library euthanasia, twapperkeeper, echolib, and New Professionals Conference

 NB: It's been pointed out to me that the links in this post are not working from Google Reader, for some reason. Apologies for that - while I sort it out, the links definitely do work online... If you are viewing this in Reader, then copy and paste this URL - http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=473 - into your browser to get a working version!

 COLLEAGUES /

:)

A whole bundle of little things in this post, starting with a link to a provocative blog post from the Library Thing Thingology Blog - have a look at this.

The central premise is a quote from a further blog post from idealog.com, about e-books killing book stores. The key part of that quote is this: "If you are for bookstores lasting as long as possible, you want to slow down the uptake of ebooks." The implication (in fact it's not an implication; the idealog blog post explicitly states this) is that we have to make an uncomfortable choice between attempting to slow down the uptake of new technology, or hastening the death of the book-store. Thingology extrapolates this to libraries, reasonably enough, and although it stops short of actually advocating strategically slowing the influx and influence of e-books, the blog post is entitled 'Why are you for killing libraries?' and the suggestion clearly is that we are being complicit in our own demise. It's thought-provoking stuff - I may save my own opinions for an entry to the LISNews Contest... But in a nut-shell,  I don't think we should slow down the technology, as we exist to facilitate access to information and if we can't do that we shouldn't be here. We need to adapt, or die, but quite honestly either of those is probably preferable to deliberately obstructing progress.

Anyhow. In other news, I've been guilty of not using twapperkeeperwhen linking to the #echolib debate on Twitter. When pointing people towards the discussion regarding how to move library advocacy beyond the echo-chamber, I've just linked to a search of Twitter- but this only keeps post from the last few days. Twapperkeeper allows you to archive all the tweets relating to any hash-tag - I'm sure most of you reading this use it already, but I thought I'd mention it just in case... Turns out Emma Cragg has already set up an archive for #echolib, so thank you to her - it has all the tweets on the subject, from the very beginning.

Myself and Woodsiegirlhave not just been collecting comments / articles / ideas on this echolib subject for reasons of idle curiosity, by the way - we're going to run a seminar on the subject at the CILIP Yorkshire & Humberside branch Member's Day / AGM in York on April 7th, so if you're around then do come along; we'll be pumping you for information and ideas as well as presenting our own! I'm hoping this'll be the first of a few sessions / presentations etc on the subject - and CILIP members, look out for an article in Update soon.

Finally just to say there is still time for a New Professionals Conference proposal submission! Submission details are here, and you can read the papers from last year for some inspiration, here. New Professionals, too, has its own twapper archive, for tweets using the #npc2010 hashtag - it is still in its infancy for now but we'll use in the run-up t0, during, and after the conference.

- thewikiman

why the new BL e-books announcement is important

It seems to me an obvious but oddly under-invested-in truththat the nicer something is to engage with, the greater the number of people who will engage with it. e-Books have suffered perennially from under-engagement - in the academic library, we've scratched our heads as e-journal usage stats go off the chart, but people continue to reserve physical books and wait for them to come back from loan, rather than consult the e-book online. e-Books haven't traditionally been that nice to engage with. They often lack some of the utility of e-journals and simply don't work as well, plus they suffer from the way we take in information these days. e-Journals are perfect for power-browsing for certain targeted pieces of information, but books still seem like a greater undertaking that doesn't suit on-screen reading. Plus, e-books suffer from comparisons withthe real paper thing: people 'love the smell / feel / look' of books, and can be left cold by the somewhat impersonal e-book, with it's dark size 12 Arial font on a plain white screen.

We're only 5 weeks into 2010 and already some barriers to e-book usability, engageability, seem to be dropping like dominoes - the very barriers which prevent a full-scale embracing of the format. Preceded by the Kindle and Nook, which invested in the format and unshackled the reader from the computer screen, the iPad has launched with its iBook store. There have been an enormous number of articles comparing the relative merits of the platforms and I don't want to rehash them here: suffice to say, the Kindle is better for long bouts of reading (having electronic ink as opposed to a back-lit screen) but really the iPad is sexier in every other way. It costs much the same as a Kindle, you can enjoy the touch-screen page turning experience, and, in any case, you can download the Kindle app for it... e-Books have become more pleasant to engage with at a stroke. They look nicer (full colour, for a start), they are now tactile to a certain extent, and the iBook store looks really tidy. Little things, like the attractive looking virtual 'shelf' with colour renditions of your purchased books on, make a big difference. If Apple has proved anything, it is that they can take existing concepts and make them so much more engaging that they suddenly seem vital to own - remember, there were loads of MP3 players around before the iPodcame along and changed the method of engagement, creating a Hoover-with-vacuum-cleaners-like synonymity (is that a word?) with the medium.

Lots of people have argued that the iPad doesn't do all that it should do, that it is a let-down, the lack of multi-tasking limits it and so on. But this is the first iteration. It'll get better. Most people who've used one say they struggle to convey just how nice the things are to hold and to interact with, so once we've had a go we'll all want one. And by the time the all-improved second or third generation versions come out, they'll be irresistible - or if they are resistible, it's because an iPad inspired rival does the same job even better. So what if it doesn't have a camera? It will do eventually, and in the meantime it'll change the way we engage with content. Either way, it's all good news for e-books.

People are often polarised about new technology - either it's 'THE FUTURE IS HERE RIGHT NOW' or it's 'this will never catch on'. In reality, it is often a mixture of both. The iPad won't completely revolutionise the world, but it's the latest significant step in an ongoing process of change. I think it's probably a very significant step, because Apple traditionally find ways to make people engage withthe same old content in new and exciting ways that somehow render the old ones a little too dull to bother with.

So, how does this all relate to the BL's e-books announcement? The British Library have announced they are shortly to offer free e-books, of out-0f-copyright works, staring in the Spring. You can read more about it here. The way in which they are digitising is significant, for a number of reasons. The difference between the BL's new e-book scheme and many existing digitisation projects is that the BL is physically digitising its own original 18th and 19thcentury texts. So rather than a version of Pride & Prejudice that looks not entirely unlike this blog post does, it'll be scanned from the original copy, with all that implies - original typeface, original illustrations, perhaps even yellower paper... As mentioned above, I think a lot of people have a problem with e-books because they are nothing like the physical experience of reading a proper book. It's not a problem to anyone born this century - they'll happily read anything in on a screen because it is convenient, just in the same way that we accept the fact that MP3 is a rubbish file-format and doesn't sound as good as vinyl, because that too is convenient - but for the rest of us the legacy of the printed word is very powerful. So the BL's digitisation of the whole object, rather than just the contents of the object - their decision to reproduce the original book, rather than just gives us the words - is yet another step towards engaging the e-book sceptics. 2 months ago, your e-book choice consisted largely of reading Austen (or whatever) on a slightly dated looking big white device with keys on it, and no colour on the screen, and just the words of the original migrated to the new format. As of the Spring, you'll be able to read facsimiles of the original first edition in full colour on a device which costs much the same as the ugly white thing, looks and feels fantastic, and allows you to listen to music, surf the net, edit Word docs and watch TV when you're finished! That's a big change in a small amount of time - e-books have gone from rather grey and utilitarian to attractive and tactile. And I think that'll make a big change to the way people engage with them. Which is great!

This ties in with some of the issues we're thinking about with the LIFE-SHARE Project I'm working on. With digital preservation, it may not be enough to just preserve the content of something - when migrating format, we need to preserve everything about the object so it really can be a surrogate copy; the contents pages and appendices and printing notes and the type-set and the blank pages before and after the main body of the text, all that stuff. In years to come, I think people will thank the BL for faithfully reproducing the old books, and giving readers who like the new technology a more authentic reading experience...

- thewikiman

library branding - the penultimate day of 5 Days, 5 Facts...

Nearly done… I feel like a man who’s decided to run a marathon without doing any preparation! I think I should have called it 5 Days, 5 Warnings, because they do seem to be more warning than fact – the first one about the digital universe expanding was pretty factual (albeit informed speculation) but the latter ones seem to be more 5 Days, 5 Conclusions Supported By Literature. Anyhow, look out for Day 5 tomorrow as it is, for me, the most important ersatz FACT of all…

Fact 4: your users don’t know what you are providing for them

I’ve gone for the more confrontational and potentially provocative ‘your’ users rather than ‘ours’ there, but I know that some of you, or the institutions you work in, will have already tried to address this problem and perhaps even solved it. I’d love some feedback on this one; if anyone’s been successfully branding library resources to raise awareness that library resources is indeed what they are, please leave a comment and tell me about it.

I work in the e-Resources team of an academic library (for another week and a bit anyway – aaargh, must finish writing hand-over document etc!) and so I get to see firsthand how little many people understand about the way in which digital resources are provided. This is quite understandable, because how can we expect people to know about the technical side of things? But what it basically amounts to is, they don’t realise the Library arranges, pays for and maintains access to many digital resources – whether that’s the obvious e-journals and e-books, the databases like Lexis Nexis, newspaper archives like the Times and the Guardian, streaming websites, online music libraries, Box of Broadcasts or anything else. So they type something they’ve seen in the library catalogue into Google, and then ring up the helpdesk to ask why they’re being told they need to pay for access…

The reason, of course, is that they’ve not gone in via our catalogue, so they’ve not been routed via our authentication procedures, and so the digital resource in question doesn’t ‘know’ they are from this University. This is problematic in that our users aren’t able to access what they want to, which is far from ideal, but of course it’s easily solved if they ask us for help. More worrying is the fact that it hasn’t occurred to them that the library is actually responsible for providing access to this stuff, and that is something of a failure of branding.

All of this is backed up by the good old UCL  / BL report from 2008, on the Google Generation, which summarises the findings of the OCLC's investigation of the situation like this:

‘books’ are still the primary library brand association for this group, despite massive investment in digital resources, of which students are largely unfamiliar [1]

I think by the time they get into Higher Education (rather than Further, which is what that particular report was covering) they’ll become familiar with them pretty quick – a recent graph tweeted by Dave Patterson (now sadly locked on flickr, maybe he’ll put it back up later) showed a very interesting and apparently direct correlation between grades and library use, and the people who were getting 1sts seemed to be using the e-resources more than everybody else was. But I think that even when they become familiar with them, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll become familiar with the fact that it is the library that subscribes to them so the students and academics don’t have to pay for access.

My own place of employment spends literally millions – millions with an ‘s’ at the end – on its e-resources portfolio. It takes up a huge chunk of the budget, and a lot of staff time to sort out. If people don’t know we’re doing this, they must be wondering what the hell the library spends its cash on every year. It’s important that people know what libraries were doing in this time of decreased funding etc, or the general perception might be that we’re not providing value.

We take some steps here to brand our e-resources, in particular the digitisation service I run. All our PDFs are placed in folders which we brand as library resources, and as well as the digitised readings themselves the folders contain information stating explicitly that this resource is provided by the library. It increases awareness, and also it separates our perfectly legal scans with any dodgy stuff the academics themselves put online – useful if we ever get audited by the CLA. But there’s not much we can do to brand e-journals – we’re just linking to them after all, and even though the URL itself actually changed to include the name of the University, most people don’t spend a whole lot of time reading URLs of sites they’re already on.

But you can advertise the fact YOU, the library, are paying for this stuff. Part of me thinks this whole thing is an old issue - and indeed, it's been a problem for absolutely ages, but another part of me just doesn’t see much evidence of libraries shouting from the roof tops about this sort of thing and actually solving the problem. As Barbara McDonald says [2]

Expose and brand content. Make sure people know you’re PAYing for things. Avoid vendor labelling; shout LIBRARY every chance you get

This issue was revisted recently by Alison Circle on the Library Journal - she linked to a selection of three articles on this subject, which are worth a look.

Anyone else have any techniques for increasing library brand awareness in this context? Let me know.

---

[1] UCL (2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future, p.7. Available via www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf  

[2] McDonald, Barbara (2009) “Building Library Systems” To “Designing UX” Available via http://works.bepress.com/barbara_mcdonald/15/