Title: Creating (Library) Value in the Age of the Amazoogles University of British Columbia 2006 September 18
1Creating (Library) Value in the Age of the
Amazoogles University of British Columbia 2006
September 18
- Stuart L. Weibel
- Senior Research Scientist, OCLC Research
- Visiting Scholar,
- University of Washington iSchool
2OCLC Research
- Research and standardization
- OCLC services
- Membership
- Library evangelism to the Web community
- Metadata management
- Knowledge organization
- Content management
- Interoperability
- Systems interaction design
- 30 employees
3What do we mean by value?
- The Library Business Model
- Make information look free to end users
- Aggregation of public resources for management,
organization, and curation of public content - The SCOAP (of the) Mission
- Selection
- Collection
- Organization
- Access
- Preservation
- Return on investment
- Return of Patrons
4Value Domains
- Societal
- Long term, authoritative curation of the
cultural, technical, and scientific assets of a
society - Information Neutrality
- Public Trust
- Technical
- Systems for supporting SCOAP activities
- Bookshelves
- Cataloging (and catalogs)
- Electronic systems
5Value Domains (continued)
- Social So-called Library 2.0 approaches
- Policies and services to promote community
engagement - Recommender Services (reader advisories)
- Ala Nancy Pearl?
- People who bought X, also bought Y
- LibraryThing
- Tagging folksonomies what value?
- Public Bibliography
- What is more important for discovery? A book
review or a MARC record? - Linking structure among first class objects is a
central feature of the Web
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8Extract (and exploit) value in structured data
- Holdings are key
- Enrich the data
- Amazon-like reviews
- Cover Art
- Controlled vocabularies
- Terminology services
- Classification systems
- Folksonomies?
- Authority control
9Increase integration across boundaries
- Make the OPAC irrelevant
- Solution of last resort
- The Green Screen of Boredom (or is that envy?)
- Weave libraries into the Web
10WorldCat in the Open Web
- On these sites
- Include either of the following with your search
terms - Google "find in a library" (include phrasing
quote marks) - Yahoo! siteworldcatlibraries.org (no space
after colon)
11Other WorldCat Partner Sites
- Abebooks (abebooks.com)
- Alibris (alibris.com)
- Amazon.com (amazon.com)
- Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America
(abaa.com) - Biblio (biblio.com)
- BookPage (bookpage.com)
- DirectTextbook (directtextbook.com)
- Google Scholar and Google Books
(scholar.google.com, books.google.com) - Greenwood Publishing Group (greenwood.com)
- HCI Bibliography (hcibib.org)
- Windows Live Academic (academic.live.com)
12Some general principles for technical value
creation in a network environment
- Reduce impediments to search
- Increase integration across boundaries
- Build Network Effect value
- Extract (and exploit) value in structured data
- Increase the efficiency of metadata creation
- Promote participation
- Book reviews
- Linking
- Recommender systems
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18Public BibliographyThe Tom Sawyer Strategy
- Metadata is expensive
- Cataloging data is important, costly, and
ill-suited to public use (at least for some
aspects of public use) - Mobilizing users to be participants in the
creation of metadata (in the form of book
reviews, recommender services, and linking,
either explicit or inferred) is a potentially
rich source of metadata and linking currency - Amazon is effective at this
- LibraryThing has a strong and growing approach
- Libraries and large cooperative cataloging
agencies are thus far not doing so well.
19Book ReviewsDesirable Characteristics of First
Class Objects
- Book Reviews are (should be) stand-alone First
Class Objects - Harvestable
- Attributable
- Linked appropriately
- Permanently identified
- Curated
20Link Currency
- Linkages are an important currency on the Web
- Who links to you
- Who do you link to
- To rise in relevance rankings, library-managed
links should be persistent and of one form - http//www.worldcat.org/oclc/26160663refererbrie
f_results - http//www.worldcat.org/search?q083890596Xqtowc
_search - http//www.worldcat.org/search?q083890596X
- http//www.worldcat.org/oclc/26160663
- Multiple identifiers are confusing, reduce
hackability, and dilute link currency.
21Libraries must compare favorably with related
information experiences that our patrons expect
- Discovery and recommender services
- Web 2.0 social network capabilities
- Experiences of comparable commercial service
providers - Last-mile delivery capability
- Bookstore social experience
- Coffee-shop salons
- People to help us navigate the intricacies of a
complicated knowledge space - We are offering an experience as well as a service
22Stuart L. Weibel
Visit me at http//weibel-lines.typepad.com Con
tact me at Stuart.Weibel_at_gmail.com
Thank you for your attention