My intention is more to talk about how I see the web now, especially the part that we still call the “social web” or “read/write web” or whatever. (One of my points is that this is really all just “the web,” as people don’t log into Facebook and say “I’m gonna get my web 2.0 on!”) I try and show that even for things that look trivial from outside, there is real communication happening between real people and real communities forming that transcend websites and screennames.

I did the same talk twice in a row this morning, which was great, because it meant that it wasn’t the same talk. In the first session, I was too concerned about getting through what I’d planned to talk about. I think people enjoyed the talk–they were polite enough to say so, anyway–but after me gabbing for 45-50 minutes, no one was really interested in questions or discussion. I’d talked them into submission.

For the second group, I didn’t wait until the end for questions. I picked a spot right after talking about this idea that social networks look different from the inside than they do from outside. At that point, I stopped and asked for comments and reactions, or for people to share their stories about their own use of online social networks.

By stopping in the middle, I think I left them enough room to enter the conversation, and not feel that I had already said everything that needed to be said. People talked about how they found long-ago neighbors on Facebook; about the perils of the library trying out every new thing; and about wikis and authority and etiquitte. It was great. I had to thow out my last dozen slides or something, but who cares?

I kinda kicked myself a little bit, because this seems to be a lesson I have to keep learning. Just as with an unconference, it’s the people actually in the room that count, not what I thought would make for a good talk the night or the week or the year before. Just as with my instuction sessions for students, it’s probably best to go in with a few outcomes in mind and leave the details to work themselves out. Just like online social networks themselves, presentations can be about sharing and conversation and community instead of just an information dump.

“Howdy” JCPL

Originally uploaded by Hatchibombotar.

On Friday, I drove up to the Jefferson County Fairgrounds where the Jefferson County Public Library was having their annual All Staff Day. Thanks to a referral from Meredith Farkas, the Jeffco folks had asked me to talk about web 2.0 / social software stuff.

I did a session I called Social Software for Library People. I had a longish time slot of 90 minutes. I knew that many of the Jeffco staff would already have some familiarity with many of the sites I wanted to talk about, and I also assumed that if I just got up and ran through the usual suspects one after another, it would get old fast. So instead, I tried to talk about a few common features or ideas expressed in social software, and look at what that meant. I used a lot of library examples, but the idea wasn’t so much “what can this library system do with social software?” but “what kind of things might people who work in libraries want to know about social software?”

I took a lot of inspiration (and some of my section titles) from Ryan Deschamps’ post Navigating Online Cultures, and I owe a lot to the Library Society of the World, members of which have been very patient with me for the past few weeks as I solicited their ideas and opinions and generally nattered on about my preparations for this presentation.

There were three or four simultaneous sessions, and I ended up with group of about 50-75 people. I think they enjoyed the session–I know I did. They fed me, gave me a bag full of library swag, paid my mileage, and generally made me feel welcome.

LSW presenters

Originally uploaded by Hatchibombotar.

In the past 36 hours, I have met more than a dozen of my imaginary friends in person for the first time. It has been a little overwhelming, but in a good way. I find that most people’s communication styles online are quite close to their affect face-to-face.

Cindi takes great photos. I don’t, but I post ‘em anyway.

I went to talks today by Mary Ellen Bates, Jeff Wisniewski, Tom Ipri, and Roy Tennant. All were excellent speakers with very well-done presentations. I don’t know if I’ll take time later to type up my notes, but if you can find their slides on the CIL site or in the wild, they would be worth your while.

The talk I gave with Josh Neff and Rikhei Harris on the Library Society of the World was total chaos. Which is to say, it went rather well. There were about 150 people in the physical room with us and 20+ people in the LSW Meebo room.

I was worried that the whole thing might seem like an inside joke, or “look at us, aren’t we cool?” And maybe it did a little bit (OK, maybe a lot). But I think people got our main ideas about the creation of online community, the benefit of online spaces that blend the personal and professional, and our joy in making these connections. It must have resonated with a few people, as there are more names on the wiki, and more “guests” and new members in the Meebo room today.

We left the LSW room chat window up on the screen for the whole presentation. I knew that it would be distracting, but that was part of the fun (especially when we got rickrolled, and you could hear “Never Gonna Give You Up” start up on people’s laptops throughout the room).

I couldn’t see much of what scrolled by on the screen, but it drew laughter and confused stares.

We didn’t have slides. If we did, they might look like this, or even these. But probably not.

A few blogs have posted on our session. Here is what I have seen so far:

• LSW FTW from Kate at Loose Cannon Librarian
• CiL Day 1 from Rochelle at Tinfoil + Raccoon (who came bearing gifts!)
• Harrumph: When TLIs intermingle from Walt “Plausible Deniability” Crawford
• LSW goes public by Jenica at Attempting Elegance

At the very least, we did something a bit different, a bit anarchic. Greg Schwartz (who is selling T-shirts these days, I hear) said there was an interesting contrast between our half of the session, and the group we shared our timeslot with, the Infododads bloggers. Greg pointed out, that unlike us the Infodoodads folks had “structure and content.”

At this point, I’ll take that as a compliment.

I’ll be sharing the stage with Josh Neff and Rikhei Harris. I have never met either of them in real life. Is it true that Josh is seven foot five inches tall? And is it RICK-hey or ree-KAI or what? And will they feel threatned by my William Shatner-like onstage manner?

It’s interesting. I had been really anxious to know whether this proposal would get accepted. Now that it has, I already have the feeling “we can’t present on that! This will never work!” That feeling is a little unnerving, but familiar. I had a theatrical design professor in college who told us that, in any project interesting enough to be worth doing you’ll come to a point where you think “I just can’t do this.” All you con do at that point is hang on and have faith that you can do it, and you will inevitably push through to something better than you thought you could do.

It also looks like Computers in Libraries will be a great opportunity for me to finally meet all these people in person that I have met online over the past few years. It’s a little wild to think about that actually; it has the potential to be overwhelming. All those people to whom I have said “I’ll buy you a drink” all looking to collect at once! Not to mention the pressure of having to kick Libraryman’s ass at Guitar Hero! (He looks pretty studly in that photo. I think I may be in trouble on that one.)

Fellow Library Society of the World denizens know that I spent much of last week fussing over a presentation to the Colorado Academic Library Summit. I enlisted their/your help a few times, and am grateful for the help. I hope that I was the first person to thank the LSW in a conference handout!

The talk, Web 2.0 and the Digital Library -or- Learning from Flickr (follow that link for slides, abstract, and further reading) seemed to go well. I had a very large room–it must have been able to seat about 200 people–with a respectable turnout of 30 to 40 people. The room wasn’t optimal, and having to use the mic was a bit of a chore, but it worked out OK. I need to remember to bring a little clock for the podium, as I finished way early. That’s not a big problem, as it left time for some very good questions and comments from the audience, but I hate not knowing how I’m doing on time.

Joan Lippincott‘s keynote on Millennials was interesting and avoided making too many sweeping generalizations about generations. I particularly appreciated that she quoted Lorcan Dempsey’s The user interface that isn’t, a blog post that was on my own list of further reading for my talk: “[Libraries] do not participate fully in the network experience of their users.” Lippincott asked how many of us even think of users as having “network experiences.” Which was one of the things I was trying to get at in my talk which immediately followed hers. Nice when that kind of thing happens.

For the other sessions, I saw Jack Maness from the University of Colorado present on “librarian 2.0.” You may have read Maness’ article Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries, as it was heavily blogged when it came out last year. He gave a very engaging talk, with a vision of the socially-present web-based library that I hope was resonant for others in the audience as it was for me.

I also attended a talk by Chris Brown of the University of Denver on using Google Scholar and Google Book Search. He had some interesting techniques and haxies for using Google Scholar with RefWorks and licensed databases. He also showed how he’s putting links to Google Book Search documents in library catalog records, which seems like a great idea. Let’s hope Google keeps those URLs stable. It was fun to listen to Chris talk about getting lists of titles, comparing lists, and generally geeking out.

I had to take off before the final session of the day got underway, but it was overall a very good experience as a speaker and as a conference-goer.

On June 1 at the Colorado Academic Library Summit, I’ll be doing a presentation called Web 2.0 and the Digital Library (or, Learning from Flickr). This will be a re-purposed version of the talk I gave last October to a group of librarians, visual resources curators, information technology specialists, and faculty which I blogged briefly here.

Here’s what I told ‘em I was going to tell ‘em:

This presentation will look at the digital library through the lens of the popular web 2.0 site, Flickr , to see how better use of user-created content and metadata (such as tags, comments, and notes) and a more predictable, programmable interface (through feeds, application programming interfaces (APIs), and better URLs) can help us create a more useful and usable digital library. The discussion will be on the conceptual level (i.e., no screens full of code).

The October talk was aimed at people at liberal arts colleges in the early stages of putting together digital image collections. I looked at some aspects of Flickr–specifically tags, human-readable URLs, comments & notes, feeds, and the API–and described how I thought they could be applied in this context, often in contrast to the way things work in the digital image project I’m affiliated with, the Image Database to Enhance Asian Studies (IDEAS).

In many ways that talk was pie-in-the-sky, as it would not be trivial to implement any of those Flickr features, but I thought it was important to look at what Flickr is doing now to get a clue as to what we might be able to do some time from now.

In that presentation, I put a lot of emphasis on the value that users provide through tagging and comments. But I’m starting to lose faith that this kind of user-contributed metadata will ever be that useful in the library context, at least in the way that I had been thinking about it.

The problem with tagging is that people don’t have enough motivation to tag something that isn’t “theirs.” I have often returned over the past year to The Del.icio.us Lesson; here’s the main argument:

The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.

Tim Spalding takes up this same argument in When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing. I’m afraid that library applications–be they the catalog, a digital image collection, or something else–will feel more like the “Amazon” experience to users than the “LibraryThing” experience.

It is way too early to judge the success of the tagging features of the Ann Arbor District Library Catalog and PennTags, but when I see that most of the “top tags” in those applications have been used fewer than 100 times, I start to wonder if library and academic users have the motivation to tag.

And I wonder how many users a project would need in order to useful. I keep thinking about our new systems librarian, Carol Ou, commenting that she didn’t think Penn’s user community was large enough to create a viable folksonomy. If that’s true, how about a smaller digital library project where the user community might number in the hundreds? (Carol has since said that she thinks smaller groups of taggers can have a greater effect in areas like “clustering” of search results; you can bet I’ll be talking to her some more before this presentation.)

The academic caste system is likely to complicate matters further. One of the examples I used in this talk in October is a Flickr photoset of Soviet-era posters. The comments on that set and on the individual photos go way beyond the typical “wow cool” as Flickr users provide additional information about the posters, including translations and corrections of errors made by the person who originally uploaded the images.

But I wonder if that would happen in an academic context. Would faculty contribute photographs to an image collection if they knew that they could be “corrected” by students? Would students feel comfortable offering up their comments in the first place?

In any case, I’m sure there is still a lot we can learn from Flickr and similar applications–the sections of my talk on URLs, feeds, and the API still hold up basically unchanged, and I’m sure I can find other aspects, too.

So help me out: what can we learn from Flickr? Is user-tagging of the digital library too much to hope for?

Karen Pardue and Steve Lawson

Originally uploaded by Colorado College Tutt Library.

Updated 2007-05-08: It amuses me greatly that I got three comments on this little stub of a post. Thanks Josh, Dorothea, and Heidi.

The presentations went well enough. Emilie Satterwhite and I reprised our Keeping Current talk from November. Emilie is a fun person to present with, and our smallish room (for this smallish event) was rather full. People seemed most excited about blogging, though they had good questions about wikis, feeds and podcasts, too. I don’t know how much the message “took,” though. We offered free premium wikis from pbWiki (through their educator presenter pack offer) to the first two people to email us with the URL of their wiki to upgrade: no one took us up on the offer.

My solo presentation, Social Software: Making Connections on the Web, was perhaps less successful. I was trying to show off Flickr, del.icio.us, and LibraryThing and their applications for libraries. I was a little too unfocused, and severely hampered by the fact that I had to kneel behind the projector if I wanted to do a live demo–small room, short projector-to-laptop cord. I think I didn’t have a good enough “narrative” for the presentation, either, so it was more like a few disconnected demos.

One of the neatest things about my day in Pueblo was meeting Karen Pardue, a librarian at Colorado State University, Pueblo. I got to know Karen a little through our participation in Five Weeks to a Social Library, and was looking forward to meeting her in person. It was fun to meet up: I was really happy to see her, and it seemed like she was happy to meet me too. I’m looking forward to meeting more of my imaginary friends in the future.

Michael “Libraryman” Porter and I did our presentation on Flickr for the Five Weeks to a Social Library. It is archived in no fewer than five files on the OPAL site (streaming whole shebang, WMA, MP3, slides, and text of the chat), so you can still catch it if you missed it.

I have been following the course blogs all along, and it is obvious to me that course participants are taking advantage of the class to learn about social software and think it through “out loud” on the blogs.

But another, perhaps overlooked, benefit of the course is to the presenters. I hadn’t presented online before tonight, nor had I ever presented with Michael. It was a great benefit for me to do both of those things, though I hope that paticipants didn’t pay any price for my inexperience.

As we were preparing, I told Michael that I wished we were just doing the presentation in person, as I knew that we could both talk about Flickr and show our slides and it would all be OK. I wasn’t so sure that the technology would work, and that was the main thing that had me nervous going in.

I did need to trade my Mac for a Windows box (which we figured out in our practice session a few hours before the talk–be sure and do that if you are presenting online) and had a bit of a scare when my headset wasn’t working properly with the OPAL software right before the talk. Tom Peters of OPAL advised a quick log out and back in, which was enough to fix that problem. A bit of handholding from Tom today made me feel much more confident that everything would work.

And presenting with Michael was a breeze. Check him out if you ever get the chance.

This isn’t meant to be a big pat on the back for myself: I’m sure that my part of the talk was too basic for some people and too fast for others. And I probably skated over some really interesting issues around Flickr. I’ll be watching the class blogs for questions that come up.

Mostly I just think that Five Weeks to a Social Library is a cool thing, and I’m pleased to have been part of it. I have even more respect now for the organizers, many of whom were already my blogging heroines going into all this. My thanks to them, and to Tom, too.

I’ll be speaking a bit about the IDEAS project, specifically the collaborative process that brought librarians, academic technologists, and faculty from four liberal arts colleges together to create an image database devoted to Asian Studies.

My main presentation, though, is on what creators and curators of digital image collections can learn from flickr. I have a full PowerPoint presentation worked up for that, which is unusual for me. I may even think about adding an audio track and posting the whole presentation to the web (the slides aren’t much use without what I plan to say about them). We’ll see.

I hope all of you who are headed to Monterey have fun without me. I will be keeping up with all things Internet Librarian by way of Nicole Engard’s nifty IL2006 OPML file; thanks for saving me the trouble, Nicole!

I am pleased to say that I will be presenting on Flickr at the free-as-in-beer, free-as-in-freedom, Five Weeks to a Social Library course, which is, as you no doubt already know, being organized by Meredith Farkas and five other excellent library bloggers. You can take a look at the entire preliminary program if you’d like to see what will be taught and who will be teaching it.

I am even more pleased to say that I will be presenting with Michael “Libraryman” Porter. Michael and I didn’t plan a joint presentation, but we both submitted proposals on Flickr, and since they were both half-baked so fabulous, they asked us to present together. Besides, they needed some token men. (That’s a joke; it never once occurred to me that my proposal wouldn’t be welcome, or given fair consideration.)

Michael and I met at last year’s Internet Librarian conference (where I was once mistaken for Libraryman) and had just been lamenting (via Facebook messages, no less! We walk the social software talk!) that we wouldn’t have the chance to hang out this year, since I’m not going to IL06.

So we still don’t get to hang out, but we do get to work together on this presentation. Michael says it will make us famous. And I believe him.

“Five Weeks to a Social Library” and you

So what is a course without participants? Forty people will be able to take the course, participating in the live webcasts, chats, and the other live, social aspects of the course. And everyone on the Internets will be able to view the course content, and archives of the live events.

If you want to be one of those forty people fully enrolled in the course, get on over to the participant application. I’m not privy to the selection process, but it is my understanding that special consideration will be given to people who have little or no monetary support for professional development from their workplace.

I think this whole thing is very exciting. It has the potential to be a great experience for everyone. It could very well crash and burn. But Meredith, Amanda Etches-Johnson, Dorothea Salo, Ellyssa Kroski, Karen Coombs, and Michelle Boule have my thanks and admiration for dreaming this up and getting it going.

(Just an aside: do we have a tag for this yet? Or at least a shorthand way to refer to the course? ‘Cuz I’m not feeling “fiveweekstoasociallibrary” as a tag. For now, I’m going to go with “sociallibraries” since that is the domain name of the course site.)

Tags: sociallibraries, freeasinbeer, freeasinfreedom