Semantic Library

As someone who no longer works in a library (but for libraries), I feel that I’ve had more space than ever in the last year to think about the future of libraries, removed from the daily grind of library work. Irony, much? This month, there’s been an absolute flurry of content by Australian library bloggers who are completing a 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge. Not something I could contemplate with much of my June to be offline, but they’ve inspired me to post some of my thoughts after reading their posts.

Advocacy, not acquisitions?

One of the topics that’s come up quite a bit, and comes up whenever I find myself in a group of librarians, is what is the future of libraries? I wrote a recent post about some ideas for public libraries, but what, more generally, are the things that will keep libraries of all types thriving in the future? I’ve seen Aaron Schmidt talk about libraries not focusing on circulating content so much any more a couple of times, and while I think that there is always going to be an acquisition arm to what we do, I wonder if more of us will join in the work to reform copyright, advocate on behalf of users, work on projects to increase access. For many, that would be a shift in skillset and expectations about “what librarians do”. For others, this is what they have been doing their whole career – every time they refuse to sign a an unfriendly publishing agreement, or advise researchers to retain copyright to their work.

Find everything, through collaboration

We need to collaborate more – we have consortia at many levels, conferences where we get together, associations where we work together. But all too often, we don’t know enough about what’s happening at the library down the street. I can attest that I have often been guilty of this – sometimes I would visit other libraries in my city to see what they were doing, and attend their events, but it was all to easy for a year or more to go by without talking to or working with colleagues from the other nearest academic library. Libraries are fragmented – if you’ve ever tried to search all the public library catalogues in your city to find a service or book that you want, it’s not an easy task. No wonder users find ‘The Google’ or ‘The Facebook’ easier. It’s just one place.

I loved the Libraries Australia service when I lived in Sydney – the function I used it for has now been replaced by Trove. I cannot tell you how often I used or recommended this service to users. This type of service is being rolled out in other countries now, not modelled on Trove, but the idea of a single-search portal for all libraries in a country. For example, here’s the Lativan Library Portal.  This is what we should be doing.

Teaching data

There’s definitely a role for libraries in teaching users how to make the most of data. Libraries teach classes for users on databases, and finding articles, using social media, information literacy and so on. But I think there is a strong need now to begin to teach how to work with open data sets, linked open data, to know how to adapt and build on this data, and to contribute data back. For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking about the role of linked open data in libraries, and I want to expand on this in future posts, but the opportunity is two-fold: one, to make use of it ourselves in what we produce, and secondly, to teach others. More and more governments are providing data. The World Bank recently opened up its data set. Being able to use data, present it, and do something with it is becoming more critical, but there’s not really anyone out there filling this need. Why not libraries?

3 ideas in 30 days

I may not have been able to take part in the 30 posts in 30 days challenge, but I thank everyone who is for providing such thought-provoking posts and inspiring me to put a few ideas out there.

A recent email from a colleague reminded me of the project that spurred the development of this blog in the first place, the idea to create a free, grassroots online learning programme to help librarians learn about the semantic web. Somewhere along the way, as these things do, it fell down my list of priorities. And then that was two years ago. So, in case it is of interest to anyone, and since there were some great contributions by a number of people on the wiki and elsewhere, I’ve dropped the content we had back onto the wiki. Please feel free to use it, edit it, contribute what you want, and make something of it!

Semantic Web and Libraries: Outline for a 6 week course

A diversion, if I may. Well, perhaps not a diversion, since this is a post about meaning, and the semantic web is all about that. But I want to step back from technology for a moment to consider the public library. In recent years, I’ve been following public libraries more and more closely as this is where a lot of the innovation in our profession is coming from. They are leading with user-centred design, responding to changing user needs, and capitalising on their location. I had a good conversation recently with some colleagues about the importance of local in the public library, which I was sceptical of at first but having just watched a typical Paxman grilling on Newsnight over the future of public libraries (alas, iPlayer link only available in the UK) I think if we change our notion of what it means to be local, public libraries could have a major role for decades, if not centuries to come.

When I was in library school, local meant that the library provided a local history service. Generally, a stack of books about the surrounding area, and perhaps a few oral histories of notable residents. Not particularly exciting. The DOK in Delft, Netherlands have taken this to the next level by creating amazing interactive applications that tell the history of streets, people and places in Delft (Youtube video) and an entire interactive wall that tells stories about the town. Kathryn Greenhill also has a post and presentation on “getting deeply local at your library“.

Three other local ideas that are not new that could bring value to the library and help it to connect to others:

Tourism information. Many times I have lamented going into public libraries on my travels, wanting to sit and relax for a short while, and never finding a shelf on local information. Street directories are one of the most popular items in libraries (at least, when I worked in an academic library), couldn’t libraries provide local information about the area, things to do, interesting facts, instead of this being left to commercial booksellers and (in larger places) tourist bureaus? Why it probably isn’t being done now: tourists by their definition are not local taxpayers.

Small meeting rooms for freelancers and small business. I really like the Business and IP Centre at the British Library, but it doesn’t really do meeting spaces very well if you don’t have a reader’s card (my BL card is just about to expire…). I frequently have to find meeting spaces in the city during business and after hours, and usually end up at a coffee shop, which is far from ideal – noisy, bad lighting, crowded etc. Not to mention, it’s a commercial space. Wouldn’t it be great if businesses and freelancers could stay local and rent out small meeting places now and then in the library, or even a casual coworking style setup? I’m sure some libraries are already doing this, but where are they? How would I find out when such information is so buried on their website?

Linked data. Collect really local publications, including zines, pamphlets, magazines, anything. Let others know you have it by publishing your collection as linked data. Digitise these materials and put them online for the world to see.

What new local services would you like public libraries to take on?

A clear indication that concept of semantic web and libraries is moving into the mainstream – ALA’s Library Technology Reports is publishing Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata by Karen Coyle:

The change that libraries will need to make in response must include the transformation of the library’s public catalog from a stand-alone database of bibliographic records to a highly hyperlinked data set that can interact with information resources on the World Wide Web. The library data can then be integrated into the virtual working spaces of the users served by the library.

LTR is a great series, looking forward to seeing reviews of this title and a spike in interest in semantic web in 2010.

At this moment, I am sitting in the dark (during the middle of the day, mind, it’s that grey and dark here in London today) cold, with the power off. Not for the first time in the past few months I find myself without electricity, without warning (and not by choice), in my building. There’s some irony in that I was watching the trailer for No Impact Man just minutes before it spontaneously shut off.

I was able to get back online again fairly quickly after rustling up a mobile broadband dongle and my laptop. But there is a danger in the era of always-on computing or assuming that essential infrastructure will be there when you need it. I’m lucky to live in a highly developed country with a relatively stable electricity grid. But I’ve also worked at a university that fell prey to frequent power failures, a happenstance of location and an ageing building. At my first workplace I remember a full day without power where we embraced the dull cast of the generator’s emergency lighting glow and took to shelving to fill in the day. Basic connectivity is an issue I’m increasingly aware of when I travel and plan for work in all kinds of different places. We anticipate having to work around technical difficulties in developing nations, but we are less prepared for it when it happens in our home environment. When we design services and software, do we make plans for what might happen if suddenly you couldn’t connect to it anymore? Even if just for an hour? Or a week? What impact being thrown off the grid would have for being able to communicate?

Food for thought while I sit in the dark, waiting for my laptop battery to run out.