launch a digital consultancy service on our campus.

Digital Project Planning

A core component of our jobs is planning digital projects. Over the past year, in fact, we’ve developed a standard project planning template that we apply to each digital project that comes our way. This has done wonders at keeping us all up to date on what stage each project is in and who is up next in terms of the workflow.

Researchers are often experts at planning out their papers, but they don’t normally have much experience with planning a digital project. For example, because metadata and preservation are things that normally don’t come up for them, they overlook planning around these aspects. And more generally, I’ve found that just having a template to work with can help them understand how the experts do digital projects and give them a sense of the issues they need to consider when planning their own projects, whether that’s building an online exhibit or organizing their selected works in ways that will reap the biggest bang for the buck.

We intend to begin formally offering project planning help to faculty very soon.

Platform Selection

It’s also our job to keep abreast of the various technologies available for distributing digital content, whether that is harvesting protocols, web content management systems, new plugins for WordPress or digital humanities exhibit platforms. Sometimes researchers know about some of these, but in my experience, their first choice is not necessarily the best for what they want to do.

It is fairly common for me to meet with campus partners that have an existing collection online, but which has been published in a platform that is ill-suited for what they are trying to accomplish. Currently, we have many departments moving old content based in SQL databases to plain HTML pages with no database behind them whatsoever. When I show them some of the other options, such as our Digital Commons-based institutional repository or Omeka.net, they often state they had no idea that such options existed and are very excited to work with us.

Metadata

I think people in general are becoming more aware of metadata, but there is still lots of technical considerations that your typical researcher may not be aware of. At our library, we have helped out with all aspects of metadata. We have helped them clean up their data to conform to authorized terms and standard vocabularies. We have explained Dublin Core. We have helped re-encode their data so that diacritics display online. We have done crosswalking and harvesting. It’s a deep area of knowledge and one that few people outside of libraries know on a suitably deep level.

One recommendation for any budding metadata consultants that I would share is that you really need to be the Carl Sagan of metadata. This is pretty technical stuff and most people don’t need all the details. Stick to discussing the final outcome and not the technical details and your help will be far more understood and appreciated. For example, I once presented to a room of researchers on all the technical fixes to a database that we made to enhance and standardize the metadata, but his went over terribly. People later came up to me and joked that whatever it was we did, they’re sure it was important and thanked us for being there. I guess that was a good outcome since they acknowledged our contribution. But it would have been better had they understood, the practical benefits for the collection and users of that content.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is not hard, but it is likely that few people outside of the online marketing and web design world know what it is. I often find people can understand it very quickly if you simply define it as “helping Google understand your content so it can help people find you.” Simple SEO tricks like defining and then using keywords in your headers will do wonders for your collection’s visibility in the major search engines. But you can go deep with this stuff too, so I like to gauge my audience’s appetite for this stuff and then provide them with as much detail as I think they have an appetite for.

Discovery

It’s a sad statement on the state of libraries, but the real discovery game is in the major search engines…not in our siloed, boutique search interfaces. Most people begin their searches (whether academic or not) in Google and this is really bad news for our digital collections since by and large, library collections are indexed in the deep web, beyond the reach of the search robots.

I recently tried a search for the title of a digital image in one of our collections in Google.com and found it. Yeah! Now I tried the same search in Google Images. No dice.

More librarians are coming to terms with this discovery problem now and we need to share this with digital scholars as they begin considering their own online collections so that they don’t make the mistakes libraries made (and continue to make…sigh) with our own collections.

We had one department at my institution that was sitting on a print journal that they were considering putting online. Behind this was a desire to bring the publication back to life since they had been told by one researcher in Europe that she thought the journal had been discontinued years ago. Unfortunately, it was still being published, it just wasn’t being indexed in Google. We offered our repository as an excellent place to do so, especially because it would increase their visibility worldwide. Unfortunately, they opted for a very small, non-profit online publisher whose content we demonstrated was not surfacing in Google or Google Scholar. Well, you can lead a horse to water…

Still, I think this kind of understanding of the discovery universe does resonate with many. Going back to our somewhat invisible digital images, we will be pushing many to social media like Flickr with the expectation that this will boost visibility in the image search engines (and social networks) and drive more traffic to our digital collections.

Usability

This one is a tough one because people often come with pre-conceived notions of how they want their content organized or the site designed. For this reason, sometimes usability advice does not go over well. But for those instances when our experiences with user studies and information architecture can influence a digital scholarship project, it’s time well spent. In fact, I often hear people remark that they “never thought of it that way” and they’re willing to try some of the expert advice that we have to share.

Such advice includes things like:

• Best practices for writing for the web
• Principles of information architecture
• Responsive design
• Accessibility support
• User Experience design

Marketing

It’s fitting to end on marketing. This is usually the final step in any digital project and one that often gets dropped. And yet, why do all the work of creating a digital collection only to let it go unnoticed. As digital project expert, librarians are familiar with the various channels available to promote and build followers with tools like social networking sites, blogs and the like.

With our own digital projects, we discuss marketing at the very beginning so we are sure all the hooks, timing and planning considerations are understood by everyone. In fact, marketing strategy will impact some of the features of your exhibit, your choice of keywords used to help SEO, the ultimate deadlines that you set for completion and the staffing time you know you’ll need post launch to keep the buzz buzzing.

Most importantly, though, marketing plans can greatly influence the decision for which platform to use. For example, one of the benefits of Omeka.net (rather than self-hosted Omeka) is that any collection hosted with them becomes part of a network of other digital collections, boosting the potential for serendipitous discovery. I often urge faculty to opt for our Digital Commons repository over, say, their personal website, because anything they place in DC gets aggregated into the larger DC universe and has built-in marketing tools like email subscriptions and RSS feeds.

The bottom line here is that marketing is an area where librarians can shine. Online marketing of digital collections really pulls together all of the other forms of expertise that we can offer (our understanding of metadata, web technology and social networks) to fulfill the aim of every digital project: to reach other people and teach them something.

New Thoughts on Digital Publishing Services

Back in early 2011, I gave an overview of the library as a disruptive publishing platform. Three years is a long time in “disruptive agent” years. So where do we stand today?

First of all, the publishing industry has not fallen yet…but the great disruption goes on.

A friend of mine was recently describing his rodent control neighbor, a charmingly opaque Eastern European gentleman whose central point about controlling rats can be summed up in a single pronouncement: “Fighting rats is F@#%ing 24×7 War!”

I’m seeing value in this statement for the effort to liberate information. As I’m learning in my contact with faculty and other librarians, the rat warrens run deep into our institutions. So invasive are their labyrinths that they threaten the very financial underpinnings of our information services.

Luckily, we are not passive observers in this state of affairs. We are active participants in creating something new. We have tools at our disposal to fill in the rat holes with a digital foundation that will ensure a long, fruitful future of open access publishing that will empower our users in ways traditional publishing could never do.

New Openings

I’m seeing a number of openings libraries are beginning to exploit that build on the “library as publishing platform” model I wrote about earlier. Namely, librarians are often becoming central hubs for a variety of digital services that include:

• digital humanities and academic computing support
• digital project consultant services for everything from how to migrate online content to advice on metadata to search engine optimization (SEO) and usability
• helping faculty navigate scholarly communications issues from copyright to developing readership and recognition
• and, of course, providing the place on campus for online publishing

Taken together, all of these emerging services suggest a fairly promising future for librarians interested in transforming the profession into something more in line with current and future trajectories for information.

Ready to enlist as a disruptive agent yet?

Over the next few posts, I’ll explore each of the above and how my library is building new services or augmenting older services to meet these emerging digital publishing needs.

First up, that thing that goes by the very vague and unhelpful term of digital humanities…

Ground Zero for Digital Humanities

At my Library, we have not rolled out a formal digital humanities support program…yet.

Nonetheless, we receive regular, unsolicited inquiries about platforms like Omeka and Digital Commons from faculty interested in creating exhibits and online course projects. To meet the demand so far, we’ve rolled out Omeka.net services, but what people really want is full-blown Omeka with plugins like Neatline and others the hosted version does not support.

Clearly, this organic demand suggests a far more robust DH service is required. As I write, we’ve deployed a faculty survey based loosely on one created by Rose Fortier’s work at Marquette University. With this, we hope to not only build awareness of our digital collections and services (spoiler: early results have 60% of faculty being unaware of our institutional repository, for example…24×7 war indeed!), but also we want to learn what services, like digital humanities support, would interest faculty.

Based on our Omeka.net experience, my guess is that digital humanities support services will generate healthy interest. If this is the case, then we will probably role out self-hosted Omeka plus Neatline and GeoServer, along with trainings and baseline technical support, sometime in 2015. The one hitch that will need to be overcome, will be multi-site capability, which will enable us to install Omeka once and then launch as many separate sites as are required with a single click of a button. That particular feature does not exist yet outside Omeka.net, but according to Omeka.org, the forthcoming Omeka 3/Omeka-S will provide this, greatly enhancing the practicality of launching an Omeka service for any library.

Meanwhile, as I recently presented at the 2014 Digital Commons Great Lakes User Group, we are also continuing to provide a measure of digital humanities support on our Digital Commons institutional repository. While not as sexy as Neatline, we are posting student-generated Map of the Month from the Geography Department, for example, in PDF format.

The recent enhanced, zoomable image viewer available in Digital Commons may also help in this regard.

We’ve also seen a few faculty interested in using Digital Commons for student projects, particularly around courses focused on digital publishing issues.

But, of course, as non-librarian content creators enter the collection-building business, they come ill-prepared for overcoming the kinds of problems library professionals excel at solving. And so, this is where I’d like to turn to next: the library as a digital project consultant service.

Google Book Scans and Library Catalogs

As librarians, we’ve long championed fair-use causes, and last week’s US District Court ruling in favor of Google’s book scanning project drew great interest from librarians. I think it’s exciting, but I also see a new and serious challenge to libraries ahead.

In a legal challenge brought by the US Writer’s Guild against Google, US District Judge Denny Chin ruled (PDF) that Google’s attempt to scan books was fair use. Chin’s main rationale can be boiled down to the fact that Google is not selling these books and does not make the entire book available in any practical way that might allow users to read a complete work online. Moreover, the books being scanned were often given to Google for scanning by organizations that had purchased the book and thus had every right under fair-use to scan these books and cite portions of them online. In Google’s case, this means the company can render relevant segments of a book to users in the form of in-page search results.

The final details are still to be worked out in a settlement between the two parties.

It was a good day for the public as well as Google. But this will definitely impact the library, especially the relevance of our (increasingly irrelevant) catalogs.

I can’t say this strongly enough: Libraries have missed the boat, big-time, when it comes to our approach to information retrieval over the past 15 years or so. Our anachronistic approach to marking up books, journals and other resources with metadata has been wildly inefficient for too long. Take the Internet model for retrieving knowledge, which uses algorithms augmented with elements of artificial intelligence. These retrieval functions integrate a given users social history, incorporate learnings from how users interact with results and even understand spelling, synonyms, grammar and natural language. The indexes these algorithms search, in turn, weight everything more or less democratically, based largely on the strength of interconnections between files (via hyperlinks) and keywords.

Now consider the library: where human agents try to pre-think the users intent by applying metadata with controlled vocabularies in unforgiving, and yes, arrogant fashion. We don’t use the users’ words. We use our words. Woe be to the user brought up on Google’s much more forgiving (i.e. helpful) search tool, who tries to use their own vocabularies to find relevant materials. When we do allow for keyword access, it is so weighted down the algorithmic chain (below our “authorized” terms) that users are often forced to page through results before they find what they’re looking for. If they can even find our catalog to start with (but I get ahead of myself here).

Even many of our most advanced discovery systems still don’t get this fundamental flaw in our approach. One discovery system in particular that I have experience with doesn’t account for how contemporary searchers often enter search strings with the assumption that they will be understood as phrase searches. At least, that’s the tendency they have leaned toward since Google’s algorithm reinforced this habit many years ago when it added proximity searching based on the order of words entered into their search engine. In this particular discovery system I’m referring to, if you search for a title without quotes, there is a very good chance (based on a number of factors) that your intended item won’t come up anywhere near the top ten…or even top 100 items.

So to summarize, libraries are still plodding down a dead end. Rather than forcing people to learn how we’ve organized things, we need to use machines to understand how our users (and the world) organizes things.

So how does the Google book scanning ruling relate to this dismal state of affairs?

Try an experiment: go to Google and type in the title of a currently playing movie. Chances are, Google will provide you with immediate information at the top of your results on which local cinema is showing that particular movie, and what time it is playing.

Now try searching for a recent book title. You’ll likely get Amazon.com, perhaps the publishers site, etc. What you won’t see is a link to your local library, let along library catalog.

So from this, consider the very near future (like next month) when you type in keywords into Google and begin seeing results from books. Click the book and you’re treated to alot of metadata, especially social metadata, like Goodreads reviews, links to author websites and in some cases, the ability to read the book if it’s open access.

Fortunately, there is a small link to “Find in a library” on the left-hand side once you’ve clicked into the Google Books interface from your initial search results. It’s just below the very obvious [Get Print Book] button which takes you to the big online book sellers. If you click on the library link (not the Add to your library which is something else), you’ll get the OCLC record with links to your nearest libraries. So it’s not totally a disaster, but hey, how did we get to this place where users looking instant access to any given information, don’t get a link to their local library’s request form (or directly to their local library’s e-version). But instead have to fork over mullah to learn something new. At least they still have YouTube and Wikipedia, I suppose.

We really need to get on the bandwagon here folks. A huge victory for fair-use has just been won, but until libraries start pushing our way to the front of the line (and the top of the results), we’re going to always come up last. And that’s not where our users are looking.

Rise of the Machines

As I write, the Roomba is cleaning my house. Googlebots are driving cars on California roads. Siri is learning what you want.

And, to the dread of many reference librarians, Watson is beating the pants off Jeopardy Champions in an opening AI move that will surely impact the library in the near future.

Already, robot shelvers are in place in many libraries, such as Santa Clara University’s Library. And if you saw the recent executive summary of Library Journal’s Patron Profiles, you saw that 76% of students reported turning to Google first when initiating their research. Compare that to just 24% that opted for the library.

This isn’t news, really, but when I heard economist Paul Krugman connecting the dots of automation, nagging unemployment, innovation and worker productivity and identifying it as a challenge to society, I had to agree with his thesis: robots are replacing people at an ever-increasing rate…and in parts of the economy we once considered safe.

Like I said in my previous post, sometimes the future sneaks up on you. But even if robotification is inevitable, we must ask ourselves, what are the human qualities that make us a value to other people?

Some might say that it’s about the in-person assistance that we can bring to our libraries: true. They might emphasize the smiles, encouraging words and subtle forms of non-verbal communication machines are pretty lousy with so far (until the David 8 release at least).

But we have to be very careful about convincing ourselves that retreating to our ramparts of physicality and empathy will serve us for very long. As the Library Journal survey illustrates, the cold, white Googlean box is often a superior tool than a library website…and quite possibly more approachable than our staff.

No, to be effective and valuable, we have to embrace the shifting technological realm and make it our own…and humanize it, improve it, augment it.

Until David 8, that is…

The Librarian of Congress Says No to Unlocking Your Device

Chalk one up for the bad guys: Last weekend, the Librarian of Congress handed over much more power to your wireless carrier over your life, your technology and your choices.

Say what?

Yes, that’s right, the Librarian of Congress…that otherwise benign, somewhat ceremonial position over the Library of Congress…but also, in this case, the Decider over patent law as it relates to consumer rights concerning their mobile devices. That’s because the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) grants the nation’s top librarian power to set rules for how the law will be applied. And last weekend, the LOC ruled against the public interest.

In a major slap in the face for technological accessibility, consumer choice and innovation, Dr. James Billington, the current LOC, just made it illegal (yes! against the law!) to unlock a device that you purchase from a carrier in one of those common 2-year contracts. These are the same, highly-attractive deals that have allowed smartphones to not just flourish, but be within reach of people who otherwise have little access to the Internet. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 38% of black/hispanic Americans, 40% of households making under $35k and 42% of young people, ages 18-29, use a mobile device as their primary means of accessing the Internet.

And if you’re not in one of those groups, you’re probably still impacted since most people opt for the lure of much cheaper smartphones when they sign a 1-2 year contract.

To add insult to injury, a recent piece by Paul Solman on the PBS Newshour, spotlighted the nickel and diming shenanigans that plague every mobile subscriber in the United States…hidden fees that bulk up the carrier’s profits.

All of this is to say that Dr. Billington just did another huge favor for AT&T, Verizon and their lot. And he did a big disservice to the rest of us. The market simply does better when there is abundant choice and openness. Helping the carriers silo off their consumers, limit our options and the applications and operating systems we can use, does nothing good for the public, the economy or the freedom of information, for that matter.

You’d think that Dr. Billington would have been more differential to these considerations given his apparent interest in Russian history, particularly in Russian populism. Just check out the titles of some of his writings:

• “Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism” (1956)
• “Fire in the Minds of Men” (1980)
• Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope, August 1991″ (1992)

Speaking of fire in the minds of men! This guy needs to remember that freedom isn’t something that he just read about in a book. It’s something that shouldn’t be trampled on…something leaders in a democracy (and especially leaders of librarians) need to preserve and protect, especially when it’s given up to such narrow, short-sided interests like a select clutch of communication conglomerates.

More on the story can be read on C|Net. and for a real eye-opener into how the Librarians of Congress have been sticking it to the little guy for the last several years via their DMCA rulings, see these stories from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.