Virtual Dave…Real Blog

Thank God for the New York Times making their archives available on the web. While doing some research I ran across this little gem from 1912:

“THERE is a certain type of girl who seems born to be a librarian. She is ambitious, but not specially creative; fond of books, but with no marked aptitude for writing; intelligent and well educated, but not inclined to take up the work of a teacher, with its heavy demands and its cramping limitations, or to go into an office where literary tastes are usually at a discount.”

A worthwhile read:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9403E2D61F3CE633A25752C0A9649D946396D6CF

OK, I got the Kindle (I’m an eBook freak, sue me). There are plenty of places to read the reviews, and the potential criticisms, so I won’t retread that ground. Rather, a clarification and a funny story.

The clarification first. I’ve read on several posts about the Kindle charging for free material, and restricting everything to a proprietary format that is DRM’d. Yes, the books you buy through the Kindle/Amazon store are proprietary and DRM’d. Yes, if you e-mail a document directly to the Kindle it costs 10 cents. However, if you have a computer with a USB port (Mac or Windows), putting your own content on the Kindle is easy and free. Amazon really messed this up in their marketing, but in the manual it shows you how to put a txt file directly on the Kindle, or how to convert a Word or html file for free. Instead of e-mailing it directly, you can email it to an alternate address, and they send you back the converted file all ready to copy over USB…free. Have a speech you want on the Kindle? Free. Itinerary? Free. Project Gutenberg texts? You guessed it.

OK, now the story. I turn it on and browse around, and find a menu “Experimental.” In there are services Amazon is playing with and one is called “Ask Kindle NowNow” that reads:

Ask us any question you want. Real people will research your question on the Web and send up to three answers to your Kindle, usually within in ten minutes.”

How am I not going to try this? So I ask “what is meant by participatory networks?” Sure enough a couple of minutes later, sent right to the Kindle, an answer. I’m reading through it and get really excited that they are talking about social networks, then Web 2.0, then Library 2.0! Wow, I say, Amazon knows about libraries! I keep reading and something starts sounding awfully familiar here. Sure enough the whole answer was a direct quote from the tech brief I co-authored for ALA. There at the end is a URL that points me right to the brief. So at least I was cited and can be happy that someone in NowNow land found my stuff, I just wish there was a bit of a preamble.

A little while later I got two more answers. The second one pointed to a CoLIS paper I did, and the third pointed to an item Todd Marshall posted on http://participatorynetworks.com/ . Looks like I have to do some more looking into NowNow (just found http://www.nownow.com/ ). Also interesting in light of the recent DigRef discussion on commercial grade services and eRef.

Click “Read More” for the full responses.
Read the rest of this entry »

OITP will be hosting a meeting to discuss participatory librarianship and the library and information science curriculum with LIS programs in the greater New York City area on December 18th, 2007. The meeting will be held at the Pratt School of Information and Library Science in Manhattan.

For more information please contact David Lankes at rdlankes@iis.syr.edu

Keisuke Inoue, doctoral student at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, explains his current research in applying participatory concepts to information retrieval and virtual reference.

Virtual Reference Service: From Competencies to Assessment. Lankes, R. David, Westbrook, L., Nicholson, S., Radford, M., Silverstein, J. (Eds.). (2007). New York: Neal-Schuman Pblishers.

A video/slideshow of a presentation given to OCLC on participatory librarianship and how it applies to credibility, library catalogs and reference is now online.

“Participatory Librarianship” Presentation to OCLC, Dublin, OH.

Slides: http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/Presentations/2007/OCLC.pdf
Audio: http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/pod/OCLC.mp3
Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7370674559319462525

The American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) named R. David Lankes a fellow through December 2008. Lankes will lead a collaborative research project with OITP on the evolving landscape of information technology and its implications for the education of the next generation of library and information science (LIS) professionals.

“Professor Lankes is the ideal candidate to serve as the first OITP Fellow,” says Alan Inouye, OITP director. “He is a leading LIS researcher as well as someone with ties to, knowledge of, and interests in the larger library community. Professor Lankes has the ability to cultivate stronger ties–for mutual benefit–between library practitioners and institutions and the LIS research community, and he’s also a future-oriented thinker.”

Lankes’ primary work will be to enhance the office’s outreach to the scholarly and educational library and information science communities. While he will be working with the office on a wide range of issues, his primary focus will be on further developing the concept of participatory librarianship first set out in the OITP technology brief Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation.

“Libraries are in a great position to improve their services, and their positions with their communities,” says Lankes, associate professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and director of its Information Institute of Syracuse. “OITP is really a think tank within ALA, and it is important that it teams with scholars as much as possible. I’m very happy to be part of that process. It is vital to the entire library and information science community that practitioners and scholars engage in a continuous conversation on how best to serve patrons.”

Lankes’ work on participatory librarianship has included presentations both domestically as well as in Australia, Italy, and Sweden. More information on participatory librarianship can be found at http://www.ptbed.org and on Lankes at http://www.DavidLankes.org.

OITP advances ALA’s public policy activities by helping secure information technology policies that support and encourage efforts of libraries to ensure access to electronic information resources as a means of upholding the public’s right to a free and open information society. It works to ensure a library voice in information policy debates and to promote full and equitable intellectual participation by the public. It does this by:

• Conducting research and analysis aimed at understanding the implications of information technology and policies for libraries and library users,
• Educating the ALA community about the implications of information policy, law, and regulation for libraries and library users,
• Advocating ALA’s information policy interests in non-legislative government policy forums, and
• Engaging in strategic outlook to anticipate technological change, particularly as it presents policy challenges to libraries and library users.

The Participatory site has been updated. http://ptbed.org is now the official URL for the Institute’s participatory librarianship work.

Aside from a great deal more content (including posters and desktop wallpapers), the site now features RSS and commenting on just about everything. So please feel free to participate. If you see a link or some content that needs to be added, please email rdlankes@iis.syr.edu.

I’ve just changed my web site rather radically. I did this to make it easier to find things (hopefully) and easier to maintain. The blog remains pretty much untouched (for now) except for the addition of some posts. I had to do this because now the entire site is pretty much run from the WordPress database.

The biggest change is the collapsing of the Participatory Librarianship site into my own site. Since this is my major research focus, I figured it was time to put myself on the line and closely associate my research with the project. I’m hoping it makes my site more useful than just going to get a copy of a vita or a presentation. Now when I update the participatory site or my own, both are updated. In a few days going to PTBed.org will show you the same splash page minus my information. If you go to www.DavidLankes.org you get the splash page plus my professional information.

My former site looked minimalist, but in fact the search engine behind it made things complex and the pages for presentations a bit overwhelming. I hope this makes it simpler.

So, major changes:

• Participatory Librarianship site and Personal site have been collapsed
• Standard list displays for publications and presentations
• Interactive timelines added for most personal pages
• RSS feeds integrated into pages to highlight relevant news and announcements
• Expanded biography…now with more bragging
• Targeted search on relevant pages
• Quick link to see and add comments to most sections of the site

As always if you see something screwy please let me know. I highly recommend using Firefox over IE. IE is still flakey with CSS and the timelines simply work better in Firefox.

I’m sure I’ll be tweaking for some time, but let me know how I can make it better.

For those technically oriented (or my digital library students) some tech details:

Bog Software: WordPress
Search Engine (and Web Links): Sphider
Timelines: Simile (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/)

All of these packages were tied together with PHP. The individual non-blog pages were created with PHP tapping directly into the WordPress database.