Sembl, the game of resemblance #ndf2012

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Sembl, the game of resemblance
Catherine Styles, @cathstyles
Sembl is a powerful system for thinking in a playful, dialogic, creative way. Cath will introduce Sembl through its initial manifestation as a real-time group adventure game at the National Museum of Australia, and explore how its play cultivates polyphonic, associative thinking, and new ways of knowing. She will explain where the game comes from and speculate on where it could go, in physical museum space but especially on the web, as an engine of open and linked data, and a game- based social learning network.
This game of resemblance has been gestating a long time, so Cath is stoked to share the story of its emergence.

[ETA: Cath’s own images, notes and clips from the presentation.]

Sembl
Game derives from Charles Cameron’s “Hipbone Game” who got the idea from Herman Hesse’s “Glass Bead Game”.

Started as an iPad game at National Library of Australia. Users make connections between objects (a branding iron and a breastplate “label bodies”; leg irons and a Welsh organ both “involve keys”), which are then rated according to how interesting they are. What makes a resemblance interesting? Makes you think about things in different ways.

Developed on paper, tested with kids, then moved to a digital prototype and tested with same kids. This got them even more interested in getting into the museum itself.

Co-authorship, radical trust, open authority, new epistemology. Meaning not just imposed by museum, created by visitors. Game provides structure for dialogue between museum and visitor and among visitors.

linked data — linked link data
identy — similarity
logical — analogical
prescribed — freeform
comprehensive — generative

Those creating network links learn network thinking.

“You kill what you categorise.” @ffunch
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant” – Emily Dickinson

Image of an exhibit colocating slave shackles with fine silverware

Open Museum had a game where users posted “this image is similar to that” until the chain of images looped around to the first image again.

“Every move you make is a futher link in the pattern that connects. Every move you make is a creative leap.” – Charles Cameron on Sembl

Beyond social #ndf2012

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Beyond Social
DK @justadandak
If social (media) is no longer the new shiny set of tools that everyone gasps at then what are the next set of questions? In this fast-paced session, DK will balance his presentation with overarching cross-sector ‘big picture’ strategies right through to platform-specific tools and techniques which deliver.
DK (yes, just a D and a K) is a social media advisor who has helped people like UNICEF, BBC, the Gates Foundation, Welsh National Assembly etc. He lives on the internet at justadandak.com. @justadandak

Not going to talk about “Why Twitter is cool” because assumes we already know that.

Shows interactive TV from 1953 Winky Dink where kids had printouts and at some point in show it told them to join the dots.

April 20th someone became first person to edit Wikipedia 1,000,000 times – rewarded by Wikipedia with a day named for him.

Quick dirty simple ideas for museums (people are already aggregating stuff for you- why not borrow/steal/embed existing work?). Problem is at conference people get excited and then realise they have to go back to work.

“Culture eats strategy for lunch” – Peter Drucker. We need a culture that embraces social media – it’s not one person’s job. Doesn’t mean everyone needs a Twitter account, but everyone needs to embrace idea.

(Lots of animated gifs in this slideshow.)

We need to become a lot more curious about other people’s work. Not just within GLAM but outside the sector. Social media lets us do that with RSS feeds.

Currently we think of our website as a destination. But the most popular places on the planet are not destinations, they’re intersections. Google’s popular but we don’t go there to stay there – we go there to go somewhere else. Same with Twitter. We should be an “intersection of amazingness”.

“Trust people to know that there’s a back button on their browser.”

Recommends Rework by Fried. DK wrote notes as read it summarising it, posted to blog. Two weeks later retweeted by author (who “could have gone a different way with that”) and got tens of thousands of hits on his blog – and was then remixed by someone else adding colour; and then someone in Sweden remixed that into a more corporate-style format. Nothing the author could have planned!

Ideas – “Social media Tuesday” once a month for social media geeks to get together over lunch and share – build culture

For a long time Mr Potato was sold without the potato because they assumed you already had one.

Clip of William Gibson talking about how we can get a bit “iPads, meh. gene therapy, whatever” about the present. DK says instead of looking forward to future, should sometimes focus on using the cool stuff that already exists.

Could ask us “Who’s got a social media strategy?” and hands would go up. But what if he asked “Who’s got a cultural strategy?”

New Memory Palaces and the Sublime #ndf2012

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Piotr Adamczyk, @adamczyk, Google Art Project
Piotr has been exploring the possibilities for exchange between practices in the sciences and evaluation techniques from the arts. Most recently he led development on the Google Art Project. Before that he held an analyst position with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. With a background in Mathematics and Computer Science, Piotr holds graduate degrees in Human Factors and Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Piotr has authored papers and organized workshops for Association for Computing Machinery conferences centred on human-computer interaction, and served as a Program Committee member for ACM Creativity & Cognition in 2007 and 2009. His recent work is focused on the use of open/linked data in cultural heritage institutions.

Shows images of museum content contrasting with museum data… Worked on Museum Data Exchange Project with OCLC

At one pointed had to scrape own website to get data sharable. Has used Yahoo Pipes. Tried this with a single object – what about with a whole collection? V&A infinite scroll. [Google, DuckDuckGo, etc do this – why not library catalogues and databases?] SFMOMA ArtScope lets you see an overview of the whole collection but still distancing, doesn’t give you context or differences. SFMOMA Collections Online Visualization Tool – Beta makes it into a graph.

Got into Google Art Project as a Met employee. Now working on backend metadata and systems. 36102 artworks from 184 collections from 43 countries – 2 from New Zealand. Will take any nonprofit institution, copyright-free or -cleared content. Not replacing existing platforms but creating another one. Not just the art but also a streetview component currently in 55 galleries. (2m-tall trolley that someone walks behind and gallery says where to go.)

Adding features – In Google can do things quickly compared to “museum time”. Eg user galleries, compare features to compare two artworks eg a sketch and a finished painting. Unplanned benefit of aggregation. Quickly added a Hangouts feature, so can take people through guided tour. Goggles – image recognition software for mobile devices to lead back to institution website.

“Memory Palace” (Wikipedia, WikiHow)

Lots of photos of exhibits here, and Flickr groups – What’s in your bag?, Bookshelf project – musing about how we visualise collections of things.

Google Art Project can only give a sense of what’s measurable, a sense of what institution has said is most significant. “But what we do well is we do everything at once.”

Brings us back to copyright, he says, showing a streetview with one of the images blurred out. (There’s someone who goes through this streetview and takes the blurred images and gets someone to paint it so that the blurred painting now actually exists!) There are also some glitches due to software/hardware images from the trolley trundling through. Some issues remaining but thinks still doing good stuff.

Q: What problems do people report with StreetView?
A: Visitors ask why they can’t go into certain spaces (navigation is determined by institution); institutions report more technical problems.

Q: Showed us several examples of meta-art – would it be useful to articulate a new level of language to talk about this kind of art?
A: Big data’s something we need to deal with which scientists have been looking at. When you start putting things together, need to have a different way of talking about collection. Language of curation and selection has to change. Trying to get metadata from different institutions to talk together is hard.

Q: Just used “big data” and “curation” and “selection in a single sentence. Can we select (“a person sifting through every day for ever”) or do we just take everything (“the firehose”)?
A: May need to go with the firehose. Can we expect people to sift, or machines, or…? May depend on how much meta info we need – if we want richness might need human intervention, to get closer to meaning. Machines can only do so much.

Q: How do we enable people to make meaning for themselves; how enhance engagement?
A: Each institution has very different reasons for joining the project. Some because everyone else was, some because they don’t have own website, some trying to drive users back to their own site, some to make use of advanced features. How do we measure success? 50million visits in last six months, which we know is just looking at the objects. Does this mean more engagement?

Q: Can you talk about the Google Art Project’s plans for opening up connections not just through screens?
A: When setting up background did work on converting data to a metadata standard and giving this back to institution. Less of half of institutions have given metadata (for whatever reason). So are being kept back from opening up as an API because only a few institutions could do something with it right now; but is something they’re interested in.

Walking backwards into the future – #ndf2012 opening by @vikram_nz

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Am at National Digital Forum 2012 doing my liveblogging thing…

Opening address
Vikram Kumar (@vikram_nz), InternetNZ

[ETA: Vikram’s posted slides (and will link to video when available.]

Vikram Kumar is currently Chief Executive of InternetNZ and has previously worked with government (State Services Commission) and the private sector (Telecom). He writes regularly at http://internetnz.net.nz/news/blog on a range of issues related to the future of internet in New Zealand. Recent topics have included re-invention and evolution of the internet, piracy, privacy and cyber-security. A regular at NDF over the years, he’s interested in how the GLAM sector can support new creative and commercial models online.

“I curate stories about the internet – how it changes individuals, organisations, countries.” Internet driving massive disruptive change. Such change has happened before, eg television.

Quotes: Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore from The Medium is the Massage: “When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Disruptive change like a midlife crisis – does God exist? why am I here?

Shows excerpt from TED talk Thomas P. Campbell: Weaving narratives in museum galleries

How do we look forward and use digital technologies in context of social, political, economic change. When looking at technologies we wonder, “What can I do with this?” Sometimes this is wrong question – should ask, “What should I be doing?” Don’t extrapolate the past to define the future.

Look at what we want to achieve, don’t worry about how we’re going to do it.

New media affect society not just by the content, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. Eg how does the internet affect copyright? Copyright from an age when cost of producing copies was high. Internet disrupts this – copying becomes not just cheap and easy but inherent to how the internet transmits information.

Internet is:

  • ubiquitous – especially with APNK. What does it mean when people are constantly connected? Need to think of ourselves not as a destination – we can go where our community is. Eg Quake Stories. Organisations coming together to deliver virtual reality – overlaying past street images over present empty lots.
  • End-to-end principle, layered architecture – internet itself is simple, just moving bits around, but it allows all sorts of things to be built on top of this. Need to permission to innovate. Semantic web emerging slowly. 1762 means nothing by itself – but add context/metadata and (a year), it gives meaning.
  • Everyone can be a producer – people we’re trying to reach needn’t be passive consumers. We don’t have to do all the education/preservation on our own.
  • Openness – goes back to not needing permission. Lets us experiment. Deep engagement. Get people involved in projects – even to put in money. Pledge Me to crowdfund NZ creativity. But only works if you’ve got engagement.
  • Bottom-up evolution – new areas of collaboration all the time.
  • Global and universal

What future do you want?

LIANZA and open access

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Moving to a new job has been keeping me happily preoccupied, but the email I received from LIANZA yesterday was just about calculated to spur me to break radio silence. To quote, interspersed with my commentary in [square brackets]:

From November 22, parts of the LIANZA website will be locked to members only. As the cost of developing and maintaining the website comes out of LIANZA membership fees, LIANZA Council decided to make certain pages exclusive to members. The Council worked with the Website Advisory Group to determine appropriate members-only content.

From November 22 you will need to login to the website to view these locked pages:

  • LIANZA Blog
    [Really? Does anyone really think I’ll log in to read a blog? I won’t even click a link to read a blog; I certainly don’t have time to log in to a website just to find out if there happens to be a post today. If the full post isn’t in my Google Reader, I don’t read it.]
  • Library Life newsletter features
    [I occasionally click a link from the email newsletter to read the full story. That’s about to become even more occasional.]
  • Latest issue of the New Zealand Library and Information Management Journal (NZLIMJ)
    [This implies that previous issues will remain accessible, which is something at least. But still a tremendous disappointment. I thought I’d been seeing a move towards opening NZLIMJ up, and had hoped to see it soon appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals. In the current climate, I think a library association should be promoting open access, not locking information down.]
  • Conference papers
    [!!!
    …
    Just… What a tremendous disservice this does to the authors! Conference papers are hard enough to search as it is; locking these behind a login only guarantees that no LIANZA non-members (and not many LIANZA members) will ever read or cite these. Don’t we want rather to raise the profile of New Zealand LIS research?]
  • Copyright resources
    […Okay, if you really must have an easter egg for LIANZA members I guess this qualifies as reasonable.]
  • Member profiles
    [Okay, sure, whatever.]
  • Advocacy Portal (already restricted to members)
    [Because it’s… vitally important that only LIANZA members advocate for libraries…? To be honest I can see the argument for this as a valuable resource. I just think it’d be even more valuable if we all – members and non-members alike – cooperated on advocating for both our individual libraries and libraries as a class.]
  • Code of Practice
    [This comprises the “policy and procedures that are to be followed, day to day, in the running of the Association.” So mostly only of use to members; otoh it seems a bit odd to keep it secret.]

Does LIANZA actually have evidence that there are significant numbers of people choosing not to be members because the content’s there for free anyway? Enough people to be worth causing this hassle to existing members?

Because as a member, this does increase the hassle for me to access the content, and therefore reduces the amount of content I’ll be bothered to look up. When I was a member of the Website Advisory Group, a big concern was getting conversations going on the website; hiding those conversations away just seems likely to exacerbate that problem. This move also reduces the visibility of LIS scholarship published by LIANZA, so makes it less likely I’d consider submitting to NZLIMJ (however see footnote). And philosophically, I’m not overly happy about paying a subscription to a library association that is working against open access to information.

Lucky for LIANZA’s coffers, membership comes with other benefits that still make it worth the annual cheque. Because the moment its website content is locked behind a login screen, its value to me plummets.

Footnote for authors: If your conference paper is about to be locked behind the login screen but you actually would like other librarians nationally and internationally to have a chance at finding your research, you can deposit a copy at E-LIS – a subject repository for library and information science. (And/or in your institution’s repository if it has one.)

Likewise for NZLIMJ articles – the author guidelines state a 6 month embargo for publication elsewhere, but I emailed editor Brenda Chawner to clarify this, and she says she interprets it to apply to formal publications, not repositories, and it would be fine with her if authors put copies of their articles into an institutional or subject repository.

Links of interest – 28th Sept

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Linkspam! I won’t even attempt to arrange these into some kind of thematic grouping this time, just throw them all at you:

Running the Library Race “draws a parallel between fatigued runners and overworked librarians, proposing that libraries need to pace work more effectively to avoid burnout. Through an exploration of cognitive science, organizational psychology, and practical examples, guest author Erica Jesonis offers considerations for improving productivity and reducing stress within our fast-paced library culture”.

LIANZA 2012 was held this week and the conference proceedings are now online.

Aaron Tay rounds up 6 presentations/posts on librarianship that impressed me.

Elyssa Kroski has put together a list of 100+ law librarians on Twitter.

Jessica Olin writes about how she handles reference on chat – including a question on “Who would win in a fight? A bear or a tiger?” – in Chat reference is a weird beastie.

Meredith Farkas writes on Living our values, pulling together thoughts on a variety of events in the general “ownership vs [increasingly-expensive-]access” debate.

Speaking of which, I’ve particularly been following the saga since Jenica Rogers from SUNY Potsdam posted about her library’s decision to cancel subscriptions to ACS journals – not an easy decision for either the library or the faculty, but she’s been communicating transparently with the faculty about all the issues for some years so has been getting their full support both on the decision and on the backlash from ACS against the attention and support her post has been getting from librarians and chemists alike – ChemBark (with all the comments) has a good summary of a large part of it from a chemist’s point of view, as does Walt Crawford from a librarian-ly point of view; and Catherine Pellegrino focuses on how other libraries and chemistry departments should step forward and stand with SUNY Potsdam on this.

My tips for vendors training librarians

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In theory, I love the idea that vendors will send a rep halfway around the world to visit libraries and give us a training session on their products. In practice, I kind of dread these sessions…. Because – and I don’t know how to say this without sounding like I’m Grouchy McHyperbole so I’m just going to say it anyway – the number of such sessions I’ve found both useful and enjoyable I can count on one finger. Maybe two.

These are products I’m interested in and need to know about for my work, so I’m already hooked and I’m not asking for whizzbang presentation skills. I just don’t want my time wasted. I’m pretty sure vendors don’t want to waste their time either, so I’m not sure what sort of global communication snafu between vendors and libraries is preventing mutually useful meetings. But in the interests of maybe untangling it a bit, here are my personal tips for folk who visit libraries on behalf of vendors, on ways you can immeasurably improve at least my own experience.

(And note that these aren’t just things that I saw once. I’ve got plenty of those stories, too – doesn’t everyone, in any context? – but these are things that I wish for regularly.)

Teach what your audience wants to learn.
I want to know about your product – what it is, what it costs, what its features are, what its limitations are (don’t try to hide or justify them, just give it to me straight), and how I and my users can use it to best advantage.

I don’t care about the history of your company or where its headquarters are, unless support vs timezones is an issue. If you merged with another company very recently that might be useful information if it affects your product, but anything more than a few years old, save it for a handout.

Teach at the right level.
If this is a brand new-to-me product, then go ahead and start from basics. Just be aware that I’m an experienced information professional; I can figure out how to do a basic keyword search in pretty much any product.

If it’s a product we’ve had for several years, you can safely assume I’ve known the basics for several years and am coming along to hear about advanced features or features you’ve released in the last year.

Know what you teach.
If you’re going to demonstrate a function to me, make sure you’ve practised it yourself. A lot. If you spend several minutes trying to remember how something works it makes me impatient, makes you look unprepared, and makes your product look badly non-userfriendly.

Let us know what you’re going to teach.
You can’t please everyone all the time. Lots of people will want different things than I do. So ask us!

And/or when you’ve worked out what you’re covering, email us in advance and say “I’m going to demo X, Y, and Z” – then people who already know that stuff, or who don’t care about that stuff, can stay away and save their time.

Yes, this means you don’t get face-time with them. On the plus side, it means you don’t get face-time during which they get increasingly irritated at you. On the whole, that’s a win-win. šŸ™‚

—

Any other library folk got tips for vendor folk?

And if any vendor folk are reading this, I’d love to hear from your point of view – are there factors I don’t know about that mean you don’t have the resources needed to be as prepared as you’d like? Or are there ways library folk could help the situation?

Links of interest: pricing, impact factors, marketing, and staplers

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Acquisitions and budgets
2012 Study of Subscription Prices for Scholarly Society Journals (pdf) is out from Allen Press. “[T]he average increase in 2012 dropped, more than a full percentage point below the average, to less than 6%.” (The Consumer Price Index, according to the same figure, was less than 4%.) Much more detail, analysis and discussion is at the source (pdf).

The Librarian in Black writes I’m breaking up with eBooks (and you can too) on the poor deal that current models of ebook provision are for libraries and, by extension, our customers.

Marketing
Alison Wallbutton in #brandlibraries ponders what branding is, how libraries are branded, and whether we want to reposition that branding. She argues that libraries are successfully branded – as “books”; it’s in the very word. But of course (segue to my own thoughts) we as librarians get twitchy about wanting to make sure that users know we’re not just books, so we reject that outright – often without having put any thought into what we’re going to replace that branding with. Which leaves us in a position where we can’t effectively promote ourselves because we don’t have any image to put out there.

Impact factors
Nixon, J.M. (2012). Core Journals in Library and Information Science: Developing a Methodology for Ranking LIS Journals. C&RL. Advance online publication.
–Outlines a methodology and resulting list of three tiers into which they’ve divided LIS journals according to “influence”. Uses a mix of expert opinions, impact factors, circulation rate, and acceptance rate and, unsurprisingly, comes up with a similar list as those derived from expert opinions or from impact factors.

Probably a good measure of influence; it doesn’t claim that quality follows. Which is good because Sick of Impact Factors which concludes that “if you use impact factors you are statistically illiterate” and has been so widely retweeted and commented on that the author has posted a followup summarising the long comment thread in sections: useful links; concerns about metrics; alternative metrics; and actions to take.

Just for fun
Library Shenanigans reports on The Stapler Obituaries – a mini-exhibition of dead staplers at an academic library.

Links of interest: ebooks, leadership, and change

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eBooks
In the Library With the Lead Pipe publishes a provocative and persuasive essay on the eBook Cargo Cult, beginning

“Libraries created the present crisis in scholarly publishing, and we are creating a similar crisis now with our approach to ebooks.”

A brief history of how libraries have handled (or given outsiders power over us by paying them to handle) the indexing of serials and how we’re doing the same with ebooks is followed by an overview of alternative models for ebook management – several great ones I’m familiar with including Unglue.It and Library License, and several more that are new to me.

Ellyssa Kroski has gathered her three posts on How To Compare e-Book Platforms (points to consider include technical requirements; content; functionality; and sales/pricing model) along with her presentation providing a background to these criteria.

Leadership
Two very insightful posts: the Librarian in Black posts 7 Lessons Learned While Being The Man; the Free Range Librarian responds with her own perspective in I am The Man ā€” and you can, too!

Change
Jenica (Attempting Elegance) posts an 8-part blog version of her presentation on Killing Fear:

19: My first library job #blogjune

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(It’s called “Blog for many of the days of June, right?)

My first paying library job was, I think, when I was 19. A couple of years before that I had a week’s work experience in a library.

But my first library job I don’t even remember. I assume I had one because I was going through some old stuff from high school a while back and came across a “Library” pin. I don’t think they handed those out just for borrowing lots of books. I guess I shelved? I can almost remember shelving — or possibly browsing, but I think it might have been shelving. I may or may not have checked out books.

I do remember, with a friend, working out that if you held two books together in a certain way you could cancel out the security strips and get them both through the security gates. (Should I be saying this online? Ehhh, it was a long time ago, surely they’ve fixed that problem by now…. Also I don’t think we got it to work every time.)

I also remember my first introduction to an indexing database. I used it to look for articles about Star Trek: The Next Generation and interloan a particularly interesting magazine article. (Previously my geeky scrapbook had contained only the snippets I could find from the Press and the Listener — I had whole seasons’ worth of the little plot summaries from the TV schedules and was always excited when they published a photo of one of the characters to go with it.)