WML Tech Updates

I just read an article on Business Week about blogs: Blogs Will Change Your Business. The tagline is: “Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.”

No, I typically don’t read this magazine, although it would probably help with working in a business library and all. But I was working on the new website Sunday morning, and was linking to a few popular business sites that have news feeds from them, and I saw this great article on blogs and how businesses are embracing blogs.

You see, blogs are traditionally seen as diaries or journals, and for the most part, you can subscribe to them. This means that they have a feed (in XML format called RSS) that you can plop into a feed reader (called an aggregator). Subscribe to several feeds, and now you can read all your info in one happy place without having to visit all those blogs.

Many businesses, universities, and libraries, have been using blogs in different ways. Why post commentary when you can push news, articles, events, and helpful information to your users? This is great, and more people are hopping on the wagon.

But interestingly enough, I see this trend almost going back to the social commentary. People don’t just like information - they also like other people’s thoughts and views on the world.

For example, Google is a mysterious place. Wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on there? So maybe an insider’s blog on the Googleplex is just as important to you as learning about all the cool tools that Google develops.

So I wonder. I am creating a blog that we in WML will be using to push info out to our users. Changes in hours, announcements, new resources, workshops, events, new staff, etc. will be posted to this thing. But what about our opinions? Should we include our thoughts on certain things such as our view on certain business practices, our comments on articles we read, or other non-factual, opinioned things? Or should we stick to the facts?

Frankly, I think our blog would be more interesting if we occassionally gave our readers something to think about. What harm is there in explaining how we do something, like select resoucres for example? But what if someone has comments on what we do? What then? Well, I would hope that we would improve that process. We learn and grow. Personally, I love honest feedback. (Maybe that’s a characteristic of an ENFJ - who knows!) But I would guess that getting feedback from users such as faculty where they question our procedures or traditional ways of doing things might scare the bejesus out of some people, or insult others.

Should we take into consideration that maybe our users want to know what we think? If they see us as authorities on information, should we give them our thoughts, or just rely on them to form their opinions. And, are we ready to hear what they might want to comment on?

I would love feedback on this one…

Many of you have heard about blogs, wikis, rss feeds, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, etc. If you interact with me, you probably hear me throw these terms around quite often. And I bet most of you have been to Amazon.com before. All of these things are considered to be or influenced by “Web 2.0” technologies and are what younger generations (and some older generations too) are using on the web these days. Web 2.0 was coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, and refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services.

So what is Web 2.0 really?

“A core concept of Web 2.0 is that people are the content of sites. That is, a site is not populated with information for users to consume. Instead, services are provided to individual users for them to build networks of friends and other groups (professional,
recreational, etc.). The content of a site then, comprises user-provided information that attracts new members of an ever-expanding network.”

- Tim O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0″

Karen Schneider, a well-respected colleague in the library field, and founder of the Librarian’s Index to the Internet, has compiled a list of common terms associated with the 2.0 thing. I have added a few terms too.

Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - and in English, it means that a few technologies are working together to help develop interactive web applications. Most Web 2.0 technologies use Ajax

Biblioblogosphere (jocular): The world of library blogging

Blog: from web + log: an easily-updated web diary/journal

Blogosphere: the larger world of blogging

Chat: IM (instant messaging): interactive, real-time, text-based conversation

Comment: A user contribution to an entity

Folksonomy: ad-hoc taxonomies generated for online content (it’s sort of like metadata!)

Podcast (from iPod + cast): an RSS-distributed audio file, usually MP3

Post: an entry on a blog

Mashup: two or more services combined into a third

Radical trust: allowing users to drive/define services and content

Rating: an assessment, usually online, such as four stars for a book

Remix: mixing two or more pots of content to get a third

RSS: Really Simple Syndication - enables rapid republication, or syndication, of web content (text, video, audio, etc.)

Screencast: a digital recording/video of what’s happening on your screen, typically with audio - useful for providing visual directions on how to do something. These can be podcasted, which are called videocasts.

Splogging: spamming within a blog

Tag: a keyword or phrase used in a folksonomy

Tag cloud: a visual representation of part of a folksonomy

Vlog: video blog

Karen also has a WONDERFUL presentation online that discusses this Web 2.0 further, like why you need to know about this, how it is affecting libraries, and what libraries should be doing about it. Her presentation is basically a cookbook - something you can digest fairly easily and can work toward developing an end product, whether that’s a staff that is more knowledgeable, or is the building of new tools. It’s called the Library 2.0 Cookbook: A commonsense guide to those perplexing but intriguing new technologies you keep hearing about.

I suggest that you take a look at it in your free time. It’s not a boring PowerPoint presentation, but rather a visually appealing document full of data and interesting information, and it will certainly help demystify what Web 2.0 really is. And it will definitely get you thinking!

1. Recent Technology Trends - This is a list of trends, new technologies, and innovations that are affecting libraries internationally and on the minds of many librarians and technologists. Things are changing fast, and these are the hottest topics being discussed. This is merely an FYI.
   • Storage Blogs (It’s short for weblog, and is a public website where users post informal journals of their thoughts, comments, and philosophies. It’s updated frequently and normally reflects the views of the blog’s creator.)
   • RSS (This is short for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication. It’s XML-based and is a commonly used protocol for the syndication and sharing of content, originally developed to facilitate the syndication of news articles, now widely used to share the contents of blogs.)
   • Citizen Journalists (Blogs and RSS Feeds are creating these “citizen journalists,” and this is a concern for authenticity for many people.)
   • Wikis (These are webpages that are editable by visitors to the website, as opposed to conventional websites which can only be changed by the webmaster. They are usually used for community or technical sites to allow for joint authoring and ownership.)
   • E-Books
   • OPACs
   • FRBR (That’s short for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. It uses an entity-relationship model of metadata for information objects, instead of the single flat record concept underlying current cataloging standards. People typically pronounce it “ferber.”)
   • Interface Design
   • WiFi
   • Broadband and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, which is basically telephone over the Internet)
   • Google Print, Google Scholar, and MetaSearching (like MetaLib)
   • Folksonomies
   • Digital Rights Management
2. Proxy Migration - All of the proxy migrations are done! Owen students and alumni will no longer have to authenticate with their VUnet ID/password, but only with their Owen ID/password. Jason Reusch, Jason Battles, and Rachel collaborated to make this work.
3. Electronic Resource Usage Statement splash page - The next step to improving the electronic resources in Rachel’s eyes is to work with the Information Services team to create a standard electronic resource usage statement that would be a page that users have to click through before entering a database about ethical usage of that database, and who has access privileges to that database. Rachel hasn’t talked to LITS about this possibility yet, nor has she really discussed it in detail with the IS team yet. But she believes that there is interest among librarians to have something like this!
4. Databases Update - Thomson ONE Banker is up and running. If you experience any problems with a popup window asking you about cookies, please disregard it at the moment. Dale Poulter is fixing it. Also, Multexnet will soon be Reuter’s Research on Demand. Dale ran across several problems and is still working with Reuter’s IT people to configure it correctly. It should be up by early next week at the latest.
5. New Computers - As you are probably aware, the new computers are in, and one is in Rachel’s office being configured. Danny will be taking the image Rachel helped set up and putting that image on all the public workstations. Danny and Rachel will hopefully be setting them up next week when he returns to work. Laura, Sylvia, Marie, and the scanning station at circulation all have new computers. These computers are awesome because they are easy to open to get to the guts of the computer, they each have a CD/DVD burner, USB plugs are on the front of the computer making it easy for people with portable flash drives to plug in, and microphone and headphone plugs are also on the front of the computer. They are also lightening speed! To give you an idea of how fast these things are changing:

   Computer Speed Memory
   Old desktops 1.29 GHz 256 MB of RAM
   Current laptops 1.6 GHz 512 MB of RAM
   New desktops 3.4 GHz 1.0 GB of RAM

6. Pay-for-Print - At this time, it is undetermined if Owen students will be paying for their printing or not. No matter what decision is made, public workstations will still have pay-for-print software on them to charge non-Owen patrons who enter the library. Deb or Rachel will let you know as soon as they hear something from Dean Bradford.
7. CDROM server databases and public workstation databases - This is referring to public workstation #9 (which has FARS, Proquest ABI Inform/Periodicals Ondisc, and Simmons Choices 3 accessible on it) and to the three databases all installed on the public workstations that aren’t accessible remotely (SDC Platinum 3.2, Datastream Advance 4.0, and the Lexis-Nexis Research Software 7.2). So, what about them? Well, recently, Deb, Rachel, and Jason Reusch met to discuss the possibility of putting these on an Owen server so as to make them more accessible. After some examination of the high cost involved in doing so, it was decided that it would be better to wait and see which of the databases are going to be coming out in Web form, and to investigate how other business libraries are dealing with these more complicated databases.
   In summary, Public Workstation #9 will remain, and the three databases will be on the new public workstations when they are deployed.
8. Java Client - LITS is STILL doing some beta testing on a new Java Client for our current and upcoming Sirsi products. It is coming soon, though!
9. Webcasts - On June 15, Rachel attended the webcast: Google’s Library Digitization Project: Reports from Michigan and Oxford. On July 21, Sylvia and Rachel attended the webcast: Narrowcasting 101: Using Blogs, Podcasts, and Videoblogs in Higher Education.
10. GIS Task Force - On Wednesday, June 22, Rachel and Rahn and the rest of the GIS Task Force presented Paul Gherman and other LMC members with a final report. It summarized the current use of GIS on VU’s campus, included an overview of what is being done with GIS at comparable institutions, and gave recommendations for the future of GIS at VU and within the library system. It was decided that the task force will continue on (possibly with additional new members) and further investigate what the Heard Library can do with the various GIS resources in existence, and proceed on to the next level.
11. Presentation - On July 14, 2005, Rachel was one of the presenters at the following Brown Bag Session. Her focus was on the importance and impact of RSS in libraries.

Wikis, Blogs, RSS, Etc.: New Tools for the New Library?
With the recent implementation of the Heard Library’s new strategic plan, we are all investigating ways to be more innovative. Fortunately, there are many new open source technologies that will help us improve communication, expand cross-library collaboration, and enable us to reach many of our goals. Come and learn more about these technologies, how they are currently being used in libraries, and how they could and are being implemented here at Vanderbilt. Join Rick Stringer-Hye, Suellen Stringer-Hye, Dale Poulter, and Rachel Vacek, who are leading this brown bag discussion based on what they discovered at the LITA National Forum earlier this year and other conferences that they have recently attended.

Have a good weekend, everyone! Thanks for your attention and time!