Bill Gates Retires from Microsoft

Recently, Forbes revealed that Bill Gates has slipped to number three on the list of the world's wealthiest people. On top of that, Bill Gates is also stepping back from Microsoft to devote more time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But that doesn't mean that Bill left with a whimper. Take a look at this video, particularly his going-away comedy skit. Nice job, Bill. Good-bye, but not farewell.

Librarians and Web 3.0

For better or worse, Web 3.0 is around the corner. Okay, maybe the technology is lagging; but we must admit that the third generation (third decade) Web is coming. In a post I had made back in September, Paul Miller of Talis made an insightful response, one which is relevant for today's discussion.

Although I'm slightly surprised at the sector's lack of overt engagement with this obviously synergistic area too, there are certainly examples in which librarians are grasping the Semantic Web and in which Semantic Web developers are recognising the rich potential offered by libraries' structured data...

Ed Summers over at Library of Congress would be one person I'd pick out to mention. Also, the work OCLC and Zepheira are doing on PURL, and our own focus on the Talis Platform within Talis; that's Semantic Web through and through, and we have significant products in the final stages of beta that put semantic technologies such as RDF and SKOS to work in delivering richer, better, more flexible applications to libraries and their users. Things really begin to get interesting, though, when you take the next step from enabling existing product areas with semantic technologies to actually beginning to leverage the resulting connections by joining data up, and reusing those links, inferences and contexts to cross boundaries between libraries, systems, and application areas.

There's also library-directed research at institutes such as DERI here in Europe, and even conferences like the International Conference on Semantic Web and Digital Libraries, which was in India this year.

Finally - for now - there's also a special issue of Library Review in preparation; Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web: context, applications and research, and I'll be speaking on The Semantic Web and libraries - a perfect fit? at the Talis Insight conference in November It's funny that you mention Jane in your post, because I'll also be doing something for her later in November that encompasses some of these themes...

Sometimes moving forward doesn't necessarily mean progress. Sometimes we need to take one step back before we can move two steps in the right direction. But it appears as if the infrastructure is there for us to move in the direction of Web 3.0. What does this mean for librarians? I suspect it means we should stop the bickering about Web versions, and start reflecting on the reasons why patrons are physically relying on library collections and coming to the libraries for information. Googlization of information has resulted in fears for the future of librarianship. But what are we to do? Standing idly by and playing the trumpets as the ship sinks isn't the right way to take it. What to do? Let's try move in the right direction.

The Business of Free-conomics

He's done it again. Fresh off the press is Chris Anderson's "Free" in Wired Magazine. In 2004, Anderson changed the way business and the Web was conducted through his visionary Long Tail. Two years later, Anderson's back with the idea of "free." While the long tail proved the staple for Web 2.0, please put "free" into your lexicon for the upcoming Web 3.0.

Giving away things for free has been around for a long time. Think Gillette. In fact, the open source software movement is not unlike the shareware movement a decade earlier. (Remember that first game of Wolfenstein?) Like the long tail, Anderson synthesizes "Free" according to six principles:

(1) "Freemium" - Another percent principle: the 1% rule. For every user who pays for the premium version of the site, 99 others get the basic free version.

(2) Advertising - What's free? How about content, services, and software, just to name a few. Who's it free to? How about everyone.

(3) Cross-subsidies - It's not piracy even though it appears like piracy. The fact is, any product that entices you to pay for something else. In the end, everyone will to pay will eventually pay, one way or another.

(4) Zero Marginal Cost - Anything that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone.

(5) Labour Exchange - The act of using sites and services actually creates something of value, either improving the service itself or creating information that can be useful somewhere else.

(6) Gift Economy - Money isn't everything in the new Web. In the monetary economy, this free-ness looks like madness; but that it's only shortsightedness when measuring value about the worth of what's created.

Collection Management 2.0

Librarianship sometimes feel (and sound) as if it's in disarray. The library discourse is often fractured and fragmented with so many difference viewpoints. Perhaps this is a result of being in our postmodern information age. Bodi and Maier-O'Shea's The Library of Babel: Making Sense of Collection Management in a Postmodern World asserts that libraries have to invest in and prepare for a digital future while maintaining collections and services based on a predominantly print world.

How is it that we're in postmodern world of academic library collection management? Collections are no longer limited to a physical collection in one location; rather, they are a mixture of local and remote, paper and electronic. Hence, in their experimentations of collection development at two research and liberal arts college libraries, the authors realize that there should be three principles. We aren't reinventing the wheel here; but sometimes, amidst our heavy work days and busy lives, we often forget to step back to reassess how things can be done better. The authors offer an interesting viewpoint in this light:

(1) Break down assessment by subject or smaller sub-topics when necessary

(2) Blending of variety of assessment tools appropriate to the discipline

(3) Match print and electronic collections to departmental learning outcomes through communication with faculty members

Top 25 Web 2.0 Tools

Jessica Hupp from College Degree has written some insightful articles about information technology. 25 Useful Social Networking Tools for Librarians might be one of the best. She profiles 25 of the best Web 2.0 tools available that librarians should consider using for their professional work. I'm just going to introduce the list. I encourage you to read her actual entry.

1. Communication - Keep in touch with staff, patrons, and more with these tools

MySpace

Facebook

Ning

Blog

Meebo

LinkedIn

Twitter

2. Distribution - Tools make it easy to share information from anywhere

Flickr

YouTube

TeacherTube

Second Life

Wikipedia

PBwiki

Footnote

Community Walk

SlideShare

Digg

StumbleUpon

Daft Doggy

3. Organization - Keep all of your information handy and accessible with these tools

aNobii

Del.icio.us

Netvibes

Connotea

LibraryThing

lib.rario.us

The Googling Librarian

An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education popped up which once again highlighted the information (or lack of) needs of college students. It has been a recent phenomenon -- this argument and counter-arguments of the necessity of libraries and librarians in the face of Google-ization. For every viewpoint that the Internet has replaced the information services of libraries, there is the stance that users' are even more confused about information overload and the mess that is the Web.

I tend to agree with a what Dennis Dillon says in a new article, Google, Libraries, and Knowledge Management: From the Navajo to the National Security Agency. Libraries and the 'Net play are different entities: libraries play the library game, not the information game. Google is the same for everyone. It is not tailored for different user groups, and it does not change, as local users need shift. Google's very nature is different from that of libraries.

Here's the kicker folks: We could wake up tomorrow to the news that a banking conglomerate has purchased Google and intends to turn it into a private corporate information tool, and wants to convert the content to French. Although just a silly hypothetical situation, Dillon makes a good point that the nature of people and organizations such as Google are not playing the same games as libraries.

Perhaps this is what libraries with foresight such as McMaster University Libraries are doing. They're integrating new technologies to supplement and complement existing facilities. Before it's too late. I personally talk a great deal about emergent technologies, particularly Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web, but in the end, I believe that these are mere tools that facilitate for the growing organism of libraries. In the end, interior design is as every bit relevant to how users perceive the physical spaces of the library as Facebook's uses for increasing outreach to students. But put the two together: and we pack a powerful punch. Dillon leaves us with a freshly yet somewhat disconcerting commenting:

Libraries have become so enamoured of technology that we sometimes cannot see what is in front of our faces, which is that there are still people in our buildings and they are there for a reason.

The Future of Digital Librarians

My colleague and mentor The Google Scholar discussed a bit about the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. Is it relevant to the profession of librarianship? Absolutely. How do we achieve it? Edie Rasmussen and Youngok Choi released a study in 2006 that surveys the skills that practitioners lack in What is Needed to Educate Future Digital Librarians. In this study, the two authors found that while many librarians are young and fresh out of graduate LIS school, they often lack the skills that are necessary for them to thrive in the increasingly digital world of libraries. LIS curricula are often limited to introductory classification and rudimentary information technology courses. There appears to be a real disjunct between the actual job descriptions that are required for newer positions and the actual skills that librarians receive in LIS school. Rasmussen and Choi's study finds that respondents are often frustrated over the "training gaps" during their studies for the following:

(1) Overall understanding of the complex interplay of software

(2) Lack of vocabulary to communicate to technical staff

(3) Knowledge of Web-related languages and technologies

(4) Web design

(5) Digital imaging and formatting

(6) Digital technology

(7) Programming and scripting languages

(8) XML standards and technologies

(9) Basic systems administration

In my own experience as an information professional, I find that these skills are sorely lacking in my own education. I'm finding it increasingly my own initiative to get caught up in the literature and the technologies. Who really has time to learn OAI-PMH metadata standards, XML, EAD, and TEI? Many librarians keep abreast of their field -- but on top of their current duties. But the problem remains that LIS schools do not to train technicians even though that is what they're doing - their mandate is to nurture scholars. Which I can understand. Yet, we can't fit a square peg into a circle. There lies the conundrum: something's got to give. But what? That has remained the intense tension in the field of LIS since its inception. With the advent of the Web and newer technologies, this gap will only widen.

Web 3.0 as in Automation?

I often wonder what kind of automation will make it possible for the Semantic Web. I know there needs to be an automated web browser (or something similar), but what would it look like? The solution could look something like Automatic Character Switch (ACtS), which is a strategy and a philosophy rather than a standard, meaning community moderators can independently implement their own ACtS methods. Similar to AJAX, ACtS is invoked only when it is necessary; that is, only when a web space is connected to a community.

So what is ACtS? According to Yihong Ding, ACtS only allows different communities to recognize whatever they can identify from a web space. A web user can set up a local web spce that stores his web resources. When he subscribes to a new web community, he uploads his local web space to the site while the site customizes its resources based on the community specifications. ACts begins with a user's subscribing a web space to a community. The community server thus performs a community-sensitive resource identification procedure to categorize (information retrieval) and annotate (semantic annotation) public resources stored in the web space. Thus, the local web space creates a community-specific view over its resources, which composes a community-specific sub-space. But ACtS is only a theory. For it to be realized, there needs to be two premises:

(1) A uniform representation - Web spaces similar to what is on Web 1.0. This requires advancement on HTML encoding. In particular, this means independent HTML encoding of individual web resources.

(2) Character recognition and casting technology - A combination of information retrieval and semantic annotation methods.

Public Library 2.0?

Much has been discussed about the role of public libraries as they are increasingly facing budget cuts while facing greater needs for technological innovations. Some have argued that this is natural, as we have entered Library 2.0, which is all about rethinking library services in the light of re-evaluating user needs and the opportunities produced by new technologies. Although there have been great resources written about Library 2.0, there hasn't been one as thorough in its analysis of public libraries as Public Library 2.0: Towards a new mission for public libraries as a "network of community knowledge"? Chowdhury, Poulter, and McMenemy proposes Public Library 2.0, inspired by Ranganathan's famous five principles. They make great fodder for further discussion, don't they?

(1) Community knowledge is for use - Since the value of a community is the knowledge it possesses, people who leave a community will have memories. Yet, little has been carried out in public libraries to digitize local resources.

(2) Every user should have access to his or her community knowledge - Knowledge is for sharing; community knowledge becomes valuable only when it can be accessed and used by others. Facilitating the creation and wider use of this knowledge should be the new role of public libraries.

(3) All community knowledge should be made available to its users - No community knowledge should be allowed to be wasted. Rather, public libraries should facilitate the creation of such knowledge so that it is recorded and preserved. Nothing should be lost.

(4) Save the time of the user in creating and finding community knowledge - Just like the paper records of past lives, the digital records of current lives are accumulating in an ad hoc manner but in a much greater quantity and variety. Hence, public library staff should fill the role of advisors on local content creation, management, and implementation of controlled description, as well as access schemes.

(5) Local community knowledge grows continually - Because community knowledge creation is a continual process, public libraries should act as local knowledge hubs must use existing standards and technology for digitization as well as metadata for the management of, and access to, the digitized resources

The Semantic Catalogue

It's important that librarians keep at the back of their minds how to integrate the Semantic Web into the catalogue, which is ultimately the bridge that users cross to access the library's resources. But it's easy to forget about it, particularly since many libraries have difficulty keeping up with Web 2.0 technologies. But regardless of how far we've come along, it's necessary to peer into the future and see what kinds of changes we'll need to embrace. It could be ten years down the road before we hit the Semantic Web . . . or five . . . or even less. Take a look at Campbell and Fast's Academic Libraries and the Semantic Web: What the Future May Hold for Research Supporting Library Catalogues. They make an excellent case for integrating existing web resources into a dynamic, information-rich, and user-centred catalogue.

Meshing services such as IMDB, Amazon, AFI's Catalogue, the authors suggest that academic libraries could use the Semantic Web as a source of rich metadata that can be retrieved and inserted into bibliographic records to enhance the user's information searches and to expand the role of the library cataloguer as a research tool rather than a mere locating device. (Something along the lines of the Pipl search engine technology). In doing so, the cataloguer acts as an information intermediary, using a combination of subject knowledge and information expertise to facilitate the growth of semantically encoded metadata. In a Web 3.0 world, the cataloguer's new responsibilities would include the following:

(1) Locate - RDF-encoded information on specific subjects, scrutinizing its reliability, and assessing its usefulness in meeting cataloguing objectives

(2) Select - RDF resources for the specific item being catalogue

(3) Participate - In markup projects within a specific knowledge domain, thus promoting the growth of open-access domain-specific metadata

Google Scholar, Windows Live Academic Search, and LIS 2.0

That School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sure churns out some great theses. The latest one is Josiah Drewey's Google Scholar, Windows Live Academic Search, and Beyond: A Study of New Tools and Changing Habits in ARL Libraries offers remarkable insight into these two academic search engines. Little has been written about Windows Live Academic Search, so much so that it appears most people have forgotten about it. (Including its own creators). Drewey's paper reveals that such is not the case. It's worth a read. Here are my favourite points that Drewey makes about GS and WLAS. I'll share them with you all, it deserves some attention here:

(1) Citation Ranking - Search results are largely influenced by citation counts generated by Google's link-analysis, which means that users see the most highly cited (and therefore, the most influential) articles

(2) Citation Linking - GS rivals Web of Science and Scopus with its ability to link to each article through a "cited by" feature that allows users to see which other authors have cited that particular article. GS is superior in this aspect as it stretches into the Humanities as well.

(3) Versioning - GS compiles each different version of a particular article or other work in one place. Different versions can come from publisher's databases, preprint repositories or even faculty homepages.

(4) Open Access - GS increasingly brings previously unknown or unpublicized content to users.

(5) Ability to link to libraries - GS has the bility to link to content already paid for by libraries. Thus, search results from GS can lead directly to the libraries' databases.

(6) Federated Search Engine - Instead of searching many databases as a query is made, GS' resources are compiled prior to the search and return very quickly.

In contrast, Drewey makes some great insights into Windows Live Academic Search. Here are the main strengths of WLAS:

(1) Better interface - WLAS uses a "preview pane" to display initial search results, which the user can mouse over a citation to show the abstract in another pane to the right, whereas GS is inflexible

(2) Names of authors are hyperlinked - Search results take the user to other works by each author

(3) Citations Export - Although GS allows this, WLAS are much more easily visible to export to BibTeX, RefWorks, and EndNote

(4) User-friendly - In many ways, WLAS offers more features tailored for users. Not only does it offer RSS feeds, it enables uses to store their preferences and save search parameters. GS surprisingly does not have such features.

The Long Tail and Libraries

To date, Lorcan Dempsey's Libraries and the Long Tail has offered the most insightful analysis of the Long Tail's importance in libraries. As I've written before, the Long Tail is an effective strategy to utilize when implementing Library 2.0 for the modern library. The question is: could it be implemented without a huge overhaul of most existing libraries? These are some points that Dempsey argues:

(1) Transaction Costs - The better connected libraries are, the lower the transaction costs

(2) Data about choice and behavious - Transactional behavioural data is used to adapt and improve systems. Examples of such data are holdings data, circulation and ILL data, and database usage data.

(3) Inventory - As more materials are available electronically, we will see more interest in managing the print collection in a less costly way. Although historical library models have been based on physical distribution of materials, resources are decreasingly needed to be distributed in advance of need; they can be held in consolidated stores

(4) Navigation - There are better ways to exploit large bibliographic resources. Ranking, recommendations, and relation help connect users to relevant material and also help connect the more heavily used materials to potentially useful, but less used, materials

(5) Aggregation of Demand - The library resource is fragmented. In the new network environment, this fragmentation reduces gravitational pull, which means that resources are prospected by the persistent or knowledgeable user, but they may not be reached by others to whom the resources are potentially useful. What OCLC is doing is making metadata about those books available to the major search engines and routing users back to library services

Google = God?

Maybe Google got it right all along. But is it God? That often appears to be the way that most people do their searching online nowadays, expecting to find the answer to just about anything. Yihong Ding calls this kind of searching, "oracle-based" web searching, which search engines such as Google are assumed to know everything. But this worked relatively well in the early days of the Web because it a pragmatic and affordable strategy; at that time, the quantity of web resources was comparatively small. We rarely searched for meaning. Based on this premise, to build a semantic oracle (i.e. Semantic Google) is equiavalent to create a real God (who knows everything) to human beings.

Perhaps, according to Ding, a better alternative is collaborative searching. Since current answer-based search strategy is motivated by questions, collaborative search is motivated by answers. In our answer-based search model, the ones who answer questions may not have passion (or enough knowledge) to questions. But an inanimate search engine such as Google doesn't know this -- nor does it care.

However, Web 2.0 is slowly changing this course of searching. Already, search engines such as Cha Cha are harvesting collective intelligence and wisdom of the crowds to retrieve more "relevant" results. Ding goes one point further: Web 3.0 will be based on community-sensitive link resources. It will reverse the relation between horizontal search engines and vertical search engines. The current model of vertical search engines being built upon generic search engines are not working well because they are too immature to provide communicate-specific search by themselves. (Just look at the limitations of Rollyo). What will the Semantic Web search engine look like? Maybe something like this.

The Future of I.S.

Meet Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of Information Studies at UCLA. During my trip to Los Angeles, I met with the IS faculty and visited some of the libraries there at UCLA. My conversation with this up and coming academic star was fascinating to say the least. Ramesh's interests includes exploring connections between diasporic/indigenous communities and new media and how information technologies shape, transform, and differentially impact nations, cultures, societies along educational, political, health-related, social, and infrastructural dimensions.

Among his more interesting projects is the Emerging Databases, Emerging Diversity (ED2): National Science Foundation-funded initiative to study methods by which digital collections can be shared via systems that maintain diverse tags, ontologies, and interfaces. In collaboration with Cambridge University's Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, and the Zuni community of New Mexico, the $300,000-funded project inquires how digital access to ancestral objects affects diverse communities. Ramesh's work involves extensive field work in places like Kyrgyzstan and India. (Exciting!)

The faculty at UCLA represents Library and Information Science's gradual shift towards the iSchool movement. Academics such as Ramesh Srinivasan represent the new face of LIS. This has important implications for librarians, who will ultimately be bred and nurtured by these new scholars nontraditional perspectives to LIS. Rather than basing their studies on users of libraries, newer scholars such as Srinivasan, whose background is as diverse as his research (his PhD is in Design), go beyond the traditional domain of LIS. Inevitably, librarianship will change because of this new approach. New ways of thinking and research will be injected into the profession -- perhaps this is where the source of innovation in libraries will come from as well. From the classroom.

Metcalfe's Law

As I had opined in previous posts, the next stage of the Web will be built on the existing infrastructure of Web 2.0. One of the foremost thinkers of the Semantic Web makes an insightful analysis of the progress from Web 2.0 to the Semantic Web. Along with Jennifer Golbeck, James Hendler puts forth the idea of Metcalfe's Law, arguing that value increases as the number of users increases. Because of this, potential links increase for every user as a new person joins. Not surprisingly, Metcalfe's Law is the essence of Web 2.0.

As the number of people in the network grows, the connectivity increases, and if people can link to each other's content, the value grows at an enormous rate. The Web, if it were simply a collection of pages of content, would not have the value it has today. Without linking, the Web would be a blob of disconnected pages.

As information professionals and librarians, we shouldn't miss out on the obvious links between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. Social networking is critical to the success of Web 2.0; but by combining the social networks of Web 2.0 with the semantic networks of the Semantic Web, a tremendous value is possible. Here's a scenario from Tom Gruber which I find very compelling:

Real Travel "seeds" a Web 2.0 travel site with the terms from a gazetteer ontology. This allows the coupling of place names and locations, linked together in an ontology structure, with the dynamic content and tagging of a Web 2.0 travel site. The primary user experience is of a site where travel logs (essentially blogs about trips), photos, travel tools and other travel-related materials are all linked together. Behind this, however, is the simple ontology that knows that Warsaw is a city in Poland, that Poland is a country in Europe, etc. Thus a photo taken in Warsaw is known to be a photo from Poland in a search, browsing can traverse links in the geolocation ontology, and other "fortuitous" links can be found. The social construct of the travel site, and communities of travelers with like interests, can be exploited by Web 2.0 technology, but it is given extra value by the simple semantics encoded in the travel ontology.

Genius.