my thoughts on the LITA streaming incident

As many librarians know, there was an incident at the LITA board meeting at ALA Midwinter in San Diego, during which the board voted to shut down a live stream of the meeting. This article provides a good summary of the incident and references to some editorial pieces on it.

I did not have a strong feeling about this incident going into the LITA Town Meeting on ALA Monday morning. I did, however, ask questions about it at my large table, because I had, in the previous two days, read Twitter posts describing the incident. The answers that I heard, the discussion at the meeting (including info provided by several board members taking the floor and speaking) and the message that Karen Starr sent me (as a LITA member) yesterday all had the same effect on me: the longer they talked, the angrier I became with the LITA board's cutoff decision and with its attempts at moving beyond the incident.

• The primary remedy described in the letter, the proposed creation of a content streaming task force, appears, from the charge, centered on programs - not meetings; it was a board meeting that's at issue in this incident. The "ancilary events" mentioned at the conclusion of the document also seems program-centered ("author/presenter chats").
  
  
• There is no suggestion that LITA member input is needed - or even wanted - in determining the composition of the content streaming task force. It's implied that "the Board" will draw upon the talent available in LITA - but only as its current members choose.
  

Really, each LITA member must decide his or her own response. I trust that members will do what's best for themselves and do what they think is right. There are opportunities for service in LITA, in non-library technical associations, and in organizations like ACRL. I believe that the January 19 letter, apparently the product of careful reflection by the current LITA board, illustrates the limits of contributing through LITA more clearly than the streaming cutoff decision itself.

Also, I urge librarians who have not yet seen the tape of the board meeting and the cutoff decision to watch it: URL http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11892303.

ala midwinter 2011

Attended the 2011 ALA Midwinter meeting in downtown San Diego.

I simultaneously attended the OCLC symposium on transformational literacy (with Dr. Mimi Ito as the primary speaker) and monitored the RMG President's Panel on Twitter. Dr. Ito asserted that we need to train students to be lifelong learners, so that they can adapt to jobs that haven't been created yet. It's both humbling (building services to educate students in order to prepare them for the jobs of the future) and frustrating, as voters and their elected officials have turned against public education. I happened to be reading Remix at the time I attended this session, and Ito described and showed examples of transforming works - "the genie is out of the bottle...the sharing and appropriation is going to continue."

And, as far as the RMG panel: The tweets were enlightening; here's the report of one attendee who was tweeting during the session; a number of other attendees were tweeting their thoughts as well, many of which reflected frustration with existing ILS vendors, whose reps were speaking at this event.

I attended a session on bX Recommender (Nettie Legace of Ex Libris; John McDonald of Claremont College). At the WSU Libs, we have licensed bX and experimented with displaying recommendations in the SFX context menu. One of the interesting possibilities described by Legace is using the bX API to create a widget that displays recommendations in other contexts - for example, current "hot" articles in a discipline, based upon click activity at the institutions contributing usage data to bX.

I presented at the OCLC Cooperative Platform presentation, along with OCLC's Robin Murray and Kathryn Harnish. First, I was impressed at the turnout - approximately 50 attendees for an initiative that's still in the pilot stage. During my remarks, I contrasted the black box, proprietary architecture of current ILS systems with the Cooperative Platform. I cited the III Millennium bursar's office functionality (which is licensed and employed at WSU) as an example, and compared it with the possibility of using local and community development to build the same functionality - and to do it in a way that enables ongoing improvement.

I attended an Ex Libris presentation (Susan Stearns, John Larson) on its next-generation system, Unified Resources Management (URM)/Alma. URM is the larger, services-based architecture; Alma is the cloud-based library management system. Alma does have significant parallels with the OCLC WMS initiative. One of the goals of Alma is to turn format-based vertical silos to service-based horizontal workflows. Also, the presenters showed bibliographic records being maintained in a community (group) context. Finally, the infrastructure for Alma is cloud-based, and I was intrigued that Ex Libris is using Amazon Web Services EC2 to support its early adopter testing of the Alma system (though the long-term hosting arrangements haven't been determined). The Alma development seems significantly behind OCLC WMS, based upon the description at this session, with general release expected in 2012.

I participated in the WorldCat Navigator User's Group meeting. At this meeting, Christa Starck of OCLC described the Navigator enhancements coming in 2011.

I presented at the OCLC Developers Luncheon on some local development efforts that Jon Scott and I have done related to autocompletion in WorldCat.org-based systems. My presentation slides are online in Research Exchange.

I attended the public session for OCLC Web-scale Management Services (WMS), which was led by Andrew Pace and included three presenters from early adopter institutions - Jason Griffey (UTC), Jackie Beach (CPC regional library system), Michael Dula (Pepperdine). All three of the presenters were positive about the current or eventual success of their WMS migrations. What's most intriguing to me, listening to Pace's remarks, is the possibilities offered by a workflow engine - enabling a management system build around more customizable workflows. I thought about this in preparing for the Cooperative Platform presentation and the relatively closed-architecture system (Millennium) that we employ at WSU for our management system. How much is our current organizational structure, the way we do our work every day, driven by the management system? What if we could tailor it to our needs, instead of setting up workflows to work with a more inflexible system (albeit one with rich staff-side functionality)?

Then, on Monday morning, I attended the LITA Town Meeting. There was a lengthy discussions on the fact that the live stream and recording for a Saturday AM LITA board meeting. I'm of two minds on this - on one hand, I do believe that rules should be followed. There was info presented at the Town Meeting that made it clear that saving/distributing a recording to the meeting is not acceptable under ALA rules. The live streaming part, I'm less clear about. But on the other hand, I did get a sense from those who supported the stream cut-off that there's not intense interest, given the technical difficulties and possible financial repercussions (in enabling ALA participation without registration and attendance), in actually pushing a change to rules related to streaming of meetings.

[Postscript: There was a LITA message/press release today, from Karen Starr, LITA President, that described the policy issues in greater detail. The text is at URL http://litablog.org/2011/01/lita-board-affirms-openness-and-transparency/. I do think that my interpretation of the meeting, described above, is accurate.]

All in all, it was a very good conference for me. It was the last conference with my BlackBerry, so I'm certain that the future exhibit floor photos won't be so blurred. I do believe that we are on the brink of generational change in library systems, as management systems shift from locally- to cloud-based; as libraries gain the ability to customize their own workflows and to manage all formats equally; and, as the pendulum in library automation work shifts from infrastructure maintenance to the creation of services. I am glad to see vendors like OCLC, Ex Libris, and Equinox embracing this vision, albeit with different approaches. And I'm confident that libraries will, for the most part, move their services to more forward-thinking vendors.

naming confusion...

Marshall Breeding posted an Ex Libris press release today, which describes an apparent name change for the vendor's next-generation library management solution, from URM to Alma. I am scheduled to attend a breakfast describing URM on Sunday morning, but the branding folks have other ideas....

Along the same lines, I've found OCLC's designation of WorldCat.org content, as the vendor simultaneously makes third-party content available through WorldCat Local, to be another confusion generator. It's more confusing than it sounds on the surface, and it's very difficult to obtain accurate and current information on the content (databases, approximate number of objects) that makes up WorldCat.org.

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Postscript: Okay, I did attend this Ex Libris session in San Diego. It's now my understanding that Alma is narrower, that URM is a broader technology initiative by Ex Libris, while Alma involves the cloud-based management system piece.

The Mesh

Reading Lisa Gansky's The Mesh. A friend highly recommended it to me after he read it.

Gansky's focus is the "streamlining of access to physical goods and services," in large part through web and mobile technologies (18). It's unfortunate that, living in the Pullman-Moscow, ID area, my access to these kinds of services will be limited. The author describes Zipcar as "a Full Mesh model" service, but looking at the cities and universities that have Zipcar services, you can see that the model succeeds in urban centers. Or, another way to look at it: the Mesh makes living in urban centers more affordable, and in smaller communities relatively less so.

Gansky notes that some companies are applying the lessons learned in open source software development to physical goods (60). This is a more compelling notion for me today than it would have been four or five years ago. The development of social networking technologies does fundamentally change a company's ability to take user feedback into account in product and service design. Thus, it's a meshing of the open source ethic and current information technologies that enable rapid service improvements and the creation of shared product services.

In terms of moving from owning to renting or leasing services: I can say that for computer support, I've made this move recently through the purchase of an Amazon Web Services [cloud] EC2 reserved instance. In a sense, I'm leasing my personal software development space. I still need a device that enables me to connect to this instance (via SSH for the Linux command line; via a web browser to review online sites), but it's a new - and more fulfilling - model for me.

It seems like if you follow Gansky's argument, that we're moving from an ownership to a sharing model, you have to accept the idea that the private sector will provide most of the services - because the public sector is shrinking as we speak. For example, when she notes the fact that more young Americans are opting not to obtain a drivers license when they reach age 17, she cites several public and private transportation options, including mass transit. But who's going to fund mass transit in 2010? Washington state is relatively progressive, but in the 2010 midterms, voters statewide opted to repeal an existing sales tax on candy and bottled water that was put in place to close the state's revenue gap. Candy and bottled water! The author's vision is noble, but the public's will is weak.


Somehow, I missed the St. Croix Falls Cinema story that the author describes in chapter 5 (see this article for info), but it is interesting that the chain (Evergreen Entertainment) now accepts credit and debit cards for tickets. Gansky's summary illustrates the power of social media, but reading the article at the above link (including the first two letters) provides a more informative account of what happened than the author provides in the book.

why I'm excited by UC's extensible text framework

This year, I've basically migrated from being a Microsoft platform-oriented programmer to one working more with open source software. The game-changer for me, without a doubt, was my deepening use of Amazon Web Services generally, and EC2 specifically. EC2 gave me an easy-to-use development environment in which I could experiment with applications, and with extending applications.

One resource that I have built, in my own time, is an online Naval Reactors database. (I worked as an operator in the program for six years, qualifying on two reactor plants, and have continued reading about the program since leaving it.) I first built it using the AWS SimpleDB database and provided online access to the database using ASP.NET. But with EC2's availability, I happened across a tool that I've really gotten excited about - the University of California's Extensible Text Framework. XTF enables an institution or an individual to create a digital repository. It serves Encoded Archival Description (EAD) XML quite nicely, though I don't use EAD in the Naval Reactors database. It also supports the discovery and presentation of other digital formats, including photographic images.

Here are some URLs that show XTF in action:

-A search that retrieves all database objects

-A search that shows hits-in-context based upon metadata contained in image files

(The database migration is still in progress, but these URLs show the basic functionality.)

What was required to make this work? Downloading XTF and getting it running on an EC2 server (I am using Fedora 8 for the OS). Then, I went through the tutorials to become familiar with customization options. I also wrote some handlers for some additional file formats (JPEG, PNG) that weren't supported by the XTF software as-is and began building the database.

In short: out of the box faceted search; an elegant search and presentation system; and a solution that's being extended by a growing community of users. I am hoping to present on this work at the mid-2011 Code4Lib Northwest meeting.

Crowdsourcing - the book

I read Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing. To me, this book has much the same texture as Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. I feel that I benefited from reading both books, which include numerous anecdotal examples on how technology and new business models have empowered individuals in unimaginable ways. At the same time, I feel like both Friedman and Howe understate the societal damage. I don't want to shoot the messenger in either case (as Friedman was targeted), but that's my perception. An example: Howe reports the impact of services like iStockPhoto on the stock photo industry and the fact that Bruce Livingstone, iStockPhoto's founder, made $25 million off the sale of the company to Getty Images, while the earnings of stock photographers plunged. Howe doesn't note the irony when quoting an iStock executive who asserts that "the community is the company" (188). True, it's just change, but it also seems like an architecture for ever-increasing economic inequality.

The value in Jeff Howe's book is that he makes the reader think about how to successfully build services in this radically new environment. Continuing with the iStockPhoto example, the author describes the role of iStockalypses (iStockPhoto-sponsored meetings) and self-starting user meetings in fostering a sense of community and meaning among active iStockers. In short, the corporate strategy in using crowdsourcing has to be well thought out and one that respects the larger community's willingness to contribute its "excess capacity" (its time and skills) (196).

One unsympathetic victim of technological change is the recording industry Led by RIAA president Cary Sherman and attorneys like Matt Oppenheim, the RIAA essentially declared war on its own customers in recent years through a string of high-profile lawsuits. For that reason, Howe's coverage of the band Hawthorne Heights in the book is refreshing. At an intuitive level, the more open or sharing approach of reduced music sales, with the trade-off revenues from concert ticket sales and other products is just a better model for the 21st century. Certainly a better model than predatory lawsuits against your own customers....

Howe explores the subtleties of crowdsourcing, including the distinction between crowdsourcing and crowdcasting ("someone with a problem broadcasts it to a large, undefined network of potential solvers" [134]), a distinction that I didn't fully understand before reading this book.

Overall, a worthwhile read, though increasingly dated. The 2009 edition that I read includes a status update from the author.

Pullman landmark - Video Quest: the end..... The end.

It's all over for the locally-owned DVD/VHS rental store in Pullman, Washington, Video Quest.

I'll best remember the store for its policy of quizzing customers about excessive rentals for a single title (e.g., "do you know you've rented M four times?) and for carrying interesting films such as Village of the Damned (British) and The Street with No Name. Its collection is being liquidated today and Linda and I purchased ten films this morning.

A Blockbuster rental store is still open, across Grand Avenue from the Video Quest location, but it's likely that its days are numbered as well.