So – Talis have done quite a bit of work in this area – just a cunning marketing ploy, or a real investment in a different approach to Libraries and online technology?

So – what is Library 2.0. There’s been a lot of debate about this (some of it pretty inflammatory) on the web.

Paul is suggesting that Libraries are often seen as ‘worth but dull’. Library 2.0 is about libraries reaching out both online and in the physical world.

Paul is starting by drawing on a couple of reports. One that OCLC recently published on ‘Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources’, and one from MORI

The OCLC report showed that 96% of people surveyed visited the library, and a large number of people go online in libraries.

MORI showed that 89% of people trusted libraries. They trusted libraries more than any other institution they were asked about (e.g. BBC)

So – what went wrong online? Paul is illustrating the quality of library catalogues online (e.g. options to do a ‘Boolean search’ as one of the main search options). The OCLC report showed that less than 30% had visited a library website.

So – if we look at ‘Web 2.0’ it is typified by the following:

Relevant
Innovative
Open
Nimble
Participative
Small pieces, loosely coupled
User centric
Responsive

Paul is questioning about how many of these can be applied to libraries. Personally I think that we do actually buy into most of these concepts. I think definitely User centric, Response, Relevant and Open are things that can describe most libraries.

Anyway – Paul is saying Library 2.0 is about:
opening the library
push the library everywhere
engage with actual and potential user communities
disaggregate library systems (and bring them together)
shared innovation

Paul is saying that most libraries spend a large amount of money every 7-10 years on a single, monolithic system that is out of date by the time it is installed. He is suggesting we should be looking smaller components, put together.

Some examples of what people in the community are doing:

http://www.plymouth.edu/library/opac is a library catalogue as a blog (or a blog as a library catalogue). It offers comments and tagging for all books on their system.

http://www.daveyp.com/blog – a grease monkey plugin that shows ‘due back’ times for the University of Huddersfield when viewing books on Amazon.

http://www.aadl.org/catalog – online catalogue represented as traditional catalogue cards. Also allows the addition of comments from readers.

Paul is suggesting that we should be looking at a platform based approach – some key components.

Firstly the ‘Directory’. A central store of data about libraries, their collection and their locations – accessible via public web services. (http://directory.talis.com)

The directory records information about libraries, and then makes it reusable by other systems.

A second key component is keeping track of the books: Holdings data in a common format – how many copies are there? Are they in or out?

In combination with the directory, it’s possible to produce a plugin to show holdings of books in many libraries while searching Amazon.

Talis have done a demonstration of this type of technology called Whisper. It isn’t a product – it is simply a technology demonstration. Have a look at http://tdn.talis.com for links and information.

To try to encourage some of the kinds of innovation that Paul is talking about Talis has announced a ‘Mashing up the Library’ competition – to encourage this kind of development (£1000 to the winning entry).

So – Talis have done quite a bit of work in this area – just a cunning marketing ploy, or a real investment in a different approach to Libraries and online technology?

So – what is Library 2.0. There’s been a lot of debate about this (some of it pretty inflammatory) on the web.

Paul is suggesting that Libraries are often seen as ‘worth but dull’. Library 2.0 is about libraries reaching out both online and in the physical world.

Paul is starting by drawing on a couple of reports. One that OCLC recently published on ‘Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources’, and one from MORI

The OCLC report showed that 96% of people surveyed visited the library, and a large number of people go online in libraries.

MORI showed that 89% of people trusted libraries. They trusted libraries more than any other institution they were asked about (e.g. BBC)

So – what went wrong online? Paul is illustrating the quality of library catalogues online (e.g. options to do a ‘Boolean search’ as one of the main search options). The OCLC report showed that less than 30% had visited a library website.

So – if we look at ‘Web 2.0’ it is typified by the following:

Relevant
Innovative
Open
Nimble
Participative
Small pieces, loosely coupled
User centric
Responsive

Paul is questioning about how many of these can be applied to libraries. Personally I think that we do actually buy into most of these concepts. I think definitely User centric, Response, Relevant and Open are things that can describe most libraries.

Anyway – Paul is saying Library 2.0 is about:
opening the library
push the library everywhere
engage with actual and potential user communities
disaggregate library systems (and bring them together)
shared innovation

Paul is saying that most libraries spend a large amount of money every 7-10 years on a single, monolithic system that is out of date by the time it is installed. He is suggesting we should be looking smaller components, put together.

Some examples of what people in the community are doing:

http://www.plymouth.edu/library/opac is a library catalogue as a blog (or a blog as a library catalogue). It offers comments and tagging for all books on their system.

http://www.daveyp.com/blog – a grease monkey plugin that shows ‘due back’ times for the University of Huddersfield when viewing books on Amazon.

http://www.aadl.org/catalog – online catalogue represented as traditional catalogue cards. Also allows the addition of comments from readers.

Paul is suggesting that we should be looking at a platform based approach – some key components.

Firstly the ‘Directory’. A central store of data about libraries, their collection and their locations – accessible via public web services. (http://directory.talis.com)

The directory records information about libraries, and then makes it reusable by other systems.

A second key component is keeping track of the books: Holdings data in a common format – how many copies are there? Are they in or out?

In combination with the directory, it’s possible to produce a plugin to show holdings of books in many libraries while searching Amazon.

Talis have done a demonstration of this type of technology called Whisper. It isn’t a product – it is simply a technology demonstration. Have a look at http://tdn.talis.com for links and information.

To try to encourage some of the kinds of innovation that Paul is talking about Talis has announced a ‘Mashing up the Library’ competition – to encourage this kind of development (£1000 to the winning entry).

The second session this morning – starting with ‘Library 2.0’ by Paul Miller from Talis, then some e-learning stuff from Scott Wilson (CETIS), and finally Brian Kelly from UKOLN.
For those not sure about Web 2.0 – start with the Tim O’Reilly Paper.

The second session this morning – starting with ‘Library 2.0’ by Paul Miller from Talis, then some e-learning stuff from Scott Wilson (CETIS), and finally Brian Kelly from UKOLN.
For those not sure about Web 2.0 – start with the Tim O’Reilly Paper.

Stephen has now introduced John Gilbey who is talking about “Managing Standards – Delivering a Quality Assured Web Environment”.

To summarise – we (the Web management community) are now responsible for critical information and systems. John argues that we need to start taking Quality seriously – consider standards like ISO 9000. We (as a community) are happy to buy into technical standards, but what about management standards?

So – to start John is asking us to think of adjectives describing an institutional web service. Mine are:

Service
Interactive
User oriented

(to describe our portal)

Audience contributions were (marked with positive or negative connotations)

Slow (-)
Clunky (-)
Disparate (+/-)
Uneven (-)
Anarchic (+/-)
Big (+/-)
Labyrinthine (-)
Brilliant (+)
Dull (-)
Moribund (-)
Reliable (+)
Unfinished (-)
Outdated (-)

Some of these are clearly just trying to test John’s spelling.

What is noticeable that the majority of these have negative connotations. But John argues that the negative traits tend to be the ones that come out – not necessarily reflecting the real quality of the service.

So – what is quality?

ISO says: “The totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied need”

ISO define standards – e.g. A4 (ratio of 1 to the square root of 2) is defines by ISO 216.

As an example of quality as relates to web services John is just relating the experience of his son applying to university. After sending off a for a prospectus, it never arrived. The attitude that his son had was – why should I ‘spend’ my fees at a place that can’t be bothered to send a propectus. Eventually the prospectus arrived many months later – having come via Uruguay – it seems, the result of one of those ‘choose your country’ dropdown boxes you have to choose from.

Government funded research now has to meet quality standards (Joint Code of Practice for Research). This implies compliance with the code of practice, external auditing, adoption of formal standards (e.g. ISO 9000)

ISO 9000 is a family of internationally acknowledge standards, which make a model for managing an organisation. It is based on 8 principles, including:

Customer Focus
Leadership
Involvement of people
Process approach (activities and resources are managed as a process)
System approach to management (join up your processes)
Continual improvement (Plan, Do, Check, Act)
Factual approach to decision making (note that when the audience were challenged with this one, there was a clear lack of belief this happened in their institutions)

I’m not entirely convinced by this. I’m happy with the idea that quality is important, and some process can help this – but ISO 9000 is a big tool, and by some reports, expensive to

The wireless network here is giving me problems. I can connect to the network OK, but I’ve had problems getting through to basic services (e.g. web pages). Once I’ve made a VPN I can do more stuff, but the connection keeps dropping.

Technology – what a pain.

The second talk in this morning’s session is Kate Forbes-Pitt (LSE).

Her first point – Documents vs Content. For some reason Users like Documents – but why is this? What has this got to do with quality?

Richard Boland said “information is in-forming, it is a change in a person from an encounter with data”

Bob Hughes and Val Keen said “Getting ideas across can be a tricky process. Human inventiveness draws on all resources – down to the look, the feel and even the smell coming off a document”

Anyway – Users ask for documents – why? Perhaps because this is how they get their information and share it. They believe this to be efficient because they are familiar with the process. They think documents communicate information effectively. They already have them – so

Just digressing to dispute Kate’s definition of a ‘document’. She starts by suggesting it is a ‘piece of paper with writing on it’. However, I disagree – to me a ‘document’ is a set of information collected together and delivered in a single form – so for me a pdf can be as much a document as a piece of paper.

Kate is trying to demonstrate something about a document. By showing a graphical representation of a letter, she shows that we all immediately recognise the ‘pattern’ of a letter – even though the picture contains no written information.

So (Kate argues) a letter is a social construct – it is a document in a sense that a pdf isn’t. We don’t just see a letter as a collection of information – we understand it in a deeper (social) way.

So – Kate argues that when you put a document on the web, you don’t reproduce the ‘information’ contained in the original document.

Kate is now outlining Rules of interaction regarding documents. With a printed document there is immediate opportunity for pragmatic access. This is not the case with an online document. The level of literacy required is different.

‘Rights and Obligations’ are different – etiquette vs netiquette?

So – a document requires social knowledge in order to interpret it AND the social knowledge required is not available within the document. We recognise a letter as a letter, and understand many things about it and how to relate to it because it is a letter.

I can go along with some of this – I think the point about how we interact with a physical document is really interesting. However, I don’t agree that it ceases to be a document just because it’s medium changes – but I can agree that it becomes a different type of document. If a physical letter is a social construct, surely an electronic letter is also a social construct.

To take an example, I would argue that a txt message is a social construct, but will never be printed. In the question and answer session, I raised this, and Kate seemed to say that for her essentially a ‘document’ is defined by being printed – this seems a fundamentally narrow definition of a ‘document’.

Anyway – I’ve digressed in my own arguments here so much that I have missed blogging quite a bit of the tail end of Kate’s talk. But the overarching message that I think is coming across, and that I agree with completely, is that we need to be very aware of the social context of our information, and the social rules governing our users interaction with that information vary depending on the format in which the information is delivered.

So – what does this mean to us as web managers? An example is the ‘online prospectus’ (this got a lot of discussion in the Q&A). We started by having a printed prospectus, and putting it on the web. We have moved towards having a website, and then producing a printed prospectus based on the same information. Perhaps we are moving to a different idea of what a ‘prospectus’ is. Just to bring some Web 2.0 type thinking here – perhaps we should be looking towards interactivity (‘live’ assistance in applying and finding your course), and community contributed feedback.

First things first – Quality of the coffee. Breakfast coffee was OK – nothing special, but not bad for mass catered coffee (may be tempted to try the coffee shop instead tomorrow morning and pay for the privilege of a ‘proper’ coffee)

Anyway, ‘Quality Matters’ is the title of the first talk of the morning, chaired by Stephen Emmott.

This seems self evident – why are we focussing on Quality? Well, as a starting point Stephen is outlining how we have moved from a culture of providing web services to a small internal audience (e.g. staff, or department) to providing them to a much wider audience (whole university, whole world) – and so, Quality is key.

First things first – Quality of the coffee. Breakfast coffee was OK – nothing special, but not bad for mass catered coffee (may be tempted to try the coffee shop instead tomorrow morning and pay for the privilege of a ‘proper’ coffee)

Anyway, ‘Quality Matters’ is the title of the first talk of the morning, chaired by Stephen Emmott.

This seems self evident – why are we focussing on Quality? Well, as a starting point Stephen is outlining how we have moved from a culture of providing web services to a small internal audience (e.g. staff, or department) to providing them to a much wider audience (whole university, whole world) – and so, Quality is key.

Well, I’ve agreed to blog the Institutional Web Masters Workshop (subtitled Quality Matters) again this year, but feel like I’m playing catchup already, as I had to miss the first day to attend training on a Content Management system (Luminis Content Management, part of the SunGard suite of products along with Luminis portal for those that are interested).

Against the advice of the website, I decided to walk from the station to the University – which took longer than I expected. However, I’m now feeling virtuous (and less bad about the double chocolate muffin I had at Reading station).

Anyway, I’m looking forward to tomorrows sessions, starting with ‘Quality Matters’ chaired by Stephen Emmott, with some Web 2.0 stuff in the afternoon, chaired by Lawrie Phipps.

In the afternoon the ‘Keep SMILing‘ workshop should be a nice break from the hard work of thinking, by doing some actual practical work (assuming I make something work, I’ll post the results on the blog).

Tomorrow evening there is a drinks reception at the Roman Baths, and a long list of pubs (and restaurants) has been provided, so should be fun to explore Bath a little. And, of course, the ‘free time’ from 5:45 to 7:00 should give time to watch the second half of England v Trinidad and Tobago…