The Synthetic Librarian

Media Sharing sites are extremely popular. Common examples are Flickr for sharing photos, or Youtube for sharing videos. You can also share audio, powerpoint presentations, and screencasts. These sites allow you to upload your content and other people can search for it, access it, and easily share your content with others in a variety of ways.

A Mashup combines one or more different *things* to make something distinctly new: something more than the sum of its parts. A mashup could combine two different songs to make something more interesting than either of the originals. A mashup could combine audio and video in an interesting way (e.g. Animoto makes movie-trailer like mashups from your videos and a soundtrack). A mashup could combine two the features of two different websites (e.g. Panoramio combines Google maps with photo sharing) to provide something that neither provided on their own.

Media sharing and mashups share a common feature: they create value through sharing content. This is obvious in media sharing, but it is also fairly simple: content is shared through viewing, linking, and copying. Mashups depend upon others sharing content, but in a way that allows the creation of something new (not simple copying).

In this post, I am going to describe how, socially, media sharing works. I am also going to explain how mashups work and are enabled by media sharing. As interesting as each of these things are, I’m going to demonstrate something remarkable: that mashups are becoming shareable media in their own right. I will conclude by arguing that this is a significant opportunities for libraries and suggests ways that it can be used.

What does it mean to “share” media?

Originally, media sharing sites were pretty simple. They were essentially social media sites: You would upload your photos or videos, and other users could view and search for your videos if they visited that site. People could also discuss each other’s content. However, it was basic: You shared your content.

Things got interesting when media sharing sites allowed anyone to embed shared content on other sites. Embedding means that you find something you like and you put a copy on your blog, or your Facebook account, or somewhere else. The content links back to the media sharing site (and all those social media features), but visitors to your blog (or whatever) can see the content without having to visit the media sharing site at all. In this context, someone else is sharing your content.

A Simple Example of Media Sharing

If you already know how media sharing works (e.g. embedding youtube videos), just skip to the end of this section.

This development is significant because it changes how content is found by others. You content becomes more findable when others can share it. Other people, people you don’t know, will find an audience for your content. Here is an example:

Imagine that Bob has a very dramatic chipmunk. He makes a video and shares it on Youtube. He’s got a small audience, and they all see the video because they regularily visit his Youtube page. A few other people might find Bob’s video by searching on the Youtube website (if he tags it well). Bob’s video is cool, but not enough people know it.

One day, Jane sees Bob’s video on youtube. She’s blown away by the coolness of Bob’s chipmunk video. In fact, Jane has a blog about chipmunks. So she copies the “Embed” code for the video into her blog (just like I did below). Now the video appears in her blog post. Her audience sees the video when they visit her site, they don’t have to visit Youtube at all. A lot more people have seen Bob’s cool video now.

The video still links back to Youtube of course. This is important, because Jane doesn’t know it but Alice has a website for humourus pet videos. Alice subscribes to Jane’s blog and see the video. Alice follows the link back to Youtube and, like Jane, shares the video on her blog, and a LOT more people see it. Now Bob’s video is getting copied all over the place. It’s so popular it’s catching on like a virus (and hence it’s called a
viral video).

The video in this example is actually real, as is its popularity, but it wasn’t originally shared by a guy named Bob (as far as I know).

Media Sharing is Important because it makes Content Findable

In The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More Chris Anderson argues that abundance is the marketplace is revealing new truths about what customers want and how they expect to get it (Anderson, 2006). Specifically, he observes that the Internet has made more goods available, easier to find, and cheaper to obtain and argues that these three forces are transforming the marketplace focus away from blockbuster hits and toward satisfying myriad niche interests.

The popularity and media sharing is an example of Anderson (2006) theory. Content creation is easy, and the Internet makes distribution cheap. We must ask, however, how in a growing glut of user-generated content is anything findable? To understand this, we must realize that, unlike older communications media, like television, not everything is a blockbuster hit and therefore known by everyone.

Anderson (2006) is heavily influenced by the example of Amazon.com researched by Brynjolfsson, Hu, & Smith (2003) which reported that Amazon.com offered a selection of books that was 23 times larger than the number of books available in a typical “big box” bookstore and concluded that “increased product variety of online bookstores enhanced consumer welfare more than lower prices or increased competition in the marketplace (p. 1580). This measure of consumer welfare means that consumer needs in bookstores are being revealed only when book selection is greatly increased (p. 1591). In short, there is a trend for variety, not blockbuster hits, to drive demand. Anderson (2006) expands on this by examining CD music sales at Amazon.com and finds the same trend (pp. 90-91).

In media sharing sites, very few videos every “go viral” as we saw in the dramatic chipmunk example. Instead, most content find a small audience that are interested specifically interested in that content. “Sharing” is the mechanism by which we make personal media findable. If you find a video on Youtube that you like, you might share it with people you feel will like it. They might do it the same. Thus, content finds it way to its audience: the audience doesn’t have to necessarily find the content.

How (socially) does sharing work?

We might ask, why does media sharing work at all? Will people really share? Why do they share? Will they share enough that non-blockbuster-popular items will find a new audience? Recent research indicates that individuals posses a variety of motiviations for sharing, and that some individuals share a great deal.

Phelps, Lewis, Mobilio, Perry, and Raman (2004) studied the responses and motivations of people in sharing content and links by email. 66 participants agreed to have their email analysed for content and forwarding patterns and 23 were later interviewed at length. The study identified a variety of motivations that influence the chances that a person will forward an email to an acquaintance. Specifically, they found that individuals were likely to pass on information in areas that they were experts in to those that they felt could benefit from the information. They also found that some individuals passed on information more generally to large numbers of individuals.

This matches the popular Tipping Point theory. Gladwell (2000) suggests that the spread of information is heavily influenced by three specific social network roles: connectors, mavens, and persuaders. Connectors are people who have many social ties, mavens are subject experts, and persuaders advocate specific ideas. The role(s) that an individual plays in their own social network and the presence or absence of others playing various roles may influence the individual’s effectiveness in finding and using information in day-to-day tasks.

Huotari and Chatman (2001) studied the influence of social networks on information seeking among staff of a University. Fourteen participants were selected from five different levels in the corporate structure of the University of Tampere in Finland and were interviewed at length. Their interviews were analysed and contacts between individuals from different levels in the corporate structure were categorized as “outsiders” and contact between individuals from the same level were termed “insiders.” The study found a variety of relationships between people: some of which revolved around reciprocal information sharing arrangements, and others which involved one-way flow of information. The study identified individuals seeking out others that fill maven-like roles especially as relates to power-relationships in corporate hierarchy (that is, the powerful actively seek out mavens). In the context of media sharing, we might imagine that this influences how and when people share professional presentations (e.g. found on slideshare). By putting your presentations on slideshare, you become a maven in the hopes of gaining the favour of those more powerful. This would appear to be a strong motivator toward sharing.

Uses of Media Sharing by Libraries

There are many examples of media sharing being used by libraries. I have previously blogged about The Flickr Commons, an extremely popular photo sharing project that grew out of the Library of Congress sharing their photo collections on Flickr. Now there are over a dozen institutions making their photos available through Flickr. These collections had limited audiences before, when they were only available on the LoC website, but are now finding niche audiences thanks to media sharing.

Calgary Public Library choose to share its videos on Youtube. So now others can embed those videos in their blogs and the advertisements might reach new audiences that they did not before. These videos are not likely to “go viral” but there isn’t a need for everyone in the world to see these. Instead, it is enough that they will reach a niche audience that is receptive of the ads.

Many librarians are expanding their professional development activities by on slideshare.com. If you give a presentation at a conference, you reach a certain audience. However, if you share it on slideshare, others can share it on their own sites with an audience that is likely to be receptive and interested. Here is a presentation on Library 2.0 for example.

Mashups are Enabled by Sharing

The open attitude that lead media sharing sites to allow embedding of content in other sites, has also lead to the development of “mashups” sites. A mashup site combines the features of two or more other sites to do something completely new. These are possible, when one website allows their content to shared through mechanisms that computer programmers can use to automatically search, retrieve, and display content. These mechanisms are called APIs: but think of them as automated sharing.

For example, Twitgoo combines twitter and photosharing. Panoramio combines Google maps with photo sharing). The Edmonton City Policy Neighborhood Crime Map combines google maps and crime stats (but shh… don’t talk about it… its against the usage agreement).

Mashups are also popular in libraries. In 2006, Talis, an ILS vendor, held the Mashing up the Library Competition (my entry was a google maps mashup showing Alberta’s libraries). Countless innovation arose, including mashups of multiple, normally separate, library services and data sources.

LibraryThing is probably the most important source of library mashups. They provide APIs so that programmers can “mashup” LibraryThing with other systems. For example, zorked.net/bm mashes up data from BookMooch, LibraryThing, and Amazon.com. CodexMap combines LibraryThing data with Google Maps.

Sharing Mashups

Mashups are as exciting as media sharing sites are. As the examples, I have given demonstrate, they should both be of intense interest to libraries. Media sharing allows libraries to reach niche audiences that they might not know exist. Mashups allow libraries to create entirely new services from existing sources.

However, a key traditional limitation of mashups, is that they are websites. Like those media sharing sites of old, before embedding, where people had to search the site itself to find content, mashups are destinations. To “share” a mashup, you would have to give them the link. Another limitation is that to make typical mashups, one has to be a programmer.

This is rapidly changing however. For example, for over a year, it has been possible to share a google map. Here is a map to the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies.

View Larger Map

That is a trivial mashup though: a little bit of data, and a map. What would be ideal, is to be able to create custom mashups, without having to be programmer, and to be able to share them as easily as we share embeddable content.

Making Embeddable Mashups with Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a system that allows you to generate simple or sophisticated mashups without being a programmer and to be able to share them as several different types of embedded content. In this section, I will describe the process of creating two mashups (one actually didn’t work but it’s not Pipes fault).

You have to have a Yahoo! ID to login to Yahoo! Pipes. After you login and you choose to create a new “Pipes” you are presented with a screen that looks like graphing paper. This is a canvas on which you will “draw” your mashup.

To create the mashup, you drag-and-drop modules onto the canvas. Your mashup has to have one input module and one output module, and (optionally) other modules that modify your input.

The input sources can be many things. For example, it could be a Flickr photo search, an RSS feed, an XML data source, a search of Yahoo! Local, a search of Google Base, or several other things. You can also type in your own input which is surprising useful

The output depends, in part, on the input. Typically the output is an RSS feed of the items generated from the input. If your input is a Flickr search, than you will have the option of presenting the output as a slideshow, as a list of image, or an RSS feed of the images. If the photos have been geotagged (i.e. contain the location of where they were taken) then you will also be able to present the results as a map.

Example 1: Flickr photos of Cameron Library

To start off with, lets create a Flickr mashup. I drag the Flickr input module onto the canvas and I specify a search of “cameron library” and then connect the input module to the output module and click “Save”. I give it a name and click “Run Pipe…”. It shows me three different views of the mashup and a link to an RSS feed. Here are two of the views.

Example 2: Creating an RSS Feed

Many libraries offer RSS feeds, however, some libraries don’t have the technology to do it. They might want to provide a list of new items that have arrives, or even something as simple as an RSS feed for events and changes in holiday hours.

Yahoo! Pipes, will let you create an RSS feed from scratch. Just drag the “RSS Item Builder” input onto the canvas and then fill out all the forms fields (e.g. Title, author, etc.). You can even include the URLs of multimedia files here (podcast anyone?!). To add multiple items to your RSS feed, just drag another RSS Item Builder and fill out, then drag a “union” module. Draw a line between each of them and the “union” and now you have an RSS feed with both items. After you save the feed, you can choose to embed it or give someone the link. Here is an embedded version.

Example 3: Searching the Library Catalog

What I’d like to do is mashup my library catalogue with RSS. I want to be able to create an RSS feed that will contain all the new books that come up when I search the catalogue for “mashups”. There is a technical trick to this. Yahoo! Pipes will allow you to use any XML data source as input. There is a standard system called SRU (Search Retrieve by URL) that will search a library catalogue and return the results as XML.

To create this, you drag the “Fetch Data” input on to the canvas, and then put in an URL. The URL is special, it is an SRU query. Once you know the trick, it is easy to change the query. Here is an example of a query of the University of Alberta Libraries for “mashup” books.

http://sru.library.ualberta.ca/neos/Unicorn?version=1.1&operation=searchRetrieve&query=bath.issn=0029-4713&maximumRecords=1&recordSchema=mods

I have to specify the XML tag (just like an HTML tag) that will contain my search results. In this case that is “records.record”. And then attach the input to the output.

To improve this, I could transform many of the input items, into known RSS fields. Unfortunately, Yahoo! Pipes, had a problem parsing the XML data from the SRU service and this pipe did not work. However, the general idea that you can transform any XML source into a mashup is interesting.

Other Possibilities for Pipes

A number of the modules in Pipes hold out interesting opporutunities. For example, there is a “location extractor” module. Any input source that contains geographical information (e.g. place names, addresses, latitude and longitude) can be used to mashup with a map. This happens automatically: the user doesn’t have to do anything to create the map output. As long as some data from the input is identified (by dragging-and-dropping or drawing lines to it) as a location identifier, the output will contain an mapping option.

Similarly, any input that contains images will provide for slideshow or other display options.

Imagine a mashup of library catalogue search and cover art. The mashup in Pipes would automatically provide an RSS feed and an embeddable list to put on a website.

The Value of Shareable Mashups for Libraries

Libraries have a lot more to share than photos, videos, presentations, etc. Libraries are sources of organized information. As with Anderson (2006) “long tail” theory, libraries have large amounts of information, where most items are likely to be of interest to only a few individuals. So how can we put together niche interest items with the unknown individuals who might be interested in them? In an Academic Library, the traditional approach is to have liaison librarians who get to know a special collection and the faculty that collection serves.

Sharable mashups present a new way to do this. By combining library data sources, with other information libraries can create new applications, that may be highly specific to a niche interest. By making these sharable through a simple cut-and-paste, users who find these items interesting can then share them with other likeminded individuals.

Reference

• Anderson, C. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling more of less. New York: Hyperion.
• Brynjolfsson, E., Hu, Y., & Smith, M. (2003). Consumer surplus in the digital economy: Estimating the value of increased product variety at online booksellers. Management Science, 49(11), 1580-1596.
• Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The Tipping Point. New York: Hatchet Book Group.
• Huotari, M-L, and E. Chatman. 2001. Using everyday life information seeking to explain organizational behavior. Library and Information Science Research 23 (4): 351-366.
• Phelps, Joseph E., R. Lewis, L. Mobilio, D. Perry, and N. Raman. 2004. Viral Marketing or Electronic Word-of-Mouth Advertising: Examining Consumer Responses and Motivations to Pass Along Email. Journal of Advertising Research 44 (4): 333-348.

For this EDES 501 blog assignment (wikis), I decided to engage in a personal and practical exploration. I am currently working on a personal project to develop resources to help information professionals learn about information security. I have called this project ISLIP: Information Security Learning for Information Professionals.

In a previous course (LIS 538), I created a collection of openly redistributable learning resources using the Greenstone Digital Library software. While Greenstone provided many features, after developing the collection, I felt that wiki might be a better technology for this project.

In this post, I will describe my motivation for using a wiki, describe the characteristics that make a wiki right for my project, share my experience setting up a prototype wiki, conclude by explaining what I think will or will not work for my wikified project.

The ISLIP Project

Information Security is the process of protecting information and has three fundamental goals: to assure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information resources and system (Merkow & Breithaupt, p. 21; Krutz & Vines, p. 6). Traditionally, information security has been treated as a technical implementation problem, however, as the impact of information security threats have become more prominent the professions that are involved in information security have broadened (Krutz & Vines, p. 4; Merkow & Breithaupt, 2006, pp. 7-10). I believe that information professionals of all kinds, including librarians, have an much to gain from learning and important contributions to make to information security (see also EDUCAUSE’s Cybersecurity Awareness activities.

What is needed is the collection of existing, re-usable, re-distributable, and re-mixable information security related content that can be used directly for individual learning or that can be used in the creation of learning materials. There exists a growing body of such materials, but they are typically aimed at information technology applications. These materials can be valuable but they must be collected and put into context through description and review. Previously, I have created a digital library with several dozen examples. Each item was a video, podcast, document, paper, or link to a website that could be used as I have described. For each, item the digital library described why the item was significant and how it might be used in the context of information security (e.g. was it an example related to a fundamental concept? Was it an exercise? A lecture? etc.).

In developing the digital library it became clear that a more collaborative technology platform would serve the ISLIP project better. That platform would have to allow for usable content management and structured descriptive metadata. A wiki would seem to be a suitable technology for this. In the next section, I will demonstrate, in detail, why this is so.

Why Wikis?

“A wiki is basically a website in which the content can be created and edited by a community of users” (Boeninger, 2007, p. 25). This is a typical definition of a wiki, however, there are many common and important characteristics that are responsible for the popularity of wikis. Wikis are valued because they are:

1. collaborative
2. content management systems
3. archives
4. capable or organizing knowledge

Wikis enable Collaboration

For those who value collaboration, Wikis represent one of the most exciting web technologies. Tapscott & Williams (2006) describe wikis as “a metaphor for a new era of collaboration and participation….” (p. 18) and attribute the successes of many projects to the ability of wikis to foster collaboration (e.g. Wikipedia (p. 71) and OpenWetWare, a wiki-based project at MIT “designed to share expertise, information, and ideas in biology” (p. 161)).

This perspective is common in the LIS literature. Farkas (2005) states that “wikis are a great way of collaboratively developing a website” and specifically suggests that they be used for the creation of subject guides “because it can be edited by anyone, patrons can add to the collection of useful resources and can prune away the dead links”.

Frumkin (2005) also stresses the value of collaboration and reviews a number of library projects that used Wikis. For example, OSU augments their virtual reference service by having a wiki that librarians update with new and updated information resources used in answering questions (pp. 19-20).

In both of these examples, the value stressed is that problems that projects that are difficult for a single person to manage, are easily accomplished when technologies allows many people to work on small parts of it. Wikis enable this collaboration.

Wikis are also Content Management Systems

Collaboration may be the defining feature of wikis, however, collaboration is not the only feature that makes them successful. Prior to wikis, an entire community could edit a single website, but problems in coordinating the editing process could quickly make the site unmanageable. Wikis are successful because they are collaborative content management systems.

Tapscott & Williams (2006) further point out that the benefits of wikis “are linked to the ease and efficiency with which collaboration takes place… wikis distribute the burden of organization across a collaborative network instead of making an individual project manager a choke point” (p. 254). We see here that is isn’t just collaboration that is important: it is the usability and management that are important.

We can imagine then, that the most successful wikis are those that provide for the most usability features. Consider that the original wikis, which used WikiWords (or CamelCase) have fallen out of favour. WikiWords refers to the practice of creating new pages in a wiki by using mixed capitalization in the text of a page: any word with multiple capital letters was assumed to be a link to another wiki page. However, this made wiki pages difficult to read as spaces were removed from many long phrases (and precisely the most important phrases, as these were the ones that represented entries in the wiki!). Usability was poor in these wikis and they are no longer popular.

Desilets, Paquet, and Vison (2005) conducted an early, formal, study of wiki usability. They observed children as they used a wiki to create a hypertext story with minimal instruction. They found that the children required little help in using a wiki, and most questions they had related to linking and not content creation. Kickmeier-Rust, Ebner, & Holzinger (2006) also conducted empirical studies on the usability of wikis among students and found that those with poor usability resulted in decreased enthusiasm by learners. The concluded that usability as a crucial factor for the success of specific wiki software.

Wikis are Archives

I feel that an overlooked feature of wikis is the ability to act as content versioning or archiving system. A fundamental problem with a content management system that allows for multiple authors is the tracking of changes. Many wikis automatically archive the previous version of a wiki page, when a new edit is created. Thus, as a document evolves, a complete archive of its history is being created. It is possible for users, to go back and see who and when a document was edited and to retrieve prior versions of the document. While this is primarily a functional feature of wikis (to enable recovery from vandalism or poor edits), it provides new possibilities in scholarship. For example, WikiScanner is a tool that tracks who is editing pages in wikipedia and has been used to out government officials and others who try to whitewash pages describing them.

When a system acts as its own archive, with fine-grained tracking of changes, entirely new possibilities are opened up and wikis are one of the few collaborative systems that do that.

Wikis support Knowledge Organization

In the library context, most applications require more than easy-to-use content management and collaboration. Libraries have a great deal of information to communicate and doing so effectively requires knowledge organization. Many wikis have features to assist with this as well: primarily I am thinking of MediaWiki.

Boeninger (2007, pp. 29-30) reports how MediaWiki supports the co-creation of content and knowledge structure: “I learned about the structure and organization as I added content. In adding the content, I assigned many of the resources in the wiki to categories, which helps to make the wiki more organized and usable.

In the corporate world, wikis are valued for their ability to organize knowledge, not necessarily for their collaborative features. For example, Wagner (2004) compared wikis to several other Internet technologies (discussion forums, blogs, video streaming, chat, among others) and found that wikis were the best collaborative solution to capturing and organizing corporate knowledge on an ad-hoc basis. This should not be overlooked: the ability to capture knowledge on an ad-hoc basis could be the key to success in many projects as authors may have the time to write, but not the time to plan and organize what they have written. Any system that allows for effective but ad-hoc organization is a winner.

Wikipedia is probably the most popular example of a successful wiki. Consider that Wikipedia has an enormous amount of information to organize. Is the success of wikipedia that it is collaborative? Certainly this is true, because without a huge number of editors, such a large body of work would not be authored. However, consider that also, that large body of work would not be usable unless it were well organized. Wikipedia’s success is partly due to the mechanisms of MediaWiki that allow content to be easily organized through the creation of categories, and alphabetic lists, as well as largely due to the encyclopedic model where information is stored in individual entries (one per page) on specific topics (unlike say, a book or a story which are not constrained to a single topic in this way).

Creating a Wiki with MediaWiki

MediaWiki for usability and organization

I was disappointed with the lack of usability I saw in PBWiki, and other hosted wiki sites like wikispaces have limits on the amount of content a free account can host. The obvious solution for my project seems to be to host my own wiki with software of my choosing. However, the number of MediaWiki, the software used to create Wikipedia. MediaWiki, by default, has some minimal usability features. I also know, from experience using sites like Wikipedia, that it has the ability to use strutured metadata to format and organize pages. This is very appealing to me. Furthermore, unlike hosted wikis, MediaWiki is appropriate wikis that serve limited communities (where only members can edit).

Installation of MediaWiki is easy

The requirements for a server to run MediaWiki are minimal. The software is written in PHP and requires an open-source SQL database, so any L.A.M.P. system will work (i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Most organizations should find this easy to support as LAMP is the most popular and widely support “web stack” in use today. I already have a L.A.M.P. server, so all that needed to be done was to follow the installation instructions.

The install process for MediaWiki is straight-forward. First, I unpacked the archive file containing the software, and uploaded it to the webserver. Second, I created a database on my server for MediaWiki to use. Third, I ran the configuration web page over the web, and followed the prompts. The install process prepares the backend database and configuration files needed to run the Wiki. Normally, the MediaWiki installer will creat the database for you, however in my environment (which is somewhat more secure than most), I had to manually create the database. In total, the installation process took about 15 minutes.

The URL for a Wiki is Important

The MediaWiki documentation explains that picking the specific URL for your wiki can have long-term consequences. I choose to follow the best-practices of creating a site for project and putting my wiki in subdirectory of my site. This allows me to have other web applications on the site in other subdirectories (for example a blog or discussion forum) and homepage at the root of the site that is NOT managed by the wiki. I choose the URL islip.syntheticlibrarian.com/wiki/ for my wiki.

Some basic Customizations are Required

The most idiosyncratic aspect of setting up my wiki came after the wiki was installed and working. I had three features that I wanted and implementing these required that I edited a configuration file that was generated during the installation of MediaWiki. To determine what specifically needed to be done required that I read some rather elaborate documentation that outlines the pros and cons of different methods. This process, including learning, took a little over an hour to complete: most of the time was spent reading, planning, and making decisions.

Fortunately, I am familiar with editing files on my server and was not challenged by the basic steps of knowing where to look and how to edit the files (this might require an extra hour or so of learning users new to web hosting technology). The MediaWiki documentation has many exmaples that novice users could follow if they have trouble configuring the software.

The three customizations I wanted were to change the default logo, to allow editing only by authorized users, and to use clean URLs.

By default there is a logo in the top-left corner of the screen with a message indicating that the logo should be changed by changing a variable “$wgLogo”. This message is a bit cryptic, but the MediaWiki documentation indicated that I just had to add a line to the file LocalSettings.php that contained the URL of a image to use as a logo. I put in the URL to my standard photo. It worked and took only 5 minutes to learn how and complete the work! I only choose my photo because it was readily available, and my time to experiment is limited. In reality, I would create a proper logo for ISLIP, should this experiment continue.

I also wanted to ensure that edits could only be made by users with accounts and that, as the administrator, I could activate accounts before they were used. This is to prevent any potential abuse or spam problems. This topic was covered in the MediaWiki FAQ and so the instructions were easy to find. Disabling the ability of anonymous users from making edits was easy and took less than 5 minutes. Reading the documentation, it became apparent that a feature I would want in the future would be the Confirm Account Extension. This extension allows the administrator of the wiki to approve accounts before they are able to make edits. Again, this would help prevent spam. Due to time constraints, I decided to leave that for another day.

Finally, I wanted to use clean URLs (called Pretty URLs in the MediaWiki manual). For example, “islip.syntheticlibrarian.com/wiki/Title” instead of “islip.syntheticlibrarian.com/wiki/index.php?id=161″. Clean URLs avoid complex and idiosyncratic syntax and communicate information to users. Given that librarians represent a professional class of information organizers, I feel that clean URLs are a must for my project .

This step took considerably longer than the others (roughly 1 hour). I had to read extensively about the various methods available to achieve the result I wanted and make choices that would impact my site. In the end I used the recommended “no root access” method. Once I picked this method, it took only 10 minutes to implement.

Adding Content to a Wiki is Easy but Organizing is NOT

After I had my wiki installed, I needed to add some content. For the purpose of this assignment, I decided to create 5 entries: a main page describing the project, 2 pages with conceptual content, and 2 pages describing external learning resources. The content is only “stub” content, designed to demonstrate and explore the wiki as a tool, not to be actual content (which would take substantially more time than this assignment allows).

Creating the main page was simple, and just a matter of understanding the basic MediaWiki syntax for linking to other pages in the wiki. Similarly, creating the 2 pages describing concepts was a also easy. I just needed to edit the page and provide content. In the concept pages, I put in links to resources pages I planned to create.

Creating pages to describe interesting external resource pages required more forethought and planning however. Everything in a wiki is identified by its title, and when you create a new page you must consider future conflicts for the title of your page. For a conceptual page, the name of the concept is clearly the title. But what about for a learning resource? Should I title it based on the title of the resource? What if that title is generic (e.g. there might be several resources I want to link to titled “Introduction to Information Security”). Another issue, that comes to mind is that pages describing external resource represent a special category of content in the wiki. This begs the question, should I create a special category in MediaWiki?

MediaWiki was chosen because it has special features for organizing knowledge, just not the ability to collaboratively edit web pages. So the category feature is something I wanted to try out. Specifically, I believe that I would like to use structured data when I add pages that describe external resources that might be useful in the development of learning materials. In Wikipedia, many special pages use this kind of metadata. For example, look at the Wikipedia page for Datura, a plant. On the right-hand side, you will se a box displaying the scientific classification for that plant. If you edit the page, you will see that this data is explicitly described: this is not just fancy presentation, it is descriptive metadata.

If you click on the “Platea” link on the Datura page, you will see a regular page, but at the bottom of the page are a number of boxes (e..g “Elements of Nature”) that represent categories of information related to the page. I believe this would be very handy for organizing categories of different types of external resources that I would describe in the ISLIP wiki.

According to the MediaWiki documentation both of these features are implemented with “Templates”. To create a template, you simple create a new page named “Template:something” and that page becomes the definition for the template used elsewhere. To use the template you use put the template name in curly braces, and supply parameters that will be displayed in the format defined by the template page.

To experiment, I created a template called Template:Resource and defined some key metadata, based on what I had developed in the Greenstone ISLIP digital library. Namely, I created parameters for the ISC2 Subject Domain (and information security specific body of knowledge), Library of Congress Subject Headings, and intended audience. After examining the template in Wikipedia used in the plant example (a Template:Taxobox), I realized that formatting would required significant work. So for this exercise, I left the formatting out.

With the new template created, I went back and created two pages (Hackers in the Library and ), that use the template. Invoking the template was a simple as entering the metadata inside triple-curly braces. One problem I encountered was that I could not figure out how to include parameters that might be repeated. For example, a given resource might have 3 LoC subject headings. This will be a topic for future investigation for me.

Due to time constraints, I was unable to experiment with the creation of categories. I would have liked to created multiple categories of resource, and created pages that list the various resources that are in each category to make it easier for users to browse through the available resources “by type”, “by subject” etc. This will also be a topic of future investigation for me.

Conclusion

I found that setting up MediaWiki was simple and that MediaWiki was a good choice of software. I also found that, while opportunities for potential collaboration provide a motivation for using a wiki, that other less discussed wiki features are significantly important. In particular, the ability to leverage knowledge organization features, tip the scales so that a Wiki looks like a much more attractive platform for the ISLIP project than does a digital library platform like Greenstone.

While, I used my project as a testbed, the lessons learned here apply broadly to other library projects that might use a wiki. While the literature emphasizes the collaborative aspects of wikis, and how that fits with library activities, my experience demonstrates, that wikis are valuable to libraries because they have knowledge organization features. The research discussed shows that wikis represent a technology platform that supports ad-hoc knowledge management that is effective enough to be useful.

In the library context, this implies that there might be other uses for wikis. For example, many libraries do not catalogue their paperbacks. The cost of doing so would be high. However, a MediaWiki has suitable support for descriptive metadata that it could be used to create an ad-hoc catalogue that links to a libraries ILS (for holds etc.) and that is maintain by patrons and librarians alike. If librarians viewed wikis not just a platforms for collaboration but for, access, archiving, and organization, what might we create?

References

• Merkow, M. & Breithaupt, J. (2006). Information Security: Principles and Practices. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Halls.
• Stamp, M. (2006). Information Security: Principles and Practices. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
• Dhillon, G. (2007). Information Systems Security: Text and Cases. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
• Krutz, R. & Vines, R. (2007). The CISSP and CAP Prep Guide: Mastering CISSP and CAP. Inianapolis, Indiana: Wiley Publishing.
• Tapscott, D. & Williams, A. (2006). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. London: Penguin Books.
• Boeninger, C. (2007). The Wonderful World of Wikis: Applications for Libraries in Library 2.0 and Beyond: Innovative Technologies and Tomorrow’s User. Nancy Courtney, Ed. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.
• Farkas, Meredith. “Using Wikis to Create Online Communities.” WebJunction. September 1, 2005.
• Frumkin, J. (2005). The Wiki and the digital library. International Digital Library Perspectives. 21(1), pp. 18-22.
• Desilets, A., Sebastien, P., & Vinson, N. (2005). Are wikis usable? In Proceedings of the 2005 international symposium on Wikis; 16-18 Oct. 2005. Presented at the International Symposium on Wikis.
• Kickmeier-Rust, M. Ebner, M., & Holzinger, A. (2006). Wikis: Do they need usability engineering? Interdisciplinary Aspects of Digital Media & Education. Conference Proceeding of the 2nd Symposium WGHCI&UE, Osterreichische Computergesellschaft, Wien, S. pp. 137-144.
• Wagner, C. (2004). Wiki: A tool for converstational knowledge management and group collaboration. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 13, pp. 265-289.

The terms virtual library, digital library, electronic library, and online library are much used but vaguely defined (See also, hybrid library). In this post, I will explore the concept, definition, and user of virtual libraries, and argue that there are three core secrets to the success of virtual libraries.

Though I prefer the term digital library, I will use virtual library as a synonym for all the terms listed above, in part because it communicates my conclusion better, and because it is the term used in the topic of the assignment for which this post was created.

Things that Might be Called a Virtual Library

Rather than start with the elaboration definitions of what a virtual library is, I decided to explore a number of concrete of examples of things that are, or might be called, virtual libraries. I am already familiar with the intricate debate over the definition of the term “digital library” having recently taken a course on Digital Libraries (LIS 538), but that course left little room to explore broader examples of libraries in the online world.

The sites I have explored, fall into a number of categories that you might already be familiar with: digitized collections, library websites, virtual reference services, subject gateways, bibliographies, and pathfinders (the last three being synonymous in my treatment here). For each group of examples, I will provide some commentary on what makes it stand out, both on its own and by contrast to the other examples.

Digitized Collections

It is common to call a collection of digital objects, or digitized copies of physical works a virtual library (digital library is the more common term in this case). Typically, these are collections of images and or documents that are scanned from originals or that are perhaps born digital. Here are some examples:

Peel’s Prairie Provinces

Peel’s Prairie Provinces consists of digitized books, newspapers, and other materials from western Canadian history. The original materials have been scanned and converted into digital images, and in some cases the full-text has extracted using optical character recognition (OCR). The collection is searchable by a wide variety of criteria and organized by collection. There are no special “library-liked” services offered on the site other than search. There are links to other collections presented on the site.

The ACM Digital Library

The ACM Digital Library (ACMDL) contains the full-text of ever paper published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), as well as citations and full-text from conference proceedings and other publications of the ACM. The ACMDL is searchable by a wide variety of criteria and is organized according to the ACM Computing Classification System (ACCS). The collection is well-defined and complete as it is, precesily, all the publications of the ACM in one collection. The ACM also happens to be one of the most prolific publishers of Digital Library scholarship.

These two examples, show the virtual library as a collection accessible online. Both of these collections have a substantial preservation component, however, you will notice the absence of other services traditionally associate with libraries such as reference or assistance with finding information (both sites have some simple help, but nothing substantial).

Library Websites

Frequently, library websites are referred to as virtual libraries. In this context, virtual refers to the virtual or online presence of an actual library (these are also referred to as hybrid libraries). In some cases, the virtual library may have no physical presence and virtual indicates that the website offers many or all the services of physical library. For example, the Coastline Community College (CCC) Virtual Library. CCC’s virtual library offers all the services of its actually library, but online. There is collection of links to licensed and free databases organized by subject, a reference service, and library instruction available.

Notice that there is a parallel with the library as an institution. Collections are part of the library, but so are people, and activities: help is available from experts and there are multiple collections or collections are more generally defined then in our previous examples.

Virtual Reference Services

Many organizations offer online reference services that may be directly related to a library institution or a separate subject-specific services. These are most often referred to as “virtual reference” but are heavily associated with the concept of virtual library services. For example, Ask A Question (AAQ), the virtual reference service of The Alberta Library.

[Disclosure: I was a consultant for AAQ from 2002 until 2006]

The Alberta Library is a province wide consortium of public, post-secondary, government, and other libraries in Alberta, Canada. AAQ is virtual reference service where any citizen of Alberta can go to ask questions, and a library staff member will answer

AAQ in not just a question/answer service, it contains an organized, searchable archive of past questions. Furthermore, staff will often refer users to resources available from their local library, including licensed online resources and databases. If you define a library by its services, then the emphasis on directing users to local resources makes AAQ look like a virtual library.

The service also caters to people around the world with questions about Alberta. Questions from people outside Alberta, that are not about Alberta, are referred to similar services located near the person asking the question.

Subject Gateways, Bibliographies, and Pathfinders

Many things called “virtual library” are simply lists of documents or links to other sites that fall into a specific category.

Criminal Justice Digital Library @ Connecticut State Library

Described as “a digital library of Connecticut state publications on recidivism, prison population, probation, and other aspects of criminal justice” this virtual library is more like an annotated bibliography with several dozen documents described in several categories.

Intute: Social Sciences

Intute offers categorized links to “the best of web”. The social sciences section is a subject gateway linking other resources on the web with no locally stored content.

Importantly, these examples show a contrast with the virtual library as digital collection. The documents are may be stored locally or may just to be links to other places. There is no expectation that services or help will be provided, the value is in collecting together high quality resources that are associated by subject.

Portals to Licensed Content

Increasingly, local governments will provide libraries with funding to license a wide variety of commercial information resources, so that there is equitable access to local citizens. When libraries act as the clearing-house for this kind of spending, a key challenge is making the resource known to and available to the communities for whom they are being licensed. Often the term virtual library is used to describe websites that are a portal that provides access to licensed resources.

Alabama Virtual library

Kentucky Virtual Library

Both of these sites serve the same function for different political jurisdictions. They both have similar missing statements: to provide equitable access to local citizens to content licensed by the state. A wide variety of databases and other online content is available. Little organization is done, and there is an emphasis on providing information about how the materials are selected, funded, and on thanking the legislators how have made funds available.

Hybrid Institutions

Physical libraries are made up of spaces, people (staff and users), technologies, and resoures: all organized in a way intended to meet a certain need or goal. There are new library-like institutions built around the outcomes desired from the application of information resources and technology. For example, the Campus Calgary/Taylor Family Digital Library which is a building by some descriptions but is defined by specific goals which draw upon specific technology, people, and information resources in a collaborative spirit often associated with libraries.

Everything in Between

Many virtual libraries combine elements seen in the previous examples. For example, The Educator’s Reference Desk contains over 2000 lesson plans (like a digital collection) but also offers thousands of categorized links to external online resources (like a subject gateway), and an archive of over 200 answered questions (like a virtual reference server, but with a preservation angle).

Further more, there is a strong move toward establishing personal virtual libraries. Beagrie (2005) argues that the new frontier of digital libraries will be applying the organization and preservation capabilities developed for libraries on a personal scale. We can see this in Web 2.0 media sharing like Flickr, which could be seen a personal photo library with organization via tagging and collections, and preservation as a paid service. Even reference is now taking on a peer-to-peer flavour with services like Ask Metafilter (AskMifi) where individuals ask and answer questions (many librarians spend their spare time answering questions in AskMifi).

Defining Virtual Libraries by Debate

A great deal can be understood about virtual libraries and why they are valued by examining the debates surrounding the definitions of the term (and its synonyms). There are a number of dimensions along which the definition of virtual libraries are debated and I will describe each one only breifly (given references for those interested in learning more). In each of these debates you should be able to see characteristics of the examples given previously.

Institution vs. Collection. Borgman (1999) and Schwartz (2000) both make the distinction between definitions of “digital libraries” as collections of digital objects (attributed to a computing science perspective), whereas the library practitioners define digital libraries as institutions that provide resources, including digital collections, and services to a community. The collection oriented approach often emphasizes services such as search and discovery, whereas the institutional definition emphasizes services such as reference and instruction. The collection-oriented definition often emphasize that collections must be large and well-organized to constitute a “library.”

Digital vs. Hybrid. There is some debate as to whether or not a virtual library must include digitized content, or whether it suffices to have digital metadata that describes physical content. Schwartz (2000, p. 385-386) argues that the “hybrid library”, which integrates electronic and print environments, “is the context within which most academic digital libraries are found.” Borgman (1999) assumes outright that digital libraries must contain digital information.
While, I have not given any concrete examples, there do exist virtual libraries that organize information about physical objects, especially unique or rare art, where one searches the virtual library based on descriptions of the real artefacts with no expectation of accessing the artefact online: the library is virtual but facilitates access to objects that are not expected to be digital.

Local storage vs. Linking. We have seen examples where virtual libraries are collections of digital items that are stored in the library itself, but we have also seen examples (e.g. subject gateways) where the library organizes links to external resources. Many of the definitions that are collection-centric insist that a virtual library must contain local digital content. However, definitions that focus on libraries are organizers, do not make such a requirement.

Access vs. Preservation. The earliest calls for virtual libraries (i.e. Bush (1945), Licklider (1965)) focused primarily on the need to access information; storage was a side-effect. Today, some digital library projects exist to create so-called “dark archives” that assume little or no access component. For example, the LOCKSS preservation system (i.e. “Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”) is used by libraries world-wide but has minimal access features (Reich & Rosenthal, 2001). If you consider the “digital library as institution” definition, a LOCKSS system is not digital library, though it might be a component of one.

The Value of Virtual Libraries

The history of virtual libraries goes back further than you might imagine. While the online presence of libraries has undergone intense development over the past decade, the earliest calls for virtual libraries predate their initial development by nearly 50 years. These early calls tell us a great deal about what is most valueable in the virtual libraries we see today. For example, Bush (1945) expressed the difficulty of finding, accessing, and managing the ever-growing volume of scholarly information:

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose…. There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today…. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers…. The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly… but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. (Bush, 1945, p. 1)

Bush (1945, pp. 4-6) envisioned an automated information system he called “memex” that would be capable of storing, retrieving, and assisting with the selection and discovery of enormous numbers of documents and other data.

Nearly two decades later after Bush envisioned memex, the Council on Library Resources contracted Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN) to conduct the “future of libraries” research project which gave “a prescient view of how computer systems… could facilitate the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge” (Swets, 2005, p. 18). The project focused on computer system enhancements based on “the need for the user to have access to large quantities of data and reference materials, a virtual library at one’s fingertips” (Pew, 2003, p. 4). The results of the project were published in Licklider (1965). According to Fox & Lunin (1993, p. 441), twenty eight years later, Licklider (1965) was a key influence on the US Congress when, in 1992, it passed an act calling for “a system of state-based electronic libraries” which would include software for search and retrieval, search strategy aids, indexes of available resources, user guides, and training in the use of electronic library resources. This act of Congress resulted in the funding of the first the large-scale digital library projects (e.g. Digital Library Initiative (DLI) I and II).

During the 1990s, the Internet began a new life with the emergence of the World Wide Web. Countless information resources, like those highlighted in the previous sections, began to emerge. These resources respond to the basic need expressed by Bush and Licklider: knowledge-work becomes more difficult as the volume of information increases and so we must employ technology to help cope.

The things we call virtual libraries use technology to make it possible for us to access enormous amounts of information as easily as it is to access smaller amounts of information without technology. In this respect, the basic functions of the virtual library is the ability to “collect, store, and organization information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieving, and processing via communication networks” (Schwartz, 2000, p. 386).

We can see that by Schwartz (2000)’s definition, most of the examples we looked at would fit in one way or another. They all have one or more of the features he includes. Schwartz was refering to large digital library projects: his definition is meant to facilitate government funding of these large projects. The early definitions of Bush and Licklider are much more inspiring as they focus on needs and outcomes that are applicable to individuals and society as a whole.

The Three Secrets of Virtual Library Success

We have seen that many things can be called a Virtual Library but despite their diversity, they share a number of characteristics that give them extraordinary value to users. I believe these relate back to the earliest calls for virtual libraries from Bush and Licklider. The three secrets to Virtual Library success are:

1. Automation
2. Transparency
3. Decentralization

Automation. A starting point for Bush (1945) was the need for technology to automate many of the processes that we carry out by hand (or mind). In the face of growing amounts of information, we need machines to automate the organization and discovery process. We see this in much of Web 2.0 and in virtual libraries. Search is not a manual process to be conducted by running a finger along lines in a book. Instead computer automate the process of indexing the words of a text, and computers automate the process of searching those indexes for the keywords we pick. Automation also applies in greater ways. The process of taking notes and making bookmarks is simpler with technology: we can cut-and-paste and bookmarking a URL is a single keystroke. Recording index terms (i.e. tags) and comparing them can be automated. Many of the digital libraries examples we examined incorporate these features (e.g. ACM Digital Library).

Transparency. The process of searching for, using, and disseminating information is becoming transparent to the user. The librarian is not a “middle man” anymore: there is no requirement to consult anyone to obtain the information, it is available directly. When you search a digital library, the material is (in most cases) a click away. Both Bush (1945) and Licklider (1965) sought to apply technology so that more information would be available as close to the user as possible. Every time a virtual library makes some part of the process of finding or using information transparent, that leaves the user with that much more energy, concentration, and time to use the information for his or her own purposes.

Decentralization. While many virtual libraries focus on centralizing digital content for the purposes of preservation and access, there is also an equally strong push to allow for search and discovery of resources across libraries. This feature ties together both automation and transparency to give the user great benefit. For example, the one thing we take for granted on the World Wide Web are “links.” This is way in which we have used to technology to automate the search and retreival of information. Following a link is a transparent way to search for and retrieve documents in a decentralized system (the World Wide Web). I will not claim that the web is itself a virtual library (it lacks organization for starters), however, what we value in virtual libraries is fundamentally a feature of the web.

Conclusion

So what is a virtual library and what makes them worthwhile?

We call them Libraries because they are defined by collection, preservation, organization, and information retrieval: the hallmarks associated with libraries long before the “virtual” world emerged. We call them Virtual because they can and are re-invented, re-envisioned, and re-purposed by and for infinitely diverse users and uses: a vision more optimistic than anything “real” could ever aspire to.

References

Beagrie, N. (2005). Plenty of room at the bottom? Personal digital libraries and collections. D-Lib Magazine, 11(6).

Borgman, C. (1999). What are digital libraries? Competing visions. Information Processing and Management, 35, 227-243.

Bush, V. (1945, July). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved January 22, 2009 from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

Fox, E., & Lunin, L. (1993). Perspectives on digital libraries: Introduction and overview. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 44(8), 441-445.

Gunn, H. (2002, July). Virtual libraries supporting student learning. Retrieved July 21, 2009 from http://www.accesswave.ca/~hgunn/special/papers/virlib/index.html

Levy, D. (2000). Digital libraries and the problem of purpose. D-Lib Magazine 6(1).

Licklider, J. (1965). Libraries of the future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pew, R. (2003). Evolution of human-computer interacation: From memex to bluetooth and beyond. In The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals of Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, J.A. Jacko and A. Sears Eds. Lawrence Eribaum Associates.

Reich, V. & Rosenthal, D. (2001). LOCKSS: A permanent web publishing and access system. D-Lib Magazine, 7(6).

Shwartz, C. (2000). Digital libraries: An overview. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 26(6), 385-393.

Swets, J. (2005). The ABC’s of BBN: From acoustics to behavioral sciences to computers. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 27(2), 15-29.

What is Podcasting?

Richardson (2009, p. 110) describes podcasting as the Internet equivalent of radio:

Podcasting is basically the creation and distribution of amateur radio, plain and simple. And it’s the distribution piece of this that’s important, because although we’ve been able to do digital audio for some time now, getting a lot of people to listen to it hasn’t been very easy. Now it is.”

But… he’s wrong about that first part. Podcasting is not radio.Internet Radio exists and is something different. Internet Radio is characterized by streaming audio. It is just like regular radio, but on the Internet: you tune into a “channel” and you hear audio and it just keeps coming until you change the channel.

On the other hand, Richardson’s (2009) comment about the important of distribution is correct. Unlike Internet Radio, podcasts are distributed in the same way we distribute blog posts: via RSS (or ATOM or XML). This means that a better definition of a podcast is a discoverable and subscribable audio or video file (This is explictily stated by Worlledge-Andrew, 2007, pp. 22-23 as well). Importantly, podcasts can be audio or video (other media filetypes are possible, but not currently usable by RSS podcast players).

Podcasting is like radio and television in that podcasting is broadcasting. However, its most important aspect is that podcasts are described media files. By describing media files in RSS, we gain something important: convenience. If we know the URL for the RSS feed for a podcast, we can tell a program like Miro, Juice, iTunes, or RSS aggregators like Google Reader or Bloglines to automatically download newly posted audio files for us whenver they are released. This might be made available to us by automatically loading them onto our MP3 players, or by making them playable with online media player (as is the case when Google Reader discovers a podcast file).

Importantly, podcasts are popular because of their convenience. Barsky & Lindstrom (2008, “Background and Introduction to Podcasting”) and Barnes (2007, p. 220) both attribute the popularity of podcasting to the availability of portable media players such as iPods. In addition to automating the downloading process, the availability of personal media players like MP3 players and PDAs that can play video, allow users to choose the time, place, and means with which they will experience a podcast.

Describing media files using XML also allows specialized search engines to discover podcasts, and index them, and make them searchable. The XML files that describe blogs and podcasts include metadata including the title, subject, and more. This means that podcasts are discoverable. Perhaps this is a little bit like old-fashioned radio: you could discover new channels by turning the dial on your radio.

It should be noted that podcasting is not necessarily the same as video or audio sharing. For example, video sharing sites focus on aggregating video content under a single site (e.g. youtube.com or revver.com). Users then explore, search, and discover content within that site. These sites typically, do provide the ability to subscribe to videos via RSS, however, there is an emphasis on sharing the videos by cutting-and-pasting HTML code to embed the playable videos in users blogs or sites in ways that are not technically “podcasting”. In short, one could podcast using a video sharing site (or an audio sharing site like Odeo) but sharing and podcasting should be seen as complimentary and not strictly the same thing.

How can Podcasts be used in Libraries?

The characteristics of podcasts imply many possibilities for use in libraries. Podcasts share the discovery and subscription features of blogs, the availability of portable media players make using these media convenient, but audio and video formats come with specific limitations (some of which I explored in a previous post on Video Sharing). These uses have been explored by many libraries and I will describe several examples below.

Promoting Services and Collections

A common purpose for which podcasts have been used is to promote library services and collections to new audiences or in a way that reaches the audience more effectively.

Jowitt (2008) reporst on how the University of College Learning (UCOL) in New Zealand usage podcasts to provide patrons with instruction on using feature of the library catalogue. UCOL used an open-source audio recording/editing program (Audicity) and existing equipment making the process cost-effective and reported that the product process was not labour intensive. The advocated the use of scripts to make the podcasts more effective.

UCOL solicited feedback from users regarding the podcasts and found that all the topics coverage were helpful, with some being more popular than others. Importantly, patrons reported that some topics were not well suited to audio-only podcasts and suggested the use of visuals to accompany the audio.

Similarily, Worlledge-Andrew (2007), reports using Audicity and existing equipment to produce a variety of podcasts to promote library services at Glasgow University Library (GUL) in the UK. GUL’s podcasts included various tours of library facilities and instructions on how to find and borrow books in the library. GUL patrons reported appreciating having text transcripts of podcasts that supplemented the audio because they allowed for better accessibility (they had one blind-deaf patron, p. 22). GUL podcasts included audio and video. When they solicited feedback from students, results were very positive (p. 24)

Barnes (2007) reports on how Mississippi State University (MSU) Libraries’ used a podcast to promote their government documents collection.

The University’s constituents require sufficient information to perform their regular activities, and a great deal of this information comes from governmental entities at both the national and international levels. In order to utilize the abundance of government information, the University community must be aware of its existence and also know how to find and access it (p. 220).

The MSU project was substantially expensive compared to the two previous examples involving the purchase of multiple Apple Macintosh computers, software, and microphones and other audio equipment and the support from central IT staff (Barnes, 2007, p. 221). The staff however, were given support from the highest levels and ample timelines to complete the project.

MSU staff produced multiple podcast episodes in varying lengths with extensive work on scripts: some were short with only announcements of the availability of content, others were longer with information on how to use collections.

A key limitation of the MSU project came in evaluation. They evaluated the project by how many “clicks” the podcast files received. Unforunately, this does not measure how many subscribers there really were and thus does not indicate how many people the podcasts reached. A better evaluation method might have been to survey users of the government documents collection to find out how they found out about it or to measure the increase of usage of the collection compared to the period preceeding the release of each podcast (i.e. that is, does podcast publication increase use of the resource being promoted).

Other Uses and Limitations

The use of podcasts for library tours seems to be popular in the LIS literature (Lee, 2006; Worlledge-Andrew, 2007). However, using the definition of podcast that I have provided above, these would not actually be podcasts but audio files. The inclination to call them podcasts seems to come from the association of iPods for use in walking tours as opposed to the discovery or subscription of content through RSS.

Outside of libraries themselves, podcasts have been successful in the profession of librarianship. For example, the Talking with Talis podcast is an outstanding an unique source of information for software developers and IT professionals working in libraries consisting of interviews with notable professionals in the industry. LibVibe was one of the earliest librarian podcasts, with weekly updates on news occuring in the library world. It covered a broad range of issues related to librarianship and libraries.

The potential for individual librarians to engage in discourse throughout their profession via audio and video broadcast seem particularly exciting to me. The kinds of podcasts I listen to and that seem to be popular are non-trivial but not particularly challenging content: opinion, news, and interviews that are both through-provoking and easy to listen to. Highly conceptual content, or content that introduces difficult new material doesn’t make for good podcasting. If I have to stop, go back, and listen again, then podcasting is the wrong format.

This highlights a fundamental limitation of audio and video. These formats are not easily scanable, not easily skimmable: they are linear. You experience them from start to finish. Thus, podcast producers need take into consideration the type of content they have to communicate and how it will be experienced in the podcast medium. The discoverable and subscribable nature of podcasts might mean your audience finds and easily uses your content, but can they understand it? Can they enjoy it?

Barsky & Lindstrom (2008) report that student “enthusiastically” accepted podcasted physics lectures made available by the University of British Columbia Library through their institutional repository. However, I wonder if this is because podcast is a superior medium for lecture, or if the freedom to listen when and where the students want is of significant value. I suspect the latter. Secker (2008) reported that at the University of London students wanted more podcasted lectures (also made available by the library), but also wanted “to attend face-
to-face classes for the interaction they provide.”

I would suggest that screencasts combining audio with diagrams, text, and/or video would provide the best alternative (this could be made available as video podcasts of course). However, audio or video recording a normal lecture and podcasting it may have extraordinary cost-effectiveness and still be useful!

Experience Creating a Podcast

To explore podcasting in practice, I created a 3 part audio recording to go along with my Hackers in the Library presentation from Netspeed 2008.

There are many technology options for recording audio. For example, one can attach a microphone to a computer and use a program to record the audio. One can record the audio using a tape recorder and then digitize the recording on a computer somehow. I already have several laptops with built-in microphones, but the quality they produce is not excellent. I have a headset microphone that plugs into computer that produces acceptable quality. Richardson (2008) outlines a number of ways to produce recordings: using Audacity and headset, using an iPod and external recording device, or using a laptop. I opted for a third option. I purchased a $99 handheld audio recorder that saves files in MP3 format and acts as a USB disk (i.e. a Sony ICD-UX70 MP3 IC Recorder). All you do is press record, talk, and when you are done, plug it into your computer. The device appears as a removable hard disk with the audio in MP3 files. This seems like an ideally simple solution.

I printed out my powerpoint slides, complete with notes, and rehearsed my podcast once. I did several brief audio tests and discovered that if I were to hold the recorder in my hand that it would pick up rustling sounds. Placing the recorder on a flat surface produced the best results. The audio quality was good. It took me roughly 15 minutes to test the device the first time.

I decided to record the audio in three segments, corresponding to the three separate parts of the presentation itself. I did this not because the presentation breaks up that way, but because I wanted to explore actual podcasting with multiple recordings described in RSS, and because I felt that it would be better for an audience to have the option of listening to 3 shorter pieces.

Recording went smoothly, with one “gonk” where someone walking in on my during recording, and recording had to be stopped, and repeated. The recording process was not much different from delivering the actual presentation, except that I took time to describe some of the slides for an audience that might be listening without visuals. I think the first part could be improved with more description and that the second two parts sounded more natural.

Richardson (2008, p. 117) states, “When you’ve finished the talking part of your podcast, you might want to do a little editing and production. Using Audacity, you can easily edit out all of the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’….” I did have some “ums” and some long pauses in my recording, so I decided to edit my podcast. I have some past experience using Audacity for editing and thought this would be as easy as Richardson (2008) makes it sound: it wasn’t. After 10 minutes I gave up, realizing that it would probably take several hours to edit the 45 minutes of audio that I had recorded.

The editing process takes time due to the nature of audio. You have to search for the precise spot where the part you want to cut starts and stops, this can be challenging and involves scaling in and out in the visual presentation of the audio. I’m sure that experienced audio editors have methods to make this easier and that I might discover those methods if I edited podcasts on a regular basis. However, I conclude that, for a casual user, editing just isn’t cost-effective.

In the end, my only edit was to eliminate an interruption that occurred during recording when someone walked in during recording. I cut out the person, and tried to make the transition as smooth as possible. The total time to do this one cut was about 10 minutes (acceptable given the outcome and seriousness of the audio “gonk”).

I also used an audio editing program, Roxio Sound Editor, to add descriptive MP3 tags. These tags are metadata that is embedded in the MP3 file that can be displayed by MP3 players, iPods, and media playing software. I tagged the recordings with a title, author name, track numbers, genre (i.e. “Lecture”), and year of publication.

To my ear, it sounds like some audio quality was lost after I edited the MP3 file to add the tags. The program I used imported the MP3 that I recorded, converted it to an internal format, and the exported it to MP3 format again. MP3 is a lossy audio compression format: that is you lose quality from the original. Multiple import/exports of an MP3 file can be bad. In the future, I would use a program designed to edit the MP3 tags without altering the audio content of the MP3 file.

From Audio Recording to Podcast

An audio recording is not a podcast. For it to be a podcast, it must be published in way that makes discovery and subscription possible (e.g. described with RSS). I decided to compare two different ways to publish this audio as a podcast. I published it to my own blog as three separate posts, and I published it using the University of Alberta’s eCast Podcasting Service.

WordPress as Podcast Platform

I use WordPress for my blog and, in theory, attaching an audio file is all that is required for WordPress to add it as an “enclosure” which makes it a podcast. Enclosure is the technical name given to the mechanism by which a blog post includes a reference to an audio file, making it discoverable as a “podcast”.

When I attempted to upload my first MP3 file, I received an error from WordPress that my file was over 2MB in size, and that I would have to edit my php.ini file to allow the upload of my file. Fortunately, this is something I both familiar and comfortable with (it’s also why I prefer to how my blog on my own server, so that I’m not limited by default settings like this).

I uploaded the files to the WordPress media library, and then created three posts, one for each Audio recording. In the post, I briefly described the podcast, and attached the media file. Uploading the MP3 files took a long time(i.e. greater than 10 minutes) because of their large size.

I verified that the “podcast” (i.e. RSS worked) by subscribing to my own blog in Miro, a podcast management program (like iTunes but open-source), and verifying that it detected the audio content. It worked!

As a final step, I downloaded and installed the Audio Player Plugin for WordPress and updated my podcast posts to include the player. This allows those people who visit my blog using a browser to play the MP3 files in their browser without having to download them (downloading is still possible via a link in each blog post).

The three podcast blog posts are available at http://syntheticlibrarian.com/2009/07/19/hackers-in-the-library-podcast-part-1, http://syntheticlibrarian.com/2009/07/19/hackers-in-the-library-podcast-part-2, and http://syntheticlibrarian.com/2009/07/19/hackers-in-the-library-podcast-part-3 and subscribable at the RSS feed of this blog.

The University of Alberta’s Podcasting Service

I became of the University of Alberta’s podcasting service several months ago and thought this would be a good time to try it out. It is available to staff and students alike: you just have to have a Campus Computing ID (CCID) to login with. It is unclear what features it offers or how it works, but the process seems easy. There are 5 steps: file upload, metadata creation, submission to producer, metadata suppression, and cleanup. I didn’t see a description of these steps and the last three seem… mysterious.

I began at the beginning by uploading an MP3 file I had recorded. It ask me what type of podcast it was (i.e. audio or video), and I have to provide a title and description.

After uploading an MP3 file, the final 4 steps happened automatically without any input needed from me. I guess that is why they don’t describe those steps. When I was done, it gave me the option to “Managed Existing Podcasts” or “Submit Another Episode”. I uploaded the remaining two episodes before “managing” them.

The “manage” step allows you to give a name to the podcast as a whole (that is the collection of all episodes uploaded) and to get the URL of the XML file that describes the podcasts. The XML file is needed if you want people to be able to subscribe the podcast. In this case the URL for my podcast feed is https://ecast.srv.ualberta.ca/Podcasts/mwm2/xml/10f8b5b3ca85e804ba60178637490713.xml.

I tested the podcast feed by adding it to Miro, my podcast player, and it worked! It automatically included an image of the eCast logo in the XML for my podcast. Unfortunately, I could find no way to change that. It would be nice to be able customize that with a logo or screenshot of my presentation. However, I do feel confident that I could recommend the eCast service to University of Alberta faculty, staff, and students: it is fairly easy to use.

Comparison of the Two Podcasting Platforms

I like the WordPress method better. I’m not sure what the advantage of using the eCast Podcasting Service would be. If I had no access to a WordPress blog, I think I would be very thankful for the eCast service though! The eCast service was easy to use but the lack of customization is tiny bit limiting.

Simple Recipes for Effective Podcasts

Based on my own experience (reported above) and the advice in the LIS literature (Barsky & Lindstrom, 2008; Jowitt, 2008; Ellero, Looney, & Ragon, 2007), I believe the following recipe represent a simple but cost-effective way to generate podcasts.

Use a handheld MP3 recorder. This eliminates the need to install and configure software and hardware on a computer. I found that a $99 handheld recorder was trivial to operate and produced excellent quality sound. It was recorded to MP3 format and the files are easy to transfer to my computer as it acted as a removable hard disk.

Minimize editing. Editing takes time, and the more time that is required to produce a podcast means the more likely it is that you will stop producing podcasts. If your podcasting project is successful there will time to learn editing skills later. The goal should be to produce a “good enough” podcast consistently and repeatedly and make improvements in the future as success allows.

Reherse. Unless your podcast is an interview, reherse the content to minimize the need for later editing. An hour of rehersal could save twice that much time in editing and produce a podcast that is more pleasant to listen to (rehersed content may flow better for the audience).

Publish it in many ways. Make the podcast available/playable in multiple ways. It’s not enough enough to support iTunes, as not everyone using an iPod. It’s not enough to make the RSS feed available for podcast players. Post each podcast episode on your blog and include an embedded audio player so that those people who don’t know or care what a podcast is can still use the audio files. Link to your blog posts anywhere where it is relevant to link to the content: promote the episodes the same way you would a blog post. This may build your viewership. In short, don’t assume that “if you build it they will come.”

What are these important elements in the recipe? Because they keep the overall amount time required to create an acceptable podcast low and the maximize it’s accessibility to your potential audience. While some libraries may receive substantial financial support and given ample time, as MSU was for the government documents podcasting project(Barnes, 2007) other may not be given that luxury. Jowitt (2008) specifically sites low-cost and simplicity as factors that make podcasting effective for libraries. Given that simple podcasting is possible, a simple recipe could put podcasting projects within the reach of most libraries, with or without budget, excessive time, or technical expertise. My own podcasting experiment took roughly an hour and half (not counting the time to purchase the handheld recorder and the time to sit around while the files uploaded to the server) and cost $99. This make me optimistic that podcasting is within everyone’s grasp… they just need the content and libraries, as hubs of information dissemination, should never been in short supply of content!

Putting it Perspective: It’s Broadcast

I will now back-peddle a little bit. I began this post by claiming that Richardson (2009) was (a little bit) wrong in claiming that podcasting is radio “plain and simple.” While people have the choice to listen to a podcast at the time and place of their choosing, they are all still listening to the same content: like radio, podcasts most defining characteristic is that it is broadcast. We must remember that people subscribe to podcasts, and once subscribed, we choose what content they will download. This has powerful implications for libraries. In the research I reviewed, libraries began their podcasting projects by choosing the content or services they wanted to promote, but they may have been better served by considering who their audience is instead. This is because implicit in any broadcast medium is the existence of an audience that can choose to tune in or tune out, but that once tuned in, will probably stay tuned in. This means that libraries may benefit by starting off considering who will listen to podcasts and asking what they will value and what they will want to listen to and finding a way to deliver it. As long as that audience finds the podcasts somewhat valueable, they will continue to listen and libraries can then deliver the content that the library finds important.

In the research I reviewed, the audience was consulted only after the fact, and while audience response was positive, little consideration was given to asking them how what else they listen to, how and when the listen, and what might make them continue to subscribe or stop subscribing. As a podcast user myself, I can attest to the fact that a person can only listen to so many podcasts in a week and competition is great. The content has to be of value and fit into my workflow and schedule.

Libraries, if they are to be successful podcasters, must think like broadcasters. This means consistently coming up with easy-to-listen-to but valuable content which will keep the audience from leaving. My advice above, is a recipe for achieving this but an incomplete one, it does not address what content might be acceptable. To determine that libraries will need to engage their audience and define them more specifically than “student” or “patron.” Content that the audience does not get elsewhere and that is entertaining, such as author talks or interviews would be key candidates. Promotion of services could piggyback this content in the same way that advertisements piggyback on radio. I believe, that while technically simple, this make podcasting one of the hardest Web 2.0 technologies for libraries to have success with (relative to others). In the end podcasting may be more like radio “plain and simple” than it is like Web 2.0.

References

Barnes, N. (2007). Using podcasts to promote government documents collections. Library Hi Tech, 25(2), 220-230.

Barsky, E., & Lindstrom, K. (2008). Podcasting the Sciences: A Practical Overview. Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, (55).

Ellero, N., Looney, R., & Ragon, B. (2007). P.O.D. Principles — Producing, Organizing, and Distributing Podcasts in Health Sciences Libraries and Education. Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 26(1 supp 1), 69. doi: 10.1300/J115v26S01_05.

Jowitt, A. L. (2008). Creating communities with podcasting. Computers in Libraries, 28(4), 14-15.

Lee, D. (2006), “IPod, you-pod, we-pod: podcasting and marketing library services”, Library Administration & Management, (accessed from Wilson Web database, 21 November 2006), Vol. 20 pp.206-8.

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. 2nd Ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

Secker, J. (2008). The adventures of LASSIE: Libraries, social software and distance learners. Serials, 21(2), 112-115.

Worlledge-Andrew, H. (2007). Podcasting – putting the library back at the centre of learning. SCONUL Focus, (40), 21-25.

This is part one of a podcast version of my Hackers in the Library presentation from Netspeed 2008 (incorrectly identified as Netspeed 2007 in the podcast). The slides are available for download so that you can follow along with the podcast.

Hackers in the Library is a presentation that tells the stories of real information security incidents that have occurred in libraries. Part three tells explains how trends in cybercrime will affect libraries

Download Hackers in the Library Podcast Part 3

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