I wrote a while back about the WoGroFuBiCo report from LC, and then again a few days later about Karen Calhoun’s Response to WoGroFuBiCo.

Thanks to Karen Schneider twittering about Mann’s Opus, I picked up Thomas Mann’s response to the report.

Thomas’ response is entitled "On the Record" but Off the Track: A Review of the Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on The Future of Bibliographic Control, With a Further Examination of Library of Congress Cataloguing Tendencies

Mann starts his response with a section of major points, starting with the statement that:

The Working Group’s Report is off the track in many of its major assumptions, assertions, and recommendations

That’s a pretty strong statement, and what follows in 38 pages would do even Annoyed Librarian proud.

Over on Cataloguing Futures, Christine Schwartz describes the report as a must-read, Karen Schneider comments

How could I *not* love this report?

arkham sums up my feelings better, commenting

First, I ended up skipping a large amount of it, when it became abundantly clear that the majority of the paper is a long rant (and lecture) on how important LCSH and LCSH left-anchored browse are and how they work - and don’t work in an Amazoogle environment.

And this ranting style is what I struggle with most about the points, I agree with much of the sentiment, and having spoken to several folks at LC I think the WoGroFuBiCo do too.

The WoGroFuBiCo report treats much of what Mann deems important with a light touch not because it is unimportant, but because the library world has been doing stuff well for many, many years. The things it focuses on, moving onto the web more wholly and in a more embracing way.

WoGroFuBiCo is about stepping out into the world once more, not abandoning everything we hold dear.

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In the air once again, not quite on the way home, but on the way to the Open Library developers meet in San Francisco. A first chance to see the bridge for me.

But I’ll talk more about Open Library after hearing what folks there have to say, for now I need to tell you all about Code4Lib 2008…

Where to start? With three and a half packed days of workshops, breakouts, prepared talks and lightning talks as well as the evening socialising there’s just too much to cover. The conference was so well organised in fact that longer standing members of the Code4Lib community wondered if they were at the right conference. Roy Tennant’s absence this year also left some folks confused and disoriented.

My time began with some folks from LibLime who ran a great pre-conference session, as did Equinox (who do a lot of the work on Evergreen); no I wasn’t in two places at once. I spent the morning listening to Josh, Galen and Henri talking about Koha and Richard spent the morning with the Equinox crew talking Evergreen. They’re both great systems and I have to say getting Koha up and running to do some dev work on it was oh so simple. Dan Chudnov also got a pre-un-conference together, reports from that were good, but I didn’t quite catch what was discussed there.

The conference proper started on Tuesday, the organisation mostly done by Jeremy Frumkin of Oregon State. His organisation was so good that when he had to leave unexpectedly on the morning of day 2 it was easy for Ed Corrado, Dan Scott, Dan Chudnov and Ross Singer to step in and hold the reigns. Ross made a fantastic MC introducing each speaker in true Oscar’s style.

But enough name-checking, what about the meat of the sessions?

I spoke this year, and I knew I had a tough act to follow when I saw that I was straight up after Brewster Kahle’s keynote. Brewster is disarmingly witty and unassuming. Known best for his role at Internet Archive he talked about that a bit and about the Open Library project. Brewster used the occasion to announce that Talis are supporting the effort by donating the millions of records that form our 40 year-old union catalogue to Open Library. This gives Open Library a great boost of UK material including records about older rare and out-of-print stuff.

Brewster’s perspective on life seems to be that things “can’t be that hard” and that if you just make a start then you’ll see how far you can get. This approach has worked well for Internet Archive and appears to be working well for Open Library too. Perhaps we could all do with a bit more of that give-it-a-go approach in library land.

I followed Brewster with a piece about mining MARC data for relationships, a piece of R&D I’ve been working on for some time now. The Code4Lib channel occupants asked me to assume no prior knowledge of RDF, which we’ve been using to describe the relationships, and a load of people told me it was the first time they understood what RDF was about, so I’m chuffed with that. I’ll be presenting a very different side of that work at WWW2008 in April.

In the lightning talks, Andrew Bullen stunned us all with a beautiful piece, set to music, about the robber baron George Pullman, his carriages and the most wonderful music. He’s been scanning the sheet music of Pullman car classics, converting them to midi and releasing them in an archive of midi and MP3 files. Beautiful work that got him huge applause. There is a suggestion that his work should appear in a Code4Lib Journal article soon; that would make a nice sequel to his article on Historical Demographic Data in the town of Pullman.

Jodi Schneider, Ed Corrado and Jonathan Brinley talked us through the Code4Lib Journal, a fully-fledged journal (with its own ISSN, even!). The journal works through a small committee of editors and technical staff to produce a web-based journal once each quarter; they’re looking for new members for the team right now.

David Walker then covered the WorldCat API nicely in his talk about working with it to create a prototype local catalogue, very similar to what we’ve seen of WorldCat Local. It’s great to see OCLC letting their customers get at their data through this kind of API. The Grid services look like a great step forward for those who are members of the OCLC club.

Karen Coyle keynoted day two in her inimitable style, getting cheers, laughs and the occasional grumble of dissatisfied agreement from her audience. If there were ever an audience in almost total appreciation of Karen’s perspective, efforts and humour it would be Code4Lib. Taking us on a whistle-stop tour of RDA, RDF, the efforts of the RDA/DCMI folks and a sideways dig at Michael Gorman (best known in Code4Lib for Revenge of the Blog People!) she had us all hanging on her every word.

Karen’s talk included the introduction of FUQ lists (frequently unanswered questions), pronounced somewhat dangerously (see photo, right). You really have to watch the video (when it’s published) to do Karen’s keynote justice!

Corey Harper also did a piece on RDF/RDA toward the end of day 3; he did a great job at not repeating Karen (or me) and really got a lot of people further interested in why the DCAM work is really important.

Biblios, presented by Chris Catalfo, followed Karen and showed us all how good a web-based cataloguing interface really could be. I saw Biblios in its early stages, when it showed great promise. It now provides a slick, standalone cataloguing UI with plugins at the back to allow records to be stored and retrieved in different stores; that means it can be bolted onto any ILS. Very nice work Chris.

Emily Lynema and Terry Reese presented on the DLF ILS work to establish a common API spec across all ILSs, work we’ve been starting on here with Jangle. Ross did a great job of talking to various folks about how Jangle could fit in with the DLF efforts and Terry and Emily ran a fantastic breakout session for interested people to see how we can all drive forward with the DLF effort. This work follows on nicely from Emily’s Free The Data presentation from last year. Emily and Tito Sierra also did a slot on Talking with Talis last year.

Aaron Swartz did a great slot on the building of Open Library, including an explanation of ThingDB, this had a lot in common with Dan Scott’s talk on CouchDB. Both talks explained a lot about the benefits of extensible schema and both have a lot in common with RDF stores.

The chatter and banter in the Code4Lib IRC channel was, as always, inciteful, witty and good humored. I’m always pleased to see how well the smaller Code4Lib channel community opens up to the larger group of conference attendees - while there were several in-jokes floating around for the three days, everyone was welcomed and everyone supported in presenting.

That’s what really makes Code4Lib a very different style of conference. Around two-thirds of attendees also stood up to present, whether a session, a breakout or a lightning talk and that’s truly extra-ordinary.

To get a more emotional feel for the conference, you should check out the photos of code4lib 2008 on Flickr

Thanks to the efforts of Noel Pedens, videos will appear here sometime soon.

Next year is in Providence, RI, hosted by Brown University - thank goodness it’s on the east coast.

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December 21, 2007

Karen Calhoun
Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
6565 Kilgour Place
Dublin, OH 43017-3395 USA

Dear Karen,

Thank you for publishing your response to the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. You’ll forgive me if my open letter to you is a little less formal.

The working group’s draft presents the library world with a rallying point around which it can choose to really move forwards into the internet age in a way that it has not managed to achieve so far. You hold a unique position of power, this is clear from the fact that you get a mention in the working group report. But with great power comes great responsibility, and for anyone who’s watched Spiderman, it’s clear that often means giving things up.

Reading between the lines your response seems to be saying that you are, in fact, better placed and better qualified than the Library of Congress to take on the role of national data provider. That may very well be the case, you are certainly better funded - their budget of around $387 million for the national library has to work very hard looking after more than 134 million items as well doing all the other great work they do.

On the other hand, you have more than $234 million of your customers money to spend each year, without any items to look after. You also have nearly half-a-billion dollars sat aside to dip into should you have to do something big and important.

So if the community were to rally behind you as the centre of an effort to truly modernise, what would they have to demand of you?

Firstly, the community should insist you open up more. OCLC’s Office of Research gives quite a lot, but on the whole you could do more. The Library of Congress data is unambiguously in the public-domain, at least within the US. The community should demand that the data you manage on their behalf should be Open too. That would mean removing some of the technical controls you have in place, but most of all removing the restrictive terms you put in your membership contracts. The community should then protect any further contributions of their data by making them under a license such as the Open Data Commons License. Of course, lots of people would like to see LC move further in opening up too.

Secondly, the community should insist that the software they have paid you to write should be open-source. To say that you have released your FRBR algorithm when most librarys have no real chance of implementing it is somewhat disingenuous; give them the code. To say that crosswalks can be accessed through a web service is great, but not for everyone; give them the code. That would make Devon happy too, he wants his awesome work shared.

Thirdly, the community should insist you become more inclusive. Invite some vendors’ developers to join in the Grid Developer Network, or just invite everyone and see who comes. Tell everyone they’re free to blog about anything you’re doing - including your staff. Invite me to your symposium at ALA in June. Start a series of webcasts with great speakers who can influence the community.

Finally, the community should insist that you let go of control. That means not locking people in, it means not promoting worse solutions over better solutions just because you own the Copyright on the worse one - it means providing the tools for libraries to move from DDC to LCSH or MESH as well as the tools to move to it.

This last point is the key, letting go of control, as Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman describe it - the difference between the starfish and the spider. At the moment you’re a spider, but using the web as a platform means being a starfish. Skype, Craigslist, the many peer-to-peer networks, email and the very web itself all work precisely because Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf before him understood they had to let go of centralised control. Tim Berners-Lee got a Knighthood for letting go of control. We can’t promise you one, but you’d certainly earn the adulation of your peers.

Right now you’re too controlling, too centralised, too judgemental of your members, you’re a spider. Even your new logo with its big blue abdomen, green body and cute little orange head is just crying out for eight marker-pen legs, two marker-pen eyes and a cheeky little marker-pen smile. But the web wasn’t spun by spiders, it’s far more like the communication trails left by ants, another interesting social species.

The WoGroFuBiCo (as William Denton calls them) are asking the community to become a starfish, you need to stop being a spider.

Again, many thanks for making your response open and giving us a chance to widen the debate. Merry Christmas to all at OCLC from all of us here at Talis.

Respectfully,

Rob Styles
Geek, Talis

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Tim Spalding posts over on Thingology (LibraryThing’s ideas blog): Open data and the Future of Bibliographic Control

The post adds to the weight of people urging the future of bibliographic control working group to come out in support of open bibliographic data - a direction we’ve been supporting for a long time.

Specifically he points to a petition (started by Aaron Swarz I think) urging the working group along.

Sign the Open Bibliographic Data Petition here

Powered by ScribeFire.

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So, the Library of Congress Working Group on The Future of Bibliographic Control released their draft for public comment last week.

The draft contains 5 high level recommendations broken down into many smaller, detailed recommendations. The amount of detail in the 41 page report is impressive with some very focussed thoughts and very clear statements about what to do next, both for the LC and the wider community.

As well as reading the draft report you can watch the working group present their findings to LC, recorded a few weeks ago.

1. INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY OF BIBLIOGRAPHIC PRODUCTION

The first recommendation is about making the production, gathering, editing and flow of data as efficient as possible. The report makes recommendations ranging from mandating that publishers supply metadata as part of the CIP process (which LC already do) to ensuring that purchased datasets are not embargoed against sharing (hard to do given the business models of commercial data suppliers).

OCLC gets a special mention, saying that “OCLC’s business model has a real impact on the distributed system of bibliographic data exchange.” In our opinion that’s somewhat understating the case, certainly for those who aren’t members of the OCLC club. I’ve met many of the OCLC folks and they’re doing some great things, but they have a business model established before the net and having to protect that is damaging their members ability to participate in this networked world.

The thrust of the efficiency recommendations are about using data that’s already available. This comes in three flavours; contractual, ensuring that data is provided by suppliers and that data that has been purchased can be freely shared; technical, ensuring that crosswalks, converters etc are available to get this data into catalogues; and social, relaxing standards to accept existing data without effort over perfect data created from scratch.

There’s also an interesting piece on LC’s costs:

According to current congressional regulations, LC is permitted to recover only direct costs for services provided to others. As a result, the fees that the Library charges do not cover the most expensive aspect of cataloging: namely, the cost of the intellectual work. . The economics of creating LC’s products have changed dramatically since the time when the Library was producing cards for library catalogs. It is now time to reevaluate the pricing of LC’s product line in order to develop a business model that allows LC to more substantially recoup its actual costs.

Finding a business model that both allows distributed responsibility for the bibliographic data and allows LC to bring in more money is a big ask. Commercial organisations are struggling with exactly that right now; OCLC being the biggest amongst them. Given that LC data is not covered by any intellectual property rights (the work of federal employees does not qualify for Copyright protection and the US has no Database Right) I don’t see any practical way for LC to achieve both objectives.

If the management of the data can be successfully distributed then much of the cost would also be distributed. In this case, with the community as a whole producing much of the data, it becomes even more important to clarify the rights people have over the data. We’ve been working on this problem for a little while, releasing an initial draft license for this purpose (licensed community generated data) more than a year ago and having recently released further drafts for comment. We’ve funded legal work and expect to have some more news on progress with our data license here very soon.

Also included in this first recommendation is some discussion of internationalising and expanding the Authorities data. I’m not sure I see this as an efficiency gain, but bringing together authorities from national libraries in many languages and reconciling them has the potential to revolutionise global bibliographic search. This work is already underway and, as long as the data is free for all to use, will be a great endeavour. This, in my mind, is the most compelling reason for LC to be asking for more funding and clearer national mandate.

2. ENHANCE ACCESS TO RARE AND UNIQUE MATERIALS

This second section focusses on one aspect of libraries that has competitive advantage over anything else - obscure stuff. The obvious example here in the UK is St John Rylands with their manuscripts, but every library has its own unique and interesting pieces. The same arguments around data as in section come up again - with a recommendation to focus on at least some access to all resources rather than having some perfectly catalogued and others not at all.

There are also calls to digitise these assets where possible and make them available online, partnering to do this where necessary.

I’ll jump on now, as section 3 and 4 float my boat a bit more.

3. POSITION OUR TECHNOLOGY FOR THE FUTURE

We have become slaves to MARC, so too have our systems vendors

That has to be the headline of this section; it’s a quote from Brian E. C. Schottlaender from the working group presentation of the draft to LC.

In my mind, MARC stands in that sentence as a placeholder for all of the library-centric, complex and web-hostile standards that we currently rely on. You could easily add Z39.50, NCIP and a host of others to the list.

The point of all of the recommendations in this section is to be able to play nicely with the web, but even in the draft report there are still signs of the record-centric thinking that MARC forces us into.

Library bibliographic data will move from the closed database model to the open Web-based model wherein records are addressable by programs and are in formats that can be easily integrated into Web services and computer applications. This will enable libraries to make better use of networked data resources and to take advantage of the relationships that exist (or could be made to exist) among various data sources on the Web.

Overall, though, the recommendations are a very good start. The data needs to be made web-accessible, the vocabularies need to be published, freely, in machine-readable forms and software everywhere must be allowed to link to elements of the data. The description is very much inline with the work that the W3C and others are doing around publishing data on the Semantic Web - it would be nice to have the report come down explicitly in support of this to save everyone two years arguing about how to publish data on the web. Currently the semantic web is only mentioned in passing in 3.2.1.2.

There are developers at the LC who are interested and active in the Semantic Web space already. LC should invite them to show the rest of LC what they’ve been playing with and what the impact of it could be. The recommendations mention SKOS, a way of representing subject headings. I’ve seen work to represent LCSH in SKOS and it looks great - LC should be opening up and promoting this kind of work.This is specifically covered in 4.

Section 3 also contains probably the biggest shocker; “Suspend further new work on RDA”. The reason is to spend time getting FRBR tested and straightened out. I hope it’s just a question of naming as many of the names involved in the RDA stuff are now pushing actively on getting FRBR sorted. Judging by the traffic on mailing lists like NGC4LIB the recommendation at least got everyone to sit up and listen.

The working group see the results of work done on FRBR as a tantalising sign of what could be done to really change the search experience for library users. Having done work on record clustering myself I have to agree. FRBR is only one step along that road, though. With the right model many relationships can mined in the data, making it explorable in a way that catalogues just aren’t today.

4. POSITION OUR COMMUNITY FOR THE FUTURE

The changing demands of library users, the increasing diversity of uses both of library resources and the metadata about them and the recurring references to making the data machine-usable will all be very familiar to those following the biblioblogosphere. That’s a very good thing, there are a lot of smart people on the working group and many more smart people not on the working group.

I was expecting more in this section around people, they make up the community after all. Instead the report focusses on some more technical efforts to link library data with other resources, integrating user-contributed data, make FRBR happen and open LCSH up for re-use wherever desired. It seems to me that these recommendations could easily have been viewed as technology recommendations. It seems almost as though they sit as surrogates or euphemisms for what is said more openly on the mailing lists - that people will have to change. Of course many people are changing already and starting to do much of what the report discusses, others are still reticent, unsure of the need for change and fearful of losing technologies they believe have served libraries well for forty years or more.

The recommendations in section 4, if viewed as surrogates for the real point, are in effect saying “Change is coming, these are the first and you need to get on-board with these”. If that’s what the working group intended to say, I’d like to see it said explicitly.

If we really want an active, world-wide bibliographic community - which would be necessary for many of the recommendations in previous sections - it would be great to see some discussion of how that might coalesce. Distributed management of bibliographic data is a fine start, but Talis, OCLC and other already do that. What factors are necessary to really form a community, as Flickr, Facebook, MySpace or Second Life have?

5. STRENGTHEN THE LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE PROFESSION

Step one on getting better at this is apparently to build an evidence base of the costs and benefits of various initiatives - that is, get professional about knowing what is worth the time, effort and money. This seems like a sensible thing to do, and slightly odd that it’s not already being done. As a majority employee-owned software company we all keep an eye on what we’re doing to make sure we’re doing the most important and valuable things.

The next step is to support ongoing research - that is, if you have people in your teams interested in where this should go let them play! Let them try stuff out, give them some time to try mining the marc data or designing an ontology, like Martha Yee did.

Then, to ensure the future of these efforts, change LIS education, convince educators to do more on bibliographic control fundamentals and convince them to share that material widely. A nice set of efforts, but judging by the way computer science education affects the wider industry, a ten-year strategy at a minimum.

6. JFDI

During the presentation of this report to LC, the working group were challenged that LC are already doing much of this, and others are doing much of it too. That’s a good thing, it means the recommendations and our actions are in agreement.

What’s notable by its absence in the report is input and commitment from ILS vendors. As ILSs are so intimately tied with MARC and the language of MARC very little can change without vendors involvement; even with the profusion of free and open-source tools we hope to see appear.

But, doing much of it and having done much of it are a world apart. I think there’s still time to change and to be a part of the web. The semantic web offers real opportunity for libraries to have the best of both worlds; and then some. To close the stable door in time, however, will require faster change than we’ve ever seen before.

Let me know what you think of the report by commenting below.

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Les Watson is up talking about Reconfiguring the Library for 21st Century Learning, a bold title. Paul and Andy and other have seen Les before, so he comes with high expectations as a great speaker; easily able to deliver on a title that promises so much.

Les starts with a great statement:

There is, as yet, no paradigm for the 21st century library.

and explains that he was instrumental in the much acclaimed work on the Saltire Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University

He talks about the transition over time from a mainly agricultural economy where knowledge was about Know-How, through industrial and information based economies where knowledge is about Know-What to what we see as our destination; a Concept economy where the important knowledge is Know-Who and Know-Why. This story starts to feel directly relevant to me, not just in a passing interest in academic libraries, but as a lifelong learner trying to understand how I know what I do know and how to keep moving to cover more of what I don’t.

The chart showing the transition in the dominant economy he attributes to Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind. Yet another one to add to the bedside table.

The only tool to get the country as a whole up this curve is our education system, students coming out need to have more skills in collaboration and lifelong learning than those before them. In large part this is because the world is no longer about what we know, but about what we can work together to achieve - it is the discovery and emergence of the unexpected, the surfacing of the previously unknown that drives innovation. To support and illustrate that notion Les directs us to The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Having justified the need for real and fundamental change Les discusses a three-legged strategy: People, Technology and the Built Environment. Unlike most projects that consider these three in isolation, often at different times, Les shows that they interplay and must be considered together.

So with these three legs working together in a synergistic strategy Les goes on to tell us that buildings are predictions; that is the designs of buildings are predictions about how they will be used. But as well know that predictions are always wrong, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot we must try to build in a way that flex with the mistakes we make.

To do that Les believes it’s important to understand how far students today are from the education system they have to go through. To illustrate this point brilliantly he uses the great video A Vision of Students Today from the Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State University. The video tells us lots of things we already know - that their is a generation of digital natives who work differently to the generations before them, that think differently. Les goes a step further than acknowledging that culture and way beyond simply tolerating or even accepting that culture. Les explains that the education system needs to positively embrace this culture.

As Les talks about txting, Facebook and gaming he explains that the common thread is one of playfulness and fun and that maybe the fundamental change in education is one of building a play ethic rather than a work ethic; especially if we are to develop the concept economy he referred to earlier. In this play ethic there is a move to collaboration, synthesis rather than analysis of knowledge and above all engagement.

Les represents this in brilliant way with a quadrant chart showing intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on the Y axis and active or passive engagement on the X. He explains that our education is firmly in bottom-left, yet the people we want our students to become need to be firmly in the top-right. As a parent with school-age children this is a description that feels all too familiar. He quotes Sir Ken Robinson:

without motivation there is no learning

Les didn’t reference it, but a great parallel to this presentation is Sir Ken Robinsons’ talk, Do schools kill creativity?, at TED. What he did reference in addition to the Ken Robinson quote is Richard Florida’s book The Rise of The Creative Class. Richard Florida podcasted The Rise of The Creative Class on IT Conversations back in 2004. This move from services to experience relies heavily on informal, social learning time. This instinctively feels right, all learning starts with conversation - remember how you started to learn to do our job? But if you’re still unsure he offers up Richard Feynman’s assertion from The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:

thinking is nothing but talking to yourself inside

For more insight into Feynman you might want to check out video of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, from 1981. As an inspiring call for action, Les finishes up with an inspiring slideshow of great buildings that people want to engage with and a short video from an American Architectural Foundation project working on a Denver school - a project that makes the students feel welcome, important and the focus of the schools activities.

Uplifting and inspiring - if you get the chance to hear Les talk; or invite him to help you work on your own projects you should expect something special.

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Marshall Breeding’s flown across the pond to join us for today and as part of his visit he’s currently presenting to around 150 librarians on the need for a new model in library automation.

Unlike some voices in the community Marshall doesn’t claim to know what’s needed; though he has some strong suggestions for some of it. Luckily for us, listening to Marshall is like listening to our own list of internal priorities.

Firstly, he quite rightly points out that consolidation in the market has left libraries with less choice and less flexibility. Not only that, but we have no success in bringing new systems to market; Marshall cites Horizon 8 recently being axed before launch and Taos from a few years back. In minor contrast I would point out that We’ve just rolled out a major release to 90% of our customer base with minimal disruption - but Marshall is keen to remind us just when these systems were first architected, and Alto is amongst the oldest on his chart.

In fact the only recent ground-up new system to enter the fray is Evergreen, but Marshall isn’t too interested in that today as it’s really doing the same things in the same ways for the most part and Marshall sees reasons to break out of the current model.

Breaking out will require dis-satisfaction with the current model, not just a little, but real and increasing dis-satisfaction. What Marshall says he really wants to know is:

Who’s doing the something that’s cooler than the iPhone?

He goes on to cover the need for openness, not just open-source, but data, conversation, APIs and much more. There are many ways to be open other than open-source and Marshall is keen to get all of them in this new world.

He gives several suggestions, from getting NISO involved with a standardised API spec to ensuring Google can see and reflect your libraries holdings appropriately. There were one or two things on the list we’re not doing yet - maybe there’s more to add to our todo list…

A video if Marshall presenting Working toward a new model of library automation at Talis Insight will be up soon.

Technorati Tags: birmingham, insight, Insight07, marshall breeding, talis

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After doing my (short) stint on stage as a bit-part in our Roadmap presentation, I thought I’d try and get into the hottest, hippest, coolest, wickedest, sickest (that means good now, apparently) session of the conference. A conversation with the Future, a panel session with a few voices you should know from Ian Corns’ young librarians series on Talking with Talis.

Chaired by Frances Hendrix, a woman with no small reputation, the session was a great chance for this group, all of whom have great future’s ahead of them.

In an echo of some of Euan’s thoughts there was a lot of passion for bringing libraries together with Facebook, libraries together with MySpace and libraries together with the web as it is today. What stops them doing that now? Empowerment, permission and time are big factors; with a unanimous message that the committees, debates and reports are just taking too long and that what they want is to just get on and do it!

The panel, Michael Stead, Bolton Central Library; Subnum Hariff, Bolton Central Library; Cheney Gardner, MLA; Claire Styles, Freelance Libraries Consultant and Anna Simmons, Luton Libraries were well-informed, energetic and looking forward to a brighter future for libraries - a future they plan to create.

Technorati Tags: birmingham, conference, insight, talis, young librarians

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Paul and Richard might be missing-in-action for a day or so as the whole company is sitting over at our conference, Talis Insight and Paul and Richard are chairing tracks. It’s about half way through the first day and so far it’s been thoroughly great - but I would say that, I work here.

This morning kicked off with an opening welcome and teaser from Dave Errington, our CEO, followed by a presentation from Euan Semple from which I take the title of this post. Euan is one of those people who not only totally gets what happening in this changing landscape of social knowledge, but who also delights in sharing that insight.

Euan talked through a range of social changes that he helped happen within the BBC and that he is talking about all over. Blogs, Forums and Wikis form the first phase of the change, but Connect (an internal Facebook style service), a BBC senior managers blog, Plase a wi-fi based geo-location announcing service and Last.fm also feature.

It would be so easy to rattle on and on about the technologies at play here, but that’s not the key thing. The key part of Euan’s thesis is that these tools provide fundamental changes to the ways people meet, learn about each other and both establish and maintain those relationships. That is, says Euan, the reason he ended up walking past the Whitehouse putting the world to rights with Thomas Vander Wal (who coined the term ‘folksonomy’).

There is something genuinely empowering about your own blog, or a wiki where you can correct any page within just a few clicks. This empowerment requires trust and Euan relates stories of managers who don’t trust their staff to do these things - perhaps those managers need to look at their recruitment policy, says Euan.

That trust brings up an even more interesting observation though. two clicks to edit a page; no 30 page report, no knowledge management system, no review committee - surely that can’t be Proper Work? However, contrary to first impressions, these are the most auditable tools there are. He shows a video of the changes to the Wikipedia entry for the 7 July London bombings - The footage shows how the page evolves and adapts as new information is brought together. At one point the page is replaced by an extremist comment, but almost immediately reverts back to a previous, objective, report. Shortly after Euan was asked to compare the reporting on Wikipedia with the reporting on BBC News Online; he found the BBC wanting…

Overall the thrust of Euan’s talk is that you should allow everyone in your organisation access to these new capabilities, both inside and outside the organisation’s walls. Oh, and once you have, get out of their way.

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