Gender and the semantic web 

Posted on by Fiona

Not including cancelled talks, 100%ofall #swib11 speakers are male with ~1/3 female participants Congrats to #gender #fail :-( via @nichtich
@nopiedra on a conference in Germany on semantic web in libraries.

I don’t want to overly criticize this conference, as I don’t have more information about it than this tweet. I am not the kind of woman to go around counting the number of women presenting at conferences. However, strategies to be inclusive of gender, new professionals and newbies (to new concepts) are a good thing in my book. Diversity is important, especially when it comes to emerging concepts and practices in the profession. I see this in my day job, working with library communities around the world to communicate better and to be more inclusive.

This blog has really fallen off the semantic web/linked data track, mostly because my interests have changed but also because keeping up was becoming a challenge. My strongest interest lies in working to communicate ideas, technology and practices in a way that is engaging to non-techies, and new professionals. I enjoyed the pieces I wrote for FUMSI, Library Journal, and Internet Librarian International on these topics a couple of years ago, and of course this blog.

Reader, perhaps this is just the kind of motivation I needed to get back into the topics that started this blog in the first place.

Friends of Knowledge work for Copyright Limitations and Exceptions for libraries and archives 

Posted on by Fiona

Mr. Chairman, we welcome the presentation by the distinguished delegates of Brazil on the treaty on limitation for Libraries and Archives as well as the modified proposals of IFLA and other like-minded organizations and for want of a better expression, Mr. Chairman, permit me to just refer to them as friends of knowledge.

Nigeria delegation, 21 November 2011 at SCCR23, Geneva

There’s been a lot of discussion over recent years in our profession about what we can do to change copyright. The good news is, libraries are working to do this right now at WIPO’s 23rd meeting of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR23), taking place in Geneva until December 2. If you have any interest in this topic, and if you’re a librarian, I’ll take that as a yes, you can follow the events and background issues online on IFLA’s website and even read the simultaneous text feed of the discussions (password: wipo4me).

The Nigerian delegation coined a wonderful new term today: friends of knowledge. Expect to see a lot more of it in the coming days.

Update: Text feed fixed

The promise and failings of online streaming services (or, why I decided to cancel my Spotify premium account) 

Posted on by Fiona

This year, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the move to streaming services by both individuals and libraries. This was highlighted best in our trip across the US this past March, where there are several providers for streaming films, TV, and music. Other countries have a more limited range of services, not only because of the complexity of negotiating licensing rights, but because of more limited broadband or more established players (e.g. – here in the UK Lovefilm (owned by Amazon) is squarely up against Sky and Virgin TV. Netflix due in 2012).

All year, I’ve been mulling over the promise and benefits of online streaming. In theory, it’s great – you get to consume media that you probably only wanted to watch once, at a lower price than physical or purchased media, and it’s near instant. The growth of these services is a no-brainer. Yet if not matched by a service that offers excellent discovery, search, and a way to record what you have watched or listened to in the past, the benefits of these services becomes very limited.

I have had a Spotify premium account for a while now. I chose the service because I wanted access to offline playlists and the mobile app. Yet, I am now exporting my playlists and planning to cancel the service and go back to a free account. While it’s extremely convenient to have a massive range of songs at my fingertips, there are just too many downsides to a service that is not as one-time watch as streaming a TV episode or movie:

  • Discovery in Spotify is terrible. Similar artists is very limited, there is no way to plug in a few favourites and discover new artists like you can with Pandora. Often, I listen to albums in Spotify for a while to see if I want to purchase them. I will return to using preview options on Boomkat and iTunes instead.
  • I already purchase a lot of music (mostly vinyl, bundled with digital download). When I moved to the UK I format-shifted all my CDs (the CDs are currently in storage) and they are currently stored across several hard drives. After a while of using Spotify, I realised that most of my playlists were albums I had already purchased on CD or vinyl.
  • Search is cumbersome, and not possible when offline. After a while, you end up with huge lists of playlists – the only way to easily find an artist or album. Too much manual scrolling when search is not available.
  • Albums disappear. Several times, albums in my playlist have become unavailable in the UK.
  • Three device limit even for premium users for offline playlists on the mobile app. Seriously frustrating to sit down on a plane for a long flight only to open Spotify and be greeted with a cheery message that all your playlists are gone because you exceeded the device limit.
  • Spotify uses P2P to upstream content to reduce load on its servers. It affects performance of other network-tasks while working. This alone is a reason to cancel.
  • Artist compensation per play is extremely low.
  • Lastly, iCloud has arrived. Yes, it is really great to buy an album and have it automatically appear on my iPad as well. And to be able to add it to my Android phone since the files are DRM free.

So what’s the lesson here? For me, it has reinforced how important discovery is to my enjoyment of music. I find new music from recommendations, reviews, podcasts, and radio. As yet, there’s no great tool that allows me to aggregate albums I’m interested in buying or recommendations to look up. For now, it’s back to the old way – scribbling down details heard on the radio in a plain text file.

Fitter, happier, more productive 

Posted on by Fiona

Sometimes, it’s the simplest of things that can become the greatest burden. In the mid 2000′s, a flurry of articles in journals appeared about the virtues of Personal Information Management (PIM), and how librarians could help with that. The idea being that as the amount of information in our lives continued to increase at a seemingly exponential rate, the anxiety faced to organise it effectively also increases until we are left with disorganised files, badly named files, and a lot of time wasted on trying to find things. We librarians often joke that the irony is that as much as we might seek to help others overcome this problem, we are ourselves amongst the worst at effectively naming and storing information – take a look at any librarian’s desk or files. In the last half-decade, PIM has become an industry of its own, with every new mobile phone announcement focusing on to do apps, reminder tools, personal information assistants (Siri), calendar apps, alerts, project charting tools and more.

The notion that a human professional can help you with that seems to have faded away. I’m not entirely sure why that is, when more and more people find themselves with thousands of digital photos that have no metadata whatsoever, to give just one example.

Yes, it’s easy to get carried away with productivity and organisation advice, and to procrastinate on actually working in favour of checking out the latest app or to do method (and I’ve been guilty of this too many times to mention) but there has been many a time when I would have sought out such a service at a library, if it existed. Libraries already offer a range of hands-on lab sessions, geek out days, petting zoos and more for a variety of topics including cooking, crafts, digital photography and computers – why not for productivity and getting organised (online and offline) too?

Does your library offer anything like this?

As for me, after spending several years battling document management and version control, I am both interested in and wary iof the shift to app-based file management, most significantly seen in Apple’s iCloud. I travel over 100 days a year, and in the past few months the iPad has become my go-to device on the road. Buying it has forced a shift in how I store information. Below is a screen capture of the apps I use for work. Using these apps, I can access all my notes, calendar (Agenda app is on a different screen), to-do lists, email, professional development reading, reference articles, bookmarks, documents and colleagues. There are many things that the iPad cannot do (writing complex documents or long emails with lots of attachments? Forget it), and things I need to workaround. However, this approach has forced decisions about where to store information (almost everything on this screen syncs via a cloud-based service) and started me on the path of dull but necessary tasks such as getting better at organising my email since Mail can only display a limited number of messages in the inbox.

iPad @ work

One of the best meetings I have taken part in recently involved sitting down and deciding together how best to manage our folder schema and file naming. Basic, records management stuff, but it can so easily be forgotten. But incredibly helpful in deciding what and how to share files, and how to manage version control in lieu of a version control system. Have you had this conversation with your colleagues lately? If not, you might be surprised at how useful it is.

Massive Change 

Posted on by Fiona

Any librarian that thinks that libraries move at a slow pace should try standing outside them sometime. In the past two years alone we’ve seen the the eBook market grow from virtually nothing in non-US markets to dominate conversation, a huge increase in the amount of legal streaming content (and simultaneous geolocking), copyright term extensions, new organisations like Library Renewal spring up, attack and defence of libraries whether by word, or by physical will.

It’s been two and a half years now since I last worked in libraries (I now work ‘for’ libraries and rejoined IFLA in 2009), and roughly that span of time since posts have been more sporadic on this blog. Not for want of issues to discuss, but rather for space and time to consider what to say, since Twitter tends to take most rapid thoughts, and in-person meetings the rest. Perhaps some blog fatigue – I had to smile when a post elsewhere said I had started blogging recently. It’s now been 12 years since I started my first blog (and had the dubious distinction of being the first Australian library blogger). Now everyone has an (abandoned) blog. In my current role, I’m fortunate to travel, visit a number of libraries and to discuss issues in the profession with a broad group of experts and professionals. While I remain interested in the Semantic Web, and Linked Library Data, it’s become just one of many things that I’m monitoring these days in both the library and development communities. Yet Semantic Web as an idea remains important – if not only because it harkens back to fundamental principles of standards, openness, transparency, and the role of ICT in development. Much that I have learned from the development community – crisis mapping, aid transparency, and developing flexible services for multiple platforms including mobile is deeply relevant to libraries too. There is growing awareness of this in many developing countries, but perhaps not so much in libraries elsewhere, in a twist on old information flows. Open Access, and the way countries can collaborate cross border to advocate for increasing access to information, remains on my mind.

I’ve been fortunate to be able to watch and discuss these topics in person in a lot of countries from Australia to Ukraine over the past two years, and I’m looking forward to bringing it back to the blog. Thanks for sticking around.