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For reasons discussed below, this area has been more prominent outside the US, but interest is also now growing in the US. See for example, the mention of RIMs in the Library FY15 Strategic Goals at Dartmouth College.
The name is unfortunately confusing - a reserved sense living alongside more general senses. What is the reserved sense? Broadly, RIM is used to refer to the integrated management of information about the research life-cycle, and about the entities which are party to it (e.g. researchers, research outputs, organizations, grants, facilities, ..). The aim is to synchronize data across parts of the university, reducing the burden to all involved of collecting and managing data about the research process. An outcome is to provide greater visibility onto institutional research activity. Motivations include better internal reporting and analytics, support for compliance and assessment, and improved reputation management through more organized disclosure of research expertise and outputs.
A major driver has been the need to streamline the provision of data to various national university research assessment exercises (for example, in the UK, Denmark and Australia). Without integrated support, responding to these is costly, with activities fragmented across the Office of Research, individual schools or departments, and other support units, including, sometimes, the library. (See this report on national assessment regimes and the roles of libraries.)
Some of the functional areas covered by a RIM system may be:
To meet these goals, a RIM system will integrate data from a variety of internal and external systems.Typically, a university will currently manage information about these processes across a variety of administrative and academic departments. Required data also has to be pulled from external systems, notably data about funding opportunities and publications.
Several products have emerged specifically to support RIM in recent years. This is an important reason for suggesting that it is emerging as a recognized service category.
Pure and Converis are parts of broader sets of research management and analytics services from, respectively, Elsevier (Elsevier research intelligence) and Thomson Reuters (Research management and evaluation). Each is a recent acquisition, providing an institutional approach alongside the aggregate, network level approach of each company's broader research analytics and management services.
Symplectic is a member of the very interesting Digital Science portfolio. Digital Science is a company set up by Macmillan Publishers to incubate start-ups focused on scientific workflow and research productivity. These include, for example, Figshare and Altmetric.
Other products are also relevant here. As RIM is an emerging area, it is natural to expect some overlap with other functions. For example, there is definitely overlap with backoffice research administration systems - Ideate from Consilience or solutions from infoEd Global, for example. And also with more publicly oriented profiling and expertise systems on the front office side.
With respect to the latter, Pure and Symplectic both note that they can interface to VIVO. Furthermore, Symplectic can provide "VIVO services that cover installation, support, hosting and integration for institutions looking to join the VIVO network". It also provides implementation support for the Profiles Research Networking Software.
As I discuss further below, one interesting question for libraries is the relationship between the RIMs or CRIS and the institutional repository. Extensions have been written for both Dspace and Eprints to provide some RIMs-like support. For example, Dspace-Cris extends the Dspace model to cater for the Cerif entities. This is based on work done for the Scholar's Hub at Hong Kong University.
It is also interesting to note that none of the three open source educational community organizations - Kuali, The Duraspace Foundation, or The Apereo Foundation - has a directly comparable offering, although there are some adjacent activities. In particular, Kuali Coeus for Research Administration is "a comprehensive system to manage the complexities of research administration needs from the faculty researcher through grants administration to federal funding agencies", based on work at MIT. Duraspace is now the organizational home for VIVO.
Finally, there are some national approaches to providing RIMs or CRIS functionality, associated with a national view of research outputs. This is the case in South Africa, Norway and The Netherlands, for example.
Another signal that this is an emerging service category is the existence of active standards activities. Two are especially relevant here:CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) from EuroCRIS, which provides a format for exchange of data between RIM systems, and the Casrai dictionary. CASRAI is the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information.
So, what about research information management (in this reserved sense) and libraries? One of the interesting things to happen in recent years is that a variety of other campus players are developing service agendas around digital information management that may overlap with library interests. This has happened with IT, learning and teaching support, and with the University press, for example. This coincides with another trend, the growing interest in tracking, managing and disclosing the research and learning outputs of the institution: research data, learning materials, expertise profiles, research reports and papers, and so on. The convergence of these two trends means that the library now has shared interests with the Office of Research, as well as with other campus partners. As both the local institutional and public science policy interest in university outputs grows, this will become a more important area, and the library will increasingly be a partner. Research Information Management is a part of a slowly emerging view of how institutional digital materials will be managed more holistically, with a clear connection to researcher identity.
As noted above, this interest has been more pronounced outside the US to date, but will I think become a more general interest in coming years. It will also become of more general interest to libraries. Here are some contact points.
Whether or not Research Information Management become a new service category in the US in quite the way I have discussed it here, it is clear the issues raised will provide important opportunities for libraries to become further involved in supporting the research life of the university.
The decentered library network presence is an important component of library service although it still appears to be an emergent interest in strategic or organizational terms.
In the centripetal trend, the focus was on integration around a singular, 'centered' network presence: the library website. The library website was the principal de facto network manifestation of the library, and the integration of library services in the website was a goal. Early examples of this were discussions around 'portals', one-stop-shops and metasearch. Later, this trend continued with more consolidated approaches which overcame some of the cost and inefficiencies of integration. Included here were the use of unified search systems often deploying integrated discovery layer products, the use of resource guides to manage resources with a consistent approach, the adoption of content management systems. Service consolidation, a stronger focus on providing a coherent user experience, a move to cloudsourced applications (discovery and resource guides for example), and an emerging emphasis on full library discovery help create a more unified experience at the library website.
In the centrifugal trend, the network library presence is decentered, unbundled or decoupled to an evolving ecosystem of services, each with a particular focus or scope. Think for example of how aspects of user engagement have been unbundled to various social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, ...), or of how parts of the discovery experience has been unbundled to Google Scholar or PubMed or to a cloud-based discovery layer, or of how some library services are atomized and delivered as mobile apps, toolbar applications, or 'widgets' in learning management systems and other web environments external to the library's. The library website is now a part, albeit an important part, of this evolving network presence. In this way, the library network presence has been decentered, subject to a centrifugal trend to multiple network locations potentially closer to user workflows. There are two important drivers here. One is the desire to reach into user workflows, acknowledging that potential library users may not always come to the library website. A second is the desire to make institutional resources (digitized special collections, research and learning materials, for example) available to external audiences in more effective ways. This is an aspect of the 'inside-out library'.
Here are some strands of the 'decentered' library network presence.
Now, despite the fact that there is quite a bit of activity supporting what I am calling here the decentered network presence, it has not crystallized as a service or organizational category for the library. It is an area of emergent interest. There seem to be at least three factors at play.
Clearly, there are different dynamics at play in the components of the decentered network presence of the library. However, we can expect a more holistic view to emerge in coming years.
Related entries:
In honor of St Valentine's day, my colleagues JD Shipengrover and Diane Vizine-Goetz have produced a list of the most widely held love stories in libraries - the most widely held books and the most widely held movies.
Here are the lists ... It is interesting seeing the similarities between the two.
These lists are based on a fiction (books and movies) subset of Worldcat, using the genre data in the records. The data is clustered at the work level, to consolidate editions and so on. A little more context is at the list page.
From this stage, I think we can see several interesting evolutions in scope, as change continues.
Here, I want to focus on another scope evolution which we are beginning to see in various manifestations. This is a trend to 'full library discovery', where discovery goes beyond the collections to include a fuller range of library capacities. In current services, a library user is usually presented with a collection search, and a range of web pages about other library services or expertise. The two are separated in the website experience, but may not be separate in the user expectation of the library. If I am interested in demographics, for example, why not find a curated resource guide or the name of a subject specialist as well as relevant articles or books when I do a search?
And, indeed, we are beginning to see discovery environments which provide a layer over not only the collections, but also potentially over the library website, library staff and expertise, resource guides, and so on. In other words, we are seeing approaches to full library discovery emerge.
I have written about Stanford and Michigan in this context before, and I draw on that post here.
[The U Michigan Libraries site] works well to project the library on the web as a unified service. A central part of this is the integrated search over collections, library website, LibGuides and library staff profiles. The return of relevant subject specialists which match the query in a separate results pane is particularly interesting. And is in line with my view that if libraries wish to be seen as expert, then their expertise must be visible.
The Stanford site offers a Search everything tab, with this amplifying tagline: "Not sure where to start? Try this.". What I like about it is that the examples searches shown emphasise the 'full library' aspect of what is on offer here: they are very deliberately pitching this at a broader level than books and articles. The example searches are 'renew books, dissertations, feminist studies, worldcat': they are about questions people may have when they come to the library website, not only about items they might find in the collection. [Two things prompted by a new website: space as a service and full library discovery]
So, what types of things are being included, or could be included?
And what implications does this have for tools and website design?
The collection remains central to the library experience. However, as library services evolve beyond the collection so it makes sense for discovery services to represent more of what the library does and can provide.
This blog entry expands the second part of Two things prompted by a new website: space as a service and full library discovery.]]>
More recently, I was pleased to attend parts of the CIC Center for Library Initiatives conference, hosted by The Ohio State University, here in Columbus (far, unfortunately, from the sea). The topic was emerging forms of scholarly communication.
Finally, Kurt de Belder recently gave a presentation at OCLC in our Distinguished Speaker Series, in which he spoke about the transformation of the academic library.
In Hobart, after some introductory material, I spoke about three challenges for libraries: a shift to engagement, rightscaling infrastructure, and innovation, notably institutional innovation. I only attended some of the sessions at the CIC meeting but I was struck by the correspondences between what I heard there and the challenges I identified. It also seemed to me that much of what Kurt spoke about aligned well with these challenges also.
This blog entry briefly talks about each challenge and illustrates them with examples from the CIC conference and Kurt's presentation.
Engagement, infrastructure and innovation are related of course. As engagement becomes more important, libraries are reducing local infrastructure where it does not make a distinctive local impact (print collections and systems, for example). Greater engagement means that there may be a need for new services which requires innovation. Over time innovations may become established and generate infrastructure requirements, which may be provided in different ways.
Libraries always did these three things, but I think the nature of the current challenge is different. Libraries are looking at more and different ways of engaging with their users as patterns of research, learning and personal information use change in a network environment, and are actively looking to re-allocate resources to support his shift. At the same time, the emergence of the network makes it possible to chose to source infrastructure in different ways and at different levels, introducing new choices and partner opportunities.
1. The shift to engagement.
By engagement, I mean that libraries are working to create distinctive value in the research, learning and teaching workflows of their users in ways which go beyond the provision of collections.
In this context, Kurt de Belder speaks about the library as an active partner in knowledge. Scott Walter spoke recently about the service turn, a direction in which libraries aim for distinction in the services they offer, as the distinctive value of collections is less strong, and content is less scarce
And I was struck by this formulation by the University of Minnesota Libraries:
In alignment with the University's strategic positioning, the University Libraries have re-conceived goals, shifting from a collection-centric focus to one that is engagement-based. [PDF]
Think of these trends:
One signal of this shift is the debate around the library subject or liaison role. Kurt de Belder describes a shift in Leiden University from collection specialists to outreach which is 'service and expertise based'. Liaison librarians will partner around 'data curation, copyright, text and data-mining, e-publishing and dissemination, GIS, datasets'.
Clearly, given its topic, the CIC conference focused on new forms of engagement with the faculty around curation and dissemination of research outputs, around new forms of scholarly publishing, and around publishing support and advisory services.
Four things occurred to me as I listened, specific to this particular discussion about publishing support, but which might be generalised to other emerging forms of engagement with research and learning.
For me, this discussion underlined the innovation challenge I discuss below. Exploration and experiment has to turn into something repeatable and scalable if it is to become part of the library portfolio. And much of the required innovation is around the institutions through which we organize to get work done - think of the changing relationship of University Press and Library, for example.
2. Rightscaling
Libraries were predominantly 'institution-scale' - they provided services at the level of the institution for their local users. However, their users now look to the network for information services (e.g. Google Scholar, Wikipedia, ...). And libraries now look to the network to collaborate or to source services (e.g. HathiTrust, cloud-based discovery or management systems, shared systems infrastructure, ...). At the same time, we are seeing a growing interest in shared management of the collective print collection, as regional and other consortia emerge to rebalance print management across groups of libraries.
In this environment the need for local infrastructure declines (e.g. extensive print collections, redundantly deployed local systems which provide necessary but not distinctive services). The scale advantage of different ways of doing things manifests itself in both impact and efficiency. Think of HathiTrust. It has more impact, because it acts as a gravitational hub on the nework. And it is more efficient to consolidate this activity rather than spread it redundantly across many libraries.
Print collections provide an interesting example of emerging infrastructure consolidation. In seven years time, say, a large part of the existing print collection in libraries will have moved into shared management, with a reduced local footprint. The opportunity costs of locally managing large print collections which release progressively less value into research and learning are becoming too pressing for this not to happen. There is a low engagement return on this infrastructure investment.
At the CIC meeting, scale came up in several contexts. John Wilkin spoke about how the consolidation of publishing activities in one unit and the sharing of infrastructure across them allowed the separate activities to benefit from scale, and achieve a level of activity that would have been impossible if they had remained separate, scattered across the University of Michigan. Charles Watkinson mentioned that it was usual to outsource technical infrastructure at Purdue. And in his closing remarks, Mark Sandler mentioned previous discussions about a single university press for the CIC. He suggested that it might be more reasonable to explore a model in which backoffice infrastructure was shared, but where engagement with research, author relations, press identity, remained individual to each campus. In the vocabulary used here, he was speculating that infrastructure might scale to the level of a regional consortium, while engagement might remain at institution-scale.
On a national scale, Kurt de Belder spoke about the Dutch bibliographic infastructure, currently provided in partnership with OCLC. He reported discussion about whether there continued to be a need for national-sscale services in the current network envioronment, and whether in fact they should go to more global provision at the network level.
Of course, although rightscaling is an important infrastructure issue, it is not limited to infrastructure. Kurt also spoke about the lack of scale as a broader library issue. He argued that each individual library could not specialize in the range of expertise required to deliver current services. He spoke, for example, about research data management services in the context of the full range of disciplines on a campus. In this context, he spoke for national and international collaboration around networks of provision to get local jobs done.
These examples show how rightscaling has become a central question for libraries. Do I build something myself? Do I do it collaboratively? Do I outsource it to a third party? Again, look at discovery systems or library management systems in this context, or look at the trend to managing down print collections alongside emerging shared print initiatives. Think of the models in use for preservation (LOCKSS, Portico). Think of newer services like analytics or recommendations where an institutional perspective may not scale and collaborative or third party approaches will be necessary. Think of how important it is to make sure that your resolver is correctly configured in Scholar or PubMed. Questions increasingly arise around cloud provision, around collaboration, or around outsourcing to third parties.
As libraries want to emphasize impact and engagement, and de-emphasize activities which do not create distinctive local value, rightscaling becomes a key question.
3. Institutional innovation
As behaviors and structures shift, innovation becomes central.
I think of two big trends here. The first is a shift - well underway - from thinking about the library as a fixed set of services (bureaucratic) to thinking about it as an organization which reconfigures to map changes in its user environment and expectations (enterprise). The second shift is around institutional innovation and the learning that flows from it.
I wrote about the first of these shifts a while ago.
Historically, libraries enjoyed stability and a shared understanding of goals. This in turn favored a focus on managing and improving the means towards those goals - building the collection, providing reference service, creating efficiencies in technical processing, and so on. This was the focus of professional practice and education. Much of this work is inherently bureaucratic. However, in an environment of change while overall mission and values may remain the same, new and shifting goals become the norm. Think of greater integration in the learning and research process through greater curriculum support, data curation, scholarly publishing, or support for grant writing or expertise profiles. Think of network based reading services, or jobseeking and homework support. As goals shift in a changing environment, so does the need to think about how to marshall the means to meet them. This may need reorganization, new staff skills, changing priorities, reallocation of staff and resources, and so on. It requires a shift from bureaucracy to enterprise, an adaptive organization that reviews and reshapes what it does in light of changing requirements. [The Enterprising Librarian]
Coping with change requires an enterprising orientation, one which recognizes that resources and effort must be continually adapted to meet the needs of the library user.
Institutional innovation is the second trend I note here, one which is inevitable as internal and external partnerships rebalance effort. Libraries have to develop new and routine ways of collaborating to achieve their goals, which involves evolution of organizational, cultural and communication approaches. At the same time they have to negotiate internal boundaries and forge new structures within institutions. In each case, they are developing new 'relationship architectures' (to use a phrase of Hagel and Seely Brown's).
Think for example of the institutional innovation required to move to shared systems and collections in the Orbis Cascade Alliance or 2CUL for example.
Or think of the innovative approach which makes new relationships within institutions (with Learning and Teaching Support, with the Office of Research, the University Press, emerging e-research infrastructure, IT, etc, for example, or with various educational or social services in a public setting). Evolving such relationships requires an enterprising approach and ensures continual learning, as staff interact with colleagues elsewhere to evolve new structures and services.
We are used to thinking of innovation in relation to startups. Here is a definition from Steve Blank: "a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model". This is useful as it reminds us that to be successful. In library terms, innovation has to result in repeatable and scalable services which can be supported over time. And this brings us back to the type of engagement that is valuable and the infrastructure that is required to support it.
Much of the discussion around the examples I have used is an exploration of how to make identified new services repeatable and scalable, and of how to evolve the skills and organizational settings to support them.
The framework used here is influenced by the categories used in Unbundling the corporation. Institutional change and learning is discussed in Institutional Innovation.
Unbundling the corporation. Harvard Business Review, 77, 2. January 1, 1999.
John Hagel and John Seely Brown Institutional innovation: creating smarter organizations to scale learning (January 01, 1999).]]>
We know very well that names are not always straightforward. Brian O'Nolan and Brian Ó Nualláin are the English and Irish versions, respectively, of the name of the person who is more commonly known to us as the author Flann O'Brien.
But things are more complicated. Flann O'Brien was the 'identity' he chose when writing novels in English. As the prolific author of satirical columns in the Irish Times, he was known as Myles na gCopaleen, under which identity he also wrote an Irish language novel (and it should be noted that this turns up under different spellings, Myles na Gopaleen, for example). I take it that Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen are examples of what ISNI (more of which later) calls 'public identities' for Brian O'Nolan. Of course, it does not stop here, as Flann O'Brien was also known by several other names.
More generally, even if most people's names and identities are less complicated than this, there is not a one-to-one relationship between names and people. This means that the relationship between people and their names and identities has become something that is managed in a variety of places. Of course, different choices can be made in those places. If I do a search on Wikipedia for either Flann O'Brien or Myles na gCopaleen, for example, I get directed to the page for 'Brian O'Nolan'. Wikipedia directs us to the person Brian O'Nolan, rather than to any of his assumed identities. Libraries have for a long time had an apparatus to manage this plurality: authority control. And national library authority files have different practices in how they roll names up to one or more identities.
Authority control has typically been organized on a country by country basis: national libraries organize national authority files. As the network unifies information spaces globally, purely national files have less utility. Recognising this issue, OCLC Research has been working with national libraries around the world to synthesise authority files into what we call the Virtual International Authority File, VIAF. VIAF now brings together names from those files into 24 million clusters, and assigns each of these a unique ID. Matches are not made simply on name text strings--contextual data from the authority files (e.g., birth date) and associated bibliographic data are also used. Further work is being done to increase the value of this consolidated resource. For example, the VIAFbot initiative creates links between Wikipedia and VIAF, inserting a VIAF link on appropriate Wikipedia pages. And VIAF now treats Wikipedia as a contributory source, ingesting names from Wikipedia alongside names from national authority files. In this way, there is a direct, actionable link between the global, addressable knowledge base that (the English) Wikipedia has become and library files, enhancing the value of each. The Wikipedia page for Brian O'Nolan has a link to the VIAF entry for Flann O'Brien. Importantly, from this we can assert that the "thing" or "person" described by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_O'Nolan is the same as the "thing" or "person" described by http://viaf.org/viaf/22146540/. We are looking at other language Wikipedias also.
VIAF has quickly become a major source of data about names. It gives a unique identifier to those entities--people, organizations, and others--which are the creators or subjects of works, gathers names which designate them, and contextualizes them with associated metadata. OCLC and the participating national libraries hope to see VIAF become an important backbone reference in the emerging web of data. And for this reason, we have made it openly available as linked data.
Of course, there are also other important initiatives, notably ISNI and ORCID. As the web becomes more central to scholarly and cultural activity, and as more information work is automated, identity and disambiguation are increasingly important. People are resources which need to be discoverable, referencable, and relatable. Accordingly, names and their relationship to the people they designate has become a key interest in the cultural, educational and creative fields.
Because of our work with VIAF we are closely connected with both ISNI and ORCID. The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is an ISO standard (ISO 27729) that uniquely identifies "the identities used publicly by individuals or organizations involved in creating, producing, managing and distributing content." It is managed by a consortium of national libraries, rights organizations and others. The ability to unambiguously designate a person is important in a rights environment. VIAF provided data to seed the ISNI pool of people data and OCLC provides the infrastructure to manage ISNIs. ISNIs have begun to be added to VIAF. ORCID emerges from the scholarly publishing arena where the consistent identification of researchers has always been an issue. Here again, as more services are built on the programmatic manipulation of data about publications, researchers and institutions, unambiguous designation has become a goal. OCLC Research participates on the ORCID Board and the relationship between VIAF and ORCID is being discussed.
We expect to see various relationships between ISNI, VIAF and ORCID as they evolve. Alongside this involvement in these important formal initiatives, we have some other important interests in names. These include:
We are pleased to be doing this important work as part of an emerging infrastructure around names and identities. We welcome enquiries or comments--to me or directly to colleagues working on these initiatives. Further details can be found on these pages:
Dan Chudnov, for example, is admirably succinct and direct:
My professional mission as a librarian is this:
Help people build their own libraries.
That's it. That's all I care about. [One big library]
This is from 2006. Interestingly, in the interim we have seen big growth in the personal 'library' - think of Mendeley or Goodreads for example.
Here are two from very different writers, each expressing the generative capacity of the library in a very pithy way ...
People should think not so much of the books that have gone into the National Library but rather of the books that have come out of it. A library, after all, feeds the people that go in there. [Quoted in Kissane, Noel. 1994. Treasures from the National Library of Ireland. [Drogheda]: The Boyne Valley Honey Co.]
This is Irish writer Seán O'Faoláin and the library he talks about is the National Library of Ireland.
The second is Daniel Dennett's oft-noted ...
A scholar is just a library's way of making another library. [Memes and the exploitation of imagination]
Now, Dennett's remarks are in the context of Richard Dawkins' argument about how memes mirror the behavior of genes, " just different kinds of replicators evolving in different media at different rates". While he wants to argue that this is a good way of thinking about ideas, he acknowledges that it is unsettling, "even appalling": "....I am not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dungheap in which the larvae of other people's ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational Diaspora".
I like the way each of these emphasises the role of the library in a cycle of creation and recreation. The library is not an end in itself but an institution which helps create new knowledge.
And finally, here are another two which come at a similar idea from different perspectives ...
First, Ross Atkinson, a refreshingly cerebral librarian, has written:
Because the purpose and result of absorbing information is always finally to produce further information, i.e., to continue the conversation, the function of the library must be understood as one that assists members of the community both in taking particular positions and in recognizing and assessing the positions taken by others. [Contingency and contradiction: The place(s) of the library at the dawn of the new millennium. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Volume 52, Issue 1, Pages 3-11.]
The opening here echoes the generative theme of the last two. But what drew me to this was the latter part, which emphasises the library's role in providing the material and evidential base for debate and enquiry.
This leads directly into what is for me the most affecting of these accounts, coming from Irish writer and journalist, Fintan O'Toole. He is writing about public libraries in Dublin, libraries which I also heavily used and later worked in for a while.
The library should not provide an argument for a particular case, but demonstrate that there is always another case to be made. The notion that the library is a place that has no agenda other than allowing people to invent their own agendas is what makes it an indispensable resource for a democracy. It is where we can learn not just to be readers, but to be the authors of our own destiny. [Reading, writing and rebelling : growing up with public libraries in: The university of the people : celebrating Ireland's public libraries]
O'Toole's essay is a marvellous tribute to public libraries. It does not appear to be available online, but I quoted from it at length here.
'Agenda' may be a more loaded word than Atkinson's 'position' but I immediately associated the two in my mind. The idea that a library is a place which "has no agenda other than allowing people to invent their own agendas" resonates strongly. Of course, to achieve this goal, libraries do indeed have to have an agenda.
Thorn writes about frustration with record company and producer, and goes on to say ...
If I had a time machine and could go back in it, to this particular point, where the self-doubt and anxiety was beginning to set in and it felt like the walls were closing around us. I know exactly what I would do. I would invent Twitter.
I firmly believe that Twitter might have been my salvation. For instance, I could have come home from that depressing meeting at the record-company office and tweeted about it and got it off my chest, and you would all have tweeted back at me with supportive comments, witty put-downs and descriptions of similar experiences in your own workplace. We would have bonded over it , and I would have felt less alone and more like there were people out there who understood what I was on about and wanted me to keep going on about it. Just laughing about it would have defused its corrosive potential. Twitter is the arena in which we share all the shit, and laughing it off, and are made stronger. .... [Bedsit Disco Queen, p.194]
p.s. I am reading it in hardback as it is a book I would like to own and keep. And yes, as I discussed the other day, I do miss being able to highlight.
p.p.s. I am surprised they kept 'bedsit' in the title for a US audience.
The big hit on Jools ....
Related entry:
A while ago I was interested to observe that I had begun to resist buying paperback novels. ... In thinking about it, I realised that I only wanted to buy the experience not the physical item. My bag and our house is already cluttered enough. I wanted the few hours entertainment the book provided, not the small burden of owning a bundle of paper to be shelved. [Buying books and/or experiences: a consumer view]
In other cases I still wanted to buy a physical item.
In the interim, the reconfiguration of publishing by the network continues. We are even more aware of the staggering impact of Amazon on the book industry, questions about the future of print 'n mortar stores are more stark, there is consolidation among publishers, publishing and reading options proliferate.
While I am professionally aware day to day of that background, I have been interested in how my reading behaviors continue to shift. The pull of digital is stronger. The benefits of portability, availability, and search weigh heavier. However, my reading has become fragmented in ways that complicate my life as a consumer.
It is fragmented in terms of actual reading experience (Kindle vs print vs other). It is fragmented in terms of collection, where what is on my shelves is joined by what is on my Kindle (in its various manifestations), or elsewhere. It is fragmented in terms of discoverability (store vs website). I often have to chose between grades of experience, and the choices involve tradeoffs (portability vs aesthetics, for example).
Of course, it is also fragmented in terms of ownership, where my ability to resell, share or move an ebook is limited in various ways. This is a major issue, although it is not my main focus here.
Here are some rather ordinary anecdotal examples .....
Anecdote 1: highlighting
I was in the Acorn Bookshop, a used bookstore in Grandview, Ohio, a while ago (which incidentally, is the bookstore which features in the movie, Liberal Arts). I was pleased to find a Nicholas Blake novel, End of Chapter. Blake is the name under which Cecil Day Lewis, poet and father of Daniel, wrote mystery novels. I have wanted to read one of his novels for years, without having been quite motivated enough to go out and get one (he does not figure in the catalog of the Columbus Metropolitan Library). Coincidentally, I was able to buy another couple of Blake novels in Caveat Emptor Books on a trip to Bloomington, Indiana, around the same time.
End of Chapter is set in a publishing house, and, as one might expect, is quite a nice read in a somewhat old-fashioned way. This meant that as I read I kept wanting to highlight sentences for saving to my Kindle space. Not being able to do so created a nagging friction as I read, which is a typical reaction now when I read an interesting book in print. I would always have been an inveterate maker of marginal pencil marks. Even if I rarely went back to them, they were there for future reference ... just in case. I now want to save highlights as I read.
This requirement has also made cross-platform differences in the Kindle app a frustration. For a while highlighting was not possible in Cloud Reader, though it now is. The major issue I have with my Windows Phone - with which otherwise I am very happy - is that the Kindle app does not allow me to highlight text. This means that I don't read books during those interstitial reading moments on the phone. I can't bring myself to read an e-book which does not have the highlighting option.
And highlighting is important - see Steven Johnson's interesting post from which this line jumped out ...
This ability to capture important clips in real-time as I'm reading a book has probably been the single most important advance in my reading life since the Web came along. [Your outboard memory]
Anecdote 2: choosing between benefits
I was going to buy Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s by Diarmaid Ferriter when it came out last year. Although it is a bit dispiriting to realise that you are now old enough that the period in which you grew up is the topic of a major historical work. However, do I go with hardback or Kindle?
I want the benefits of the digital, but there are also some pleasures of ownership associated with a physical book like this. These don't really have an analog in the current e-book environment. This pleasure is also in contrast to the poverty of the Kindle collection experience. It is unclear to me why they do not do a better job of allowing you to manage collections in a congenial way - this seems like a big miss, but presumably their data shows that this is not a big enough requirement to push aside other development needs? I am sure this will get better in the future.
I would certainly lightly annotate a paper version of a book like this, but as I say above I would prefer to keep those passages online now.
A couple of times I have expressed frustration on Twitter or Facebook about having to chose in this way, and in each case somebody responded with the example of music, where, if you buy Vinyl you can also download MP3s. I would be willing to pay extra to get digital and print for some types of books, ones like this one. This point was also made by Nicholas Carr ...
There's a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand - so they'd be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren't going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it's not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way. [Rough Type]
It seems unlikely that an e-version would be available with the hardback without some price increase. But I probably would not pay the premium that you pay for vinyl. I do not know what price point would persuade me, but I would certainly pay more. I now have several books where I have bought both print and e versions.
My indecision meant I did not buy the Ferriter book when I first saw it - I did not know which way to go. As I write this, however, I went back and bought the hardback. Although, when I get around to reading it, I know that I will be thinking of how I miss the digital highlighting feature :-) And I definitely won't be reading it on a plane, as I won't want to carry a book of this size around with me.
Anecdote 3: borrowing
I bought Information wants to be shared by Joshua Gans last year. I bought it on the basis of a blog entry by John Naughton, who bought it on the basis of the Amazon abstract. On Amazon.com, it appears to be only available as an ebook. Now, normally for this type of item - which I would like to read, but not necessarily buy - I would suggest to the very fine folks at the OCLC Library that they acquire it. However, acquiring an ebook for lending from Amazon is not an option. So, as it was just $4.99, I went ahead and bought it. This touches on major policy and business issues, but as a consumer it is a way in which previous behaviors don't map onto current options.
Of course, these may be the 'morbid symptoms' that accompany transition between orders. And we will always have choices. I just hope we have some better ones soon ... as the reconfiguration continues.
Think of the close collaboration within the Orbis Cascade Alliance for example, where academic libraries in Washington and Oregon are moving to a shared systems infrastructure. Or think of the various initiatives looking at managing down individual print collections within a coordinated collective framework, WEST, for example. Or think of collaboratively sourced initiatives to tackle new service areas, Hathi Trust for example.
Of course, in many countries there are publicly funded bodies who are charged with managing shared services, development work, or community R&D. Think of how union catalogs or license negotiations are provided in many countries, or the role in national provision of some national libraries, or the national work of educational organizations like JISC in the UK.
At the same time, libraries are looking to simplify their infrastructure requirements through cloud-based approaches. Think of the wide deployment of Libguides for example, or of the growing adoption of discovery layer products, or of the move to cloud based systems infrastructure (resolver, ILS).
In each of these cases, libraries are looking at different models of sourcing their needs - collaborative, public, and third party respectively. They are also looking at doing things at different scales - shared with a group (e.g. Orbis Cascade Alliance), at national or regional level (e.g. Libraries Australia), or working with a supplier at the institutional level (e.g. cloud-based discovery layers). Sourcing and scaling now pose interesting policy and service questions across library services.
Recognizing the importance of these questions, OCLC Research has organized some of our activity in a new program area to address them: system-wide organization. Our early work in this area has focused on the collective print collection, mining our data to provide community intelligence to support decisions about the future configuration of print collections. The influential "Cloud Library" report (Cloud-sourcing Research Collections) provided a framing context for this work, and was followed up more recently with Print Management at 'Mega-scale', which is the first study of its kind, showing the geographic concentrations of collections. This work has been very purposefully connected with policy and organizational issues and we work closely with most of the major initiatives tackling this question. We have also carried out the largest study of circulation data to date, the OhioLINK Collection and Circulation Analysis, and are preparing a synthesis of those findings. Another strand of current activity is exploring through Worldcat how national literatures are represented in the global library resource, and a case study will be published soon. This focus continues our earlier work on mining Worldcat to reveal characteristics of the collective library collection (see for example our original analysis of the collections in libraries working with Google on digitization, or our analysis of the aggregate print book resource likely in copyright).
While early work has focused on applying data analysis to policy and service questions, we are now working with individual libraries to think about the wider context of sourcing and scaling across the breadth of their work. Here is how we describe it on the theme's web pages:
System-wide organization explores the shift from local provisioning of library collections and services to increased reliance on cooperative infrastructure, collective collections, shared technology platforms, and "above-the-institution" management strategies. At the same time, we examine the array of collections and services that are best provided at the level of the local institution. Our research agenda in system-wide organization aims to improve our understanding of the factors that guide institutions in their sourcing and scaling choices as they seek maximum impact and efficient provision of library collections and services.
Libraries are embarked on a shift to greater engagement with the research, learning and development lives of their users, and reconfiguring space, services, expertise and infrastructure to facilitate this. Our agenda is being designed to provide examples and research findings which assist in this shift.
Related materials
OCLC Research Activity Pages
This entry adapts the introductory message in the OCLC Research Quarterly Highlights, Issue 7, October-December 2012.]]>
One especially interesting characteristic is the quite different approach to discovery in each case, even though this distinction has not yet crystallized in clear service categories.
I was struck by the distinction during a recent discussion of 'discoverability' in a publishing context, where the focus was on the active marketing of resources through a variety of channels. This is an emphasis that has not been common in a library environment, but, which, I argue here, is becoming more important. It is not enough simply to make resources available on the network; more active promotion is required if they are to be discovered.
What do I mean by outside-in and inside-out?
Throughout much of their existence, libraries have managed an outside-in range of resources: they have acquired books, journals, databases, and other materials from external sources and provided discovery systems for their local constituency over what they own or license. They aggregated scarce materials, services, and expertise close to their users. They provided a local gateway which was central to many of their users' information lives.
The discovery focus was very much on improving a set of well-known systems that provide access to the collection (acknowledging that the library had in fact little direct influence over how access to the journal literature was presented). And this remains the main focus. This discovery apparatus has evolved, and now comprises catalog, A to Z lists, resource guides, maybe a discovery layer product, and other services. 'Discoverability' might be interpreted in the context of how well those systems served their users.
However, in a digital and network world, there have been two major changes, which shift the focus towards inside-out.
First, access and discovery have now scaled to the level of the network: they are web scale. If I want to know if a particular book exists I may look in Google Book Search or in Amazon, or in a social reading site, in a library aggregation like Worldcat, and so on. My options have multiplied and the breadth of interest of the local gateway is diminished: it provides access only to a part of what I am potentially interested in. As research and learning information resources have become abundant in this environment, the library collection and its discovery systems are no longer the necessary gateway for library users. While much of the discovery focus of the library is still on those destination or gateway systems which provide access to its collection, much of their users' discovery experience is in fact happening elsewhere.
Second, the institution is also a producer of a range of information resources: digitized images or special collections, learning and research materials, research data, administrative records (website, prospectuses, etc.), faculty expertise and profile data, and so on. How effectively to disclose this material is of growing interest across libraries or across the institutions of which the library is a part. This presents an inside-out challenge, as here the library wants the material to be discovered by their own constituency but usually also by a general web population.
These factors shift the discoverability challenge significantly. The challenge is not now only to improve local systems, it is to make library resources discoverable in other venues and systems, in the places where their users are having their discovery experiences.These include Google Scholar or Google Books, for example, or Goodreads, or Mendeley, or Amazon. It is also to promote institutionally created and managed resources to others. This involves more active engagement across a range of channels.
Think of a couple of obvious examples. Libraries have worked to make their knowledge bases visible to Google Scholar because they want to link available library resources to their users' discovery experience. They want to make their resources discoverable in Scholar. Users should be able to access a copy of a resource the library has acquired wherever the discovery takes place. In fact, having an institutional resolver work with a variety of services (e.g. Mendeley, Pubmed Central) is increasingly important, and it would be very interesting to see some research which shows the balance between internally and externally generated resolver traffic across a group of libraries. Anecdotal evidence suggests the growing importance of external sources.
Second, think of the recurrent discussion about the discoverability of institutional repository resources in Google and what steps should be taken to improve it (see for example the work by Kenning Arlitsch and colleagues [pdf]).
We have not yet seen clear integrated library strategies emerge for the inside-out case, but various approaches have emerged ....
There is growing interest in connecting the library's collections to external discovery environments so that the value of the library investment is actually released for those for whom it was made. There is also now a parallel interest in making institutional resources (research and learning materials, digitized special materials, faculty expertise, etc) more actively discoverable. In each case, there is a shift towards inside-out thinking, as the library thinks about promotion and visibility in external services. In our network environment, it is clear that 'discoverability' involves an array of changing, tactical responses, working across a range of services and approaches. This active attention will become a stronger focus for libraries.
Whatever your political orientation, it is clear that Obama has been remarkably successful at mobilizing people and money through the network. .... the combination of social networking techniques and the diffusion of connectivity through mobile and other devices have allowed Obama's campaign to scale very effectively, both in terms of numbers participating and amount of funds raised. [Candidate 2.0 and crowdfunding]
This year, we may have seen yet another important threshold crossed - as the data-driven campaign has been ushered in. Big data has come to the election.
The Obama campaign approach is described in the widely observed article by Michael Scherer in Time Magazine. He describes a 'metric driven campaign' managed by a highly secretive analytics department.
The "scientists" created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White House's Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney's campaign: its data. [Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win]
The article describes how the team analysed data to identify donors, voters and efficient ad placements. Patterns in the data influenced which celebrities were asked to address which audiences and persuaded Obama to answer questions on Reddit.
That data-driven decisionmaking played a huge role in creating a second term for the 44th President and will be one of the more closely studied elements of the 2012 cycle. It's another sign that the role of the campaign pros in Washington who make decisions on hunches and experience is rapidly dwindling, being replaced by the work of quants and computer coders who can crack massive data sets for insight. As one official put it, the time of "guys sitting in a back room smoking cigars, saying 'We always buy 60 Minutes'" is over. In politics, the era of big data has arrived. [Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win]
Analytics is now a major activity, as transaction or 'intentional' data is aggregated and mined for insight .... and the Obama campaign appears to have relied heavily on 'campaign analytics'. Having collected a lot of data they used it as a strategic resource. One side-effect is to further embed the importance of quantitative methods in the popular consciousness. Increasingly, as we yield up data in more of our interactions it is mined to predict behaviors, to adapt systems, to improve services. Pandora, as I note in the blog entry above, does our listening for us.
As more material is digital, as more business processes are automated, and as more activities shed usage data, organizations are manipulating larger amounts of relatively unstructured data and extracting value from it. We have become used to recommendations based on buying or navigation patterns. Within the library field, patterns of download, holdings or resolution are being mined to improve services. We are seeing the emergence of predictive analytics in education. Altmetrics based on user behaviors of various types are a topic of rich discussion. We are collecting data and making it work harder everywhere ....
Coda: John Naughton has a nice column on the importance of data for the campaign and more generally.
Related entries:
Note: updated 11/12/12
The first was the foregrounding of library space as a service. The second was what I might call full library discovery, the ability to discover the full capacity of the library, not just the collections, with a single search.
Library space as a service
A shift is underway in library space, from being configured around collections to being configured around research, learning and related social behaviors. In this way, space is an important aspect of how a library engages with its users; it is a service in itself, not only part of the infrastructure to manage collections.
This is recognized here in that two of the elements in the nice central navigation strip are about space, Library hours and Places to study.
If you look at Library hours, it tells you what is open now, as you look at it. It is not just a static list of times and locations.
If you look at the Places to study tab it opens out interestingly to allow you to filter by your requirement - for individual study, for quiet, for group study, for particular facilities, and so on.
From 'full collection' to 'full library' discovery
There has been a major focus on integrated discovery services in recent years, with the model of a cloud-based, central index over catalog, article and related data becoming common. The goal has been 'full collection discovery' delivered in a single search box.
We are now seeing an extension of this ambition to cover 'full library' discovery where services, staff profiles and expertise, or other aspects of library provision are made discoverable alongside, and in the same search environment, as the collections.
I have written before about the University of Michigan site, which is a good example. It works well to project the library on the web as a unified service. A central part of this is the integrated search over collections, library website, LibGuides and library staff profiles. The return of relevant subject specialists which match the query in a separate results pane is particularly interesting. And is in line with my view that if libraries wish to be seen as expert, then their expertise must be visible.
The Stanford site offers a Search everything tab, with this amplifying tagline: "Not sure where to start? Try this.". What I like about it is that the examples searches shown emphasise the 'full library' aspect of what is on offer here: they are very deliberately pitching this at a broader level than books and articles. The example searches are 'renew books, dissertations, feminist studies, worldcat': they are about questions people may have when they come to the library website, not only about items they might find in the collection.
Now, in practice results work better sometimes than others, but the general principle is good and you can see how it can be improved over time. In an accompanying blog description, Chris Bourg repeats Feminist studies as an example. Note the the staff profile pages returned in the library website search.
As libraries move in this direction, several trends are apparent. One is the use of Drupal, Blacklight and other 'container' frameworks to deliver unified services. A second is a rethinking of how services, staff profiles and expertise, and other library activities are represented and indexed. The increased use of resource guides - in many cases Libguides - is one aspect of this, in particular as they are used as a simple content management framework for various type of information about the library, and not only for lists of information resources. Another is the 'Bento box' style results, as not only may it be difficult or confusing to rank results across different types of resources, but a tabular presentation like this may make more sense to users.
For more information about Stanford design decisions and ambitions see the justifiably proud blog entries by Chris Bourg.
Related entries:
One word that was used a lot was 'entrepreneur'. It was used in two related ways. First was entrepreneur with a big 'E', where schools are preparing people with the skills and outlook to found or go into startups. Second was entrepreneur with a little 'e', where schools are preparing people to work flexibly in dynamic environments which value enterprise.
I was interested in this theme as it chimed with a quote from Manuel Castells I had used in my written submission to the Symposium (these will be published later in the year). My focus was on libraries, not on the broader information field. Here is the Castells quote ...
In a dynamic, evolutionary perspective there is a fundamental difference between two types of organizations: organizations for which the reproduction of their system of means becomes their main organizational goal; and organizations in which goals, and the change of goals, shape and endlessly reshape the structure of means. I call the first type of organizations bureaucracies; the second type, enterprises.[Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print.]
This is quite dense, and needs to be unpicked a little in relation to libraries. Historically, libraries enjoyed stability and a shared understanding of goals. This in turn favored a focus on managing and improving the means towards those goals - building the collection, providing reference service, creating efficiencies in technical processing, and so on. This was the focus of professional practice and education. Much of this work is inherently bureaucratic. However, in an environment of change while overall mission and values may remain the same, new and shifting goals become the norm. Think of greater integration in the learning and research process through greater curriculum support, data curation, scholarly publishing, or support for grant writing or expertise profiles. Think of network based reading services, or jobseeking and homework support. As goals shift in a changing environment, so does the need to think about how to marshall the means to meet them. This may need reorganization, new staff skills, changing priorities, reallocation of staff and resources, and so on. It requires a shift from bureaucracy to enterprise, an adaptive organization that reviews and reshapes what it does in light of changing requirements.
Now, just after I had written my submission I came across an interesting looking book by Bethan Ruddock: The new professional's toolkit. I was very taken with the table of contents and the OCLC Library kindly acquired a copy for me. Here is the table of contents:
Each chapter includes practioner case studies, some from her colleagues at Manchester. Readers will find some familiar names there, including for example Amanda Hill, Bohyun Kim, Lukas Koster, Jenica Rogers. An expanded table of contents with links to some of the case studies is on the book blog. I paste in the fuller list at the end of this entry for reference. Now, Bethan talks about information professionals broadly in the preface but this looks like a publisher-encouraged widening of focus (I may be wrong :-). In the Introduction, she notes it is aimed at librarians and archivists.
What struck me immediately about this list was how the focus was very much on generic skills applied in a library or archival context. And those skills are very much about managing an enterprise: many are explicitly about managing in a changing environment. Importantly, much of the material is about positioning oneself or one's organization in relation to other players, a theme that becomes more important in dynamic environments of multiple stakeholders. So, for example, there is material about budgets; but there is also material about negotiating, about raising money from other sources, about demonstrating value. There is little material here about management as such, which surely would have featured in an equivalent volume some years ago, but there is material on managing projects, on training and communication, and on assessing needs and evaluating services. There is also a strong emphasis on personal skills and positioning, with discussions of personal branding in a networked environment, skills development, and professional involvement. It is taken for granted that communication, marketing, assessment, promotion and brand management are central activities for the organization and the individual. For example ...
It is not just your organization and services that need promoting: you also need to promote yourself and for many of the same reasons. This isn't about boasting about how great you are, but about making people aware of of your unique skills and expertise, so they can call on them as necessary.
Just as your users won't know how your service can help them unless you specifically tell them, people won't know what you personally have to offer unless you make it obvious. In the workplace, you as a peson can inspire trust and reliance in a way that your library or archive as a service can never do. Your users are much more likely to connect with your pesonal expertise: 'The information service can do that. I read it on a leaflet' is a much less powerful message than: 'Bethan can do that. She was talking to me about it last week.' Your knowledge, expertise and personal skills can be a very valuable asset to your organization.
This echoed a comment I have been using in presentations recently: "if the library wishes to be seen as expert, its expertise must be visible".
The book does focus on the individual rather than the organization, so the technology chapters, for example, are somewhat impressionistic, but they do hand off to interesting and informative case studies. And one can look elsewhere for the detail.
This 'toolkit' covers some of what I took to be entrepreneurial skills. Or in language I prefer in this context, it covers some of the skills the library enterprise needs to include, and the enterprising librarian needs to have.
Here is the expanded list of contents.
1. Project management
2. Teaching, training & communicating
3. Meeting your users needs and measuring success
4. Marketing your service and engaging stakeholders
5. Utilising technologies
6. Getting and staying online
7. Generating funding and doing more with less
8. Managing money - budgets & negotiating
9. Information ethics and copyright
10. Up-skilling and professional development
11. Networking and promoting yourself
12. Professional involvement & career development
It seemed a statement appropriate to our times, and especially apt to a recent phenomenon: the growing importance of large-scale knowledge bases which collect data about entities and make relationships between them. Wikipedia is already an 'addressable knowledgebase', which creates huge value. DBpedia aims to add structure to this. Perhaps more importantly, Wikidata is an initiative to create a machine- and human-readable knowledge base of all the entities in Wikipedia and allow them to be augmented with further data and links.
This is one of several examples, which although different in purpose, scope and sustainability model, collect and organize data about 'things'. These are important because they collect and organize data in ways that support answering questions, and are machine-processable. They make 'facts' or 'things' discoverable, referencable, relatable. They become reference points on the web, or support services that become reference points on the web.
Think of two important recent developments: Siri and Google's inclusion of Knowledge Graph data in its results. Siri created a splash when it appeared. Among the sources it uses to provide answers are Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. Here is a results page from Google. The panel on the right shows the Knowledge Graph data ...
And here is how Google describes the rationale of the knowledge graph:
But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world's most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It's why we've been working on an intelligent model--in geek-speak, a "graph"--that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.
The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about--landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more--and instantly get information that's relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.
Google's Knowledge Graph isn't just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It's also augmented at a much larger scale--because we're focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it's tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web. [Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings]
The phrase 'things, not strings' is telling.
One of the added values of library descriptive practice has been that it provides structured data about the 'things' of interest in a body of literature: authors, works, illustrators, places, subjects, and so on. A major motivation for library linked data is to more widely release that value and to make those 'things' more discoverable, referencable, and relatable on the web - in ways in which other services can build on. An important aspect of this is to link the 'things' established in library resources to 'things' established in these emerging webscale knowledgebases. If this does not happen, library resources will be less valuable and the library contribution may be overlooked.
Viaf is an example here. It synthesises data about people - their names and bibliographic contexts - from multiple national libraries and makes it available in a way that makes an identity readily referencable:
Paul Muldoon
We provide a lot of contextual data, including links to different names, creations, and so on. And we relate it in various ways to other resources, including Worldcat, Wikipedia, some national library authority files, and so on. And links to Viaf are appearing in other places, including Freebase.
We hope that this 'relatedness' will become richer, but also that applications will begin to exploit the referencability and relatability we and the participating national libraries are providing.
Related entries:


text:
Nightwood's Brooklyn Home MakeoverJanuary 27, 2012
Do you remember CassaStyle's announcement last summer about the opening of Brooklyn's Nightwood? Not only has this environmentally aware home design company seen success since its launch, but now its eco-efforts have garnered attention from The New York Times. In their latest article titled, "What Vintage? Circa 2011," Elaine Louie writes about Aya Yamanouchi Lloyd, who enlisted Nightwood to re-design her townhouse in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill. The result was a vintage inspired space with unique character, and a modern rustic appeal. Her home proves that new designs can come from old treasures, and that eco-friendly can also be beautiful. Browse through some of the images from the re-design below and for your next home makeover, schedule an appointment with the design team at Nightwood.
The mirrors make the room appear larger and add to the vintage appeal with their aged appearance.
This marble topped coffee table was originally laminate, and the stools were refurbished in assorted fabrics.
This sofa was recovered in linen, and the legs were cut to fit with the rest of the room. The leaf mobile and birdcage really add character to this space!
This cute, mini-desk was once a bar cart!
Once again, the designers add some personality to the room with the light cage that they used as a hanging lamp.
This gorgeous settee has been recovered in kimono fabric!
For more information and images, visit The New York Times to read the complete article.
All images courtesy of Trevor Tondro for The New York Times

subset: commoncrawl


text:
School DistrictsCal State San Marcos has a long history of meaningful partnerships with local K-12 school districts and other educational agencies. From formal agreements that guarantee admission to CSUSM, to teacher professional development opportunities through our School of Education, our programs and partnerships enhance the educational opportunities for both local communities and CSUSM students.
K-12 School Districts
Carlsbad Unified School District
Escondido Union High School District
Fallbrook Union High School District
Lake Elsinore Unified School District
Murrieta Valley Unified School District
Oceanside Unified School District
San Marcos Unified School District
Temecula Valley Unified School District
Valley Center/Pauma Unified School District
Annual Events
Middle School Counselors Conference - middle school counselors from partner districts are invited to spend the day learning about the Guaranteed Admission Agreement and learn how to advise and prepare middle school students and their parents for district high school program and transition readiness to postsecondary education.
High School Counselors Conference - counselors from partner districts are invited to spend the day learning about the Guaranteed Admission Agreements and how to advise students to meet the criteria of the agreements.
District Partner Family Reception Celebrations - high school graduates from partner districts are invited to celebrate their accomplishment and their guaranteed admission to CSUSM at these annual family receptions.


text: Navy Yard shooting victims had long careers there Share this story email Share this story «Previous 18 of 20 Photos Next » Read the story « » Shooting Military Building Three women embrace near Nationals Park where family members waited to greet loved ones that were at the Washington Navy Yard, Monday Sept. 16, 2013, in Washington. At least one gunman launched an attack inside the Washington Navy Yard, spraying gunfire on office workers in the cafeteria and in the hallways at the heavily secured military installation in the heart of the nation's capital, authorities said. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)


text:
Era-defining local legend DJ Qbert scratches out his first album in 16 years, Extraterrestria
Qbert's domination of the DJ world could be read as the apex of that scene, which faded in the 1990s with the rise of digital technology. And of course Qbert went on to create his own crew of fellow Filipino DJs: The Invisibl Skratch Piklz, with Shortkut, Apollo, Mix Master Mike, and several others. The Piklz went on to become insanely popular, establishing scratching and other turntable manipulations as a form of art and a highly marketable genre — turntablism — that changed the sound of hip-hop and dance music. Mix Master Mike went on to become, in essence, the fourth Beastie Boy; one early ISP member was A-Trak, current turntable-wielding heartthrob of the superstar EDM crowd.
In fact, the current popularity of turntable-rooted DJs like A-Trak and the burgeoning trip-hop and late '90s revival makes the timing of Qbert's return auspicious. "A-Trak runs a dance music scene and I think it's great that he brings the scratching into it, he's really unique in that field — so more power to him for turning on a different crowd to the sound. But for me it's never really gone away, pure scratching. There's a zillion underground cats who are genius at what they do — Quest, Deeandroid and Ceslkii, Disk, tons more. And maybe the widespread recognition isn't there, maybe it isn't in your face like it once was, but they're all around. It's like the guys who still do yo-yo tricks. They don't know things have moved on. They keep practicing and practicing and doing incredible things, regardless of how many people are following. They're always battling, always progressing. Never put down your yo-yo, man," he laughs.
As for connecting to a new generation, working with (gasp!) turntables and (double gasp!) vinyl at this stage of DJ history is a deliberate artistic choice. Even with a resurgence of interest in analog techniques — a specific reaction to digital overload — does Qbert fear that scratching will be seen as merely a retro novelty?
"I think no one can deny that, whether you're old or young, using a turntable to make a scratch sound — well, you can't deny that it sounds really bugged out. How else are you going to make that sound unless you're actually moving the sound with your own hand? Just to hold the sound and grab it, move it back and forth — that's unique and fascinating to people. It's like a sci-fi movie in real life, a sound that people have heard since maybe they were little kids, but one that also points to a future where man meets machine. It's a real manipulation, a sound design in itself. What other instrument can do that?"
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FALL ARTS 2014 Like a daily multivitamin, your recommended dose of live shows through November


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Every Nov. 11, this nation pauses in large and small efforts to observe Veterans Day, and the honorable men and women who largely compose a volunteer force of defenders of the American way of life.
And yet increasingly there's a sense that Veterans Day - despite its praiseworthy focus - might be losing its relevance as a stand-alone national day of remembrance and celebration. This year, for example, residents in an Illinois school district questioned the tradition of a day off for students.
But Mayor Tim Baldermann of New Lenox wisely intervened. "This is the best opportunity to educate our children about those who have served our country, those who are going to serve our country, the history and why we enjoy the freedoms that we all enjoy and that all of us take for granted on a daily basis," Baldermann said during a school assembly.
It's been more than half a century since we've welcomed our returning troops home with massive parades at where the public got to rah rah our heroes and exhibit national pride for our calculated effort to wage wars when necessary and avoid or end them earlier than planned when diplomacy and treaty agreements proved useful.
But as today's front-page story illustrates, so many war heroes are not looking for a thank you.
"We're the ones who don't want to be patted on the back for what we do," said Senior Master Sgt. Bryan Ford, a maintenance flight chief and full-time Reservist with the 512th Maintenance Squadron at Dover Air Force Base. "That's kind of the enigma of being a veteran, of being in military service. It's about more than us as individuals. It's about the greater good. And it's about defending things way, way bigger than ourselves."
For 237 years, Americans like Master Sgt. Ford, have left their loved ones to protect this continuing experience in self-governance, envied the world for its democracy. They have fought our nation's battles at Lexington and Concord, Gettysburg, Appomattox, San Juan Hill, the Argonne forest, Anzio, Rome, Normandy, Guam, Okinawa, Tarawa, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and scores of other places, as David Skocik, president of the Delaware Veterans Coalition has pointed out.
So whether in a classroom, at a public civic gathering or grocery store line, those who served honorably - and survivors of those who return to our shores in coffins - will have to pardon our shameful gratitude when we heartily blurt out, "Thank you for your service." Especially when we follow it up with special employment, health services and other deserving accommodations to welcome your return home.


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