Wild ideas free to a good home

1.You know in sf you get to say "Oh hi computer, calculate this for me / find me information about this thing / make me some hot Earl Grey tea!" and the computer says "Sure thing, my friend!" and does it?

Here's how that could work in the near future:

• speech recognition - this is fairly well developed already (I've recently started using it myself for navigating and dictating on my home computer) and will continue to improve
• + a search engine
• + a whole lot of aps for different functions, with associated metadata which can be matched against what the user's asked for.

The computer, like a librarian, doesn't have to know everything, it just needs to know where to find everything. Ask it a calculating-type question and it gets a Wolfram|Alpha-style widget that can calculate the answer. Ask it an encyclopaedic-type question and it brings you an answer from a Wikipedia-type source. Ask it to convert your word processing document into pdf and it finds the appropriate ap to do that. Tell it you want a pizza, it finds the aps from the local pizza places, asks (or remembers) your price/quality/toppings preferences, and places the order for you. In due course, your doorbell rings.

I wouldn't be surprised if something like this was working within five years. I also wouldn't be overly surprised if it wasn't; while we've got all the pieces, gluing it together mightn't be quite so straightforward as an idealist would think.

2.Dynamic/adaptive website navigation. For sprawling websites: instead of having the traditional static navigation links, have the server generate the links based on the most popular recent destinations for visitors to the same page.

This one's easier to program (I think, if I put the work in, I could come up with a clunky implementation myself) - you just need server-side scripting with access to stats of a) links clicked and b) keywords searched. I'd weight keywords searched a bit higher than links clicked (partly to keep things dynamic but mostly because people will tend to click a link first if it looks even halfway relevant, so just the fact of searching will indicate that the current links are useless).

So when you go to (say) the uni library's homepage at the start of term it'll show links to the catalogue, and tutorials, and computer workrooms. Towards exam time people will start searching for "past exam papers" so that'll soon appear on the homepage, while "tutorials" will drop off, but people will click the "computer workrooms" more so that'll stay on.

There are obvious downsides to this approach. Confusion about links shifting around, for one. Also ideally it should be customisable so postgrads can see a view which isn't overwhelmed by the preferences of undergraduates for most of the year. But. It would be interesting. I'd like to try it sometime (or see someone else try it).

Review: Journal of Library Innovation

My favouritest new journal ever is currently the Journal of Library Innovation. I have vague memories of issue 1 being decent but issue 2's contents are totally awesome. They include:

• an editorial (pdf) pointing out that: a) when we innovate we don't have to seize on every expensive new technology, and b) on the other hand sometimes failing to use a new technology can be expensive too
• Quick and Dirty Library Promotions That Really Work - whee, fortune cookies!

  [I would really like to amplify this squee. I think we should do this: it puts a smile on people's face and it 99% guarantees they'll actually read the promotional message, which is at least 90% more than traditional signage. (Fudge factor because I can't remember the number I saw the other day, though I think it was less than 10% and included primarily mature students.]

• Accommodating Community Users in an Authenticated Library Technology Environment - making a computer kiosk for non-members to use which respects database license agreements; not my thing at present but cool enough that I nevertheless recognise the super utility of it.
• Making Physical Objects Clickable: Using Mobile Tags to Enhance Library Displays - QR tags in book displays - evidence that these increase usage of promoted materials/webpages

  [See also Embedding tutorials into physical objects - using a QR code on a photocopier to link to video instructions. I think here I'd use QR codes in conjunction with a bit.ly link for people who don't have the right hardware/software combo to make it work, but this caveat shouldn't be construed as decreasing my enthusiasm for the idea.]

• The Library is Undead: Information Seeking During the Zombie Apocalypse - another quick and dirty library promotion, jumping off a student event.

  [Why do we insist that big promotions have to be planned months in advance? Maybe it's Parkinson's Law ("Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion") - when you plan 3 months in advance, it still feels rushed at the end so you figure next time you should plan 4 months in advance. But if you start planning 6 days in advance (as this library did), sure you're rushed at the end, but the short timeframe has forced you to forgo normal inefficiencies and brush off the temptation to perfectionism, so you save thousands of staff time and in the end you've still got it done.]

• and also book reviews which seem genuinely helpful and balanced evaluations of how useful the books are and for what purposes.

Why reinvent the wheel? (a photo essay)

Stone wheel in a trough (by Vincent Jones, CC-BY-SA)


Wagon wheel (by Richard Sonnen, CC-BY-NC-ND)


Steamroller (by Rog Frost, CC-BY-SA)


Car wheel (by Mr T. in DC, CC-BY-ND)


Bicycle wheel (from Soil-Net, CC-BY-NC-SA)


Bulldozer tread (by John Schilling, CC-BY-NC-ND)


Eggbeater (by Candice Wouters, CC-BY-NC-ND)


Table saw (by Patrick Fitzgerald, CC-BY)


Wheel of Fortune (by Paul Stack, CC-BY-ND)


Ferris wheel (by Josh McGinn, CC-BY-ND)

My earthquake post

I've just blogged "Rocking the Library" at Libraries Interact.

Links of interest 20/10/2010

QR Codes
(What's a QR Code? See QR Codes: An Overview.)

Google has launched goo.gl, a URL shortening service (like tinyurl.com, bit.ly, etc) which as a bonus gives you a QR code: eg http://goo.gl/Xxyl links to this blog and http://goo.gl/Xxyl.qr gives you a pretty QR code you can paste onto a poster. Shortly thereafter, bit.ly joined in the fun.

On the downside I recall reading (somewhere on the internet; it sounded plausible at the time) that, cool as QR codes sound, since they're mostly being used by advertisers, actual real people aren't really all that keen on using them.[citation needed] On the upside, I've also heard anecdotes from people who do use them. And in any case they don't cost any money and almost zero time.

Library tutorials

• An old post I just came across: Subversive Handouts: One Librarian’s Secret Weapon - a sneaky way to get some extra face-time with a class.
• When an imploring librarian is not enough - a sneaky way to get students to actually want to use Web of Science etc rather than Google Scholar

Open Access

• Dramatic Growth of Open Access
• The Economics of Open Access points out that "Every time a researcher or teacher cannot get to the information she needs to do her work, or must obtain it by labor-intensive means like interlibrary loan or direct contact with the author, time and knowledge, which are both worth money, are wasted; open access reduces that loss."
• Open access: the world is your consortium sees open access as a new solution for the inability of library consortia, let alone individual libraries, let alone individual scientists, to be able to afford access to journals.
• Almost Halfway There: an Analysis of the Open Access Behaviors of Academic Librarians "presents results of a study of open access publishing and self-archiving behaviors of academic librarians" and discusses "several strategies to encourage academic librarians to continue embrace open access behaviors".

Links of interest 22/9/10

Assessing the (Enduring) Value of Libraries

MIT Libraries has created a Beta Graveyard for trial projects that aren't being continued - nice to see what's happened to old ideas.

Cyberpunk Librarian, part 1 - a librarian and a library robot; a problem and a cunning solution.

The launch of Foursquare buttons for websites - a button you can easily add to any website that lets users link your site and your physical location on their phone.

Hacking Summon in Code4Lib describes how OSU made their data display more tidily

Possible topics for crowd-sourced research

Since first talking about this I've been pondering what topics would make good candidates to try out the model. I think it should be something that:

1. is of interest to as many people as possible; and
2. can be contributed to by as many people as possible;
3. as easily as possible.

With these criteria in mind I've come up with two possible ideas:

A. Trends in patrons' use of electronic equipment in the library
This is basically an extension of the article that inspired my thinky thoughts to start with, which did headcounts to measure laptop use in their library. We could extend this to, say, a headcount of

• total people, of course;
• users of library computers;
• users of personal laptops;
• PDAs;
• cellphones;
• and a handy 'other' category.

We could decide what time(s)/day(s) to run the headcount on, set up an online spreadsheet, and anyone wanting to participate could do their headcount and enter the data into the spreadsheet. Whether people can only participate once, or can do it recurrently, there'll be value either way. It's simple and quantitative and easy.

B. Librarians' perceptions of the quality of vendor training
(ie training provided by vendors in the use of their products to librarians, in case that's not clear)
This is. Perhaps a delicate topic. I've been thinking for a while about blogging about my own perceptions, all aggregated and anonymised but it still feels a bit "bite the hand that holds all our resources", because my perceptions are not good. But perhaps it would be less awkward if it came from a whole lot of librarians. And vendors are starting to respond more and more to concerns raised in social media so maybe it would actually get some attention and help vendors provide better training.

OTOH this would be an inherently messy topic to research. It'd be a good test of whether crowdsourcing a qualitative research topic could work, but perhaps not a good test of whether crowdsourcing research per se is workable. There'd need to be a lot of discussion about what exactly we want to research:

• Likert scales of measures on eg amount of new info, amount of info already known, familiarity of trainer with database, ability of trainer to answer questions...?
• more freeform answers about problems with presentations eg slides full of essays, trainer bungles example searches...?
• surveying trainers themselves to find out what kind of training they get in how to give a good presentation?

So.
So, for anyone interested in going somewhere with this -- or just interested in reading the results -- what do you think? Topic A, topic B, topic C (insert your own topic here), or all of the above?