hangingtogether.org

There are precious few library speakers upon whose every word I hang. Call me difficult to please. But one person who has achieved that status is Prof. David Lankes from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. The dude rocks. And although he is a frequent speaker, including at the upcoming ALA Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, you don’t have to wait a single minute to hear him talk about some of his most important issues.

Last week I caught up with him virtually via Skype, and recorded him for our ongoing podcast series “What keeps you awake at night?” What resulted was a rollicking 25-minute romp through some fairly important issues for us all. Central to his theme was “raising expectations” — for ourselves, for our institutions, for the clienteles we serve. He also talked about making innovation a core part of what we do. To do this, he asserts, we need to create environments where taking risks and failing is OK, and he cites Seth Godin’s definitions for “mistake” vs. “failure”:

A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal.

A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.

Prof. Lankes covers a lot more ground than this, including a segment on “dead wood” in the organization, and much better than I can attempt to parrot back to you. What I’m trying to do, if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is to intrigue you enough that you will listen to the whole thing. It’s only 20 minutes since I sped up the recording by 20%. Yes, we know your time is valuable. After all, you have some expectation raising to do. 

Today we released Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Part 2: Survey Analysis. This is the second of a series of three reports a 21-member Social Metadata Working Group from five countries produced as the result of our research in 2009 and 2010.

The cultural heritage organizations in the OCLC Research Library Partnership have been eager to expand their reach into user communities and to take advantage of users’ expertise to enrich their descriptive metadata. Social metadata—content contributed by users—is evolving as a way to both augment and recontexutalize the content and metadata created by LAMs.

Our first report, Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Part 1: Site Reviews, provides an environmental scan of sites and third-party hosted social media sites relevant to libraries, archives, and museums. We noted which social media features each site supported, such as tagging, comments, reviews, images, videos, ratings, recommendations, lists, links to related articles, etc.

The second report is our analysis of the results from a social metadata survey of site managers conducted from October to November 2009. Forty percent of the responses came from outside the United States. A few highlights:

• More than 70 percent had been offering social media features for two years or less.
• Engaging new or existing audiences is used as a success criteria more frequently than any other criteria.
• A minority of survey respondents are concerned about the way the site’s content is used or repurposed outside the site.
• Spam and abusive user behavior are sporadic and easily managed.
• The survey results indicate that engagement is best measured by quality, not quantity.
• The vast majority of respondents considered their sites to be successful.

The upcoming third report provides recommendations on social metadata features most relevant to libraries, archives, and museums and factors contributing to success and an annotated list of all the resources the working group consulted.

As with many OCLC Research publications, this report was written to help meet the needs of the OCLC Research Library Partnership. The Partnership not only inspires but also underwrites this type of work, so many thanks to the institutions who both contribute to and support our work!

We look forward to hearing your feedback!

We’ve been writing a mini blog series to put a spotlight on just some of our accomplishments this year. This is the final post in that series.

Winding up this series of year-end posts is a big bow to the successful launch of the OCLC Research Library Partnership. The launch and the associated rationale and aspirations were discussed in a variety of posts back at the start of the fiscal year. All of us were pleased with the response and have enjoyed these first few months of working with staff at Partner institutions in this new configuration.

Instead of more words here are two pictures of the Partnership to end the year. Happy new year. We look forward to more progress and congenial work on behalf of the Partnership and all OCLC libraries.

OCLC Research Library Partnership

ORLP and Times Higher Education World Rankings

This is the sixth post in a mini series, where we look back at accomplishments in 2011.

While OCLC has gotten some (deserved and undeserved) bashing in the blogosphere during 2011 about the cooperative’s practices over the release of major bibliographic subset we’ve also been active in the Linked Data arena in ways that have moved the library linked data community forward.

Exhibit number one is, of course, the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), about which much has been written. It fits the pattern that I think will emerge in the linked data arena. Rather than lots of institutional releases of data we will see the emergence of significant hubs based around authoritative aggregations on which many applications and implementations will arise. This file created through the manipulation of twenty-one authority files from eighteen organizations is prominent in the Linked Data Cloud and getting more than 2 hits/second from Google. Thom Hickey, the principal force behind the creation, extension and maintenance of VIAF has sensible commentary about its development on his blog including how VIAF relates to other name identifiers. The principals in VIAF – LC, DNB, BnF and OCLC – are working to formalize VIAF’s integration as an OCLC offering where it will be offered under an Open Data Commons Attribution license. Right now it’s out in the cloud without a license which counts as “not openly licensed” in that community.

Exhibit number two is the very recent release of the Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) file as linked data. I blogged about this not long ago. It has now shown up in the Linked Open Data Graph.

Exhibit number three is the Dewey linked data. Exhibit four OCLC’s support for and involvement with the Library Linked Data Incubator Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) where my Research colleague, Jeff Young, was a participant and contributor.

We expect more activity in the linked data arena during 2012 and hope to see some creative implementations and use cases as the year progresses. For now it’s Robert Burns and Auld Lang Syne time.

I understand that the earliest known manuscript of Auld Lang Syne autographed by Robert Burns is at the Lilly Library Indiana University but I couldn’t find a digital image…

We are closing out 2011 with a mini blog series, looking back on some highlights. This is the fifth post in the series

Although we’ve blogged about WIP, or “Well-intentioned practice for putting digitized collections of unpublished materials online” we failed to mention that it was endorsed as a standard by the Society of American Archivists in August.

Documenting the practices of “reasonable archivists” and encouraging the adoption of a risk management approach in digitizing materials from archival collections provides a path forward for archivists and decision makers, helping institutions to at least consider digitizing low risk materials. We’re pleased to have helped with establishing a community of practice for archivists who are concerned with making their materials available for research in an online environment.

This conference that OCLC Research sponsored back in June 2011 and which was summarized in a series of blog posts that month continues to influence our work. It was constructed around three areas that we imagined would shape the future expectations of library users and therefore of libraries themselves which was why we subtitled it Shaping Research Libraries in a Networked Age. We built around changing patterns of data consumption, the futures of publishing, and the future of higher education. We had distinguished keynote speakers – George Oates, Brian O’Leary and Ben Wildavsky – get the discussions of each underway.

All of them were terrific and in different ways. All of them set up good discussions and energized panels that followed them. And they became friends to OCLC Research. I’ve been following them ever since. I think you should as well.

George left the Internet Archive on 23 December to become the art director at a design studio in San Francisco so I’m not sure whether or how she’ll have time to keep up her blog. You can see some of her presentations here.

Brian keeps up his blog with an enviable output of thoughtful commentary about publishing and helpfully separates it into three areas concentrating on magazine, book, and association publishing. Go over to his site and get the RSS feed on your reader. If you need to be tantalized one of his recent posts featured this quote from a conference exchange

I don’t want to see them figure out how to change; I want them to get out of the way so that the rest of us can get on with it.

Ben keeps up a steady flow of interesting observations about higher education directions. The most recent piece I saw of his was called Crossing to the dark side? and discussed for-profit versus traditional higher education. I don’t believe he keeps a blog so I just keep a Google Alert to keep up.

As 2011 comes to a close, we are looking back at the year in this mini blog series. This is the third in the series

We try to blog all the high points, but sometimes we miss a few beats, and this was one of them. In 2011, our very own Jackie Dooley was elected as vice president / president elect of the Society of American Archivists (she is now serving as vice president and will step into the presidency in 2012). This is not only a huge honor but also a big position — being part of the executive in a very large and active organization like SAA will keep Jackie on her toes. Those of us who work with her know she’s up to the challenge. Congratulations, Jackie!

You can read more about Jackie’s position here.

At the end of 2011, we are doing a mini series of blog postings to reflect on some of the year’s highpoints. This posting is the second in the series.

“Seeking Synchronicity” was published as an OCLC members report in 2011, but is based on many research projects on virtual reference, both research conducted by OCLC Research Scientist Lynn Connaway and Rutgers Professor Marie Radford, and others. Marie and Lynn have helpfully boiled down findings to a very readable set of recommendations and guidelines about virtual reference and optimizing your chances for satisfaction and success.

What has stuck with me after reading the report, is the importance of building relationships. Practicing good customer service goes well beyond virtual reference.

You can view a webinar (and find more information about the project) here.

As 2011 winds down, we are reflecting on what we’ve worked on or created in a mini blog series. This is the first entry, so stay tuned for more!

ArchiveGrid is, as the name hints, a discovery vehicle for archival collection descriptions. Although ArchiveGrid has been a subscription service for many years, we’re excited to offer a free version which will serve as a testbed for a number of important experiments around optimizing the discovery of materials that are described at a collection, rather than item, level. In 2011, my colleagues Bruce Washburn and Ellen Ast have invested significant effort in creating a new interface and refreshing the underlying content (bringing the number of records from just over a million to 1.7 million in a relatively short period of time).

In 2012, we’ll be experimenting with NER (named entity recognition) across the corpus, and also with a paper finding aids scanning project. We’ll report more about those efforts here. We also hope to refresh our knowledge of our user base, their habits and preferences. In 2006, we conducted user studies that afforded us key insights into what’s important to researchers, but it’s time to refresh our knowledge, so you can look for more information on that as well.

Check out ArchiveGrid at beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid, and let us know what you think!

To learn more, you can watch this short YouTube video on ArchiveGrid.

And if you want to dig deeper, there’s an ArchiveGrid webinar as well.

It’s that time of year, and before you start tuning out your feed reader and start tuning into your favorite holiday tunes, we have a little something to get you in the spirit. This video was created by my very talented colleague Dennis Massie (for a long time know around here as the “SHARES Guy” although his work spans well beyond that). It’s both wry and heartfelt, and I think you’ll find it worth your while.

You can also check out other offerings on the OCLC Research YouTube Channel

p.s. My favorite holiday music is the SOMA FM Christmas Lounge stream. What’s yours?