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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Let me start with a question - what is the collective noun for clouds? In trying to dream up a catchy title for this post, which you will discover once I’ve stopped waffling is about Word Clouds, I tried to discover from colleagues and places like answers.com what you call a collection of clouds. Answers received so far: a host, a storm, a front, and the one I chose - a cloud. I’m sure someone out there will be able to put me right on this, I’ll be monitoring the comments with interest.

Anyway, why am I so interested in [word] clouds all of a sudden? Well its is not all of a sudden, I’ve been interested word/tag clouds as a device for serendipitous browsing through a set of meta data based upon the popularity of words within, or tags associated with, information, for a while.

Flickr, Technorati, and LibraryThing, are all well know examples of the use of these clouds in a user interface. More examples are appearing almost daily.

The thing that triggered me to write this post was the appearance of a word cloud on the site for the BBC’s radio station Radio 1. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you should see a display of the most popular words contained in SMS text messages sent to the station. This is refreshed every couple of minutes or so, so gives an insight in to what the station’s audience is thinking about. With the station receiving often in excess of 1,000 messages per hour, the theme behind the words displayed is an aggregate of a fair amount of input. The tool that displays this also checks for well know words, like the name of a group or DJ, and makes them a clickable link to more information.

The thing that struck me about this implementation is that the BBC just put it there with no explanation or hints, expecting that their online audience will understand that words in larger fonts are more popular than others in smaller fonts and the ones in blue are clickable. Not that many months ago I remember having to explain those concepts to those seeing Flickr and del.icio.us tag clouds for the first time.

The Web 2.0/Library 2.0 world is one where new user interface metaphors appear and become accepted very rapidly. Although, I am still aware of some libraries who shy away from making changes to their OPACs until ‘there has been training‘. All I can say to such organizations is that I think you will find your online audience is more astute and open to change than you think. By all means offer some ‘How to get the most from the new features’ sessions, but if you have to train in the basics you have probably got your interface wrong.

Another thing that made me think about word clouds today, was a comment that somebody made in a telephone conversation about the Aquabrowser OnLine trials of libraries, such as Islington Libraries, who have contributed to the Talis Platform, that I posted about the other day. The comment passed on from a further education college was that the word cloud in the Aquabrowser OnLine interface could be of great help to those with dyslexic problems identifying different spellings etc. Another good example of how offering access to data by using new and innovative user interface metaphors, in addition to the traditional ones, can have unexpected beneficial consequences.

Technorati Tags: Talis, Talis Platform, Library, Library 2.0, Web 2.0, Aquabrowser, Tagging, Radio 1, BBC

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Tim Spalding over at LibraryThing provides a nice write-up of Richard Wallis’ LibraryThingThing extension to the Firefox web browser. A number of interesting points get raised in his post, and in the comments shared by members of LibraryThing’s community, and I thought it might be useful to offer a few thoughts in response.

Firstly, Tim writes;

“This is an exceedingly cool mashup, and a very good demonstration of all the components. To my mind, it would be more useful if it did less, telling you only if the book was in your library.”

With straightforward access to a raft of Platform APIs and a solid body of data on library holdings, it becomes feasible to slice and dice the results in whatever way makes most sense to the users themselves, rather than insisting upon any ‘one size fits all’ solution. I can, personally, think of a whole host of reasons why you might wish to view holdings from a user-selected set of libraries, and the real technology lying behind Richard’s simple browser extension is certainly capable of supporting these use cases.

I, for example, live in one place and work in another, 150 miles away. I’d like to see the library local to my home and the library local to my office. I have no interest (no offence intended!) in the libraries of North Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and wherever else lies along my route.

Or what about the university student who wishes to see their own university library, the public library of their university’s city, the public library in the town where their parents live, and the public and university libraries in the city where their boy/girlfriend is studying?

We are also seeing a welcome (and long overdue) growth in interest around the notion of collaborative access arrangements between neighbouring libraries, which is ultimately to the benefit of all library users. Rather than conducting painfully slow and eye-wateringly expensive procurements for yet another monolithic dinosaur of a system (believe me, I’ve read some of the procurement documents!), technologies such as those behind Richard’s tool might usefully and easily be aligned with existing library systems, in order that a borrower is able to see holdings data from all the institutions participating in a particular scheme. Indeed, if nothing fancier were required, Richard’s existing code could easily be modified for deployment on top of an existing OPAC. Imagine looking for a book in the library of the university at which you are studying, finding that the book is on loan, and having a browser extension very similar to LibraryThingThing let you know that there’s a copy in the local public library…?

LibraryThingThing is a rapidly produced (one afternoon, essentially) illustration of a number of possibilities. A tool deployed to best advantage in day to day use would doubtless concentrate upon fulfilling a smaller set of purposes with greater focus. Given the open nature of the APIs behind LibraryThingThing, there’s nothing to stop any of you experimenting and producing the tool that does what you want it to. If you like the idea of wrapping the tool up for delivery as a Greasemonkey plugin or Firefox browser extension as Richard did, the source of the Greasemonkey plugin is also available for you to modify.

Tim goes on to add;

“How should LibraryThing tie into libraries. As always, your thoughts are much appreciated.

We were, actually, planning on doing something like this, and even started the code. When we bring something live it will be a lot less technically elegant—good old server-side programming—but also not browser- and extension-dependent.”

Excellent! We’d (obviously) be keen to see LibraryThing extend in this way with the help of the underlying Platform technologies that made Richard’s browser extension so easy to produce. The Platform and its APIs are neither browser nor extension-dependent; Firefox and Greasemonkey simply provided an easy way for Richard to bring LibraryThing and some of our Platform components together without needing to get inside LibraryThing’s codeline. Tim would be able to use the same Platform components, but in a way that integrated them far more closely with LibraryThing without the need for particular browsers or extensions. That sounds like a win-win to me, and one we’d of course be happy to lend assistance to…

Now to the comments…

James Darlack writes;

“Perhaps rather than having LTThing look up only a specific library, it would be helpful if it could look libraries within a preset distance of a zip code, similar to the way Open WorldCat works.”

Absolutely. Behind the scenes, one of the places that LibraryThingThing looks for data is to the Talis Directory. This can hold various details about libraries, including their postal address and their latitude and longitude. The Directory is an open repository of information about a growing body of libraries, and if your local library isn’t listed you are free (indeed hereby encouraged!) to add it. The information you contribute is governed by a flexible and permissive licence, and a growing body of Platform APIs ensure that the data can be consumed by a range of third party applications to provide the sort of capability that you would like to see. The open nature of the APIs ensures that you actually have a far greater degree of flexibility than Open WorldCat achieves by drawing you back to an Open WorldCat-controlled web page every time you use it, meaning that you could do all sorts of quite clever things with the location data if you had the will and the ability. Libraries within a preset distance of a zip code, but on a bus route? Libraries within a preset distance of a zip code, but close to a Starbucks? Libraries within a preset distance of a zip code, with convenient parking and a copy of the book on the shelf? These applications aren’t necessarily for Talis to build. We simply provide the tools to enable the community to do so.

Jonathan Cohen adds;

“When I click on the LTThing link, the only libraries it finds are British ones. Is Talis a British-only service, or is there some other reason?”

The Talis Platform, and the open and inclusive model that it represents, is a relatively recent activity for Talis and it will take time to work with the community on increasing the (already large) number of libraries represented. The holdings data visible to the Talis Platform today are predominantly those contributed to the Platform as part of library participation in a UK service we also run, called Talis Source.

The Platform itself is not restricted to the UK, and nor are the tools and applications built on top of it. If your local library is interested in contributing holdings data to the Platform (free of charge) so that it can be visible in LibraryThingThing and a growing number of other contexts, you should certainly encourage them to get in touch.

In investing in the Talis Platform, we at Talis are demonstrating our commitment to the continued development of libraries. We are also showing, quite explicitly, that library data has a value far beyond the walls of the library. Sites such as LibraryThing, complete with their significant (53,940 when I checked) communities of passionate bibliophiles offer one obvious place in which it makes sense to bring as many library-sourced resources as possible. Why make it hard for LibraryThing’s members to take the logical step into a convenient library? Why require those libraries to join some expensive club, just to make their holdings (or their very existence) visible?

Free participation. Easy contribution. Open APIs and a permissive license. It really does make sense, and every day it becomes harder to justify the monolithic technologies, closed clubs and exorbitant charges of the past with which libraries and their users continue to grapple today. There really is a better way. Come and see, then help build it.

Technorati Tags: Audience, Blogging, Folksonomy, Libraries, Library 2.0, LibraryThing, mashup, MUTL06, Participation, Platforms, API, Talis, Talis Platform, TDN, Web 2.0, web services

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I am currently sat at the back of a hotel conference room in Leeds, in the morning session of one of the Talis Customer Days is in full flow. I am presenting on the future, Web/Library 2.0, and the Talis Platform during the afternoon session. Through the wonders of hotel broadband [it’s a wonder it ever works]; bringing a wireless router with me; and Virtual Private Networking [VPN] I’m not only physically in Leeds, I am virtually at the Talis Offices near Birmingham.

This is, frustratingly, very real - I now know via internal email that I have just missed the breakfast van; the sandwich delivery has just taken place at the Talis office, and its still two hours to lunch here in Leeds! An example of, virtual, local activity in a global context - because of ubiquitous Internet connectivity I could have been equally frustrated by messages about sandwiches anywhere on the planet.

This brought me thinking about the comments that have flowed from Paul Miller’s posting from a couple of days ago.

In discussing shared participation Paul commented:

there’s certainly a place for viewing comments by those geographically nearby. There must surely also be value in viewing comments across a community of interest, regardless of space. Yes, there’s already Amazon, but the comments are locked up there. A shareable pool of comments contributed to and consumed by libraries

This drew the, somewhat surprising to me, comment from John Blyberg at Ann Arbor:

In regards to shared participation, yes, I agree with you Paul that building a pool of contributed content could be a powerful and useful addition to any PAC. However, in a community such as Ann Arbor where both Ed and I live, my intuition tells me that we would want to avoid such a clearinghouse and opt for a community-built social software program. The reason is that (as most people in Ann Arbor would agree), our community is very unique and filled to the brim with book-lovers and library-users who could start building a database that belongs solely to our community and reflects the tastes and interests of the community, not the world at large. The main problem with a large shared database is that it is no longer unique and will ultimately align itself with the likes of Amazon.

It is at times like these that you have the realization that your assumptions are not always in line with everyone else’s.

So what are my assumptions then? Well firstly, the contributions of the citizens of Ann Arbor would be of great use, interest, and value to a far wider audience than just their district. Secondly, contributions to any global pool should be tagged as to their source and type. Thirdly, because of that tagging, selection of results should be able to be via many filters such as library, library authority or institution, library type, country, language etc.

So following through those assumptions in John’s situation, I would hope that contributions for my community would add value to the global pot; be displayable locally in isolation as a coherent set; and optionally could be supplemented by those from other appropriate communities around the country and the rest of the world.

To answer my own question in the title of this posting, providing data is tagged as to its source and type, Local is just a filtered view of Global resources so under the hood they can be the same thing.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Library 2.0

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Writing on LISNews, Blake draws my attention to a post by Rory Litwin on Library Juice.

“Privacy is a central, core value of libraries”

Is it? Ensuring access to a wide range of material, yes. Protecting the individual’s right to go where they wish without censorship or censure, yes. But ‘Privacy’ is a term that can quickly become overly loaded, and can equally quickly become a quite ridiculous justification for not doing anything interesting.

“As serious as privacy concerns may turn out to be, the features of Web 2.0 applications that make them so useful and fun all depend on users sharing private information with the owners of the site, so that it can be processed statistically or shared with others. This presents a problem for librarians who are interested in offering Library 2.0 types of services. If we value reader privacy to the extent that we always have, I think it’s clear that our experiments with Library 2.0 services will have uncomfortable limitations. This is probably going to lead many librarians to say that privacy is not as important a consideration as it once was. They will say that the Millennial generation doesn’t have the same expectations of libraries in terms of privacy that older generations do, and that we should simply adjust.”

Mungeing of data streams to create large anonymised sets, opt-in, informed consent. Each is a powerful tool in ensuring that we can leverage value in the aggregate whilst protecting the individual, and we should not be afraid to make full use of them in delivering services to those users.

There is a balance to be struck between surrendering ourselves fully to the Cloud in order to gain maximum ‘benefit’ from personalisation, network effects, wise crowds of strangers with long tails and all the rest on one hand, and presenting an opaque and impermeable face to the outside world that reduces our capability to benefit from the network’s intelligence on the other.

That balance is not for the library to strike on my behalf, although the library may well have a role to play (along with many others) in ensuring that my decisions can be informed.

Rory raises a number of points that are worth thinking through, but whilst recognising the importance of upholding and protecting personal freedoms we must not become trapped in endless agonising over whether or not our poor misguided users should be ‘allowed’ to ‘give up their privacy’.

Technorati Tags: attention, Audience, Libraries, Library 2.0, Participation, Social Networking, Talis, Trust

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ZDNet carries a piece from Reuters, entitled “Bertelsmann looking to create ‘MySpace’ for older set”, which continues;

“German media group Bertelsmann plans a return to the Internet and is looking at transforming its Direct Group of book, CD and DVD clubs into an Internet networking scene for older people.

The company believes that Direct Group can turn its aging customer base of around 35 million to its advantage by changing its traditional clubs into Internet communities of like-minded people united by their similar cultural interests.”

In many ways, an interesting idea, but I can’t help wondering what role the library could play here were the community to demonstrate sufficient will?

“Book club” ?

“similar cultural interests” ?

Sound familiar? And would you rather have that with or without Bertelsmann’s “lucrative” proposition that is to be “driven by advertising” and [presumably with] an “intrusive brand”?

Technorati Tags: attention, Libraries, Participation

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John Blyberg (that mover and shaker) muses in his latest post about the social role of the OPAC.

Dave Pattern the always active proponent of doing stuff to add value to the experience of those using the OPAC at the University of Huddersfield, has spent much of his weekend Ajax-ing to deliver functionality around serendipity suggestions and related items.

All this cranial and coding activity as made me start to wonder what would be the norm for OPACs in say 4-5 years time. In the same way the Web OPAC had become the norm by 2000 (although its early predecessors surfaced in 1995), by 2010 the results of pioneering work today should be part of the mainstream.

I’ve pondered this a bit more in a forum posting in TDN, where I’ve thrown up the question “OPAC-2010 what do you think it will look like?”

I invite you to tell me where you think the OPAC as an interface to our/your libraries is headed…

Technorati Tags: Library 2.0, Web 2.0, OPAC

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In my posting about my recent enjoyable trip to the University of Huddersfield I asked Iman Morandi [Huddersfield’s answer to Superpatron] if he had a screen shot of the PDA application which he produced as part of his library project.

Not only has he done that, as you can see, but also he has provided a link to a flash demo of it running here. ( Once it has loaded, click on the button and once the display has come up hover over the book jacket images)

I’m sure Iman would like me to emphasis at this point that this is a demonstration of a prototype, and not as yet a real product.

As Superpatron himself, Edward Vielmetti commented “that’s a good idea“. Again Iman, a thought provoking, simple but impressive demonstration of what the technological side of Library 2.0 is all about - getting the bits of the library that a user can benefit from to where they need it when they need it!

Technorati Tags: Library 2.0

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With apologies for the plethora of Michaels and Crunches in this sentence… Michael Casey at LibraryCrunch picks up Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post about Teleflip, and he considers possibilities for the deployment of such a product in the service of library users.

He covers the use of text messages to inform borrowers about holds, overdues, and similar traditional library messages; something that Talis already handles with Talis Message.

“What really got me thinking was how we could use this in libraries. Without having to purchase any additional equipment or software, we could use the customer’s cell number (with their permission, of course) to send reminders about holds, late items, etc., by simply entering their cell number (plus @teleflip.com) into the email notification field in our ILS software. From that point on, all messages would arrive as SMS text messages, right on their cell phone.”

As Gordon Fowler comments in response to Michael (Casey)’s post, the use of text messages to reach library users is surely only the beginning, but we have a long way to go to reach a model whereby any user can (easily!) select from a battery of communications methods for talking to the library, receiving information from the library, or conversing with the library. They will also, of course, need to be able to easily - and probably frequently - change their preference.

And - before anyone else says it! - we need to continue to offer broadly comparable levels of service to those unwilling or unable to use and configure a mobile phone.

Today, something like Talis Message is associated quite closely with a third party capable of sending the text messages on the library’s behalf. In a Web/Library 2.0 world, companies such as Teleflip (which appears only to work in the USA?) or e-txt should be able to market their message-sending capabilities aggressively, offering different capabilities - or prices - to individual libraries in such a way as to make it easy and painless to switch from one provider to another as and when a compelling opportunity to do so arises.

Tools are becoming ever better at coping with notions of ‘presence’, and adapting the ways in which they behave depending upon where we are, what we’re doing, and what the source of any external contact might be. More than four years ago, my mobile/cell phone was capable of being switched from a ‘normal’ mode (in which it just rang), to an outdoor mode (in which it rang loudly), to a meeting mode (in which it either vibrated, or shunted calls straight to voicemail). I had to do the mode switching, though, and I had to remember to do it. The phone was also capable of handling calls from various people in different ways, and at that particular time was set to always allow calls through from one number, ringing just as loudly as it could to drag me out of whatever meeting I found myself in, and home for the arrival of a baby. In the end, I never got to find out if it worked, nor to experience the glares of fellow meeting attendees who would doubtless assume I’d carelessly forgotten to switch the phone to silent (as if!) rather than knowing the truth of my clever and careful programming…

As products such as Microsoft’s latest battery of communications tools become better at coping with notions of ‘presence’, deciding whether my desk or mobile/cell phone rings in response to a call, and making decisions as to which device should receive IM traffic, we begin to move to a world in which some of these distinctions can be handled automatically, on our behalf.

How far (quite?) are we from a situation in which I might receive an e-mail if sat at my desk, or a text message if on the road? Do we want such a world?

Technorati Tags: Audience, Libraries, Mobile Web, Web 2.0

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