Take Responsibility...

Lawrence Lessig, Educause Keynote 2009 via D'Arcy Norman



You/we have been warned...

Arcadia citation

My M-Libraries: Information Use on the Move report has been cited in the Journal of Academic Librarianship’s guide to professional literature.

The guide is

a selective summary of articles, books, reports, announcements, news items, and web-based information that the editors feel would be of greatest interest to academic librarians. blreiner@wellesley.edu

REINER, L. and STEBBINS, L., 2009. The JAL Guide to the Professional Literature. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 35(6), 609-619. (Citation on p609)

Do Libraries Cater for Today's Undergraduate Students?

Complementing the Researchers of Tomorrow interim report on young researchers' use of academic Libraries and their associated resources, (Do Libraries Cater for Today's Researchers and Research Students?), where it was suggested that research students favoutr Google and Google Scholar as a discovery engine above all other things, I thought it might be worth comparing that report with the results of Lizz Edwards-Waller's Arcada Fellowship report on Information Skills Provision for Cambridge Undergraduates [PDF], based on a survey completed by 1771 respondents*.

* Of the 1771 respondents, 57.5% were from undergraduates (n=1019), 34.1% from postgraduates (n=604) and 8.4% from clinical students (n=148). From the undergraduate survey population, 34.5% were first year students (n=352), 33.5% were second year students (n=341), 26.6% were in the third year of their course (n=271), and 5.4% were in their fourth year or more

So where do these students get their references from? [1005 responses]



Predominantly set material in first and second years, but then reference chasing kicks in as they progress through their student career.

On the usage of 'general' electronic resources, 860 undergrds, 488 postgrads and 140 clinical students responded as follows:



In free response, JSTOR was also mentioned as a useful resource by a significant percentage of students.

When trying to understand the motivation or expectation of searchers when looking for information, relevance and speed are key:



The 'higher level' factors - being able to cite a reference or rediscover a resource, are most keenly felt in the third year, presumably a time when individual research projects are being assessed.



So when it comers to seeking help for finding or sharing information, where is the first point of call? The Library?



Err, no! (Looooo-zerrrrr... #fail).

In terms of making use of Library induction offerings, the 796 responses were dominated by induction tours, rather than info skills sessions or online guides.



Finally, 60 Library respondents reported on how Library induction/training matters were communicated to users:



It is not reported how effective those communication channels were either felt to be important, or actually were...

Do Libraries Cater for Today's Researchers and Research Students?

Apparently not...

A recent story in the Times Higher reviews an interim report from "[a] three-year study by the British Library, Researchers of Tomorrow, [which] is tracking the research behaviour of doctoral students born between 1982 and 1994 - dubbed 'Generation Y'" (Next-gen PhDs fail to find Web 2.0's 'on-switch', via Peter Morgan/@tweeterpeter) describes how researcher are making use of 'emerging technology' tools. The THES describes how interim results:

... show that only a small proportion of those surveyed are using technology such as virtual-research environments, social bookmarking, data and text mining, wikis, blogs and RSS-feed alerts in their work. This contrasts with the fact that many respondents professed to finding technological tools valuable.

Just under half of those polled used RSS feeds and only about 10 per cent used social bookmarking, with Generation Y students exhibiting the same behaviour as other age groups.

In addition:

The study also shows that when it comes to getting help with the tools, Generation Y students are likely to turn to their peers or supervisors rather than library staff. Dr Newman said this could suggest that library professionals need to rethink their work in this area.

The study found that Google and Google Scholar are the main sources used by doctoral students to locate information; that only about half have been trained to find journal articles; and that far fewer have received any training in using more advanced technological research tools, such as e-research.

We can find a full copy of the report (PDF)) - which was not linked to from the THES story? - on the project website Researchers of Tomorrow Project.

So what sort of training is acknowldged in the 5,408 completed questionnaries:



'Finding/using subject based resources' and 'using own instituional portal' seem to do best... Presumably, the subject based resources relate to things like database collections subscribed to via the institution?

So what sorts of information do research students look for?



And where do they look?



Ask a teen how the libraries are doing and they'd probably say: "looooo-zerrrrr". Or maybe #fail.

Libraries are go to places for support though, right?



Well, maybe, for some things... What jumps out at me though, is the low uptake in alerts, and 'subscriptions' to possibly by extension subscription to persistent search feeds.

This is borne out by the relatively low proportion of people who make use of subscription RSS/alerting services:




(For more on this, a separate small scale study with only 21 surveyed participants looked at how young researchers uses subsciprion tools (Preliminary findings of user trials (Bayesian Feed Filter). Whilst 11 researchers used email alerts, only 2 used RSS feeds. Discovery of new and interesting papers was predominantly (16 people) by searching (my emphasis) latest articles.)

I'd like to think that the increasing ease of use of geo-related tools and visualisation tools will be reflected in the increasing uptake of these tools, although there again I'm not sure that I'd immediately think of going to the library to ask how I might visualise on a map all the UK HEI Libraries (a 5 minute job if you know: a) where to find the data; b) how to geocode it using free tools; c) render it on an embeddable map)...

This question of whether it's the Library that should be the go to place for information (let alone the use of information visualisation tools) about online information tools is ne I touched on very briefly in IT Skills or Information Skills?.

If the Library is there to serve the information needs of the learner or researcher, then it requires the provision of support in the use of available electronic information technologies, as well as card catalogues...

But whilst many Libraries do already offer skills training on the more effective use of 'public' services such as Google (e.g. search for google (training OR tutorial) on UK HEI Library websites (via Open Library Training Materials and Custom Search Engines), could they be doing more?

As patrons get more of their information needs satisficed from sources outside the immediate control of the Library, if the Library is to contribute to developing this activity (in terms of maximising its effectiveness), then this part of the Library's role needs to shift towards supporting how patrons discover those resources, whether or not the Library has any say in the way those resources have been collected.

Consider it this way: if you believe that one reason why Libraries develop collections is in order to support discovery of proven quality resources, then the Library can still fulfil this role. For example, it can play a role in developing an understanding about how to make effective use of everyday tools to support discovery and management of resources. Just because the folk previously known as library patrons no longer access information via the Library, does that mean that the Library shouldn't be a go to place for students and researchers who want to access the information that the Library might traditionally have provided unique access to, but that is now more widely accessible through a variety of routes. If part of the Library's role is helping people find resources, then if you look back from those resources to the tools that most people use to discover the resources, aren't those the tools you need to support in some way?



Finally, what must be remembered is that the tools that are most likely to be used, (particularly when a student graduates from the academy), are likely to be free public tools.... but they are no less powerful for being that...

What If? Livescribe Book Support

At the Cory Doctorow Arcadia Talk last night (more on that later...), I sat next to Quentin Stafford-Fraser and noticed that he was taking notes with a Livescribe computer pen. These pens - that work as pens as well as audio recorders - use a special notebook that allows a digital copy of your handwritten notes to be made and synched with an audio recording made at the time.



A few things immediately struck me about the device - firstly, that it would be great in a legal interview setting; secondly, that it might be handy if you could replace the pen's audio track with a higher quality recording after the fact (the talk last night was 'officially' recorded for podcast release somewhen soon, for example); thirdly, that it would be really handy if you could 'record' your own interface drawings and associate them with arbitrary bits of code.

So for example, in the video above, starting around 2minutes 0 seconds in, there is a piano demo where the user can draw a small piano keyboard, and then play it with the pen.

(Note - if you don't already know this trick, you can deeplink into Youtube movies by adding things like #t=2m0s onto the end of the video id - so e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU_RKv5zemM#t=2m0s)

All when and good, and I didn't really get any further than the idea that it would be good if you could draw/record your own interfaces, though I had no real idea what form that might take.

But as I was dropping off to sleep, I started wondering what sort of paper based note taking interface might be useful for working alongside a book or print journal article. For example, what sorts of mechanism might devices like the Livescribe offer in terms of pulling in additional context around a book that a readr was taking notes on (as in LibraryDNS, cf. RadioDNS: Books that Can Phone Home).

The first thing that came to mind was that it might be hand to make a reference to a book (e.g. by ISBN, or in the case of a journal article, a DOI) and then by page.

Here's one way I thought it could look like:



Using the pen display, it could then display a shortcode to the book reference (e.g. pointing to a page like http://my.safaribooksonline.com/032157947x), or if an audio version of the book were available on the pen, it could play from that reference. (The above notation supports multi-page references e.g. pp 76-78, the two dropped p lines specifying a - separated range of pages.)

What this in turn requires are book websites that have full text copies of books available on them to use URIs that can be readily constructed around an ISBN and a page number.

So for example, on Google Books, if you can find a book ID from its ISBN, you can deeplink into a page (if preview or full view is available) directly: http://books.google.com/books?id=x1Q9TxhYA3sC&pg=PT14

I'll try and ponder some more possibilities, and plausible use cases, over the next week or two... And as with my thinking about all mobile library applications, they'll be driven by a mind's-eye view of someone sitting at a desk somewhere, maybe a library, maybe not, maybe with print material (journals and/or books) around them, maybe not, maybe with a pad or notebook, or a laptop or mobile phone, or even a computer pen, just trying to get some information related or related information activity done...

PS in passing, it never ceases to surprise me how many websites that deal with books are not capable of identifying an ISBN and then searching by ISBN when an ISBN is entered into a search box...

Tony Hirst's Most Recent Arcadia Related Bookmarks

LibraryDNS, cf. RadioDNS: Books that Can Phone Home

Someone once called me a butterfly, because of the way way I flit from domain to domain, trying to recast ideas from one domain into another. So to start the week, here's an idea from the world of radio that might be relevant to the world of library books: RadioDNS.

That FM radio in your mobile phone could, if it wanted to, connect to the internet to discover more about what it’s listening to. The DAB radio in that wifi radio you have at home can similarly connect to the web to get lots of information about the current broadcast. And listening to radio on your MP3 player could interact with the internet when it docks to your PC. In short, there are a lot of radio sets hidden within connected devices.

However, just because your radio also has an internet connection within it, that doesn’t instantly mean that it can find more information about what it’s listening to.

Which got me wondering - if I take a book out of the library, does that book provide me with any means of connecting to the wider context around that book via the web?



Not directly...

That’s where RadioDNS comes in. Put simply, it uses information that is already broadcast to create a kind ‘pseduo [sic] Domain’, which, by using standard DNS technology on the internet, can point your radio quickly and simply to the broadcaster – and from there, to advertise to the radio what this broadcaster supports.

So what information does the book carry? ISBN, possibly. If I've borrowed it from a library, it will almost definitely have a barcode attached to it somewhere (although is this necessarily the case with RFID'd books?) But just given the library affixed labels in the book, is there any direct link back to a web context for it? There isn't in the case of the book shown above, for example - no URIs anywhre in sight, (and the bar code isn't recognised by my phone's barcode reader, either... Hmmm...)

In Visual Links - Sharing Links With QR Codes, I suggested that there is a library catalogue shortcode available for each book in the Cambridge Newton catalogue of the form ul-4528529 (there's an example resolver on that page), so in the Cambridge context at least there is a local identifier available that resolves directly to a web page for the resource:



(The Subject Links lead to lists of resources related by subject/category, albeit two clicks away.)

So if I've borrowed a book from the Library, or I'm sat at a desk in th Library with a book and a web connection, how might I raise the web context for the book, and what might I want to do within that context? Here's what RadioDNS is looking at:

RadioDNS can support applications that combine broadcast and IP technologies. There are some applications already in development within the RadioDNS project:

* RadioVIS, a way of adding text and visuals synchronised to the radio programme
* RadioEPG, an electronic programme guide, that also allows a “universal preset” which will find your station wherever in the world you might be
* RadioTAG is a really interesting technology, not unlike Radio Pop, allowing you to ‘tag’ bits of the radio you find interesting. Whether it’s your favourite song, an interesting news story, or just something the presenter said that you thought was amusing. It’s then up to the broadcaster to keep those tags, to let you interact further when you’ve the time.

I imagine that RadioDNS endpoints will also support content negotiation (as in BookServer - Like URIPlay, but for Books...?), to provide you with content in a format appropriate for your local conditions (device, browser/client, locale, connection speed, subscription details etc.)

In RadioDNS, then, we see RadioDNS as providing a vector from a radio station you are listening to back to a web context for that station, a context that might include more information not just about the currently playing track, but also items related to that track, programme, station, community, and so on.

RadioDNS thus potentially provides a way for the radio station as listened to, to be seen more directly as a "social object" (cf. Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality ). That is, RadioDNS provides a vector relating the radio station as listened to, to a web located context for that station and its output.

In the case of a book, the previous screenshot from the Newton catalogue provides links to both more information about the book, as well as related books, although it does not support a community around the book.

Some libraries are looking at how to support communities around books, though, as Lorcan Dempsey describes in a recent post on Community bibliography, where he explores an instantiation of Bibliocommons on the Ottawa Public Library Website:

What jumped out at me was how the block at the bottom of the screen was named: Community activity seemed like a very good name in this case.

The community features are interesting and feel familiar from other environments. A reader can 'connect' with others who have selected the item being viewed. The connections work across libraries in which Bibliocommons is deployed.

This adoption of a public social layer that can be federated across library catalogue UIs is something that it yet to be proven, although it's something I'd like to see succeed (I'm not sure if Aquabrowser's social tools operate across instances?)

(I'd also like to see loans data shared for the purposes of making better academic book recommendations, via initiatives such as JISC MOSAIC...;-)

What's also missing at the moment is any sense of course or research group context around a particular group. A couple of entries in the JISC MOSAIC competition tentatively explored the degree cotnext around books with a given ISBN, although not at a module level (where for example, related suggested readings, curricula, teaching materials and exam questions might also be brought in to play (cf. Looking Out for "Linked Course Data" and The Library's Role in Organising "Course Knowledge").

So many pieces, so nearly joined... (but not quite... at least, not yet...)