“Every­thing has been lead­ing to this”

Intro­duc­ing “Sum­mon” to do the things Joan Lip­pin­cott talked about

with your col­lec­tions today being pre­dom­i­nantly dig­i­tal (look at your sta­tis­tics), it’s more dif­fi­cult than ever to con­nect stu­dents to your resources

PQ looked very closely at how stu­dents are try­ing to dis­cover infor­ma­tion and con­tent
did “extreme ethno­graphic research” where the kids were search­ing, includ­ing into their dorm rooms
did in-person obser­va­tional research in the dorm, in the cof­fee shop, etc.
recorded ses­sions in-person with users and saw their rates of suc­cess
sur­veyed more than 10,000 users
did online focus groups

the good news about these kids is that they believe we offer the most cred­i­ble, supe­rior source (by a wide mar­gin)
also believe we have the most effi­cient search engine for them, although their behav­ior doesn’t sup­port this
and they say that, too — that they go to Google first
they’re real­is­tic about how they actual go about find­ing information

the library is increas­ingly dis­in­ter­me­di­ated from the search for infor­ma­tion, which is caus­ing the belief that the library is not the cen­ter of campus

why?
– no clear and com­pelling start­ing place (library’s pages say a lot about the library — lit­er­ally says a lot — but dif­fi­cult for end-users to find appro­pri­ate start­ing point for research)
– dif­fi­culty iden­ti­fy­ing appro­pri­ate resources (they can’t find a spe­cific resource even when they know what they’re look­ing for; we have more dig­i­tal resources than ever & it’s dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish between them)
– gen­eral lack of aware­ness of resources (the OPAC, built on the print model, has only a small por­tion of the library’s resources; they get dis­cour­aged try­ing to find things & their unwill­ing­ness to go through long lists of resources is increasing)

under­ly­ing tech­ni­cal issues pre­vent easy searches
com­pare that to “sim­ple, easy, fast” of Google and web searching

if only there was a Google-like search for libraries
wel­come to Summon

a com­pelling place for your end users to start their research to dis­cover the wealth of your resources avail­able to them
enables quick dis­cov­ery of all of your library’s dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal resources (repos­i­to­ries, data­bases, OPAC, books, ejour­nal arti­cles, etc.)
does it in a Google-like sin­gle search, very fast, very coör­di­nated, takes them into the dis­cov­ery phase very, very quickly

what is a uni­fied dis­cov­ery ser­vice?
NOT fed­er­ated search — doesn’t use con­nec­tors or trans­la­tors
it pre-harvests mas­sive amounts of data to bring them together in a sin­gle search through a sin­gle search box
pre-built, pre-coördinated

urge libraries to bring to Sum­mon every­thing Joan described in her talk
because they know what your library sub­scribes to, they can make sure your end user doesn’t get into dead ends
end users only see the things they actu­ally have access to (unlike Google Scholar)
it’s an open sys­tem with APIs — put the search box wher­ever you want
not a nextgen cat­a­log, although you could use the API in one

“I’ll believe it when I see it” (when pigs fly)

more than 40 pub­lish­ers are pro­vid­ing meta­data today
more than 50,000 jour­nals are already rep­re­sented
300+ mil­lion items indexed so far (as of today)
update ser­vice weekly with new pub­lish­ers
Gale and Pro­Quest are lead­ing the way with SerialsSolutions

also have the sup­port of Springer, SAGE, Cross­Ref, Tay­lor & Fran­cis, High­Wire (help­ing with har­vest­ing), Nature Pub­lish­ing Group, Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, Houghton Mif­flin, Acad­emy of Sci­ences, soci­ety pub­lish­ers, open access con­tent, Econ­List, Soci­o­log­i­cal Abstracts, GPO, Med­line, ERIC, Agri­cola, and more

through their use of the A&I resrouces, can still lead users to con­tent even if they don’t have a part­ner­ship with them
85% of EBSCO Aca­d­e­mic Search­Premier is avail­able via Sum­mon
64% of JSTOR
87% of Ovid

Sum­mon is in beta at Dart­mouth and Okla­homa State (since November)

DEMO!

did two quick searches
the open­ing screen is just a search box and noth­ing else
let a branded search box be your dig­i­tal pres­ence
– keep it clean and focused

can fil­ter by full text online items only
can fil­ter by peer-reviewed or schol­arly resources

will be a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice that is fully hosted

stop by their booth (#1904) to see it in action
sign up on their web­site for news about the service

Q — how is this related to AquaBrowser?
A — AB is a nextgen cat­a­log so you can bring Sum­mon con­tent into it through the Sum­mon API

Q — don’t you have 2 fed­er­ated search tools that you were com­bin­ing, and what has hap­pened to them?
A — we do, and we are, but dif­fer­ent libraries have dif­fer­ent needs; still need to offer a good fed­er­ated search prod­uct for those libraries that want one; but they believe the com­pelling start­ing point is Summon

Q — we’re talk­ing about tons and tons of data, how do you show cur­rent sta­tus?
A — pre-harvest with meta­data but click through in real-time

Q — is there a poten­tial to aggre­gate all of the col­lec­tions among libraries?
A — we’ll have to wait and see; right now, the focus is to pro­vide this Google-like, com­pelling presence

Q — for those things that aren’t in Sum­mon, is there a way to lead them to fur­ther resources?
A — yes, the screens are all very cus­tomiz­able; want to keep the open­ing screen clean, though

Q — one of the advan­tages of pre-harvesting is find­ing rela­tion­ships between things — will you be doing that instead of just pro­vid­ing facts?
A — yes, but right now it’s still just in beta; will take time

Q — ??
A — have already brought into Sum­mon the con­tents of one partner’s OPAC (didn’t say which one), so they know these pro­to­cols work

Q — is the pric­ing going to be in the “dream come true” range, too?
A — pric­ing has not yet been deter­mined, but they are aware of the issues around cost

Joan Lip­pin­cott started out by speak­ing about net gens — “If we were cre­at­ing aca­d­e­mic libraries today, what would they look like?”

Oxford, San Jose State Uni­ver­sity?
would they only have print col­lec­tions, spe­cial collections?

or would we cre­ate learn­ing com­mons?
would they look like Google Book Search or iTunes Uni­ver­sity where the librar­ian mostly deals with licens­ing, totally online?

can we cre­ate libraries with con­tent, tools, and ser­vices for today’s students?

looked up “what’s in my bag” pool on Flickr to see what today’s stu­dents carry (not books)

net gens — born between 1982–1991 who grew up with com­put­ers and other media at home and in school from ear­li­est ages
Joan has two Net­Gen daugh­ters, although their friends are bet­ter infor­mants
also calls them mil­len­ni­als, dig­i­tal natives, gen y, next gen, Dot­Nets
when asked what comes next, she uses the term “screenagers” :-p
– the gen­er­a­tion that will have had com­put­ers and mobile devices since birth

char­ac­ter­is­tics of Net­Gens (a pop­u­la­tion, not a gen­er­a­tion)
using “Born Dig­i­tal” def­i­n­i­tion, a highly edu­cated sub­group has the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics
– always con­nected, multi-tasking
– ori­ented to work­ing in groups (doesn’t mean they love “group­work,” but they like hang­ing out with their friends and social­iz­ing while work­ing; you used to go to the library, do your work, & go back to the dorm to social­ize. now they social­ize at the library with friends who are there and who aren’t there)
– expe­ri­en­tial learn­ers (like the shift to hands-on learn­ing from lec­ture)
– visual (ori­ented towards visual cues, although they do still read; when they’re doing a his­tory paper, they may embed a map or cre­ate a video — they don’t just use text)
– pro­duc­ers as well as con­sumers (they cre­ate some­thing of their own)

even if you have 50% adult learn­ers at your cam­pus, many of these char­ac­ter­is­tics still apply
(kids today call them “cam­eras,” not “dig­i­tal cam­eras”)
any­one work­ing in dig­i­tal human­i­ties is work­ing in groups
adults are active learn­ers — they want hands-on
think of any pro­fes­sion — they are all pro­duc­ing web­sites, word doc­u­ments, or pro­duc­ing some form of dig­i­tal information

so our tools need to be ori­ented towards these char­ac­ter­is­tics because they’ll need the skills using them going forward

char­ac­ter­is­tics of “deeper learn­ing” (edu­cause)
– social
– active
– con­tex­tual
– engag­ing
– student-owned

libraries are per­fectly posi­tioned to take advan­tage of this
it’s the projects they do out­side of class that gives them the skills in class
– gives them con­text, they own their prod­uct, and engages them

it’s not just hype and it has rel­e­vance to learn­ing
have to think about how we do this in our own institutions

are all stu­dents really tech-savvy?
stu­dents are con­nected
98.5% of respon­dents own a com­puter, 82.2% own a lap­top (doesn’t mean they are new com­put­ers or that they bring them to class)
spend 19.6 hours a week doing work online (Joan thinks that’s low)
almost all are using social networks

har­vard med­ical school sur­vey of stu­dents in 2007 found 52% own a PDA
app with most use is ref­er­ence!
have to think about the next gen­er­a­tion of pro­fes­sion­als and how we serve them

they love the inter­net and would give up TV & radio before inter­net (because they’re doing those things on the web)
col­lege kids increas­ingly live in the online and offline worlds at the same time
has impor­tant impli­ca­tions for how we struc­ture services

JISC study found that learn­ers who are effec­tive in online envi­ron­ment also cre­ate con­tent, seek peer sup­port using infor­mal net­works & social tools — an under­ground world of net­work­ing that is invis­i­ble to institutions

they may know how to build a web­site, but “we’re more inter­ested in the art and flow of argu­ment“
have to teach them how to use these tools in their dis­ci­plines, not their per­sonal lives
we want stu­dents to con­nect bet­ter to library col­lec­tions and services

Henry Jenk­ins’ “selected core skills“
– col­lec­tive intel­li­gence
– judg­ment — the abil­ity to eval­u­ate the reli­a­bil­ity and cred­i­bil­ity of dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion resources
– net­work­ing — the abil­ity to search for, syn­the­size infor­ma­tion
– sim­u­la­tion — abil­ity to inter­pret & *con­stuct& dynamic mod­els of real world processes
– appro­pri­a­tion
– mult­task­ing — a pos­i­tive thing when can shift focus to salient details

MIT Photo Diary study

there will be an increas­ing empha­sis on data for visu­al­iza­tion (how do we rep­re­sent this in our find­ing aids)
con­tent opti­mized for mobile devices

Cor­nell has put images from their dig­i­tal col­lec­tions on their com­put­ers as screen­savers so that when stu­dents ask where the images came from, the librar­i­ans can tell them

Seat­tle PL visu­al­iza­tion of books being checked out

need to think about embed­ded con­tent and trans­form­ing text data into more visual formats

- adopt and adapt
– assess
– hir­ing new types of staff
– train exist­ing staff
– let go of things you don’t need to do

these stu­dents are our future and it’s our role to recre­ate aca­d­e­mic libraries