Direct Me NYC 1940

Even better: since they developed it themselves, this information didn’t cost NYPL a penny. If they had asked a vendor to build a tool like this, it would likely have involved thousands of dollars in licensing fees, months of meetings and an expensive support contract. By building and releasing it quickly and by themselves, though, New York Public Library has created a tool that gives people a fascinating look into our past and saved money, too.

Hopefully, this will encourage more public libraries to take a chance on building useful tools themselves instead of just relying on vendors for everything.

But here is where I think Branding is right. If a library system serves a small enough or similar enough community of users that they typically want or need the same services and programs etc… that there is a large enough crossover of patrons between the library system’s branches who are not also using a number of other libraries in the area or that the use of those libraries would not dilute the brand they are trying to create. And of course, that the cost of trying to rebrand every library is far lower than the benefits. I’ve only seen 2 public library systems where I would argue that this occurs.

I agree that “branding” has become a fad — both in library schools and in libraries — but I also think that eventually, the true value of branding will become apparent and libraries will deploy it when it can have a geniunely positive impact and not just because something is novel. However, the only way to reach that level is to understand what branding is and what it does.

A brand is a means, not an end.

Right now, digital media centers such as CPL’s YouMedia are heavily branded because they seem novel… but they’re really not. They’re actually quite a natural stage in the evolution of the library. To your average teen, a digital media center in the library is as obvious a feature as including a steering wheel in a car.

Look at the PC market: Dell, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, Acer, Samsung, Alienware… all of them have a “personality” to their brand, but they’re all effectively the same. It’s one of the reasons so many people have little brand loyalty in the PC market: despite the intense marketing efforts of those companies, the average consumer sees them all as virtually identical. When you’re just another copycat doing all the same things as everyone else, your brand doesn’t carry any real weight with your patrons.¹

In short, your brand is a tool for highlighting your differentiation from “the rest”, not your similarity to them. When a person sees Apple’s brand, they think of devices that are well-designed and work together (and are more expensive). Apple’s “think different” philosophy infuses not just their ads, but their whole product line. This, in turn, creates in the minds of its customers psychological connections that the company reinforces through its brand.

As digital media centers proliferate in libraries across the country, the novelty of branding them will wear off and eventually, we’ll be left with a generic term for them (hopefully, something more succinct and catchy than “digital media center”).² And thus should it become clear that your brand was only ever a means to an end: namely, providing the services your patrons need.

Money quote (emphasis mine):

The user is not broken in that our job is to fulfill the user’s needs, and the user’s needs are, while not always well-defined, possible to meet, or understood by either side, valid — so accusing the user of Doing It Wrong is counterproductive to our goals and needs, and should be avoided. This applies to space usage, reference inquiries, customer service, and use of our online tools.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Libraries need to pay a lot more attention to how our patrons behave and start adapting our systems to the way our patrons expect search to behave. Our seemingly in-built desire to force patrons to search for things our way is counterproductive and ultimately damaging to our credibility and our profession.

If there’s one point that I’d like to add to hers, it’s that a big part of the problem is that very few libraries actually take real responsibility for the software that’s used to build their site. By relying on external vendors and not having in-house coders who can improve the system, many libraries pretend that any deficiencies in it are minor and/or not their responsibility. But everything that happens under your logo — whether it’s on your website, at the Reference Desk or how you organize your stacks — is ultimately your responsibility. That means that, like it or not, it’s your job to make things as easy and intuitive for your patrons as you can. As Jenica so wonderfully puts it:

We can sit back, all of us, in libraries and outside of them, and with smug self-satisfaction explain why our tools, websites, spaces, and services are just brilliantly perfect… or we can thoughtfully observe our environment, acknowledge that the user has needs and is showing us what they are, and adapt.

However, those agreements also come with baggage. When you buy a solution, you’re lashing yourself to the vendor’s development cycle and you’re trusting that the software they provide you (both in the short term and over the length of the contract) will meet your patrons’ needs. You’re also betting that when you need to add a new product or service to your repertoire, that piece of software will either do what you need or will integrate well with another piece of software that does what you need.

Relying on vendors for your software is a decent short-term strategy, since it lets you get up and running quickly and provides a dedicated support channel when things go wrong. Over the long term, though, it causes stagnation: if your patrons want or need something new, you can’t provide it to them without waiting on your vendor, shelling out more money for another product… or both. And if your vendor discontinues a product or even just decides that what your patrons need isn’t in their interests, you’re left out in the cold.

For example, I know of a library whose content management system is not only no longer developed by the vendor, but hasn’t even been supported by them for several years. That library hasn’t upgraded or switched to a new platform, because doing so would require them to negotiate a new contract with a new vendor. With money so tight these days, many libraries (including my own employer) are seeing dramatic reductions in funding; as a result, that library system is stuck with a dead-end content management system for the foreseeable future.

Libraries need more coders. I’m not talking about “that guy in the office who knows HTML”, but real, honest-to-goodness coders, who can build a custom solution for your library from scratch. There’s no reason your library can’t have a search system that includes your research databases or build its own app for the iPad. Building your own solution means you can innovate at your own pace and you can meet your patrons’ specific needs.

In fact, programming should really be a track in library school, because programming skills allow people to build their own solutions, which is a big part of what libraries need to stay relevant in the age of the iPhone. Lots of Library Science programs teach students HTML (a nice start and certainly better than nothing), but librarians are supposed to be experts at dealing with information, so why aren’t library school students being taught to do interesting and useful things with that information in a digital setting? Why aren’t library school students being taught how to write a web app in Rails, how to do version control with Git and how to get an open-source project off the ground?

The emergence in the last few years of the mobile information market has been staggering. Ever since the iPhone, iPad and Android revolutionized the way we view our mobile devices, there’s been a tsunami of development in this market. Everyone’s rushing to build apps and mobile-friendly versions of their websites. Libraries are a natural fit for this world, since we curate large amounts of quality info and we are seen as trustworthy by the public at large.

Libraries can’t wait a year or two for their vendor to deliver an iPhone app or a mobile website. The future is here – right now – and any library that isn’t trying to deliver its services to patrons wherever they are (especially on their mobiles) is merely contributing to the view that they are merely relics of a bygone era.

In case you haven’t heard, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to slash funding for Chicago Public Library. And, as two of Chicago’s aldermen noted at a budget hearing two weeks ago, the mayor is looking to take this huge cut out of a city department that accounts for 3% of Chicago’s annual budget and is comprised of people who are not paid handsomely for their work. An astute observation, because of the more than 700 layoffs Mayor Emanuel is proposing, more than 500 are from Chicago Public Library.

If Mr. Emanuel thought that this cut would sail through unopposed, though, he was wrong.

The people of Chicago have responded brilliantly, thanks to a campaign by CPL staff that has been supported by numerous aldermen and the public in general. The petition to fully fund Chicago Public Library has drawn more than 5000 signatures and the Library and its supporters have been keeping the pressure on the City Council. I was even surprised to see a (very bad) picture of myself in the Chicago Tribune:

I’ve heard that I was shown on TV, too, but I haven’t seen that, so I’m assuming that I look equally terrible, there.

Anyway, after several weeks of fighting hard, we’ve managed to move the Mayor, but only a bit. He’s offered to restore $3 million of the original $11 million that he wanted to cut from CPL, but to be honest, that’s really nothing more than an attempt to placate the aldermen and make the backlash go away.

This is a make-or-break moment for Chicago Public Library and that’s not just because my job is at risk, but because the services we provide are now in serious jeopardy.

Worst of all among these cuts, the Mayor wants to lay off all of CPL’s library pages. They shelve the books and they’re the lowest-paid employees at CPL. In truth, though, they’re probably our most important employees, because a librarian who spends all of her time shelving is a librarian who isn’t able to spend time teaching computer classes, hosting a children’s story time or helping an unemployed patron write a résumé.

I have written a letter to my alderman, which I am posting here. You are free to re-use as much or as little of this letter as you like, but if you live in Chicago, please sign our petition and write or call your alderman – today – and tell them to fully fund Chicago Public Library.

Alderman Pawar:

As one of your constituents, I would like to express my opposition to the cuts proposed to the Chicago Public Library in Mayor Emanuel’s 2012 budget, as well as to Mr. Emanuel’s offer to restore a small (and in my opinion, inadequate) portion of the cut funding. I would like to voice my support for full funding of the Chicago Public Library in 2012.

Chicago Public Library is a valuable resource, serving all Chicagoans without regard to race, gender, religion, political affiliation or income level. Any Chicagoan, from the poorest to the wealthiest, can go to their local library and avail themselves of its many resources. Those resources would be be dramatically affected by the loss of so much money from this system and despite what Mayor Emanuel has said, I believe that laying off one-third of Chicago Public Library’s workforce would result in severe disruptions to the quality and variety of its service.

More and more services are going “online only” every year (just ask anyone who’s searching for a job in this economy), but there are still many people in Chicago who cannot afford a computer or home Internet service. I have many friends who bring their young children to the library for “story time” or who participate in programs like One Book, One Chicago as a means of broadening their horizons.

Regardless of whether we are talking about $11 million or $8 million, these cuts are unreasonably severe and punish people and services upon whom many Chicagoans depend, thereby unreasonably punishing those very same Chicagoans in turn.

You are fond of saying that “all response is local”. I would like to ask you to consider a question in reply:

Can our city truly be improved when its ability to respond to its citizens (locally, quickly, efficiently or even at all) is diminished?

Yours,

Robert Dumas

Submitted under “found art”:

My desktop, almost 10 years ago. I was reading a lot of Jhonen Vasquez and William Gibson, kind of wanted to be living in the Matrix and thought I was driving a pretty pimp desktop.

Netflix is splitting its DVD and streaming businesses into two companies and people are hopping mad about it. I’m not surprised, though, because the root cause of all this trouble is something we’ve seen before.

Let’s start with an assertion that we can all agree on: Netflix wants to deliver movies and TV shows over the Internet. That’s the future and we all know it. However, their contracts are coming up for renewal and the studios are demanding massive increases in licensing fees. To top it off, Starz announced that they’re not renewing their re-licensing deal with Netflix.

Netflix is stuck: they’ve built this amazing infrastructure that can pump out huge amounts of video over the Internet, but “Big Content” won’t agree to let Netflix stream their content… unless, of course, Netflix agrees to the same odious terms that Big Content tries to foist upon everyone: tiered pricing, a cut of Netflix’s revenue and pay-per-view.

In short, Big Content is doing to Netflix what they did to iTunes a few years ago: shaking them down for better terms by threatening to poison the well if they don’t get their way.

This really shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. Big Content’s own ideas of digital distribution systems have always had several characteristics in common: complicated licensing models, tiered pricing and pay-per-view. (You may read all of these things as “lots of different entertainment lawyers sticking their fingers in the pot”.) Consumers, on the other hand, want the opposite: simple licensing models, flat pricing and “all you can eat” viewing. Big Content has historically ignored the concerns of music and movie lovers and the result has been digital distribution platforms (e.g., Pressplay and MusicNet?) more labyrinthine than a Thomas Pynchon novel.

We’re locked into a strange cycle: everyone (Hollywood, Netflix and consumers) wants to pay for content on demand, but Big Content’s own efforts are terrible. Along comes a new player like Netflix (or, several years ago, iTunes) and introduces a system with a simple pricing and licensing model. The market flourishes and sucks energy out of piracy – why go to the trouble of pirating when you can just watch it right now for a reasonable price? – but when the contracts run out, Big Content tightens the noose and insists on tiered pricing, a cut of revenues and pay-per-view exclusives.

If you keep your eyes on Netflix over the next couple of years, you’re going to see most or all of this happen.

What has all of this to do with their DVD business? Well, it’s still a good moneymaker, but it’s clearly a secondary choice for subscribers. (Raise your hand if you’ve had a Netflix DVD sitting on your coffee table for more than a month.) So Reed Hastings is splitting the two businesses to insulate the revenues of the DVD business from Hollywood. There’s no way in hell he wants to do this, but if Hollywood can get a toehold into Netflix’s DVD business, they can dictate terms to them on DVDs, too.

If Hollywood were smart, they’d find a way to force all copyright-holders to follow a common licensing scheme so that they could build a decent digital distribution system. If they did, though, they’d find themselves skewered on their own knives in the same way a few years later.

Update, 10 October: It looks like after major customer outcry, Netflix is keeping their DVD business.

By the way, since the usual serving size for cheese listed on a US nutrition label is 1 ounce, that translates to 2.5912 × 10^24 one-ounce servings, which means you’re going to need a heck of a lot of crackers for that particular cocktail party.

(Found via @TomHut and @WolframAlpha via the #WolframB2S hashtag.)

My job was to come in at 6:00 a.m. and, with one other guy, shelve all the stray books from the day before. It meant getting up really early, but it wasn’t bad, because it was nice and quiet. At 10:00, I would punch out and go off to class.

But when we opened at 9:00, no customers came in. That was odd, because we almost always had a customer or two waiting for us to open.

A few minutes later, I heard two of the managers talking about the news report they’d heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. My first thought was, “How terrible!” but I thought we were dealing with something like the 1945 accident where a B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building. That incident had a grand total of 14 fatalities.

But just an hour later, I got in my car and switched on the local news radio station… right as the South Tower collapsed.

Oh, my God.

It was at that moment that I remembered that my sister was going into the city that morning for a job interview.

In the World Trade Center.

And she was riding in with my dad, who worked next door in the World Financial Center.

Oh, no. Please, no. Nonononono.

I had a flashback to 1993, when terrorists detonated a bomb in the parking garage of the WTC. At the time, my dad worked for a company located on the 30th floor of the South Tower. His company got out and made it home OK, but the hours in between had seemed like an eternity to us.

Now the entire South Tower was gone.

Class was inconsequential. I raced to my parents’ house. I don’t remember if anyone else was there.

A few minutes later, I watched the North Tower collapse, live on television. My heart pounded so hard I almost couldn’t hear the announcer.

The next few hours are a panicked blur. My mom and little sister are there, somewhere. My dad and middle sister are still missing. Call their cell phones. Get a busy signal. Pace the living room. Repeat every five minutes.

When they finally did arrive home, I didn’t hear the car’s engine, but the sound from the driveway of the car door shutting made me jump as if someone had fired a gun outside. I ran out and saw them both. Safe and sound and unharmed.

“Thank God you’re OK! The World Trade Center is gone!”

I can’t remember why they’d come home. Maybe they got to Penn Station and were put right on a train going back out. Everyone was fleeing the city, after all.

My dad didn’t believe me at first. “Calm down, Rob. What do you mean?”

“The buildings collapsed; they’re fucking gone!” I immediately regretted swearing at my family when I knew I was really overjoyed to see them.

If my dad experienced any panic, he didn’t show it. We all came back inside, looked at the wreckage on TV – maybe for the first time – and after a few minutes, Dad came to a decision.

He turned off the TV, got out the griddle and made pancakes, as though it was any Saturday morning when we were kids.

It sounds strange, but in fact, it was exactly what we needed.

To eat together as a family.

A whole family.

It’s all very cool, but I find myself wondering about the implications of a library where users can’t browse the collection. At my own library, we have a research collection whose stacks are closed to the public. While this means that material can be preserved – there are some extremely rare, valuable and fragile works in the collection – the opportunity cost of such a setup means that patrons can’t browse the collection and discover things they didn’t know they wanted.

Have you ever been looking for something in a library (or bookstore) for something and come across a book on your topic of interest that you didn’t know about? A book, perhaps, that you only came across because you stopped focusing so narrowly on a small section and let your eyes wander over the entire length of a shelf or height of a bay and that your eyes seemed to lock onto almost automatically? Well, in librarianship, that’s called serendipity, though I’ve seen it referred to in retail circles as “browsability” or “walkability”.

Serendipity has always been a big part of a library’s appeal. It’s one of the (many) reasons things are so carefully catalogued: in addition to providing organizing principles by which material can be sorted, it also allows patrons to discover interesting titles simply by walking through the aisles.

See, people often have a good idea of what they’re looking for, but the human brain is especially adept at making connections and to rapidly sift and sort data (e.g., a shelf or bay of books), turning it into information (e.g., a particular title that relates to a patron’s interests.) Our brains naturally look for relevant “hits” – that is, things that seem to stand out – and when presented with a large dataset, will tend to automatically narrow and widen our focus to try and make sense of it.

Serendipity, in that sense, is about trusting that the patron is allowing their brain to naturally narrow and widen its focus in their search.

This serendipity, derived from a collection’s browsability, is largely lost online. Computers are very good at storing and sorting information, but they are extremely poor at making the kinds of connections between things that come so naturally to the human brain. It’s why companies like Amazon spend billions of dollars trying to mimic a highly complex and nuanced process that, for the human brain, often seems effortless.

There are all sorts of computer models for mimicking these connections. The most popular is probably purchasing habits, which you’ll often see online as “people who bought this item also bought…” or some such similar phrase. Another is by collecting and comparing attributes (sometimes hundreds or even thousands). The Music Genome Project is a good example of this. If you haven’t tried Pandora, the commercial Internet radio derived from the Music Genome Project, you really should.

But crucially, these computer models only mimic human behavior and often poorly at that. I’ll bet you’ve gotten frustrated with at least one online store that offered “recommendations” that had little or nothing to do with what you wanted. Assuming that the company isn’t putting in bad data, this is usually because the system is trying to generalize all shoppers’ habits; however, individuals often come to different conclusions about the same set of data, because due to many factors (e.g., life experiences, political opinions, race, gender… even how recently they’ve eaten can have and effect!), their brains will automatically assign different mental “weight” to data.

We’re getting better at training computers to deliver quality recommendations, but what we’re discovering is that the computers have to keep a lot more data on people in order to deliver quality results (which naturally leads to privacy implications). Amazon, for example, has several enormous datacenters around the world and has to store, sort and index terabytes, petabytes, even exabytes of data… just to make sure it’s recommending things you might actually like.

The only way to make up for the lack of a browsable collection is to put resources into creating an online catalog that will accurately mimic the abilities that the human brain innately possesses. Recommendations through “social” technology, though still in their infancy, seem to hint at a possible solution, but as yet it’s unclear exactly how “social” fits into providing better results (especially without running afoul of privacy concerns).

I don’t expect that all libraries in twenty years will look like the Mansueto Library. But given the costs involved – building an automated storage facility, designing a truly intuitive catalog that consistently makes top-quality recommendations – wouldn’t having librarians and pages to catalog and shelve the books in open stacks cost less and still allow for browsability and serendipity? Or are librarians destined to react to such automation as Ewan MacGregor’s character did in the first twenty seconds of this clip from Danny Boyle’s (highly underrated, in my opinion) A Life Less Ordinary?

I was a Delicious user for about five years, but moved over to Pinboard a few months ago, when it became clear that Yahoo not only wasn’t developing Delicious any more, but was looking to get rid of it. Pinboard works just as well as Delicious, has a compatible API and they love librarians, too. Pinboard is also under active development, so it’s (probably) got more of a future than Delicious.

Being a librarian, of course, I have an impulse to catalog everything to within an inch of its life. One thing I’ve been interested in for a while is where I get all the links I share, so a while back I started adding attribution tags to them. For example, If I’d gotten a link from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball or Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders, I’d add a “via:daringfireball” or “via:43folders” tag to the link.

That scheme worked well for small sites and for ones where a single person or a small group was writing, but it fell apart when it came to getting links from massive sites like Twitter, Facebook and the like. Adding “via:facebook” doesn’t really tell you much, because the site has more than half a billion members. Sure, I’m not friends with all of them, but I do know enough people that from whom I got the link makes a difference to me.

I tried adding a unique tag for each person (e.g., person:SallyFriend). I thought this would work, because I planned to build a comprehensive database of Sally Friend’s links, regardless of whether they came from Twitter, Facebook, her blog, her shared items in Google Reader or whatever. It didn’t, though, because although she might be @SallyFriend on Twitter, she might have a totally different unique identifier on Facebook or other services.

The solution I’ve come up with, then, is to create a second level within those tags, where the person’s username (or other unique identifier) is included in the tag. Now, all of the links I’ve gotten from Rober Ebert’s Twitter feed are tagged with via:twitter:@EbertChicago. This tag works well since it has all the information you’d need to identify from which Twitter user the link came.

This means that if I pull these tags into another tool (like the forthcoming Drupal version of this site), I can make use of the tags when I import them. I can write a function in PHP, for example, that will check a Pinboard link for such a “via” link; if it sees that one of the tags is via:twitter:@EbertChicago, then it can do something with that, like add a Facebook-style “via” note that links to Roger’s Twitter page. It works the other way, too; if I were to reverse this workflow so that I post links on this site (as I ultimately intend to do) and then push them out to Pinboard through their API, I can easily break the referring URL down into just such a tag.

It’s not perfect, of course (then again, few things are). While many people on Facebook have set up their “profile URL” (e.g., facebook.com/username), some of my friends haven’t; as a result, some people still use the classic URL scheme, which is more like facebook.com/profile.php?id=89023753740. I haven’t come up with a good solution to that beyond possibly adding a third dimension to the tag with their Facebook user ID number. It’s a bit inelegant, but it might just work

However, this scheme seems to work well, as I’m able to save links with attribution in a format I can parse easily.

Hopefully I’ll be able to demonstrate this in the coming months. (If only I had more time!)

Iron-on letters can make any t-shirt into something awesome!

A couple of months ago, I bought a domain, cpl.to, and set it up as a bitly Pro account, because I like the idea of having a special “shortlink” domain that I can use for tweets about CPL. However, I haven’t shared them anywhere but on Twitter and you might find these interesting or useful, so here are a bunch of useful links I’ve created so far.

Please note: Some resources will require you to log in using your Chicago Public Library card and ZIP code. They are marked with an asterisk*.

Basic Info

1. cpl.to/my-cpl*: Log into your CPL account from this shortlink, check the status of your holds, renew books and more.
2. cpl.to/pcres: Reserve a computer at your nearby branch right from the Web!
3. cpl.to/museumpass: Thanks to the wonderful folks at Kraft Foods, you can sign out passes at your local CPL branch that will get you and a few friends into many of the amazing museums we have here in Chicago…for free.
4. cpl.to/jobsearchers: Let’s be honest: it sucks to be looking for a job right now. CPL recently updated and relaunched its “Especially for Job Searchers” section, where you can get research careers, learn new skills, find out what goes into a winning résumé, find places in the city where professionals can help you and more. Hang in there!
5. cpl.to/reciprocalcard: If you live in one of Chicago’s many beautiful suburbs, you can still use CPL! All you need is a valid ID (or a recent piece of mail) and your suburban library card and you’ll be able to check out books, movies, music, museum passes and access all of our “members only” resources like our online research databases and downloadable audiobooks and ebooks!
6. cpl.to/teacherinthelibrary: If your kids need homework help after school, or if they just want a refresher on what they’re learning, CPL has fully-qualified teachers available after school at many branches.

From Our Catalog

1. cpl.to/whattoread: Looking for something good to read? Why not browse the many lists we’ve compiled of some of the best books in our collections?
2. cpl.to/chicagofiction: Chicago is a beautiful city, so it’s natural that authors would want to set their novels here. Take a look at this list of books set right here in the Windy City.
3. cpl.to/thehungergames: Are you a member of Team Peeta or Team Gale? CPL has Suzanne Collins’ amazing Hunger Games trilogy for teens…and that’s definitely real.
4. cpl.to/photographybooks: Looking to learn photography? CPL has tons of books that will help you release your inner shutterbug!
5. cpl.to/potterholics: Are you in Dumbledore’s Army? Do you wish you could go to Hogwarts? Wondering what Harry Potter stuff Chicago Public Library has? Look no further.

Research… like a Boss!

1. cpl.to/onlineresearch*: The main page for CPL’s online research tools. We’ve got newspapers going back to 1849, collections of scholarly journals, investment research, encyclopediae, science, history, biographies, genealogy and more!
2. cpl.to/chiltonlibrary*: Strapped for cash to give your car a badly-needed tune-up? Check out Chilton Library! Just select your car’s year, make and model and find out how to repair and service your car, check for recalls and more.
3. cpl.to/morningstar-db*: If you’re an investor, it’s important to have the best information at hand about the stocks and mutual funds in which you’re interested. Learn more about where to put your money with their incredible tools.
4. cpl.to/referenceusa*: Reference USA is a huge directory with more than 14 million US businesses and 89 million US residents listed. Great for stalking that high school crush who ditched you at prom!

Have You Visited a Branch Lately?

1. cpl.to/hallbranch: CPL’s classic George Cleveland Hall Branch (located at the intersection of 48th and Michigan) was a common meeting place for some of America’s greatest African-American writers, such as Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and Richard Wright.
2. cpl.to/waterworks: CPL’s new Water Works location, located at the Chicago Visitor Information Center on Michigan Avenue (and within walking distance of the John Hancock Center and the Drake Hotel) is a great place to pick up your book requests if you live or work between River North and the Gold Coast. It also has a small selection of popular works available for check-out.

That’s all I’ve got right now, but there are more coming and when I create one, I’ll be sure to post it on this blog.

iPhone. Android. Flickr. YouTube. Delicious. Goodreads. Meetup. Formspring. WordPress. Bit.ly. Github. Dropbox. QR Codes. Creative Commons. Twitter. Facebook.

All of these things have something in common: they are all technologies that Chicago Public Library (as well as countless other libraries across the country) should be embracing.

I’ve gotten a ton of work done in the last couple of days on what’s going into the social media presentation I’m working on, for which there will be both patron and staff versions. I am particularly excited about the one for library staff, which will focus on how libraries can and should use these technologies to go where their patrons are and to innovate quickly and cheaply.

However, it has not escaped my attention that the City of Chicago has some fairly draconian policies regarding the use by staff of many of these very same technologies. That flavor of irony is particularly bitter.

Folks, when the Library of Congress has a Flickr account I think it should be understood that librarians should be allowed use social media. Because we have to special collections. The curated selections.

And one of our major raisons d’être is to catalog every single item in them to within an inch of its life.

Because that’s how librarians roll.

I’m working on a presentation on social media, which I hope to be able to present at Chicago Public Library’s All Staff Institute Day. Right now, it’s just a mockup and it still needs several sections (Part 2 needs work and I still need to put together a section on mobile), but it’s definitely starting to take shape.

Found in an old book, Decoration and Design for the 80s. This is the “date due” card, which would be stamped by the library when you checked the book out. It also has computer punch-slots (from the days when computers used punch cards). The data “stored” in the punches is currently unknown.

I just don’t think we were expecting that when it finally came out this month, we’d be staring at iTunes Ping.

To say that I’m disappointed in Apple would be putting it mildly. In its current state, Ping is at best a beta product.

Now, in general, I like Apple. I appreciate that they work harder than anyone else to make things work well and I think their taste is second to none. However, I’m not a zealot and so I have no problem saying that Apple sometimes makes decisions so pig-headed and cynical that they infuriate me. Ping is a perfect example of this cynicism hiding beneath Apple’s glossy “experiences”.

Who are these “Beatles” you speak of?

The biggest and most glaring flaw I can see in Ping is that it only works with artists and albums represented in the iTunes Music Store. Yes, I know that Apple is out to make money and that they love vertically-integrated products, but I’m surprised to find that a company that claims to love music as much as Apple would think no one would miss the ability to list bands like The Beatles, who are not sold in the iTunes Store but who are incredibly popular bands. In comparison, Ping’s chief competitor, Last.fm, allows me to share my listening habits regardless of whether that artist’s music is sold online. The ability to spread the word about any song or artist in my music library allows Last.fm to build catalog entries for unsigned indie bands and ones who just aren’t sold online. As a result, Last.fm’s catalog is deep and wide, the way your average Tower Records was back in the day.

In comparison, the iTunes Music Store is more like one you’d find at your local mega-retailer like Best Buy, Walmart or Target: sure, it’s large, but it focuses on big artists who’ll sell a lot and so suffers from a lack of depth and breadth. By limiting Ping to stuff sold in the iTunes Music Store, Apple is effectively operating a closed system, in which people can’t show off their love for an indie band…or even a mega-band like Radiohead that just isn’t in the Store. When all of this is taken into account, the question becomes, “What’s my incentive for participating in a social network that doesn’t let me share my true tastes?”

Where we say, when we say, how we say

Ping also works in only two places: on an iPhone (or iPod touch) running iOS 4.1 or greater and in iTunes 10. Yes, lots of people use iTunes and many iPhone users have upgraded to iOS 4.1, but great social networks allow input from other sources. Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and others all have ways of letting people use the service without requiring them to use one specific app. Ping works well on the iPhone, but it seems rough in iTunes on the desktop. As Gruber says:

Ping on the iPhone feels like a decent native client to a social network. Ping on the desktop (Mac/Windows) feels like an afterthought to iTunes — one little source list item halfway down the list, with content that doesn’t seem designed at all. Not that it’s poorly designed, but un-designed. It takes the shape of default iTunes Store content.

While I agree with this sentiment for the most part, I’ve found Ping on the iPhone to be less useful than I’d have thought. For starters, there’s no way for me to “ping” my love for a track I’m listening to; all I can do is share my purchase history with my circle. Second, Ping won’t give me recommendations for stuff I’ve played recently and won’t even let me recommend an artist to the people I’m connected to. Does this sound like a meaningful social network to you?

Fixing Ping

What Apple seems to have done, in essence, is to take my iTunes Music Store purchase history, added a mediocre recommendation engine and dressed it up as a social network. I’m sorry, but that’s not revolutionary and it’s certainly not at the level of quality that users expect from Apple. To put it bluntly: these are the shenanigans I’d expect from someone like Microsoft.

If Apple wants Ping to become a first-class social network, they’re going to have to do something very uncharacteristic and loosen their grip on their users. Part of “social networking” entails allowing users to create interesting new connections and therefore have some control over the direction the system takes. Ping, on the other hand, is a closed loop, a hermetically-sealed echo chamber where users can only participate within the bounds of what Apple sells. As influential as Apple is, there’s an awful lot of music out there that people enjoy, but that isn’t in the iTunes Music Store, so Apple will simply have to accept that there’s more to music than the selection at your local Walmart.

In its current state, iTunes Ping is almost useless to anyone who has an extensive catalog of music in their library. Until I see some dramatic improvements in it, I can’t see a good reason to use it.

One recent piece by Nat Torkington, Clue is a Renewable Resource, is particularly smart to me because it represents someone who’s looking to take a long view on an employee. (It should come as no surprise that I got this link from Rands, a very smart guy who writes really well about managing people.) Unfortunately, we as a society seem completely incapable of taking any sort of long view right now and it’s something we’ve really got to start thinking more about.

Short-term thinking is, of course, necessary in dire times like these just to keep the lights on and a roof over your head, but we have to remember that short-term actions have long-term consequences. We have to stop treating people like robots and we have to stop thinking about the small picture to the exclusion of all else.

We have to start thinking long-term and big-picture.

(Photo by Helen Richard.)

Ask yourself, right now: “How much time have I spent this week on things that might not pay off for several months…or longer?”

I know it’s difficult to, say, find X dollars to cut from our budgets just to make it through the next year, but we have to stop robbing the future just to pay for the present (or worse, just to cover the interest on the past). Short-term thinking, by its very nature, will only get you through the short term.

Development is going to carry us out of these doldrums. I’m not talking about software development, but rather people development. If you’re reading this, I want you to stop, close your eyes, take a deep breath and say this out loud a few times:

The people who work for (and with) me are valuable. It is my responsibility to help them to become better. It is their responsibility to help me to become better.

You’ll need to repeat this every once in a while for it to really stick.1

Most importantly, “better” doesn’t just mean people who are below you on an org chart; it means everyone and it even extends beyond what’s written in a person’s job description. It means that people aren’t robots or cogs, so they need a chance (on a regular basis) to stretch themselves, to try new things, to be given responsibility, some trust, a chance to take their own initiative and some understanding and support if they mess up. People who are reduced to machines in their workplace (or who are watched like hawks by their bosses for the slightest deviation from “maximum productivity”) have fundamentally less satisfaction at work and are less productive, too.

So ask yourself: does this paragraph from Nat’s article sound like your workplace?

Very few…human needs are well-met in the typical organization: someone else chooses your projects, someone else tells you how to do it, you rarely interact with anyone or get praise from someone you respect and your public reputation goes straight down the toilet as you vanish behind the firewall. The work inside the firewall can, sometimes, rarely, be interesting and humanly-rewarding, but the emphasis is on “rarely”.

We end up chasing short-term goals so often–increased circulation, higher quarterly sales, cutting costs, whatever–that we forget how creative people are, in our never-ending quest to pigeonhole everything we can and we shut out everything we can’t. We treat our organizations as though they’re monoliths, when they’re really just a bunch of people.

Some organizations understand this. Google has a policy that employees spend 20% of their time on projects unrelated to the ones they’re assigned to. Netflix actually allows its salaried employees to take as much vacation time as they want, provided they’re getting “amazing amounts of important work” done. This slideshow by the CEO of Netfix on the company’s culture is required reading for everyone, because it’s one of the best examples I’ve read of how to create a culture of excellence. This will be on the test.

Even something as small as allowing someone to spend a couple of hours a week working on a pet project can have major long-term benefits. In the short term, they’ll be happier and feel less trapped by their job, but in the long run, they might just come up with an idea that saves your organization millions of dollars.2

There are tons of great opportunities out there for you and your employees to grow. Your organization doesn’t necessarily need a formalized policy on what gets posted to its official Twitter or Facebook pages, but it does need the flexibility that allows an employee to make the case for sending them to a conference or workshop on something about which they care passionately. People who have the opportunity to stretch themselves a bit will often stay with you for longer because they feel more like they have a measure of control over their lives. Sometimes they’ll overextend themselves and screw up, but you can’t really learn to ride a bike until you take off the training wheels and fall a few times, so that’s when you have to understand and support them. Sure, a few might use that conference to escape to another job, but if that isn’t a large, blinking LED sign telling you to make some changes, nothing’s going to get through.

And you know what? Growth is additive. Maybe learning Drupal won’t come in handy this week, but if you move up the ladder or get a job somewhere else–maybe at a place where the whole online system is held together with duct tape and static HTML files or is using a content-management system that went “end of support” four years ago, that time spent learning Drupal will make a big difference for you and the people around you.

The worst part of it all is that “www.” was never really necessary in the first place. Back in the early- to mid-1990s, when the Web was just starting to take off, we were all using relatively simple web browsers. Even so, I remember that the first browser I used heavily, Netscape 1.1, would automatically fill in the “http://” protocol if you didn’t specify it. That was an obvious call, because hey, you were using a web browser, so the odds were pretty good that you were going to a web site if you didn’t tell the browser otherwise, so the of course the browser should go ahead and fill in the protocol.

The “www.” part of a web address is actually a subdomain of the main domain, which was supposed to help separate the web server (the part of the server accessible via HTTP) from other protocols, like Gopher, FTP, email and the like. However, if you tried to connect to servers using HTTP, the servers were almost entirely capable of noticing what protocol or port was being used and answering correctly. Unfortunately, no one at the time had any idea that the Web would become one of the most transcendent ways of sharing information, ever, so sysadmins everywhere just gave the Web server a subdomain (e.g., www.somesite.com) as they did with, say, mail servers (e.g., mail.somesite.com).

Fast forward fifteen years and the Web is not only still around, but it’s going strong and still growing…which is more than anyone can say for poor old Gopher. However, we’ve been stuck with “www.” add-on, even though web servers are smart enough to perform a simple forward if it’s been set up.

It’s time to drop the “www.” from our domains. Don’t worry, though; your sysadmin can set up a simple forward so that if people still type in the “www.”, they’ll just get shown to the right URL.

There are several reasons I’m advocating this:

1. There’s no need for the “www.” part. As I said above, it’s completely vestigial in terms of the Internet. There’s virtually no chance any more that someone’s coming to your site with Gopher.
2. Less is more. Leaving off the “www.” gives you four characters back and these days—with social networking sites like Twitter being as popular as they are—the shorter your URL is, the easier it is for people to remember it and pass it along.
3. It looks better. Okay, this is a personal reason, but I happen to think that a shorter, more readable URL looks a lot better on an advertisement than one with the “www.” included. Whenever I see an ad with it still included, I feel like the company behind it doesn’t quite get the Internet. (Embarassingly, when Chicago Public Library started their “Not What You Think” ad campaign and had ads all over the city referring people to “chipublib.org”, they discovered that their web server was not set up to handle automatic redirects from chipublib.org to www.chipublib.org.)
4. It’ll do better in search engines. Google, for example, ranks http://somesite.com/ slightly higher than http://www.somesite.com/.

So brush up on your .htaccess terminology and drop the useless “www.” from your domains.

Now, if you follow that link and read the first two Excel spreadsheets (curse you, OECD, for not providing PDF or HTML versions of this data!) you’ll see that it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds: first, the US has the highest number of overall broadband subscribers of any country; second, most of the countries with higher adoption percentages are countries far smaller than the US (Britain, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, S. Korea, etc.). Naturally, it’s a lot easier to wire up the entirety of small countries than it is a continent-spanning nation that’s quite spread out, as much of the US west of the Mississippi River is.

Still, if you want to get broadband Internet service in the US, your options—even in a major metro area like New York or Chicago—are limited. In most Chicago neighborhoods, you’re limited to Comcast cable service and either Verizon or AT&T DSL service. That’s it; there are virtually no broadband alternatives. (Clear’s WiMax service has only recently appeared in Chicago, so we’ll have to see how that goes.) Now, I could editorialize for quite a long time about competition in the Internet, TV and phone service markets, but I won’t bore you with that, as it’s only my opinion, it’s often debated by people far smarter than I and it tends to spark political flame wars.

There have been some interesting developments in broadband lately, though. Google, for example, spent a lot of money after the dot-com bubble burst buying up unused fiber and they recently announced a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service that they are looking to set up in test markets and that they may later roll out elsewhere. The chief feature of this service is astonishing: Google plans to give users of this service one gigabit/second connections, straight to their house, which would make a user’s Internet connection almost as fast as the hard drive on her computer (though, of course, the actual speed of any data transfer is limited to the slowest leg of the journey). Also interesting is the fact that they intend to license out this service to others, meaning we could actually see a resurgence of “boutique” ISPs—local service resellers—rather like the ones we had in the early 1990s (and that were killed off by mega-ISPs like AOL, cable companies and telephone companies in the late 1990s).

Google has stated in the past that the more people that use the Internet, the better it is for Google, so I’m not entirely surprised that they’re doing this (though I was surprised at the speeds they’re looking to achieve). Still, it gives me some hope that if they do roll out an ISP, it might present a real “third option” (or, if small companies can resell the service, even fourth, fifth and sixth options) and some much-needed competition in telecommunications for America, which can really only be a good thing for users. (Hooray for supply and demand!) I think a broadband price/service war is brewing in America. It may not have started yet, but if a few things fall into place, it could start as early as a year or two from now.

However, just giving everyone a fast Internet connection isn’t enough; The Internet can be a dangerous place for a novice and so there also needs to be a program of education about using the Internet effectively and safely…and, as a matter of fact, that is exactly the conclusion to which a recent FCC survey came. The New York Times recently ran an AP article that says as much:

The Federal Communications Commission’s first-ever survey on Internet usage and attitudes concludes that those who aren’t connected today need to be taught how to navigate the Web, find online information that is valuable to them and avoid hazards such as Internet scams.

Boy, do we ever need more of this! If I had a penny for every bogus offer and slimy con I’ve gotten in my email over the years, I could retire a wealthy man by now. Goodness knows how many people get suckered by these things every year and with the economy sucking as hard as it has for the last year, I’ve seen far too many library patrons willing to sign up for un-guaranteed loans from god-knows-who on the Internet. I even ran into a patron last year who bought into a scam—despite my warnings that it was such—that would, for a monthly fee, “put her on a list for whom their ‘thousands of members’” would pray. (Not that I’m against prayer, but I guarantee that just one look at this email she showed me would have told you it was an obvious scam, too.) Scams are like cockroaches: if I see one patron getting taken in, there are many more I haven’t seen who have, too.

Education about how to use the Internet—not just technically, but also practically and safely—is where I think we’re really hurting in the US. I am occasionally reminded that the Internet is still very much the Wild West: there may be lots of civilized places out there, but there’s also quite a lot of uncharted territory, too, and people need to be mindful of what they’re doing, who they’re giving their info to and what happens after they do. (It was only fifteen years ago that I first started using the Internet and I don’t mind telling you that as a naïve teen, I made some pretty stupid mistakes that I would scold my younger self for if I could.) Since then, the pace and sophistication of technology has only accelerated, to the point where today it is shockingly easy to get your identity stolen.

I don’t know how to get around this other than for teachers, librarians, writers of “how to use the Internet” books and the like to educate as many people as we can. Unlike other media that came before the Internet (such as radio and television), the Internet’s two-way nature offers great power to people and, as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben once told him, “With great power comes great responsibility”. I fear that as the supply of broadband Internet service goes up and prices come down, there will be growing pains as people adjust to the full scope of this truly awesome medium. The big question is: will millions of people outgrow those pains or succumb to them?

Google spends millions and millions of dollars every year on tweaking their search results to make them better.  Engineers at Google constantly ask themselves:  How can we give people the information they want in as few clicks as possible?  Can we add context-relevant information such as a map, movie showtimes or images in order to make the search results more useful? In other words, Google would rather just give you the information you need if it possibly can, instead of sending you somewhere else.

When you search for something using a standard Google search (that is, at Google.com or through your browser’s search box), the search engine doesn’t separate relevant results, forcing you to click various sections of results. Instead, Google just gives you a list of the best results, depending on what you’re searching for and regardless of what type of result it is; consequently, a Google search results list will include links to web pages, maps, images, videos and more, all in one list. This “smart firehose” model works well for Google because it gives good results and then trusts people to make the right choice.

Libraries, in comparison, are woefully behind in search. Catalog searches are almost always totally separate from research information, so in order to find good information about, say, diabetes, a user will need to do multiple searches; one for the library’s catalog and at least one for the research databases. Often, users will need to go into several different research databases and perform individual searches.

Library users need a smart firehose.

Let’s start with how things are done right now by two libraries: Chicago Public Library and New York Public Library.

Fig. 1 (click to enlarge)

Fig. 1 shows the results we get when we use the search box in the top-right corner of the front page of Chicago Public Library’s website to search for the term “diabetes”.

The complete lack of results pertaining to research databases leaves the user totally ignorant of the top-notch information they could be getting. As it stands, no user will ever know, based on what they see here, that Chicago Public Library has access to lots of high-quality, authoritative information in the research databases.

It is also worth noting that even if a user chooses to use CPL’s Advanced Search page, no results from the research databases are shown. None.

Fig. 2 (click to enlarge)

Fig. 2 is a bit deceptive. While it looks like a lot of good information, it’s actually the same problem–from the opposite end–that we saw in Fig. 1. If the user does discover the link from CPL’s front page to online research (buried “below the fold” on the page for most users in a link labelled “Choose a Research Topic”) and follows that to the page for Health & Medicine research databases, they can then use the Quick Search box to do another search for “diabetes”, the results of which are seen here. Note, by the way, that the Quick Search does not include the Health and Medicine Reference Collection (which has several extremely good articles on diabetes) or Medline, both of which would be extremely useful to someone researching the topic.

The results here are good, though, even if it did take two difficult-to-find clicks to get to the right place from which to search.

Fig. 3 (click to enlarge)

New York Public Library does even worse. Using the search field on New York Public Library’s website and leaving “Everything” as our search type, we see this. Instead of getting the results we want, we get no results whatsoever; just a tally of the number of hits in each of the different collections. Users will have to click each link to see what results they’ve gotten.

These segregated results serve only to confuse the user. Why separate results? The business of a library is providing good information, so we shouldn’t be hiding (or worse, giving no clues to the existence of) authoritative information.

Now, let’s look at search done right by the reigning champion: Google.

Fig. 4 (click to enlarge)

Now, this is search done right. By going to Google.com and searching for “diabetes”, we are presented with these results. I would like to point out several things:

1. The number of results is off to the right, just above the advertisements, because it is almost incidental to the actual results.
2. The number of results are not separated into how many of each type of results were located. To Google, a good hit is a good hit.
3. The results include information from several types of sources, all presented in ways that are immediately apparent to users.

Google, of course, has a number of proprietary tools to create that list of results, collectively called PageRank.  No one outside of Google knows precisely what is involved in determining PageRank–something Google is, for various reasons, very anxious to keep secret–but from the company’s history, we have a rough idea.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s rough idea for determining how valuable a page on the Internet was that the more sites that link to a particular page on the Internet, the more valuable that page must be, hence an increased PageRank. Of course, PageRank has evolved considerably since its days as Larry and Sergey’s project at Stanford (then called “BackRub”).

Integrated library systems (ILSes) and vendor-supplied research databases have tools like this, too: the number of times a title has circulated and the number of times users have viewed a database article. Sure, truly intuitive ranking systems are more complex, but it’s a start.

But this brings us back to the original problems that this essay is determined to discuss. Why can’t results from the catalog and the research databases be merged into one list that gives users what they want, regardless of source? At the very least, why can’t a catalog search results page offer a link to relevant research databases when a user performs a search? (E.g., “You appear to have been searching for ‘diabetes’. Have you tried our health and medicine research databases?”)

Here is one last figure to consider:

Fig. 5 (click to enlarge)

The three default icons under “Are You Looking For?” have been supplemented with a fourth: “research databases”. (Excuse my oversimplified illustration; the icon is supposed to be a mortarboard hat, if you can’t tell.) Also, the first result is a hit from a research database, along with a paragraph  taken straight from an article, describing what diabetes is and offering a link to more information there. Users can immediately grasp that the first result is a relevant one and, entirely without requiring any extra effort of the user, more high-quality information is presented to them.

Integrating all of the information a library can offer in one easy-to-use list is a difficult task, but it is one that must be undertaken if libraries are to remain relevant and useful to patrons. This change would be a momentous one, since companies that make all different types of software–catalogs, databases and ILSes–would have to hammer out some sort of standardized API for these sorts of things. (This, though, is an expansive topic that is probably best left for a future essay.) It is, unfortunately, something which I fear may not happen for some years, by which time more of our “mind share” will have been taken away from us by Google. If libraries are to remain relevant, we have to put all our information at the users’ fingertips, regardless of source and with one simple search. We need our own smart firehoses.