My favorite airport is Amsterdam’s Schiphol (convenient since many flights to Europe from MSP transfer in Schiphol). Last time I was there I even spent the night, due to an awkward transfer on my return from Austria. I noticed quite a bit of construction near the museum (yes, there is a museum at the airport). Little did I know this was the installation of a library!
Hat tip to Lorcan for the news that Schiphol has become the first airport sporting a permanent public library. Most of the collection will be in English and won’t circulate. However, it sounds like there will be a way to take something on the plane with you: downloads!
As an Apple fanboy, I am also interested to see that the public computers at this library are iPads! I love the little stands they’ve created. I wonder how long it may take US libraries to realize that an iPad could make a pretty snazzy and durable public kiosk machine?
Now I just need another excuse to fly through Schiphol. How about iPres 2010? Anyone want to send me?
Do you have a few minutes? 12? If you care about libraries, take those 12 minutes to listen to a bit of wailing from Tim Spalding, the guy behind LibraryThing. I showed LibraryThing to a small group at Minitex in September 2005, the same month it became public. Today LibraryThing gets more traffic than WorldCat. What I love about Tim is that even as an outsider to the profession, he takes librarianship seriously and does everything he can to help drag libraries into the future. This is just a gentle kick in the pants for librarians.
It looks like Access 2009 was a great conference, and they have many of their presentations online. The shame of this is that until a few hours ago I didn’t even know Access existed. With my US blinders on, I failed to realize that Canada hosted a conference that falls somewhere between DLF Forum and Code4Lib. It’s been going on for a long while, I have no excuse! I’d better start watching some video.
Yesterday I gave a talk to the wonderful staff of the CSBSJU libraries. I love the setting and the scale of this library, so I knew I’d enjoy the event. Even so, I got nervous as always about my talk. Did I have anything worthwhile to share? Would I keep people awake and thinking or put them to sleep? Was I using my toolkit in a way that enhanced the discussion or shut it down? I think the talk went well, I got some nice feedback from the staff, and maybe I’ll have to courage to do something similar again some time.
Getting up in front of a roomful of (essentially) strangers is something that many librarians confront every day. We are teachers, among other things. Today I came across a very helpful post by Carrie Donovan on In the Library with the Lead Pipe. She talks about being authentic in the classroom:
In his book, The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer (1998) discusses identity as the evolution of all the forces that come together to form a person, including: background, culture, experience, and anything else that shapes the self. Recognizing that we bring all of these aspects of ourselves to everything we do, including our instructional activities, is key to finding your teaching identity. Librarians have pursued neutrality for a long time in their provision of organized and accessible information and knowledge, but this philosophy does not serve us well in the classroom.
We have to find (and share) ourselves in order to convey the richness of the experiences we want our students (or audience) to grasp. Not easy, but very rewarding when we pull it off!
I ran across a story about a cool iPhone apparatus that makes scanning documents with the iPhone simple. This is a neat idea, the iPhone can make a serviceable scanner in a library or at home, a great alternative to copying costs.
But even better was the service the creator of this apparatus had used to build and sell it. Called Ponoko, it is a website that lets you build almost anything you can imagine. You design it, you price it. Ponoko makes it, ships it, your customer assembles it.
I love sites like Jakprints where I can print almost anything and CafePress where I can design and sell t-shirts and other swag. Now I can come up with a crazy idea for a physical object and have that instantiated in the world. Cool.
OCLC is laying down some big bets on the direction of library automation, and it appears to me that these bets may pay off. Library systems (those “integrated library systems” we buy from vendors like Ex Libris) have long been simultaneously too expensive for libraries and too complicated for the vendors to support. OCLC is now entering the market with a “cloud” service for libraries. Their bet is that libraries will accept a bit less uniqueness for a whole lot more interconntectedness:
“Visits to libraries, focus groups, and over a decade of engagement in the library automation world have convinced me that libraries require less complexity in their management systems,” said Andrew Pace, OCLC Executive Director for Networked Library Services. “To truly deliver network-level services—a platform-as-a-service solution—and not simply Internet-hosted solutions of current library services, new system architectures and workflows must be built that are engineered to support Web-scale transaction rates and Web-scale collaboration.”
I think this could work for OCLC. I think libraries are finding the old model unsustainable and are open to a new approach. But I think that it will be a true shame if OCLC does not build clear API’s to these “web scale” services so that libraries can extend them and reach into them from their own services. Putting services into the cloud can work, as long as the data you build there are accessible in all sorts of ways. Take the Flickr API as an example.
The troubling aspect of this is that OCLC has been much too ready to hold back other players on the data front, insisting that institutions cannot reuse and share the data they have created to further their interests and those of other collaborators around the world. Will they be just as closed on the services front? Will this new initiative help them open up on the data front? It is too early to tell, but well worth recalling some early warnings.
This new direction will take years to play out, but I wish OCLC well in the effort. It represents a significant shift in the library automation marketplace.
In the past, this handbook recommended including URLs of Web sources in works-cited-list entries. Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value, however, for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors’ names than by typing URLs. You should include a URL as supplementary information only when the reader probably cannot locate the source without it or when your instructor requires it.
It appears to me that the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers in § 5.6.1 comes very close to saying, “It’s out there somewhere; I found it; you probably can, too.” … Many of [their] points are well taken. But I would urge that you always give the URLs that you used to reach the cited material. Why not give your reader all the help you can? Why make him or her do a search for a source for every item in your paper? If the RL fails, then he or she can always resort to the searching that MLA recommends.
All in all, I am very impressed with Crouse’s recommendations in Citing Electronic Information in History Papers. If you are looking for some sensible advice, you might want to start there.
I love to see how LibraryThing approaches the task of cataloging. LT invites everyone to catalog, which rules out the use of priestly tools like AACR2 (3!) or the Library of Congress Subject Headings. One nifty feature of the professional library catalog has been authority control, which among other things provides the ability to distinguish one person from another, even if their names are the same. Last week LT started to offer an alternative for sorting out names.
LT calls this “distinct authors” and the concept centers on the fact that each author will have a universe of books they have authored, likely quite distinct from the universe of books authored by someone else of the same name. This clustering of books can be used to disambiguate the authors themselves. That could work! It is fuzzier than authority control, but that may matter little in our fuzzy tech enabled world. It also only deals with one of the problems in the authority control domain, but LT already has solutions to some others and I am convinced that over a long term the LT approach will prove more sustainable. We’ll see.
I just want to take a moment to acknowledge one of the giants in the field of library science today: Herbert. John MacColl posted a wonderful summary of a Herbert retrospective at the 9th International Bielefeld Conference last week.
Herbert is fearless, jumping into problems with abandon, always certain that he and his teams can make a contribution. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes not so much. But the failures are often as interesting as the successes, full of discoveries and insights.
His conclusion last week, after looking back at his work of the past decade: we do what we do in order to optimize the time of researchers.
That deserves a good ponder. Do new systems optimize the time of researchers? How does leveraging tools already out there in the infoecosystem balance with developing specialized tools to facilitate their research? Does this statement miss the need to facilitate collaboration as well as research? I love it when Herbert makes me think!
