Xavier University's Web 2.0

In this presentation, they're showing off a kind of new student portal that borrows functionality from youtube, MySpace.

Xavier has a fairly radical organizational structure that completely sheds the "library" division. They have a discovery services department which seems to pick up some of the traditional library functions, as well as the content services division.

Interesting concept: inverted service pyramid...put the weight of staff into automated and self service services. Reserve in person services for specialized stuff.

People with young kids always put them in their presentations for a little comic relief; no exceptions here.

They also demonstrated a fairly traditional campus portal with library resources, people (librarian, advisor, dean), courses tailored to each student.

Educause 2007

Here I am up in Seattle, signing in for Educause 2007.

I flew up this morning from Portland to avoid the cost of a downtown hotel stay. This made for an early morning and missing the keynote session.

After getting signed in, I couldn't help but drift up the hill into the familiar Capitol Hill neighborhood, where I am currently situated in a coffee shop fueling up on a double Americano in preparation for the first of the regular sessions. I've spent a fair amount of time in this area of Seattle, especially back in the mid to late nineties. The divey Comet Tavern is close by, and I have a feeling I might be drawn there at some point.

Initial impressions of the conference are that it is huge and well-organized, leveraging IT in lots of ways.

One pet peeve of recent conferences attended: the ever present disposable tote bag. Out of principal, I am refusing to pick mine up this time. These things are worthless and serve only to advertise the vendor on the outside of the bag and fill up our landfills. Educause also is giving out free umbrellas...sort of a nice touch in Seattle. But they obviously don't realize that people in the Northwest hardly use them. We realize that a little water is pretty harmless.

Another environmental complaint: I've never received as much junk mail at work as after having signed up for this thing. Lots of garbage from software vendors and IT service providers. Some of them have even called so I've been using caller ID a lot.

As long as I'm on a roll, I notice that the official dress code for the conference is "business casual." For some reason, the whole business casual concept just ooozes a sense of blandness and mediocrity. I suppose I dress that way at work most of the time, but actually making this official recommendation for a conference somehow seems kind of lame. I prefer a more inclusive dress code--with everyone from jeans and t-shirts to Saville Row suits being okay. If we want cutting edge IT, we need to be open to a Googlely sort of dress code?

Access 2007

Reporting in here from Access 2007, the Canadian library technology conference.

Here are some of the major topics at the conference:

• next generation OPACs
• the ILS marketplace
• cyberinfrastructure and large scale research computing

From the "ILS options for academic libraries" talk this afternoon, one of the speakers talking about III likened user group conferences to Zombie movies. He was making the point that many staff at III libraries have sort of been lulled into complacency and might not be prepared for the moment when outside forces conspire to force a migration.

demise of the CIO

One of the themes that I've pursued in this blog has been the demise of centralized information technology in organizations. Nick Carr continues a familiar theme in his work on the decreasing strategic importance of CIOs:

We've entered the long twilight of the CIO position, a sign that information technology is finally maturing. Technical expertise is becoming centralized in the supply industry, freeing workers and managers to concentrate on the manipulation and sharing of information. It will be a slow transition - CIOs will continue to play critical roles in many firms for many years - but we're at last catching up with the vision expressed back in 1990 by the legendary CIO Max Hopper, who predicted that IT would come to “be thought of more like electricity or the telephone network than as a decisive source of organizational advantage. In this world, a company trumpeting the appointment of a new chief information officer will seem as anachronistic as a company today naming a new vice president for water and gas. People like me will have succeeded when we have worked ourselves out of our jobs. Only then will our organizations be capable of embracing the true promise of information technology.”

From my experience in the higher ed environment, I'd observe that leadership in the application of technology is critical. But it need not come from one centralized place in the organization.

outsourcing a public library

This is kind of a disturbing tale from down in Jackson County, Oregon. It appears that county officials are going to outsource the operations of the library to a company in Maryland. Are we going to start seeing this "franchising" phenomenon in academic libraries?

It seems to me that you'd lose some of that local connection to the community by having a library run in a McDonalds style fashion.

Flickr ideas forum

I just posted something in the Flickr ideas forum:

I work in a liberal arts college library that is building an institutional collection of digital images (primarily of art and architecture) to support teaching. Many other colleges and universities are doing the same thing.

The problem is, the digital asset management systems that we're using (MDID, ContentDM) aren't that great. They don't have the elegance and functionality of Flickr's web interface or image management tools. This is really a drawback, especially when we're trying to get faculty to build their own personal image collections online and share them with the institutional collection.

The other drawback of using these digital asset management systems is that they are isolated systems--they must be maintained locally and they don't share data nicely in a Web 2.0 sort of fashion like Flickr.

If Flickr had organization-level capabilities, it could potentially revolutionize digital asset management in this arena. The main things missing now are:

1. an organizational account designed for larger scale use, in which several users could administer images (different than current groups capability)
2. capability to authorize a large body of users without flickr accounts to see certain photos through IP recognition, LDAP authentication, etc. (necessary because some of the images we manage have copyright restrictions)

I realize that opening up the Flickr platform to organizations could alter the flavor of the community. But perhaps it could be done in a way that preserved the spirit of Flickr. Perhaps only organizational collections that fit certain criteria would be elgible for inclusion in the broader body of Flickr work.

Opening up Flickr in this way could enrich it.

Mark Dahl
Lewis & Clark College

on the Talis Platform

Something about these semantic web databases fascinates me, and Jeremy and I had an enjoyable conversation with Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist from Talis, about the possibility of using the Talis Platform to mount data from the Summit catalog. Given the time difference with the UK, it was about the time of the day where he was ready for, as he put it, a "warm beer" and we were needing our coffee.

At one point, I asked him what advantages we would get by mounting the data on the platform versus setting up a MySQL database on our own. As I recall he mentioned three major advantages:

• the platform is zero-setup and "web scale", no overhead of running a database server ourselves or scaling it to handle load; it resides "in the cloud"
  
• it is already optimized for handling MARC bibliographic and holdings data and building faceted next gen type catalogs around it
• its a semantic web type database; the data can be easily "augmented" with other value added data (bookjackets, wikipedia info) in Talis stores or outside the platform
  

I also learned that the platform can ingest digital objects and automatically extract metadata from them. This makes me wonder if the platform could be used for setting up lightweight digital asset management systems. Can the platform compete with something like Fedora? Many of their capabilities seem quite similar.