Monday summary

It’s interesting to hear what the speakers say are their favorite social media or website tools. From the discussion about public libraries at the end of the day, this question came up: If you could pick only one social media, what would it be: There were just two favorites from all of the panelists: flickr and facebook.

While I was listening to these Monday presentations, there were several that I thought would be a great help in chat reference, where efficiency of reply to questions in text form can be a challenge. Here are a few:

Citebite is an example of a site that looks useful for those times when you want to refer to a particular section of a website to answer a chat question. At times you have a very long url, and when you copy it into the chat window, you see immediately that it looks absurd, incomprehensible. Citebite may be a way around this, by creating a shorter url. Even better, you are spared all of the effort of typing instructions about where to look in a web page for specific information, since citebite highlights in yellow the excerpt you want them to know about.

Screengrab is another that might help for economy of reply in chat reference. Screengrab is a firefox extension, like citebite. Use it to save a web page as an image, anything that you can see in a browser window, from a small selection, to a complete page.

From the session by Mary Ellen Bates on search tips, I am going to try out the examples she gave and see what works well for chat reference, that can perhaps lead to quicker results.

Here is one in particular:
searchcloud: a beta search engine that formats your search terms into a tag cloud – the larger the text, the more important the word. example: nanotechnology and solar and green – type a query with your words and decide the importance by choosing a larger type font for the word – this creates the tag cloud for your search, and might be a quicker and more successful way to get started with a question that has multiple terms and ideas.

Public library issues & reflections

Moderator: Aaron Schmidt
Participants: Greg Schwartz, Sam Davis, Joy Marlow, Sarah Houghton-Jan, Andrew White, Zeth Lietzau

Here are the questions that came up during this session, with comments by the panel for some, but not all, of these topics.

Question about the meaning of a quote: “The job is not to convince people that they need libraries, but to convince libraries that they need people”

Question: library branding: In looking at libraries and branding, how do you create a personal library brand?

Question: personal info on your library blog, etc. how much do you want to include? how much personal information about yourself? decide how you feel about personal visibility for blogging in terms of communication. Define your personal and professional identity and where you want the division to be for privacy.

Question: How do you go about redesigning a website for your library for teens? Get input from teens directly and add contributed poems, stories, art, etc.

Question: What do you do about administrators who are non-believers in web services and the part these have in libraries? Show examples of what you would like to add from other libraries, and connect them up to the administrators of these libraries. Help people see how a technology can help them personally or professionally.

Question: The social catalog: why should public libraries get involved with comments, reviews, etc. on the website? For some people, the library is the most community-oriented website that they have, and thus it can have more value for them than global sites for information as a way to connect with others.

Question: If you could pick only one social media, what would it be: Answers: flickr, facebook

Search Tips & Keeping Current

Steven Cohen, Senior Librarian, Law Library Management & Editor, LibraryStuff.net

Author of Keeping Current

Why keep up?

• help market your organization and  be useful to your organization
• help your customers keep up with whatever they need and market your skills with your customers
• research question doesn’t end until your customer tells you that they have enough info
• Steven Cohen forwards more info to his customers as fyi, almost like an rss service for them, personalized to their interests
• use services like rss so that the information comes to you to help send ongoing info to your customers. Steven has google alerts on research areas that his customers ask about.
• Friends of the Library: they tell other people about the services you provide, so provide good services to them for questions that they have.
• Steven monitors news articles, press releases, changes to web pages to send news to his clients. He looks for new products, staff changes, etc. to help them get new business.
• Look beyond the initial question that is asked. For each lead that you find, send on to your customer the results of the leads that you find. He provides a research service for people, a “keeping up guide”

Tools he uses:
1. rss readers: 

• rss reader: Steven uses google reader He uses keyboard shortcuts to read info from his rss reader and forwards them on email to his clients. When he forwards info to his customers, add the date and time that it was published, so that the customer knows it is really current.
• Quote: “this is not rocket science, it’s library science” - [this gets a big laugh]
• he doesn’t look at his google reader during the day, since he is too busy. But at home, late, after everyone is asleep, he spends about an hour and speed-reads through it all.

2. Supreme Court and Circuit Court Opinions – sends info to his customers

3. watchthatpage – monitors web pages for you and emails you the new items from those pages. subscribe and send changes on to your customers. From the site: WatchThatPage is a service that enables you to automatically collect new information from your favorite pages on the Internet. You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. The new information is presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page. You can specify when the changes will be collected, so they are fresh when you want to read them.

4. web site watcher  WebSite-Watcher detects website updates for you and highlights all changes in the text

5. Page2rss -if a page doesn’t have rss updates once a day. It is a service that helps you monitor web sites that do not publish feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS aggregator.

6. ReloadEvery  Reloads web pages every so many seconds or minutes. The function is accessible via the context menu (menu you get when you right click on a web page) or via a drop down menu on the reload button.

7. feed sidebar  Feed Sidebar is an extension for Firefox that displays the items from your Live Bookmarks in the sidebar.

8. update scanner Monitors web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds.

Steven Cohen’s favorite tools:

• turn part of a page in an image: screengrab
• cool iris
• invisible auctions.com  An ebay typo finder. Every day thousands of misspelled auction items on eBay fail to sell because they can’t be found using eBay’s built-in search tools. To find these so-called ‘fat fingers’ eBay misspellings you need to use a specialised eBay typo search tool such as this one.
• citebite makes a url for you, so you can send a website to someone without a long url, or telling them to scroll down. makes a static page good for assistive technology and mobile devices.

Book Search & Catalog Search

Scott Frey, Reference Librarian, Western State University College of Law
Maria Armitage, Digital Experience Analyst, Digital Services, Columbus Metropolitan Library
Amy Barnes, Digital Experience Analyst, Digital Services Department, Columbus Metropolitan Library

Scott Frey:

• Question: Why would a librarian want to develop a search engine for the library?
  Answers: In order to collect resources from various websites onto one site that are customized for your library users. Add public domain or other sources (like google books) to create library resources for customers. Collect resources into one site, tailored to your individual library, using open-source search engine programs.
• Technology issues: what is difficult in setting up a search engine?
• Answers: Insufficient hardware, insufficient operating system, insufficient bandwidth, buggy software, file formats that are difficult to index (for example, pdf files), restrictive IT policies, computer and network security, administrative skills of staff to create search engines.

Search engine software examples:

Nutch Apache Software Foundations
problem: hasn’t been updated in a year. Most recent: 2 April 2007: Nutch 0.9
Scott Frey set up a search engine using Nutch for a small project at the law library where he works.

Thinking about developing a search engine yourself?
Here are some sources to read:
“A comparison of open-source search engines“
“Why writing your own search engine is hard“

- – - – - – - -

Maria Armitage and Amy Barnes, Columbus Metropolitan Library
This session was about the transition to a new opac using Aquabrowser, a change from the inhouse catalog search that they had used previously. They originally created their own opac in 2000.
link to the new catalog: http://catalog.columbuslibrary.org/

This catalog uses Aquabrowser that draws data from the original homegrown catalog.
Observations from results of change to new catalog opac:

• Their library customers were accustomed to the old catalog and title searches; the new catalog didn’t yield the same results in quite the same way for customers who didn’t know how it worked.
• Need to fix problems fast!
• look at stats to find out where the problems are and to find out how well the new catalog is accepted and used.
• MARC database is more visible for duplicate records, errors, etc.
• when they launched the new catalog, they found out that their customers were library users, not necessarily web users.
• New projects: database integration using federated search tool, social networking (adding tagging, ranking and reviewing), library events integrated into the catalog: add events to author entries, kids catalog, syndetics content info.

Search widgets & gadgets for libraries

Jason A. Clark, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Montana State University Libraries
Tim Donahue, Instruction and Outreach Librarian, Montana State University, prior to that Flash instructor and Adobe Macromedia teacher

This session is about: “push” technologies, flash-animated tools, plus some code at the end.

Jason’s students: they use the web 2.0 technologies. Question: how to place library resources so that students will find them? One way: Construct small widgets to embed in library 2.0 pages.

How to play [connect]:
- “broadcast our signals” build small applications that can work in these distributed environments
- opensearch browser plugins – widgets
- google gadgets
- link these back to library resources

demos from Jason’s site:
Micro Library Apps – OpenSearch Widgets and Google Gadgets for Libraries
http://www.lib.montana.edu/%7Ejason/files/tools/

The samples below are live on the MSU Libraries web site at http://www.lib.montana.edu/tools/.

OpenSearch Widgets:

MSU Libraries Catalog: Install | View Source

Journalist (Journals from MSU Libraries): Install | View Source

Videos from MSU Libraries: Install | View Source

MSU ETDs: Install | View Source

Collection 10 – Schultz Photographs (MSU Libraries): Install | View Source

Google Gadgets:

MSU Libraries Search Gadget: Install on your Google Homepage | Install this gadget on Blackboard or any other Web page | View Source

TERRA – The Nature of Our World RSS and Search Gadget: Install on your Google Homepage | Install this gadget on Blackboard or any other Web page | View Source

Use Google Gadget editor to create code to add to your site:
http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/gs.html

What’s next:
explore additional opportunities to sprinkle library content into our users’ workflow.

- – - – - – - – -
Tim Donahue

Topic: an application of new technology applied to the old technology of print. Tim is a flash designer and used his flash background to make new library guides. An example: he created new library maps with flash to include the subcategories of the LC classification of the maps, with mouseovers that show the categories for the stacks for Skidmore College Library website. The most practical use is that a library user can see what sections of the stacks have what they need, since it is all mapped out.
Link to the Skidmore College map: http://hudson2.skidmore.edu/library/subjectmap2/

Quote: clutter in a map or website has the effect of stalling people – a benefit of mouseovers that help keep top level content visually simple.

Methodology: rendered map in flash. Flash allows you to create content without knowing code. The web address never changes for the map; the map is hundreds of layers of flash animations all within the same url. He got a very positive response from students to this map to help them use the library. The map helps make the library structure transparent. Useful also for reference and instruction, used by library circulation staff to help train library workers. Advantage of flash: scalable for pdas etc. and can be used for google gadgets.

new projects:
-integrate map with the catalog for call number ranges.
-integration of library resources with igoogle.
-Montana State University is encouraging students to use igoogle for college projects. Tim/Jason are creating library widgets for students to use that link to library info they use.

flash browsing applications: they are working on creating new ones

what they don’t have: links from the online catalog back to the flash map sections

More: view library instructional videos that they created for the library web site http://www.lib.montana.edu/

Searching conversations: twitter, facebook, & the social web

Greg Notess, reference team leader, Montana State University
Monday, Oct. 20

Greg’s website: www.searchengineshowdown.com

Question: Online conversation as database: does it disappear? what are the privacy issues?

• public conversation: if the NSA is data mining conversation, perhaps use images as text (therefore not necessarily visible)
• question: public vs. private – the lines between these are blurring
  fully public: open web sites
  semi-public communities that are members only
  mostly private – if no one else shares.
• what is archived and where?
  email: you have to rely on others not sending out your email as forwards.
  mistakes: sending email to many by mistake
  facebook: has more privacy than other services.
• keep track of conversations: use email and email discussion lists, usenet (google groups), web forums. Search dejanews searches newsgroups archives.
• keep track of events and history through your personal email and discussion lists archives. list web archives as history may be available to members only.
• A tool to use for searching archives – www.summize.com  – this was bought by twitter since they had no search method and has morphed to www.twitter.search.com
  Incredible search options, search reviews/opinions, twitter search.
• What’s on twitter right now?
• what is happening with IL2008?
  

www.twitter.com
use to: find the topics that are important to people (at least in the twitter realm), short online conversations ranked by rate of frequency
use to find a topic, or what is happening in a place, limit by distance, etc. in the advance search
use to find news from the people who are active in online space
use to reply to people who send twitter messages

twitter is a public space – but you can set privacy options to private. Only your friends will see your posts.
search:

- http://search.twitter.com/
- www.tweetsearch.com

www.facebook.com
set privacy settings the way you want them; there are many options for privacy settings.

www.spokeo.com
find social network participation, search by amazon wish lists, etc.
search by all known email addresses to find a person.

other ways to track conversations:
blogs and blog comments
video comments, etc.

Super Searcher Shares: Search Tips Spectacular

Mary Ellen Bates – 20 search tips, that you can link to, all on her site

1. google translation: enable a way to conduct a search in another language. translates your search from another language to english etc.
www.google.com/translate_s

2. google news archives: a better timeline for searching news by specific dates using google archives.
www.news.google.com/archivesearch

3. google news timeline.

• use the timeline in google news archives to see visually with the timeline chart so you see a span of time for a topic or event.
• graphing the news. helps you search to find out about opinions and discussion in the news at the grassroots level. timeline shows the volume of news about an event on a particular day, highlights some of the most important places in the news. Shows the relative use of a search term by city and location. Gives you additional insight into when interest in an idea peaks.

3. Yahoo searchassist- related or complementary terms and concepts that hep you expand or narrow your search.

4.Yahoo [brackets]
how to use: enclose two words in brackets. This retrieves words in that order but not necessarily a phrase.

6. Yahoo Glue: blends search results.
Developed in India. Why? listing results in linear format may not be the best way for everything. Yahoo groups search results. It is beta, may not be available at all times.

7. www.live.com product reviews:
search for a product. divides user reviews by topics, whether positive or negative.
live.com reads results and uses linguistic analysis to help sort results

8. i’d prefer this: from live.com
live search: use prefer add to query

9. www.searchme.com
still beta,no advanced search.
type in a term to see a group of icons to sub-categorize what you want by some topic – see different meanings as you start the search without typing in a whole concept

10. www.powerset.com
-another sense-making search engine. works only on wikipedia, good for extracting data, check this: “factz” example: search plutonium – use to find all the articles that mention a concept. powerset.com extracts out the keywords so that you can use the combined set to get a better definition of a concept.
linguistic analysis that uses nouns/verbs/objects to create a search result. gives you really quick key ideas to use to help narrow your search. This was recently bought by Microsoft.

11. www.searchcrystal.com
good for visual approaches to a search – instead of listing a search result in a linear fashion it groups them by most frequently occurring words and phrases. gives you a visual tool to plan how to continue your search. Use this as a place to start your search to figure out how to proceed.

12. www.carrot2.org
clustering on demand. you choose the clustering algorithms. search for “aviation safety” use “show” option:
in carrot2 there are more search options. try different versions of clustering in the drop-down box to change the cluster format.

13. www.silobreaker.com
visualizing the news. see relationships between people. emerging industry trends identify unexpected relationships. Use this to see a different view of the news. look at map for news “hotspots” chart of related topics in a cluster

14. www.searchcloud.net
a beta search engine
puts your search terms into a cloud – the larger the text, the more important the word example: nanotechnology and solar and green – type a query with your words and decide the importance by choosing a larger type font for the word – this creates the tag cloud for your search

15. www.loki.com toolbar a location-aware tool to use with wi-fi connections

find location-dependent content based upon ip address (yours) and figures out where other wi-fi networks are near you. maps where you are now, searches locally. use to find: a local atm, starbucks etc. without knowing your address. not yet ready for firefox 3. You don’t need to know exactly where you are to use this search.

16. www.serph.com
a web 2.0 metasearch engine. blog search engines, social media sites, social news sites, social bookmarking sites. caps out at under 300 results. get results across the web 2.0 sphere for results

17. www.twing.com – search discussion boards
mines discussion forums and online communities; a good way to find an obscure expert in a discussion forum

18. www.louisdb.org – this is down as of today…try later

19. www.technorati.com – get conference buzz if you can’t attend. use for citizen journalists for experts in conferences
bloggers attach tags to conferences. search in technorati with the conference’s glog tag to get sense of key themes and ideas.

20. www.spokeo.com – aggregates find content about a person from facebook, myspace, twitter, youtube, flickr, amazon wish lists, blogs and some web content – a reminder that there is no privacy on the internet. This is a way to stay in touch with people as a more positive aspect of this search method.

summary of links:

Super Searcher Shares: Search Tips Spectacular

• Carrot Clustering Engine #
• Google News Archive Search #
• Google Translate #
• Google Trends #
• Live Search product comparison #
• Loki #
• LOUIS #
• Powerset #
• SearchCloud.net #
• searchCrystal #
• Searchme #
• Serph #
• Silobreaker #
• Spokeo #
• Technorati #
• Twing #
• Yahoo Search Assist #
• Yahoo! Glue #

Opening keynote – Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold: professor at UC Berkeley and Stanford
Recent book title that relates to this presentation: Smart Mobs worldcat.org
and a site about this book

When he was in school, he was kicked out of class and the teachers sent him to the library, where the librarians answered questions and made him feel welcome. “Thank you, Librarians!” he says.

He is here today to ask us to help spread a new story: The old story: “Biology is war, only the most fit survive.” A new story: mass participation and collective action through mobile devices: Japan in 2000: people talked on their cell phone by using the screen of the phone, not held up to their ear. Young people today flock like birds, sending text messages by phone: Today: a softening of time, not so much divided by time zones. Text messaging as a way of political communication, collective action by spreading a message in response to an event. A smart mob. Text messaging: a hybrid between cell phones and computers that is in the early stages of evolving to a new way of communication. Ex. Korea O my news. of citizen journalists. Writers earn money depending upon numbers of people who read their stories. Text messages sent out to let people know about an event, summons to meet to protest or celebrate a major event. SMS organized protests are more common around the world. Howard began to search for more examples of collective citizen action through text messages. You can extend this co-evolution back as well as forward: use of symbolic action to influence events. Early societies: hunter-gatherer societies and larger groups survived by hunting in larger groups for big game. Early record-keeping, symbolic notation to keep track of shared resources….evolved to printing books, another source of collective action. Forms of symbolic communication that lead to group action. At this point we are coming closer to the point where most people in the world are carrying a device for communication that enables group action. Ability of print to create new forms of trust and communication. We are not yet finished with this business of creating new forms of electronic communication. Companies: Toyota uses social networks inside the corporation to use for new ideas by collective action. Example: In 1997 a plant was destroyed by a fire that produced an essential part. They tapped in to these systems and in 3 days with worldwide communication inside these Toyota networks, they came up with a solution to provide the missing part from other sources. GM doesn’t function this way for solutions via social networks inside the corporation. Toyota’s solution provides them with an advantage to solve problems.
Examples of early indicators for change in collective action by mobile devices. Instead of news by passive sources, a change to active participation through social networks to share news, and create participation for individuals.

• E-bay: created a multimillion dollar market by creating an element of trust for commerce using ratings from consumers about sellers.
• Wikipedia, a new form of production
• amazon.com sharing code
• thinkcycle – share invention ideas
• google
• folding@home distributed computing distributed.net – swarm supercomputing collectives. folding.standford.edu
• Open-source movement
• asian tsunami blog – worldwide communication system to solve the problem of a disaster
• katrina networks – craigslist, usenet to find relatives. an adhoc network made a katrina wiki to help people communicate to find family members. this response to an emergency was created by a person who was 15 years old.
• mechanical. turf – an amazon system

Techologies of cooperation and sharing economies.

Herbert Reinghold and others at Stanford: site for cooperation theory: www.cooperationcommons.com

Elements of cooperation theory:

• participation media: podcasts, blogs etc. Everyone can connect by devices to others easily and rapidly. Social networks enable broader and faster coordination of collective action. Literacy happens for students through new media. Rheingold teaches students how to use blogs and podcasts and other participative media rhetoric, successful communication. Teaches how to communicate in these new media effectively.
• Rheingold created a whole curriculum around social media using open-source software. Teaching students how to use these new media for communication.
• A social media classroom website. examples: video and blog simultaneously in a site. use for large many-to-many conversations, chat, social bookmarking from delicious, etc. that can be formated for privacy options, twitter, etc. Each of these are appropriate for difference purposes: students learn how to use each effectively. ex.: twitter: use for communication.

Summary: Literacy = the learnable secrets of communication.

• If you want to keep up, don’t keep up with the technology, keep up with the forms of literacy.
• how can librarians contribute: help solve this: how do you find the answer, and how do you know that the answers that are returned are true? This is perhaps the most important role for librarians today, in helping people with these participatory forms of knowledge.

Invitation to librarians to particpate in these questions: sign on to this network:
www.socialmediaclassroom.com a drupal installation.