Category: Ideas

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Has Dave Abandoned Virtual Reference?

I was asked several times at ALA this past week if I had abandoned virtual reference? Was virtual reference passe? Is it dying? Do I think “been there, done that?” In a word — no. I remain an advocate for virtual reference and there are still a few virtual reference related publication in the pipeline. I take some pride in seeing virtual reference deployed widely and seeing the whole field of reference coming out of the 50% rule doldrums and into some really innovative research and development. However, I am certainly not devoting as much of my research time to the topic.

This is for lots of reasons, not least of which is there is now an active community doing brilliant research in the area so I can focus on new implications and practices in librarianship. When I started writing about digital reference, it was a pretty lonely field. Now with folks like Marie Radford, Jeff Pomerantz, Lynn Connaway, and Lynn Westbrook (among many others) it is an active field. I feel like I can learn from them while I seek new implications of how expertise and human interactions fit into information systems. Couple this with real deployment and development from folks like Caleb Tucker-Raymond, Dynex/Sirsi, Tutor.com and there exists a real marketplace of ideas.

The reality is also that my current work in participatory librarianship is just the current place my overarching research has taken me. Starting with AskERIC on how you build a digital library that begot the Gateway to Educational Materials to deepen the investigation into how you organize digital library resources (and metadata and the like). It also begot (love that word) the Virtual Reference Desk into how people provide expertise online. All of this work lead up to the power of conversations… that is the primacy of context in sharing information and the necessity of discourse. This of course lead to my current work in participatory librarianship. In many ways, this is taking what I learned in virtual reference (including on digital reference knowledge bases) and projects it out to the library as a whole.

For those who remember the last VRD conference in San Francisco we rolled out Story Starters and OpenQA that used blogging as a social means of providing reference service. This work itself came from Reference Extract, a search engine based on reference citations. These projects came out of my work in credibility, that was an examination of how users can believe the information they get from reference or in general. Even my more theoretical focus in the participatory world comes from an attempt to better conceptually integrate reference and other functions of the library.

So have I abandoned reference? No. I want to take what we all learned in virtual reference and play it throughout the rest of the library world. Remember, at heart I’m a systems guy, meaning I always want to see how all of these pieces (reference, metadata, archives, etc.) fit together, and what can we get out of novel combinations.

So keep up the good work in virtual reference. Call me when you need me, I still consider myself one of you. I also invite you to be active in the new participatory library world.

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Great Minds

Isn’t it amazing how you can run across kindred spirits separated by time. I just ran across an article by Joan Bechtel called “Conversation, a New Paradigm for Librarianship?” written in 1986 (full citation below). It is a great read. I see a lot of crossover ideas here with our paper on Participatory Librarianship. She didn’t necessarily have the theory piece, or the tools, but she laid a very strong foundation. I wish I could find it online to point to but here’s a link to its ERIC entry.

Some great quotes:

“”Libraries, if they are true to their original and intrinsic being, seek primarily to collect people and ideas rather than books and to facilitate conversation among people rather than merely to organize, store and deliver information. TO be sure, libraries have traditionally collected the documents of human imagination and action. In doing so they have preserved the ideas and events of history and have become centers for ongoing conversations in which people speak their opinions, criticize others’, and enlarge or restrict the scope of discussion.”

“Conversation, essential to the quality of life of Homo sapiens, provides the occasion and m ode for intimate, significant, and ongoing engagement of human beings with each other in society.”

“Focusing on the enlargement of conversation in the educational environment demands that librarians ask questions about the needs of faculty and students…THe answer to such questions concerning collection development and services will necessarily come out of continuing conversations with faculty and students, both individually and in the governance structure of the college. Surely the whole range of possibilities – reference service, database searching, term paper consultations, bibliographic instruction, and, one hopes, new possibilities for services not yet envisioned – will be explored in order to bring about the widest participation in the intellectual inquiry.”

Did I mention this was written in 1986!!!!

Here is the citation:

Bechtel, Joan M. 1986. Conversation, A New Paradigm for Librarianship? College & Research Libraries 47: 219-224.

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Test Plugoo

I’ve tried Meebo, but wasn’t impressed. Great to IM through a web interface, but you have to be logged onto Meebo. I saw folks talking about Plugoo on Dig_Ref and thought I’d take a look. Seems very cool. It connects a web based IM to my IM client (adium) on my desktop through AIM (or ICQ or Yahoo! or..). If I’m online give it a try and say hi.

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IKE in 3D

I’ve been playing with inductive clustering of digital reference questions. To this point I’ve been visualizing this in 2D, but I have been keeping track of three dimensions.

I’ve discovered a great little development application distributes as part of it’s developer package called Quartz Composer. It uses a visual programming language to directly tap into Apple’s graphics architecture. It’s inputs aren’t too rich, but I managed to get MySQL data dumped into it using RSS. While it seems a bit of a kludge, it works pretty well.

Here’s an animated GIF showing the digital transactions clustering in 3D:

3D Ike

Here is a quick MPEG movie showing how you can fly around the cluster at any point. What you’ll see is a screen capture of me moving around using the keyboard and mouse:

3D Cluster Move

Here’s just a pretty rotating movie of a small subset of the data:

3dplay.mov

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Making Digital Reference History…well, at Least Reconstructing It

First the facts, then the plea, then the larger picture.

Facts:
I’ve put up a website to allow the VRD community to add events, articles, people and other to an interactive timeline (surrounding the VRD conferences…more on that later). It is anonymous and pretty informal. People go to the timeline at http://askeric.syr.edu/VRDTimeline and they can add (or edit) items they feel should be part of the history of virtual reference (at least over the past 7-10 years). You can browse the timeline, and I even put up an RSS feed and a cloud view of the entries.

Plea:
I need folks to add things they feel should be part of this timeline. I also need folks to vote for items they feel are particularly significant. While the timeline is centered on the VRD conferences, I’m really hoping to build a more comprehensive view. If you wrote an article in virtual reference…add it! Started a service – add it! I’m very interested in the people you feel shaped the past 7-10 years in virtual reference (people seem reluctant to add those). I’d really like this to be a resource of and for the community.

Larger Picture:
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that this has a VRD perspective (particularly the conferences). This is because I’m hoping to use this data as part of the next VRD book from Neal-Schuman. The next book will be more of a continuous narrative, and less proceedings (it will include articles from this year’s conference). The idea is to capture the evolution of digital/virtual reference over the past decade. In the text will be people profiles, important articles, and a good dose of “movement building” activities and descriptions. I’d hope to really reflect the community, and hence the desire to have the VRD community add information and vote.

So please add and vote.

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Open Infrastructure for the Greater Good

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In the spirit of sharing ideas early (even before they are fully developed), I’m posting a prospectus I put together on building an Open Infrastructure for the Greater Good. Maybe it already exists and I just don’t know about it, that’s why I put them into the public realm for comment. I think it is a good idea, but I’d be interested to see what others think:

Developing an Open Infrastructure for the Greater Good

A Brief Prospectus
R. David Lankes, Syracuse University
rdlankes@iis.syr.edu

Vincent and Didi Frochette lost their son Lukie to a rare form of cancer. In memory of their son they formed a charitable foundation to raise money for the Syracuse Childrenâ??s Hospital. Each year they hold a golfing event and want to put up a website to both advertise the event and recognize sponsors. Both Vincent and Didi had full time jobs, and no technology experience. Imagine if they could go to a place on the web and with three clicks of a mouse and 5 minutes time build a web site. Not a simple 1 page brochure on the web, but a website that allows Vincent to blog about the upcoming event; allowed the couple to upload pictures of the current and past events, allowed them to set up e-mail accounts and listservs for volunteers, and ensured their site conformed to standards for disabilities, usability.

Funding agencies are taking scarce funds from program activities and devoting it to building project websites. While there may be projects where the construction of highly unique web resources is key to the success of a program activity, in many cases funds for web sites lease web server space, hire designers, and train staff in how to build web pages. If the primary purpose of funding organizations is to promote Internet literacy, this makes sense. Otherwise these dollars represent money that could be spent on program objectives.

Continue reading “Open Infrastructure for the Greater Good”

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International OpenQA

Sorry for the long time lag. So as we are continuing our StoryStarter (Kathy is working on cleaning up the data structure, and revising the PHP code for a first public beta) we’ve been percolating an interesting idea. Once we’re done with the first beta of StoryStarters, we’ll take that code base an begin transforming it into OpenQA for distribution at VRD (feature requests very welcome).

The interesting idea? Tamal Guha, a visiting Fullbright at the Institute has started work on a multilingual version of StoryStarters. He is currently translating StoryStarters into Hindi! We’ve been kicking around the idea of creating a multi-national project to support the development of a multilingual open source digital reference system. The idea would be to emulate the quality study we did with Chuck McClure and Melissa Gross where we identify the project (developing OpenQA) and then seek sponsors for the project. International organizations could join at various levels (right now we are thinking as a function of size and what how much say in the direction of the project). Join at one level and you get a hold of the software and source. Next level you pay for a language adaptation. Next level you drive the software features (we want chat, etc).

This is still fuzzy, but it seems to resonate with folks here. The end result would be an open source, low cost or free digital reference packaged built for multinationals. It would also focus on building software, not consortia or content, hopefully by-passing legal issues.

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IKE Animation

Ike-1
If you were scratching your head over that last post about IKE (the Inductive Knowledge Engine) and that clustering, fear not. Here is an animation showing IKE in action. The dots you see scattered about are each Story Starter responses. They have been randomly scattered around a 100 x 100 graph. Each frame of the animation has a dot compare itself to another dot and then move (so one dot eventually compares itself to all other dots), then the step is repeated with the next dot. Each frame represents one full cycle of comparison. In each comparison the dots are getting closer to each other if they come from the same blog, and farther away if they are from different blogs. The clustering is dynamic. Entries from the same blog end up clustered together.
THis example is pretty simplistic as it is based on a single static variable (blog title). However, I wanted to give you an idea how IKE was working.

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Story Starters Prototype

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Hi all. I’ve put the StoryStarters prototype online to play with. Note it doesn’t play too well with Internet Explorer for Windows. Click here to see a streaming video overview. Or go right to the prototype.

A few notes about the prototype:

We are in the process of implementing the “real” system. Consider it a working model. There are a few things you need to know before you start playing with it:

  • Assume all data will be lost when we put up the real system. You never know…it might still be there, just don’t assume it.
  • There are known bugs using Internet Explorer for Windows. It has been tested on Firefox Mac and Windows and Safari.
  • If you find bugs (and you probably will), let me know at my e-mail. I can’t promise we’ll fix them, as this is just the prototype, but it is still very useful to know.
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What I’ve done with My Summer Vacation

It has been a busy month at the Institute with all of us traveling and moving in different directions before the start of the semester. I thought it would be useful to recap some of the recent projects I’ve been working on and where they are headed. Some of this information is just an update to previous posts on my blog, some is new. Sorry if it is repetitive, but it helps me put it all in one place.

My projects have revolved around two threads…credibility and digital reference. There are three major projects here:

• Reference Extract: A digital reference search engine
• Story Starters: building a blogging community of answers and questions, and
• IKE: the Inductive Knowledge Engine

Let me break them down:
Continue reading “What I’ve done with My Summer Vacation”