UTS on future academic libraries

On 9 February 2010 Dr Belinda Tiffen, Sophie McDonald and me from the UTS Library presented some ideas for our future Library to a national library conference in Melbourne (VALA2010).

As part of the UTS City Campus Master Plan, we have begun the early stages of planning for a new library building or “learning commons” on Broadway that will set new standards for online and physical services to our clients (students, researchers, academics and staff), green culture and operations, and our own work environment. About 60% of our current collection will be buried in a robotically-served retrieval system under Alumni Green (adjacent to the new library building), freeing up the library space for things other than book storage. That facility will be designed and built in the near future.

Our ideas for the future library were presented in three short but entertaining video clips outlining scenarios for:

• students (by UTS students James Shepherd, Dan Miller and friends),
• researchers and
• our staff (in homage the the well-known CommonCraft videos).

Peter Murray-Rust's 12 point action plan for libraries

Peter Murray-Rust Keynote at ILI 2009 from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

Peter is seeing no fire in our collective bellies and not enough passion coming from librarians about our own future. He puts forward an interesting action plan calling for librarians to be less passive and far more proactive on issues such as Copyright in academic publishing, open everything (publishing & data), community collaboration and action, and taking more steps to make the library a growing and addictive organism.

In this talk he delivers a pretty good 12 point action plan that most of us working in academic libraries should at least consider very seriously. The whole video is well worth watching, but I know most people won't bother so here again is my summary of the key points along with a few of my own comments thrown in for good measure.

Before introducing his action plan he mentions a few other interesting ideas:

• He grounds his presentation by referring to Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science, although he dislikes the term "user" preferring "reader".
• Copyright as we know it must be destroyed for the sake of academic publishing and in order to facilitate the sharing of knowledge (as distinct from the business of making money from restricting the sharing of knowledge). He claims by example that Copyright is currently preventing the sharing of knowledge that could help to save the planet and that we as librarians should be agitating, displaying our "raw anger" and protesting for legislative change.
• He laments the situation in academic publishing where academics create works for free, but are expected to pay in order to see the work of their colleagues. It is a situation that must be changed.

The 12 Point Plan (in no particular order):
1. We should act as citizen librarians towards a common or shared goal. (See some examples below of communities collaborating towards shared goals.)
2. Post all academic output publicly: ignore Copyright. For this, we need to display our passion and one of probably has to volunteer to go to gaol. I like this one, but I can't be the one going to gaol. Sorry. (Beth & Belinda: step forward please. Don't worry, I'll look after the shop.)
3. Text mine everything. Currently this isn't allowed by the publishers who own nearly everything. It stops researchers trying to find stuff. As he says: "when violating a publisher's terms of use, you are guilty until proven innocent".
4. Put 2nd year students in charge of developing educational technology resources. They use it all the time and will know whether to go mobile or to use Xbox or Play Station. There is some truth in this.
5. Actively participate in obtaining science grants. Because scientists find it all too repetitious and cumbersome. They need our help.
6. Actively participate in the scientific publishing process. Again, they need our help. Maybe we can help them to publish their work more openly and also to facilitate better management of their IP.
7. Close the science library and move it all to the departments. He says this is a no-brainer. (We don't have a science library at UTS.)
8. Handover all purchasing to national Rottweiler publishing officers. Apparently they deal with the publishers centrally in Brazil. We could not do it in Australia. Getting any form of agreement with so many egos and so much self-interest in the room would prove far too complicated. Besides, we have less important issues to worry about. It is actually something we should at least try to do, very seriously. It may well be one of the big issues on this list, along with taking action on Copyright and open access publishing where we really could have a very beneficial effect and demonstrate our worth.
9. Set up a new type of university press. The traditional presses have all been failures. We have been handed an opportunity with the Internet, but our presses have been less innovative than other publishers. I think we are taking steps in this direction now and UTSePress is a good example, publishing journals, books and conference proceedings online.
10. We should develop our own metrics system. Publishers manipulate the metrics system in order to get us to buy what they think we want.
11. We should publicly campaign for openness. He gave a few examples like the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Rights Group. We should be actively involved.
12. We should make the library an addictive "game". He used the example of building "reputation points" through involvement and participation in something like stackoverflow.com After a while it becomes a bit addictive, like ebay.
We should be asking ourselves "what can we do to change the world and keep the library a growing organism"? His list seems like a decent start, even if it is a tad biased towards science.
He wound up his presentation with a few examples of the contributions made by online communities, including: Galaxy Zoo where 150,000 members world-wide have assisted professional astronomers to classify over one million galaxies; and OpenStreetMap, a free editable map of the world that is up-to-date within minutes thanks to the contributions made by over 250,000 members.
One of the most important pleas he makes is for the democratisation of knowledge. This should be possible on the web. For it to happen, democratisation must win over commoditisation for commercial purposes (i.e. the protection of business empires).
I am surprised that there has not been more debate about his address.

An old but still relevant rant from Bruce Sterling

Recently, I found the text for an internally circulated article that I sent to some colleagues in the museum I was working in. It dates from March 2007, but some of the statements are still relevant today, so with a small amount of updating, I'm re-posting it here as maybe some of those new to this environment missed what Bruce had to say.

I remember being impressed by the amount of live web coverage coming from SXSW 2007 including a website full of content, papers online, podcasts, blogs, flickr sites and online videos.

Furthermore, I thought about what this means for us down here in Oz where we are soooo far away from all these hip conferences about new stuff. The web is finally making these far-away conferences and even some courses more accessible to us and it seems to still be mostly free. Those who truly understand what it is about also understand that to get the message out there, you don’t lock it away on pay-per-view sites or member only networks. You share it for free and maybe include some ads that hardly anyone ever clicks or views. At least that’s the way I see it and the whole new web culture of sharing, i.e. sharing valuable, new knowledge and even some wisdom, still amazes me.

So, later that day, in need of some inspiration, I listened to a keynote rant from a guy called Bruce Sterling who was then a Visionary in Residence at wired.com. The podcast was already available on the SXSW website and while not all of it is directly relevant to the work of a cultural institution, some of it was and still is in a conceptual sense if we are to understand the world we are now part of (particularly given the large investment already in most museum websites). I knew that not many of my then colleagues would ever listen to the whole podcast (an hour long), so I jotted down these notes from it as I listened:

Bruce mentions RFID in the SXSW participant wrist bands, but doesn’t ever allude to what they really used RFID for apart from the obvious. (RFID tagging of items like conference delegates, triathletes and baggage at airports has moved on a lot since then, but that is a whole other story, so lets not go there now.) He then refers to “2007 – the year of video”. Sterling calls it a stoopid medium, especially in TV which really is a wasteland. And the vested interests from TV-land are trying to step on the net, but he says it isn’t going to happen.

New trend drivers are emerging.

Three in particular are worth discussing (Prof) Henry Jenkins and convergence culture; Yochai Benkler who wrote The Wealth of Networks; and Lev Manovich and his Soft Cinema – hybrid media. These blokes have cultural, legal and media studies backgrounds, but they talk the same language. They talk in an analytical policy vocabulary – about a new method or approach to increase peoples’ wealth.

On the web information is free and it wants to be free. You are charged nothing and don’t have to click the ads. It is available to anybody and it is incredibly powerful and growing right there in front of you. The first world is the global market – capitalism and the market world as we know it. The second world is all forms of government. The new third world is common-space peer production – not communism, not the state and not the market. It is really growing fast and having profound effects. We use ‘Google’ as a verb now. It is also about ‘Not-For-Profit’ stuff. The fourth world is disorder and where they don’t have any of this.

The new third world is more powerful than we give it credit for, but not necessarily a good thing yet. It is a new thing. Benkler’s and Jenkin’s arguments are fearsome, but the new networks may not be as fragile as they think – they are pretty resilient. Take for example Craigslist – he isn’t a business mogul, he is mild and low key guy from San Francisco and not really interested in business. He just wanted 200 million friends. But he has gutted the revenue streams of major newspapers (i.e. classifieds)! He has no business. (My comment: Some of these networks and start-ups are now being acquired by bigger predators though and will someone like Murdoch or Yahoo eventually acquire craigslist?)

‘Peer2Peer networks are turned on and they out-shift anything else ever built without a dime changing hands.’ This world is still vulnerable to charlatans and rip-off merchants. And there are down-sides to too much ‘fan involvement’ in art.

Mashups – of video & sound.

Are they really a tremendous source of creativity? They won’t last 10 years. They are novel (now) and have no staying power as music. They are not tremendously creative works. It is new and has an audience, but it isn’t a cultural advance.

Lev Manovich talks about soft cinema – digital tools are melting all media down into a kind of slum. It is all merging and distinctions go with powerful compositing tools. Effects are becoming the means of production. All pieces are sent to a compositor, like in Hollywood films. Different flavours come out of the same mixing machine. There are different windows to the same media. Does everything need to go through this ‘media blender’? It is a new capacity, but isn’t necessarily any better. Electronic art stinks. It is interesting, not great. Ease of production? E.g. deviantART. Sure it is folk culture, but it is for hicks! We need a new form of media criticism. Film media, literature, music are all just going away and there are new realities, but they are not that good.

Now there are some 55 million blogs and some are good? Well, no actually. He would be quite surprised if any exist in 10 years. (And if it is true that blogs are that ephemeral, some cultural institutions like libraries and archives better start archiving those relevant to their collecting guidelines sometime soon!) They may be best as platforms for the development of something. ‘They are like watching yourself get beaten to death with croutons’ – and they’re not that potent a media. They’re also not fine art. The usual discourse is like three paras, an embedded video, some hyperlinks, flickr sets, Digg and social book-marking links, etc. Is it done well or badly? Is there any web design critique that could be applied to it to say whether it is done well or not? Sterling (a blogger himself) says it is an unstable media not aspiring to greatness. A word-of-mouth kind of culture.

Is it good to turn on the ‘information factory’ and leave the room? It is machine expression and needs to be understood as that. ‘Semiotic pollution’. The worst is spam. Gibberish. Imagine if that happened on TV or in a movie theatre!

Reed Hundt – a US intellectual and lawyer, who is very weary looking. Disenchanted by Federal Government, he is now in private practice. He was involved in auctioning spectrum (just like we are doing here in Oz). And he has a mad scheme to steal broadband and sell it (as gifts) to police, public safety authorities, etc. He wants to take it from broadband TV. Broadband TV is for shut-ins. Broadcast TV is a lower end evil medium. It was bad before American Idol, but now there is no budget to put on decent stuff. It is junk. He wants to put the net over TV as b-band Internet. It would reduce distinctions between the different media forms. There is no technical reason to not do it. It would change major stuff. It needed a ground swell of support and Hundt was trying to do it with public-safety and security services – cops, firemen, etc. The US would then leapfrog to the top of the national broadband rankings. He has a rather dull website and he used to run a blog.

Yochai Benkler – social networking and what it takes to build a third kind of production system that harnesses productivity, creativity. They need thoughtful engineering and some care. He puts forward a method for socially motivated common-space peer production:

• divide up the work – there is a lot to do, suck helpers in


• the work must be granular, modular (projects) and ‘integrate-able’ (all adds up to turn into one thing that really achieves something) – not seen much in other lines of work, not business, even government


• be self-selective – people chose to join in (people come out of the wood-work)


• have an in or out mechanism (like a two-way membrane)


• have a communication platform to talk to each other, fast & efficient


• humanisation??? (not further discussed)


• include trust construction – has to be built, confidence building (very important)


• someone has to think about what is normal, acceptable behaviour and create that


• transparency – so motives are not questioned


• monitoring (a police force of sorts to prevent someone attacking the system – hackers, thieves, etc. because the Internet is a savage world)


• peer review (who is good at stuff?) – a motivator


• discipline (an Achilles heel of all Internet efforts)


• fairness (will ‘the intelligentsia exploit the helpless proletariat?’!) – Wikipedia and Digg don’t pay people! Things that were formerly professions are now falling apart on the net and are no longer business, they are melting like the Arctic


• institutional sustainability – who knows how long it will last (e.g. Slashdot) – what is the legacy plan, what is needed? The hardware is radically unstable!

Benkler doesn’t talk about some unpleasant extremist forms which might appear to have all of this licked! We can all think of extremist organisations who might be doing much of the above, but perhaps without the transparency and with a different take on humanisation and fairness? Maybe they are proof of the potency of this form of organisation?

In order to make this work, Benkler says that we need to understand that computers are platforms for self-expression rather than well-behaved appliances. Computers really stink as appliances. They are painful to use, always in beta, etc. Well-behaved appliances kill self-expression and common space peer production. Something that barely works can become a common space peer production factory!

Benkler distributed his book (all 500+ pp!) in pdf format and then he opened a wiki for everyone to help him explore this issue, but there was nobody there. It isn’t easy to be as smart as he is! It was just a vast echo chamber. You can open stuff like that, but it doesn’t mean they come in and if they do it doesn’t mean they’ll be useful. Sterling says he could not help him. It is an interesting issue.

Sterling closed his rant with a poem about serenity and a sense of fulfilment. Perhaps it was about life not on the web? It was a bit of a stretch for me . . .

New rules for media or online museum communications?

I read these new rules for media first on Tony Walker's fantastic blog ABC Digital Futures and then went straight to the original source - Mark Glaser at Mediashift.

Mark's rules might at first seem only relevant to journalists and such, but the mere fact that museums are now engaged in online communications using their websites means that the rules also apply to us in a general sense. So, what I'll do is take Mark's rules and offer a museum perspective on what they mean for us more specifically. (Apologies to both original sources for a tad of borrowing.)

1. The Audience Knows More Than the Journalist: Rather than being a one-to-many broadcast, museums now must understand that they are just part of a much larger conversation that is networked and constantly evolving. So, replace "Journalist" with "Curator" (or historian, etc.) and you get the message. Our audience probably also has something valuable to contribute. A great topical example is the post we put up regarding HMAS Sydney’s recent discovery and the community’s contribution to that story. It has proved very popular and offered a perspective that we simply could not provide alone.

2. People Are in Control of Their Media Experience: The people are taking control and watching, and listening to what they want when they want. Making sure that we, in museums, provide content that is suitable for multiple platforms and entry points is critical. Increasingly, we will need to provide an option for content suitable for consumption on mobile devices.

3. Anyone Can Be a Media Creator or Remixer: But it still takes skills to use those tools and stand out from the millions of others who are doing the same thing. In a way, museums already do stand out as trusted sources of high quality content, but we need to balance what we do with regard to Rule #1 to ensure our position is not compromised here. As I've said here before, the big advantage we have is the content we can generate and provide online, particularly through our digitisation programs. Just facilitating conversations using fancy new technologies probably isn't going to be enough for us to sustain an audience.

4. Traditional Media Must Evolve or Die: The evolution that traditional museums must make online is not just in adding new features; we must change our mindset, ideas and methods to new ways. Many of our old processes are now completely irrelevant or redundant in this environment and hanging onto them has seen others bypassing us and finding new ways to search our content and collections, describe it, promote it, provide access to it, etc. Many traditional research journals are now either dead or dying and in Australian we’ve seen the death of the formerly popular Bulletin magazine. Maybe we need to look at some of our more traditional publications and move them online too. We also need to think up and use different methods for commerce in the online environment if we need to charge for services provided.

5. Despite Censorship, The Story Will Get Out: This isn’t just about censoring news stories; it also applies to new technologies like peer-to-peer file-sharing. Maybe we need to see these new technologies more as potential friends, than enemies. A good example is LOCKSS which uses peer-to-peer technology (as I understand) to safely share and store digital assets.

6. Amateur and Professional Journalists Should Work Together: The reality now is that professional curators/historians and amateur collectors, enthusiasts and historians can learn from each other and the new social media platforms not only allow this to happen, they facilitate the conversations much more readily.

7. Journalists Need to Be Multi-Platform: Museum professionals need to learn how to make best use of a host of skills to reach different audiences. I think most of us need to be familiar with digital cameras, scanners, digital recording equipment, and online technologies such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarks, RSS, tagging, mashups, social networks & collaborative technologies. We can’t just expect to engage with physical visitors nor those who come directly to our web front page.

I reserve the right to add more examples and thoughts to this post as they arise.

It was worth the trip just to hear this bloke

Repositories Through the Looking Glass
(Keynote)
Andy Powell, from Eduserv Foundation (an educational charity based in Bath)
This presentation had a lot of useful views for us as we approach the new philosophy of our whole ECM environment.
So far (and at this conference) digital repositories seem mostly on the academic agenda in university libraries. Not much seems to be recognised regarding the challenges facing cultural institutions, so maybe we can learn something from the academic experience?
Powell has some cynical views re repositories.
He started by giving us his background with Dublin Core – he has been involved from early days, esp re web based metadata generation tool development. (The Abstract Model was discussed zzzzzzzzz.)
Then he moved on to JISC Info Environment – again aimed largely at the tertiary and further education environment. Most UK digital repositories are based in this environment. They use all the expected standards, but the environment has missed or ignored the Web and this is missing from most digital library spaces, particularly web architecture.
Eduserve has worked with the UK Science Museum and they started by modeling the infrastructure behind the repository (similar to what we have done with ECM). They have built (i.e. developed) a repository for them that they called a Web Content Management (WCM) system.
Serving stuff on the web still missing from JISC Road Maps. He was very positive about open access and what it will do to scholarly publishing – it isn't an "if", but a "when" – it will happen!
Repositories (to date) are mostly focussed on deposit, not servicing the web. WCMs are essential if they are to be used. Concepts such as search engine optimization are essential (not just having federated search within the environment).
He briefly touched on the "REST" architectural style – it focusses on resources and global identifiers.
Is the focus just to be on the institutional repositories or a global environment?
Web 2.0 means: the new "prosumer", remote applications, social-ness & exposed APIs; plus diffusion (eg. blogs, etc.) and "concentration" (via Lorcan Demsey's recent writings at OCLC) – hosting services that are global in scale, eg. Flickr, Technorati and maybe del.icio.us? He mentioned those using Amazon S3 hosting. Social networks are critical, particularly for research purposes and this needs global services.
Future – what would a web 2.0 repository look like? He said it would look like Slideshare Not many in the audience seemed to be using it. You can share, embed, tag, favourite, etc. Other attributes he suggested: a high quality web based document viewer; tagging; visible to Google; RSS; Amazon S3 (infra-structural services); social groups ability; global in scale. BUT – it doesn't support preservation, complex workflows and doesn't expose rich metadata – so what? Are they really needed (in this system)? How can these needs be met without destroying everything? I think that is the problem we have made for ourselves with some of our CMS - wanting them to be all things to all users and forgetting their most critical tasks.
One way forward may well be using SWAP – scholarly works application profile. Used to described eprints – scholarly works/publications held in repositories. They used FRBR – functional requirements for bibliographic records. (See also this Demsey blog post.)Simple Dublin Core (the metadata standard/protocol) doesn't do this – it is all about relationships, not just a flat structure description. But it may all be too complex in the end. Can we just encourage users to tag, vice deep formal cataloguing that nobody ever sees and few outside the institution ever use? This has effectively distorted much of our work (in the AWM) that seems lost to any users, even on our own site. Rich cataloguing records are locked away inside some of our CMS and NEVER exposed on the web. THIS IS FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG!
We need to learn more from Web 2.0 about what works on the web as most repositories are not working (particularly re sharing on the web). They are not marrying up with the social networks that researchers actually use. Slideshare gets by with almost no formal metadata, just by using tags and links between resources.
Open access is important – making content available on the web. Policy needs to reflect this. We still focus on deposit, not putting resources on the web.
Andy's clossing message was for us to think about resource orientation, not services – digital libraries ignore this at their peril.
Questions & further discussions:
Warwick Cathro (NLA) suggested that institutional repositories can account for needs such as preservation and richer identification (which is what we are aiming at to some extent), but Powell said that that world has not yet been built, at least not in the UK. Building the social layer is beyond that model.
Physicists seem to be sharing their knowledge and research in arXiv.org and they maintain their affiliations.
Why do we still publish as PDF – it is like still working on paper, why not XHTML – embedded links and micro-formats. It runs counter to the mainstream web. Citation is another huge area and is still at odds with how it works on the web yet even WordPress allows for this with an app.
Stuart Weibel from OCLC suggested that researchers are too lazy and won't do what is needed re deposit and identification of resources. But Powell remains optimistic that the low cost of sharing a presentation on slideshare brings massive benefits in terms of knowledge sharing. It is intuitive and obvious and can work with little encouragement. It is a second best to say “you must do this”. Systems must be more intuitive than that! (I think this is a key message for us and the new practices and protocols we will be setting up and using within our ECM.)
Re future of scholarly publishing, Powell said that Open Access is just an inevitable change. We see it in the music industry already. Researchers can make their stuff free on the web. Yes, people will still want to buy and want to publish in journals. Maybe they'll be different, but something will change. National funding bodies seem unable to fund global networks for researchers, so publishers are starting to step into that space, building “Facebooks” for researchers. What impact will blogging have on this – probably an increasing one.
[My apologies for this long post, but this is the one paper not yet provided to us online or via the CD we received at Rego. I had to take these rough notes during his presentation. I thought it was pretty relevant to us as we approach ECM implementation.]