Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings

Seasons Greetings to all. It is indeed a wonderful holidays as the Google Scholar has published an important piece to the Semantic Web literature. He's done it again, writing an concise and cogent piece on the key elements which differentiates Web 3.0 from Web 2.0. In other news, a reader recently made a comment from a previous entry which I found to be very interesting. Here's what he said:

I (as a librarian) found the article and the whole topic very important. I especially enjoyed the conclusion. You wrote that "Web 3.0 is about bringing the miscellaneous back together meaningfully after it's been fragmented into a billion pieces."I was wondering if in your opinion this means that the semantic web may turn a folksonomy into some kind of structured taxonomy. We all know the advantages and disadvantages of a folksonomy. Is it possible for web 3.0 to minimize those disadvantages and maybe even make good use out of them?

My response? It'll sound cliched and tired: it's really too early to tell. But although it's murky as to what the Semantic Web will look like, all directions point to the possibility that folksonomies will play a key role. Here's why:

(1) Underneath the messiness of the Web, is a fairly organized latent structure, whose backbones are web threads. A scale-free network is significantly dominated by few highly connected hubs.

(2) What this means is that folksonomies and tagging are in fact controlled vocabularies in their own right. Lots have been written about this. Recent studies have shown that the frequency distribution of tags in folksonomies tends to stabilize into power-law distributions. When a substantial number of users tag content for a long period of time, stable tags start appearing in the resulting folksonomy.

(3) Such a use of folksonomies could help overcome some of the inherent difficulties in ontology construction, thus potentially bridging Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. By using folksonomies' collective categorization scheme as an initial knowledge base for constructing ontologies, the ontology author could then use the tagging distribution's most common tags as concepts, relations, or instances. Folksonomies do not a Semantic Web make -- but it's a good start.

Genre Searching

At today's SLAIS colloquium, Dr. Luanne Freund gave a presentation on Genre Searching: A Pragmatic Approach to Information Retrieval. Freund argues for taking a pragmatics approach in genre searching and genre classification. But there are two perspectives of pragmatics: socio-pragmatic and cognitive-pragmatic. Using a case study, a high-tech firm, Freund and her colleagues built a unique search engine called X-Cite, which culls together documents from the corporate intranet (which include anything from FAQ's to specialize manuals) with tags. In ranking documents based on title, abstract, and keywords as part of the search engine, the algorithm uniquely cuts down on the ambiguity and guesswork of searching. Using a software engineering workplace domain as its starting point, Freund believes that genre searching has the potential to make a significant contribution to the effectiveness of workplace search systems, by incorporating genre weights into the ranking algorithm.

In genre analysis, three steps must be taken:

(1) Identify - The core genre repertoire of the work domain

(2) Develop - A standard taxonomy to represent it

(3) Develop - Operational definitions of the genre classes in the taxonomy, including identifying features in terms of form, function and content to facilitate manual and automatic genre classification.

Throughout the entire presentation, my mind kept returning to the question: is this not another specialized form of social searching? A tailorized search engine which narrows its search to a specific genre? Although the two are entirely different things, I keep thinking that creating your own search engine is certainly much easier.

Web 3.0 Librarian

My colleague Dean Giustini and I have collaborated on an article, The Semantic Web as a large, searchable catalogue: a librarian’s perspective. In it, we argue that librarians will play a prominent role in Web 3.0. The current Web is disjointed and disorganized, and searching is much like looking for a needle in the haystack.

It's not unlike the library before Melvil Dewey introduced the idea of organizing and cataloguing books in a classification system. In many ways, we see the parallels here 130 years later. It's not surprising at all to see the OCLC at the forefront in developing Semantic Web technologies. Many of the same techniques of bibliographic control apply to the possibilities of the Semantic Web. It was the computer scientists and computer engineers who had created Web 1.0 and 2.0, but it will ultimately be individuals from library science and information science who will play a prominent role in the evolution of organizing the messiness into a coherent whole for users. Are we saying that Web 2.0 is irrelevant? Of course not. Web 2.0 is an intermediary stage. Folksonomies, social tagging, wikis, blogs, podcasts, mashups, etc -- all of these things are essential basic building blocks to the Semantic Web.

Web 3.0 & the Sem-antic Web

Ready or not, like it or not, Web 3.0 is around the corner. It's coming - so it's best to understand the technologies. Particularly for librarians, we need to understand the intricate technologies behind what the semantic web will look like, how it runs, and what to expect from its much anticipated (although still hyper-theoretical) features.

Ora Lassila and James Hendler, who co-authored along with Tim Berners-Lee, on the article which predicted what the semantic web would look like in 2001, argues in their most recent article, Embracing "Web 3.0" that the technologies that make it possible for the semantic web is slowly but surely maturing. In particular,

As RDF acceptance has grown, the need has become clear for a standard query language to be for RDF what SQL is for relational data. The SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL), now under standardization at the W3C, is designed to be that language.

But that doesn't mean that Web 2.0 technologies are obsolete. Rather, they are only a terminal stage of the evolution to Web 3.0. In particular, it is interesting that the authors note

(1) Folksonomies - tagging provides and organic, community-driven means of creating structure and classification vocabularies.

(2) Microformats - the use of HTML markup to decode structured data are a step toward "semantic data." Of course, although not in Semantic Web formats, microformatted data is easy to transform into something like RDF or OWL.

As you can see, we're moving along. Take a look at this: on the surface, Yahoo Food looks just like any Web service; underneath, it is made from SPARQL which really does "sparkle."

Top 25 Definitions for Web 2.0

Summer has gone by so quickly. What happened to June? I've been culling readings from all over everywhere, aggregating the best definitions of Web 2.0. Notice there is a lot: twenty-five in all. I tried making sense of everything, even trying to arrange and shuffle for a catchy acronym (think ROY G. BIV). I challenge all librarians and other information professionals interested in Web 2.0 to do the same: find a catchy acronym and share it with us all. I will share my own in one month's time.

(1) Social Networks - The content of a site should comprise user-provided information that attracts members of an ever-expanding network. (example: Facebook)

(2) Wisdom of Crowds - Group judgments are surprisingly accurate, and the aggregation of input is facilitated by the ready availability of social networking sites. (example: Wikipedia)

(3) Loosely Coupled API's - Short for "Application Programming Interface," API provides a set of instructions (messages) that a programmer can use to communicate between applications, thus allowing programmers to incorporate one piece of software to directly manipulate (code) into another. (example: Google Maps)

(4) Mashups - They are combinations of APIs and data that result in new information resources and services. (example: Calgary Mapped)

(5) Permanent Betas - The idea is that no software is ever truly complete so long as the user community is still commenting upon it, and thus, improving it. (example: Google Labs)

(6) Software Gets Better the More People Use It - Because all social networking sites seek to capitalize on user input, the true value of each site is definted by the number of people it can bring together. (example: Windows Live Messenger)

(7) Folksonomies - It's a classification system created in a bottom-up fashion and with no central coordination. Entirely differing from the traditional classification schemes such as the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Classifications, folksonomies allow any user to "social tag" whatever phrase they deem necessary for an object. (example: Flickr and Youtube)

(8) Individual Production and User Generated Content - Free social software tools such as blogs and wikis have lowered the barrier to entry, following the same footsteps as the 1980s self-publishing revolution sparked by the advent of the office laser printer and desktop publishing software. In the world of Web 2.0, with a few clicks of the mouse, a user can upload videos or photos from their digital cameras and into their own media space, tag it with keywords and make the content available for everyone in the world.

(9) Harness the Power of the Crowd - Harnessing not the "intellectual" power, but the power of the "wisdom of the crowds," "crowd-sourcing" and "folksonomies."

(10) Data on an Epic Scale - Google has a total database measured in hundreds of petabytes (a million, billion bytes) which is swelled each day by terabytes of new information. Much of this is collected indirectly from users and aggregated as a side effect of the ordinary use of major Internet services and applications such as Google, Amazon, and EBay. In a sense these services are 'learning' every time they are used by mining and sifting data for better services.

(11) Architecture of Participation - Through the use of the application or service, the service itself gets better. Simply argued, the more you use it - and the more other people use - the better it gets. Web 2.0 technologies are designed to take the user interactions and utilize them to improve itself. (e.g. Google search).

(12) Network Effects - It is general economic term often used to describe the increase in vaue to the existing users of a service in which there is some form of interaction with others, as more and more people to start to use it. As the Internet is, at heart, a telecommunications network, it is therefore subject to the network effect. In Web 2.0, new software services are being made available which, due to their social nature, rely a great deal on the network effect for their adoption. eBay is one example of how the application of this concept works so successfully.

(13) Openness - Web 2.0 places an emphasis on making use of the information in vast databases that the services help to populate. This means Web 2. 0 is about working with open standards, using open source software, making use of free data, re-using data and working in a spirit of open innovation.

(14) The Read/Write Web - A term given to describe the main differences between Old Media (newspaper, radio, and TV) and New Media (e.g. blogs, wikis, RSS feeds), the new Web is dynamic in that it allows consumers of the web to alter and add to the pages they visit - information flows in all directions.

(15) The Web as a Platform - Better known as "perpetual beta," the idea behind Web 2.0 services is that they need to be constantly updated. Thus, this includes experimenting with new features in a live environment to see how customers react.

(16) The Long Tail - The new Web lowers the barriers for publishing anything (including media) related to a specific interest because it empowers writers to connect directly with international audiences interested in extremely narrow topics, whereas originally it was difficult to publish a book related to a very specific interest because its audience would be too limited to justify the publisher's investment.

(17) Harnessing Collective Intelligence - Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia are good examples of how successful Web 2.0-centric companies use the collective intelligence of users in order to continually improve services based on user contributions. Google's PageRank examines how many links points to a page, and from what sites those links come in order to determine its relevancy instead of the evaluating the relevance of websites based solely on their content.

(18) Science of Networks - To truly understand Web 2.0, one must not only understand web networks, but also human and scientific networks. Ever heard of six degrees of separation and the small world phenomenon? Knowing how to open up a Facebook account isn't good enough; we must know what goes on behind the scene in the interconnectedness of networks - socially and scientifically.

(19) Core Datasets from User Contributions - Web 2.0 companies use to collect unique datasets is through user contributions. However, collecting is only half the picture; using the datasets is the key. These contributions are then organized into databases and analyzed to extract the collective intelligence hidden in the data. This extracted information is then used to extract collective knowledge that can be applied to the direct improvement of the website or web service.

(20) Lightweight Programming Models - The move toward database driven web services has been accompanied by new software development models that often lead to greater flexibility. In sharing and processing datasets between partners, this enables mashups and remixes of data. Google Maps is a common example as it allows people to combine its data and application with other geographic datasets and applications.

(21) The Wisdom of the Crowds - Not only has it blurred the boundary between amateur and professional status, in a connected world, ordinary people often have access to better information than officials do. As an example, the collective intelligence of the evacuees of the towers saved numerous lives in the face of disobeying authority which told them to stay put.

(22) Digital Natives - Because a generation (mostly the under 25's) have grown up surrounded by developing technologies, those fully at home in a digital environment aren't worried about information overload; rather, they crave it.

(23) Internet Economics - Small is the new big. Unlike the past when publishing was controlled by publishers, Web 2.0's read/write web has opened up markets to a far bigger range of supply and demand. The amateur who writes one book has access to the same shelf space as the professional author.

(24) "Wirelessness" - Digital natives are less attached to computers and are more interested in accessing information through mobile devices, when and where they need it. Hence, traditional client applications designed to run on a specific platform, will struggle if not disappear in the long run.

(25) Who Will Rule? - This will be the ultimate question (and prize). As Sharon Richardson argues, whoever rules "may not even exist yet."

Librarian 3.0

I was recently asked in a job interview how Web 3.0 would work for a law firm. It's made me think on the fly: how would the Web of the future work in such a scenario? We're barely even half-way into Web 2.0...I had to think back to an article that Michael V. Copeland of Business 2.0 Magazine had written entitled, What's next for the Internet to envision a glimpse of the "future."

The semantic Web in the Berners-Lee vision acts more like a series of connected databases, where all information resides in a structured form. Within that structure is a layer of description that adds meaning that the computer can understand.

Since we're on the topic of visions and dreams, here would be my answer: Imagine the lawyer, Mr. X, flipping open his laptop (which by then would be priced similarly to a cell phone), and typing in "2 o'clock meeting with Angela at Starbucks." All of a sudden, his online calendar would pop open and a series of clients names would appear, and the correct "Angela Smith" would be sent an email with details of the meeting agenda sent to the printer. Starbucks would receive an electronic notification with the usual order of Venti Chai Latte (two cups) and a newspaper -- the Globe and Mail (his favourite) to boot. Because Mr. X's car is in the shop because of a recent accident and a replacement car isn't ready yet, a taxi has been order automatically for Mr. X and will be ready for him upon arrival for 1:30 at the entrance. The ride is estimated for 15 minutes to his destination, but his preference has always been for early arrival.

Finally, it's the library's turn now. Mr. X. sends an email to the librarian, (after all, she is the one responsible for the library's more intricate databases), simply with the message "Wang V. Granville LLP" (both pseudonyms of course), and immediately, the librarian works her magic and types in the necessary key terms. All of the acts, statutes, regulations, as well as updated case files relating to the case are electronically retrieved and stored onto a file which is automatically sent to the lawyer's dossier. (The librarian's job is behind the scene - she is the one who carefully collates the materials and gives them tags which the semantic databases will translate into its own readable language).

The lawyer walks out of the firm nonchalantly and begins his afternoon with everything he needs, but taking only one-tenth of the time and effort he would need back in the days of Web 2.0. That, in my hypothetical world based on user history and preferences and interlocking databases, is how the future of Web 3.0 might look like.

The Library as a Conversation

Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation is an excellent read, one definitely worthy of serious consideration for practitioners who want to rethink the way the library will serve patrons in the future. Libraries need to be part of the conversation of its users, rather than trying to be the single point of entry. Conversations are varied in their mode, places, and players - moreover, conversations are intensely personal. This means that the library needs to be a facilitator, and therefore needs to be varied in its mode and access points. In order to do so, libraries must strategize how to use Web 2.0 tools. But to do that, we must first understand the main components of it. Here are what the authors deem as the core concepts of Web 2.0:

(1) Social Networks - The content of a site should comprise user-provided information that attracts members of an ever-expanding network. (example: Facebook)

(2) Wisdom of Crowds - Group judgments are surprisingly accurate, and the aggregation of input is facilitated by the ready availability of social networking sites. (example: eBay, Wikipedia)

(3) Loosely Coupled API's - Short for "Application Programming Interface," API provides a set of instructions (messages) that a programmer can use to communicate between applications, thus allowing programmers to incorporate one piece of software to directly manipulate (code) into another. (example: Google Maps)

(4) Mashups - They are combinations of APIs and data that result in new information resources and services. (example: Calgary Mapped)

(5) Permanent Betas - The idea is that no software is ever truly complete so long as the user community is still commenting upon it, and thus, improving it. (example: Google Labs)

(6) Software Gets Better the More People Use It - Because all social networking sites seek to capitalize on user input, the true value of each site is definted by the number of people it can bring together. (example: Windows Live Messenger)

(7) Folksonomies - It's a classification system created in a bottom-up fashion and with no central coordination. Entirely differing from the traditional classification schemes such as the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Classifications, folksonomies allow any user to "social tag" whatever phrase they deem necessary for an object. (example: Flickr and Youtube).

The Long Tail and Emily Dickinson

Librarians (and all information professionals) need to understand what the Long Tail is in order to fully comprehend the impact of Web 2.0 and the manner in which communication and publishing have changed. The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in Wired in 2004 which proposed that Amazon and similar Internet companies had changed certain business and economic models. While there are cultural, political, social, and business implications, I think using an analogy might be more appropriate for fleshing out these ideas.

Think of Emily Dickinson. Although she had lived during the 19th century, it wasn't until a century later that her works were "re-discovered," and appreciated by readers. True, the shift from the Victorian to Modernist had helped, but one can imagine what would've happened if Dickinson's ingenuity occurred during our times. According to the Long Tail, things would've been different. Her works wouldn't be hidden in her drawers, but perhaps would be published online or print-on-demand. With services such as Amazon and Netflix, the playing field has been leveled. (Think Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat).

Because physical geography and scale are no longer important, artists no longer need sales to occupy spaces on bookshelves and video stores. Even the most obscure of artists can have their work published online (be it on Youtube, Lulu.com, or Blogger). In many ways, the "steroids" of wireleness, as Friedman had put it, has merely intensified Dickinson's rise to fame in a matter of months (or days), up from from years and decades. This is the power - or perhaps - inevitability of Web 2.0.

For libraries to move into the "next" level, they must consider how to integrate Web 2.0 concepts such as the Long Tail into their operations. It's not difficult; in fact, it's likely inexpensive and likely not very time-consuming at all. It requires only creativity and an open mind. Here is what Anderson proposes for maximizing the power of the Long Tail:

(1) Make Everything Available - Unlike bookstores, which shelves books based on sales figures, Web 2.0 services make everything available. Without the need to worry about physical space, all you need is a database or catalogue, and some marketing, and voila, you let the patron decide for himself what title(s) he wants. It doesn't matter if it the item gets used only once, what matters is that it's there at all.

(2) Cut the Prices in Half. Now Lower It - When you lower the price, consumers tend to buy more. If lots consumers buy bits and pieces of something, that adds up and in the end, everyone is a winner. (Think iTunes).

(3) Help Me Find It - You can't select what you can't find. Amazon is one service that cleverly employs its users' recommendations, social tagging, and uses encourages an element of social networking for patrons to browse its huge selection of merchandise. It must be the smartest marketing ploy since Coke's secret formula. If libraries can maximize on such creativity, the sky's really the limit. Especially since gate counts are decreasing...

Librarian 2.0?

Library 2.0 has received quite a bit of controversy recently when Wikipedia community debated whether the term deserved a place on Wikipedia. In the end, Library 2.0 remained, and all is well. Or is it? How about the librarian of the "future," one who works in a Library 2.0? Stephen Abram has an innovative list of what constitutes this Librarian 2.0 model:

(1) Understand the power of the Web 2.0 opportunities

(2) Learn the major tools of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0

(3) Combine e-resources and print formats and is container and format agnostic

(4) Is device-independent and uses and delivers to everything from laptops to PDAs to iPods

(5) Develop targeted federated search and adopts the OpenURL standard

(6) Connect people and technology and information in context

(7) Doesn’t shy away from non-traditional cataloging and classification and chooses tagging, tag clouds, folksonomies, and user-driven content descriptions and classifications where appropriate

(8) Embrace non-textual information and the power of pictures, moving images, sight, and sound

(9) Understand the “long tail” and leverages the power of old and new content

(10) See the potential in using content sources like the Open Content Alliance, Google Print, and Open WorldCat

(11) Connect users to expert discussions, conversations, and communities of practice and participates there as well

(12) Use the latest tools of communication (such as Facebook) to connect content, expertise, information coaching, and people

(13) Use and develops advanced social networks to enterprise advantage

(14) Connect with everyone using their communication mode of choice – telephone, Skype, IM, SMS, texting, email, virtual reference, etc.

(15) Encourage user driven metadata and user developed content and commentary

(16) Understand the wisdom of crowds and the emerging roles and impacts of the blogosphere, Web syndicasphere and wikisphere

To Continue with Web 2.0...

In my continuing series, of which I have written here, and here, and here, and also here, Paul Anderson's What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education is the most comprehensive to date. As I have mentioned, I am compiling and synthesizing the literature surrounding Web 2.0, and will be writing an article. As information experts, we are constantly handling information, where we sit behind a computer most of the day churning through emails and invisible matter. Hence, I believe it's important to understand the architecture behind what we are doing online, and I believe Anderson does a superb job highlighting six major concepts of Web 2.0:

(1) Individual Production and User Generated Content - Free social software tools such as blogs and wikis have lowered the barrier to entry, following the same footsteps as the 1980s self-publishing revolution sparked by the advent of the office laser printer and desktop publishing software. In the world of Web 2.0, with a few clicks of the mouse, a user can upload videos or photos from their digital cameras and into their own media space, tag it with keywords and make the content available for everyone in the world.

(2) Harness the Power of the Crowd - Harnessing not the "intellectual" power, but the power of the "wisdom of the crowds," "crowd-sourcing" and "folksonomies."

(3) Data on an Epic Scale - Google has a total database measured in hundreds of petabytes (a million, billion bytes) which is swelled each day by terabytes of new information. Much of this is collected indirectly from users and aggregated as a side effect of the ordinary use of major Internet services and applications such as Google, Amazon, and EBay. In a sense these services are 'learning' every time they are used by mining and sifting data for better services.

(4) Architecture of Participation - Through the use of the application or service, the service itself gets better. Simply argued, the more you use it - and the more other people use - the better it gets. Web 2.0 technologies are designed to take the user interactions and utilize them to improve itself. (e.g. Google search).

(5) Network Effects - It is general economic term often used to describe the increase in vaue to the existing users of a service in which there is some form of interaction with others, as more and more people to start to use it. As the Internet is, at heart, a telecommunications network, it is therefore subject to the network effect. In Web 2.0, new software services are being made available which, due to their social nature, rely a great deal on the network effect for their adoption.

(6) Openness - Web 2.0 places an emphasis on making use of the information in vast databases that the services help to populate. This means Web 2. 0 is about working with open standards, using open source software, making use of free data, re-using data and working in a spirit of open innovation.

Web 2.0 Course this Summer at University of Western Ontario

Web 2.0 is slowly emerging in the LIS curricula. Amanda Etches-Johnson, the User Experience Librarian at McMaster University Library, is teaching an innovative course at the University of Western Ontario LIS school called LIS 757: Social Software and Libraries. Here is a brief description of what the class entails:

The term “social software” has been applied to Web-based software tools that facilitate communication, collaboration, and network/community-building. This course will explore social software applications such as blogs, RSS, wikis, social bookmarking, tagging, and online social networks within the context of library services.

What do you think? Is it time that LIS faculties make Web 2.0 courses mandatory, or at least integrated into the curricula? Here is a schedule of the weekly topics.

• Week 1: Introduction to social software
• Weeks 2 & 3: Blogs - introduction to technology, terminology & software options. Discussion of blog content, design, usability, and library case studies.
• Weeks 4 & 5: RSS - introduction to RSS technology and specifications. Discussion of RSS trends and current issues, review of RSS aggregators, hands-on, and library case studies.
• Week 6: Wikis – technology, software options, hands-on, and library case studies.
• Week 7-8: Social bookmarking, tagging, folksonomies – technology, trends and current issues, hands-on, and case studies.
• Week 9-10: Online communities and social networks – trends and current issues, exploration of various online communities, hands-on, library case studies.
• Week 11: Gaming and virtual worlds.
• Weeks 12-13: best practices, discussion, evaluation.

Move Over Google

With Web 2.0 comes social searching, a type of search engine that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users. Social searching takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels to more sophisticated approaches that combine human intelligence with computer algorithms. One search engine that has impressed me to no ends is ChaCha. Why?

Using ChaCha's Search with a Guide feature, your query is sent to a real person who is skilled at finding information on the internet and knowledgable on the subject at hand so that you get the few exact results you want, not the millions of results you don't. The more ChaCha is used, the "smarter" and "faster" ChaCha becomes. Indexing all the questions that are asked and associating them with the search engines and resources used by Guides, and the links visited by the users, ChaCha knows where to look and what the best human-approved resources are for each question or topic. Indeed, this kind of searching and type of search engine poses an interesting challenge to our friends at Google. How reliable are the guides? Here's where ChaCha is creative:

The primary reason is that we pay them and their pay is directly related to their performance. At the end of every session, you can select between one and five stars to rate their performance. While we expect you to be honest when rating a Guide, ChaCha can also detect any needlessly malicious ratings.

Welcome to Search 2.0, which uses third-generation search technologies designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models. User preferences + collaboration + collective intelligence + a rich user experience = Search 2.0.

The "New" Web

Prior to coming across Tim O’Reilly’s “What is Web 2.0," I was still lost in the maze that is now referred to the new web 2.0. Blogging, Wiki's, podcasts, etc. etc. were merely a rehash of previous technologies. (I realize I've been harping on this point for ages - so I apologize for the repeat). However, O'Reilly allays my suspicion with the opinion that Web 2.0 is not meant to be a radical transformation - it is not meant to systematically alter the internet as we know it. Rather, Web 2.0 is a progressive and more interactive approach to online information.

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between Tim O'Reilly and MediaLive International. O'Reilly, who actually majored in Classics but moved onto the computer manuals business, realized that companies that had survived the collapse all had some things in common. To O'Reilly, the dot-com collapse marked a turning point for the web.

But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people asserting that it as a marketer's buzzword, while others take it as the holy grail. (I was somewhere in the middle). O'Reilly's article is definitely worth a read for those uninformed about social software or skeptical about its applications. Here are some of his main points:


Web 1.0 ------verus ------- Web 2.0
DoubleClick ----------------> Google AdSense
Ofoto ----------------------> Flickr
Akamai ---------------------> BitTorrent
mp3.com -------------------> Napster
Britannica Online ------------> Wikipedia
personal websites ------------> blogging
evite ------------------------> upcoming.org
domain name speculation----> search engine optimization
page views ------------------> cost per click
publishing -------------------> participation
content management ---------> wikis
directories (taxonomy) -------> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness -------------------> syndication


Does this look eerily similar to the modern/postermodern dichotomy so hotly contested within academic circles? Sure does to me. But this is a good thing, and a worthwhile discourse in LIS. I see the future of library and information science, and it is headed in the direction of Web 2.0. I feel that we are on the cusp of something great, something that is only starting to unfold. However, there is no "true" concise definition for "Web 2.0" - nor should there be. It should continually contrast and challenge the way we perceive and use information as librarians and information professionals. The next stage in this evolution? Mashups. More on that to come....

The Search Continues

I recently encountered one of the toughest questions to date. This one nearly blew my mind out when I first skimmed it over. Where to start? How to start? What is it? (And, what have I gotten myself into?)

We are attempting to build a scale out of our
Attitudes and Expectancy data. A starting reference point is Brown, Christiansen and Goldman 1987 – Journal of Studies on Alcohol Sept. 48(5), 483-491.

If these references fully explain the methodology for the development of the Alcohol Expectancy questionnaire, you can move on to…

Other attempts at building an expectancy profile exist around the Iceberg Profile – from the Profile of Mood States questionnaire.

You can also look at scale development in Item Response Theory information…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory

We are looking for scales that have been developed in the exact same way as we hope to, and/or the Alcohol Expectancy Questionnaire was developed.

After a few gin & tonics, and some LIS training and search experience under my belt, I thought it would be interesting to take this on as an information professional at the ref desk. Here is what I did: (1) Find the article. Read it. Analyze it. I used PubMed, which has a "single citation match" feature which allows us to enter a the author's name, volume, issue, and page number to find the article, if a title is not provided. And wouldn't you know it, PubMed indeed came up with the title I needed, plus an abstract!

(2) I then moved onto the the UBC Library Subject Guides. The challenge is that the multi-disciplinary nature of the topic at hand. My first inclination is to start off in Psychology. Yet, other life sciences topics are equally pertinent (i.e. nursing and social work). Even within medicine, different disciplines are relevant.

(3) Thus, starting with PsychInfo, I eventually cover what I feel are the other main indexes & databases: CINAHL, Embase, Medline, and Web of Science. I also cover the free online databases: Google Scholar, SCIRUS, and Tripdatabase. Interestingly, Academic Search Premiere, a multidisciplinary database proved to be one of the most useful as numerous useful hits came up.

(4) With the search tools mapped out, the next step is to come up with some search terms. It took quite some experimentation, using many different combinations of terms. But in the end, I used (1) "alcohol expectancy questionnaire" and "scale development". (2) "Iceberg profile"; (3) "profile of mood states questionnaire" and "scale development"; (4) "Item response theory" and "scale development". Some interesting results did come up. Any ideas on how to improve upon this fairly rag-tag approach?

Open Access, Open Search, and Social Tagging

It's summer, and with the heat, ideas too can melt and meld together into a mishmash of incoherent mess. Recently, I've been introduced to a variety of online tools. With some reflection, I believe that three "trends" if we can call them that, have emerged from online environment which are highly relevant to the information professional.

(1) Social tagging - Flickr, Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, and Library Thing are but a few of the online tools for which users can freely search for information (an items) through the creation of hyperlinks without the constraints of controlled vocabulary or rigid taxonomy structures. Anyone and everyone can create his or her own terms, post them, and share them other users. The question is, is such social tagging (ethnoclassification, folksonomies, or collaborative tagging) a new thing? Or is it an outgrowth of an existing online world which we've been using all along since the inception of the internet? Only now, we have terms for them.

(2) Open Access - Journals are slowly integrating themselves into the online world. Open Access is perhaps one of the hidden gems of the internet that is slowly emerging as an important tool in the academic/professional community. Library Student Journal, Journal of the Association for History and Computing, and Biomedical Digital Libraries are but an inch of the light years of open access journals readily available for perusal. Yet, recent controversy surrounding open access is just how "open" is it? Some journals charge its writers for a fee.

(3) Open Searching - Pubmed is one of the shining examples of how collaboration can open up the world of information to users in need. It's a matter of time, that it opens up to other avenues beyond the health sciences world and into the humanities, social sciences, and business. It still intrigues me the shroud of secrecy in the legal world, where Lexis Nexis and Westlaw charge the users by the minute. Although it does promote the librarian to a higher status of importance in the particular locale, does it not make an intriguing contrast with the "openess" of Pubmed?

So with this said, the question remains, is the librarian useful in this online world? Ab-so-lute-ly. As an information professional, librarians are perfect for such fact-finding and information searching missions. Not only do librarians have the knowledge of cataloguing/classification essential for a deeper understanding of how information is organized, they also have the social skills (and interest) to help users look for what they are searching for -- they're good at customer service! Because if you think about it, the online world is a jungle, and librarians are trained to sort through all that mess.