Sketch-notes – Open Linked Data

Roy Tennant, Jon Voss and Ingrid Mason
Keynote for ALIA Information Online 2013

This was one presentation that I felt I should attend, but I was also fearing because it is a serios and technical subject that might be hard to present in an entertaining and lively manner. Well that certainly was not the case with these three presenters. They grabbed our attention after lunch with well selected personal musical introductions for each.Then they managed to pass on some key messages about the benefits of open linked data along with some powerful examples of what data can do when it is shared, open and then linked. A very memorable presentation!

Sketch-notes – Sarah Drummond

Sarah Drummond’s keynote
ALIA Online 2013

Sarah Drummond provided a great deal of inspiration at ALIA Online, particularly for younger librarians who could identify with her in so many ways. She really engaged by participating in the New Librarians Seminar the weekend before the conference itself and then by running a one day workshop on design, that emphasised the importance of understanding and mapping your customers’ journeys, after the conference. She was one of several keynoters who urged us to start with people and not technology and she was brave enough to tell us that we hold too much fear and that results in our attachment to too much command and control. We need to let go more.

Sketch-notes – Designing Better Library Experiences

Zaana Howard’s session at ALIA Online 2013

Zaana gave a very short session on designing better user experiences in libraries. Her key messages (above) were few and short, but memorable and wise. I think they were timely reminders and her research is evidence based. She had a verysignificant influence on the under current of service design in this conference and I thank her for her input on that.

Sketch-notes – Business Model Innovation

Tim Kastelle
Keynote at ALIA Information Online 2013

This is the first of a series of sketch notes from the ALIA Information Online conference held in Brisbane during February 2013. I have to declare that I was on the Program Committee for the conference, so maybe you’ll read some bias into my comments here. I’m trying to be objective.

The sketch notes above are from one of the first keynotes by Tim Kastelle from the University of Queensland Business School. I think one of his best messages for libraries (which you can see above) was to aggregate, filter and connect. I also liked his suggestion that obscurity was worse than piracy for content creators. He urged us to consider innovation in our business model (i.e. behavioural change), not simply in or through technology.

I think that keynote neatly set us off on what the Program Committee hoped would be a series of rather different messages and themes for the conference. These included:

  • Designing new services for people.
  • Finding and providing more meaning in what we do as cultural institutions.
  • Finding our voice and becoming better advocates for the public good (e.g. Open Access, Copyright reform and a sustainable future).
  • Putting people before technology.
  • The importance of empathy and user experience research.
  • Reassurance of the value in play, fail, learn as a strategy.

I’m still learning about the use of sketch-notes. They do force you to think more deeply about the messages you are hearing and how to represent them visually. I’m being mentored in this by one of my colleagues @thelibrarykim so I thank her for all of her tips and assistance. Her sketch-notes are always grand!

Ebooks, the future of research & cultural preservation by libraries

Closed stacks

I read this post from O’Reilly TOC this morning and I was glad that someone finally raised these issues that have been bothering me for some time. I almost posted about the same issues a few weeks ago, but was distracted. The post raises some real concerns about the preservation of knowledge for future research. For me it is wider than that and goes to cultural preservation for our communities. Is it right that for our e-content we should just rely on someone else to have a copy (like Apple or Amazon as the article suggests)?

I had been worried about this, because like many other libraries we have been e-preferred for some time now. Is it also right that cultural material we collected and provided for our own communities could be unavailable for them in the future because the e-content is no longer available via our library? I don’t think it is and I don’t think we should simply hope for the best, divest ourselves of this responsibility and rely on others doing it for us, like say the National or State Libraries and certainly not the publishers because it isn’t really their role and it really never has been. Don’t we have an obligation along these lines (i.e. cultural preservation) for those in our communities? I think the rush to e-preferred has possibly led us to a focus on the now, the most convenient, the most efficient, and the least expensive alternatives, but quite probably at the expense of our obligation to preserve knowledge and culture for future generations.

I had been running around asking everyone who was involved with ebooks a lot of questions about what happens when the providers go bust, when we cease subscribing, or in the case of other inconvenient but worrying events (like hacking, file corruption, etc.). I am told that it varies with different ebook providers. Some regard it as a lease of those ebooks, others allow you to download the content in their proprietary format or in xml, but this ultimately isn’t a solution. Encrypted formats offer a whole other dilemma. Many contemporary publications are in danger of disappearing, becoming untrustworthy or inaccessible in the future if we don’t seriously consider this issue now. My own view is that there is actually more to cultural preservation of publications than simply preserving the xml. Books have always had other features, like covers, layout, typography, illustration, decoration, way finding assistance, etc., that add to the reader’s experience. In our relentless hunt for efficiency and convenience I think we’ve progressively discounted the value of these features for our readers.

Perhaps this will be addressed by those talking about ebooks at the 2013 ALIA Information Online conference in Brisvegas next week.

This was originally posted here:
http://informationonline2013.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/ebooks-the-future-of-research-cultural-preservation-by-libraries/

What did I say, think and write in 2012?

NYE2013 57

Just in case you missed it, and let’s face it you probably did, here is a listing.

With colleagues from UTS Library (S Schofield, B Tiffen) I co-authored the article “Change and Our Future at UTS Library: It’s Not Just about Technology.” Australian Academic & Research Libraries  43 (1) , 32- 45.

I contributed the essay “Design as a Catalyst for UTS Library” for J. Schweitzer & J. Jakovich (eds.) Crowd-Share Innovation: Intensive Creative Collaborations, Freerange Press ( 2012) , Ch. 2: 114- 119.

For the ALIA Biennial Conference Sydney 2012 (http://conferences.alia.org.au/alia2012/), again with UTS colleagues (B Tiffen, J Vawdrey), I co-presented on Discovery for Academic Libraries.

Chapter/essay (about the future library) for forthcoming book on the 25th Anniversary of UTS edited by Paul Ashton & Debra Adelaide. (Publication title not known yet.)

Various conference, interviews, blog posts and seminar presentations including:

On becoming extraordinary

Becoming extraordinary from Mal Booth

I found this recently, so thought I’d share the slides from this online talk that I did for QUT’s Information Studies Group (@qutisg) in mid-2012. There are no speaker’s notes, but most of the ideas presented are pretty self-explanatory.

Thanks to Chris Gaul for his design work on these slides.

The implications for libraries of recent global trends in open online education (Part 2)

Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43

With assistance from my colleagues at UTS Library and the commenters on the first part of this post, here is a listing of the implications for libraries of recent trends in open online education (such as MOOCs). These implications vary depending on whether the University is providing MOOCs or seeking to utilise the content available on them. I have tried below to account for the implications covering both of these situations.
Open Access
If MOOCs (and the like) are seen as another form of scholarly publishing, it makes sense for libraries to push for Open Access as the default standard for MOOC course materials. Protecting and extending Open Access policies and initiatives that facilitate open online education through enhanced access to Open Educational Resources will provide a far better and more accessible future for all than one in which another form of “open access” is available for a fee. (This can already be seen in the publishers using “Gold Open Access” models that are facilitated via Article/Author Processing Charges levied instead of subscription fees.) This issue is covered very well in this recent post by Timothy Vollmer http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/34852
Discoverability 
Discoverability of MOOC courses is mainly the problem of the course provider, but to date this seems not to be a problem if we look at the large numbers enrolling in some courses. Some MOOC directories already exist and some of these include rankings. It should be noted that MOOC resources are often behind registration/password walls. Lecturers seeking advice on MOOCs can always consult Librarians at their institutions for help in collaboration in finding resources for a course as is currently the case.
Accessibility
Equitable access for all users should be the ethical obligation and should be design in at the outset for all MOOC courses. Research shows that retroactively making material accessible is much more difficult, expensive, time consuming and a job that usually falls to libraries.
Advising on IP, Copyright and the use of licensed resources 
This primarily involves access to our existing online resources and the physical collections of the library which are governed by existing access guidelines and policies. It also involves the copyright clearance and management of course materials. It is already believed that fair-use exemptions will not hold for open courses in the US. The terms and conditions applying to many existing MOOCs also indicate that not all MOOCs should be assumed to be “Open”, so their free re-use cannot always be assumed.
Delivery of teaching & learning assistance and support 
If an institution were to offer a MOOC-type course what library involvement and support is envisaged? Our enquiries indicate limited involvement by libraries in other Australian universities providing MOOCs. Librarians should be able to work with academics to develop the courses and advise on the inclusion of appropriate scholarly resources. Librarians may need to engage more with and within these new online environments and learn the skills to create, mash, present and market content in aid of promoting the expertise and knowledge within the institution. Libraries will need to consider how to embed information literacy into “flipped” learning models, but to some extent we are already using this model with our current forms of IL being more hands-on and interactive (less lecture style).
If support is to be offered for remote courses and a massive extension of the hours is involved are collaborative arrangements between participating institutions the answer here (e.g. the Australian and NZ public libraries collaborating in virtual reference services)?
If MOOCs do lead to a major change in the delivery of a lot of higher education, it could mean that libraries need to offer more online services in terms of training, resources and digitisation of collections (where possible) – for remote and online users.
If an institution offers a MOOC course, to what extent (if any) are those enrolled in that course to be considered the same as currently enrolled university students and afforded access to the same library resources that those students pay fees for? I doubt that this will happen to any great extent.
Assistance and advice in the future as the lines between MOOC and LMS providers and publishers blur 
This seems already to be happening and libraries can offer useful advice re vendors and in negotiating with publishers for content and licenses. Publishers may also start to offer new products such as e-texts that are aimed specifically at the mass MOOC market and library staff will most likely be the best to deal with and provide this form of content to support MOOC courses.  Examples so far indicate that publishers see e-texts as revenue-saving at least or a money making opportunity at most so the issue is who pays?  For a free MOOC, they would target individuals directly rather than the university but students of a fee-paying MOOC would expect them gratis.
Collaboration 
If some of the commentators are correct in predicting that MOOCs are likely to be the first disruptive step that changes the provision of education, then the most thoughtful and helpful initiatives are likely to be found in new forms of collaboration. Libraries have a long background in this field, nationally, internationally and across all kinds of other boundaries and we can probably build on some already existing collaborative arrangements.
One major need if higher education moves in this direction is a need for well designed and dedicated online collaboration spaces where people can easily connect with each other beyond a classroom, learning commons or a formal LMS as they exist. Maybe this kind of platform should be built into the MOOC itself?
Technology support issues 
There are some technology support issues that MOOCs raise because of their massive scale. These issues mostly concern those in institutions who provide and maintain the LMS, but the Library may also have a role to play in providing the sophisticated, extended, remote and scalable support and systems that will be required to support our initiatives. Scalability, but also reliability are major requirements. Integration of some of our online services and resources (where allowed and feasible) into MOOC platforms is another technical consideration.
Continuing to promote the relevance, value and impact of the Library and its services 
This is a competitive advantage to the University and also to its enrolled students. Those enrolling in MOOCs without being enrolled in a university will have little or no access to the wide variety of reading, reference and other special collections available from institutional libraries, beyond the course materials provided.
In addition, some libraries (like ours) are busy expanding cultural services and experiences with things like events, exhibitions, performances and art works in the Library. Should these also be offered online? The generation currently attending university is said to value experiences, so perhaps those experiences are another advantage of the campus-based university?
Mobile access
The trend now is for everything going online, but also there is an even greater trend of mobile devices outselling traditional PCs. Not only will MOOCs need to consider this, but libraries in general must do the same.
A more general consideration
Lastly, and more generally than specifically about libraries, a major issue is the amount of time and resources we invest into MOOCs and this depends on the institution’s objectives. If the courses do not account for credit, should we be focusing more on our degree/paying/enrolled students. The priority and resourcing to be allocated for the support MOOCs needs to be determined at each institution.