Phil Bradley

wants things to make his life and his job easier
doesn’t care what you call it

RSS is your friend

Watching pages

Searching with MSN (put search results in front of users)

Incorporate these things into your work, on your own website

Encourages libraries to have blogs because it makes it easier to put what you want users to see out there for them to see
– 2.0 makes it easier to share data back and forth

Showed his browser bookmarks and how messy they are, then noted del.icio.us, diigo, and raw sugar

Other options: Furl, Spurl, Squidoo

Talking to users:
– face to face (excellent, but limited)
– telephone (good, but limited)
– Email

Consider using instant messaging – always on, always available, can demonstrate online search with Messenger

Web 2.0 is about communities – easy to start or create community pages
– no longer lists of places to go – your start page does it all for you
– these can then be made available for other people, too

Share photographs with Flickr – library tours, events, new resources; also a superb information resource

Create your own search engine – don’t rely on Google, etc. – using Rollyo, Eurekster Swicki
for general or specific subjects

Create your own wiki – PBwiki

Podcasting and video

in summary:
– it’s about outreach
– it’s about users becoming partners
– librarians as publishers
– librarians become facilitators

you can, should, and must take control

Paul Miller – Bringing Libraries to Searchers

– open the library; ensuring all of the value and stuff in the library (and in librarians’ heads) gets out to where the users are
– push the library everywhere
– engage with actual and potential user communities

doing library stuff isn’t a task – doing research for your dissertation is a task, looking up cinema times is a task

showed Blyberg’s Google gadget winning entry for the Talis Mashup contest & runner-up Second Life Library

showed Innovation Directory on Talis site

What makes Library 2.0 possible?
– falling cost of storage
– falling cost of computer power
– growing connectivity, increasing prevalence of broadband
– camera 2.0 on mobile phones
– commoditisation; don’t have to anticipate demand in advance because can always slot in new pieces of equipment or bandwidth whatever to cope

The Three “O’s”
– open source
– open data (have to be able to let go)
– open APIs (let them build their services; no longer about centrally-controlled services offered up by the library or the state or anyone else)

Essence of Library 2.0 – architecture of participation
blogs, wikis, podcasting, etc. are expressions of this participation

librarians are doing an awful lot of this – are the vendors?
do they blog? do they have open APIs? they do they have open networks?

data mobility – share, move around freely; “lipstick on a silo?”

Project Cenote – “how do I get involved?”

need to liberate the data we have because we’re sitting on a goldmine
instead, we’re padlocking it and hiding it
our users have other ways to find information that isn’t as good but they will go there instead
need to get the data to the user and not force them to come to us
requires an open mindset and shared innovation

Brian Kelly – Web 2.0 and Library 2.0: Addressing Institutional Barriers

come to these conferences and hear great things, but go back to institution and IT says no so doesn’t go anywhere

organizational barriers:
– technology is immature
– it’s too costly
– user comments are scary, legal risks (copyright)
– infringements of guidelines (contradicts our policy)
– institutional inertia

why aren’t we doing these things?
Takeup of New Technologies – The Gartner Curve

IT services:
– don’t understand learning and teaching
– have no interest in what the users want
– we know what the users want and we’ll give it to you
– tend to work in silos

Beware the IT Funadmentalists
need to avoid simplistic solutions to the complexities
– open standards fundamentalists
– open source fundamentalists
– vendor fundamentalists
– accessibility fundamentalists
– user fundamentalists
– legal fundamentalists
– Web 2.0 fundamentalists

Librarian Fundamentalists
– think they know better than the user
– think users should be forced to learn Boolean
– don’t want the users to search for themselves
– still want to classify the entire web
– want services to be perfect before they release them

– many users are conservative and won’t care
– many will feel threatened
– many won’t like WiFi in libraries, lecture theatres, students chatting on IRC, Googling answers
– many will soon ask for WiFi to be removed, blocked from lecture theatres (including areas where it’s not yet available)

issues to think about – not just about technologies
cultural issues

addressing the barriers:
– a change in culture
– being more open
– revisit AUPs
– develop more sophisticated models for standards, accessibility, open source,…
– information literacy; staff development…
– safe experimentation

need to change catchphrase from “computer says no” to “yer, but, no, but, yer”
should be a dialogue because it’s not a one-dimensional world

implement an open approach
– Creative Commons licenses
– Acceptable Use Policies (should be meant to work on behalf of an organization, not as a control mechanism)
– risk management

encourage enthusiasts – University of Bath Library Science News, a wiki to engage users for planning deployment of their podcast (on WetPaint)

audience question: do these tools work in a way that lets you share information within organization but restricted to certain users?
Paul Miller: basically yes
Brian Kelly: many organizations using wikis for intranets
Phil Bradley: point of Web 2.0 is community, but that doesn’t have to mean the whole world

question: why isn’t the library world building its own tools and offering them to the world?
Brian Kelly: some libraries are doing this (Fedora, Dspace, etc.)
Phil Bradley: librarians are focused on their jobs and what they already do; “you might have time for this, but I’m too busy doing my job”
Paul Miller: libraries have a depressing proclivity to keep building things ourselves; if there isn’t an existing thing in the outside world, *then* build it yourself; something built in the library for the library’s users only reaches those users that are already there

Tags: ILI2006