My Own Cafe

OK - time for some self-promotion. I didn't get a chance to blog for one of yesterday's afternoon sessions because Vickie and I were busy presenting on My Own Cafe. I'm not going to blog about myself, but I am going to link to a Technorati search that will point to what other bloggers said about the site.

http://www.technorati.com/search/%22my+own+cafe%22+libraries

Yeah! LibraryThing!

When I first got my Computers in Libraries program in the mail several months ago, the first program that jumped out at me was the "Cutting-Edge Tech Leaders" program with LibraryThing founder Tim Spaulding. I love how LibraryThing has build up a community around books, and I was excited to hear how we could apply this in the library world. Tim actually spoke during two programs at this conference. In this program, he mainly focused on the development of LibraryThing and introduced a new project in which LibraryThing tags and other content can be incorporated in the catalog.

LibraryThing - www.librarything.com - Tim Spaulding

Spaulding described LibraryThing as a site for book lovers. It currently has 180,000 members.

Registration only requires a user name and password. You do not have to provide a name or even an e-mail address. "This is about privacy," Spaulding said. ""Library Thing does everything it can to not know about you."

With LibraryThing, you can find people who have the same books as you, and read/write reviews on books

"LibraryThing is trying to explore who you are through the books you have."

Users can upload their own covers for a book. Wow – look at this example from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - http://www.librarything.com/work/1133624. You need to scroll down to the bottom of the screen to see the user-provided covers. They come from all over the world.

Spaulding says LibraryThing could be called an example of a growing field of niche social networking sites.

"Social networking is not just for friends," he said. "If I share 40 books with you…, I have a real connection with you."

LibraryThing has also proven that "Amazon is not the best book site forever." Google's book search will not be the end. There will still be opportunities for new sites with new ideas to make an impact.

Some intersting things LibraryThing has found through the data its readers has provided. People who like Dilbert books often recommend programming books. People who have read Our Bodies Ourselves often recommend books on Wicca.

He also noted that LibraryThing, like library catalogs, will actually contain more titles than a site like Amazon because there are many books people own that can not no longer be bought. "The Long Tail " was mentioned quite a bit at this conference, and Spaulding mentioned it as well. "The long tail of ownership is nothing like the long tail of buying. It's a lot longer."

A big distinction between LibraryThing and sites like Amazon is that LibraryThing is just about books, not about selling books.

"Books are not just items of commerce...Books are conversations...Books are objects of obsession."

Through LibraryThing, he was able to see a chronological timeline of when he bought different books. "If I had this for my whole life, it would be so amazing," he said, adding that reading books were such milestones in his life.

He showed the LibraryThing Helpers Log - http://www.librarything.com/blog/2007/02/introducing-helpers-log.php - where people are combining works and Improving the catalog.

thingISBN tool - http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2006/06/introducing-thingisbn_14.php - You can send LibraryThing an ISBN and that will get all related editions of an ISBN.

"Isn't it amazing that regular people in their off-hours are creating library-related data that rivals the efforts of OCLC?"

Tagging - Tagging is LibraryThing's way of allowing users to describe their content by giving them tags as opposed to using Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Pointing to one tag, he said, "chick lit is something you can't get from the Library of Congress."

One example of where tags provide more information about a book than LC subject headings is for the book Darwin's black box: the biochemical challenge to evolution, one of the top books in among people who advocate for "intelligent design." The LC Subject Heads are Evolution and Molecular Evolution, providing no hint on what the book is really about. On the LibraryThing pag, you can see immediately something else is going on by looking at the tags, which include"intelligent design" and "creationism."

Spaulding also introduced a new service LibraryThing will be offering for libraries.

"This is our answer to what OPACs need to do." Libraries will be able to send a list of ISBN's and LibraryThing will offer content as enhancements in the catalog. Tags will be available through the catalog as well as related works. He noted some users will want to add their own tags, which I don't think would be available through this service. Tagging would not work in a single institution. "If you had a single library adding tags, you would never get data that is significant."

"There needs to be an OCLC for user-generated data," he added.

LibraryThing will assign user ratings for tags too, so it won't show tags that are inappropriate for children.

People say one problem with OPACs is searchability. LibraryThing has proven it wrong because it has bad search. LibraryThing wants to get better at it. "We're allowing you to have tag searching, but not doing anything more than that."

The service went into beta testing as of Monday. He expects it to be in production in the next two to three weeks.

Comments in the catalog

I'm still catching up on posting yesterday's sessions.

Glenn Peterson, Hennepin (MN) County Library did a session on "Comments in the Catalog: Community Interaction." You can see Hennepin County's catalog from its Web site at http://www.hclib.org/ (I love this Web site!) His presentation will be posted at www.hclib.org/extranet.

He described the comments as Mini-reviews or "a blog for every book."

All posted comments are listed with the title in the library catalog.

The seeds of this idea were first planted when the library started to encourage teens and kids to read in summer by posting book reviews on Web site. The kids liked it, and the library decided to let it run through the school year as well.

The library later moved on to adults, but it wasn't as successful. It was heartening to hear this since I know some SEMLS members have struggled with getting patrons to participate when their libraries have started blogging. It really seems like the younger patrons are the audience to start with on these projects.

When Hennepin County's IT people started to talk about customizing the catalog using APIs, the idea was raised to include conversations about books.

He demoed adding a comment to a title, and it was as easy as commenting on this blog. In the bib record, the Comments button is in the upper right section of the bib record, taking up pretty prominent real estate. After adding a comment, users are prompted to log in with user name so that comments are tracked by user.

Patrons can comment from the bib screen and from their "Items Out" screen. Also can comment from book lists on the site. Showed example. Very nice booklists. Incorporates book cover and summary.

This feature is essentially a mash-up combining many different data sources:

• Bib info – catalog
• Enriched content – Syndetics (could get this content from Amazon as well.)
• Patron comments
• Audio reviews from staff (podcasts) included on comments page and booklist page as well.
• Amazon reviews – need to click to see them, but they display on the page. It doesn't go to Amazon, but you need to include a link back to Amazon.

Most of titles don't have comments on this point, so you can click over to Amazon titles. It was a mildly controversial decision.

The library provides an RSS feed for comments on a particular title or you can subscribe to a feed for all comments.

The comments are the most-heavily used feature on the site. It's big with teens. 5700 comments from 3000 users over the first 11 months.

There are not as many people leaving comments as looking for comments.

They have also noticed The Long Tail effect with this comment feature. (If you are not familiar with the Long Tail, you can read it at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. There are a small number of titles with multiple comments and a lot of titles with just one or two comments. The new Harry Potter book, in the catalog as an On Order record, is already getting comments about the title.

Comments are pre-screened for language, what he called a "naughty word filter." Ver few comments are problematic "almost none." It's an automated process. Peterson noted there are a lot of places on the Web where people can comment. Why come to the library to leave nasty comments? Title is the word that gets flagged the most, just because the first three letters raise a red flag.

The automated process batches comments from the last four hours and send them as an e-mail message to the Web Services staff. They can just click a link to hide a comment. They can mask words as well.

To-do list:

Ratings – surprised how many critical comments they receive. He thought people would only take the time if they really liked it.

Avatars (Great idea! teens love the avatars on My Own Cafe and want us to make them even bigger.)

User profiles - another great idea for the teens. Users on My Own Cafe love to really personalize their presence on the site.

Tag clouds – now that they have enough comments, they would like to do a tag cloud of the most frequent words in titles and comments (e.g. romantic, scary).

Related developments – WPopac, now called Scriblio, includes comments (There will be a presentation on Scriblio at NELA this fall.) SOPAC (social OPAC) at Ann Arbor District Library. Millennium III now has a tab for reviews, but he's not sure how it works.

LibraryThing for Libraries. Service for libraries that will utilize that social information and apply it to the library catalogs.

I love what Hennepin County has done with its catalog, but it also is a little frustrating to see it because I know most, if not all, of our libraries do not have the technical skills, staff time, money, etc to customize their catalog with using APIs. It's a shame that our vendors cannot use these grass-roots efforts as a model for incorporating similar features into catalogs so that libraries did not have to do all this works to provide a forum for their patrons.

Mashups!

I've enjoyed using mashups on other sites for a while, but haven't had a chance to explore how to create them or to think about how libraries can incorporate them on their Web sites. So I was happy to see that Darlene Fichter, Head of the Indigneous Studies Portal and Data Library Coordinator at the University of Saskatchewan Library, Canada, was presenting on "What's A Mashup & Why Would I Want One?" at this year's conference. The room for this program was beyond capacity with several attendees standing to hear the talk. The presentation will be available on her blog at http://library2.usask.ca/~fichter/blog_on_the_side/.

"If you can click your mouse, you can make a mashup," Darlene said, which was encouraging since I know most of the libraries in our region wouldn't be able to utilize Mashups if it took too much knowledge of programming.

A mashup is a Web application that uses content from more than one source to create a new service. The word is actually borrowed from the music industry. Before the start of the program, Darlene played "I bought it on eBay" from Al Yankovik, which is an example mashing a tune with lyrics.

Example : frappr– http://www.frappr.com/ - people + Google Maps.

IBM interested in Mashups inside the enterprise. They believe it will free up the ability to innovate rapidly.

"Mashups are like today's playground," Darlene said. Children playing in a sandbox can lead to adults who design or build our future buildings. Athough some applications for mashups may seem frivolous, they can be powerful applications. Just because people have gone for the cool, or the cute or the fun, don't be mistaken that people won't go for the robust, she said.

While Web 2.0 is often referred to as the Read/Write Web, Darlene believes Mashups can be considered to be the Read/Write/Program Web. People can become "do-it-yourself builders of applications."

To create a Mashup, you need:

1. Open Data - Big sites like Amazon, Google Maps, Yahoo, are opening up data to users.
   
2. An open set of services - things that can do things with data so that you don't have to do it yourself.
3. And we need you so that you can create the new way of looking at data.

Some interesting examples of Mashups are:

Newsmap – http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/ -using Google News, Newsmap maps news items it by topic and creates different displays to see what topics different countries are covering.

Housing Maps – http://www.housingmaps.com/ - A Mashup of Craig's List and Google Maps that shows what's available in real estate.

PlaceOpedia – http://www.placeopedia.com/ - A Mashup of Google Maps and places included in Wikipedia.

What can we do in libraries to show information and make it useful?

The Lewis & Clark Library System in Illinois has created a mashup with a Route Map for Deliveries – http://www.lcls.org/members/routemap.aspx. They basically took library route data and adding it to Google Maps. Maybe SEMLS could do this! However, I'm not sure whether this would be really useful.

Book Carousel – http://www.cambridgelibraries.ca/hot/carousel.cfm - using Book Covers to show newest books at their library. The content comes from Syndetics, but Darlene noted that it could have been from Amazon as well.

McMaster Library - http://library.mcmaster.ca/maps/airphotos/1919.htm - did a Mashup of Google Maps and its collection of 5,000 aerial photos collection. The collection used to be something that patrons browsed in the library. Now patrons can find a location on the map and access the unique identfier for the photo.

Go-go Google Gadget – http://www.blyberg.net/2006/08/18/go-go-google-gadget/ - created gadgets to shows holds, checkouts, new books, what's popular on a patron's Google homepage. This is so cool!

How do we create Mashups?

The easiest place to create a mashup is from Google Maps - http://maps.google.com - where you can access the Mashup by clicking on "My Maps." You can add pushpins and create maps. The problem is you have to link to it. You can't publish it on your own Web site.

Community Walk – http://www.communitywalk.com/ - create a map, share it, repost it on your own site. One suggestion from Darlene is to use works of fiction. (It would be great if we could pull this info from the LCSH headings in our catalogs to help with this.) We could also use this to create a map Mashup of the photos in our local history collection. I checked out the site, and it can import information from a spreadsheet as long as the spreadsheet includes one of the following: an address with street, city, state, zip code or latitude and longitude.

Yahoo Pipes – http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ - is a new tool that allows you to merge different information sources together and apply logic. Darlene says it essentially uses Boolean logic (yeah! We already know how to do this!) It's not something to start with, but maybe something to progress too after doing a couple of basic Mashups.

There are more powerful tools that allow you to do data crunching, but they require more programming expertise. Many of the mapping mashups require latitude and longiutde. Geocoder.us can make that conversion for you.

Some issues raised by Mashups - "Right to remix" – Intellectual property issues. Provenance. When teaching about evaluating Web sites, we often tell people to find out who is authoring the information. Mashups make it difficult because you can't always tell what the source of the data is.

Finding out more:

Google Maps Mania

Mashup Dashboard

Social networking and the media

Well, I missed the first day of CIL thanks to the falling wall at T.F. Green Airport. But I was fortunate enough to get a flight in last night so that I could be here for a full second day of the conference.

The keynote speaker for today is Andy Carvin from National Public Radio who is speaking on "Using Social Media for Community Engagement." His presentation is available at http://andycarvin.com/complibraries.ppt.

Carvin is in charge of Web 2.0 strategy at NPR where he explores ways to better use the Internet to engage the public. He also ran the Digital Divide Network for many years and was a columnist for MultMedia Schools.

He started by talking about traditional media production where you needed to be part of the mainstream media to get a message out or your needed to rely on someone else's media to get the message across.

Things started to change with Web 1.0 in mid-90s, but information was still produced by a certain class of people either those who could afford to pay someone or those who had technical skills. In the late 90s – Web 2.0 came around and anyone can organize and create their own media. In NY it is often called "We Media." He noted that Time Magazine got it wrong when they named "you" as the Person of the Year. He said it's not really you but us.

Senator George Allen's use of the word "macaca" was one example of how Web 2.o has made an impact. The video of his speech was uploaded to YouTube, and its presence on YouTube was able to raise the issue to get the rest of mainstream media interested in it. Social software is having an effect on what's happening in our country.

Who are these people who are producing information in a Web 2.0 environment? A year ago, the thought was it was mostly white male. Last summer, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study that suggests the demographics are shifting. Race, income, and education level are starting to reflect our population.

His presentation included Tag Cloud of what is included in the Web 2.0 universe, which is a nice visual to check out.

Mainstream media vs. bloggers is often talked about as war. There are mutual feelings of distrust. However, he said these two groups are learning to get along. They are trying to make efforts to collaborate with teach other. He talked about "networked journalism" where the media is not thinking of themselves as separate from the audience. Mainstream media Web sites have become more transparent about how they make news.

He talked about different ways the media is embracing social networking. Examples included:

NPR –is trying something called Open Piloting where they explore the question of "What are benefits to show people how we are developing our shows?" Maybe the public has better ideas than we do. If the public is part of conversation, maybe we can make better programming. Rough Cuts - http://www.npr.org/blogs/roughcuts/ - is a project where pilot episodes are posted online in draft form as a podcast. Listeners give feedback as they are producing the shows.

This project was inspired by Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon – http://www.radioopensource.org - from Public Radio International. It embodies the idea that everyone contributes to an open process. They did a program on Globalization and Hip Hop. The community sent sound clips of hip hop from around the world and helped them develop the show. When it was aired, the community could then post feedback.

OhmyNews (Korea) - http://english.ohmynews.com - is a publication that decided to devote 20% of column inches to stuff submitted by the public. It helped them get news from parts of the world they couldn't afford to cover with correspondents. However, it also got coverage of areas that might fall through the cracks. The site has a map of news hotspots and encourages users who are from areas that are not on the map to send their stories.

Same tools also used to make better informed voters. VoteGuide encouraged citizen journalists to cover candidates in the 11th Congressional District race in California. The idea was to get everything candidates said on the record. They used tools like YouTube and Blip. It could be tagged so that people could use RSS feeds to keep up on what candidates were saying.

Minnesota E-Debate used blogging to host the state's gubernatorial debate. There is discussion to replicate on this on a national scale.

There were many more interesting examples, and I encourage everyone to take a look at the PPT to explore these sites.

He ended with a quote from Dan Gillmore – "My readers have more knowledge than I do. And if we can all take advantage of that, in the best sense of the expression, we will all be better informed." Carvin said "no single entity has a monopoly on knowledge." He stressed the importance of Media literacy so that we can see a continuation of the trend where the production of information is becoming democratized. Until everyone has equal opportunity to participate, the media, politics, etc. will continue to be limited to those who have the money and means to participate.

Going to Arlington

I'm flying out early tomorrowing morning for the Computers in Libraries conference in Arlington, VA. This is the third time I've been to this conference, and I'm thrilled to be going back again after a three-year hiatus.

I am very excited about the keynote tomorrow morning - Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Some of you may remember Lee from "The Technolgy-Friendly Library" program SEMLS sponsored in December 2005. I missed some of his presentation, but heard it was wonderful. I hope tomorrow's weather doesn't delay me enough to miss his presentation again.

I get so much out of this conference, and I often have a hard time figuring out how to share it with all my colleagues in the region. I definitely incorporate much of what I learn in my workshops, but, this year, I'm going to try something different and blog from the conference. I hope to pass along some ideas and information that will be valuable to your library. And if you are a SEMLS member and are planning to attend the conference, I hope to see you there.