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.