The Library of Birmingham's bright vision for the future

Since the Google books/copyright situation has been resolved, at least for now baring court appeals, I'll address "Rewriting the Book: On the Move with the Library of Birmingham".

The whole piece did leave me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth due to the fact that it felt like a commercial for a library.  This isn't surprising given that it was written by the assistant director for culture on the Birmingham City Council.  A promotional piece is essentially what it was intended to be.  That being said, I find myself thinking that it was very one-sided in its emphasis on the mobile technology side of the new offerings.  I have read about this new library in Birmingham before, and honestly the most exciting part of it is not that I can use my mobile phone to access information from it, but that the entire library experience could be enriched by the new experiences that the library will be providing.  The fact that they call it "Birmingham Library and Archives Services" is promising, mainly for the latter part of that title.  Municipal archives are criminally underused, and the integration of it with the larger library whole is to be commended.  I am impressed by the fact that they are planning on making use of library web space to give the archives a digital presence, which should serve to entice patrons in to use the physical items more often.  Often archives are a bit of a hidden collection and need help seeing the light of day.

Of particular note is the graphic explaining their concept of "The 5 libraries of LOB Digital".  This breaks down the various roles that the hope the library will play.  It includes the library as a space, as a collection of materials, as a facilitator of community knowledge sharing, a resource of knowledgeable employees, and as a way to connect the digital lives of patrons with the information they want to gather and use.

The article concludes by saying the the library of the future will be very different from the library of today.  While I personally would like to think of it not so much being different as being "enhanced", the amount of effort and city resources, both in time and financially speaking, is astounding and laudable, especially in an age when many are questioning the role of the public municipal library.

The internet, libraries, and the real world

                It embarrasses me to admit, I have managed to get through nearly 20 years of internet use without having any more than the most basic idea of how it all works.  I’ve bandied about words like servers, T3 connections, and routers, only knowing half of what it in fact is that these terms mean and what the objects in question do.  The readings for this week’s class were immediately helpful to me in grasping some of the building blocks of what makes the internet the internet.  My next thought was that it would’ve been extremely beneficial to have had this information a lot sooner than my final year of grad school.  Surely this kind of thing is what should be taught as part of some core curriculum at least at the high school level.  Perhaps it is, and just wasn’t while I was in school because the internet was such a new thing.  Much like I had to teach myself the grand majority of the historical knowledge that I have today due to a lack of classes in the subject, I imagine it is through hobby and personal interest that the majority of computer engineers know what they do about the internet. 

                With the net becoming more and more integrated into the everyday tasks libraries face, it seems to me that it should not be taken for granted that library students will just pick things up as they go along.  Specific courses that deal with internet history and current trends should be made more widely available.  Perhaps this is being done already, but web integration in the classroom during grade school should certainly be applied widely. 

In the O’Reilly and Battelle article, they describe the coming “Web 3.0” as being the “information shadow” of the real world.  Increasingly, I find this to be absolutely true.  In fact, it is getting to the point that if something does not have a web presence, it might be suspect.  I found myself appalled to learn a few years ago that job seeking committees often felt that it was a red flag if they googled the name of a job applicant and nothing came up.  To me it was a privacy issue, to them it meant that this person did not have any kind of online professional or personal space.  The lack of the former could mean the applicant was a luddite, the latter an indication of possible anti-social tendencies.  Now I find myself shying away from eating at restaurants or staying in motels if there is not an official website of the place for me to find more information about it.  I would argue that while such real life/web interface can be a good thing in many ways, that it is best that remember that the internet is still simply a tool.  Admittedly it is a tool with many uses for many aspects of life, but a tool nonetheless.  When used overmuch or in the wrong way, it could very much backfire on the user.   Knowing this, smart users of the internet try to limit the amount their private information is bandied about.  Which brings us to a strength that libraries have libraries in the internet age over Barnes and Noble and Amazon.  Libraries and librarians have privacy as a core value professionally.  Not so private companies.  They would like to harvest your information to better sell you products.  Libraries are committed to bringing you and the best information possible together while never jeopardizing private details about individuals.  With life and the net getting closer and closer together, I believe this is an aspect of librarianship that libraries should emphasize to maintain relevance in the future.

Too much? Too little? Just right?

While the idea of enriching the OPAC sounds great, I find myself thinking that there is only so much that one can do that will reach the middle of the ground user.  The new bells and whistles that the Deng article "Beyond the OPAC" suggests range in complexity and use.  Not all features will be used or even should be used by all patrons.  But so long as a critical mass of patrons use the new advantages made available by a retooling of the OPAC in the ways Deng illustrates, it very well could be worth the man power and time involved to create and maintain such features.

However, it would certainly not be enough to build this amazing new search tool and then simply sit back and wait, like Kevin Costner in a late 80's movie, for them to come.  Students, especially in the digital age, desire and expect quick and easy results.  They will follow the path of least resistance to gain info that works, not necessarily keep searching for the best info out there.  Additionally, Mooers' Law comes into play, in that giving patrons all this access to new forms of information and new ways of getting the info both old and new may be more of a nuisance than not having the info.  Especially with long standing researchers, any change, especially drastic ones, means a time of adjustment and perhaps disenchantment with the system.

All of that being said, it is still the best course of action to innovate and push things forward, so long as some of the time and effort being spent is used in utilization study to help craft something that will both be useful and stand the test of time, even in the ever changing world of the internet and information search and retrieval.

It's all about the HCI

Initially, the point that the Zhang et al. article was making was to me, a no brainer.  Of course one must consider human computer interaction when developing systems!  But then, this is perhaps the librarian in me talking.  In all of the libraries in which I have worked, the human customer has been considered, either the outside customer (patrons) or the inside customer (employees of the library itself).  But I could see how meeting organizational needs might cloud the individual user level from being considered as well as it should be. 

Straight off, I absolutely agree that good Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is vital in the day and age when individuals more often than not will be handling their own needs instead of consulting an employee or professional.  Typically individuals would like to be able to do something quickly, do it themselves, and if possible, do it anywhere they like with their smartphones. 

As I am going through the article, the paradigms defined by Hirscheim and Klein seem to me to be too harsh and lacking in gray area.  They may be useful as tools of analytical thought when applied to the creation of systems, but strike me as something that should not be followed blindly.  Especially when dealing with the paradigms that seek to abolish or transcend the status quo.  In many situations, there are good things about existing systems that should be carried into the new way of doing things.  Especially within the world of library systems, many patrons are long time users of certain technological features that expect certain services to work in certain basic ways.  Mucking about with this too much seems to me a recipe for disaster where the patron researcher ends up confused or upset, and possibly goes elsewhere with their information needs.

Something missing from the article is simply because it is a product of its time.  Published in 2005, it predates the era of the ubiquitous personal smart phone, which has greatly enhanced the place of the individual in the information systems services world.  It occurs to me that much of the neglect of HCI addressed by Zhang may not in fact still be occurring as regularly within systems development due to a new heightened awareness of the need for it.

For instance, app creation and use is a massive new enterprise that is being taken up not only by institutions but also by private companies and even private individuals, then being sold to the information systems providers.  Due to the very personal nature of the smartphone version of HCI, everyone is attempting to insert concern for the human factor into each step in the development of systems, not merely in design as an afterthought.

That being said, many of the tried and true standards that are mentioned still hold great value in systems development.   The International Standards Organization dictating defining usability as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use” still does and will continue to work.

Would the systems development life cycle look drastically different today in the more streamlined and robust digital age that we are now in compared to the nascent one that existed in 2005 at the time of the article’s publishing?  I’m lead to believe that it wouldn’t.  The basic ideas laid out by Cervone in 2007 are all still true.  Outside of the technological side of things, the considerations about money, time, and delivering a product that simply fits the needs of the users and the organization that will provide the system are still valid.  Of course, the metrics one might use to evaluate the system may change as expectations of users change.  And that would be something that should be kept in mind as the existing “new” system becomes the “old” system and a new team along the lines of what Cervone describes is pulled together to develop yet another new system. 

All in all, I very much agree with the whole of Zhang and its close agreement with the steps Cervone outlines.  The HCI is certainly now, if it hasn’t always ever been, the central focus of what the systems development life cycle hinges upon.  Any other way and you end up with a mess that no one likes and some outright refuse to use, then you’re back to the drawing board again, sooner and with less resources and time to spend due to not getting it right in the first place.

Usability testing

Approaching the two readings "Why We Are Not Google" from Swanson and Green, and "Website Redesign" from Tolliver et al., I was particularly interested in their conclusions because I view the website as being of primary importance in how patrons interact with the library in the twenty-first century.  In my personal experience, the self service model is how the majority of patrons would like to be able to go through life, be it at the grocery store or at the library.  Just as people need food, patrons need information.  It is quicker and easier to find and select both on one's own without the help of specialists, and indeed at both the grocery and library it is often now possible to "check out" without an employee, making the whole experience completely independent.

That being said, the information that one might get on one's own in the library is much dependent on how intuitive the technologies are that enable resource finding and consumption.  This is where website usability comes in.  Do patrons know enough or can learn enough on the fly to successfully make the best possible use of library resources?  Let's see what the two papers in question say.

First off, I like that the testers in the Tolliver article have multiple steps to their testing that each produce different concrete results that can be sorted and analyzed.  The specificity of issues found with the website was intriguing as well.  The trouble some patrons had because “borrowing materials” didn’t suggest checking out books, and looking for “my account” when the wording on the page was in fact “your account”.  It may sound trite, but in my own personal experience it is precisely these types of little things that add up to usability.  I was, however, surprised that they used student assistants and employees of the library, rather than actual student patrons that had no other connection to the library.  Surely they should have included that, their largest patron base.  The article also did not emphasize much where to go from there, once they had their website’s usability analyzed.  There was scant info on how to go about acting upon the information found, though I recognize that perhaps that would be a totally different study and article in and of itself.  

The Swanson et al. article was particularly apt, especially considering that I had just used a relatively new google-esque search box on the front page of Catholic University’s library website to find the article itself.  Two things immediately came to my mind upon finishing the article.  First, that obviously serious academic research is a discipline that necessitates at the very least some training to be able to make use of the many information finding resources that are available on a library webpage.  Second, that having the option of a well-placed federated search box on the homepage, as well as the links to the various databases, OPAC, and finding aids would probably be the best decision.  Why must it be one or the other?  Serious researchers who plan to dive straight into the databases don’t like having to delve through multiple pages of the library website in order to get started, and the casual patron can start with the search box.  However, there is the risk with that option that some that are less educated in the options available to them might believe that their search was futile and not realize there is another way.  I would make sure to have alerts and options clearly present to enable the patron to switch research modes at any time. 

I do agree with their ultimate conclusion that the academic library website and search is not, and should not be Google.  The nature of academic research lends itself to being so much more than that.  But that is not to say that there could be an option there to use a federated search, just in case they are attempting to find something specific, just as I was when I needed to look up two articles for class.  Quite literally, in my case, the success I had in being able to find my ends quickly justified the less scholarly means I took to get there.

 

Thoughts on Hirshorn and Liu

My immediate reaction to both of these articles was a personal one.  I had noticed that they had both been published back in 2008, and could not help but compare their visions of the future to what I desired and encountered as a 21^st century student researcher using the webpages of multiple schools and different organizations.  In some ways, they were spot on.  Other predictions seem to me to be a bit off the mark, however.

Environment Scan, by Hirshon, first off struck me by the fact that it has a very “outside looking in” perspective when it came to discussing Generation Y.  Using phrases such as “to reach generation Y”, it made it sound as if the author were an anthropologist describing their attempts at communicating with a remote jungle tribe.  If a birth year of 1982 is used as the beginning of generation Y (as is fairly common) then in 2008 there would be fully educated adults that could’ve assisted the author in providing concrete answers and examples of what it was his/her generation wanted and expected.  Instead the article uses broad generalizations based on other articles. 

As I mentioned above, some of the prognostications seemed a bit off to me.  One stand out idea was that of avatars becoming a normal part of online interaction.  With the advent of software like Skype and Facetime, the up and coming generation will come to expect not some graphical representation of a person or themselves, but an actual videochat/conference face to face with the real thing.  Additionally, one of the greatest impediments to the realm of virtual reference is the lack of non-verbal cues when trying to assist patrons.  Via chat and email both, nuance is lost when providing information and instruction.  An avatar would not be able to provide anywhere near as much information as a real person could about how the reference interview was going. 

The gaming and social networking emphasis by the articles also is not quite right.  While aspects of both can be applied to the web presence of academic libraries (and other institutions), I find that in fact the rising generation compartmentalizes their lives within the virtual realm.  They’ll facebook and tumblr, but they don’t necessarily want to do so with their employers or their schools.  Adding a social component to the catalogs and research portals of the library however, would strike more of a chord than would the library attempting to connect with patrons via the social networks that they use strictly for social purposes. 

The Liu article takes some of the general observations of the Hirshon article and applies it practically to the homepage of an academic library.  Liu is definitely on the right track in pointing out that what the newest generation of researchers will be expecting is a “seamless, one-stop information environment that minimizes users’ way-finding effort and nutures the formation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and experiences”.   Now that the web 2.0 idea is a number of years old and interacting with the virtual environment of web pages is the norm, personalization of a research portal in an effort to make information searches as painless and as accurate as possible would indeed be extremely attractive to the digital native generation.  That being said it is important that the personalization be quick and easy, and also a one-time thing, in which past customizations can be permanent yet changeable, and research history can be saved.

Liu also goes into great detail to design and describe the perfect layout and content of the ideal academic library homepage.  Again he uses the emphasis on ease of use that is of such importance to 21^st century researchers’ choice of online tools as a guide to how a page should be laid out.  All the functionalities should be as intuitive as possible and when it comes to navigation, need as few clicks as possible, as few page jumps and scrolling as possible.

There is one important aspect to all of this that the Liu article did not address, namely that of the promotion needed to ensure that students are actively going to the library webpage in order to do their research.  I cannot help but reflect upon what my alma mater and recent employer, University of Maryland, College Park, has recently done.  Upon finding that many students are simply googling rather than going to the OPAC, they have totally gone all in with OCLC’s Worldcat, providing a UMCP skin on Worldcat local to guide patrons to the resources they need.  The old catalog is still there, but is no longer the main focus.  Why the switch?  Worldcat entries for items show up in google searches.  The idea being, no longer can we expect the patrons to come to the library even virtually (library homepage on the web), the library must go to where the patrons are (Google).

The beginning...

This is a test!  Need a blog for class, and here it is!  Exciting times!