John Blyberg was 2.0 before 2.0 was cool. In fact he's so ahead of the game that he's pretty solidly 3.0, going on 4.0. Back in 2005, when Blyberg was working for the Ann Arbor District Library as Network Administrator, he re-built AADL's network and server from scratch. The result was a user-centric website, beautifully integrated with the library's catalog, dubbed "AADL 3.0".

From Library Journal:

AADL 3.0 includes cross-postable blog entries, user comments, RSS feeds, gaming tournaments, and interwiki links, making for a dynamic, interactive online experience. In fact, some posts have garnered hundreds of patron comments. The site also integrates seamlessly with the catalog, offering RSS feeds of holds and checkouts and fluidity between site and catalog user accounts. Much more than just adding blogs or RSS feeds to an existing site, AADL 3.0 embraces a “Library 2.0” perspective (though it predates the coining of the term). Borrowing principles from Web 2.0, Library 2.0 takes a new and disruptive approach to library service that emphasizes the importance of a two-way flow of information from users to institutions, resulting in a constant evolution and improvement of library service.

Yah! Disruptive!

Now John works for Darien Library in Connecticut as Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives, and he's busy disrupting things over there, too. Just last week he announced that the new SOPAC2 website was live and that the software was available for FREE DOWNLOAD. SOPAC2 (which stands for "Social Online Public Access Catalog," the first version of which was integrated with the Ann Arbor site) was built for Drupal with the intention of being fully customizable and fully compatible with any ILS ("Integrated Library System").

This is really revolutionary. Every part of it feels so thoughtful and organic. John himself has stated that he created SOPAC so that the "library experience" could be extended into the digital realm. With SOPAC2, users can not only browse their library catalogs, place holds, renew books and pay fines- they are also invited to tag, rate, and write their own reviews.

Check out the Darien site, which is using SOPAC2. You don't even have to have a Darien library card to create an account and use the site! Anyone is free to review, rate and tag items in the catalog. This is an amazing feature, one that truly extends all their library has to offer well beyond the walls of the actual institution.

I love what John had to say about Social OPACs and their potential for enriching the library services:

Let's not forget the role libraries play in a community. Perhaps the view from inside sometimes is only a view of ourselves reflected back at us, when in fact, the truth is that the public comes to us in need. Sometimes that need is small, casual. Sometimes it's the type of need that transcends record authority and can only be redressed by another in similar need. Are we really the final say on what the best resources are if someone wants help with teen pregnancy, domestic abuse, or cystic fibrosis? Can all of our collective training tell that needful person exactly what material best suits their situation?

Of course not. Our OPACs cannot be the golden kiosks we all want, but by inviting participation in the stewardship of a community resource, we can begin to build unique meta-collections that slide value, pertinence, and humanity into the search process. It may be that in that moment when a patron is about to turn away from the library, something catches their eye--a tag, a comment, some marginalia, perhaps, that puts the patron in front of the material they truly need.

So not only is John Blyberg a genius, the man is also a poet.

John Blyberg Awesome Show- Great Job!

Marshall Breeding

Open source trends in library automation

For a couple of decades things have been done in a certain way by a certain set of vendors. Open-source has fundamentally changed this. Libraries have perhaps been underserved by their vendors.

Open source ILS options: Koha, Evergreen, OPAL.

Although a number of libraries are moving towards an open source ILS, there is much more action in the public side than on the academic. The number of academics moving to open-source systems is much smaller than the "swell" of public libraries moving in this direction. It may take another year or two before we start seeing greater involvement on the part of academics.

Instead of traditional licensing arrangements, the emerging model is support of open source with contract programming, moving the focus of the revenue from the licensing side to the services side.

There is also a move towards open data.

ILS Discovery Layer Interface Committee - Working on standards that define interoperability between library automation systems and the new generation of front-end interfaces.

The Berkeley Accord
Some automation vendors have already signed on as part of this project.

Anyone developing library automation software has to respond to libraries' demands for more openness.

Openness is great, but beware of the marketing pitch. Read the fine print, be skeptical, look deep. Are things as open as the vendors portray them? Are they doing tings that really deliver new value through openness?

Karen Schneider

Open-source
"You know that open-source is viable because people make money at it."

Broadband - We never have enough of it, and we seem to be in a perpetual cycle of catch-up. These limitations drive library policy and practice. Some libraries can't explore certain initiatives because their broadband simply won't support it. No federal broadband strategy.

Open-source - We have come full circle with our automation history. Librarians are now writing their own software, charting their own destinies.

Sarah Houghton-Jan

Now people have faster Internet access at home than at libraries. The problem is multimedia. When you have a lot of people in libraries watching videos, playing online games, and streaming radio stations, you wind up with clogged bandwidth. (Probably more of an issue in public libraries than in academic?) More of IT budgets are going to be dedicated to broadband.

People talk a lot about things that are new and beautiful, but not so much about sustainability. At the outset, people are not thinking enough about how much effort it takes to sustain new projects. How many abandoned library blogs are out there? How many library myspace sites are not being maintained?

Libraries as organizations are not nimble. We need to look at how we make decisions and how we encourage innovation. Innovation is discouraged in many libraries. The structures and practices of our organizations create these barriers to innovation. Part of this is attibutable to the age-old librarians' fear of failure. We can't try anything new unless it's been planned to death and it has already been tried in 80% of other libraries (so we're pretty sure it won't fail for us). Staff are hesitant to innovate because of the seemingly insurmountable multi-level bureaucracies. People don't have the time in their workdays to think about innovation. Then trying to wade through the bureaucracy is a waste of time.

Clifford Lynch

There is a growing enthusiasm about open-source in libraries, the higher ed community in general, and cultural heritage organizations. Open source is wonderful, but it isn't a panacea. There seems to be a widespread belief that by declaring something to be open-source, you can solve a widespread range of financial, technical, and design problems, that are otherwise insoluble.

After their enthusiasm, there is likely a coming backlash against open source as people try to calibrate on a realistic view the places where it solves effectively, the places where difficulty is conserved. You need to be smart about it. You need to not overreact in any direction about open source. You need to think about when open source makes sense, and when you're just appealing to it to solve a problem that basically nobody knows how to solve in the first place.

Virtual Organizations - Concept from the ideas of cyber-infrastructure, collaboration across the network.

People need to be able to work together and set up work arrangements in a fairly agile fashion. There is a need to be able to do this in a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous ways. Real indications that travel will get more expensive and more difficult in the future. Besides fuel, airlines are dropping a significant amount of air transportation capacity. We're going to find that a mixture of physical and telepresence will become more of the norm at meetings for participants and audience. (Cliff said that this was being handled pretty badly at this Top Tech Trends session!) Needs to get much better very quickly. Has implications for teaching and learning.

Network storage, cloud storage. This is starting to take off in a bigger way.

Move by libraries and cultural heritage institutions to make their digitized materials available outside the library in places suck as Flickr. This is a "letting go" of holdings so that they can be reused and so that they can be put into contexts that are valuable to people.

Information overload - Social networking systems/social software. How quickly and how severely will we run into overload situations? We're already seeing early signs of this.

Roy Tennant

The age of experimentation - revealed through a number of different projects - VuFind, Scriblio, Extensible Catalog Project. People are taking control, experimenting, and trying to find out what might be usable techniques.

Game-changing surprises such as Google digitizing entire libraries.

Data - Everyone needs to get really good at extracting data from within whatever system it resides. ILS, ERM, etc. You will be throwing those systems away at some point, so you need to be able to get your data out. Even if you keep those systems, you need to be able to analyze your metadata: find missing elements, find bad elements, do transformations.

People - Take responsibility for your own professional development. Don't expect training courses. Support people in the organization with the opportunity to learn what they need going forward.

Systems - Take control of your systems. Don't be locked into an outdated version just because it's so hard to upgrade. If it's that hard, get out of that system.

Question for Roy: What can library schools do to help prepare students for an environment of constant technological change?
Answer: Good luck. The trouble there is that personality traits are needed rather than specific knowledge, and that is really hard to impart in library school. Either you're the kind of person who loves change and loves to learn new things, or you're the kind of person who likes to get comfortable in a position without having to learn new things. Library schools can't really affect that. However, library schools can focus more broadly on concepts that can be applied in different technological situations: information retrieval, precision, recall. Those kinds of things last. Specific systems don't last. However, it would be useful to teach people at least one specific programming language because that helps them talk to programmers. This is a role that librarians increasingly need to play.

Meredith Farkas

Social software - The role of social software in collecting local knowledge. Local wikis for cities. Why can't libraries collect local knowledge to benefit everyone? Having a space to collect knowledge is very important. Libraries can be the online hub of local communities. This presence will in turn drive more visitors to the library website.

Libraries can provide an important technical and educational role in communities. Some libraries are doing extensive technology training in their communities. Example: The Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County.

Archiving blogs as historical artifacts. Many of the real current library conversations are happening in blogs. Will this knowledge be preserved for use in future research? This could change the way we think about how we archive materials.

John Blyberg

Green technology - In 2005 American consumers dicarded 2.5 million tons of electronic equipment. Most contained some amount of toxic material. Manufacturers are coming up with new types of material that are more eco-friendly. Energy efficiency is also a rising concern. The Internet (and related computers, monitors, hardware) consumes about 350 billion kilowatts of electricity per hour in America. This is almost 10% of total energy generated in the U.S. Most of that power is wasted in toe form of heat generated and energy required to cool hardware. New devices/innovations for ultra-low voltage and heat abatement.

In the future conferences may be transformed by technologies that allow more and better virtual participation. Less physical presence also translates into less total energy consumed.

Semantic webNew Reuters API that adds semantic markup to unstructured HTML documents. As you do a search and refine the search, the software helps you locate other connections that you might not otherwise have found.

Converged Media Hubs
Portable media devices are actually mini-PCs, such as the iPhone. They can bring together a wide variety of content such as RSS feeds and live TV, and this is available in the palm of your hand. We may not be ready to accept the idea of reading books and watching entire movies on a handheld device, this drastically and fundamentally changes the expectations of our users when they look at us as information providers. Those who use these devices heavily customize their experience so that it's tailored to their needs. This indicates that people are beginning to develop a very personal relationship with information. As users build these customized information frameworks, they begin to place a good deal of personal reliance on them. This puts in a position where we can help them do this.

The Library as Content Creator (not just content provider)
When users leave the library, they enter a world that is very highly produced. Highly crafted radio, television, and Internet experiences. Not necessarily highly crafted content, but definitely a highly crafted container. This creates an expectation from the users that their user experience will be well-presented and professionally developed. The problem is that users don't appreciate it, they just expect it. When it works well, they take it for granted. When it doesn't work well, they are highly judgmental, and they will disregard the content if the container is not up to their expectations.

Karen Coombs

APIs are becoming very important to libraries. Beyond just bibliographic APIs, libraries need to consider media sources such as Flickr and Blip.tv. These will enable libraries to pull data back from those media sources or make it possible for faculty to simultaneously upload content to the institutional repository and these media sources. Libraries have to find ways for faculty to put content in institutional repositories, discipline-specific repositories, and government repositories with a single submission. Repositories are a way for this to happen.

Virtual Participation
New facets to virtual participation. More experiences with people in a physical space and in a virtual space collaborating together.

Eric Morgan

With regard to scholarly publishing, it is no longer just about the article anymore. It's about the data that supports the article. How are we going to collect and provide access to that data, and maintain it for a long period of time.

Mobile devices
Mobile devices will become more the norm. As libraries, how are we going to get our content onto these small screen.

Web APIs. these are the pieces that fuel web 2.0. This is a way to get your stuff out there.

It's increasingly important to make sure that library websites have bling. People really do judge books by their covers. Libraries need more expertise when I comes to graphic design. We might know how to organize information bibliographically, but when it comes to organizing it visually, we stink.

Next-gen library catalogs/discovery systems
All of these next-generation type things are essentially indexes with services running against the index.

The next challenge for libraries is letting patrons use the content that they find. Finding content is not the problem. As libraries we can allow patrons to use the content in a different sort of way. The next gen catalog is a tool to do others things that are exemplified by action verbs: tag it, review it, annotate it, compare and contrast.

Libraries always serve a community: business, university, city, government. Your library will be able to provide services against your content better than Google can.

Karen Coyle

I want to be able to walk into the stacks and do catalog searches with handheld devices. The fact that when I'm in the library and have less access to resources than when I'm sitting at my desk at home is ridiculous.

What my job often is these days is that I'm paid to write reports you couldn't pay me to read.

"The future of bibliographic control will be highly collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and web-based. It will take place in cooperation with the private sector and users will be among the new partners who collaborate with libraries. Data will be gathered from multiple sources. "

Paraphrase of the opening section of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.
http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/lcwg-report-draft-11-30-07-final.pdf

The future of bibliographic control will not have control. It is not going to be a controlled future. It will be a gigantic mash-up. My fear right now is that if we don't make some extreme changes, it will not involve libraries. Other people will be doing it, we won't. And we won't because it is going to be about linking, it is going to be about everyone having access to the data. The data has to be unencumbered and anyone can use it in any way they want. Right now it is easier to get bibliographic data from Amazon and from the publishers than it is from libraries. So if we don't really get on the ball, the future of bibliographic control is not even going to involve us. There are a lot of things that we have to give up in order to allow this future to include us, one of them being that it no longer matters if the data/records we create for bibliographic data are the same.

Need to be able to offer the users the option to see other items that are similar.

The increase of user to user interaction.

More and more the institution is not going to be the focus of the interaction. As users can connect and interact with each other, that will be their choice. Libraries have to make sure that their content is available and accessible while users are interacting with one another.

Egotrippat? Absolut!
Kul? Iaf för bibliotekarier som kommer ihåg hur ett katalogskåp såg ut.
Användbart? Eventuellt - kolla in katalogen från Ann Arbor District Library

När du ändå är ute och kollar kul saker: Kolla in Jenny Eklunds sidoprojekt "Ditt liv på sex ord"

Jen Maney started out with the "required" definition of Web 2.0, using Webopedia.

She then encouraged us all to remember, that "It's Your library... so think about it: which tools will help you reach your library's goals and how do we get to become part of the lives of the individuals who come to our library!" [This theme of becoming a part of the customers' life was repeated throughout their program and is a big step for all the Web 2.0 gurus... everyone is starting to "make meaning" of all the technology!"

Experiment! This was another key word... and if you're not comfortable experimenting with the Web 2.0 technologies?... "get over it!" 2.0 technologies are NOT going away. It's just like Current Events... they just keep on coming.

At her system, they are desiging for "uncertainty" because things are changing faster than anyone can keep up. Our job is to "watch for trends," "try something and if it works, great, if not, then stop doing it," and remember, "there's no pressure to be 'right,' there's only change!"

PLAY! Technologies cannot be understood by talking about them... it's important to touch them and try them.

Some examples from her system was a contest they ran with teens who were asked to create "trailers" like the movies... but for books! (very cool idea!)

It's all about making it relevant to the customers (and to ourselves). But remember, we can't do it all.

Some primary spaces where all libraries should have a presence: Facebook, FlickR, LibraryThing, MySpace & YouTube.

We should begin asking, whenever we plan an event, would any kind of web-based participation enhance the program or event? For instance, if an author visits, wouldn't it be great to have a Q & A afterward as a podcast? Even something as simple as a comprehensive list of RSS feeds can direct specific information to the public.

Michael Stephens comments.

The evolving web is open and social. Is you library on Wikipedia? (The answer is yes, but it's out of date. Gotta fix that!!!)

There are lots of new sites that are aggregating content together to make things easier. One of them is called PageFlakes. We need to move ahead and all libraries should be doing IM by now ... and the aggregator for that is Meebo. An example of Meebo being used by a library is the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (right on the home page!)

The library needs to appear "transparent" and speak with a human voice (not vendor speak). And like Jen, repeats that the it's important to say, "yes" to play and experimentation, particularly with one's surroundings. "Throw out the culture of perfect!" He gave general examples of libraries worth viewing that have tried a variety of 2.0 technologies: Brooklyn Public Library, Darien Library, and Hennepin Copunty Public Library.

Ideas that have worked in other libraries: Storypalooza, interview the director, flickR profiles of the library, send in a photo of yourself reading, video tours, teen avatars - guess who we are.

Think of the library website as a sandbox! How does your library feel? What is the coolest library you have every visited in person and why? (His is Salt Lake City Public Library.) Think of "library as place." Is there a way to translate the physical appeal to the web?

Stephens believes that staff need to "bring your hearts to work." (See 2cents blog... not sure which link is the correct one on this... may need to do some extra looking.)

We are in the age of "continuous computing!" Also, consider, we need more "evidence based librarianship."

More examples? See Moraine Valley Community College Virtual Tours.

Stephens final quote: "Learn to Learn, Adapt to Change, Scan the Horizon."

John Blyberg's comments.

Blyberg tried a different take on things by "responding" point by point to the case being made against web 2.0 by Andrew Keen who wrote Cult of the Amateur. Some of Keen's observations include: "bad" stuff will be published if we allow "just anyone" to publish content, many people don't have "good taste" and should be monitored, big media (aka Hollywood) is better at creating movies, an author may be taken seriously and actually "influence" others, the web 2.0 lexicon is problematic, and artists are too opinionated. I think this list is enough alone and not worth additional comments. Blyberg and most Web 2.0 adherents think Keen is way off base. So do I.

Jill Stover: Off the Wall but On the Mark

How do you get started generating useful ideas?

Looking for the "white spaces" (kind of like negative space in art) -- places where there is a need and no current functionality to serve it.

Creative process: Divergent thinking --> Incubation --> Convergent thinking

Dangerous to skip the incubation step! Must "live with" an idea for a while *before* rejecting it.

Access is important -- but we need to find how we add value.

Creative people have "a beginner's mind" -- cleared your mind of the baggage of pre-conceived notions.

Idea of being observant to things that might normally escape notice. Example: a cup of tea with the tea bag string wrapped around the handle. Is this white space? Is there opportunity here?

Rules for brainstorming -- withhold judgement on ideas; encourage wild and exaggerated ideas; quantity of ideas more important than quality; building off the ideas of others; be supportive of all ideas

John Blyberg -- Innovation

Need to have rock-solid infrastructure before you can support innovation (John is coming from an IT in libraries background).

John says that if staff in his library want to do something with technology -- he never says no! But -- he does let the staff know what is involved and demands that the staff make a commitment to the project in the long run. Sometimes knowing what resources are going to be required is enough for the staff member not to pursue it.

Jessamyn West -- Sleeper 2.0: Agitprop Problem Solving

http://librarian.net/talks/agitprop

Interesting perspective on the Seattle Public Library -- may be really striking and beautiful, but not really very easy to work in -- if book truck is on the spiral staircase, no one else can use it.

Some wrap-up thoughts -- we are a field that has a tension -- we are both very traditional and on the cutting edge technologically. Putting innovation in place can be difficult in traditional environments.

Important not to get too personally invested in any particular project. Some will succeed, some will fail -- but that's ok. There have to be failures in innovation.