Following the keynote, I moved to the session on new roles. The first speaker is Birte Christensen-Salsgaard, Director of IT, StatsBiblioteket in Copenhagen. The dynamic catalogue involves changes in communication, differentiated search, moving the web from portals to services, and new types of roles. There are new forms of scholarly communication such as living reviews, databases with incremental results, and blogs, plus it’s integrated into production process (discussion fora, chat, gaming, holistic view on institutional repositories, Flickr). Our role is to make production of our community visible to outside world so they can use it. The looking glass is turned around. Make user visible to the world rather than make world visible to user. Google is very focused, maybe that’s not the best idea.

Google is not addressing quality. There are different types of search engines. Her examples are FAST and Grokker. She wants Google Scholar as Web services so her library can build things on top of it. Google can’t oblige. Now she’s showing the StatsBiblioteket catalog, which you can sort by relevance.

Dynamic library card, NetLibrary, is a project of 7 public libraries. There’s a
white paper looking at cost-benefit against the technological requirements. First version of NetLibrary had multiple portals, one for literature, music,etc. Now embedded in library portal. Web services is behind this (SOAP/HTTP), one machine talking to another. Trying to implement some personalization. There’s a recommender service. Libraries should aggregate services. Might introduce some taxonomies to return other relevant terms when user enters (or misspells) word.

Do we want the library to be everywhere?
We are in middle of paradigm shift. Going from scarcity to abundance, from owning to licensing, changing nature of content, democratic publishing opportunities, new forms of research, publication, teaching, and digital preservation.

The recommender service is still a prototype and only works with Danish language books.

The second speaker is Britta Woldering, Senior Librarian, Die Deutsche Bibliothek, talking on The European Library (TEL). She’s describing the background, mission, organization of TEL. National libraries pay to be part of TEL. Not just union catalog. Interoperability of catalogs. Future planning include scalability of the portal in the browser solution, a help desk (haven’t decided whether to have one or not), collection descriptions (need user-oriented descriptions), digitized content (too few materials in national libraries that are digitized, user want full object rather than bibliographic description), multilingual issues (always a problem, maybe have automated solutions, maintenance issues are daunting, there are 7 languages and could expand to 36), and character sets (Slovenian and Finnish were problems that have been solved, but Cyrillic script will be challenge).

Google digitization initiative caused great stir in Europe. EC won’t fund digitization. CENL Resolution on digitization of European Cultural Heritage, will develop a network of digitization activities. TEL is seen as ideal single point of entry to digitized material.

There are some discussions between TEL and Google.

Relationahip between TEL and EU? CENL (Council of European National Libraries) is connected to Council of Europe not EU. There’s big interest from European Commission, butthey won’t fund digitization but will fund networks, so they don’t reinvent wheel.

It’s the second day of Internet Librarian International and the keynote speech on relevance, Google, and why it matters by Stephen Arnold . The actual title is Relevance: What? For Whom? When? How?

Steve says he doesn’t really have an answer to the last question.

Situational Relevance: Googleplex, patenting relevance, SEO, the GUI fix, and observations.

The SEO conferences are larger than many librarian conferences. He just asked if people think Google is a search engine. Only one person raised their hand. Everyone else agreed Google was more than a search engine. Then he read a sentence from an article in today’s International Herald Tribune that suggested Google should run the Internet. There was a combination of gasps and groans from the audience.

Search is computationally intensive. The Googleplex (not the physical building in Mountain View, but a conceptual representation of Google)has Linux in the center, surrounded by Gmail, News,s Ad system, and Search. In the circle around these applications are data centers (165,000 servers at data centers around the world), Outputs go in 4 directions–XML/HTML, WSDL, POP3/SMTP, and Atom (Gmail, Blogger).

Relevance is now a fuzzy black box. Now the fire alarm is going off. Steve says, “I’m so hot.” Precision and recall is no longer operative in the search world.

Now the hotel is evacuating us. The fire engines showed up, said someone was smoking a cigar in his room and set off the fire alarm. We stood outside for about 15 minutes, but now we’re back and Steve’s back to talking about relevance.

With individualized, personalized search engines, you may get results relevant to you, but not relevant to someone else. Steve says that Google has lots of patents about potential personalizations, plus it has products already personalized. I can see where this wouldn’t be terribly helpful at a library reference desk which is, by its very nature, not personal. Google is mathematics-based entities. Sergey and Larry are algorithmic. Google is watching you and Steve says he’s got a software solution to keep Google from watching you.

How do metrics affect relevance? The new industry is SEO. Aviadian Technologies fell off the Google watch list, disappeared from the Google index, because it was put into Google Sandbox because it changed its code. Look at Google’s rules for webmasters. You must have in-bound links from high traffic sites, fresh semantically tight content, site map that points to what you want indexed, well-formed pages, appropriate metatags. If you’re a library, point to other libraries and make sure they point to you. Microsoft and Yahoo follow in Google’s footprints.

Five cheats: steal text, metatag spamming, blog seeding, link yourself in link farms, doorway cheat. The full ten are in the sidebar to his September/October 2005 issue of ONLINE .

Everybody is not driving the same car. Google is driving a Jaguar; everyone else has a Mustang.

What is boundary between SEO and “real indexing”? The answer is the interface. We’re not in an “ss=” world. Endeca powers eToys.com. It lets you drill down through choices rather than typing a search query. This gets lots more usage. Boolean implementation that’s been chosen by Library of Congress. Now he’s showing a hybrid search (facets, hard coding, synonym expansion) from Mondosoft powering the Pope’s Web site. That the exact opposite of typing a search query into Dialog

Who defines relevance? The searcher? Advertiser? Client of search engine?

Many ways to delivery relevanace, more subtle ones coming, understand context of content. Assess the basics: Provenance, accuracy, currency, selectinve depth. Google is redefining search, relevance, content, and many other sectors as the driver of our business. Google is even changing patent searching, since they don’t list themselves as patent assignee. Traditional online have not kept up. Has LexisNexis, Dialog, Derwent changed our world? No. Google has.

New job for librarians. You are the only ones who can assess those basics.

SEO is legitimate indexing model.

We need more work on situational relevance. This is one of most exciting times in information science. Old model is laptop. New model is handheld.

Q&A:

Is next generation being taught this? Two schools talk about it, Liz Liddy at Syracuse & Michael Koenig at Long Island University. I think he should ask the audience who’s teaching it?

Do you approve or disapprove? He disapproves of SEO as indexing. Only question from search optimitzers is how do I become number 1?

Why are you offended? It’s intellectually dishonest. The way to index is honestly, not just to cut costs. Need people as indexers. If medical term is misused, could affect person’s life, since appropriate article/item is not found.

What about Yahoo? What about portals? Is concept of portals coming back? If your behavior suggests to Google that you want a portal, you’ll see one when you log on. You can opt out. Less invasive than Microsoft’s approach. Google’s algorithms are far more subtle. Google puts cookies on your machine that expire in 2025 from Google Scholar. Google can block you from certain documents even if you’ve changed machines. Yahoo is box of straws in tissue paper. Structural weakness of Yahoo.

Google is revolutionalizing more than librarianship. Google WiFi is coming, it’s the next AT&T. And it’s unregulated.

Morten Christoffersen, Information Specialist for Novo Nordisk’s Library & Information Centre, is giving the corporate view of collaboration.

“Tools are not collaborative; people are.” Collaborative tools include not just blogs, wikis, discussion lists, but also the coffee machine. Applications and devices: Same data, different wrappings. Maybe email should die, but in the meantime we send a lot of them. But people also delete them and then need the information. The system can retrieve these. Users want support for their BlackBerries and NN will support starting next week.

Focus on the user not the library database. Library is not center of the world, the user is. For premium content, NN includes search strategy in emails, unless it’s a patent search. Search alerts mailed directly to project web sites.

Are BlackBerries collaborative? Yes! And it’s independent of time and place. You can share even when not at the office.

Benefits: Gent what you want, where you want it, in the format you want. There’s one global site, whether you’re in Bagsvaerd or Beijing. Everything seems local. Library gets better questions, not run of the mill stuff.

Challenges: We know the statistics, but not the context. Librarians set up service, but don’t know whether users simply delete emails, feeling it’s too hard to unsubscribe.

Life today in the NN library: Fewer ad hoc searches; less reactive, more proactive; fill needs don’t just serve needs; and understand business processes.

It’s after lunch and Rachel Bridgewater (Washington State University) and Anne-Marie Deitering (Oregon State University) are doing a tag team presentation on their implementation of a wiki for the Oregon Library Association’s Library Instruction Round Table. They first identified their community and what the needs were, then surveyed the available technology. Why are wikis so ugly? was one question that came up. Then they had to choose a wiki software and discovered there were lots out there. They picked Mediawiki, which was easy to install. Just download the software and, boom, you have a wiki. Now what do we do? Populate it with content. The community is unfamiliar with wikis, so just throwing out the page and asking for contributions would be counterproductive. Populating an entire wiki should not be done by just one or two people, need pushback from the user population.
Instruction resources, glossary, and style manual were first pieces. Put in template. Then opened up to small group of people. They wanted specific disciplines and teaching techniques.

Turned their attention to how to encourage people to become contributors to the wiki. Brought wiki to focus groups. Informal usability testing.

How wiki do we want to be?

No restrictions to entry because no one wanted to remember another username and password. Not much of a hierarchy to the wiki.
Contributors could put information wherever they wanted, which was often not where Rachel and Anne-Marie thought it should be. But they left it where it was classified.

Did some un-wiki things.
Not easy to add elements. Requires hard coding php. It’s not easy. That’s why Mediawiki wikis all look alike.

Released the library instruction wiki only about a month ago.

Lessons learned:

Customize it.
Be prepared for culture shock
Have some content in it from the start
Write a lot of help documentation
Have a specific, defined purpose/community being services
Does require maintenance
Still not sure a wiki is the best solution.

Christopher Hamb, from the Grainger Engineering Library, University of Illinois, is talking about creating a blog from scratch. He described their situation as “we want a blog,” then someone asked them “why?” So they had to come up a rationale. When they asked for money to investigate proprietary blogging software, the answer was “no.” So they looked at what they had — they are a heavy-duty Microsoft shop — and they adapted Access to become blog software. He’s showing blog posts and they look just like posts using standard blog software such as Blogger, Typepad, and the like. But there’s no spellcheck.

The Grainger blog pulls in news from Slashdot, CNN.com Technology, Engineering talk industry headlines, and Moreover engineering news. Also adds new titles at the university library that are relevant to the engineering library.

How to market the blog. Linked from engineering library homepage and public access page and listed on U of IL library blog page. Now university has license for Movable Type, but engineering library still using the home grown software.

Most users are on campus and within engineering school. Many come from search engines. Wants to add customized RSS feeds, online resource of the week feature, and Engineering Library kiosk integration.

May Chang, Web Development Librarian at North Carolina State University, began by dispelling 2 myths Brian Kelly propounded an hour ago. She likes technological tools and she’s “not a boy” and U.S. library budgets are not huge. That’s why she went with open source, because it doesn’t cost money. Interesting comparison table for community tools. Horses for courses. Look at Low Threshold Applications.

Forums (bulletin boards) are still used. Products include OpenBB, phpbb, and Phorum. Public website for Business Information Newwork uses phpbb. Professor uses for classwork, but forum is maintained by library. Blogging software includes b2evolution, Blosxom, Blogger, LiveJournal, and rediff.com. To overcome negative connotations of blogs as person diaries, she called it news blog. The blog allows multiple blogs. Also used on intranet. RSS feeds (Abilon, Bloglines, FeedReader, FeedDemon, Bloglet, and more). Desktop Widget - use for clock, weather, news. Confabulator.

Wikis have niche use. Great for true collaborative working on a document. Using MediaWiki to create. IM helps with presence awareness, realizing the online status of staff. AOL IM can’t talk to MSN IM or Yahoo IM. Third party multi-protocol IM clients (Gaim, Trillian). Open source IM, Jabber. No ads. She’s showing screen shots of single protocol IM client: Exodus. Now it’s Gaim/Miranda.

Podcasting uses: anything to do with voice. Lots of new stuff coming.

I’m moderating Track A: Blogs, Wikis and Collaboration Tools at Internet Librarian International. The first panel is on Digital Tools for Collaboration. Michael Stephens, of Tame the Web and the St. Joseph County Public Library, is introducing collaborative tools such as Podcasting (he’s showing actual libraries’ use of podcasting as marketing tools, publishing book reviews, etc.), User-created Content (may be more important than podcasts), messaging (IM, VoIP, Skype, virtual reference replacement), and Wikis (Welcome to Web 2.0 and the age of collaboration). It’s the Read/Write Web. He’s showing his own test wiki for ILI2005 and the prototype for the internal wiki at his library. He also mentioned that the Flickr tag for this conference is ili2005.

Aaron Schmidt of the WalkingPaper blog and the Thomas Ford Memorial Library, is talking about why we are collaborating and with whom. Think about collaborating with library patrons rather than serving them. Look at Ann Arbor District Library web site and how it’s created a virtual community for teenagers.

Brian Kelly of UKOLN encouraged the audience to use mobile phones to blog, IM, Flickr, and other collaboration. What don’t we need? E-mail. We should kill email. He prefers RSS, IM, sound & video, blogs, wikis, podcasting. Reluctance is due to tradition, trust, and immaturity of technologies. Are these “toys for boys”? Are there gender issues? Strategies for change: copyright issues, alternative business modesl. Does accessibility and widening participation trump copyright? Use wiki for note-taking. published podcasts prior to event. Use SMIL presentation as a backup. Saves time and travel costs. Blogging for librarians. What happens if you give librarians voice? Soon it will be wierd that you don’t provide blogging. Warwick University is ahead of the game.

Email can still be useful. It doesn’t have to die.

Ronald Milne is now talking about the Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, which was founded in 1602 and has 120 miles of shelving. The Google Library Project isn’t the Bodleian’s first foray into digitization. Some images have been given to RLG.

Now he’s moved on to the Google project. Google is reasonably altruistic, but let’s not kid ourselves—it’s a means of Google’s remaining the search engine of choice. The project aligns Oxford’s mission statement with Google’s. Oxford was talking with Google as early as 2002. The plan is to digitize 19th century out of copyright material, which amounts to 1-1.5 million times. The project will take up to 3 years. Oxford is legal depository library, meaning that publishers give the library one free copy of their books, so Oxford doesn’t want to antagonize them. Oxford’s already a principal partner in Early English Books Online and the Eighteenth Century Collections. Hugh Griffiths is the project manager for Google. Digitization will take place on university premises. They’re making 2 copies, one for Google and one for Oxford. Now he’s showing slides demonstrating the types of items to be digitized.

Issues include conservation (fragile materials won’t be digitized and newspapers/large format materials are excluded), logistics (space requirements and transporting by van to another part of campus, starting with English, then French, Italian, German, Spanish—it’s not Anglo-centric, that’s nonsense—there are another 430 languages—the French National Library not withstandings, it’s a very international project), and workflow (have to barcode books because the Bodleian is not a lending library and 20% of the stock is uncut.

Page image delivery will probably be JPEG 2000. Google will host for 20 years. Wants Bodleian’s material to be available throughout the world.

I’m at the Tara Copthorne hotel in London for Internet Librarian International. It’s the 7th year for this conference and, on a historical note, this hotel is where the very first International Online Meeting was held. That conference, originally produced by Learned Information, is now owned by VNU and is called Online Information.

Ever felt shy about asking a question when you’re attending a conference? Don’t be! At WebSearch University a few weeks ago in Arlington, Virginia, an attendee asked speaker Tara Calishain about the feasibility of a keyword-based RSS feed generator. Tara replied that it shouldn’t be that hard to develop and that she’d go home and do it. Now she has–and she’s called it Kebberfegg. It allows you to generate up to 3 dozen or so different kinds of RSS feeds from a variety of resources, divided into categories.

Two weeks from idea to finished product! And all of us at WSU were “in at the beginning!”

Purdue University announced today that it received $2.5 million from Wayne Booker, a former vice chairman of Ford Motor Company, to endow a chair in information literacy. It’s the first ever in the U.S. Booker graduated from Purdue in 1956 with a degree in economics. The university will do a national search to find the proper academic to hold the chair. This person will “conduct research and launch additional initiatives to increase students’ ability to access, assess, and integrate information, and make good judgments about what information on they choose to use.” Sounds like a good idea to me, and I particularly like it that the business press picked up on the press release.