NELINET TrendGauge

As these systems evolve, some open-source options are becoming extremely attractive for organizations and institutions looking for a robust, customizable, and community-driven CMS tool. One of the more visible and advanced open-source CMS tools, The Sakai Project, originally developed by a team of institutions including University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, and Stanford, is now being used in colleges and universities worldwide. The Sakai community is enormous, with developers around the globe continually contributing add-ons, improvements, and updates. One particular development of interest is Sakaibrary - developed by the University of Michigan and Indiana University Libraries and funded through a grant from The Mellon Foundation in 2005. Fundamentally, Sakaibrary is an optional tool within the CMS software that allows students and faculty to link directly to citations and full-text of scholarly electronic resources. The Sakaibrary proposal states that the group’s project goals were to provide tools within Sakai that allowed “seamless integration of content from licensed library databases” and to “leverage existing library technology infrastructure” in the development of the resources.

In its current phase, the Sakaibrary “Citations Helper” (built into Sakai release 2.4), allows users to search licensed library databases, manage citations, and retain persistent links to articles and other online resources within the library’s holdings. For example, a student can directly access a citation, or the full-text of an article within a university library database such as ProQuest or JSTOR, all directly from within the learning space of the CMS. Faculty can attach lists of citations to course assignments, discussion boards, and other elements of the Sakai CMS. Furthermore, the system allows integration between Sakai and Google Scholar. For the most part, these functionalities rely on already existing library infrastructure, most often OpenURL.

In a blog posting entitled “The Demise of Second Life?” on the Harvard Business Review Online, Paul Hemp reports that Wired has an article in the August 2007 issue that “argues Madison Avenue is wasting millions of dollars getting clients to create virtual stores that rarely get a visitor. Time just labeled Second Life one of the “5 Worst Websites” because of its user-unfriendliness and called Fortune 500 forays into the world “a case of some CEOs trying too hard to be hip.” “ Hemp also reports that Forbes “catalogued examples of the vandalism and pranks that have beset real-world brands in Second Life.” He goes on to say that this misses the point that “brand-building initiatives by real-world companies in virtual worlds must engage users, enhancing their experience phone of repeat purchases. by, say, offering a compelling game or helping to foster a social interest group. A mere presence in the world isn’t enough.” He also notes that “while Second Life, with its occasional lawlessness and somewhat clunky technology, may not survive as a mainstream marketing venue. But other virtual worlds will emerge.”

I cannot dismiss entirely the questioning of the value of Second Life as posited in the Wired article, but it also reminded me of comments that were made by some big IT consultants in the mid-1990s when the web was just taking off. At that time, the consultants calculated the full cost of mounting a web site and the “real cost of business” to do so. Speaking to an audience of IT administrators in higher education, the consultants said that there was no justification for web sites on a cost-benefit basis. Even then the argument did not ring true, and it didn’t take hindsight to know that these consultants knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

This “cost of business” line of reasoning was extended to another bit of ridiculous commentary back in the early days of the web. As a chief information officer at the time, one businessman said at a meeting that “I just don’t know how you can make money off of the web.” There seemed to be no understanding that the web then (and Second Life today) was not really a product to sell, but rather an infrastructure and enabling technology. (One has to wonder whether people said to Alexander Graham Bell, “well, the phone is an interesting experiment, but I just don’t understand how you can make money off of the telephone.”)

Part of the cost of doing business (even for non-profit “businesses” such as libraries) is experimentation. Not all experiments will fully succeed/ It is also common for success to come in a form different than the one originally envisioned. The development costs for corporations to create a presence in Second Life as cited in the Wired article may seem large, but are no doubt small potatoes compared to the total marketing budgets of these corporations. There may not yet be enough repeat traffic on Second Life for American Apparel or other retailers to develop and maintain an island right now, but there is some evidence that Second Life is starting to have legs. If it does take off then we are likely to see a second or third wave of businesses enter (or re-enter) the virtual space — which is very much what happened when the web matured.

This TrendGauge podcast features Jason Fry and was recorded on May 11, 2007 shortly after Jason presented the keynote talk at the NELINET Annual Meeting in Westford, MA.

Jason writes Real Time, a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal Online about how technology is changing our daily lives.

This podcast runs 12 minutes.

Listen to Jason Fry.

I recently came across an interesting article on the growing competition between Wikipedia,org and Conservapedia.org. Conservapedia in case you are not familiar with it is a right-leaning alternative to Google and Wikipedia. They claim that Google and Wikipedia are biased and are six times more liberal than the American public. How they determine that is not clear. Conservapedia began last November as a class project for fifty-eight advanced home-schooled and college bound students in New Jersey.

The rivalry has led to the development of a satirical site called Uncyclopedia.org which pokes fun at both. The article cites as an example that it notes that some call “Wikipedia a database of useless trivia, including lists of trains, Pokemon…villains from Mario games, road intersections, webcomics… God, Satan, life, the universe and Everything, as well as a thing they call articles.”

You can find the article which appeared in the Boston Sunday Herald May 13, 2007 p9 at

http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=1000968&chkEm=1

In case you missed it, Thomson Corp is attempting a takeover of Reuters. If successful, there would now be only two major suppliers for financial data and news. Inside Market Data reports that Bloomberg has 33% market share, Reuters has 23% and Thomson has 11%. Dow Jones follows with just 3% market share.

For financial information consumers this cannot be good news. There will be fewer choices for these resources. Fewer perspectives on a story being reported and less incentive to control costs.

The deal must still be approved by shareholders and regulatory agencies. Hopefully they will take a long look at this deal.

It is increasingly important for librarians to be aware of the growth of the new media outlets. USA Weekend reports that there are now more than 100,000 podcasts posted on the iTunes store. The word “blog” called up more than a billion matches on a recent online search. Users now watch more than a 100 million videos daily at YouTube.com.

Somehow librarians must learn to stay current on how their users are obtaining information in order to be able to advise them on how to use these tools effectively. If information professionals don’t work to stay current with these technologies, their users will pass them by.

Please click on http://www.usaweekend.com/07_issues/070408/070408ethics.html to view the whole USA Weekend story.

This TrendGauge podcast features Sarah Thomas and was recorded on March 28, 2007 shortly after Sarah presented at the NELINET seminar “Life on the Edge: Succeeding at Library Innovation” at our headquarters in Southborough, MA.

Sarah is the Bodley’s Librarian and Director of Oxford University Library Services. Formerly she was the University Librarian at Cornell University.
This podcast runs 9 minutes, 29 seconds.

Listen to Sarah Thomas.

This TrendGauge podcast features Jeff Trzeciak and was recorded on March 28, 2007 shortly after Jeff presented at the NELINET seminar “Life on the Edge: Succeeding at Library Innovation” at our headquarters in Southborough, MA.

Jeff is the University Librarian at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

This podcast runs 9 minutes.

Listen to Jeff Trzeciak.

There are a couple of articles in the latest issue of Wired magazine that should pose some interesting questions for libraries that are concerned about service assessment and the potential of the web to change or improve the assessment process.

In the article 2-Way Talk, the author, Daniel Akst, notes the importance of customer interactivity to improve everything from information from your doctor to the investment of creating new spaces in Second Life. Perhaps even more striking is The See-Through CEO, which speaks about “the new world of radical transparency,” which uses the company web sites and blogs as totally open and honest places to describe what is happening within a company – including acknowledgement of big mistakes. The new radical transparency is replacing the old and controlled press releases with the posting of internal memos and strategy goals. As the author of this article, Clive Thompson, this is “a cultural shift, a redrawing of the lines between what’s private and what’s public.” The corporate secrecy is being replaced with a communal mea culpa. Not only can the CEO post these messages, but staff throughout the organization are also able to do so. Most importantly, the customers are given an open chance to comment. As Thompson says “your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info - so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process and inviting them to do so?”

What does this have to do with libraries? Everything. Think about the millennial generation that is now in high school and college. As Thompson notes, they have grown up in an open internet world, and so “it’s hard [for them] to trust anyone who doesn’t list their dreams and fears on Facebook.”

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Library Journal announced the 2007 Movers & Shakers … and local librarian Casey Bisson, Information Architect at Lamson Library at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire is so honored! To learn more about Casey, read the LJ announcement.

The photocopier technology has changed in the past five years and most machines now scan images to a hard drive prior to producing copies. Unless the data on the hard drive is somehow protected by erasure or encryption it can be retrieved and get into the wrong hands. In a library setting one can image the types of sensitive documents that might be copied on these public machines. They could include tax returns, birth certificates and financial records. Libraries should take steps to make sure their copiers are secure and when possible safeguards on the data stored on the machine’s hard drive are in place.

A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life project, published on January 31, 2007, reports on how Internet users are organizing content on the Web. There is also an interview with David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Read the report entitled Tagging.

In keeping with the growing trend towards Internet journals, the non-profit Public Library of Science has launched its first open peer-reviewed journal called PLoS ONE. It is focused on science and medicine. This represents a major step towards changing the paradigm of how scientists release their research to the public.

You can access PLoS ONE at www.plosone.org

A recent article in the Worcester Sunday Telegram discussed that the trend to make web sites more engaging to readers may have the unintended consequence of making them inaccessible to the disabled. Screen reading software has a much easier time deciphering and narrating static documents than some of the newer ones that have “Web 2.0″ features such as software trees where clicking on little plus or minus signs expands data or rolls it up. Britain’s Royal National Institute for the Blind estimates that 80% of web sites have accessibility issues.
Companies are working on solutions to this problem. IBM is developing a system called iAccessible2 that addresses some of these concerns, but there is much work to be done.

The article is available at http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070121/NEWS/701210434&SearchID=73269841269212

Our friends at Google have moved their Librarian Newsletter onto Blogger. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up on what Google deems important to our community.

It has been a wild ride of late.  Private investment firms first bought Ex Libris, then the same firm bought Endeavor, and then a different firm purchased Sirsi/Dynix.  Why would they do this, especially given the fact that the library market is notoriously small, hard to please, expensive to support, and there has been recent interest and growing interest in open source software alternatives?  Are these investment firms simply in a rush to capture a declining market?  Are they looking to purchase a customer list, to sell off the systems piece-by-piece, or do they see the library management system rising like the Phoenix from the ashes to become an entirely new platform for information discovery?

The answers lie in ones view of where the world of information discovery and delivery is going.  For example, OCLC has an intriguing vision that builds upon their recent innovations with Open WorldCat and WorldCat.org, as well as their work creating group catalogs for libraries, to provide expansive access to library holdings.  If an NCIP-compliant circulation interface were added it could enable patron-initiated borrowing and circulation across different library management systems.  At the hub: the OCLC centrally-managed international union catalog.  This is a compelling vision – the library would need to manage only the truly local portion of the system (circulation) to leverage the advantage of being a part of a centrally-managed larger bibliographic access system.  

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In case you missed it an annual ranking of America’s Most Literate Cities was recently released. Seattle followed by Minneapolis remained at the top of the list. Boston dropped from seven to eleven this year. The ranking is based on data such as newspaper circulation, the number of bookstores, libraries resources, etc. The goal is to determine not if residents can read, but whether they do read.
It occurs to me that with the population of readers in our area, libraries should be sending out a message to the public of the reading resources that are available. It is a traditional message but one that may be lost with all the other programs and services today’s public libraries engage in.

To see the complete rankings go to www.ccsu.edu/AMLC06

Yesterday the Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings met with the Accreditation Forum to discuss her plans to “improve accreditation”. A meeting which was anticipated with apprehension because many feared criticism on the existing system and a call for further standardization. Read all about the results in today’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Three elements stand out: an increased focus on student learning, comparable outcomes and public availability of the institutional results. (more…)

Preparing my seminar on facilitating meetings, I had to make a decision. I could easily fill the time talking about preparation and procedures, but that is just half of the story. I felt that the ability to able to manage behavior is equally important to ensure the success of meetings. We all know circumstances, group history and dynamics have an impact on meeting results, but it is not always easy to detect and overcome barriers for effective communication during a meeting. So, these things should be addressed in my seminar.

When you start reading about managing behavior, it is amazing how universal the recommendations are. Take for example the articles in this month’s Harvard Business Review on trust, political correctness and managing A-players. Robert Hurley (in ‘Managing yourself. The Decision to Trust’) states that the degree to which one person trusts other people depends to great extend on his or her character and circumstances. Hurley identifies 10 factors that influence trust and which can be used by managers to create a culture of trust within the organization. (more…)

This TrendGauge podcast features John Blyberg and was recorded on November 17, 2006, shortly after John presented “The Library’s New Edge: Crossing the OPAC’s Threshold” at NELINET’s Robert L. Cunningham Bibliographic Services Conference at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

John is the Systems Administrator and Lead Developer for the Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was instrumental in the design, development and deployment of their popular new web site. He has also been responsible for the complete overhaul of their network infrastructure and the addition of many vital patron services. John has been named by Library Journal as a 2006 “Mover & Shaker”.

…move away from the search and move towards the discover…

In this podcast John talks integrating the OPAC with a library’s website creating a seamless face for the public.
References include:

• Westport Public Library (CT)
• Jon Udell’s LibraryLookUp Greasemonkey script

This podcast runs 9 minutes, 10 seconds.
Listen to John Blyberg.

This TrendGauge podcast features Ben Vershbow and was recorded on October 13, 2006, shortly after Ben gave the keynote address at NELINET’s Third Annual IT Conference at Bentley College. Vershbow is a writer, researcher and publisher at the Institute for the Future of the Book, a New York-based think tank and publishing lab connected to the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Librarians will save the world.

In this podcast, the second of two, Ben talks about the role of authors when readers are contributing content to a work, the role of librarians as expert researchers and, Wikipedia, the role of copyright in a world where texts are collaborative efforts, and the future of text-based scholarship.

References include:

• Larry Sanger’s Citizendium
• Wikipedia
• Creative Commons
• Lawrence Lessig’s Code v.2

This podcast runs 16 minutes, 21 seconds.
Listen to Part II of Ben Vershbow.

For those of you who have missed this piece of news, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education of November 10: the entire editorial board of the prestigious mathematics journal Topology has resigned over pricing policies of the journal’s publisher Elsevier. Apparently the high price of the journal ($1,665 per year in the US) is having an impact on the journal’s reputation and is believed to damage the mathematics community. According to Elsevier, this kind of protest is rare. Which might be true, but for academic libraries, it is invaluable support.

This TrendGauge podcast features Ben Vershbow and was recorded on October 13, 2006, shortly after Ben gave the keynote address at NELINET’s Third Annual IT Conference at Bentley College. Vershbow is a writer, researcher and publisher at the Institute for the Future of the Book, a New York-based think tank and publishing lab connected to the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California.

In this podcast, the first of two, Ben talks about the Institute’s work and the role of librarians and libraries in a world of networked books. This podcast is approximately 11 minutes long.

Listen to Part I of Ben Vershbow.

Two spanking new browsers released within a week of one another…what are we to do? Turn to our friends at Wired for a brief comparison. The big news with Internet Explorer 7.0 is built-in RSS subscription support, tabbed browsing, and strong web standards support…oh but wait, hasn’t Firefox had all these things for a while now?

Get downloading and installing today!

Second Life — a 3-D virtual world where users create avatars, design their own clothing, rent apartments, go to class, hang out with friends — now has several libraries! The Alliance Library System and the Second Life Library/Info Island announced the grand opening of Info Island over the weekend of October 12-14, 2006. A devoted group of librarians across the world have worked effortlessly to design and create an environment where Second Life residents can chat with a reference librarian, go to book discussion groups, even attend a stock market basics class given by a former consultant to Business Week. For information about the project and current goings-on, visit the InfoIsland blog.

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A recent article that appeared in USA Today cited some interesting statistics. Since March 2004, the blogosphere has doubled in size every five to seven months. There are now more than 53 million blogs. 150,000 blogs are created every day. Every day there are 1.6 million postings. 39% of blogs are in English, 31% in Japanese, 12% in Chinese and 2% in Spanish. 40% of people who start a blog are still posting to it 3 months later.

What this tells me is that blogs are a communication channel that is not going away and libraries must figure out a way to use them to reach users and outreach to potential users. Libraries should provide links to staff blogs off their websites and invest time in creating interesting content to draw in users. This is an inexpensive and convenient way to develop a connection to users that would not otherwise be possible. Staff members could share expertise and insights with readers that would not be otherwise possible.

Librarians should spend time researching library blogs to find out what other institutions are doing and think about how they could offer unique and enticing offerings on their own. Get out their and join the trend. All are welcome in the blogosphere!

This TrendGauge podcast features Dr. Leora Barón and was recorded on September 29, 2006. Leora is the director of the Teaching and Learning Center of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and has extensive experience in working with faculty and librarians in the arena of information literacy. Leora spoke with us the day she delivered her seminar Library and Classroom Faculty Collaboration at NELINET’s offices in Southborough, Massachusetts. Leora passionately makes the case for reaching students and advocating for information literacy programs through faculty. And she has a lot to share regarding the best approaches for outreach. This podcast is approximately 9 minutes long.

Listen to Leora Barón.

The Associated Press recently wrote about how the New York Times blocked British readers from a news article that described the investigation into the recent airline terror plot. The paper used their Internet ad targeting technology into a means of complying with British laws. Other examples of this blocking were also mentioned including the BBC’s limiting free access to landmark television reports outside of the British Isles and Major League Baseball’s restricting live online access to games involving hometown teams.
The bottom line of this story for librarians is that they should be aware that when searching the web-based version New York Times and presumably other publications is their access can be subject to local laws and probably other economic factors as well. Technology is a two edge sword in that it easily extends as well as limits access to information and librarians must be sensitive to this issue.

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings gave a speech yesterday (26 September) in which she outlined “her five-point ‘action plan’ for the future of American higher education.” Most of the press attention went to two points of marginal interest to libraries: streamlining the process of applying for federal financial aid, and creating an online database record to track the academic progress of students. However, there are two points that are much more relevant to academic libraries, and one that with application to public and school libraries. Unfortunately, this speech was apparently intended to float some trial balloons, not to provide specifics. In fact, the specifics for some of the five points will only start to develop beginning with some summit meetings in November, and other specifics will not be released until next spring. Nonetheless, we should be prepared to continue to track three items:

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At the close of the 20^th century, in the midst of the Internet Boom, now known as the Web 1.0, one of my favorite magazines to read was Fast Company. The magazine always featured stories on the companies and people who were driving what was universally referred to as the “New Economy.” Fast Company also had great layout design which made the journey even more pleasurable.

Well, as we all know, the Internet bubble burst and the Web 1.0 has given way to the Web 2.0. Lucky for me, Fast Company has survived the transition and continues to be one of my favorite sources of information. However, since we are in the firmly in the Web 2.0 world, I now get my Fast Company fix via an RSS feed online.

Recently FC Now, the Fast Company Blog, had a posting titled Web 2.0: the Movie and More. The post featured a video that assembled 13 CEOs of Web 2.0 companies (Browster, Technorati, Rojo, Wink, Edgeio, and Video Egg to name a few) to share their thoughts on what makes the Web 2.0, the Web 2.0.

There was a lot of very interesting Web 2.0 general information. Such as:

• The number of people on the Web is growing at a phenomenal rate (China has a lot to do with this)
• The nature of the up and coming digital born Millennium Generation has created a large chunk of Internet users who ALL act as early adopters of technology
• The key characteristics of Web 2.0 companies are search, tools/applications, content, and communities
• The business model of the Web 2.0 will continue to be advertising
• “Word of Net” is faster than “Word of Mouth”

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