photo by Flickr user "Muffet"

Happy holidays from In the Library With the Lead Pipe! We had so much fun putting together our November 26 post, “Getting to Know You,” that we’ve decided to do it again! In the spirit of vacation and merrymaking, we’ve put together another trio of semi-personal questions selected and answered by yours truly.

1. What is your professional new year’s resolution?

Brett: It’s sort of a meta-resolution, but I plan to:

1. Make a list of the projects I’m working on (or that I’m thinking about working on);
2. Figure out which ones seem most likely to succeed in ways that are important to me;
3. Determine which ones seem likely to benefit the most from my participation;
4. Identify what I hope each one can achieve in 2009;
5. Specify what I’m going to do to help them get there.

Emily: Simple and completely unglamorous—to find another job for when my grant funding runs out.

Derik: To think more carefully about what I get myself involved in (no, not an allusion to this blog) and how much I get involved in it (I don’t want to dilute my efforts in quantity). Learn more programming. Learn more about learning and instructional design. Start my posts for this blog earlier.

Hilary: I’d like to diversify my professional reading, take a little more time to investigate online tools such as sproutbuilder.com, leverage our library system’s collection intelligence tools to programmatically manage data about our collections and use that information to do targeted marketing of our collections.

Kim: As we tighten our belts I resolve to more fully appreciate what I have: a great job with lovable colleagues, lots of variety, independence, and the freedom (if not the funding) to travel, explore the latest technologies, and try new approaches to my work. Heck, I’ve got one of the Best Careers for 2009 according to US News & World Report! Life is good.

Ellie: To incorporate more of the research I’ve been doing on instruction into my actual practice.

2. What are your three favorite novels?

Brett: Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace), Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides), and Cockfighter (Charles Willeford). I wouldn’t argue that they’re the best novels I’ve ever read (that is, the three novels I think other people should read) or the three I most wish I’d written or anything like that, but if I had to spend the rest of my life re-reading three novels I’ve read at least once, I think these are the three I’d choose.

Emily: I’m no good with favorite novels (my favorite book is non-fiction–Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks–but that doesn’t follow the rules). I’m not apt to re-read much of anything that is fiction. That being said, the fiction I am liable to strongly recommend are as follows: Doris: An Anthology 1991-2001 by Cindy Crabb (I find her narrative voice deeply moving), The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall (sad, hilarious, and gross all at once), and a novel by an acquaintance recently published that is on my to read list– Couch by Benjamin Parzybok.

Derik: 1) The Recognitions by William Gaddis: 900 pages of art, religion, 50s New York parties, fakers, and fun. 2) This is Not a Novel by David Markson: 100 pages of unattributed quotes, famous deaths, odd facts about artists, and more. 3) Le Chiendent (translated either as “Witch Grass” or “Bark Tree”) by Raymond Queneau: Philosophy as fiction, funny and deep, chaotic yet highly structured. (I didn’t even have to think about this one.)

Hilary: Honestly I don’t have a lot of time for pleasure reading now, but at one time I did. So, a few random titles: Five Hundred Years of Printing by S.H. Steinberg; The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, anything by Richard Brautigan.

Kim: I’m ridiculously all over the place when it comes to reading fiction. So I’m going to go with 1) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy for sheer moving tragic power; 2) Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey as a book that changed the course of my life; and as for 3) yes I’ll admit it, The Lord of the Rings trilogy by JRR Tolkien as the biggest, fattest, funnest book I’ve read every few years since I was a kid and enjoyed it immensely every time.

Ellie: Only 3, so hard. I’ll go with a childhood favorite that stuck with me - The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman, a high school favorite that got me bragging rights on an important final paper - David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and a recent favorite that I recommend to everyone - Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

3. What three computer or Web applications can’t you live without?

Brett: Firefox (w/can’t-live-without-’em-extensions Adblock Plus, CustomizeGoogle, Linkification, No Squint, and Scrollbar Anywhere), Dropbox, and rss2email.

Emily: Tab mix plus (the best Firefox extension to exist), Firefox, and I hate to say it, all of those lovely webapps owned by Google: Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Calendar. These might give me a bit of a guilty conscience, but they are so good with interfaces that I have just acquiesced.

Derik: 1) Tinderbox:  A wonderfully versatile application that I use to store my note and records for work, for planning presentations, and for plotting my comic, as well as the occasional html export. 2) Wordpress: It runs this blog, my own blog, and my comic’s site. 3) iTunes: Where would I be without my music, podcasts, and online listening to NPR?

Hilary: Google stuff, spreadsheet programs (stuck with Excel for now), starting to get into Basecamp for managing team projects at work.

Kim: Chalk me up as another Google addict. And I’m pretty sure I’d fall apart with Delicious + Firefox’s Delicious add-on. Clicking that button to pull up the whole list of my bookmarks in a sidebar in my browser… it’s sheer organizational beauty. Last on my list, as a more recent addiction, is the musical brilliance of Pandora.

Ellie: Another Google and Firefox disciple here, the imperative extension being Better Gmail 2. I run all my email through one main account thanks to the included Folders4Gmail and Gmail’s account option to “send mail as.”

We’d like to get to know you, too! What are your answers to the three questions above? Please post them in the comments below.

Please don’t fill your slides with words. Find some relevant and pretty pictures to support what you’re saying. You can use the pictures to remind yourself what you’re going to say next… Your presentation should be *very* incomplete without your narration.

This is something I have been working on since I started giving presentations professionally. I sat through a lot of bad presentations in the past few years, and, while some of them were bad just because the content was poor or uninteresting, many of them were just poorly formatted. In the comments on Aaron’s post, Kevin Driedger added:

…my thoughts on slides - they should illustrate the talk, like a nice illustrated book… (Comment #10)

This lead me to a subject my thoughts often settle on: comics. In this case the equation:

Presentation = slides + speech [1]

Comics = image + text

Earlier this year I started using hand drawn images in my slides (see this pdf for an example), instead of bulleted lists or photographs, but I hadn’t yet given much thought to the factor that is common to both presentations and comics: image-text interaction. A number of definitions of comics emphasize this factor, going all the way back to Rodolphe Topffer, the father of the comics form, who, in 1837 describing one of his histoires en estampes, wrote:

This book is of a mixed nature. It is composed of a series of line drawings. Each of these drawings is accompanied by one or two lines of text. The drawings, without this text, would only have an obscure significance; the text, without the drawings, would signify nothing. [2]

This interdependence between image and text is at the core of the form of comics, and the same concept can be easily applied to presentations. Not all presentations necessarily require slides (or words for that matter), as a lecture without slides or a silent slideshow also form a presentation. In that interim place between all slides and all speech, I preliminarily posit some types of slide-speech interaction [3]:

1. Slides and speech are redundant:

This is the classic boring presentation. A slide shows a list of bulleted items while the speaker reads them off or even worse reads whole sentences and paragraphs off the slides. This redundancy of two information channels is disengaging. Most attendees will read the list for themselves more quickly than the speaker can say them. The redundancy of text and image does not provide any space for friction, thought, or curiosity. In many cases, where the speaker is not significantly elaborating on the slides’ text, the speaker becomes peripheral and even unnecessary.

Old comics are great for this sort of tedious redundancy:

from Sheena, Queen of the Jungle 11 (Spring 1951): 9.

2. Slides and speech are independent:

This is veering into performance, but I can imagine a presentation where the speech and the slides tell separate narratives. This is not to say that the two narratives are completely unrelated; often the point is to draw on the conflict or similarities between the two. A library conference is probably not the place to be experimenting with such things though, unless you have something really well done and interesting planned. Even comics examples of this tactic are extremely rare, the most popular example being a short story by Chris Ware called “I Guess” [4].

Panels from Chris Ware's "I Guess"

3. Speech carries presentation:

At some point people stopped just talking and started using slides and other media. I can’t think of many examples of straight-up speeches that I’ve seen at conferences, other than some keynotes (by non-librarians) at ACRL. More common is a cursory use of slides that tend to be brief, visually dull, and do little to add anything to the speech. I used to make a lot of slides that would fall into this category, for instance:

One of my boring slides from 2006.

These slides were accompanied by lots of talking. The slides act as little more than placeholders, a visual signifier to back-up the speech and add a small portion of emphasis. This type of presentation is not necessarily bad, but it does require a speaker who is dynamic and engaging. Depending on the presentation’s content, this format may leave something to be desired in its ability to convey information in a complete manner. If I am speaking about a web application, having a number of screenshots in the slides can aid greatly in comprehension for the audience.

This type of speech and slide combination is rather popular, getting praise for Guy Kawasaki (who uses 10 slides with short words or phrases on them) or the “Takahashi Method” (using very large words). Another example of this is Lawrence Lessig’s well-regarded style. He uses a lot of slides with a small amount of text or simple images, but he displays them at a rapid rhythm. I find the visuals in the few presentations of his I’ve looked at online to be mostly superfluous, seeming to serve primarily as a visual attention grabber (give the audience something to look at) than as an additional channel of new information. Though, I shouldn’t ignore the utility of slides as attention grabber; it is a valid use.

4. Slides carry presentation:

This type of presentation is rarely seen at conferences. It belongs more to the classic vacation slideshow (”And this is the little cafe in Paris we went to on our first morning”) or, in current times, watching a slideshow from a Flickr photo set than to what someone would expect from a professional presentation. This may be the appropriate style for certain types of presentations, but one would need a good sense of design and visual narrative to pull off something like this successfully. Information that is process or space oriented might be the best candidates for visually driven slides that require little added speech.

Reader participation bonus section: Find me a good example of this in a presentation.

5. Slides and speech share duties in conveying a point:

I believe this is the ideal mode for most speech + slides presentations. When visually appealing slides complement the speech, the presenter can engage multiple senses of the audience members. The conjunction of the multiple channels of words and image (sound and image) can create a synthesized effect that is greater than each individual’s. This “wow,” sit-up-and-take-notice factor is one of the joys of comics. Even in the most basic of comics, something like a New Yorker single panel, the humor and the pleasure of reading comes from the picture and the text creating something that does not exist in either one independently. A similar sense of pleasure and creation can come from the well planned slide/speech conjunction, often through contrast, metaphor, or unexpected juxtaposition.

The following comic, for instance, would not have the same effect if the text or image were viewed separately:

Peter Arno from The New Yorker 12 Apr 1930

For brevity’s sake, I must here ignore numerous other complications that arise from considering the interaction between speech, text on a slide, and image on a slide. I will also leave out much discussion of how the rhythm with which the slides are changed can effect the presentation. The simplest of slides can be effective if they are quickly moved through, while more detailed slides could retain interest for long periods of time as speech is used to elaborate on the visuals (the classic example I can think of is an art history lecture where a single work is shown and discussed at length, though even this can be improved with detail views.). As I noted above, Lawrence Lessig’s slides are often not very interesting in themselves (a word or two), but he moves through them quickly enough that the viewer’s interest can be maintained.

Many people seem to think slides need lots of text so the audience can have something to take home and re-visit or so people who didn’t make the presentation can take advantage of the presenter’s information. Slides with little or no text would be mostly opaque on subsequent viewings. I would offer a few responses to this concern. A presentation is made for the audience, the people who show up to listen. A presentation done well should not be easily boiled down to a mass of text (else, why not just write an article or a blog post). It should take advantage of its particular form/media. The best method for re-visiting the presentation or archiving for those unable to attend is a recording. Cheap options are available to make multimedia presentations available online.

When I presented in Second Life a few months ago (which I talked a bit about in my previous post to this publication), I followed up by creating a recording of my voice over the slides. In this case I re-created the presentation, recording a new version of my speech–rather than recording the original live–and then syncing it over the slides. In this way, an interested party could watch my presentation in a form closer to the actual event than a simple deck of slides.

If you want to have a take away for the audience, printing out your slides is a cop-out. There are better options. I’ve previously handed out (posted) my speaking notes as a complement to slides, allowing for viewers to at least get the main points I spoke about to accompany the slides. A simple sheet (half-sheet if you want to conserve paper) of main points and, if appropriate, urls or citations can act as a reminder and reference for attendees when they get back from the event.

Creating a presentation that utilizes an interesting combination of speech and slide does take more time and effort than a bulleted list. Besides the conceptual effort, the actual creation of the slides can become time consuming. You can create your own images (drawing, photography, etc.), but even for those without such skills, plenty of options are available to take advantage of other’s artistic work. Free photos are available through various Creative Commons sites (like Flickr’s) and there are numerous options for clip art–good clip art (check out the many options from Dover books) not that clip art that comes with MS Office [5].

The presentation of information should be important to our profession. After all, the fourth of the ACRL Information Literacy Standards includes:

3. The information literate student communicates the product or performance effectively to others.
Outcomes Include:
A. Chooses a communication medium and format that best supports the purposes of the product or performance and the intended audience
B. Uses a range of information technology applications in creating the product or performance
C. Incorporates principles of design and communication
D. Communicates clearly and with a style that supports the purposes of the intended audience

I’m not sure how directly practical all of the above is, but I hope it at least gets people thinking about the topic. Presentations can be interesting for many different reasons, and one of them is the form. I realize some of the forms above might be too “arty” for most presentations, but I don’t think it is outside the realm of reason to add more art to our conferences. Art can convey information as well (if not better) than dry technical work. Creativity should never be overlooked in our work.

Next time you are making a presentation, set aside extra time to work on your slides, not just to make them but to think about them and how they will interact with what you will say. If we challenge ourselves and our audiences, we will not only have more interesting presentations, but we will all get our brains working a little more.

Further Reading:

There are tons of books and websites about slides and presentations and the dreaded Powerpoint. There are also hundreds of books on design. You can also learn a lot from just looking at art and design and examples of great presentations. You might start with: Presentation Zen.

Thanks to Aaron Schmidt, Kim Leeder, and Ellie Collier for comments on the content and Lianne Hartman for editing.

Image Credits:

“Sheena” image is in the public domain. Drawing by Robert Webb. “I Guess” image copyright Chris Ware. Arno comic copyright The New Yorker.

Notes:

[1] I’ll admit that we could consider a speaker’s movements and body language a third factor, but that’s a whole other topic, one that is rarely put to use in librarian presentations I’ve seen. This is a channel of information that is particularly missing in the webinar format.

[2] Quoted from: Kunzle, David. History of the Comic Strip vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. 46.

[3] Borrowing a bit from Scott McCloud’s Understand Comics where he describes and names a number of image-text interactions.

[4] From Raw 2.3 (1991).

[5] I’m told there is a good collection in Word from iStock Photos. It’s not on my Mac, so I haven’t seen it.

The impetus for this blog post was an email that has been making the rounds, originating from Dr. Richard Price of Oxford University, that reads as follows:

I recently finished my Ph.D on the philosophy of perception from Oxford. With a team of people from Stanford and Cambridge, I’ve just launched a website, www.academia.edu, which does two things:

- It shows academics around the world structured in a ‘tree’ format, displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations.
- It enables academics to see news on the latest research in their area - the latest people, papers and talks.

We are hoping that Academia.edu will eventually list every academic in the world — Faculty Members, Post-Docs, Graduate Students, and Independent Researchers. Academics can add their departments, and themselves, to the tree by clicking on the boxes.

The message concludes with the names of a few notables who have joined (or been added) to the site, and a request to assist Dr. Price and friends in their efforts by further circulating the announcement.

Call me a sucker, but I got that message and immediately joined up, forwarded it to my colleagues, and started envisioning the possibilities. What intrigues me is Academia.edu’s combination of a professional networking site with a digital repository. Could this take the place of our nascent institutional repository or save my fellow librarians from having to put together an institutional bibliography each year?

A screen shot of Academia.edu's homepage.

The networking-repository hybrid model was new to me, though I learned later that Academia.edu is not the first to do this. Nor is it the only virtual platform where researchers can create a profile and search for others with similar research interests. A lot of people in academia already use Facebook and LinkedIn to connect with their colleagues and friends, but Academia.edu and its competitors are different because they were specifically created to serve the needs of academics, in terms of research, professional networking, listing citations, and file sharing. Try some of those activities on Facebook, and you’ll soon agree that it falls far short of an academic’s networking needs.

Here’s an overview of the major academic networking sites and their features (if you know of others I overlooked, please comment below). All allow you to create a profile and search for other academics by research interest, so I’ve omitted those features in the table.

In addition to the characteristics above, these are the qualities that make each site unique.

• Academia.edu: Networking for academics in all fields. Offers unique visual format with organization by institution. Features Facebook Connect.
• BibApp: Must be hosted on your server for campus-specific organization of faculty experts and research. Functions more like a catalog of faculty than a networking site, but could be used either way.
• Epernicus: Networking targeted for scientists. Features “BenchQs,” which is like Yahoo! Answers for science.
• Graduate Junction: Networking for graduate students that professes to be less intimidating than professional sites. Offers a conference diary & job listings.
• Labmeeting: Networking for scientists in the biomedical and related sciences. Offers features to assist in organizing and sharing information in lab settings. Also includes strong privacy protection.
• Pronetos: Networking for academics in all fields. Organization by discipline, and offers discussion forums for each discipline.

I’m going to use the remainder of this post to critically review these academic networking sites, looking at the benefits, limitations, and possible future outlook.

The Good

There are two major benefits offered by participation in most of the sites I’m looked at, especially Academia.edu and Pronetos:

1. The ability to locate other scholars with similar research interests.
2. The power to upload papers, articles, and even books to contribute to a worldwide digital repository.

As far as #1, the networking aspect goes, it would be natural to ask why any of these sites are an improvement over the ubiquitous Facebook. Who needs another social network, for goodness sake? Vivek Murthy, one of the founders of Epernicus, addressed the question in a post on the Epernicus blog: “Mikhail and I started Epernicus because we realized that the social networks to which we belonged weren’t able to serve our needs as scientists. The profiles didn’t capture what was important to scientists. And equally as important, we couldn’t use these networks to help us find expertise in real world scientific networks.” If they had a question or issue unique to their research that no one they knew personally could address, they wanted a way to find others out there who might know more. This is not what Facebook was built for.

In theory, the opportunity to share research interests and connect with other scholars sounds idyllic. Finally, the chance to find out who’s walking the same path and reading the same articles. It’s like eHarmony for the brain instead of the heart. If there is a need and a demand for such a thing, it could really take off.

Personally, I get more excited about #2, the digital repository side of this project. The sites that actually host files, especially Academia.edu and Pronetos, are contributing to the open access movement in ways they may not even realize. Although those of us in libraries already know that faculty usually don’t want to take the additional time to post their papers to our repositories, these two sites could be different because (a) they’re easier to use than any library repository I’ve ever seen, (b) they’re prettier, and (c) they make it clear that the papers uploaded will be shared with others instead of stored in a dusty server room, never to be heard from again.

The Bad

First, any social networking site, whether personal or professional, is only as good as its membership. With that in mind, I would say that all of these sites have a long way to go in soliciting members. Academia.edu appears to be the largest, at about 20,000, but this is still a small percentage of academics worldwide. GraduateJunction may have the greatest potential in this arena due to its specific target audience (graduate students) and the fact that it boasts more “useful” (job and conference) features than the other sites in this review.

Second, although I initially found it entertaining to search for others with similar research interests to mine, once I found a few I realized that I just didn’t know what to do with them. I could add them as contacts and review their publications. What then? If I were extremely motivated perhaps I would email them and say a few words in our unique research interest language (”speaking geek,” I think they call it). But how often would such contact lead to something constructive? The more I searched, the more skeptical I became.

Third, academic networking sites are facing big challenges in finding an effective way to ensure that only legitimate academics participate. The UK Times Higher Education expressed concern about Academia.edu because “anyone can pass themselves off as an academic…and scholars could be misled into putting their details on it because it occupies the generic top-level domain ‘.edu,’ which is normally reserved for universities.” On the other hand, some sites are so careful to screen members that they seem almost impossible to join. Despite repeated attempts, I was unable to join Labmeeting or Pronetos due to their screening standards. Pronetos sent me an activation message that somehow disappeared into cyberspace (and no, it wasn’t in my spam folder), while Labmeeting did not recognize my university email address as being from a legitimate academic domain (my university president would take issue with that!).

The Ugly

All in all, social networks of any variety are a curious tradeoff. How much time are you willing to put into them in order to expand your web of connections? In writing this blog post, I spent 8-10 hours crawling around on the various sites mentioned here, creating profiles, exploring group and research interests, checking to see if I knew anyone (or wanted to know anyone) on any of the sites. I found many of the sites appealing at first, and enjoyed some of my wanderings. But now that I’ve had some exposure to these platforms, returning to Facebook feels kind of like going home. True, I can’t search for other scholars based on my research interests. But considering how many other avenues I have to find them — from publications to blogs to conferences — do I really need a new one?

As Jeffrey R. Young noted in “New Social Network Hopes to Catalog All Researchers and Their Interests,”an article in the September 16 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, “It’s too soon to tell whether any of these sites will catch on, and it seems that the services will only become valuable if a critical mass of researchers join in. The final winner may be Facebook itself.” So, are these new-kid-on-the-block academic networking sites worth your time? Based upon my admittedly limited experience on these sites, probably not. But if you have some free time, go for it. Create your profile and see who else is out there. You might get lucky.

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Many thanks to Brett Bonfield and Ellie Dworak for taking the time to offer feedback on the draft of this post, and to Brett for his coding kindnesses.

Thanks to Inju on Flickr for this image. (Exercising in National Library Singapore)

Librarians are great at taking care of their patrons. We will conduct searches for our patrons and provide them with the resources they need, we contribute to the public good and offer ongoing educational opportunities, and we provide community space in the name of discourse and community building. We also testify in and lobby Congress in support of legislation that affects our work—all in the name of taking care of our patrons. But to what extent do we take care of ourselves?

I’m talking about workplace wellness. This is an issue that seems largely ignored in library land, an issue that may cause eye-rolling and cause some of our Lead Pipe readers to stop right here and move along to the next post in their feed reader.  But workplace wellness is an issue that seems to be largely ignored by libraries, librarians, and library organizations. Literature searches in library and information science databases return very few relevant articles on the subject. Why?

Before I attempt to answer this question I’d like to propose a working definition of workplace wellness.  Wellness in the workplace refers to an employee’s mental and physical health. Many businesses and organizations have implemented workplace wellness. Examples include the facilitation of lunchtime walking groups, providing on site massage appointments, and offering classes and lectures regarding wellness. Also included would be programs supporting employee health; providing free flu shots and health screenings, providing ergonomic work stations, having healthy snacks available, or even allowing workers flexible schedules to take care of their physical and emotional health as needed. According to this loose working definition it’s likely that every library has some sort of wellness program, but it seems to me individual and organizational buy-in aren’t that widespread in the library community.

I assume that the reason workplace wellness hasn’t caught on in libraries is a combination of the following reasons. First, wellness programs that do exist usually happen within a broader institutional context. Since most libraries are part of an academic institution, county or city government, or some other larger bureaucratic model, wellness initiatives seem to occur at a higher institutional level, and, as such they haven’t become top priorities for many libraries. Second, librarians are hard working dedicated people, who may not feel they have the time or even the desire to participate in a wellness initiative. Third, wellness programs haven’t been heavily marketed to libraries and librarians, either by their institutions or by profession-wide initiatives. Fourth, wellness programs cost, and most libraries are already run on tight budgets. Finally, wellness may not be part of a library’s organizational culture, or it might not even been an organizational value. It is this fifth factor that is perhaps the most prohibitive to the overall wellness of library employees.

A healthy and well library staff will provide better services to its patrons. Providing for and assisting employees in this regard will mean that they can work more efficiently and effectively. Of concern to many administrators should be the fact that wellness initiatives will save the institution money in health care costs when workers have fewer physical and mental health problems. One of the best examples that support this is ergonomics.

Wellness in the workplace constitutes a web of factors that can determine the status quo level of health and wellness experienced by employees at your library. Many of these factors may seem irrelevant when considered on their own; however, when placed in conjunction with others, they work collectively to either create or hinder employees’ well being.

The first two factors affecting workplace wellness are simple—your library’s physical space and physical location. How the inside of your workplace is designed affects how much you move at work. (E.g. is there an elevator, how far do you have to walk to place something in the recycling?) The library’s physical location can also affect workplace wellness. (Is there a tempting restaurant nearby or are you close to a park with walking trails?)

The third factor isn’t as cut and dry—organizational culture and values. These can greatly impact wellness at work. For example, many librarians work hard and long hours, which can lead to skipping breaks, even skipping lunch or eating at our desks in front of a project. These habits do not contribute to having a healthy workplace. For one, it reinforces the sedentary nature of library work, and second, it doesn’t allow an individual the mental break that one needs to best achieve work efficiently.

Food is also a large part of culture at many libraries. At one library where I used to work, there was a “chocolate drawer” behind the reference desk. Whenever we had a particularly trying interaction with a patron we would medicate ourselves with chocolate. Other libraries might have a tradition of pastries at department meetings, or social events, which usually include food.

However, changing an organization’s culture is not an easy thing. And if there’s anything that organizations are not quick to do, changing the culture and our values are it. So how are we to tackle this issue? How do we even frame an argument for starting wellness initiatives within our workplaces? First, we have to work to create wellness as a value within the workplace. At institutions where a wellness program already exists, but is not culturally adopted by the library, how do you get the library to do so?

I’d like to offer some suggestions as to how we can begin to tackle the organizational culture and values regarding wellness issue in the places of our employ.

• Conduct an informal evaluation of your workplace to find supporting factors and hindrances to a healthy work place.
• Ask for institutional support based upon your informal evaluation or observations. Paired with the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, this might be a convincing argument that your supervisor can send up the management chain.
• Start a wellness committee and task yourself with developing a wellness plan for your library.

But what if your place of work/administration is not understanding of your plight?

• Be aware of your habits at work. Wear a pedometer; take a walk during your lunch break (and invite your colleagues to join you), consider ergonomics, etc.
• Investigate whether your larger organization (city, county, institution) has a wellness program and participate in that as an individual. Then try to market it to your fellow staff.
• If you create community programs in your library or conduct outreach work, try to plan and implement programming about health and wellness.

There are some resources and initiatives that do exist regarding wellness in libraries. Most notably, ALA Past President Loriene Roy created the Circle of Wellness as one of her presidential initiatives. This web site offers resources for individuals to use to assess wellness attitudes in their library, as well as track their personal wellness goals. These resources offer a good starting place for you if you are interested in investigating wellness at your library.

The healthiest work places already have an organizational culture of wellness and value health as an institution. If this is not the case in your library, establishing a culture of wellness will happen very slowly. It takes quite a bit of energy and work to change and shape organizational values and change begins with the action of one or two motivated and dedicated individuals. It’s time we take care of ourselves and take the steps to create healthier work places. In the long run, our health and wellness serves our well-being and also our ability to provide the best services to our patrons.

Many thanks to Phil Eskew (one of the best instructors I had in library school), and Miriam Rigby for offering feedback on this post. Thanks also go to fellow Lead Piper Derik for reading this prior to posting.

Thanks to moqub on Flickr for the pic!

1. If you could choose one thing to change about libraries, what would it be?

Emily: I would like to dismantle the notion that libraries and librarians are politically neutral. We, as individuals, professionals, and as a professional collective, have a vested stake in what happens to so many items of legislation, state and federal funding, intellectualism and ideas. Mind you, I am not advocating to eliminate discourse from our communities–representing many view points–however, I think we do libraries and patrons a disservice when we claim to remain “neutral.” None of our decisions–what book vendor to use, which software to use or system to implement, what circulation and other policies to create and enact–are made without our personal influences and experiences. Why are we so scared to claim our bias? Isn’t our bias based in our experience and our mission to serve our patrons and communities? Can’t our bias be that, which benefits all?

Ellie: I would change the speed. Coming from a television background where we were setting up an office (location, furniture, computers, etc.), casting a show and breaking down (returning everything, archiving materials, etc.) in 3 to 6 months and 24 hours was far too long a turn around for most things, the speed of doing anything in libraries seems glacial.

Brett: I want a WorldCat, only with Open Library’s license, for serials. I don’t mean volume-level information. What I want is to be able to find, instantly, all relevant information about every article in every journal, magazine, and newspaper. And I want libraries to collectively own, and freely license, the information that makes that search possible.

Hilary: From the birds-eye-view on down to a particular component, I would like to see libraries function in a world where it’s easy to get at the composition of materials in context with the use of resources, the volume of content and extrapolate out to see the rate of growth of continuing resources alongside the cost over time, the state of licenses and the history of decisions behind subscribing or canceling resources, etc.  And an ideal system would be able to show where and how our local constituents are interacting with our collections and services. It should be a lot easier than it is to get at some kinds of information about your collection to adequately serve collection intelligence needs for assistance in strategic collection decision-making.

Derik: I wish more libraries (historically) collected and cataloged comics. If I want to study most subjects I can get sources from libraries, in print and online. In studying comics, I have to rely on sources I buy myself. The public library I worked at had hundreds of Harlequin romance novels, but no comics (except a few contemporary comic strip collections).

Kim: I would turn libraries into for-profit companies. Not because I want to make lots of money, but because looking at our organizations as businesses instead of a public good might actually help us do a better job of using our resources effectively and better serving our “customers.” At the least it would force us to be more active and competitive among other information businesses (such as, dare I say, Google?)

2. What would you be doing if you weren’t a librarian?

Derik: I’d stay home and make my recreational activities my professional activities. Spending all day drawing comics and writing criticism would be my ideal job. I have few illusions about that happening (unless my wife becomes rich); librarian is a good second place. The times I work comics/art into my librarian life are extra special (like the drawings for this site).

Emily: I would either be working in development (money grubbing) wondering if that’s really what I should be doing, wondering if my work were soul-less and contemplating grad school, or being just another Portlander who can’t stand to leave the West coast hippie utopian mothership city of bicycles, coffee, indie rock, DIY culture, and microbrews. Wait a minute….

Ellie: When I was considering library school the other thing floating through my mind was marine biology (specifically the deep sea), but I can’t get past how many creatures you have to kill to learn about them, so I’d probably stick to the reading type of research, preferably for nature documentaries.

Brett: I’d probably have remained a fair-to-middling fundraiser, and I almost certainly would have been an even more frustrated novelist. If you write a book-length story but don’t show it to anyone in the publishing industry, is it still a novel? And if you write a second and won’t submit that one either, are you a novelist, a loser, or both?

Hilary: I started out as a botanist and ended up as a librarian, so somewhere in between with dirt firmly packed under my nails would be where I’d find myself if I were not a librarian.

Kim: I expect I would have gone back to school for a degree in a field related to animals, plants, or the environment. Maybe I’d be a vet or a wildlife expert tracking herds of wild something-or-others around Yellowstone. That would be good fun.

3. What did you do, before becoming a librarian,
that did the most to prepare you for your current career?

Derik (realizing he missed the “most to prepare” part of this question, on that front it was all the time I spent shelf reading in the public library): I went to art school, a major part of which are “crits”: the class puts up work and critiques each other. In that situation you learn not to take criticism personally and how to think/look critically — helpful in many situations. I only wish others were able to not take criticism personally and apply a more critical eye to various ventures.

Emily: In college I learned how to think critically. So much about librarianship depends on our ability to make intelligent and informed decisions and to use creativity and thinking skills.

Ellie: I would say the research I had to do for the papers in my book history classes is what taught me how to really, fully use the library and my work in television prepped me for all the personalities I’ve run into on the administrative side of things. Oh, and being born to a Systems Architect prepped me for the techy side :)

Brett: In my last year at college, and in my first year after I graduated, it was my job to interrupt people during dinner. You know those nonprofit workers who call you on the phone and ask you to give money to causes you would happily support if only you had more money? That was me. What I learned from that job was that it didn’t matter what I said, what towns I was calling, or how much people had given before. What mattered was my attitude.

This became clear the night after my first date with the woman who sat in front of me in African-American Literature of the 1960’s. Aside from my wife, she had the most beautiful neck I’ve ever seen, and this early-90’s bob that brushed just along her nape. We just had pizza, but I was flying high the next day. Donors couldn’t reach their Visa cards fast enough.

Now, just seven months into my first job managing a library, I draw on that lesson daily. My neighbors, colleagues, board members, and Friends are fantastic and want very much for the Library to be great. It’s up to me, in every interaction, to reinforce their belief that the work they do to improve the Collingswood Library is energy well spent.

Hilary: Convinced that I would never become a librarian, I worked in libraries through undergrad and initially during my first stint in grad school to help fund my development into being a plant systematist (a botanist who studies plant evolution and diversity).  It was doing research for other people and then doing research for myself that taught me how to make the most of information resources.  Plus, there’s a decent amount of overlap in the way species are conceptualized and the way library resources are organized.

Kim: For my first Master’s degree I wrote a thesis on a slightly obscure historical character whose memoirs, papers, and reports were not largely available. As part of my research I spent long hours reading and copying microfilm, took a road trip to review the Bancroft’s collections, and dug, dug, dug, for anything else I could find. I sure did enjoy the search, and learned a lot about libraries in the process.

Le Mundaneum à Mons (Belgique) © dalbera / CC-BY-NC

Depending on books can feel like relying on snail mail. “Now that I’ve showed you how to find some articles,” I say to people at the reference desk, “I’ll show you how to use our website to find some books you might want to check out. And after that, wouldn’t it make your grandmother’s day if you wrote her a letter?”

For anyone accustomed to the Internet, books can lack the immediacy of articles or websites. Books generally have slower developing narratives, and often have longer paragraphs, sentences, and words, which means they don’t lend themselves to skimming. Compared to digital material, relevant passages can be hard to find, and even finding the right book can be challenging.

Although library websites are improving, keyword searching doesn’t work well at most libraries and faceted browsing—the links down the left side of the page on Amazon—is still a rarity. More importantly, with one notable exception, there is a good chance that nothing on the shelf that is “printed on paper and constructed on the model of the codex” includes the exact information you have in mind.

This is where universal catalogs come into play. If there’s nothing on the shelf that meets your needs, the next step is to figure out if such a book exists. There are five websites that provide relatively complete and easily accessible lists of books: Amazon, Google, LibraryThing, WorldCat, and Open Library. In order to make the best use of these websites, it can be useful to learn how each of them started, what keeps them going, and how their business models and practices affect the data they collect and and how they go about sharing it.

Amazon

It’s tempting to think of Amazon as a technology company. That’s how Werner Vogels sees it, which is understandable: he’s their Chief Technology Officer, and he seems to have done a very good job of it, because Amazon’s technological initiatives have taken a leap forward since Amazon hired him away from Cornell in 2004. Over the last couple of years, Amazon has made its mark as a service supplier, rewriting the rules for online hosting with its Amazon Web Services; it has developed a successful consumer electronics product (the demand for its Kindle e-book reader consistently exceeds supply, and it seems to be extraordinarily popular with publishers as well: they have made almost 200,000 titles available); and it has also made use of its infrastructure with offerings as diverse as its Mechanical Turk and Fulfillment services.

But if you look at its revenue stream, it’s pretty clear that Amazon has very little in common with a traditional technology company, such as Microsoft, its Seattle-area neighbor. Instead, Amazon is probably most like a different neighbor: Costco.

Amazon’s founder, Jeffrey Bezos, seems to have a firm grasp of three important aspects of retailing:

• Look for items that can be sold in near limitless quantities (such as “books, music and videos”);
• Figure out how to sell them profitably but with minimal markup (“He said he would ‘relentlessly slash prices,’ even if it cut into incremental profits, because he was convinced that it was the right thing to do”); and
• Focus your energy on building customer loyalty (“Satisfaction surveys show that Amazon enjoys a golden reputation among most of its 49 million active customers”).

Similarly, Costco’s founders, James Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman, stock their retail outlets to the rafters, refuse to mark up items more than 15%, and, in their most recent report to shareholders, they note, “This past year we also enjoyed the highest membership renewal rate in our history at 87%, attesting, we believe, to the high level of satisfaction our members have in our products and services.” Think about the things you typically shop for at Amazon: are they more like what you buy from Microsoft or are they more like what you buy from Costco?

Because of Amazon’s size, breadth, and ubiquity, it can be easy to forget that its original business model was pretty basic: it resold books it bought from Ingram and Baker & Taylor. As Tim O’Reilly points out in an apologia on Web 2.0, Amazon purchased a database of book information from R.R. Bowker, put it on the still new World Wide Web, and encouraged its customers to share reviews, bibliographies, and even correct any mistakes or omissions in its data. Two years later, when Amazon went public, it carried more than 2.5 million titles, “including most of the estimated 1.5 million English-language books believed to be in print, more than one million out-of-print titles believed likely to be in circulation and a smaller number of CDs, videotapes and audiotapes.” Out-of-print titles were generally available within two to six months.

Amazon’s original formula hasn’t changed all that drastically. In 2007, books and other media accounted for 62% of its net sales, down from 66% in 2006 and 70% in 2005. The trend may be downward, but media sales are actually improving—it’s just that other sales are improving even faster.

Despite investments in other areas, Amazon knows that it is still primarily a retailer of books and other media, and it continues to invest in complementary initiatives and businesses that fortify its ability to sell these items. Its recent acquisitions, including Audible, Shelfari, and AbeBooks (which brings with it a 40% stake in LibraryThing), join other Amazon businesses, including the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Alexa, and BookSurge. It also developed its own search subsidiary, A9, it was an important participant in creating ONIX, “the international standard for representing and communicating book industry product information in electronic form,” and it published a hugely successful API (now a part of its Associates program) through which it makes book jackets and summaries available to affiliates (including libraries), and also shares a percentage of sales, inspiring creative programmers to develop websites like BigBookSearch and Zoomii.

Amazon does all this so it can sell more goods and, in general, it seems to be working. Consumers are getting deeper discounts on a broader range of books and other media than ever before, and they have an easy time finding the items they want thanks to Amazon’s faceted browsing interface, its active user community, and its search engine which, in many cases, makes it easy to search within the text of published items.

While Amazon does everything it can to provide you with as much information as possible about the items it has in stock, there’s no motivation for it to share information about items it can’t sell in volume, such as out-of-print material. If the information you’re seeking is likely to be included in new, commercially available books, then Amazon is an excellent resource. If not, you’re best served looking elsewhere.

Google

Amazon is one of two major corporate alternatives to libraries; Google is the other.

Amazon followed one of the two traditional paths for forming a giant corporation: it was founded by an entrepreneur who had a good idea for a company and then hired talented people to build its technological infrastructure. Google followed the other path: its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created something the world wanted and then hired people to turn their idea into a profitable corporation.

While still graduate students at Stanford, Page and Brin took Eugene Garfield’s work on citation indexing and adapted it for the World Wide Web. Garfield, who marketed information products through his company, the Institute for Scientific Information (now a Thomson Reuters subsidiary), records how often scholarly papers are cited by subsequent scholarly papers, which is useful because citation frequency is a reasonable proxy for importance. Similarly, Google’s PageRank algorithm is primarily a scheme for measuring and weighting links between Web pages: the more links to a page or website, the more likely it is to be important, especially if those links come from other important sites. PageRank is intended to determine which Web pages are likely to be perceived by Google’s users as relevant.

It was soon apparent that Google worked—users found what they were looking for—but no one saw any money in it. Page and Brin tried to sell their technology for $1 million to the big players in the Web market. After everyone turned them down, they decided to start their own company, focusing their attention on attracting as many users as possible.

Where Amazon is a retailer that can be thought of as a virtual Costco, Google is an entertainment company like News Corp or Viacom—it generates 99% of its revenue from advertisements. Just as Amazon is primarily a reseller of products others make, Google is primarily a portal into content others create. Its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Note the absence of the word “Web” in that mission statement: Google’s goal is to organize every bit of information. For instance, Google created its free telephone directory assistance project, GOOG-411 in order to develop speech recognition software. In turning spoken words into text, Google opens up the possibility of searching audio and video files through the same Google search box that is currently used to search websites.

Though the Web has become many people’s primary information source, a great deal of the world’s information is still found in books. In order to harvest that data, in December 2004, Google announced that five libraries—the University of Michigan, Harvard. Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library—had agreed to let Google begin scanning their collections (and several more have since joined the project). Multiple elements of this arrangement remained secret, including the terms of these agreements and the rate at which books were being scanned. It was also unclear how Google would deal with potential copyright issues, especially after the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild almost immediately filed a joint lawsuit.

This copyright lawsuit mirrors another: Viacom’s suit against Google acquisition YouTube for copyright infringement. There was some speculation that Google bought YouTube specifically to make sure YouTube didn’t lose its lawsuit, establishing a precedent that Google would have to overcome if it were ever sued for hosting video files. When Google reached a settlement in its book scanning lawsuit this past October, Viacom saw a potential concession in its own suit.

The book-scanning settlement has raised concerns about preservation and access for Google-scanned materials. Harvard has expressed its reservations publicly, and Peter Brantley has been doing an extraordinarily good job of identifying and summarizing the issues involved. How all this will affect people who want to read books online has yet to be determined.

What does seem settled, at least for now, is that Google has archived an unparalleled number of books (and also scholarly articles) whose entire text could be as easy to search as the Web. With the success of Google-411, it seems likely that Google will soon be able to offer text-based searching within audio and video files as well.

What’s not clear is whether advertising will make these ventures profitable or if Google can successfully transition to alternative business models for subsets of its data. Right now, it resells access to scholarly articles and newspaper stories for several publishers, and it appears that it will soon be selling access to the books it has digitally archived. It’s also not clear if Google sees any point in developing an active user community around books. While Google allows users to add reviews at its book website, user-contributed content is not a focus in the same way it is at Amazon or at LibraryThing.

LibraryThing

Founder Tim Spalding’s LibraryThing is a new kind of Internet-enabled organization, the small company that operates on a large scale. This method for doing business has been best documented by programmer, essayist, and venture capitalist Paul Graham, one of Spalding’s inspirations, though LibraryThing probably resembles Craigslist more than it resembles any of the YCombinator companies Graham has helped to shepherd into existence.

Like Craigslist, LibraryThing has an evangelical faith in its users, maintains a simple and easy to understand interface, is satisfied with steady and modest profitability, and competes for attention in a field with significantly larger entities (Craigslist is often cited as a cause of the newspaper industry’s financial difficulties, even though it employs fewer than 30 people).

LibraryThing gets its data from Amazon, from libraries that make their catalogs available through the Z39.50 protocol, and from its users, who supplement the data by providing reviews, cataloging information, adding tags, and disambiguating records. These last two seem to be particularly successful even though they vary from standard library practice.

The tagging concept, popularized by Joshua Shachter’s group bookmarking website, del.icio.us, allows users to catalog items using whatever keyword they wish. This enables works like Bridget Jones’s Diary to be tagged “chicklit” or Neuromancer to be tagged “cyberpunk,” subject terms that differ greatly from Library of Congress designations for these works by Fielding and Gibson.

Disambiguation allows users to clarify records by taking actions such as combining entries for works that are identical but released under different titles, or aggregating work under a single author heading even though that person has released work under multiple names. These can be difficult tasks when a small group of staff members attempt to take this on manually, and it has proved tricky to teach computers to disambiguate records programmatically. For instance, author Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s name is subject to multiple permutations (C.N., Cyril N., C. Northcote, etc.), and his most famous work, Parkinson’s Law (which expands on his belief that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”), has been released with multiple title variations and in numerous editions. Amazon struggles to make it clear which edition of Parkinson’s Law a potential customer might wish to purchase and Google offers a few different options that are not readily distinguishable from one another. LibraryThing, while representing more options than either of the other two, also makes it clear which title its users believe should be considered definitive.

It’s worth noting that Amazon, Google, and LibraryThing are not operating on a different scale when it comes to the number of books they’re cataloging. LibraryThing, which launched on August 29, 2005, has catalog entries for over 32 million books. While open cataloging has its limitations, LibraryThing’s website regularly demonstrates the power of crowdsourcing big tasks to a large, devoted community.

That community is the key to LibraryThing’s success. Just as del.icio.us users socialize around shared bookmarks and tags, LibraryThing users socialize around the books in their collections. Users can add 200 books for free, but to add more they have to pay either $10 per year or spend $25 for a lifetime membership.

That’s one way LibraryThing makes money. The other is LibraryThing for Libraries, a service that allows libraries to integrate LibraryThing’s tag database and, as of September 2008, its user reviews, into participating libraries’ websites. This service is offered on a sliding scale, with the smallest libraries paying $1,000 per year.

While Amazon’s business model does not target libraries in any discernible way (either as customers or competitors), and Google appears to be interested only in the largest libraries as partners, LibraryThing seems to be actively interested in selling its services to pretty much every kind of library—dozens have already signed up for LibraryThing for Libraries—and in digesting Z39.50 feeds (or getting records in other formats) from any library willing to share. In a pinch, it appears that LibraryThing will even take care of your cataloging.

WorldCat

OCLC is a nonprofit consortium that includes almost 70,000 libraries as members. It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Consortium. In 1977, it began allowing libraries outside Ohio to become members, and in 1981 it changed its name to the Online Computer Library Center. It has made multiple acquisitions as it has grown, including the Dewey Decimal Classification System and its only competitor, the Research Libraries Group, which operated from 1974 until 2006. This sort of activity, and OCLC’s business model, led to its nonprofit status being investigated, but ultimately recognized. Understandably, OCLC uses its tax status to its advantage, just as some nonprofit hospitals take advantage of their status and IKEA makes use of its unusual structure.

OCLC’s most widely visible product is an amazingly good website, WorldCat.org, which provides free access to over 110 million library catalog records, most of which are for books: member libraries provide access to their entire collection, which includes articles, audio, and video. Right now, WorldCat.org is the best free website that lets visitors use keywords to conduct serious research across all media types, a feature which all on its own would make it valuable. On top of that, OCLC has integrated its work on FRBR and xISBN—projects that make it easier to find what you’re looking for—helping to turn WorldCat.org into an invaluable resource.

One of the two major problems with WorldCat.org is what it doesn’t include: the long tail of library records. With 70,000 libraries contributing records, it’s tempting to assume that just about every book is included in the WorldCat.org database, but that’s probably far from true. OCLC’s Karen Calhoun has written about its efforts to position its pricing and services so smaller libraries can participate, and OCLC is making inroads, but it still serves far fewer than half of the smaller libraries in the United States. This won’t affect most of the popular material—big libraries have just about every major work held by a smaller library, so the small libraries’ records are redundant in these instances—but it does mean that more obscure works collected by smaller libraries, representing local authors and regional historical resources, may not be included.

This sort of limitation affects everyone from amateur genealogists to academic researchers. For instance, I have a friend who is writing her doctoral thesis on the history of illness in the counties surrounding Philadelphia. Almost none of the libraries, archives, and historical societies she is relying on have shared their catalogs with OCLC. This means she must make use of each of these collections individually, usually in person, and spend time learning how each collection is organized. This is the research equivalent of using a manual typewriter instead of a MacBook Pro to type her dissertation, and represents a failure to make the best possible use of available technology. These collections’ records should be included in WorldCat.org.

This kind of wasted opportunity to assist researchers is one major disadvantage of WorldCat.org’s omission of smaller libraries’ holdings. The other major problem arises when researchers try to make use of one WorldCat.org’s signature features. When users search for an item in WorldCat.org, they can select a tab labeled “Libraries,” which takes them to a list of local libraries that have that item in their collection. However, only libraries that share their records with OCLC are listed. For example, search for Daemon: a novel by Leinad Zeraus and select the Libraries tab. WorldCat.org displays ten libraries where you can find this book, in descending order of proximity. It would be natural for WorldCat.org visitors to infer that these are the ten closest libraries that have this book. Unfortunately, that’s probably not the case. Instead, WorldCat.org is displaying the ten closest libraries that share their records with WorldCat. Users who believe that WorldCat.org is helping them search their nearby libraries may be led to believe that their local libraries don’t have any books at all—or, at least, none of the books they’re hoping to find.

Of course, it’s possible that some libraries may not want their records included in WorldCat.org. I’m not sure why they would feel that way, aside from the recent hullabaloo over licensing which appears to be getting increasingly heated. However, the library where I work very much wants its records in WorldCat.org so that our neighbors in town can use it as an alternative way of looking for the books that are available in their local library.

OCLC markets WorldCat and other services through a network of regional service providers. The provider for our area is PALINET, so if we want to get our records into WorldCat, we have to go through PALINET. Unfortunately, between OCLC and PALINET, a sort of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” pricing structure seems to have emerged for getting records included in WorldCat.org.

I don’t think this is anyone’s fault. Everyone I’ve met at OCLC and PALINET is smart, dedicated, and helpful. My guess is that it’s more like Kate Sheehan’s post office story in which her attempt to pick up a package left her feeling “broken or inept.” That’s certainly how I felt after spending a month exchanging emails with PALINET. At the end I was so confused that it just didn’t seem worth bothering to get an accurate price to take to my board, because the one thing about which I was relatively certain was that we didn’t have enough money to share our records on the WorldCat.org website.

The folks at OCLC seem to be working hard to remedy this situation. I have faith that they’ll get there. But until they do, there will probably be a lot of libraries that would like to share their records in WorldCat.org and either can’t afford it or can’t figure out if they can. That means researchers are going to have to keep working harder than necessary, WorldCat.org users will keep being misled by its Libraries tab, and frustrated libraries may find themselves looking for more accommodating partners.

Open Library

Along with OCLC’s WorldCat.org, Open Library is one of two major nonprofit initiatives centered on creating a universal book catalog: its goal is a page for every book ever published, and to enable those pages to be updated by users, just as LibraryThing or Wikipedia pages are edited by site visitors. Since its founding in July, 2007, it has added over 30 million records to its book database.

For now, Open Library may be best known for its founder, Brewster Kahle, and its technical lead, Aaron Swartz. Both are Internet celebrities and serial entrepreneurs, though both specialize in nonprofit startups. Kahle has sold companies to AOL and Amazon, but he is best known for his work on the Internet Archive, home of the Wayback Machine, which attempts to archive the entire Web. Swartz was a founder of Reddit, which was sold to Condé Nast, and a developer of RSS, which enables websites, most notably blogs, to deliver content directly to readers. Open Library is currently funded by the Internet Archive and the California State Library and is committed to remaining entirely free, right down to the code that runs the site, which it makes available through an open source license.

Unlike our experience with OCLC, sharing our records in Open Library was dead simple: I emailed Aaron Swartz and he replied that receiving our records “was cause for much rejoicing.” (I also emailed Tim Spalding at LibraryThing to see if he might be interested in our records, and I found out he was as well.) Open Library is actively soliciting these contributions from libraries. However, it could, potentially, get these records directly from library websites. The technology involved is pretty simple and fairly well understood.

For example, the library where I work recently introduced a new website that’s powered by Casey Bisson’s fantastic Scriblio project. To import the Collingswood Library’s old records into our new website, we had Scriblio visit the web page for each record in the old catalog and import its data into the Scriblio database, turning blah into beautiful. We also use scrib_availability to show website visitors if the book is on the shelf.

Open Library clearly has the technical knowledge to do something like this and, because just about every library has a web-based catalog, it could easily include every book from pretty much every library in its database, enabling site visitors to learn if their local library has the book they want. For now, Open Library’s book pages, LibraryThing’s book records, and Google’s About this book pages link to WorldCat.org. (Edit: I originally wrote that Google’s About this book pages did not link to WorldCat.org. In the future, I’ll try to remember to disable my Firefox extensions before making such claims.)

The issue isn’t technical; it’s legal and ethical. On behalf of the library where I work, I uploaded our records to archive.org, making it possible for Open Library to use them, and on behalf of my library I uploaded them into our Scriblio-based website. It seems unlikely that libraries will have their records aggregated without their permission, at least in the near future. However, it wouldn’t be surprising if Kahle or Swartz, instead of asking for our records, began asking for our permission: what if they came to us and asked if they could automatically index our catalogs, creating for free a service that costs libraries thousands of dollars through OCLC? Even non-OCLC libraries are used to sharing their records. Why wouldn’t they accept Open Library’s offer to create a universal catalog? For most libraries, there’s no downside, but there’s an enormous upside: a single website where the world could see their records, and a free hub they could use for sharing records with each other.

A Useful Amplification

In his 1992 Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto, Michael Buckland writes that, “(f)rom an operational perspective the library catalog can be seen as a useful amplification of records that are unavoidably needed anyway. The information in a catalog can be useful in a variety of ways to library staff and library users. The difference between modern library catalogs and those before the late nineteenth century is essentially that the modern catalogs have a much larger bibliographical superstructure added to the locational information than had previously been the case.” In a nutshell, Buckland is saying, libraries decided that, since they had to keep a list of what they owned, they might as well describe each item and make sure they knew exactly where copies of it could be found. “With materials on paper, having copies stored locally is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for convenient access. With electronic materials, local storage may be desirable but is no longer necessary…. The answer is to shift from catalogs to union catalogs or linked catalogs…. Arguably the present day catalog… is more a product of the limitations of nineteenth century library technology than of present day opportunities.”

Between Amazon, Google, LibraryThing, WorldCat, and Open Library, we’re getting ever closer to setting aside nineteenth century models and to more fully taking advantage of present day opportunities. There is no technological reason preventing us from building a universal catalog that contains information on every book in existence and locates that book in every library that has a copy available for use.

We’re also closing in on having a digital scan of every book, making full-text searching possible, as well as concurrent, remote use of scarce resources (by which I mean, I can look at the text of a book on my screen while you’re looking at it on yours, a feature not available in a paper-based book, which is limited to being used in a single location and, generally, by a single user). It’s an exciting time to be a booklover, and it gives one hope that, with better resources available, books will begin to seem as accessible and vital as born-digital resources.

I like the alternatives that Amazon, Google, LibraryThing, WorldCat, and Open Library make available. I think each has made the other better, and I like having alternatives in researching books just as I like having FedEx, UPS, DHL, and the United States Postal Service available when I’m trying to send a package. I don’t think researchers are generally lazy, and I don’t think they want fewer options. What they want are a few really good choices, and they have them. It’s exciting for all of us that these good choices seem intent on becoming great ones.

Thanks to Tim Spalding and Aaron Swartz for reading an early draft of this article, and to my ItLwtLP colleague, Hilary Davis, for helping me with its final version.

Flying high - image by Flickr member Dezz

“If where our scientists are and how they work is fundamentally changing, doesn’t that fundamentally change how we support them?” (Luce, 2008 - audio | slides)

A major change to our profession is afoot. Well, more than afoot – the “E-science” ship has sailed and has some major momentum behind it, but are we on board? If you’re one of the librarians still standing on the dock wondering what “E-science” is, you’re not alone. In simple terms, E-science is international, collaborative, technology-driven science that brings together data, research, and people around the world. The Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science describes it as an “inter- and multi-disciplinary” enterprise “with significant dependence on computation and computer science;” and as a data-intensive approach to scholarship that is focused on team-based research composed of scholars spread across the globe.

Some examples of team-based, cross-disciplinary research with people and computers connected within a “grid” of networks across the world: ClimatePrediction.net which leverages the underused computer processor power of home computers to study climate change models; the Southern California Earthquake Center which has over 600 collaborators from Tokyo to Woods Hole, Massachusetts working on ways to understand earthquake behavior in order to minimize the damages of earthquakes; and the Biomedical Informatics Network which has pooled together biomedical researchers and computer scientists from sites spanning the UK and the US to share data and research insights to enhance diagnosis and treatment of diseases.  This is science that rises above place, institution, and even country, science that shatters the boundaries upon which our libraries are traditionally built.

Stepping back a bit to take in a wider view, an ever broader term, E-research, is defined as “the development of, and the support for, advanced information and computational technologies to enhance all phases of research processes” (Luce, 2008). What this all comes down to is supporting research on the broadest scale, with added layers of depth that include high performance computing, both human and non-human consumers of information, and an utterly complex world of data types and data quantities. Add in the diverse expectations of not only the scientists conducting the work, but also their funding sources, and their network of existing and potential colleagues, and you start to get the picture (see Nature’s Big Data issue (September 3, 2008), for a n