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#echolib – the Seth Godin Uber-Echo Disaster

21 Jan

Just to add some more context to the discussion of moving beyond the echo-chamber (which is gathering pace on Twitter and in the blog comments here and in particular on Organising Chaos ) – I was discussing this whole thing with someone in an email, and it forced me to articulate the problem a bit more, so here’s an extrapolation of what I said.

The echo-chamber problem as it applies to the information profession, just to be clear, is good ideas being conveyed to like-minded people who then repeat it back to other like-minded people, who all agree about the ideas, but the whole process doesn’t ever reach the people who were not of like mind to begin with. Wikipedia describes the echo-chamber like this: “…any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space.”

The biblioblogosphere in particular is jam packed full of absolutely ace ideas, trends, memes, and inspirational people; the problem is how ‘enclosed’ the space is. I’m generalising here, but it seems like the people who really get the whole need to reinvent and revitalise libraries, and the role of the information professional, are the ones already online and reading what each other have to say. The dyed-in-the-wool librarians who like to kick it old-school and refuse to engage with the problems we’re facing, aren’t likely to be reading blogs, or sifting through Twitter, in the first place. So the initial problem is the best ideas are being kicked around in an enclosed space that only reaches people who start off receptive to exciting ideas, rather than getting to those who are resistant to change.

(A sub issue of this, as I’ve discussed previously, is that a lot of the newer professionals who spend time learning a whole host of insightful stuff via blogs etc, are not yet in a position of sufficient responsibility to apply what they learn to their 9-5 jobs.)

The wider issue is, we’re not reaching beyond the library in a lot of cases, either (or breaking out of the library ghetto, as Matthew Mezey so succinctly puts it!). So there’s me thinking I’m highlighting important issues at last year’s New Professionals Conference, talking about the way in which librarians are portrayed in popular culture, about how we are really, and about what we can do to change perceptions. But really, it was into the ech0-chamber – I was talking to other new professionals, and no one outside the library sector will have heard what I had to say, let alone been influenced to change their mind about librarians. (The version of that talk I gave at the CILIP Graduate Day was better in this respect, as non-librarians and potential librarians attended this.) I know some of the real uber-bloggers with thousands of followers do reach beyond the realm of the info pro, and that’s fabulous. But in a lot cases, the people getting to hear about all our cool new ideas are our existing users, and other Information Professionals.

The whole Seth Godin thing was something of a frustrating example of this. For anyone living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, Seth Godin is very, very popular and influential marketing guru, who recently turned the attention of his blog to the future of the library. Seth’s blog post asked the question, what should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age? The first sin, right there, is assuming we aren’t already relevant in the digital age. He went on to say: “Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.” Sin number two – this is a great idea, which is why we’ve been doing it for years already. And he also says: “…the net turns things upside down. The information is free now” which of course is massively over-simplistic (ie basically it’s not true) and so constitutes Sin number three.

What happened next was quite exciting, in that a lot of extremely articulate library bloggers took Seth to task on all the points above (and more) and really broke down what he said and set him straight. Andy Woodworth wrote an excellent article about it, in which he provided a list of quite a few of the other good responses, which I’ve copied here: SarahGlassmeyer(dot)com, Digitization 101, Lucacept, Neverending Search, Blue Skunk Blog, Schooling.us, Justin the Librarian, A Curious View of the World, The MLXperience, Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts, Library Idol. Of particular note is the post on theanalogdivide, which was one of the first responses to Seth’s original post and was widely re-tweeted (kicking off this whole thing), and has lots of extremely well argued points from Info Pros in the comments section – as well as a slightly bemused response from Seth himself; if you only have time to read two, read that one and Andy’s (his blog is the absolutely awesome Agnostic, Maybe).

This was inspiring stuff – a brilliantly reasoned, passionately articulated explanation of what we do, and a real statement of our value. The great and the good of online librarian presences combined to mount a spectacular defence of the profession, and of the library.

BUT. Seth Godin’s blog does not allow comments… so, the vast majority of the argument for the relevancy of libraries in the digital age etc took place in the enclosed space of the information professional’s online community echo-chamber. This is incredibly frustrating – because Seth’s global audience is massive, and will have all read his indictment of the profession, but the fantastic response from the profession will have fallen largely on the ears of our own community. And not only is he influential, he represents the views of a massive amount of potential library users – people do think libraries are not relevant in the digital age, they do think all information is free, and so on and so on. So the point of #echolib is to discuss how we can respond to this kind of thing beyond our enclosed space, and in the public arena…

- thewikiman

[EDIT: I have just had it brought to my attention that the Huffington Post article (which I'd read and enjoyed but shamefully forgotten to include in this blog post), was in fact written by Mr Theanalogdivide himself, Toby Greenwalt... This is a 100% proof fantastic example of well and truly escaping the echo-chamber - this is the kind of thing we need to be doing! So have a read of it, and take note of all the fantastically positive comments...]

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Posted in Information Professional Stuff, The Web

#echolib – how do we get library advocacy beyond the echo chamber?

19 Jan

Myself and woodsiegirl (@woodsiegirl on Twitter) would like to look into how to move library advocacy on beyond the echo-chamber. That is to say, not just tossing good ideas around among ourselves, and not just preaching to the converted – but reaching the unconverted too.

Plenty has been talked about the image of librarians and libraries etc, but how do we go about addressing the misconceptions on a wider basis? At the moment, I reckon a very (very) crude representation of library advocacy might look a little like this:

One-way traffic

The point being, the library skeptics aren’t really being reached, and many of the excellent ideas we have are going into the echo-chamber of our own Information Professional community.

So we’d like to look into this further, and see what people think. Please use the comments below, or on Woodsiegirl’s post, or particularly if you are on Twitter use the #echolib hash-tag, and let us know what you think. In particular:

What is the current state of play?
What can we do about it?
Who are the shining lights who can lead us by example?

Let’s try and get some debate going…

- thewikiman

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Posted in Information Professional Stuff

library apps

13 Jan

What are the possibilties for libraries and apps? I’d say there’s huge potential to develop bespoke library apps, lots of uses for Information Professionals of existing apps, and plenty we can learn from what other sectors are doing. While smart-phones are by no means universal yet, I think the majority of phones in say three year’s time will support apps, so it would be good to be ahead of the game.

This picture is so post-modern it doesn't NEED a caption

Existing Apps for Information Professionals

Joeyanne Libraryanne has already written a series of posts at the start of last year, about useful apps for the likes of us. Picking up on those:

I would second what she said about downloading Stanza to read e-books – it’s free, and so are thousands of the books. When you start reading using this, you start to see why so many are predicting 2010 as the year of the e-book – one in five apps sold is an e-book, and all that stuff. It’s so simple and so free. People talk a lot about the tactile nature of books, their smell, the desire to read them in the bath etc – that’s all fine, e-books don’t have to replace physical books, the two can work together (as Librarian Idol has recently said, this dichotomy between techies and book lovers isn’t so great as people make out). It’s like MP3s and vinyl – people LOVE vinyl, feel passionate about it, but they also make do with MP3s for the convenience of them. Imagine you’re going to a Conference in London (assuming you don’t live in London) with an overnight stay – do you want to take a small overnight bag with a couple of hefty books in, or do you want to just read a book on your iphone on the train? More to the point, you can choose the book while you’re on the train, and just download it there and then.
She also mentions the wordpress plugin that optimises your blog for iPhone users – there’s no excuse not to have this, just download it and switch it on and you’re away
There are a gazillion apps for Twitter now – I normally use Tweetdeck to synchronise my phone with my desktop. On the subject of social networking, there is also a LinkedIn app worth looking at.
For catching up on blogs you can just add Google Reader to your iPhone homepage (via Safari) and it behaves like an app – you access it via a button, you always stay logged in, and it fits the screen because it knows you are using an iPhone

On top of all that, the Guardian app is great, spotify is heaven for anyone who’s ever liked music, WiFi Zone or similar apps are good for finding the nearest wifi spots, and until you’ve exchanged personal details withsomeone via the Bump application, you really haven’t lived.

Apps we can learn from

Cultural apps are becoming more prominent – there have been a couple of articles in the Guardian about them the this year already. That article and this one mention the success of the Nick Cave book, “The Death of Bunny Munro, the success of which perhaps owes to its integration of text with soundtrack, audiobook and films of Cave reading, thus exploiting the unique capabilities of the iPhone/iPod Touch”. Now personally I’d say those are the unique capabilities of e-books per se, not the iPhone in particular – I’ve mentioned this here because I think the world of e-books has been crying out for a success story which shows readers (and library users, and ultimately e-book developers) that e-books aren’t just a compromise for when the real thing isn’t available (as sort of Pepsi to the printed book’s Coke…). e-Books have fabulous capabilities, being as they are a multimedia platform, which can be exploited to make them an exciting choice in their own right and not just an alternative to something else. Music, video, and words, for a more immersive reading experience. Excellent.

Also of note there is the National Gallery app, and a similar idea to that is the Louvre app. Have a look at this break-down of what the Louvre app contains – doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing we could be doing with our Special Collections? Lovely pictures of the artworks / rare books, visitor information, video tour – all stuff we could be well set up to cater for.

The LibraryThing app is a good example of someone library-related making a step into the app market and coming up with something people want – early signs seem to be that this will be successful. It applies the local-listings approach normally taken with gigs or bars, to sources of books. The Unquiet Library are early adopters.

Lots has been written about 2010 and Augmented Reality (the overlaying of exciting stuff on your camera’s view-finder, giving you what you can actually see plus something else, be it information, pictures, house-prices or whatever). The iPhone 3Gs has a compass, so using Google Maps it knows where you are and which way you are facing. Clearly, this allows for guided tours of museums etc, based on where you are in the building. The same could apply to a Special Collections exhibition, perhaps. But with augmented reality browsers, you could go further and provide key information about a particular exhibit you were facing, through the view-finder (like a Heads-Up Display) – not just historical info, dates etc, but perhaps filling in colouring where colour has faded, and that sort of thing. For a free example of Augmented Reality, check out the Acrossair app, and imagine what we could do with it in libraries.

The possibilties are endless…

Guided tours, ways of accessing library stuff from anywhere, awareness raising packages which could potentially become revenue-streams (we’re all trying to save money; let’s try and actually make money!) - there’s loads of possibilities, surely? Imagine an Augmented Reality browser that showed you the shelves you were looking at, and provided inf0 about where to find related materials. (And not just ‘they’re on level 2, on the left’ – but actual arrows to follow on screen.) Imagine, and this is something I was wondering about over in Joeyanne’s blog’s comments, harnessing the power of RFID for use in an app! Book not on the shelf? Point the iphone at the library and it’ll find it for you, and guide you to it… w00t!

Is that even potentially possible? I’d love someone with technical knowledge to tell me if it is… Either way, it’s exciting to think about what we could do, and any new ways to engage with wider communities is a terrific thing.

- thewikiman

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Posted in Information Professional Stuff, The Web

the importance of greedily grabbing at transdisciplinary opportunities…

09 Jan

Lesson 1: collaboration is fantastic!

Anyone who has read this blog a couple of times, or seen me talk at a CILIP event, will know I’m interested in the way we market ourselves. There are many strands to this – marketing our actual library and the service it provides, marketing librarians per se (a releated but distinct thing), marketing ourselves within our profession, and marketing ourselves AS Information Professionals, to the related disciplines and the wider world. ALL Information + Library Management Masters courses ought to have a marketing module to address these issues; insofar as I am aware, none of them do (I’d be delighted to be proved wrong, though).

One of the most exciting ways we can market ourselves to our wider community (be that an academic, public, health or law community – actually everything I’ve read on law librarian’s blogs suggests what I’m about to say wouldn’t work with legal types at all…) is to integrate the library or an aspect of the library with new projects which cross disciplines. If you hear about some new proposal and you think, there is a skill-set an Information Professional can bring to this / there’s a resource the library can bring to this, you need to march right up to whoever is in charge and start making things happen! If you can deliver what you promise, then you get a reputation beyond your own little sphere, and awareness of your institution grows in the community. Just by getting involved with something interesting and having fun, you’re doing a sort of double-whammy marketing exercise which benefits everyone, including the project you’re working with.

And of course, for all that people bang on about ‘pushing yourself outside your comfort zone’ etc, there’s actually a lot of truth in that; there are few better ways to learn new skills, than to put yourself in a situation which builds on your existing knowledge, but demands that you learn new stuff that your comfortable /normal job doesn’t teach you… And you can learn from the different kinds of people you don’t normally work with, too.

As you’ll probably have guessed, I’m moved to write about this subject because I’m currently in the process of experiencing it myself. As I mentioned in December’s Format is Dead blog-post, I attended an Away Day relating to the History of Print Culture towards the end of last year, at the Leeds Humanities Research Institute. This came about because a friend in the History Department, Rafe Hallett, mentioned an upcoming project (on Print Culture) which was a collaboration between 30 or so academics from different disciplines, who were looking for someone who had knowledge of print legacy and the digital revolution - specifically issues of preservation and so forth. This fitted in partly with my job of the time, but more so with the LIFE-SHARE role I’ve just started this week.

Now I am a weird mix of confident and shy (actually, it’s not all that weird, no need to page Dr. Freud – basically my Mum is shy and my Dad is confident, so I have elements of both…) so for example I had no nerves at all when presenting in front of 100 delegates at the New Professionals Conference, but when Rafe mentioned this away day, and the fact that he himself wasn’t actually going to be there for most of it, my immediate thought was – I’m not sure if I want to go on an away day with a bunch of academics who I don’t know, to talk about a subject I don’t yet know that much about, with the only link between me and them (Rafe) absent for most of the day! I thought it could be awkward, or embarrassing, and that I might have nothing of value to offer. THEN I thought (and one of the great things about keeping a blog like this and being a ‘reflective practitioner’ etc is that you feel inclined to practice what you preach rather than taking the easy option) this is exactly the kind of thing I should be doing, both for myself and for my library. So I went along, and, as is pretty much always the case with stuff I worry about, it was fine – I had a lot to contribute in the end, and I learned loads too. (For example, while we’re worrying about whether format migration is a viable means of preservation in the library, in the computing department they’re working on automatic format migration! Items in a repository would, of their own accord, seek the best new file-formats to convert to, and do so automatically at a time when both their current and new formats were running simultaneously – rather than, say, waiting till PDF is dead and then casting about for whatever has superseded it. How freaking cool is that?!)

Anyhow, there are now plans afoot for all sorts of exciting things to do with the comparative history of print culture (seminar series, interdisciplinary MAs, and a Centre purpose built for study and conferences in this area), and of course the library should be involved with this. We have a fabulous collection of rare texts, we can be a venue for seminars, we can provide research tools, and I can bring my own developing knowledge of the digital / preservation side of things. I’ve ended up creating a wiki (living up to my nom-de-2.0, eh?) for those involved to discuss ideas, discovering that the bit of me that could have been an academic is still alive and well and is thrilled to be discussing seriously academic stuff again… and I’ve ended up on the bid committee, helping to put together the funding bid to try and get all this stuff off the ground. It’s all terrifically exciting of itself, and even if we don’t win funding I’ll have learned a lot and had a great time. But more importantly, my involvement has ensured that the Library is involved as an intellectual partner in the whole endeavour – I’m very comfortable with the fact that for the vast majority of the time, libraries are just there to serve the community. But when there are chances to work with it in collaboration, these should be taken (as shown by Buffy Hamilton’s post on her recent collaborative experiences). This is in fact the first time a non-academic name (ie mine) has been listed among the bidding partners on a document like ours – the people who deal with the bid weren’t sure about it, but we’ve pushed ahead anyway because it sums up the transdisciplinary nature of the whole thing. And that, for me, is really exciting.

So in summary, I was taken out of my comfort zone, but it’s worked out brilliantly, and helped raise the influence of my library already, so these opportunities should be grabbed at. I’m not sure it had even occurred to most of the academics involved that a library person could be part of it, but they all seem really supportive and pleased now it’s happened – even if it’s not a zone the library normally operates in, if you can see a chance to integrate your institution with something exciting, go for it!

- thewikiman

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