Former Detroit Public Library chief Tim Cromer accused of closing branches while embezzling $1.4M:
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130522/METRO01/305220352

Quite a depressing read.

by Joe Atzberger at May 22, 2013 11:22 PM

For those working in a small library, particularly one that may have little technical support, a foundational knowledge of technology is crucial. Written for librarians, library staff and administrators at libraries serving populations of 15,000 or less, “Technology for Small and One-Person Libraries: A LITA Guide,” published by ALA TechSource, shows how to successfully develop, implement, sustain and grow technology initiatives. Editors Rene J. Erlandson, Rachel A. Erb and their contributors draw from personal experience in rural libraries and regional state university libraries to offer guidance for making sound technology decisions. Whether looking for a quick answer or starting an in-depth technology project, readers will quickly find basic information on the full range of library technology, organized into chapters with numerous headings for easy scanning. Topics include:

• An overview of library technology basics;
• Electronic resource fundamentals, including a look at licensing issues;
• Webpage development, Open-source (OS) applications and a six-step plan for social media and social networking;
• How to create and sustain an effective technology strategy.

Erlandson is the director of virtual services at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) libraries, with oversight of computer systems, digital asset management, digital collection development, electronic resource management, emerging technologies, library systems, network infrastructure and Web development. Prior to joining the University of Nebraska faculty, she worked at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Iowa State University over the course of two decades. As the senior cataloger and project coordinator for the Library of Congress-administered Illinois Newspaper Project at UIUC, she visited many small libraries throughout the state of Illinois and was often consulted on technology questions by librarians working in those libraries.

Erb has been working in technical services for over a decade with substantial experience in cataloging materials of various formats and in managing integrated library systems. She recently transitioned to focusing on electronic resources and is now the electronic resources management librarian at Colorado State University (CSU). Most of her professional experience consists of working in either rural settings with limited resources or regional state universities. She has also written several case studies of technical services operations in these environments.

ALA Store purchases fund advocacy, awareness and accreditation programs for library professionals worldwide. Contact us at (800) 545-2433 ext. 5418 or editionsmarketing@ala.org.

by mprentice at May 22, 2013 09:30 PM

New vacancy listings are posted weekly on Wednesday at approximately 12 noon Central Time. They appear under New This Week and under the appropriate regional listing. Postings remain on the LITA Job Site for a minimum of four weeks.

New This Week

• Digital Archivist, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ
• Emerging Technology and Systems Librarian , University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, Green Bay, WI
• Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services, Rice University, Houston, TX
• Library Associate – AnswerLine, County Library System, Issaquah, WA
• Reference and Instruction Librarian, Brandywine Campus, The Pennsylvania State University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA

by mprentice at May 22, 2013 09:28 PM

The SemanticWeb.com Spotlight on Library Innovation
Update

Thank you for all the nominations we received for the first Semantic Web.com Spotlight on Innovation in Libraries.

We are pleased to announce that Kevin Ford, from the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress, was selected for the Semantic Web.com Spotlight on Innovation for his work with the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) and his continuing work on the Library of Congress’s Linked Data Service (loc.id). In addition to being an active contributor, Kevin is responsible for the BIBFRAME website; has devised tools to view MARC records and the resulting BIBFRAME resources side-by-side; authored the first transformation code for MARC data to BIBFRAME resources; and is project manager for The Library of Congress’ Linked Data Service. Kevin also writes and presents frequently to promote BIBFRAME, ID.LOC.GOV, and educate fellow librarians on the possibilities of linked data.

Without exception, each nominee represented great work and demonstrated the power of Linked Data in library systems, making it a difficult task for the committee, and sparking some interesting discussions about future such spotlight programs.

Congratulations, Kevin, and thanks to all the other great library linked data projects nominated!

TheSemanticWeb.com Spotlight on Library Innovation team

We’d also like to remind the library community that the Semantic Technology and Business Conference is well worth experiencing. SemTechBiz brings together industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities jointly impacting both business leaders and technologists. Conference sessions include technical talks and case studies that highlight semantic technology applications in action. The program includes tutorials and over 130 sessions and demonstrations as well as a hackathon, start-up competition, exhibit floor, and networking opportunities.

As supporters of the SemanticWeb.com Library Spotlight, LITA and OCLC members will get a 50% discount on a gold conference pass – use discount code LITA or OCLC when registering -

LITA members – http://semtechbizsf2013.semanticweb.com/?c=stsflita – discount code “lita” minus quotes

OCLC members – http://semtechbizsf2013.semanticweb.com/?c=stsfoclc – discount code “oclc” minus quotes

by dshapiro at May 22, 2013 09:08 PM

From the Ithaka survey of US Faculty , and library perceptions Figure 44 in full report.

“Percent of respondents agreeing strongly with each statement”

Because scholarly material is available electronically, colleges and universities should redirect the money spent on library buildings and staff to other needs

•  2012: ~18% (results annoyingly seem to only be given in bar chart form, requiring me to graphically estimate numbers, sorry)
• 2009: ~10%
• 2006: ~8%

Because faculty have easy access to academic content online, the role librarians play at this institution is becoming much less important

• 2012: ~20%
• 2009: ~17%
• 2006: ~4%

Around 1/5th of faculty surveyed agree with those statements in 2012. According to report narrative, even higher in the sciences, somewhat lower in the humanities.

What do you think those numbers will look like in 2015 when they run the survey again?

At what number (if not already) will the percentage of ‘strongly agreeing’ faculty (especially to the first one, ‘redirect money spent on library…’) result in lowered funding to libraries?

Because there is certainly some point, at any institution, it will, right?

Different institutions have different decision-makers for library funding, depending on public vs. private university, centralized vs decentralized, etc.   But in almost all of them, faculty opinion is going to have an effect on library decision makers, and when a substantial number of faculty think the library should have it’s funding reduced…. ?

While I think libraries ought to continue to have a huge role in university teaching, research, and culture — I think it’s indisputable that our role is,  in fact, lessening. And I think, at most institutions, faculty are right that the value they are getting for the substantial investment the university makes in the library… is getting smaller and smaller.  Less and less justified.

It’s not an issue of marketing, or just properly ‘branding’ ourselves.  (Or do you think that our marketing has gotten much poorer in the past 6 years, and that’s why the number of faculty thinking our budget should be reduced has doubled? Really?)

Our decades-old service models will not justify our budgets to our host institutions. The services we used to provide are, in fact, no longer as needed/valuable as they once were — no longer as succesful even in cases where what we’re trying to do is still needed and wanted, we’re failing at fulfilling those needs.

We will not survive by focusing on what we think our patrons need and ought to want, in contradiction to what our patrons say and believe they need and want. We will not survive by trying to convince them to want what we provide, but only by changing and coming up with new provisions that excite and delight them.

We need to change. We need to provide new and different services. We need to preserve some services, but significantly change the manner in which they are delivered.

And yes, that means we need to reduce and eliminate other services too. Change is hard. Yes, there are still some staff and patrons who are used to and rely on the services we’ve got now exactly how we deliver them now, and are going to be disrupted and upset by change.

But the number of patrons who think we are decreasingly relevant — and deserve a smaller share of the university’s budget — gets larger all the time.

When those numbers start effecting the relevant decision-makers, who start cutting library budgets as an overall share of the university budget (not just because overall university budgets are shrinking, which they are too) — our services will be reduced and eliminated then anyway.  Our staff and organizations will be cut, and in some cases even eliminated.

Insisting that what we’re doing really is valuable, and our patrons are wrong not to realize it — isn’t going to work (even if it were true, which I do not believe it is). We have to learn how to change faster and better, or we are not going to exist anymore.

The need for expert assistance in organizing and finding information is not going away, it’s only getting larger. There is — or ought to be – an important place for libraries in the contemporary university. But only if we learn how to provide the information services that our host institutions need today, not what they needed 20 years ago –  and are willing to seriously change up our game. Many of our library organizations are not willing to do this — in their practice if not in their leaders words, do not exhibit a willingness or capability to change. Those are going to be the organizations that disappear in the coming… decade?  There will come a point, if it has not already come, that it is too late to recover our value to our host institutions.

by jrochkind at May 22, 2013 07:22 PM

Last month, SemanticWeb.com, supported by OCLC and LITA, put out a call for work that promoted or demonstrated the benefits of linked data for libraries.

read more

by hostetls at May 22, 2013 04:01 PM

As concepts like self-publishing and digitized materials come to the forefront, how are libraries evolving in the new book world? In the new American Libraries digital supplement Digital Content: What’s Next?, leading library practitioners and experts discuss promises and “Faustian bargains” of ebooks.

The future-focused digital supplement examines how libraries are evolving in response to the digital revolution, including exploiting opportunities in self-publishing, while confronting challenges in licensing constraints.

The digital supplement also details progress made by the ALA’s Digital Content Working Group to advocate for equitable access to ebooks produced by the world’s largest book publishers.

Highlights from the report:

• Libraries as content creators: “It is time for the library to step up as the nurturer of content creation,” says James LaRue, director of Colorado’s Douglas County Libraries system. LaRue discusses how libraries can—and should— become local community publishers, and how community members themselves could be involved in deciding which ebooks are made available by libraries.
• ALA to move beyond the Big Six publishers: “In early 2012, urgent questions revolved around why the Big Six publishers wouldn’t do business with libraries or, for those publishers who did, why the terms were so unfavorable,” said ALA President Maureen Sullivan. “We focused on these issues last year and into 2013. While we’ve made some headway, more remains for us to do.”
• Assessments on ebook library lending: In “Ebooks in 2013: Promises Broken, Promises Kept, and Faustian Bargains,” Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, provides an overall assessment of the library ebook situation, concluding that “the reality has been appalling.”
• Ebook business opportunities: Peter Brantley, director of scholarly communication at Hypothes.is, examines the implications of ebooks that are no longer the intact products of today’s trade ebooks.

Digital Content Supplement

The supplement Digital Content: What’s Next? is the third supplement to American Libraries magazine on ebooks and digital content. For more information about the ALA’s efforts on digital content and libraries, visit the American Libraries E-content blog.

Read the full report: http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/7d9e3366

Participate in the ebook discussion at the 2013 Annual American Library Association Conference in Chicago. At the session “ALA, Ebooks, and Digital Content: What’s Next?” the leadership of ALA’s Digital Content Working Group will provide an overview of ALA activities and plans. A distinguished panel will then provide views on libraries as publishers and stewards of America’s digital cultural heritage, and how ALA can best advocate for these important library interests. Brantley and Wolven will continue the conversation as part of the ALA Virtual Conference on July 24, 2013.

The post How Libraries are Evolving in the New Digital Realm appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Jazzy Wright at May 22, 2013 02:19 PM

In brief: During my first professional position I found myself building a teen services program from scratch at a public library in a small town. In this article, I reflect on some of what I learned through that experience, including the value of data, the importance of having a vision, how much relationships matter, and the value of professional community. I conclude with a call for dialogue among other builders of teen services to share our experiences and lessons.

Teen Iron Chef Competition – photo by Gretchen Kolderup

When I finished library school (where I’d focused on teen services), I was expecting to work in a birth-through-eighteen youth services department and was hoping I’d be able to specialize in teen services while working alongside and learning from my other youth-serving colleagues. After all, there weren’t too many librarians I knew who did just teen services. Instead, I was hired as the first Teen Services Librarian at a library in Connecticut and found myself building a teen program nearly from scratch — all while working part-time (first 19 hours a week, then 21, then 28, with more hours each fiscal year). It was my first professional job, and I was building myself as a librarian as much as I was building the YA program at the library; I learned a lot about the real world of library work, about myself, and about the value of professional community.

I’ve written a few posts for the YALSAblog about my experiences ^{[1] [2]}, but I’d like to dig a little deeper and explore some ideas more thoroughly here. This isn’t going to be a practical how-to guide for others who are building YA services from scratch; for that, I’d recommend Sarah Ludwig’s excellent, encouraging Starting from Scratch: Building a Teen Library Program. This article is, instead, a collection of personal reflections on four things — the value of data, the importance of having a vision, how much relationships matter, and the value of professional community — that I wish I’d appreciated when I was beginning to build teen services from scratch.

I wish I’d known the value of data

Oftentimes I think the data we gather and report to our administration feels like a chore, but especially since I was building a program from scratch and only had 19 or 21 or 28 hours to do everything from selection and weeding to programming to outreach, I wanted to know what was working and what wasn’t, and numbers were one good way to assess that.

I was lucky enough to have taken a course in library school on how to evaluate library services using different kinds of data gathering methods and different kinds of analyses. It was one of the least popular classes (perhaps because librarians are, by and large, more word people than number people), but I’d done my bachelor’s degree in math and I enjoyed it and learned a lot. I didn’t realize, though, how useful the things I learned in that class would be — it was one of the most valuable courses I took.

Because I was the first librarian of my kind at this library, I didn’t always have data from before I started. Circulation data that predated me were easy to get, but there were only a handful of teen-focused programs held before I arrived, so it was important to choose my metrics and start establishing baseline data as early as possible.

My supervisor was the head of collection management, so I was able to watch closely how the YA collections were performing. Every month, I tracked circulation for YA fiction, nonfiction, audiobooks, graphic novels, and periodicals, and calculated what percentage of the entire library’s circulation was YA materials. I compared that percentage to other months that year and the same month in previous years. I tracked the turnover rates for our general YA fiction collection versus the recently purchased (and differently shelved and displayed) YA fiction. I carefully recorded and graphed everything and could thus prove that what I was doing was working. For example:

• YA fiction circulation as a percentage of all circulation had been falling in the three years before I was hired, but after I began working, that trend reversed itself.
• Even though print circulation across the library was falling, circulation of YA print materials was increasing.
• After creating the new YA fiction section and shelving more items face-out, circulation increased.
• When I suggested moving the YA audiobooks from the teen section to instead be shelved next to the adult audiobooks, circulation increased.
• After introducing a teen summer reading program, circulation of YA materials increased drastically in the summer months.

Because I had data that showed that what I was doing with the YA collection was working, I could prove that having a YA librarian was good for the library (increased circulation stats were something the director could include in her reports to the board and the community) and good for teens.

But while I had a relatively easy time improving circulation of materials, successful programming proved to be more complicated. Part of this, I think, was because programs for teens were totally new to my library, whereas books for teens were not. Teens thought about books when they thought about the library, so getting them to check out more or getting more teens to visit to borrow materials wasn’t hard. However, because teens didn’t think about events when they thought about the library, building a consistent program audience was more challenging.

For each program I held, I counted attendance, which is pretty standard, but then every month I’d analyze it. How had average program attendance changed from the month before (or the year before, once I’d been at the job long enough)? Which programs were attracting more teens (or fewer)? How was attendance at our book club versus the Teen Advisory Board trending over time? In the last year, what was the average attendance — but what was the standard deviation, too? (That is, was a particular monthly program attracting a consistent number of kids, or were there some months where we had a lot of attendees and some where we had few or zero?)

These data were really useful in deciding which programs were worth the time it took to plan and run them and which weren’t — or which ones needed extra publicity or promotion through outreach. For example, I had no problem ending movie nights when no one was coming, but I refused to let our book club die and was going to try everything I knew to do to increase attendance. (Even though libraries are certainly more than books, it’s one thing our community expects from us that other organizations likely don’t offer.)

Before I started at this library, there was a summer reading club for children and one for adults, but not one for teens. Summer reading programs are paramount in the youth services world, so I designed a program based on the one at the library where I’d done a summer internship during library school and made sure to collect a lot of data along the way via reading logs and at the end with a survey to kids who participated.

Once the summer reading club was over, I put together a report — in part for my director but mostly for myself — that analyzed how the club had done. Since it was the first year, I didn’t have previous data to compare it to, but I was able to analyze who participated in the program, how they’d heard about the club, how the number of registrations and reading log entries rose and fell through the summer, what prize levels participants reached, what formats they chose for their reading, and which authors were popular.

Because I knew in detail how the club had played out and what kids thought about it, I was able to make changes for the next year that saw a major increase in the number of kids who registered and increased participants’ reported enjoyment of the program. I was also able to use the data they generated about what and how they read to shape my collection development efforts. It took work to collect and analyze the data, but both my patrons and I were much more satisfied with the summer reading club in its second year, and, had I stayed at that library, I’m sure the third year would have been even better.

I also collected data on how many questions I answered when I was at the newly-created YA service desk, what kinds of questions those were, and how many questions per hour I was answering (since I didn’t always spend the same number of hours at the desk in a given week). I didn’t know ahead of time what the data would show, but gathering as much data as possible helped me make connections I might not have otherwise. For example, the way desk transactions correlated with program and circulation data was interesting: most of my reference desk transactions were performing readers’ advisory or helping patrons locate books, and a rise in reference transactions per hour matched closely with increases in circulation from month to month. Had most of my questions been homework help, I would have expected my transactions per hour to peak around the beginning and end of the school semesters rather than during the summer as it did. The data told a story, and being able to track and compare data helped me better understand what my patrons expected from the library.

The metrics you choose really do matter. My director wanted to know the number of reference transactions performed at the YA desk every month for her own reports, but I was much more interested in the number of transactions per hour since the number of hours I spent at the YA desk changed from month to month. (I was the only one who ever staffed the YA desk, so if I took a week-long vacation, that’d be a week that no questions were answered, and a 25% drop in the number of transactions wouldn’t be unexpected — but also wouldn’t be very helpful in knowing how I’d served my patrons that month.)

Sometimes statistics are for directors or for reports to the state library, but statistics can also be an irreplaceable way to know how you’re doing, what’s getting better, and what needs either more attention, restructuring, or to be phased out. It takes work to collect the data, but what it tells you about your patrons and services is invaluable.

Of course, numbers aren’t the whole story. Especially in teen services, a lot of what we do is focused on helping kids develop into happy, healthy adults and lifelong learners and readers, which can be tough to measure numerically without large-scale longitudinal studies of both library users and nonusers. We measure some of our impact in how many teens we reach through programs or through lending materials, but we measure a lot of our impact in how we change lives in large and small ways. In addition to my spreadsheets of statistics, I also kept a text file of what I called “good library moments” — things like when a mother told me her son hadn’t been much of a reader but was now totally hooked on our summer reading club or when a teen told me she loved the manga club because she felt like she was around people who understood her and that she could be herself in a way she couldn’t at school. I’d look through that list on bad days to help me remember why I was in this profession, but I’d also use those anecdotes (with identifying information removed) in the monthly reports I sent to my director alongside statistics. Statistics help us know how we’re doing with our work, but personal stories of the impact we have on kids’ lives help us remember why we do that work in the first place.

I wish I’d known how important it is to have a vision

All of the data collection and tinkering with services I was doing would have been scattershot if I hadn’t had an idea of where where I was and where I wanted to be (or could be). I wouldn’t have believed you as a library school student, but after my experience with building teen services from scratch, I believe that developing a vision for your department is one of the most important things you can do. This was something we touched on a little bit in my library management class, but we didn’t spend a lot of time on it and it all felt very silly and corporate.

After I’d been at my library for about five months, our director wanted to put together a vision statement and strategic plan for the library with input from each department head. I was nervous about the prospect: I had less than half a year of hands-on experience, and I was still introducing so many new things for teens that it was hard to know how those efforts would be doing in a few months, much less a year or five years. But through the process of coming up with a vision statement for my department, I really had to think about why we were doing what we were doing, what I wanted to provide to my patrons, and how what my department did fit in with the rest of the library.

The town where I worked has a teen center, and I spent a lot of time trying to decide what differentiated the library from the teen center. Obviously the library is more media-focused (we devote a lot of our building and budget to books, music, and DVDs in a way that the teen center doesn’t, and they do more teen programming than we do), but if we were going to be offering teen programs like video game tournaments or Teen Iron Chef competitions, what made us and the teen center different? Was it possible for me to do those things and still maintain the library perspective?

I’m still not sure I have a great answer for that (other than the library being more focused on lifelong learning), but having to write a vision statement and look to the future of my department forced me to clarify and articulate the library’s values when it comes to teen services. This was good for me because as I was planning new projects and programs and outreach, I was grounding them in what I had decided was important.

Working on a vision statement was also immeasurably useful in being an advocate for my department and my teens. Once I had a vision statement and had identified my department’s five core values, I could take that vision with me to talk to administration, to parents, to schools, and to the community at large. It was easy to explain why a program was appropriate for the library and why it was good for kids. It was easy to explain why the teen perspective mattered in the library as a whole and how what I was doing supported the library’s mission statement. It was easy to talk about why the library was a natural partner with different organizations. It was easy to explain why we wanted funding for new projects. I knew why I was doing what I was doing and how everything I was doing connected to everything else, and that gave my outreach and advocacy efforts such clarity.

Now that I’m working in a more established program, I’m not sure I feel as compelled to create such a detailed vision for teen services, but I do want to have a direction, good justification for why I’m doing what I’m doing, and a sense for how everything we do for teens connects. Creating a vision or a mission statement, regardless of the final product at the end, is a good thought exercise that has helped me be more reflective about my work.

I wish I’d known how much relationships matter

This might be a function of working in a small town, but while trying to build something new at the library, I was continually reminded how much relationships — between me and my teen patrons, between my department and others in the library, between the library and the schools, and between the library and the community — mattered. This definitely wasn’t something we touched on in library school; my youth services classes were all about programming or youth development or books for young people. We didn’t talk a lot about community building or how to raise awareness of what the library does for teens.

But relationship-building affects all other aspects of library services to teens. The first month or so of programming that I did was a disaster: no one came to anything, because no one knew anything was happening, or if they did know, they had no reason to come and none of their friends were going anyway. It wasn’t until I got to know our regular library teens and could convince them to come to programs and bring their friends (and had learned what programs they were actually interested in) that my attendance numbers were non-zero. Knowing kids in the community personally and then using their relationships with their friends was key to getting my programs off the ground.

Trying to get the word out about anything I did was also hard because while the library had established channels for reaching adults — via an e-newsletter, our website, press releases in the paper, and announcements via other community groups, for example — we didn’t have a way to get the word out to teens. I put up posters in the teen area and around town, but it wasn’t until I developed relationships with the schools, the PTA, and other groups in town and could ask them to tell their students or members about what we were doing that I started to see kids I didn’t already know come to my programs. Building relationships with other community groups gave me the opportunity to use their PR outlets to promote my programs.

And finally, while I could do programs or buy materials for teens who were already using the library, it was by forming partnerships with other organizations that we were able to do something special. I worked with the teen center to get books into their rec room, reaching kids we would never see at the library. I worked with a local private psychiatric facility and drug treatment center to get books to the kids living there, and when I left, we’d been talking about doing a book discussion with them or bringing an adapted version of our summer reading club to them. A few months before I left, I also started working with the creative writing teacher at the high school to launch a literary magazine for teens that would solicit submissions from across the entire county. The relationships I built with the librarians and staff members at these organizations helped both of us create something neither of us could have done alone.

I’m glad I knew how valuable it is to have a professional community

This one is a little bit of a cheat because it’s something I discovered in library school and brought to my first job with me, but I still want to emphasize it.

So many YA librarians are basically solo librarians (and so many school librarians are quickly becoming the only librarians in their schools or districts) that working with teens can be lonely work. Having connections with other YA librarians — whether through local or state library associations, national associations, or just forming relationships online — is essential if you want to be exposed to new ideas, keep on top of what’s happening in the field, and find companionship with like-minded people. Once you’ve built a network, relationships can be sustained through email and Twitter exchanges, Facebook groups, and meet-ups at conferences. Especially since this job was my first one out of library school, I depended on my peers for practical ideas from programs to displays to ways to run a summer reading club. I also depended on them for encouragement when no one turned up for a program or when I met resistance to new ideas in my community. Honestly, I don’t know how I would have done my work without being able to rely on the inspiration and support of my colleagues across the country.

And as I found myself growing and learning, I discovered other librarians who were also building teen services programs from scratch, and we were able to learn from each other. We could share common concerns and questions and encourage one another. For example, after all the work I put into creating the spreadsheets I was using to track circulation, program attendance, and reference transactions, it felt great to share those templates with a fellow builder of teen services, have her crunch her own numbers, and see her use what she’d discovered in an annual report to her administration.

I also found that the work I was doing for YALSA and the work I was doing for my job fed one another. I served on (and then chaired) YALSA’s Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults committee, which made me a much more sophisticated listener and a better listeners’ advisor — and the conversations I had with kids and parents who enjoyed audiobooks helped me remember what to listen for in the titles the committee was evaluating. Chairing a committee helped reinforce my supervisory skills (useful in Teen Advisory Board meetings!) and time management skills. Managing YALSA’s YA lit-focused blog, The Hub, positively steeped me in the world of young adult literature, and the trends and connections that I noticed while I was ordering books or putting them on display or recommending them to patrons gave me ideas for posts for the blog. And through all of that work, I was meeting more people to add to my personal learning network.

Writing, both for my own blog and for the YALSAblog, also helped me live a more examined professional life. Having to sit down and think through what worked or didn’t for a program, how I was going to plan a new project, or what I had learned through some experience reinforced those lessons I’d learned and gave me the chance to see things from a different angle. This relates to writing a vision statement in that the more you think about what you’re doing and why you do what you do and how it’s going, the better equipped you are to make good decisions later.

I certainly wouldn’t have been as good at my job if I hadn’t had a network of peers, connections with other librarians further along in their careers, and fulfilling association work that reinforced what I was doing at my library. A library science degree is a static thing that you get once, but a good professional community is a never ending source of continued learning throughout one’s career.

Are there other builders of teen services out there? In 1995, 11% of libraries reported having a dedicated young adult librarian (either full-time or part-time); in 2007, that number was 62%^[3], so when I started my job, I assumed that the upward trend would continue and that we’d see more builders of teen services. Unfortunately, the most recent Public Library Data Service (PLDS) survey from 2012 found that the percentage of libraries that reported having a full-time YA librarian dropped from 51% in 2008 to 33% in 2012^[4], so it seems the number of builders of YA has likely shrunk. If library budgets ever improve and the YA librarian community can advocate for itself, it may be that we see more rebuilders of YA in the coming years — at least, I hope so.

There’s a lot I wish I had known when I started my last job and found myself unexpectedly building teen services from scratch, but there’s a lot I learned during my time with that library. Now that I’m in a new supervisory position, heading teen services at the New York Public Library’s Bronx Library Center, I’m once again finding that there’s a lot I don’t know — but I’m looking forward to learning, reflecting, and sharing with my professional community.

While there are other young adult librarians who are also the first YA person their library has had, their experiences are bound to be different from mine based on their libraries, communities, backgrounds, and circumstances. I was a new librarian, I was the first teen services librarian and a department of one, and I was part-time. I’m interested in how my perspective and experiences are similar to and different from those of other librarians who are building teen services from scratch, and I think we can benefit from sharing our stories with each other.

If you’re in a similar position, building YA services from scratch or rebuilding YA services after your library was without a staff member whose job was to serve teens, what has your experience been like? I found data collection and analysis, writing a vision, building relationships, and cultivating a professional network really important, but I’m sure others learned different things. Did you struggle with some of the same things I did? What have you had to learn quickly on the job? What about the job has surprised you? We can all benefit from each others’ experiences and become better librarians by sharing!

Acknowledgements

My sincerest thanks to Lead Pipe Editorial Board members Ellie Collier and Emily Ford for their patience and thoughtful editing and to my colleague Emily Calkins Charyk for her unique insight and immensely useful observations. Without them, I would have given up on trying to coalesce and condense my thoughts into this article long ago.

Citations

[1] Kolderup, Gretchen. (2011, January 24). Learning as I go: building a foundation for teen services. The YALSAblog. Retrieved from http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2011/01/24/learning-as-i-go-building-a-foundation-for-teen-services/

[2] Kolderup, Gretchen. (2012, October 11). Connect, create, collaborate: Building teen services (nearly) from scratch. The YALSAblog. Retrieved from http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2012/10/11/connect-create-collaborate-building-teen-services-nearly-from-scratch/

[3] Flowers, Sarah. (2012). Evaluating teen services and programs. Chicago: Neal-Schuman. 13.

[4] Young Adult Library Services Organization Board of Directors. (2013). Reaching Library Administrators. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/yalsa/sites/ala.org.yalsa/files/content/Administrators_MW13.pdf

by Gretchen Kolderup at May 22, 2013 10:30 AM

As I gear up I to write more about programming, I have installed the Embed GitHub Gist plugin. So by writing

[gist id=5625043]

in the text of this post, I can embed https://gist.github.com/rdhyee/5625043 into the post to get:

from itertools import islice

def triangular():
    n = 1
    i = 1
    while True:
        yield n
        i +=1
        n += i

# <codecell>

for i, n in enumerate(islice(triangular(), 10)):
    print i+1, n

by Raymond Yee at May 22, 2013 03:31 AM

by ptsefton at May 21, 2013 11:34 PM

By now the announcement of a collaborative project by the big search engines to create a vocabulary for encoding metatada for people, places, and things, is old news. Schema.org made a splash a while back, but it’s a bit hard to tell what the take-up has been like by web managers.

However, since I recently have undertaken to redesign some of my personal web properties such as FreeLargePhotos.com and SonomaValleyWineries.org, I took that as an opportunity to finally integrate Schema.org markup into my pages. In so doing I found some tools that helped me to do it that I want to highlight for anyone trying to do the same.

To make it easy to find out what markup you should put where, Google offers the Structured Data Markup Helper. First you select the type of item you wish to markup from one of these:

• Article
• Movie
• Software Application
• Event
• Product
• TV Episode
• Local Business
• Restaurant

Then you plug in the URL of one of your representative pages (for me that was a descriptive page for a winery) and hit the “Start Tagging” button. The site then loads the page and allows you to highlight representative strings of text on you page and select what that string is from the options — things like “name” or “phone” or “email”. The options are defined by the type of item you selected at that start, so it only allows you to pick relevant labels.

After marking and labeling all of the relevant metadata elements, you hit the “Create HTML” button and it shows you your HTML markup with the embedded Schema.org markup highlighted. This shows you exactly what you need to do to add structured metadata to your pages.

After you’ve done that, you can then use another one of Google’s tools to verify that it worked. Go to Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and plug in the URL of one of your pages. It will attempt to scrape the embedded metadata from your page and show you what it has extracted. If you don’t see what you expect then you may have to fix an error. Otherwise, you’re good to go.

The likely benefits are two-fold. One is that Google and other search engines can display more full-featured and accurate descriptions of individual search results that have such markup. Another is that search engines may give results that have such markup more “juice” in results ranking. In other words, it is very likely to be worth the little effort it might take to embed this markup in your pages. And if your pages are generated by a CGI script as mine are, then there is very little excuse not to.

by Roy Tennant at May 21, 2013 11:12 PM

Beth, Matt, & Yiming

Beth Plale and Yiming Sun, both from the HathiTrust Research Center, came to Notre Dame on Tuesday (May 7) to give the digital humanities group an update of some of the things happening at the Center. This posting documents some of my take-aways.

As you may or may not know, the HathiTrust Research Center is a part of the HathiTrust. And in the words of Plale, “the purpose of the Center is to develop the cyberinfrastructure of the Trust as well as to provide cutting edge software applied against the Trust’s content.” The later was of greatest interest to the presentation’s twenty or so participants.

The Trust is a collection of close to 11 million digitized books. Because close to 70% of these books are not in the public domain, any (digital humanities) computing must be “non-consumptive” in nature. What does this mean? It means the results of any computing process must not be able to reassemble the content of analysis back into a book’s original form. (It is interesting to compare & contrast the definition of non-consumptive research with the “non-expressive” research of Matt Sag. ) What types of research/analysis does this leave? According to Plale, there are a number of different things including but not necessarily limited to: classification, statistical analysis, network graphing, trend tracking, and maybe even information retrieval (search). Again, according to Plale, “We are looking to research that can be fed back into the system, perhaps to enhance the metadata, correct the OCR, remove duplicate items, date items according to when they were written, or possibly do gender detection… We want the Trust to be a community resource.”

After describing the goals behind the Center, Sun demonstrated some of the functionality of the site:

1. Ideally, log in but this is not always necessary.
2. Create or choose a “workset” — a collection of documents — by searching the ‘Trust with a simple faceted interface. Alternatively, a person can select any one of the existing worksets.
3. Choose an algorithm to apply against a workset. Many of the algorithms have been created using Meandre and output things like tag clouds and named entities. There is presently an algorithm to download all the metadata (MARCXML records) of a set.
4. Download the results of Step #3 to further one’s own analysis.
5. Go to Step #2.

Interaction with the Center in this manner is very much like interaction with JSTOR’s Data For Research. Search content. Run job. Download results. Do further analysis. See a blog posting called JSTOR Tool as an example.

Sun also highlighted the Center’s wiki where there is documentation describing the query and data APIs. The query API is based on Solr allowing you to search the Trust. The data API provides a means for downloading metadata and associated content.

As the presentation was winding down I thought of a number of ways the underlying metadata and reading experience could be improved through a series of relatively easy applications. They include:

• add the length of a book in terms of words allowing a person to search for a “short” book
• add one or more “readability” scores allowing a person to search for “easy” books
• allow search results to be plotted graphically (visualized) using readability and lengths
• compute a short list of statistically significant words for each book to supplement “aboutness”
• enhance the reader’s experience by supplementing it with concordances, frequency tables, word clouds, etc.

This was the last of our sponsored digital humanities presentations for the academic year. Matthew Wilkens and I sincerely appreciate the time and effort Beth Plale and Yiming Sun spent in coming to visit us. It was very interesting to learn about and discuss ways the content of HathiTrust can used to expand our knowledge of the human condition. “Thank you, Beth and Yiming! Fun with the digital humanities”.

by DH @ Notre Dame at May 21, 2013 07:37 PM

Last week, I had the privilege of participating in the conference “Networking Sciences, Engineering, Arts and Design to Confront the Hard Problems of Our Time,” held at the Smithsonian Institution, and co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Network for Sciences, Engineering, Arts and Design (SEAD). SEAD’s mission is to “operate in entrepreneurial, sustainable ways to identify and promote broader impacts for communities and individuals in new areas of practice, research and critical discourse, achieving creative excellence and intellectual merit.”

The extended luncheon session featured federal agency representatives of great diversity—including the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Department of Energy, National Endowment for the Humanities, Department of Education, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. One of the participants noted her surprise (and appreciation) at the use of the word “imagination” from each agency in the respective characterizations of projects and programs.

I first became involved in this general topic over a decade ago when I worked as a study director at the National Research Council. I was the lead staffer on a multi-year study that culminated with the report Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity, published in 2003 with my co-editors, the late William J. Mitchell and Marjory Blumenthal, and inspired and funded by Joan Shigekawa, then an associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation.

Beyond Productivity focuses on the opportunities enabled by the rise of the Internet and related technologies that promote the creation of innovative art and design. In collaboration with scientists and engineers, the work centers on both new forms of creative practices and outputs, as well as novel ways to engage the public in these new forms. One of the major topics in the study is exploration of venues for the new “Information Technology and Creative Practices.” Museums, art galleries, corporate R&D labs, and universities are among the likely venues, as well as cyberspace itself. In 2003, libraries were not identified as likely venues. It is interesting how some things come full circle, as now in 2013, libraries clearly are a venue for new information technology and creative practices, as libraries are rapidly evolving, incorporating larger roles in the production of information such as makerspaces, and shaping how libraries themselves fit in the evolving information ecosystem.

The American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP), among others, emphasizes the increasing role of content production in libraries. In addition to makerspaces, libraries include video production studios, digitization facilities, book publication services, and other activities in support of an evolving vision for libraries. For example, consider the Library as Incubator Project, whose mission is to “promote and facilitate creative collaboration between libraries and artists of all types, and to advocate for libraries as incubators of the arts.” Of course, other libraries are pursuing various initiatives such as those at Chattanooga Public Library, which recently hosted Makerday: 3D Throwdown, and the Chicago Public Library is well-known for Youmedia, its innovative teen learning space.

I’m not sure yet how to systematically connect these efforts to paradigms at major research universities and art and design organizations with the library community, but there is potential for fruitful collaboration there. The possibilities vary with library types—school, public, academic, or other—and could provide benefit to library users as well as enable the development of new forms of art and design that incorporate participation from a diverse, potentially large, group of community members.

Contemplating such things is central to OITP’s mission: working to connect the dots to benefit libraries and the communities that libraries serve.

The post Some thoughts on knowledge production, makerspaces, and libraries appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Alan Inouye at May 21, 2013 05:41 PM

To assist libraries in providing e-government services to patrons, the American Library Association (ALA) and the Information Policy & Access Center (iPAC) at the University of Maryland will host the no-cost webinar “Libraries & E-government” on May 30, 2013, from 2:00–3:00p.m. EST.

Register for the webinar

As part of the webinar, participants will:

1. Learn how to use LibEGov (www.libegov.org), an easy-to-use web tool that helps libraries serve the e-government needs of their communities
2. Become more familiar with online resources available from government agencies and non-governmental organizations in the areas of immigration and taxation; and
3. Learn about the benefits of the virtual Ask A Librarian feature available through the Government Information Online service.

Developed by ALA and iPAC, LibEGov is the product of an Institute of Museum and Library Services funded national leadership grant, intended to foster collaboration between libraries and government agencies, as well as to offer guidance to libraries on the provision of e-government information and services to a range of populations within their communities.

Speakers include University of Maryland professors John Carlo Bertot and Paul Jaeger; University of Maryland doctoral candidate Ursula Gorham-Oscilowski; University of Maryland Graduate Research Associate Natalie Greene Taylor; and ALA Office of Government Relations Assistant Director Jessica McGilvray.

Register for the webinar

The post Have You Used LibEGov? Learn How To During the Free E-Government Webinar appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Jazzy Wright at May 21, 2013 04:56 PM

We’re glad to announce that Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, will be one of our keynote speakers at OKCon 2013. As co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, Ellen Miller advocates the use of the internet to inspire greater openness and transparency in government. She founded two further organisations, the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign, that focus their activities in the fields of money and politics. Ellen Miller can look back at a career of 35 years advocating non-profit advocacy, grassroots activism and journalism.

From a recently published blog post by Mrs Miller, On the Topic of Open Government and Open Data:

Sunlight believes in open data and open government not because these are abstract goods, but because we want to make government more accountable to ordinary people and less subservient to well-connected special interests. We think it’s great that more consumer-facing data will be opened up by the Obama administration (aka “smart disclosure”), and we want the “operating system” of government open and free, along with many others. And to be sure, there are many additional benefits to be had from opening up government data including increasing efficiency, reducing waste, creating new business opportunities and empowering consumers. But we remain insistent that a central if not the core goal of the transparency movement must be to shift power from the few to the many, by making all the information about who is trying to influence the process and what they get out the other end more accessible to all.

From the Gov 2.0 Summit 2010, from her talk Open Government Scorecard:

We can’t wait to attend her talk at OKCon in September! And we’ll be happy to have you joining us, too.

Early Bird tickets are now on sale and will be available until June 23rd, 2013. Buy yours now!

by Jan Zuppinger at May 21, 2013 11:53 AM

The world’s ugliest websites are not library websites. But we’re not far behind.

In the course of my work, I scan some pretty dismal exemplars of this tragic state of affairs. But let’s be frank, we’re not talking about a few bad apples. Bad websites are the norm for libraries.

Now, I won’t draw attention to specific offenders (we’re all guilty to some degree after all) as I really want to focus on what goes into good library design. Nor will I indulge my first impulse to drop a few old-school animated GIFs onto this post to illustrate my point in 16-bit fashion. Let’s keep this civil. No need to induce any migraines or sore feelings.

But in order to highlight the best design approaches to common library problems, we need to first call out the number one cause of usability disasters in the library world.

Clutter

Busy bee librarians have built hives too heavy for their own good. Sooner or later, the twig of user patience will snap and the bears of irrelevance will eat us for lunch.

Here are the commonly heard refrains in library web conversations: Everyone-has-to-have-their-way, everything and the kitchen skink must be on the homepage, repeated ad nauseum from page to endless page, down the rabbit hole. If it is a thing related to the library, their must be a link!

[Your Brain Dump Here]

Clutter is a tenacious problem on any website, namely because it arises from the very sensible desire to help people find things. And for librarians, whose primary service model was built on pre-arranging materials in logical ways, this “helpfulness” seems natural and entirely appropriate.

But the short history of the Internet is littered with the failures of this approach. The clearest example was during the early Search Engine Wars between Yahoo! and Google.

Yahoo!’s approach was to organize the Internet into browsable hierarchies on top of having an okay search product (sound familiar yet?). Google, on the other hand, just focused on the search product (it had to be fast, accurate and dead simple). As you probably noticed, Google won.

Pretty much every library site follows the failed Yahoo! model. Again, this is largely due to the historical approach to pre-organizing information for people. It’s practically in our QP 624.

Meanwhile, Google continues to chip away at the loyalty of our user base. According to the 2012 Academic Library Edition of Library Journal’s Patron Profile Google is the initial choice for starting research for 76% of student respondents. The library was the first choice for 24%.

In some libraries, it’s the dreaded Web Committee that is the primary cause of clutter where the impulse to pre-organize information is compounded by group-think and organizational politics. Other times, it’s a simple lack of understanding of basic usability principles. And in some cases, the understanding of usability is there, but other considerations get in the way, such as clashing web strategies where the website is being used for purposes beyond what its architecture can handle.

Solutions

The Web Committee

The solution to the Web Committee is to break this body up and do an extreme makeover. Distributed content management is definitely the goal, but this must be a curatorial process handled by professionals. Sadly, most “information professionals” don’t come out of library school with usability core to their training. From my perspective, this is a key oversight in our professional strategy and one that explains why libraries no longer lead in terms of delivering information.

As I just indicated, the replacement for the Web Committee is a Web Curator Committee. Actually, it’s less a committee than a group. Whatever you call it, here are the basic outlines of what this body should be about:

• Small: Limit membership to one representative from each part of the library that is the main service provider for any given content. Typically, this might be one curator from instruction, one from reference, one from access services, etc.
• Focused: Each member should be a knowledgable expert from their department, that knows the audience their content addresses and the key services being offered. And that one person, will have sole responsibility for the pages they are assigned.
• Skilled: Each member will either come trained in usability or be trained to do their job well. In my library, this group has been given a measure of informal training, including webinars from usability experts and readings. Plus they get to hear me rant from time to time ;P

Once you have this group in place, it becomes much easier for distributed content management to happen and happen usably. The idea is that the group meets quarterly to keep on the same page but largely they work independently. Most importantly, curators are dynamite at keeping the clutter at bay as these people serve as ambassadors to their departments and often have more trust than, say, someone from an external web team. Their role, then, is to gather input on updating content and then edit ruthlessly using their arsenal of best practices and understanding of the library’s content strategy.

Usability? What Usability?

In many libraries, usability is a new concept. As I mentioned, training in usability principles is not (yet) core to our profession, so if you or someone you care about is one of these people, here are the basic principles of design you should consider.

Four good starting places:

1. Dan Brown of EightShapes has a great webinar on the principles of good web design. Watch it (or scan the slideshow) and you’re already halfway done.
2. Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen is slightly more detailed (and ironically, not the most elegant design-wise)
3. Also, of course, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, is an easy classic that is simultaneously funny.
4. Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web takes you step by step on how to build a framework to do content right.

Mission Creep

Sometimes library leadership knows all about usability…but then there’s what they do for a living. Let’s face it, the top brass are wheeling and dealing, fighting the good fight on a level that we lower down the organization can’t even comprehend. The library website, to some library leaders, is, yes, a discovery layer that needs to be usable, but also a tool in winning friends and allies and keeping the budgets healthy. Thus, we get the library site that is at once a tool for 99.9% of our users to find things, but also built around a host of other purposes.

This can result in lots of content…trough-fulls of it…and it all must be on the homepage.

Until this is managed appropriately, this problem can best be described as mission creep. More complicated than either of the other two causes of clutter, mission creep is actually quite common. In cases of mission creep, it’s important to turn to experts like Kristina Halvorson. While Halvorson is a stickler for holding the line on runaway content, she also understands that business goals are key to content strategy. And if your leadership’s business strategy requires lots of links to keep the lights on, ultimately, your site must provide this.

For the usability purists, this is a hard truth to face. But there are creative options open to us. Consider the following:

1. As Dan Brown might say, break the navigation. Create content areas on your site that allow you to put new links or images or even blocks of text that meet any business needs your library might have down the road.
2. Another Dan Brown turism: Growth Happens, so plan for it.Build your architecture so that it anticipates “runnaway growth” in a way that doesn’t overwhelm your typical library user. This can include planning for sub-sites or handing over a menu to meet changing missions.
3. Let search save you. Fortunately, many, many people prefer using your search box than browsing your pre-organized links. If all else fails, make sure your search tool is central, easily reachable and works.

There are places where professional usability-minded web managers need to draw the line, however:

1. The left-most menu item is sacrosanct. This should be considered the easiest, most usable spot on your site and every effort should be made to keep it free of content that can mislead or confuse users with too many dead-end options.
2. The little arm of the F: The above the fold, below the nav bar area just to the right of your left rail is critical. This is where your search must be on your homepage and if you do this, all the clutter in the world will not stop most users from ignoring everything else and getting to your resources. Unfortunately, many users will find your website deeper in the navigation, having come from a link somewhere else, but again, that’s when creativity in design (such as in your navigation) can help save the user.

Best in Show

So what does good design look like? A pretty nice implementation of a clean, usable library site is at the ETH Bibliothek in Switzerland.

The first thing you’ll notice about this library website is that it doesn’t look anything like your library website. You’ll note the slick, modern design that looks like something out of Mountain View or Cupertino, not the Web Committee.

You’ll see that it has the search box visible right smack on the small arm of the F-pattern and that this box appears on every page in exactly the same place.

You’ll also note that this site has a lot of content (look at the fat footer site map). See? Clearly the architect had to build for lots of needs, but used an ingenious technique for meeting those demands, while keeping the site smooth and simple.

So, to sum up: the library world needs a good, strong shot of usability…or else. And the real heroes that will save our users and our relevancy to the world, are the leaders in this area.

by mryanhess at May 20, 2013 11:00 PM

Today is International Clinical Trials Day. To mark the event, here’s a post from Iain Hrynaszkiewicz reviewing the current state of open knowledge in medicine. You can see an earlier version on F1000’s blog.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA), the organisation which approves drug license applications from the pharmaceutical industry in Europe, has made important progress towards more open science. They hope to release anonymised data from drug trials online, but are faced with widely divided opinions on how data sharing should happen, as well as legal challenges in making it happen. The Open Knowledge community has a chance to help produce better outcomes for the beneficiaries of medical research.

On 30 April 2013 the EMA published advice documents, which cover five different aspects of clinical data sharing and are designed to help the EMA craft their policy on data release. The advice was sourced from around 200 volunteers from across the drug industry, academic research, publishing, and patient advocacy communities. I’ll be the first point out this is not an open data policy – it’s a data sharing or data access policy. The EMA is, along with most medical research, a long way from implementing an Open Knowledge-compliant data policy – with data rapidly released in machine-readable formats to the public domain. But amongst the documents released there are some pertinent developments – worrying and promising in equal measures – that the open science community should recognise now.

Copyright and licenses

One suggestion in the EMA’s legal advisory group was that all data submitted to the EMA would be protected by copyright under the EU Database Directive. This seems unlikely, as it assumes all trial data are in a database. Data take many forms within and without databases. Whether copyright applies to data is a much debated issue depending on, amongst other things, the legal jurisdiction. However, Creative Commons CC0 was proposed to the EMA as possible solution to this problem. Data repositories Dryad and figshare were used as examples along with the journal F1000Research, which was the first journal to use the CC0 public domain dedication waiver for data it publishes.

Data formats and standards

Data standards breed efficiency – efficient reuse, sharing, understanding and computation. The advice to the EMA on data formats includes some promising recommendations. The advisory group was quick to recognise the importance of clinical data standards such as CDSIC and file formats that can be read with open source software. But to avoid delays in implementing the policy it seems likely that such standards will not be required and “any format shall be acceptable for all data until the policy is applied by stakeholders”. PDF, a format widely discouraged for data, was even recommended by some as a format for some types of data.

Many other issues were covered, and the documents are available with full version history.

Making more science data and research results available openly ultimately means faster progress in solving the most difficult problems facing the world. In medicine the benefits of doing more reliable science through open data are the most tangible. People’s health is improved. But much of the clinical research community are not even used to sharing or being able to share – publish – the reports of their work (papers in journals) let alone their raw data.

Publication bias, where positive trials are more frequently published than negative trials, has been found in more than 50 different treatments including widely prescribed antidepressants and anitvirals. A lack of available platforms is not the barrier. Many journals accept or encourage negative results – including F1000Research which just launched a fee waiver for negative results –and various repositories can accept negative data.

The EMA’s initiative comes at a time when there is unprecedented attention on access to information from medical research in the UK and EU. The UK Government’s Science and Technology Select Committee is reviewing large amounts of oral and written evidence on its recent inquiry on clinical trials. The Alltrials campaign for the reporting and registration of all trial results – an initiative of Sense About Science, BMJ and others and fronted by Dr Ben Goldacre – has amassed more than 50,000 signatures.

Medical research is finally moving, albeit slowly, to a new default of open. The open science and open knowledge community should support and guide the EMA and other interested parties in taking these important steps towards open data. And to mark International Clinical Trials Day, go sign the Alltrials petition! This is a real chance to change medical evidence for the better.

by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at May 20, 2013 02:02 PM

If you’d like to give the Open Knowledge Foundation a birthday gift, please consider making a regular or one-off donation to support our work opening up knowledge around the world!

Plaque to commemorate the founding of the Open Knowledge Foundation in May 2004 on Panton Street, Cambridge.

Nine years ago today the Open Knowledge Foundation was born. We’ve come a long way from our humble beginnings in Cambridge in 2004.

From government to science to culture, open knowledge is now on its way to being established as an essential part of our information environment.

Governments around the world are now putting open data at the heart of their transparency plans. Major publishers and research funding bodies are supporting and mandating open access to research publications and data. Leading cultural institutions and cultural portals are opening up their holdings.

And there are now more projects, initiatives and organisations than ever before dedicated to using open knowledge to improve the world – from civic hacking to citizen science, from data journalism to the digital humanities.

But we still have our work cut out for us: much essential information about the world is still locked up or gathering dust, and much remains to be done if we are to put this information to work to improve the world.

To mark the occasion of us entering our tenth year, we’re going to have a quick look at where we’ve come from, and some of our hopes for the future.

Where we’ve come from

Many of the Foundation’s earliest projects, principles, activities and aspirations are still with us today.

The Open Definition – our foundational text

The Open Definition – which sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content – was one of the first projects that we launched, and it still underpins everything we do.

The world’s biggest open knowledge events

Early on we still ran our big annual open knowledge events, like the ones we run today. Writer and open source advocate Glyn Moody (who now sits on our Advisory Board) wrote of our first edition of the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), Open Knowledge 1.0 in London:

The location was atmospheric: next to Hawksmoor’s amazing St Anne’s church, which somehow manages the trick of looking bigger than its physical size, inside the old Limehouse Town Hall.

The latter had a wonderfully run-down, almost Dickensian feel to it; it seemed rather appropriate as a gathering place for a ragtag bunch of ne’er-do-wells: geeks, wonks, journos, activists and academics, all with dangerously powerful ideas on their minds, and all more dangerously powerful for coming together in this way.

Panel discussion from Open Knowledge 1.0. From left to right: Becky Hogge, then Executive Director of the Open Rights Group; Charles Arthur, Technology Editor at the Guardian and Founder of the Free Our Data campaign; Ed Parsons, then CTO of the UK’s Ordnance Survey; and Steve Coast, Founder of Open Street Map.

Our 2010 and 2011 Open Government Data Camp events helped to transform a loose knit group of public servants, hackers and advocates into a coordinated force for open data around the world. Last year saw over 1000 people gather in Helsinki for OKFestival 2012, which was the biggest open knowledge event to date. This year, OKCon 2013 in Geneva will convene governments and civil society representatives from dozens of countries to figure out how to support the growth of open knowledge internationally.

‘Raw data now’

OKF Founder Rufus Pollock’s 2007 call to ‘Give Us the Data Raw, and Give it to Us Now’ was adopted and popularised by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee in a 2009 TED talk. This became one of the rallying calls of the open data movement around the world, and was widely covered up in the media (for example, see articles in the BBC, the Guardian, or Wired).

Following the money

A prototype of our Where Does My Money Go? project – which shows how UK public funds are spent – was featured on the front page of the BBC News. The Open Knowledge Foundation went on to play a leading role in securing the release of the COINS and £25k spending data, which are amongst the most detailed spending databases ever released by any government. Our Open Spending project now has over 13 million transactions, covering over 50 countries and over 80 cities and regions around the world – from Belgium to Bosnia, Portugal to Puerto Rico.

Labour MP Tom Watson on our Where Does My Money Go? project in the BBC: “We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this new tool will have a big impact on the way the public sector is held to account by UK citizens.”

Open source tools for open data

CKAN, our open source data platform, was one of our earliest software projects. It is now being used by governments and organisations around the world, and last week saw a major new release.

From our earliest years, the Open Knowledge Foundation has attracted developers who want to work on open knowledge projects. Our OKF Labs continue to provide a place where like-minded hackers who want to develop and use open source tools for open knowledge can collaborate.

Empowering people to use data to change the world

Over the past few years, we haven’t just been working to open up the world’s knowledge: we have also helped more people than ever to use, share and benefit from it.

Our School of Data project works to help journalists and civil society organisations use data to improve their research and reportage. The Data Journalism Handbook, a free book that we created with the European Journalism Centre, shows journalists how to use data to improve the news and is now being translated into many different languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Russian.

The Data Journalism Handbook, which ReadWriteWeb said offers “a resounding case for data-driven journalism … and the service that it offers the public”.

Opening up our culture

We have long been interested in the digital public domain and the cultural commons – from our early attempts to build a global registry of public domain works, to trying to model copyright law in countries around the world to determine which works are in the public domain.

The Public Domain Review started life as a relatively modest project to highlight interesting public domain works and to raise awareness of importance of having an open cultural commons. In the past few years it has received extensive praise from some of the world’s most prestigious literary publications, and has a dedicated base of regular readers which is just about to hit 10,000.

Our OpenGLAM initiative continues to liase with cultural institutions around the world to encourage them to open up their holdings – and to support people who are trying to create useful things using open cultural material, through initiatives such as the Open Humanities Awards.

Curated collections of public domain images from the Public Domain Review, which the Paris Review called “one of our favourite journals”.

Where we’re going

Since 2004, we’ve become a truly international organisation. We’ve gone from being a handful of like-minded advocates – mainly based in the UK and Europe – to becoming a global network, spanning countries and cities across the world.

We want to continue to expand and empower this network, to open up essential information about things that matter – from carbon emissions to clinical trials to our cultural past. We want to catalyse and support projects which use open knowledge to change the world for the better, whether through greater accountability, more successful data driven investigative journalism projects, or more collaborative scientific research.

We’re looking forward to many more years of open knowledge, and we have some really exciting plans for our tenth year and beyond. We hope you’ll join us.

by Jonathan Gray at May 20, 2013 11:34 AM

The horrific factory collapse at Rana Plaza in Dhaka has brought the business practices of global garment brands, as well their thousands of suppliers, into the spotlight.

At School of Data we noted that corrupt and missing data were part of the story. Data on building permits in Bangladesh is largely unavailable due to lack of state inspections. However, after years of pressure on global apparel brands from labor activists, the publishing of garment factory supplier lists is becoming increasingly standardized. We’re asking you to join us in mapping the data on garment factories.

Data Expedition: Mapping the garment factories 

When: Saturday May 25 – 12:00 BST to May 26 18:00 BST - link to your timezone

We’ll be looking for projects such as:

• Mapping garment factories locally and globally

• Exploring the global supply chain of garment export and imports

• Mapping the ownership of local factories and global brands with open company data

• Finding stories and patterns in the connections between global brands and local garment factories

Sign up here for the Data Expedition!

Please note that limited space is available. For more information about the Data Expedition format, we encourage you to read this article.

Before the Data Expedition – Help us build an open garment factory supply list

Before heading out on this important expedition, we’ll need to gather as much data as possible on garment factories. Labor activists and campaigners typically articulate the data in terms of ”supplier lists.” Some brands, such as Nike, provide a list of all factories in their supplier network via Excel and JSON downloads; while others, such as Levi-Strauss, only offer lists in PDF format. In order to prepare a solid dataset for the Data Expedition, we’re asking you to help locate, clean, and merge the supplier lists from across garment brands into one comprehensive Open Garment Factory List.

Begin today by adding to the Open Garment Factory List and join us for a GoogleHangout on Thursday, 23 May at 19:00 CET, where we’ll be engaging in joint data collection.

by Anders Pedersen at May 20, 2013 10:23 AM

The "First Annual" Publishing Hackathon was this weekend. As advertised, I participated and worked on an EPUB backmatter project. My awesome team consisted of me, Javascript/Ruby developer Max Jacobson (who's going to be even more highly sought-after when he finishes Rails school this summer), and TLC librarian Dianne Coan.

Here's our demo video:

 

Here's how we described the project:

Banned Books in America

Website that maps book banning incidents and links them to Openlibrary

Book Discoverability: A Graphical Solution

Concept for browsing books as nodes on a graph.

Book Discovery INSIDE the eBook

This was us! Our demo crashed and burned. The popup screens from the wifi messed up the ebook reader display of embedded dynamic content.

BookCity Finalist!

Website that recommends books by connecting them to cities.

BookieGoer

Website that helps you lend the books you've borrowed from the library.

Booklvrs: Read. Discover. Meet.

App that advertises the ebook you're reading to the people around you.

bookmatchup

Website that multi-factor-matches you to books.

BookMob

Website that aggregates book recommendations from your twitter followers.

bookshelf.me

Website that displays books as if they were on a bookshelf. I'm pretty sure there was more to it.

Publy.io

Website that recommends books to users based on books they've liked.

Captiv Finalist!

App and Website that uses machine learning algorithms and your tweet about last night's party to combat the short attention span of Today's Readers. I may not have understood this one.

Coverlist Finalist!

Website that believes in judging books by their cover.

Evoke Finalist and clear judging favorite!

Pinteresty website that recommends books based on emotions categorization.

Happy Chapter

App that recommends books based on tags you click.

I read your Brain

Brain-sensing rabbit ears that wiggle depending on your response to a book from a website.

IGNITE

Website that lets users rate romance novels for steaminess.

KooBrowser Finalist!

Browser plugin that analyses what you read to better sell you books.

Library Atlas Finalist!

Mobile app that sends you geographically appropriate quotes depending on where you are. My favorite.

Literary Trinket with Book Wish

3D printed QR-ish code baubles. Cooler than it sounds.

Meadows

Website that turns reading into a game where you earn points.

Meme a book

Website that turns books into lolcats. (I may not have described this accurately.)

MovieReader

Website that recommends books connected to the movie you just saw.

NYPL Reinvent

Analysis of NYPL metadata advocating a divorce of the library from its classification system.

OkLetsRead!

Website offering crowd-funded serial fiction (ebooks).

Quiply

Website that recommends books based on a user's video viewing.

Reading Tollbooth: A Gateway to Book Discovery

Website to match kids to books.

Something2Read

Website that recommends books based on tags you click.

Valerie's Baby App

App that promotes literacy to a girl named Valerie by making sliding block puzzles and defining words at her.

Visibrary

Website that uses library data to make graphical book circles.

Vookstore

Website that turns ex-bookstore owners into book curation engines.

by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) at May 19, 2013 09:49 PM

One of the biggest challenges facing the WorldShare Platform is putting together a robust infrastructure to support authentication and authorization for our web services. Our initial set of web services were read-only and didn't contain sensitive data. Therefore, when we required authentication at all, we could use a fairly simple authentication model, which merely identified clients making requests to Web services. This methodology, which is referred to as WSKey Lite, is probably most familiar to developers using our web services today.

read more

by librarywebchic at May 17, 2013 09:14 PM

Went to a visual recording workshop http://visualharvesting.com in Antwerp. Was really very much fun and I learned some great new techniques in storytelling. Some impressions: Filed under: Doodles, visual recording Tagged: graphic recording

by hochstenbach at May 17, 2013 06:52 PM

Filed under: Cartoons, Doodles, Sketches, Urban Sketches Tagged: brain storm, commute

by hochstenbach at May 17, 2013 06:33 PM

I was asked to be the librarian on this panel at the BCLA conference that was moderated by Ken Roberts. The other panellists were Roland Lorimer (Director of the Publishing programs and the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at SFU), Michael Vonn (lawyer and has been the Policy Director of the BC Civil Liberties Association) and Kevin Williams (President, Publisher and majority partner of Talonbooks).

For the most part we were in agreement, which surprised me. Towards the end I realized that I was sitting between a former Access Copyright board member (Roland) and a current Access Copyright board member (Kevin). Things got a little livelier then with some librarians from the audience challenging Roland and Kevin’s ideas on what fair and reasonable copyright fees look like.

Here’s my opening statement.

The current business model for ebooks sucks for libraries and library users. Libraries need to work with authors, and perhaps publishers to make a new model. Playing by the current rules does not serve our users and it doesn’t serve libraries.

Electronic content in libraries is such a broad issue. Fiction ebooks in public libraries is a completely different world from open textbooks in post secondary institutions. I’m much more familiar with the post secondary context.

So, I haven’t tried to access an ebook or audiobook through the public library for a couple of years. I was wondering if the experience was still as bad as that cartoon “Why DRM doesn’t work, or how to download an audiobook from the Cleveland Public Library”.

As a librarian the “give up on stupid library” concerns and worries me the most.

I wondered if things have improved. Last week I tried to download an ebook version of John Grisham’s The Rackateers through my library.

These were the steps:

• go to library website
• figure out which ebook link to click on
• search for Rackateers, my search turns up nothing. realize i’ve spelled it incorrectly, though the interface doesn’t give me any suggestions on how to correctly spell it.
• see that there are 0 copies available, and that there are 6 patron holds, Initially I made a mistake and went through the wrong version of Overdrive and saw that there were 500 people waiting in the province.
• decide to queue up to wait and click the “place a hold” button
• hit the authenticatication screen, go looking for my library card because there’s no way i remember the 13 digit library barcode number
• place a hold
• open bittorrent site
• click download
• enjoy audiobook

I had the .mobi and .epub formats in less than a minute. In 3 years the number have steps has decreased a bunch, but ultimately the outcome has not changed. I wasn’t able to get what I wanted from my library but I was able to bittorrent it quickly and easily.

The theme for this year’s conference is “Are we there yet?” The answer is “no, no we are not.”

I don’t think any of this is new information for people in this room. We all know that the Overdrive experience is sub-optimal and yet most of us feel stuck in the middle. Friends who work in public libraries have said it’s awkward to try and explain that it’s not the library that sucks, but it’s a combination of the vendor and the publishers that are making this hard. (This excuse doesn’t matter to most of our patrons.) Playing by the existing rules is an endorsement.

Let me make one thing clear: the solutions we come up with need to compensate content creators. When I go to work I expect to get paid, and I expect the same for my friends who are authors. I know that John Grisham will not get paid for the ebooks I downloaded. This is what we are losing out on by not being more proactive and creative in helping shape the business models around ebooks.

When he was on sabbatical the awesome Gordon Coleman from BC ELN was curious about the availability of best sellers on download sites. He put his expert “search and find” skills in his back pocket and Googled using a naive search persona. Gordon was able to quickly find 49/50 of Amazon’s best sellers.

He observed that much of unauthorized copying of ebooks seemed to be driven by love of books and desire to communicate, share and recommend. For example, the book review blogs which link to unauthorized copies, and also anonymous people who select favourite titles to build themed collections which are then available as single downloads: “The best 50 business books of 2010″ or “The complete works of Terry Pratchett”.

Gordon wrote in an email to me:

I thought about the root of what drove it…a love of books, a desire to share that love, a desire to pick and choose and recommend…and I thought: who else possesses these traits? Oh yes, LIBRARIANS. In fact file sharing is motivated by many of the same things that motivate us; in other words, the pirates ARE librarians without the MLIS. In a way they’re continuing the true spirit of what we do, but outside the walls of the library and not encumbered by any of the institutional crap and licence agreements we’ve agreed to.

I think my intro time is up, but as this conversation continues I’d like to share some ideas on other business models for ebooks that don’t suck.

Links:

• http://librarianaut.com/2012/09/19/your-friendly-neighbourhood-wretched-hive-of-scum-villainy-a-presentation/ Justin Unrau’s controversial and awesome talk at the SFU Big Ideas event last fall:
• http://unglue.it/ crowdsourcing money to pay a content creator to release existing content under an open license
• http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=10143 libraries commissioning content directly from authors
• http://open.bccampus.ca/open-textbooks/ current BC initiative to create 40 post-secondary textbooks that will be freely available on the web
• http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/33237485887/introducing-the-humble-ebook-bundle a pay what you want model for DRM free ebooks, where ths user decides how much they want to pay and how that will be split between the author and a donation to charity.  

I think the Humble Bundle model could be viable for queer/LGBT authors publishing with independent publishers. I hope to write a post soon outlining some initial thoughts about what I think this could look like.

by Tara Robertson at May 17, 2013 05:40 PM

JSTOR Tool is a “programatic sketch” — a simple and rudimentary investigation of what might be done with datasets dumped from Data For Research of JSTOR.

More specifically, a search was done against JSTOR for English language articles dealing with Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, and transcendentalism. A dataset of citations, n-grams, frequently used words, and statistically significant key words was then downloaded. A Perl script was used to list the articles, provide access to them, but also visualize some of their characteristics. These visualizations include wordclouds, a timeline, and a concordance.

Why do this? Because we suffer from information overload and computers provide a way to read things from a “distance”. Indexes and search engines are great, but no matter how sophisticated your query, the search results are going to be large. Given a corpus of materials, computers can be used to evaluate, analyze, and measure content in ways that are not feasible for humans. This page begins to illustrate how a cosmos can be created from an apparent chaos of content — it is a demonstration of how librarianship can go beyond find & get and move towards use & understand.

Give JSTOR Tool a whirl, and tell me how you think the data from JSTOR could be exploited for use & understanding.

by DH @ Notre Dame at May 17, 2013 03:40 PM

by jodi at May 17, 2013 01:44 PM

To go into a little more detail about what we're hoping to achieve, here's the project spec. Primarily, we'll be creating a new library portal (currently dubbed "MyLibrary") that will provide a bespoke view of key library services and will include the following planned functionality:

1. the ability to view items on loan and renew them, and see details of current holds/requests and their status
2. allow users to place hold requests from within Summon
3. within Summon search results, highlight which items the user has previous borrowed
4. provide easy access to module reading lists
5. provide the user with a history of items they've borrowed previously from the library
6. links to the relevant LibGuides for the user
7. a feed of new items (books, journals, journal articles, etc) tailored to the modules that the student is studying, based on analysis of circulation and e-resource activity
8. offer an opt-in service that will track usage within Summon and the link resolver, so that the user can re-run previous searches and locate articles that they've viewed
9. generate bespoke "you might be interested in…" suggestions based on the user's recent borrowing
10. extend the functionality of the reading list software to allow students to create their own lists of items found in Summon

The new library portal will replace the existing library page within Blackboard (which is currently a static page of links) and will integrate with the student portal to provide an overview of the user's library account.

Development work started about 2 weeks ago and the aim is to launch the initial version of the portal (with the functionality marked in bold) by mid-June. The remaining functionality will be gradually iterated into the library portal during the 2013/14 academic year.

by Dave Pattern at May 17, 2013 06:22 AM

On Tuesday, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and four other members of Congress supported an extension to a waiver requiring least developed countries (LDCs) to comply with world trade agreements. The LDCs are seeking policy flexibility to develop domestic technological and creative capacity before having to adopt the highest standards of intellectual property protection and enforcement.

In summary, the World Trade Organization waiver would extend intellectual property rights under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement for LDCs until they individually graduated from LDC status. These waivers affect the price, availability and use of resources in libraries for education, research and personal development, as well as access to affordable medicines, agricultural goods and renewable technologies.

The post Intellectual Property Access for the World appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Carrie Russell at May 16, 2013 06:38 PM

If you follow me on Twitter (@daveyp), you'll probably know already that we're about to take the plunge and retire our OPAC in favour of using Summon. There are a few drivers behind this, including:

• the OPAC's search facility is crude by modern standards and it's difficult to refine a search
• it looks like the OPAC can't display RDA records correctly, but Summon can
• we're planning to replace the ILS/LMS within the next couple of years and, chances are, whatever we get to replace it won't have an OPAC
• getting rid of the OPAC means one less thing we have to show students how to use

This isn't going to be a trivial project, as we need to integrate the missing circulation functionality (holds, renewals, etc) into Summon and our version of Horizon has no web services, but it's definitely "doable".

As I've blogged about previously, the Summon interface can be easily tweaked if you're familiar with jQuery, so there's a lot of potential for integrating the circulation functionality in a way that will appear seamless to the end users.

As the project progresses, I'll blog and post snippets of code that might be useful for other libraries. In the meantime, you can see some screenshots of the work-in-progress on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davepattern/sets/72157633427926980/

by Dave Pattern at May 16, 2013 05:24 PM

The Challenges and Lessons of Creating Accessible Course Materials

• Maureen Glynn, Yueh-Chin Ma, Digital Education Strategies
• Restiani Andriati, Digital Media Projects Office
• Diane Michaud,Library and Archives
• Charles Silverman, School of Disabilities Studies

Universal design for learning

• Planning for the widest range of potential users results in a better learning experience for all users
• Be inclusive in your language and instructions
• Provide a logical and consistent structure to your online materials
• Ensure that your material is understandable e.g. unusual terms, abbreviations, pronunciations, etc.
• Recommended: Multiple modes of representation, engagement, expression

Action plan for Legacy courses

• Establish processes and guidelines
• Retrofit legacy content
  • Course outlines: logical structure, properly formatted especially tables, meaningful links
  • Course content: a/v migrate media to ryecast with closed captions and transcripts

Document Accessibility

• Machine readable i.e. selectable – can use OCR to make it so
• Include descriptions for images/figures/tables
• Proper heading structure

A/V

• Closed captions (basic level = subtitles, only covers spoken)
• Audio description ideally

IT Working Group

• Working on making the IT environment accessible
• Content (documents, videos, etc.)
• Systems (LMS, HR, Student Management, email)
• Process (policies and processes)
• Align with AODA/WCAG 2.0

Content

• Includes LMS pages
• documents to download (ideally multiple formats, beware of PPT)
• sites sent to
• media

by Cynthia at May 16, 2013 04:22 PM

Last week, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced the Unlocking Technology Act, H.R. 1892, copyright legislation that would allow consumers to circumvent digital rights management on smart phones, e-readers, DVDs, and other digital products for non-infringing purposes.

As one who has prepared for and attended the Copyright Office’s triennial 1201 rulemaking proceedings for the past 14 years, all I can say is “hallelujah.” The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), of which ALA is a member, posted this statement (pdf) in response to the announcement.

The post “Unlocking Technology,” Common Sense Legislation appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Carrie Russell at May 16, 2013 02:09 PM

Teaching and Learning in Socio-technical Networks

• George Siemens

Transition to new technology can be hard, but while it can be difficult to learn new technology, there are some positive sides e.g. story of his father getting immediate help when having a heart attack.

Change

• Examples including Windows becoming much less dominant, increase use of tablets and smartphones
• Large Growth in eLearning and online learning
• Student population has greatly changed. Over half of students are non-traditional students. Cannot treat all students the same.
• Ed-tech startups shows the increase of venture capital into higher education sector.

Networks

Networks are everywhere. All you need is an eye for them. - Albert-László Barabási

• To understand is to perceive patterns video
• Snapp will do a network analysis. The question is what about the students who aren’t part of the network.
• Power of social media, examples: VEG girl rating cafeteria food whose blog was shut down by school, Boston bombing reddit hunt identified wrong suspect – varied in impact, tend to be either very good or bad
• Networks have changed over time to pursue interests instead of geographical area.
• Power, identity, structural shift from . To /
• Used to be the school as the hub, but now the school is a node
• We are no longer in control of what students learn.
• Need to account for a broader scope of learning

Granularization

• As goes info, so goes higher ed
• If students can get the same information themselves, like watching lectures on youtube, why do they go to class? Why are we sitting in this room if this talk could have just been delivered over skype?
• Conversations that are open, distributed, accessible, scalable, social, networked, self organized, iterative, adaptive, global, multimedia based
• We have packaged knowledge for students, but that information is incomplete.
• So students create socially create temporary centers e.g. Twitter hashtag; technologically create temporary centers: content and conversation aggregation e.g. google personalization
• Participatory pedagogies: force students to put their thoughts into the curriculum
• Knowledge is networked and distributed
• The experience of learning is one of forming the neural, conceptual and external networks
• Occurs in complex, chaotic, shifting spaces
• Increasingly sided by technology
• e.g. Got 3rd yr students to write python textbook in wiki for 1st yr student
• Network opportunities and frictionless learning

Meeting complex challenges

Requires a deeper level of learning and different set of skills, especially with technology

by Cynthia at May 16, 2013 02:01 PM

Last week, the Open Knowledge community was out in force at Berlin’s re:publica conference, which brought together over 6,000 bloggers, internet activists, innovators and makers to meet in person, for three days. Here, we’ve collected a few of our personal highlights – let us know what yours were in the comments below!

The event was peppered with presentations from members of the Open Knowledge Foundation community. First, OKF Germany’s Stefan Wehmeyer and Julia Kloiber talked on “What does Open Data have to do with me?” (presentation in German). Their beautifully designed presentation looked at how open data could positively impact the everyday lives of citizens, such as through open publication of school inspection results, as happens in the UK, or police forces making data about cycling accidents available, enabling the creation of maps such as this one for Chicago.

The OKF’s OpenGLAM team, Joris Pekel and Daniel Dietrich, gave a talk about the curation of the digital cultural commons., largely inspired by the recent post on OpenGLAM about Small Data in GLAMs. They addressed the issue of effective overload of data – that the vast amount of data available renders it almost incomprehensible. Dealing with this effectively requires better infrastructure, access and tools.

Other OKFn-ers were spotted on the panel on Opening Public Transport in Berlin (Julia Kloiber again – the only woman on an all male panel!), and at the workshop News You Can’t Print (Friedrich Lindenberg), exploring how data informs how we tell news stories.

Over the entire three days, we came across so many new and exciting projects, many of whose objectives go hand-in-hand with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s. Check out Eugenio Tisselli’s Sauti Ya Wakulima project based in Tanzania, for example, which provides a simple platform for farmers from different regions to share insights and advice on how best to grow particular crops. This type of knowledge sharing, open to all and running on an open source platform, is a great example of how the open movement can improve the lives of people across the globe, in many different contexts and positions.

Other highlights included:

• Yoani Sanchez, Cuba’s first independent blogger, talking about the challenges of working in a ‘closed’ environment, both in terms of the overall media environment and in terms of not being able to have access to new hardware such as computer parts or USB sticks. We hope her plea for future visitors to Cuba to take with them any pieces of old hardware and give them to Cuban citizens hit home with other listeners!

• Laurie Penny’s talk on cybersexism highlighted the gender imbalance within the tech world, an issue which will be explored in forthcoming blogs here at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

• A presentation from Tactical Technology Collective’s Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski on “Investigation 2.0” highlighted the results of collaboration across different spheres and of individuals taking on the role of institutions, thanks to new reams of data being made available for all to use.

• GIZ’s Global Innovation Lounge gave us the chance to mix with representatives from every one of the AfriLabs incubation hubs network, which was a wonderful opportunity to hear how technology and innovation is being fostered in various African countries. Hacker spaces and technology hubs are really taking off, and we hope to see the Open Knowledge community expand within the region too via our Local Groups and Ambassadors scheme.

The complete list of fascinating projects and people we came across is too long to include here, but the fact that there are so many projects working within the open movement is incredibly inspiring to us at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We look forward to collaborating with many of you – do get in touch, tell us about what you’re doing, and let us know how our global OKF Network could help. Or if you’d like to have a look for yourselves what we’re up to – check out our thematic Working Groups or geographically based Local Groups mailing lists, introduce yourselves and get involved in the Open Knowledge Foundation community!

Thanks to Joris Pekel for contributing to this post.

If you’d like to carry on the conversations started at re:publica, join us at OKCon this September!

by Zara Rahman at May 16, 2013 11:48 AM

In my various posts over the last six years on A Petabyte For A Century I made the case that the amounts of data and the time for which they needed to be kept had reached the scale at which the reliability needed was infeasible. I'm surprised that I don't seem to have referred to the parallel case being made in high-performance computing, most notably in a 2009 paper, Toward Exascale Resilience by Franck Cappello et al:

From the current knowledge and observations of existing large systems, it is anticipated that Exascale systems will experience various kind of faults many times per day. It is also anticipated that the current approach for resilience, which relies on automatic or application level checkpoint-restart, will not work because the time for checkpointing and restarting will exceed the mean time to failure of a full system.

by David. (noreply@blogger.com) at May 16, 2013 09:00 AM

Editorial by Laurence Lannom, CNRI

May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

Article by Micah Altman, MIT Libraries; Jefferson Bailey, Metropolitan New York Library Council; Karen Cariani, WGBH Media Library and Archives; Michelle Gallinger, Jane Mandelbaum, and Trevor Owens, Library of Congress

May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

Article by Gabriella Gray and Scott Martin, UCLA Library

May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

Article by Jacob Jett, Megan Senseney and Carole L. Palmer, University of Illinois

May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

Article by David Massart and Elena Shulman, ZettaDataNet, LLC

May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

Conference Report by Alex H. Poole, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

Conference Report by Sarah Ramdeen, University of North Carolina

May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

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May 15, 2013 06:21 PM

My first several weeks on the Platform Team have been rushing by and I am anxious to give you a preview of what we've been working on here. At a high level, we're still focused on the goal of providing you with useful and easy to use web services so you can develop your own solutions utilizing the shared data assets of the OCLC cooperative. I'm starting to get a sense of how many people are involved and how much behind-the-scenes effort goes into working towards that goal. If the recent release planning meeting (my first!) is anything to go by, we have a lot to talk about.

read more

by hostetls at May 15, 2013 04:17 PM

Information Today Inc. is running a sale on the following books (including The Accidental Systems Librarian) through Monday, June 10, 2013.

Information Today is offering 30% off the retail price on the following books:

• The Accidental Systems Librarian, 2nd Ed [Sale price: $20.65]
• The Embedded Librarian [Sale Price: $34.65]
• Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook, 4th Ed [Sale price: $17.47]
• Face2Face [Sale price: $17.47]
• UContent [Sale price: $34.65]
• LG to Negotiation [Sale price: $34.65]
• LG to Micropublishing [Sale price: $34.65]

Pick yours up today!

The post Information Today Inc. Book Sale appeared first on What I Learned Today....

by Nicole C. Engard at May 15, 2013 03:00 PM

We welcome the Shakespeare review as a time to reflect, coming as it does at a time of great growth in open data in government and the public sector.

The UK has lead the way with government taking a pioneering stance on open data policy in recent years, and this report sets out key recommendations for how to best take forward this work.

It is particularly good to see acknowledgement that there is a “difference between a commitment to transparency and a true National Data Strategy for economic growth” as it is clear that many of the benefits of open public sector information will go beyond the economic.

As the Open Knowledge Foundation has long emphasized:

The best thing to be done with your data will be thought of by someone else

Shakespeare recognises this with the comment that “we cannot always predict where the greatest value lies but know there are huge opportunities across the whole spectrum of PSI.”

Getting more data released quickly, without agonising over quality concerns, is an excellent recommendation and we look forward to seeing this in practice. Alongside this we welcome the demand for high quality information in the National Core Reference Data plan, including key entity data; such reference data, following clear open standards, will transform what can be done with UK data. The request that Trading Funds should remove restrictive PSI licensing and work towards releasing all raw data for use and reuse is particularly warmly welcomed.

We are pleased to see consideration being given to privacy and confidentiality issues; our definition of open data has always excluded personally-identifiable information, but with greater data collection than ever before, we acknowledge the challenges this can bring for data publishers. The demand for realistic and pragmatic consideration of privacy and confidentiality is welcomed, and best practice guidelines will be very helpful in assisting data publishers here. In addition we hope to see key security and privacy sector experts engaged in this as there are tough technical challenges around anonymisation, aggregation and sandbox use, and deep technical understanding is needed to fully appreciate the risks and limits of such systems, and to create sensible guidelines.

We are also delighted to see open access mentioned in the report; open access to publicly-funded research data and papers has been a long-standing tenet of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s work. Shakespeare notes that “even today, access to academic research that has been paid for by the public is deliberately denied to the public, and to many researchers, by commercial publishers, aided by university lethargy, and government reluctance to apply penalties; thereby obstructing scientific progress.” We can, and must, do better here.

We applaud the call for more data scientists and greater statistical skills at all levels; stronger data awareness and skills are critical for all the benefits of open data to be realised. In particular, the recognition that interactive and workshop methods can be most effective at teaching data skills is well aligned with our own School of Data and long standing culture of hackathons and developer engagement. The more teaching and training around data, alongside other key STEM areas including maths and technology, the better.

Finally, it is great to see that the economic value of open data will be assessed through research and audit, but at the same time it is vital to be realistic about the timescales for significant change and impact in this field. We think on a timescale of decades to see the full benefits and effects of the new open approaches to creation, sharing and reuse of knowledge, and government and others must be realistic about what will be achieved and how quickly, to avoid disappointment.

Open data is valuable to us socially and culturally as well as commercially, but it is only one part of a solution, and we need to work on the other key elements, including institutional change, tools, skills and awareness, which are also necessary conditions to realise the full benefits of openness. These other elements may be harder, and more expensive, than the release of data – we should still release more open data, and we are glad to see this report affirming this and encouraging data skills alongside – but the journey is far from over.

As Shakespeare puts it:

“It is now time to build on the very positive start we have made on open data with a more directed, more predictable engineering of usable information. Obstacles must be cleared, structures defined, and progress audited, so that we have a purposeful, progressive strategy that we can trust to deliver the full benefits to the nation.”

If you’re interested in open data and you’d like to join our global community of open government data advocates, you can join our open-government mailing list:

by Laura James at May 15, 2013 10:06 AM

Book discovery needs innovation. It’s never been easier to get a book into a reader’s hands—just one click. But, with over 10,000 books published each year on every topic imaginable, how do people find out about them? There are fewer bookstores to help readers discover exciting new authors and ideas. There’s currently no digital experience that replicates the serendipity of browsing bookshelves. Recommendation engines are fairly primitive – they know what you bought, but they don’t know why. It’s a disruptive opportunity that hasn’t been explored.

by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) at May 15, 2013 12:33 AM

Many of you have heard me say “Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not”–and that has certainly been the case since I got back from the NISO Roadmap meeting a few weeks ago. Somehow, with my head down, I missed part 1 of Roy Tennant’s post “The Post-MARC Era, Part 1: “If It’s Televised, It Can’t Be the Revolution”. I’m old enough to remember the 60’s and the call to revolution that Gil Scott-Heron referred to, and in fact had a small part in it–but since it WAS live, I’ve no evidence to present about my participation, you’ll just have to believe me.

On the other hand, I’ve been very involved in the revolution under discussion in the remainder of his post, and there’s quite a bit of video to confirm that, including at the beginning of the NISO Roadmap meeting, where Gordon Dunsire and I tossed a few thought-bombs out before the conversation got going. I think it validates Roy’s point about participation to say that the points we made came up frequently in the subsequent small group sessions, which were not, I believe, on the video feed. What I observed as a participant was that more than a few folks left with some new information and (I hope) some expanded thinking about what the revolution was about; more than they came in with.

Despite the fact that I’ve acquired an undeserved reputation for being a MARC hater, I actually think that we should continue to use the semantics of MARC, and get rid of the ancient encoding standard. It’s in some ways a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde problem we have here, and we’re about to kill the ‘wrong MARC’ in our exasperated search for something simpler, because we can’t seem to get clear about what MARC is and isn’t. The reality is that the MARC semantics represent the accumulated experience in library description from the days of the 3 x 5 card with the hole in the bottom (see Gordon Dunsire’s presentation on that evolution). We’ll clearly need to map the semantics of our legacy data forward, but that doesn’t require that we carry along the ‘classic’ MARC encoding. Consider the old days of the telegraph, where messages were encoded using dots and dashes. Those messages were translated into written English for end users, who didn’t need to know Morse Code to read them. Now we use telephone messaging and email for those kinds of communications, and Morse Code doesn’t figure in there anywhere.

In addition, we need to look past all those rarely used MARC fields, and recognize that they are only irrelevant in an environment that looks very much like our current one, with artisanal catalog records records and top-down standards development. That’s not really what we’re hoping for, as we wrap our minds around what an environment based on linked open data might free us to do differently. When systems were built to process MARC-encoded records, those systems needed to be updated at regular frequencies and all the sharing partners moved in lockstep. It was very expensive to manage the code that was the plumbing of those systems and the specialized fields didn’t add much value. But remember that each of the proposals for change were extensively discussed and formally accepted. I was there for many of those discussions, and recognize that not all of them were accepted, but a considerable number were, and then not always (or often) used after they were included in MARC. Before we label all that effort wasted, and attempt to re-litigate all those decisions, let’s take a closer look at the real costs of moving those forward, in the very different environment we’re envisioning, where the costs are differently distributed and everyone need not move in lockstep. It’s entirely possible that some new communities will find these specialized fields very relevant, even though libraries have not.

Roy quotes from the BibFrame announcement, which states:

“A major focus of the initiative will be to determine a transition path for the MARC 21 exchange format in order to reap the benefits of newer technology while preserving a robust data exchange that has supported resource sharing and cataloging cost savings in recent decades.”

It’s still unclear to me (and I’m not alone here), that we really needed a ‘transition path for the MARC 21 exchange format’. Why can’t we join the rest of the world, which is tootling along quite nicely, thank you, without a bespoke exchange format? We have several useful sets of semantics, built collaboratively over the past half century–why would we need to start over? I generally read the BibFrame discussions, but rarely participate, mostly because it all seems like a reinvention of something that doesn’t need reinventing, and I have no time for that. Whatever the BibFrame people come up with will be mappable to and from the other ongoing bibliographic standards, and whoever wants to use it for exchange can certainly do that, but it will never have the penetration in the library market that MARC has.

It’s also a bit mysterious what ‘preserving a robust data exchange’ actually means. Are we talking about maintaining the current exchange of records using OCLC as the centralized node through which everything passes? What part of that ‘preservation’ is about preserving the income streams inherent in the current distribution model? What is it about linked open data, without a central node, that isn’t robust enough?

Roy ends his post with something that I didn’t expect, but definitely applaud:

“Watching the NISO event over the last two days crystallized for me that I had fallen into the trap of thinking that the Library of Congress or NISO or OCLC (my employer) would come along and save us all. I forgot that for a revolution to occur it can’t come from the seats of the existing power structure. True change only happens when everyone is involved. Those organizations may implement and support what the changes that the revolution produces, but anything dictated from on high will not be a revolution. The revolution will not be piped into our cubicles, ready for easy consumption. The revolution will be live.”

We could start by no longer waiting for LC to deliver an RDF version of MARC 21, unencumbered by 50 year old encoding standards. We already have that, at marc21rdf.info. Yeah, it needs some work, but it’ll get done a lot faster if we can get some help from the 99% of the library world. Give us a holler if you’re interested.

Clearly the revolution is not happening on the BibFrame discussion list, it is happening elsewhere.

by Diane Hillmann at May 14, 2013 09:34 PM

Marta M. Deyrup of Seton Hall University Libraries is the recipient of the 2013 Distinguished Service Award, granted by the New Jersey Library Association’s College and University Section / Association of College and Research Libraries New Jersey chapter. This honor is awarded annually to an individual who, by his or her outstanding contributions, has directly enriched the profession of librarianship in New Jersey.

This award honors Marta’s excellent, energetic, prolific, and long-standing contributions to New Jersey librarianship both in information literacy instruction and as an international educator, editor and writer in information science.

Marta has twice received the prestigious Researcher of the Year Award at Seton Hall University Libraries. She has long been an active participant in NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ. She was a member of the team that won the first NJLA CUS/Technology Innovation Award in 2002 for “Information Literacy in the Wired University.” She has served the VALE Committee on Information Literacy, the VALE Committee on Bibliographic Control and Metadata and is an active member of the VALE Assessment, Evaluation and Statistics Committee where she helped to create the new VALE Survey Planning Checklist.

Marta currently serves as Acquisitions Editor for LITA Guides and is on the editorial boards for the Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship as well as the Technical Services Quarterly. She has written extensively on technologies and scholarship in librarianship and has contributed to the literature for Slavic librarians.

Along with her many contributions, Marta has also served as the Co-Director of the Elizabeth Ann Seton Center for Women’s Studies at Seton Hall University. She has also served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Library Science for the Institut Morocain d’Information Scientifique et Technique in Morocco as well as for the University of Zadar in Croatia.

Marta received her Master of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University and her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literature at Columbia University.

A formal presentation of the award will take place at the College and University Section’s luncheon at 12:30 pm on Wednesday June 5th 2013 at the NJLA Conference at Revel Hotel, Atlantic City, NJ. Please join the NJLA-CUS/ACRL-NJ Executive Board in offering Marta congratulations and appreciation for the many years she has dedicated to the academic library profession.

by mprentice at May 14, 2013 08:35 PM

LITA has announced the winners of annual scholarships it sponsors jointly with three organizations: Baker & Taylor, LSSI and OCLC, Inc. These scholarships are for master’s level study, with an emphasis on library technology and/or automation, at a library school program accredited by the American Library Association.

This year’s winner of the LITA/Christian Larew Memorial Scholarship ($3,000) sponsored by Baker & Taylor is Daniel Verbit, who will pursue his studies at The University of Alabama. The LITA/LSSI Minority Scholarship ($2,500) winner is Elizabeth Tham who will pursue her studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign. Lisa Lynn Tyler, the winner of the LITA/OCLC Minority Scholarship($3,000), will pursue her studies at the University of Washington.

Criteria for the scholarships include previous academic excellence, evidence of leadership potential and a commitment to a career in library automation and information technology. Two of the scholarships, the LITA/LSSI Minority Scholarship and

LITA/OCLC Minority Scholarship, also require U.S Citizenship and membership in one of four minority groups: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, African-American, or Hispanic.

The Scholarship winners will be honored at the LITA Awards Ceremony, which will be on Sunday, June 30, 2013, 1:00 pm in Chicago, Ill. at the McCormick Convention Center in S105a-c.

by mprentice at May 14, 2013 08:29 PM

Tomorrow morning will see the release of a major new review on how to make the most out the UK’s Public Sector Information authored by Stephan Shakespeare, founder of opinion polls company YouGov.

Given our role in advocating open data in the UK for many years, we’re very keen to see what Shakespeare says. Here are a few of our thoughts about what we hope to see in the review.

Strong commitment to open data as the default for UK Public Sector Information.

On the back of President Obama’s recent Executive Order announced last week that says public information in the US should be “open and machine readable” by default, we hope Stephan Shakespeare’s review will urge similarly strong support for open data in the UK.

In particular we hope he pushes the UK to do more to open up raw data currently sold by trading funds, and key datasets like the Postcode Address File (which is a crucial part of any website or app which involves putting things on maps).

Supporting standards to make open data more usable and useful

We hope that the review contains recommendations about developing and promoting better standards to make open data more usable and useful.

From spending information, to carbon emissions data, to health data, we hope to see initiatives to ensure greater standardisation of public information across central and local government to lower barriers to reuse. (This point was also alluded to in a article on the Guardian published earlier today.)

We’ve started work in this direction with our Data Protocols, but we’d really like to see the UK government doing more in this area. Given its role in the Open Government Partnership, it could help to create standards that could be used not just in the UK, but around the world.

Open data isn’t just about money

While we expect the economic potential of open data to be a major focus area for tomorrow’s review, we hope Shakespeare recognises that open data is not just about money.

Making essential information easier to use can bring about many different kinds of value – not just those that can be directly measured in pounds and pence. For example, greater accountability, innovative digital public services for citizens, and new forms of civic participation, journalism and campaigning. The impact of open data isn’t a magical rapid increase in jobs and economic value, but in many cases will be over a longer term, and will include non-monetary gains such as fairness and equality.

Next month, the US’s National Day of Civic Hacking plans to mobilise over 5,000 developers to address a variety of different challenges. The Data Journalism Handbook is full of examples of how journalists are using data to improve the news.

The UK has been a world leader in using data to benefit society – from projects like mySociety‘s TheyWorkForYou, which enables people to track what their MPs say in parliament, to pioneering data driven reportage from the likes of the Guardian. We hope the review also recognises this, and recommends that the UK does more to support it.

If you’re interested in open data and you’d like to join our global community of open government data advocates, you can join our open-government mailing list:

by Jonathan Gray at May 14, 2013 07:16 PM

Filed under: Figure Drawing, Sketches Tagged: art, class, Life Drawing, model, Nude, Nudes

by hochstenbach at May 14, 2013 07:14 PM

There is a discussion taking place on the BIBFRAME listserv about the draft proposal for BIBFRAME Authorities. I've made some comments, but this is a topic that requires diagrams, and therefore doesn't work well in email. This blog post is an illustrated comment on the BIBFRAME Authorities proposal.

The way I read the proposal, this diagram represents the current thinking on BIBFRAME Authorities:

<!--  BIBFRAME Authority -->
<Person id="http://bibframe/auth/person/franklin">
      <label>Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790</label>
      <relationToWork>supposed compeser.</relationToWork>
      <hasIDLink resource="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402" />
      <hasVIAFLink resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/56609913" />
      <hasDNBLink resource="http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534912" />
</Person>

1. It's all triples. It's easy to forget this when looking at graphs.
2. Availability is a technical issue for which there is an answer (or more than one answer)
3. The main action in a linked data space is a query. This is not only for traditional discovery, but also for forming displays. To display a person's name will be a query for a "label" linked to a URI. It doesn't matter whether the URI is a BIBFRAME authority URI, an LCNA URI, or a DNB URI -- each of those is a triple in linked data space.

by Karen Coyle (noreply@blogger.com) at May 14, 2013 01:23 PM

• What. Volunteering at OKCon 2013
• When & where. 16th-18th September 2013, Geneva, Switzerland.
• How. Find the call and the submission form here
• Deadline. The deadline to submit your application is May 26th, 23:59:59 GMT.

Are you a team player passionate about the power of open knowledge?

Are you ready to make OKCon 2013 a unique experience?

Do you have good English speaking skills and are you outgoing, hard-working and 100% reliable?

We want to hear from you!

We are looking for highly motivated volunteers willing to join us to make OKCon 2013 a fantastic and invaluable experience.

We expect our volunteers to deliver professional work during 2-3 days (16th-18th September, 2013). In return, we offer  an enlightening work environment, and the opportunity to connect with incredibly inspiring and like-minded people. Needless to say that we plan your work around your choice of talks.

Given the qualification for the profiles needed, those already in the Open Knowledge Foundation Task Force and other active members of the OKF community will be looked upon favourably.

If you are interested and available from 16th to 18th September 2013, please apply on the OKCon Call for Volunteers webpage. Deadline for the applications is Sunday, 26th May at 23:59:59 GMT. We look forward to receiving your application!

by Beatrice Martini at May 14, 2013 09:25 AM

Here is Paul Krugman pointing out how much better econoblogs are doing at connecting economics and policy than traditional publishing. He brings out several of the points I've been making since the start of this blog six years ago.

First, speed: 

The overall effect is that we’re having a conversation in which issues get hashed over with a cycle time of months or even weeks, not the years characteristic of conventional academic discourse.

In reality, while many referees do their best, many others have pet peeves and ideological biases that at best greatly delay the publication of important work and at worst make it almost impossible to publish in a refereed journal. ... anything bearing on the business cycle that has even a vaguely Keynesian feel can be counted on to encounter a very hostile reception; this creates some big problems of relevance for proper journal publication under current circumstances.

Look at one important recent case ... Alesina/Ardagna on expansionary austerity. Now, as it happens the original A/A paper was circulated through relatively “proper” channels: released as an NBER working paper, then published in a conference volume, which means that it was at least lightly refereed. ... And how did we find out that it was all wrong? First through critiques posted at the Roosevelt Institute, then through detailed analysis of cases by the IMF. The wonkosphere was a much better, much more reliable source of knowledge than the proper academic literature.

We believe the [Elsevier] adds relatively little value to the publishing process.  We are not attempting to dismiss what 7,000 people at [Elsevier] do for a living.  We are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.

The world's research and education budgets pay [Elsevier, Springer & Wiley] about $3.2B/yr for management, editorial and distribution services. Over and above that, the worlds research and education budgets pay the shareholders of these three companies almost $1.5B for the privilege of reading the results of research (and writing and reviewing) that these budgets already paid for.

by David. (noreply@blogger.com) at May 14, 2013 09:00 AM

Karen Doerksen, MLIS degree candidate at the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies, has been named the winner of the 2013 LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award, sponsored by Ex Libris Group and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA).

Doerksen’s paper, titled “A Sight to Be Held: Adapting Comics and Graphic Novels for Visual Impairment,” describes the vital role of graphics and pictures in the development of early literacy and examines the challenge of adapting comics and graphic novels into assistive formats to support the achievement of graphicacy in visually impaired individuals.

“The members of the LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award Committee are pleased to acknowledge and honor with this award Karen Doerksen’s thought-provoking manuscript, which reconsiders the position that comics and graphic novels are highly unsuitable for adaptation for the visually impaired,” said Regina Koury and Heidi Hanson, co-chairs of the committee.  “Ms. Doerksen’s paper illuminates the challenges and controversies surrounding this complex topic, and explores the possibilities inherent in emergent assistive technologies.”

The award will be presented at the LITA Awards Ceremony on Sunday, June 30, 2013 during Sunday Afternoon with LITA at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

by mprentice at May 13, 2013 08:52 PM

Brewster Kahle has been named the winner of the 2013 LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology.

Emerald Group Publishing Limited and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) sponsor the award that recognizes outstanding individuals or institutions for their long-term contributions in the area of Library and Information Science technology and its application.

After graduating from MIT in 1982, Brewster Kahle developed a system for publishing, distributing and searching information on the Internet, known as the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), which was a precursor to the World Wide Web. In 1996, he founded the Internet Archive and began archiving and indexing Web pages and other digital content, preserving it for posterity and making it freely and openly accessible. One popular feature of the Internet Archive is the Wayback Machine, which enables users to search and retrieve over 280 billion archived web pages.

Michael Witt, LITA/Hi Tech Award Committee chair, said, “When Brewster started the Internet Archive, he used the analogy of Library of Alexandria to explain what he was attempting to do, and he took the title of Digital Librarian for himself. His goal of enabling universal access to all knowledge speaks directly to the mission of libraries.”

Kahle has been an important advocate for digitization and increasing access to information electronically. He was instrumental in the creation of the Open Content Alliance and the Open Library that provides more than 1 million free e-books online. He has served on advisory boards for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. In 2012, Kahle was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

The Library and Information Technology Association and Emerald, the publisher of Library Hi Tech, are pleased to present the 2013 LITA/Library Hi Tech Award to Brewster Kahle for his outstanding contributions to communication in library science and technology.  The award will be presented during Sunday Afternoon with  LITA on Sunday June 30, 2013, at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

by mprentice at May 13, 2013 08:49 PM

LITA has announced Barbara Tillett as the 2013 winner of the  Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology. The award, which is jointly sponsored by OCLC, is given for research relevant to the development of information technologies, especially work that shows promise of having a positive and substantive impact on any aspect(s) of the publication, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information, or the processes by which information and data is manipulated and managed. The awardee receives $2,000, a citation and travel expenses to attend the award ceremony at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois, where the award will be presented on June 30, 2013.

Dr. Barbara Tillett is recognized for her outstanding leadership in library metadata standards, technology integration and international standards in cultural heritage and information institutions. As the chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office in the Library of Congress, Dr. Tillett led the work of metadata standards exploration and research for 18 years.

Dr. Tillett is the current chair of the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of Resource Description and Access and is a leader internationally in the world of metadata. She obtained her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles and her dissertation research, titled “ Bibliographic Relationships: Toward a Conceptual Structure of Bibliographic Information Used in Cataloging,” helped transform the library community’s view of bibliographic metadata and emerging models of records and relationships. This work is still resonating in the field with her leadership in RDA design and adoption.

Dr. Tillett’s long and distinguished career has included work with the Library of Congress, University of California, San Diego, The University of Hawaii and the University of California, Los Angeles.  She has been both a leading practitioner and researcher in library and cultural heritage metadata and has helped influence the profession through service with numerous IFLA and JISC organizations, including RDA and the FRBR working group.  In 1999, Dr. Tillett received the Library of Congress Distinguished service award, as well as the Library’s Meritorious Service Award in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000.

Notified of the award, Dr. Tillett said:  “I’m especially thrilled about this award, as I have worked with LITA and OCLC since the 1970′s and have a great appreciation of the significance of this recognition by my professional colleagues. Thank you so very much.”

Members of the 2013 Frederick G.  Kilgour Award committee are: Brett Bonfield, chair; Nancy Roderer,  past chair; Rene J. Erlandson; Erik Mitchell; David King, LITA board liaison; and Roy Tennant, OCLC liaison.  The award will be presented during Sunday Afternoon with  LITA on Sunday June 30, 2013, at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

by mprentice at May 13, 2013 08:44 PM

Last week the average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, a level which is said to be unprecedented in human history.

Leading scientists and policy makers say that we should be aiming for no more than 350 parts per million to avoid catastrophic runaway climate change.

But what’s in a number? Why is the increase from 399 to 400 significant?

While the actual change is mainly symbolic (and some commentators have questioned whether we’re hovering above or just below 400), the real story is that we are badly failing to cut emissions fast enough.

Given the importance of this number, which represents humanity’s progress towards tackling one of the biggest challenges we currently face – the fact that it has been making the news around the world is very welcome indeed.

Why don’t we hear about the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from politicians or the press more often? While there are regularly headlines about inflation, interest and unemployment, numbers about carbon emissions rarely receive the level of attention that they deserve.

We want this to change. And we think that having more timely and more detailed information about carbon emissions is essential if we are to keep up pressure on the world’s governments and companies to make the cuts that the world needs.

As our Advisory Board member Hans Rosling puts it, carbon emissions should be on the world’s dashboard.

Over the coming months we are going to be planning and undertaking activities to advocate for the release of more timely and granular carbon emissions data. We are also going to be working with our global network to catalyse projects which use it to communicate the state of the world’s carbon emissions to the public.

If you’d like to join us, you can follow #OpenCO2 on Twitter or sign up to our open-sustainability mailing list:

Image credit: Match smoke by AMagill on Flickr. Released under Creative Commons Attribution license.

by Jonathan Gray at May 13, 2013 06:57 PM

Last week, the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) arranged a meeting to bring together library leaders with President Barack Obama’s Domestic Policy Council staff as part of the week long activities for National Library Legislative Day. As part of the meeting, the group discussed where library priorities meshed with the President’s agenda.

Above, Carolyn Brodie, president of Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), tells Domestic Policy Assistant Mary Wells and IMLS Director Susan Hildreth about the exemplary programs ALSC members are offering around early childhood learning and parental engagement. In the photo, Brodie is talking about Every Child Ready to Read and showing Wells a handout highlighting: talking, singing, reading, writing and playing. Brodie encouraged the Obama Administration to visit one of the 330 excellent programs across the country that are doing just that!

Jack Martin, President of Young Adult Library Services Association, spoke with Steve Robinson of the Domestic Policy Council staff about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Martin talked about the important part librarians, in both public and school libraries, play for children working in STEM.

Eva Poole, president of the Public Library Association, spoke to the group about what public libraries are doing for immigrants, especially around English as a second language and civic education. She followed up with how important public libraries are for health information and what an important part they could play with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

Mandy Cohen from the Department of Health and Human Services was very interested in what Poole had to say and has already followed up to see what we can do to help each other. As Poole pointed out, we know our patrons will come to us to ask about these new insurance pools and what are the new requirements and we need good information from the federal government.

ALA President Maureen Sullivan ended the meeting by tying together what Brodie, Martin and Poole said and very positively saying that libraries serve their communities in all these areas and we look forward to hearing President Obama and Michelle Obama mention libraries and what we are doing on these important issues!

The Domestic Policy Council staff left very enthusiastic, and both IMLS and ALA leadership were pleased by the eagerness of the meeting. Now, we look forward to seeing how successful we were.

The post Library leaders head to the White House appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Emily Sheketoff at May 13, 2013 04:26 PM

This past weekend I took a road trip with two of my fellow board members of the very soon-to-be-officially-open hackerspace of Windsor, Ontario to GOOpenData: a one day conference dedicated to "bringing together developers, administrators, educators and citizens from across Ontario for an open dialog about open data" being held in Waterloo.

On this drive up I was nominated to give a brief lightning talk. So before I settled in for the night, I wrote something up from our conversations in the car and then presented those words at the conference the next day.

Thank you years of blogging experience for the ability to capture and convey ideas within strict time constraints.  And with that caveat...

by Mita Williams (noreply@blogger.com) at May 13, 2013 03:52 PM

Work continues on keeping our web services up to date and the following improvements are now available for two APIs.

read more

by hostetls at May 13, 2013 12:52 PM

For your delectation, we bring you the third installment of Global Community Stories – a round up of the fantastic projects and activities of our Local Groups across the world, including a Wikipedia Editathon for girls in Nepal, a multitude of events in Belgium, Big Data Week across Spain, a Swiss Government pilot project, a multicultural open data event in Edinburgh, and a tiny town in Austria taking the lead in releasing data sets – the race is on!

Following the incredibly kind donation of OpenBelgium.be to our Open Knowledge community by Wunderkraut, OKF Belgium is preparing to take on maintenance of the site and grow the community that they began. They’ve been busy developing other collaborations too; a meet up with Random Hacks of Kindness is coming up June 1-2, as well as developing appsforgeo.be. Their impressive upcoming events include a fully booked master class on Open Culture data, a presentation at the Flemish government to civil servants, as well as Apps for Flanders on June 14, and a General Assembly in June too. They’ve been keeping an eye on the public sphere too, and are organising a debate on new business models to allow financial sustainability through art following a lawsuit by the Belgian copyright organisation Sabam against ISP for not wanting to cooperate on copyright tax on internet subscriptions.

In Austria, the OKF community is supporting the fight for a freedom of information act…

 Together with other civil society initiatives, the Austrian Chapter of OKFN is supporting this movement by organising a series of workshops for all stakeholders on the upcoming freedom of information law, reaching out to civil servants, citizens and politicans. They’ll be providing an opportunity for every stakeholder group to discuss and define their point of view, empowering change-makers across the sphere to broaden their influence, and they’ll be looking to develop the debate around freedom of information in a similar way to which the topic of open data was discussed some years ago.

 One little village in Austria deserves a special mention – Engerwitzdorf, a town of only 8000 inhabitants, has released 116 data sets – more than the entire federal government of Austria! They’ve been honoured for their work by being nominated for the Document Freedom Award by the Free Software Foundation Europe – congratulations! OKF Austria will joining in the celebrations through organising Engerwitzdorf’s first OKF MeetUp.

In Switzerland, government data is being made more accessible…

In Switzerland, the OKF Swiss Chapter has been developing a pilot project called Open Government Data at the Confederation – or, OGD@ Federation for short. Through the project, a group of government agencies will be attempting to bundle their data together via an open source platform, and they’ll be presenting this on May 22. We’ll keep you updated with how it goes, and for readers in Switzerland, you can register here.

OKF Spain has been expanding rapidly…

..having reached 149 members on their mailing list and recently having organised a successful Big Data Week in Madrid and Barcelona! It doesn’t sound like they’re sitting on their laurels though, as they have another three day event coming up in Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla and Valladolid about data journalism which will include a hackathon, a barcamp and several workshops. They have an impressive line up of speakers too, including James Ball from the Guardian, Manuel Aristarán from the Knight Foundation, and OKF Central’s own Michael Bauer, so if you can, swing by!

They also undertook the invaluable task of translating into Spanish Laura’s blog post, “Open Knowledge: much more than Open Data” – which has now become “Conocimiento Abierto: Mucho más que Open Data.” This is a wonderful way of getting our message out to a whole new audience – thanks!

Laura’s post was also a hit with our OKF Greece Chapter, who kindly translated it into Greek. Translations of posts on the okfn.org into any language at all are very much welcome; if you do any translations, please do let us know so we can publicise it too, and we very much appreciate your efforts!

OKF Greece have also been busy organising an #OpenHealth event, and also took part in a Wikimedia workshop together with the Greek Wikipedia community. They recently completed the incredibly useful task of translating the Open Spending handbook into Greek, and you can now find the OKF Greece group on Facebook, too!

In Scotland, Germans and Brits came together…

Last week, the University of Edinburgh hosted the wonderfully multicultural event of German-British Open Data event. Scholarship holders from the Foundation of German Business came together for the weekend of talks, under the title “Open Data — Better Society?” and you can find a great round up of the talks and conclusions on the OKF Scotland blog.

OKF Nepal have been focusing on getting girls into ICT…

OKF Nepal recently teamed up with Wikipedia Nepal to organise a Wikipedia Editathon, which took place on the International Day of Girls in ICT. A truly great initiative, addressing a key issue facing the tech movement. OKFN Nepal’s Prakash Neupane also took to the stage to explain about the Open Knowledge Foundation’s mission, and from the photos it looks like all involved had a wonderful time. We look forward to hearing from the next event!

Congratulations all, for some incredible activities from across the globe!

(and keep an eye out for some exciting upcoming events- OKF Brazil are organising an event on Open Science at the beginning of June, and OKF Australia are organising a Beautiful Data GovHack at the end of May !)

by Zara Rahman at May 13, 2013 10:32 AM

The post-CMS landscape

This week, I installed Drupal, then module after module after module to get it content-ready for a new project. Drupal is excellent, but it is big. Over the years, CMSs have made it easy to create content, but they have increasingly hidden the technology behind them. CMSs were certainly not giving me much motivation to get up to date with HTML5, CSS3, or jQuery.

Development Seed is an organisation whose work I’ve admired for years – their open data and government projects are exceptional. In the midst of all the module installing I caught up on their transition away from Drupal, to static HTML.

What? Static HTML? In 2013?

It actually makes a lot of sense. Complex systems have a lot of potential failure points. They require scale. I work with people in developing countries who are on slow connections. Site speed and efficiency matters. For years I’ve hosted my personal portfolio, a total of 7 pages, with WordPress – overkill.

As more content is accessed via mobile devices including phones and tablets, it’s also essential to be designing responsive sites that work cross-platform and cross-device.

You are the controller

CMSs certainly still have a place, but feeling the need to build something, and not just install it, is exciting. I really missed the days of making a website from scratch. What I really missed was understanding how my sites really functioned, and having control over them. I had also grown frustrated with spam and injected spam in my WordPress sites.

Static generator

So, what to use instead? Cue Jekyll, a Ruby-based, blog aware site generator. Dave Cole at Development Seed sets out the rationale:

From straight up blog and page content sites like this one to advanced map and data portals, we can use Jekyll to generate sites that rival the layout flexibility of our most complex Drupal sites with none of the development and maintenance challenges a dynamic CMS introduces.

Jekyll works with Markdown, which is where things get really interesting. I’ve been generating all my HTML pages for years with Markdown in TextMate (MarkdownPad in Windows) and then pasting it into the WYSIWYG. Due to connectivity issues and code vagaries, I have never been a WYSIWYG fan. If you do feel the need for something more visual you can work with sites using Prose.io, also from Development Seed.

The next part is reminiscent of how creating websites used to be. Instead of FTP to upload content, you can use the version control system Git to manage content, and host pages on GitHub. You can see a prototype of my portfolio on GitHub.

More than version control

GitHub is not just a place to post code, but a place to collaborate and learn:

As people who were once just users become producers, they’re re-shaping the culture of open source. GitHub, I believe, is doing to open source what the internet did to the publishing industry: It’s creating a culture gap between the previous, big-project generation of open source and a newer, more amateurized generation of open source today.

GitHub is also free. Ben Balter calls this the post-CMS world and points out the costs:

Putting aside the value of time for a moment, shared hosting’s going to run you in the ballpark of $7 a month; AWS starts at $14, plus the cost of bandwidth and storage; and Jekyll, if hosted by GitHub? Free.

Yes, at this point, you need more technical skills to build a site using Jekyll than you do with Drupal or WordPress, but this will change. Already there are frameworks like Octopress which build on Jekyll. TechHubs, user groups provide space and people to learn from and work with. MOOCs, open source project documentation and tutorials are improving all the time. For web entrepreneurs everywhere, being able to collaborate through TechHubs + GitHub (and other places) is a one-two punch giving the ability to learn from and build on others work.

The future?

I’m excited about working with Jekyll, and learning Twitter Bootstrap (a CSS framework) and jQuery. It’s not the future for every site, but it will be the future for (some of) mine.

by Fiona at May 11, 2013 08:38 PM

Following my previous post about using fail2ban to stop malicious requests to xmlrpc.php, I set up a CloudFlare account. In doing so, I ran into two issues:

First, my access logs were only showing CloudFlare’s IP address, not those of the users making the requests. That’s due to how CloudFlare proxies every request. Fortunately, CloudFlare provides an Apache module to translate the IP addresses for your logs.

Second, even with the correct IP address in the logs, fail2ban was no longer effective in stopping requests (since it handled the requests before the Apache module translated the IP addresses). I needed to stop the requests at CloudFlare, before they ever made it to my server. Fortunately, it’s simple to set up a fail2ban action that utilizes the CloudFlare API to block those requests. Create an action including:

actionban = curl -s "https://www.cloudflare.com/api.html?a=ban&key=<ip>&u=<account>&tkn=<token>"
actionunban = curl -s "https://www.cloudflare.com/api.html?a=nul&key=<ip>&u=<account>&tkn=<token>"

And set your filter(s) to use that action.

by Jonathan Brinley at May 11, 2013 02:42 AM

CKAN is a powerful, open source, open data management platform, used by governments and organizations around the world to make large collections of data accessible, including the UK and US government open data portals.

Today we are very happy and excited to announce the final release of CKAN 2.0. This is the most significant piece of CKAN news since the project began, and represents months of hectic work by the team and other contributors since before the release of version 1.8 last October, and of the 2.0 beta in February. Thank you to the many CKAN users for your patience – we think you’ll agree it’s been worth the wait.

CKAN 2.0 is a significant improvement on 1.x versions for data users, programmers, and publishers. Enormous thanks are due to the many users, data publishers, and others in the data community, who have submitted comments, code contributions and bug reports, and helped to get CKAN to where it is. Thanks also to OKF clients who have supported bespoke work in various areas that has become part of the core code. These include data.gov, the US government open data portal, which will be re-launched using CKAN 2.0 in a few weeks. Let’s look at the main changes in version 2.0. If you are in a hurry to see it in action, head on over to demo.ckan.org, where you can try it out.

Summary

CKAN 2.0 introduces a new sleek default design, and easier theming to build custom sites. It has a completely redesigned authorisation system enabling different departments or bodies to control their own workflow. It has more built-in previews, and publishers can add custom previews for their favourite file types. News feeds and activity streams enable users to keep up with changes or new datasets in areas of interest. A new version of the API enables other applications to have full access to all the capabilities of CKAN. And there are many other smaller changes and bug fixes.

Design and theming

The first thing that previous CKAN users notice will be the greatly improved page design. For the first time, CKAN’s look and feel has been carefully designed from the ground up by experienced professionals in web and information design. This has affected not only the visual appearance but many aspects of the information architecture, from the ‘breadcrumb trail’ navigation on each page, to the appearance and position of buttons and links to make their function as transparent as possible.

Under the surface, an even more radical change has affected how pages are themed in CKAN. Themes are implemented using templates, and the old templating system has been replaced with the newer and more flexible Jinja2. This makes it much easier for developers to theme their CKAN instance to fit in with the overall theme or branding of their web presence.

Authorisation and workflow: introducing CKAN ‘Organizations’

Another major change affects how users are authorised to create, publish and update datasets. In CKAN 1.x, authorisation was granted to individual users for each dataset. This could be augmented with a ‘publisher mode’ to provide group-level access to datasets. A greatly expanded version of this mode, called ‘Organizations’, is now the default system of authorisation in CKAN. This is much more in line with how most CKAN sites are actually used.

Organizations make it possible for individual departments, bodies, groups, etc, to publish their own data in CKAN, and to have control over their own publishing workflow. Different users can have different roles within an Organization, with different authorisations. Linked to this is the possibility for each dataset to have different statuses, reflecting their progress through the workflow, and to be public or private. In the default set-up, Organization user roles include Members (who can read the Organization’s private datsets), Editors (who can add, edit and publish datasets) and Admins (who can add and change roles for users).

More previews

In addition to the existing image previews and table, graph and map previews for spreadsheet data, CKAN 2.0 includes previews for PDF files (shown below), HTML (in an iframe), and JSON. Additionally there is a new plugin extension point that makes it possible to add custom previews for different data types, as described in this recent blog post.

News feeds and activity streams

CKAN 2.0 provides users with ways to see when new data or changes are made in areas that they are interested in. Users can ‘follow’ datasets, Organizations, or groups (curated collections of datasets). A user’s personalised dashboard includes a news feed showing activity from the followed items – new datasets, revised metadata and changes or additions to dataset resources. If there are entries in your news feed since you last read it, a small flag shows the number of new items, and you can opt to receive notifications of them via e-mail.

Each dataset, Organization etc also has an ‘activity stream’, enabling users to see a summary of its recent history.

Programming with CKAN: meet version 3 of the API

CKAN’s powerful application programming interface (API) makes it possible for other machines and programs to automatically read, search and update datasets. CKAN’s API was previously designed according to REST principles. RESTful APIs are deservedly popular as a way to expose a clean interface to certain views on a collection of data. However, for CKAN we felt it would be better to give applications full access to CKAN’s own internal machinery.

A new version of the API – version 3 – trialled in beta in CKAN 1.8, replaced the REST design with remote procedure calls, enabling applications or programmers to call the same procedures as CKAN’s own code uses to implement its user interface. Anything that is possible via the user interface, and a good deal more, is therefore possible through the API. This proved popular and stable, and so, with minor tweaks, it is now the recommended API. Old versions of the API will continue to be provided for backward compatibility.

Documentation, documentation, documentation

CKAN comes with installation and administration documentation which we try to keep complete and up-to-date. The major changes in the rest of CKAN have thus required a similarly concerted effort on the documentation. It’s great when we hear that others have implemented their own installation of CKAN, something that’s been increasing lately, and we hope to see even more of this. The docs have therefore been overhauled for 2.0. CKAN is a large and complex system to deploy and work on improving the docs continues: version 2.1 will be another step forward. Where people do run into problems, help remains available as usual on the community mailing lists.

… And more

There are many other minor changes and bug fixes in CKAN 2.0. For a full list, see the CKAN changelog.

Installing

To install your own CKAN, or to upgrade an existing installation, you can install it as a package on Ubuntu 12.04 or do a source installation. Full installation and configuration instructions are at docs.ckan.org.

Try it out

You can try out the main features at demo.ckan.org. Please let us know what you think!

by Mark Wainwright at May 10, 2013 08:58 PM

TL;DR — I created a JavaScript library for getting GeoJSON out of Wikipedia’s API in your browser (and Node.js). I also created a little app that uses it to display Wikipedia articles for things near you that need a photograph/image or editorial help.

I probably don’t need to tell you how much the state of mapping on the Web has changed in the past few years. I was there. I can remember trying to get MapServer set up in the late 1990s, with limited success. I was there squinting at how Adrian Holovaty reverse engineered a mapping API out of Google Maps at chicagocrime.org. I was there when Google released their official API, which I used some, and then they changed their terms of service. I was there in the late 2000s using OpenLayers and TileCache, which were so much more approachable than MapServer was a decade earlier. I’m most definitely not a mapping expert, or even an amateur–but you can’t be a Web developer without occasionally needing to dabble, and pretend you are.

I didn’t realize until very recently how easy the cool kids have made it to put maps on the Web. Who knew that in 2013 there would be an open source JavaScript library that lets you add a map to your page in a few lines, and that it’s in use by Flickr, FourSquare, CraigsList, Wikimedia, the Wall Street Journal, and others? Even more astounding: who knew there would be an openly licensed source of map tiles and data, that was created collaboratively by a project with over a million registered users, and that it would be good enough to be used by Apple? I certainly didn’t even dream about it.

Ok, hold that thought…

So, Wikipedia recently announced that they were making it easy to use your mobile device to add a photograph to a Wikipedia article that lacked an image.

When I read about this I thought it would be interesting to see what Wikipedia articles there are about my current location, and which lacked images, so I could go and take pictures of them. Before I knew it I had a Web app called ici (French for here) that does just that:

Articles that need images are marked with little red cameras. It was pretty easy to add orange markers for Wikipedia articles that had been flagged as needing edits, or citations. Calling it an app is an overstatement: it is just static HTML, JavaScript and CSS that I serve up. HTML’s geolocation features and Wikipedia’s API (which has GeoData enabled) take care of the rest.

After I created the app I got a tweet from a real geo-hacker, Sean Gillies, who asked:

@edsu I’d love to help Wikipedia get some GeoJSON in their API results. Then you could use leafletjs.com/examples/geojs….

— Sean Gillies (@sgillies) May 8, 2013

Sean is right, it would be really useful to have a GeoJSON output from Wikipedia’s API. But I was on a little bit of a tear, so rather than figuring out how to get GeoJSON into MediaWiki and deployed to all the Wikipedia servers I wondered if I could extract ici’s use of the Wikipedia API into a slightly more generalized JavaScript library, that would make it easy to get GeoJSON out of Wikipedia–at least from JavaScript. That quickly resulted in wikigeo.js which is now getting used in ici. Getting GeoJSON from Wikipedia using wikigeo.js is done in just one line, and then adding the GeoJSON to a map in Leaflet can also be done in one line:

geojson([-73.94, 40.67], function(data) {
    // add the geojson to a Leaflet map
    L.geoJson(data).addTo(map)
});

This call results in callback getting some GeoJSON data that looks something like:

{
  "type": "FeatureCollection",
  "features": [
    {
      "id": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City",
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "name": "New York City"
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -73.94,
          40.67
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Avenue_(IRT_Eastern_Parkway_Line)",
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "name": "Kingston Avenue (IRT Eastern Parkway Line)"
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -73.9422,
          40.6694
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Heights_–_Utica_Avenue_(IRT_Eastern_Parkway_Line)",
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "name": "Crown Heights – Utica Avenue (IRT Eastern Parkway Line)"
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -73.9312,
          40.6688
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Children's_Museum",
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "name": "Brooklyn Children's Museum"
      },
"geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -73.9439,
          40.6745
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/770_Eastern_Parkway",
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "name": "770 Eastern Parkway"
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -73.9429,
          40.669
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Parkway_(Brooklyn)",
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "name": "Eastern Parkway (Brooklyn)"
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -73.9371,
          40.6691
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson_High_School_for_Business_and_Technology",
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "name": "Paul Robeson High School for Business and Technology"
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -73.939,
          40.6755
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathways_in_Technology_Early_College_High_School",
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "name": "Pathways in Technology Early College High School"
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -73.939,
          40.6759
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

There are options for broadening the radius, increasing the number of results, and fetching additional properties of the Wikipedia article such as article summaries, images, categories, templates used. Here’s an example using all the knobs:

geojson(
  [-73.94, 40.67],
  {
    limit: 5,
    radius: 1000,
    images: true,
    categories: true,
    summaries: true,
    templates: true
  },
  function(data) {
    L.geoJson(data).addTo(map)
  }
);

Which results in GeoJSON like this (abbreviated)

{
  "type": "FeatureCollection",
  "features": [
    {
      "id": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Spring,_Maryland",
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "name": "Silver Spring, Maryland",
        "image": "Downtown_silver_spring_wayne.jpg",
        "templates": [
          "-",
          "Abbr",
          "Ambox",
          "Ambox/category",
          "Ambox/small",
          "Basepage subpage",
          "Both",
          "Category handler",
          "Category handler/blacklist",
          "Category handler/numbered"
        ],
        "summary": "Silver Spring is an unincorporated area and census-designated place (CDP) in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It had a population of 71,452 at the 2010 census, making it the fourth most populous place in Maryland, after Baltimore, Columbia, and Germantown.\nThe urbanized, oldest, and southernmost part of Silver Spring is a major business hub that lies at the north apex of Washington, D.C. As of 2004, the Central Business District (CBD) held 7,254,729 square feet (673,986 m2) of office space, 5216 dwelling units and 17.6 acres (71,000 m2) of parkland. The population density of this CBD area of Silver Spring was 15,600 per square mile all within 360 acres (1.5 km2) and approximately 2.5 square miles (6 km2) in the CBD/downtown area. The community has recently undergone a significant renaissance, with the addition of major retail, residential, and office developments.\nSilver Spring takes its name from a mica-flecked spring discovered there in 1840 by Francis Preston Blair, who subsequently bought much of the surrounding land. Acorn Park, tucked away in an area of south Silver Spring away from the main downtown area, is believed to be the site of the original spring.\n\n",
        "categories": [
          "All articles to be expanded",
          "All articles with dead external links",
          "All articles with unsourced statements",
          "Articles to be expanded from June 2008",
          "Articles with dead external links from July 2009",
          "Articles with dead external links from October 2010",
          "Articles with dead external links from September 2010",
          "Articles with unsourced statements from February 2007",
          "Articles with unsourced statements from May 2009",
          "Commons category template with no category set"
        ]
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          -77.019,
          39.0042
        ]
      }
    },
    ...
  ]
}

I guess this is a long way of saying, if you want to put Wikipedia articles on a map, or otherwise need GeoJSON for Wikipedia articles for a particular location, take a look at wikigeo.js. If you do, and have ideas for making it better, please let me know. Oh, by the way you can npm install wikigeo and use it from Node.js.

I guess JavaScript, HTML5, NodeJS, CoffeeScript are like my midlife crisis…my red sports car. But maybe being the old guy, and losing my edge isn’t really so bad?

I’m losing my edge
to better-looking people
with better ideas
and more talent
and they’re actually
really, really nice.
— Jim Murphy

It definitely helps when the kids coming up from behind have talent and are really, really nice. You know?

by ed at May 10, 2013 07:08 PM

The Library Copyright Alliance (of which ALA is a member) has released these comments (pdf) regarding United States negotiating stance on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) questioning whether the United States should negotiate an intellectual property section in the trade agreement given the differences between EU and US copyright laws.

The post LCA Comments on Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Carrie Russell at May 10, 2013 06:52 PM

Public librarians now have a second opportunity to learn ways to provide job-related e-government services to patrons. Watch archived footage of the webinar “E-Government in Action: Matching People with Jobs,” which was hosted by the American Library Association in early May. View the webinar now.

As part of the webinar, participants will hear from numerous e-government grant recipients on innovative workforce development programs that have successfully connected people with jobs.

Speakers include:

• Janice Collins, technology supervisor, Mandel Public Library (West Palm Beach, Fla.)
• Betha Gutsche, programs manager, WebJunction OCLC
• Tiffany McClary and Sheri Shafer, NJ Works @ your Library (New Jersey State Library Program)
• Jeff Scott, deputy county librarian, Tulare County (Tulare, Calif.)

View the webinar: http://ala.adobeconnect.com/p7m1neieyhh/

**Note: Due to technical issues, the first few minutes of the webinar were not properly recorded.

The post Learning Opportunity: Helping Patrons Find Jobs appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Jazzy Wright at May 10, 2013 04:18 PM

I’ll participate on a conference call regarding the  World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty (WIPO) for people with print disabilities next week. As usual, there will be 4-5 representatives from the associations for the blind and US libraries that support the treaty, which would allow greater access to reading material for people who are blind or have other print disabilities. All of the others on the call will be opposed to the treaty, maybe 15-20 representatives of the publishing and motion picture industries. I can understand why the publishing industry would be interested in the treaty since we are talking about an exception to copyright for print materials. They hold copyrights for print materials. But why Hollywood? Why do they have a bone to pick when their economic interests focus on copyright holdings – motion pictures and other media – which were excluded from the treaty altogether, hence the purposeful name — Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities?

The treaty would create a copyright exception for authorized entities (non-profit organizations like the National Library for the Blind, Bookshare, and libraries) to make accessible copies of print materials for the print disabled on request. In addition, the treaty would allow nations to share or make accessible copies for the print disabled in other countries – many who have almost no access to reading materials. This is a beneficial policy proposal that includes many already negotiated caveats that would protect the interests of rights holders.

Over the last five years, this treaty has been moving forward in the negotiation process with stops and starts along the way, concessions here and language changes there, but that is expected path of international treaty development. In February of this year, after a weeklong negotiation session, WIPO member nations agreed it was the time for a diplomatic conference, one of the final steps in enacting the treaty. Then (“lights, camera, action”) comes the motion picture industry who has aggressively lobbied the state department and government officials, calling for opposition to the treaty. The industry has gone so far as to contact every foreign embassy to urge their nations’ WIPO representatives to oppose the treaty. Hollywood has usurped the role of the US delegation to WIPO by clamoring to higher echelons of the federal government.

Why the opposition? Chris Dodd, former U.S. Senator and now chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), explained that the treaty has become “a vehicle to weaken copyright and ultimately undermine the global marketplace.” Holy crap! Leave it to the MPAA to come up with some kind of “shock and awe” statement to freak people out. The MPAA still supports a treaty for the print disabled, but it must not weaken copyright protection. Additional provisions to the treaty must be added to make the treaty as weak and as difficult to implement as possible.

The planned diplomatic conference to finalize the treaty will continue to take place this June, but many are not optimistic. Now with United States government support for maximalist copyright on behalf of the motion picture industry (from an earlier, relatively balanced approach to the treaty), this meaningful treaty —to help visually impaired people who have the audacity to hope, the audacity to read —has becomes meaningless.

The post Hooray for Hollywood? Choosing maximum copyright over justice appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Carrie Russell at May 10, 2013 03:20 PM

There was big news for open data yesterday with a new Executive Order announced by President Obama. The order lays out the general principles that open, machine readable, data are the “new default”. (We note the Open Definition already includes machine readability in the definition of open data). There will a new Open Data Policy which will require U.S. government agencies to conform to standards “to collect or create information in a way that supports downstream information processing and dissemination activities”. Below, we summarize the key points.

Open By Default

The order reiterates some of the key reasons for openness and makes clear that open is the default:

To promote continued job growth, Government efficiency, and the social good that can be gained from opening Government data to the public, the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable. Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness …

Development of an “Open Data Policy”

Sec. 2. Open Data Policy. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in consultation with the Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), shall issue an Open Data Policy to advance the management of Government information as an asset

Clear set of best practices and tools

[Section 3] (a) Within 30 days of the issuance of the Open Data Policy, the CIO and CTO shall publish an open online repository of tools and best practices to assist agencies in integrating the Open Data Policy into their operations in furtherance of their missions. The CIO and CTO shall regularly update this online repository as needed to ensure it remains a resource to facilitate the adoption of open data practices.

Build the policy into procurement

(b) Within 90 days of the issuance of the Open Data Policy, the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, … to identify and initiate implementation of measures to support the integration of the Open Data Policy requirements into Federal acquisition and grant-making processes

By building open data release as a default into procurement this should greatly simplify open publication and remove arguments against release based on cost and complexity.

Assessment

Implementation will be tracked and assessed:

[Section 3] (c) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Chief Performance Officer (CPO) shall work with the President’s Management Council to establish a Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goal to track implementation of the Open Data Policy.

In a follow-up we’ll be providing more detailed analysis of the full Open Data Policy memorandum including plans for the new data.gov and its use of CKAN.

by Rufus Pollock at May 10, 2013 02:35 PM

Via the Knight Foundation’s flickr

Today is Karen Archer Perry’s last day at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Formally, she is a senior program officer at the Foundation, responsible for overseeing various grants in the Global Libraries Program. Less formally, we see her as an energetic, caring, committed thought partner and insightful strategist for the national library community. On behalf of the American Library Association (ALA) and several other leading members of the library community, we want to thank Karen for her service to the library field and wish her the best in her future endeavors—which we hope will include libraries.

“Given Karen’s impact on the library community, no one person can really do justice to a proper thank you,” said Emily Sheketoff, Executive Director of the ALA Washington Office. “So we thought that we would collect thoughts from several of us and publish them together. As for me, I admire her determination in pushing for new opportunities for libraries with federal agencies.”

“Karen’s enthusiasm and energy for her work with and for libraries is palpable—and contagious,” said Larra Clark, Program Director at ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP). “It has been a pleasure to share this fever and work together for libraries. Karen has brought creativity, deep knowledge, and ambition to her collaborations. I deeply appreciate these qualities and how it has made my own work better and stronger.”

From Alan S. Inouye, OITP Director: “I think of Karen as the ‘connecting the dots person.’ Actually, we have few such people in the library community at the national level. In some respects, it is not surprising. Most people must focus on running their library, applying for E-rate, interpreting copyright law and licensing agreements, or developing new online applications. Few of us think about and understand how each piece relates to each other and to pieces outside of the library community—much less do it strategically and effectively. In a time of fundamental change, like the present, the field really needs people to connect the dots. This is Karen’s substantive contribution that I will miss the most, though perhaps Karen will be able to engage with libraries in her future endeavors. I sure hope so, as we need every national and policy strategist that we can find!”

“Karen started out as the program officer for our Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) support grant from the Foundation, but quickly grew to be much more than that,” said Ann Joslin, Idaho State Librarian and President, Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA). “A conversation with her at the 2012 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Dallas started changing my view of potential roles for COSLA. That was followed by her encouragement and support for the Public Access Technology Community (PAT-C) project, coordinating meetings of state library agency people with key Federal Communications Commission teams, introducing COSLA members to others in the philanthropic arena who have interests in common with COSLA, and taking a lead role in the Foundation’s Bold Visions convening held at the 2012 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim. In short, Karen’s support and advocacy helped bring COSLA to a crossroads with the 18-month expansion of the PAT-C project and an organizational planning process. And she’s a heck of a lot of fun to work with!”

Susan McVey, Director, Oklahoma Department of Libraries, observes that “I have many ‘Karenisms,’ but one of my favorites is in reference to allowing space for a discussion on the challenges in implementing BTOP grants was to describe it as ‘coming to a meeting without your makeup on.’ That kind of permission to recognize both sides of a situation is all too rare and important. She is a force of nature and accomplished so much while she was with us. I will miss her!”

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project, notes that Karen “is the best kind of advocate and overseer of grants like the one the Gates Foundation has given Pew Internet: She has been assertive when that was the requirement; deferential when we needed to seize the bit; creative in working through challenges; supportive when mystery fogged the windshield; patient when we had to wait for data to be collected; trusting and open-minded when we pitched new ideas; a great translator when others had to be told who we were and what we were doing; a quick and deep study of our material when she had to master it and describe it to others; collaborative always; haughty never (a special feat when the words ‘Bill & Melinda Gates’ are connected to your job).  Above all, Karen’s special talent is her ‘brightness’ in all senses of that word. She clearly is really smart. Just as important, she’s a light shiner and pathway forger. It’s a wonderful combination of traits that make journeys with her fun. If we’re lucky, we’ll have more of them.”

“Karen’s departure from the Gates Foundation is a hard pill to swallow,” said John Windhausen, Executive Director, Schools, Health, & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition. “She combines an ‘on-the-ground’ feel for how libraries serve their communities with a great strategic vision of how libraries can expand their future role in a world of tumultuous technological change. Her creativity and thoughtfulness have been enormously helpful, and you can see that her work is driven by a passion for helping people and communities.”

The post Thank you, Karen Archer Perry appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Larra Clark at May 10, 2013 02:25 PM

In Part 1 of “Where the Problems Lie” I focused on some issues that I see with the set of technologies and standards that I have lumped, for simplicity’s sake, under the heading “MARC”. In this post I am passing along issues that my OCLC colleague Jean Godby ran into with her work to crosswalk different bibliographic metadata formats (e.g., MARC21, ONIX, Dublin Core) from one to another.

As you might imagine, doing this well requires both intimate knowledge of the data being captured in the various standards and a very detailed and painstaking process of determining where those elements need to end up — and how. Therefore, the issues below are often quite specific and backed up with evidence.

• Some critical information is represented redundantly. Example: A description of an e-book is spread across the 245, 008, and 300 fields, but is concisely represented in a more modern standard such as ONIX. 
• Some MARC fields are ambiguous. Example: The MARC 300 field has an ‘extent’ sense when it appears in a record that describes a sound recording. But it has a ‘page count’ sense in a record that describes a printed book. The Crosswalk has to make an unreliable check for data in a free-text field to disambiguate the two senses. When distinctions exist in 5xx fields, they may not be recoverable at all. 
• Many MARC free-text fields have formatting requirements. Example: ISBD formatting rules for titles require that only the first word be capitalized. Since this convention is not widely used outside the library community, it must be taken out when a MARC record is translated to a non-MARC standard. 
• Punctuation in free-text fields is sometimes meaningful, sometimes not. Example: In a 100 field, the comma separates parts of a structured name and indicates an inverted presentation order. In a 500 field, the comma is just another character in a stream of text. 
• Some MARC fields are coded with hidden assumptions. Example: A MARC record that describes the author of a printed book has no explicit mention of the author’s role or the physical format of the work. But a MARC record that describes a musical score identifies the material type in a code in the 008 field and the contributor’s role in a $4 field. 
•  MARC data elements are semantically complex and built up from many components. In most contemporary non-MARC standards, the elements are semantically simpler and resemble the words in a dictionary that make up a bibliographic description, such as title, contributor, personal name, and subject. Example: Marc 245 $a is not a title. It is an AACR2-defined access point that may contain a concise bibliographic description with title, author, author’s role, physical description, producing another one-to-many mapping. 
• MARC has a “long tail.” In other words, the standard is large, but MARC tag usage studies (1, 2) show that most of the specification is rarely used. In fact, many of the most widely used fields are the 5xx notes, despite many opportunities for representing a description in more explicitly coded data. This can be interpreted as evidence that MARC is no longer the best fit for bibliographic data, perhaps because new concepts are not represented and some existing concepts are not modeled effectively.

by Roy Tennant at May 09, 2013 11:43 PM

This week, hundreds of library supporters met in D.C. to speak with their legislators about the importance of libraries.

From May 7–8, 2013, more than 350 librarians, patrons, trustees, educators and parents met with members of Congress to discuss key library issues during the American Library Association’s 39th annual National Library Legislative Day. The event focused on supporting federal funding for national libraries.

Advocates discussed the need to protect federal library funding and support access to federally-funded scholarly journal articles, among other issues.

As part of this week’s activities, library advocate Mary Ann Bretzlauf received the White House Conference on Library and Information Services Taskforce Award for her commitment to supporting national libraries. Additionally, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) received the United for Libraries’ 2013 Public Service Award for his public support of libraries.

“The advocates who came to Washington are true ‘nation builders’ that help citizens reach their potential,” said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s Washington office.

Now that the annual advocacy day has ended, National Library Legislative Day participants are encouraged to use the following media template to notify local media outlets about their advocacy work:

• Download the local media release template (.docx or .doc)

The post Hundreds Gather in D.C. for 39th Annual National Library Legislative Day appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Jazzy Wright at May 09, 2013 08:31 PM

His book, along with all LITA guides, will be available for purchase at 20% off at the ALA Store.

by mprentice at May 09, 2013 08:06 PM

The White House has issued a new Executive Order, making open and machine readable the new default for government information and a memo, Open Data Policy – Managing information as an asset.  These documents provide a new set of guidelines for government agencies that will help to ensure a more open and accessible government. “This Memorandum establishes a framework to help institutionalize the principles of effective information management at each stage of the information’s life cycle to promote interoperability and openness.”

The EO specifies that within 90 days the government will “identify and initiate implementation of measures to support the integration of the Open Data Policy” and a new Cross-Agency Priority Goal will be created to track the progress of agencies as they implement the new policy.

This is another positive step in creating a more open and transparent government and will as a result help to inform the American public. As the memo states “making information resources accessible, discoverable, and usable by the public can help fuel entrepreneurship, innovation, and scientific discovery – all of which improve Americans’ lives and contribute significantly to job creation”.

The post New Executive Order will increase government transparency appeared first on District Dispatch.

by jmcgilvray at May 09, 2013 04:14 PM

Yesterday, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded exemplary museum and libraries National Medals for their service to their communities. The National Medal is the nation’s highest honor conferred on museums and libraries, and celebrates institutions that make a difference for individuals, families, and communities.

This year’s honorees come from a variety of library and museum institutions, including public libraries, a children’s museum, music museum, art museum, and multiple county library systems.

National Medal recipients include:

• Boston Children’s Museum, Boston, Mass.
• Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio
• Delta Blues Museum, Clarksdale, Miss.
• Discovery Science Center, Santa Ana, Calif.
• Marshalltown Public Library, Marshalltown, Iowa
• National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
• Pierce County Library System, Tacoma, Wash.
• Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Cincinnati, Ohio
• Rancho Cucamonga Public Library, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
• Waukegan Public Library, Waukegan, Ill.

“We applaud the winners of the 2013 National Medal for Museum and Library Service,” said Maureen Sullivan, president of the American Library Association. “These institutions have made exceptional contributions to their communities. We applaud them for their accomplishments and we thank them for their service.”

The post 10 Museums, Libraries Awarded National Medals appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Jazzy Wright at May 09, 2013 03:49 PM

Jobseekers at Redding Library job fair.

On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) introduced legislation to amend the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 that will integrate public libraries into state and local workforce investment boards.

The bill, the Workforce Investments through Local Libraries (WILL) Act, would expand libraries’ opportunities to take leading roles in helping the public find employment in this weak economy. The WILL Act would support library efforts that provide job search support in communities all across America.

Additionally, the bill recognizes public libraries as allowable “One-Stop” partners and authorizes new demonstration and pilot projects to establish employment resources in public libraries.

This will allow library users access to workforce activities and information related to training services and employment opportunities, including but not limited to resume development, job bank web searches, literacy services, and workshops on career information.

Senator Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) co-sponsored the bill.

“I thank Senators Reed and Cochran for recognizing the important roles libraries play in preparing people in our communities for success in the workplace,” said Maureen Sullivan, president of the American Library Association.

“Libraries provide free Internet access that enables individuals to search for jobs and to complete employment applications. They provide software programs for resume preparation and training in the use of technology. Our libraries offer resources and individual consultation not found anywhere else in our communities,” Sullivan added. “Their contribution is integral to workforce development in our country.”

The post This Week: Libraries Included in Workforce Bill appeared first on District Dispatch.

by Jazzy Wright at May 09, 2013 03:23 PM

Filed under: Comics, Doodles Tagged: doodle, i-ching

by hochstenbach at May 09, 2013 02:30 PM

Filed under: Comics, Doodles, Urban Sketches Tagged: brugge, comic, doodle

by hochstenbach at May 09, 2013 02:29 PM

Filed under: Cartoon Class, Doodles Tagged: doodle, i-ching

by hochstenbach at May 09, 2013 02:27 PM

I recently noticed a lot of requests to this and other WordPress sites’ xmlrpc.php file. By “a lot”, I mean about 10-20 every second. It wasn’t particularly breaking anything (there aren’t any currently vulnerabilities there that I’m aware of), but it was increasing the load on my server.

My first step was to set an .htaccess rule to give a 403 response. That at least avoided hitting PHP with all those requests. But Apache still had to process them, so I wanted to take it a step further. I’m already using fail2ban, so I wanted to figure out how to stop these requests at that level instead of waiting until they reach Apache.

First, I needed to create a filter, telling fail2ban what kinds of requests I wanted to block. On my system (Ubuntu), I created a file at /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/apache-xmlrpc.conf. The file is fairly simple:

[Definition]
failregex = ^<HOST> .*POST .*xmlrpc\.php.*
ignoreregex =

This tells fail2ban how to parse the log files to find requests for xmlrpc.php, and where to find the IP address. You might need to adjust the regex if your log files are formatted differently.

Now that we’ve created the filter, we tell fail2ban to use it. We open /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf and add this rule:

[apache-xmlrpc]

enabled  = true
port     = http,https
filter   = apache-xmlrpc
logpath  = /srv/www/*/logs/access.log
maxretry = 6

Adjust the logpath parameter to point to your Apache access logs, and adjust maxretry to taste.

Restart fail2ban:

sudo service fail2ban restart

And you should soon find Apache handling far fewer requests. An added benefit to using fail2ban: legitimate requests to xmlrpc.php (e.g., trackbacks) should still get through.

by Jonathan Brinley at May 09, 2013 02:25 PM

May 09, 2013 02:06 PM

No, this isn’t about “predatory publishers”.

Check out this Nature comment about a comment. 

 scientists at Amgen who were able to reproduce findings in only 11% of 53 published [pre-clinical cancer research] papers….

…The Amgen scientists approached the papers’ original authors to discuss findings and sometimes borrowed materials to repeat the experiments. In some cases, those authors required them to sign an agreement that they would not disclose their findings about specific papers.

1.  It’s disturbing enough that results could only be reproduced in 11% of cases.

2. In order to even attempt to to reproduce, the reproducers needed access to information not in the published record, information that could only be obtained directly from the original authors — who insisted on disclosing it only in confidence.

• What does that say about how actual science corresponds to the platonic ideal practice of science?  The scientific method is fundamentally based on the idea of reproducibility — but actually existing scientific publication does not give enough information to reproduce?  Another scientist just has to take it on faith?

3. Okay, yeah, I lied, this is about ‘predatory open access’  – how does this complicate and problematize the idea that there is a clear black&white division between ‘good publications’ that only have quality research and ‘predatory publications’ that do not.   Does relying our on socially-endorsed prejudices of indicators of quality really lead us to scientific quality?

4. Hypothesis: The current peer-review system is more or less broken. It does not in fact result in assurances of research quality. It is wrong for librarians to educate students that these things are black and white.

by jrochkind at May 09, 2013 12:40 PM

The Canadian philosopher of communication and media, Marshall McLuhan, famously argued:

We see the world through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future

In the early days of the web it was common for retailers to replicate paper brochures online, so called ‘brochureware’, missing the interactivity and format opportunities the web provides (and losing customers in the process too!). We continue to transpose our experiences of physical paper and books online, with little or no adaptation to the opportunities for interaction and multi-media.

While mobile technology has been available for decades, its current ubiquity and power (both socially and technologically) mean we find ourselves at the edge of a technological shift. As we move from a desk top to a mobile lifestyle we must be careful not to succumb to the rear-view mirror effect and replicate the desk top experience in the services and systems we design for the mobile user.

We find ourselves inhabiting a very different environment to a few years ago. Where once our computing power was located in one place, it now travels with us, capturing and distracting us no matter where we find ourselves. It connects us to people, places and things in ways not previously possible.

With this mobile lifestyle in mind I want to explore 4 challenges that mobile technologies present to libraries. In articulating these challenges I hope it will become increasingly clear what strategies and opportunities there are for libraries, and their services, systems and collections.

Simplicity

When you take a look at some of the best mobile experiences, whether apps or websites they usually have one thing in common: They do one thing extremely well. Everything extraneous is stripped away to leave only the most essential and relevant information.

Exemplars include Rise, an alarm clock app that incorporates visually simple interfaces, combined with gesture recognition and your music playlists. Or Clear, a ‘to do’ app, with intuitive gesture controls and the use of colour to denote urgency – nothing else.

Amazon’s stripped down app is a good example of a website that has adapted its presence to a mobile experience: Only the relevant information is included and all the complexity is hidden away from sight (although you can dig deeper if you wish).

The Amazon example is an interesting one. It invites comparisons with the library catalogue, and it certainly provides an effective template for mobile discovery. However, libraries have a physical infrastructure, processes and technologies that mean refining the mobile experience to a single thing can be hard. When we use a phrase like ‘discovery’ in a library or information-seeking context we often mean a set of interrelated actions, such as: search, select, find and use. Is it possible to break these down into their component parts and still deliver a positive experience for the user, both in terms of the mobile experience and of using the library?

The challenge the mobile devices present to libraries in this context is one of needs over solutions. The challenge is to think beyond the solutions already in place (the catalogue, discovery layer), to articulating the actual need. In the case of discovery maybe, ‘I need to answer a question’, or; ‘I need to find something’. Formulated in this way it is clear that a solution may be very different to the ones already available.

It forces us to consider the context we’re operating in; it invites us to invent, not retro-fit!

People and Place

Increasingly, the mobile device is a bridge between our online social connectivity and our localised real-world interactions. If you explore a map on your phone you don’t have to tell it where you are, the internal GPS has already told it. Similarly, it can tell you when a friend is near-by through apps like Facebook, FourSquare and so on.

There are a number of interesting examples where libraries and others have exploited these inherent benefits of mobile devices. Mendeley, the reference manager, is a good example of a service that is explicitly looking to build a social layer on top of the bibliographic data they have crowdsourced from the academic community in the form of bibliographies. You can follow academics with similar research interests, build groups and curate and build your own, personalised discovery network.
Increasingly, the discovery experience unfolds and is led by the content itself. What used to be the destination, the content or resource, is now the beginning of the journey.

For example, projects like Bomb Site, from the National Archives, have taken bomb site map data and made it available as a responsive website so that academics, researchers and members of the public can explore where bombs fell. This data is augmented over a map and includes images, descriptions and people’s memories.

Bomb Sight App

Similarly, the PhoneBooth project from the London School of Economics mobilised the Charles Booth poverty maps of London so that students and researchers could use and annotate the maps in context, i.e., on the streets of London as part of their learning experience.

PhoneBooth app

Increasingly the discovery process will find itself facilitating peer-to-peer and social recommendation experiences.

The traditional catalogue will itself begin to disappear from these interactions. Instead, the discovery experience will have an intimacy and personalisation associated with it that mirrors the intimately personal experience of the mobile device itself.

Personal

The web provides unparalleled opportunities for scale. The local bric-a-brac shop becomes eBay, the bookshop Amazon, the University becomes the massively open online course (MOOC) such as Cousera. Similarly the library begins to operate at ‘web-scale’ with its systems and services.

Yet, the mobile experience is an intimately personal one. It challenges libraries and information providers to find a balance between these two types of scale: the singular (the personal) and the ‘web-scale’. It is not enough simply to adopt web-scale systems and services: mobile challenges us to think about how that web-based interaction is transformed into real-world action.

One opportunity for libraries is in the data that circulates through their systems, both the management data and the user-generated interaction data. There are an increasing number of services and projects looking at exploiting this data for the personalisation of the user experience. These include commercial offerings, of which the best known is bX from Ex Libris.

There are also a number of academic libraries exploring the use of this data, including: SALT (surfacing the academic long tail) and RISE (Recommendations improve the search experience) which are exploring how different sets of data can be used to enhance and personalise the library experience.

The ability of libraries to exploit this data will grow increasingly important. The data provides a way for libraries to continue delivering services to hundreds and thousands of users, while providing a personalised experience that users expect from web-based services.

New models

If the mobile shift challenges libraries to invent new experiences, it also invites us to rethink how we develop and implement these.

As information becomes abundant and digital, the models for how libraries develop and implement new services and systems will radically change too. Libraries are no longer comparing themselves and their services to other libraries; instead they are being compared to the web, and the types of services and resources users can access there. Increasingly libraries will find themselves needing to adopt approaches that would normally be more associated with web start-ups.

This implies a greater focus on ideas (ideas from everywhere: librarians, users et al), rapid iteration and testing, and implementation of the idea (or quick relegation of ideas). This more entrepreneurial approach recognises that there is no simple crossing between how things are now and the future. There is not a simple roadmap from the complexities of the information environment as they are now, to some stable future; disruption is a feature, not a bug of the system.

While the change in a libraries approach to the user and the work it undertakes is significant, and not easy, there are some straightforward starting points. There are already great examples and case studies of mobile innovation in libraries. The M-Libraries community support blog, for example, includes a large amount of information, including case-studies, best practice guides and inspiration from other organisations on how they have transformed services with mobile technology.

Indeed, as many of the examples on the M-Libraries blog demonstrate, the financial overhead for this type of change should be low. Rethinking your approach to design of mobile services shouldn’t include significant barriers, either financial or technical. A good place to start is by borrowing ideas from other domains, like software development and design. The example of paper-prototyping, used in a recent mobile development workshop, provides a good place to start.

What many of these examples share is a renewed focus on the user. It moves us away from a focus on internal systems and processes, toward the behaviours and requirements of the user. The centre of gravity moves away from the technology and toward the user; the mobile-turn is one where the technology is overshadowed by the needs of the user.

The challenges mobile technologies present to libraries are ones drenched in paradox. The hardware (the phone, tablet, ereader) gradually fades from view, and it is the user, with their intricate behaviours and requirements that remain the focus of our attention.

Unlike so many other technologies, mobile enables the library to rethink its services, systems and processes to ensure that it is the user that remains at their heart. This does not mean business as usual, however. But it does mean that by understanding these challenges and their implications, libraries are in a position to design and deliver mobile experiences that users will want to engage with.

by Ben Showers at May 09, 2013 12:11 PM