From Ponderous Perfection to the Perpetual Beta Library Services and Superabundant Information

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From Ponderous Perfection to the Perpetual Beta
Library Services and Superabundant Information

• Readex Digital Institute, 2008
• David Seaman
• Associate Librarian for Information Management
• Dartmouth College

8 October 2008 Chester, VT
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Uneven change widening divisions re-think our
systems services.

• STM departments have embraced digital preprints
  and articles and transformed their
  (inter)disciplines the humanities are still
  often book-bound and solitary.
• The physicist and the philosopher have never been
  further apart in working methods and information
  architecture needs.
• Students come in with radically different network
  habits and privacy values than faculty.
• All this is a challenge for libraries many
  audiences to serve. New habits and old habits of
  work and service.

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A babel of silos and time sinks

• A constant state of partial attention.
• Ricochet serendipity.
• Information snacking.
• Convenience and the path of least resistance.
• Good enough information retrieval.

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A Need to Inform New Services at Dartmouth

• Next Gen Library System swat team heterogeneous
  mix of librarian, faculty, student members. Four
  month lifespan a few intense meetings.
• Expectation of action (or at least reaction)
  budget line to fund this. Public report to entire
  library staff.
• Impatience at cautious, ponderous, pace of change
  and service innovation. A license to behave
  differently.
• Irritation at complex, disjointed info retrieval
  landscape and our inability to hide it from users.

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One search box to rule them all

• We currently have a super abundance of resources
  accessed through a complex, disjointed discovery
  layer.
• Filtering of results and personalization of
  features are poor or absent. We need much simpler
  ways to find much more relevant information to
  build much better knowledge.
• Next generation services must radically enhance
  resource integration and move us on from the
  isolated data silos of the present.

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More is not always more

• Specificity, selectivity, and convenience are
  often of much higher value than undifferentiated
  bulk.
• Customized feeds of information are increasingly
  necessary as the available material grows in
  number and complexity. We should explore
  services that harness staff and faculty expertise
  canned searches designed by experts, for
  example.
• The abilities for users to add reviews,
  recommendations, and folksonomic metadata would
  be useful.

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Convenience rules

• In a world of growing resources and no more time,
  and we ignore convenience at our peril. Most
  users most of the time take the path of least
  resistance.
• We make our users work too hard. Embed services
  where the users are through widgets and APIs that
  allow programmers to bypass an interface and
  address services directly.
• Forcing users always to go to destination web
  pages to leave the catalog to go to the ILL,
  for example is frustrating.

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Access trumps ownership

• We need to be sure we have broken from the
  curatorial thinking of the pre-internet
  library.
• Discovery services need to foreground
  availability they should answer the basic
  questions when can I get it? and what can I do
  with it?
• This may favor a World Cat Local approach over
  the current library catalog, which highlights
  that which we own or to which we subscribe.

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Privacy is so Web 1.0

• Users trust the library to make good use of user
  data if it allows for richer, more personalized
  services or more relevant filtering of results.
• Personalization is not threatening as long as it
  is optional and under the users control.
• Treat different communities to different info
  portals.
• Services that use knowledge of ones prior
  activity and/or ones membership in a group are
  of increasing value. Such recommender
  services are commonplace in commercial services
  such as Amazon.

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Remember the scholarly primitives

• Discover/gather/create/share -- a good framework
  within which to think about library services.
• Which primitives do we serve and enable?
• Next generation systems should extend our service
  reach beyond discover.

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Scholarly Primitives
University of Minnesota Library A
Multi-Dimensional Framework for Academic Support
A Final Report. http//www.lib.umn.edu/about/mell
on/UMN_Multi-dimensional_Framework_Final_Report.pd
f
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Dont Lose Sight of our Edge.Kevin Kelly
Better than Free.

• Eight intangible values (generatives) that we
  buy when we pay for something that could be free
  libraries abound in these
• Immediacy
• Personalization
• Interpretation
• Authenticity
• Accessibility
• Embodiment
• Patronage
• Findability
• It costs nothing to make a pill. We pay for
  Authenticity and Immediacy in drugs. Someday
  we'll pay for Personalization.
  http//edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.
  html

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Embrace the ChurnRevel in a State of Perpetual
Beta

• Service design and assessment processes need to
  be quick, agile, ongoing, and iterative. Next
  generation systems must be defined by users and
  not librarians, which means we must be more
  sophisticated in uncovering what users need and
  what they do.
• Open up beta testing of new features in systems
  to interested users. Make it clear that they are
  trying beta releases.
• We need to be braver about letting users opt to
  try new features while we are evaluating them,
  even when they have rough edges .

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Google Books The Price of Good Enough?
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Google Books Services release early and often.
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Get a plan to generate change.John Kotter
Leading Change.

• Establish a sense of urgency.
• Form a powerful guiding coalition.
• Create a vision.
• Communicate the vision.
• Empower others to act on vision.
• Plan for and create short-term wins.
• Consolidate improvements and produce more change.
• Institutionalize new approaches.

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Summary transform, tailor, embed

• The next generation library systems need to be
  nimble, personalized, relevant, and convenient.
• Our library organization needs to fully embody
  these traits too.
• The library must get used to competing for
  attention through ease of use as well as
  excellence of content.
• Services should to be accessible from within
  whatever online space a user inhabits (iGoogle
  Facebook Blackboard) and on whatever networked
  device.

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Summary select, excite, act.

• Access, Discover, Select, Filter -- Current
  systems focus on the first two at the expense of
  the second two.
• The library is still a tale of mass and
  malleability, but we need much better selection
  and filtering services to help us limit the vast
  result sets that result from the current
  generation access tools.
• Primitives and generatives can be helpful
  touchstones.
• It is time now to experiment, innovate, and act.