Stephen Abram
2020 Vision Conference: Idaho Library Challenges of the Future
sponsored by the Idaho State Library
[Sarah's note: this wasn't everything Abram covered, by far, but it's the most I could capture with my 100 wpm little fingers and 50wpm brain. I hope you find something nuggety and useful in it. I know I did.]
Stephen Abram gave the keynote talk Tuesday evening for this conference. About 120 people were in attendance at the event, which was open not only to registered library staff, but to the general public as well, who were definitely present.
Abram started the discussion by talking about how we’ve been through a period of huge invention (technology, the web, etc.), the first huge difference in generations, and are having trouble keeping up and coping with this mind-shift.
People who know how to find, collect, and disseminate good information will be invaluable in or society. But unless libraries face up to what people really need, we won’t be in a position to capitalize on that.
Abram talked about things we need to discard from our libraries: the idea that "there’s no place like home" — the 1960s libraries. He compared librarians with this ideal to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz wanting to return from the fabulous Oz to her dustbowl orphan life in Kansas. We have to acknowledge that things are changing, and change with them.
What is the best future for libraries? Should we compete on the basis of search? No–we’re about learning, community, helping people become knowledgeable and have better lives. We shouldn’t be competing with Google…they’re very good at what they do. Let them do it. Let them answer their who/what/where questions.
We do "how" and "why" questions well. That is our area of expertise. Ask Google how to do a "really fine marketing plan" and you’ll get nothing useful. Libraries also need to start collecting our own data better–so we know what people are doing on our websites (privacy protected), what items are circulating, and identify where our collections and services are weak.
People who borrow books from libraries read different things than people who buy books. Libraries promote bestsellers, and then let their patrons languish in months-long hold lists. Why are we promoting things that we don’t have in stock? Libraries are all about the long tail–not the most popular things, but quality materials that are useful to our users.
We also need to think about how human behavior is changing. Newspapers are configured in A-frames–up from one corner to the top middle, then down, and across. If you’re under 30, your eyes travel in an F-frame–up and down the side, and across twice. Younger children’s eyes are moving in a circle and then a dot in the middle. So, we need to gear different portions of our websites to how our users physically view materials–use an F-frame for teen and adult sites. A-frame for senior sites, etc. Think about colors too–ask the kids and teens what colors they like. Use those. Don’t use your own preferences.
Abram notes that Boolean fails on large databases, like Yahoo, Google, and a large database built of intense amounts of data about leukemia patients. So–what else do we use? A visual or game-like interface overlay that allows us to access the information in a more visual and dynamic way.
Abram notes that the number one fear of librarians is that we will become irrelevant.
In usability testing he’s done with information goals, as they differ between librarians and library users, he has identified a huge gap. The two needs that come out of these studies for the users are learning and community. We say that the library is community oriented and a place to learn–but is it?
Think about your library: are you capitalizing on this enough? Are you really offering learning opportunities? Community building? I’m willing to best that most of us are not.
What are the communities that people live in? Two: physical neighborhoods and virtual communities through blogs, e-mail listservs, etc. Many of us are part of both every day. Social networking is moving very rapidly.
If librarians lose the battle for finding quality information, we’re lost. Instead of cataloging information, we need to be back in the business of informing…switching from the noun to the verb.
Abram talks about the different cycles of technology adaptors. You have early adopters who have dozens of gadgets in their drawers, the bulk of people who adapt once the technology has hit critical mass, and skeptics and non-adopters. Abram suggests we not listen to the last group–they’re not the bulk of our users. Listening to people who resist change for the sake of resisting change are not the people to be driving our technology in libraries.
He talked about universities who found that 80%-90% of their students are on Facebook. They’re there–where are we? There is a whole network of people connecting with each other, socializing, developing relationships and vast quantities of social information. Where are we?
Abram noted that the front page of MySpace is earning more than $1 million per day in ad revenue. Still think it’s fad? That it’s for kids only? That it’s not used much? Again–where are we?
The Eastern University Library offers a 3D reference desk, VBI Reference Central (in Active Worlds)–access to federated search engines, databases, books, etc….all set up as a real game envronment. They’re performing reference with virtual avatars.
Abram talked about Second Life, which is all about creation. There is a great library with a secret donor who paid for an island for them. They have meetings, programming, reference, everything at the virtual Second Life Library. Avatars for real librarians are teaching bibliographic instruction in the Second Life environment.
Abram discussed how we build websites. When he met with people at Google, they admitted that it probably wasn’t a good idea to get people to believe that a single search box in the middle of the page is the best thing ever. It provides no context. As long as library websites follow good usability guidelines (Abram mentioned Jakob Nielsen), we can provide dense context on our websites that will be digestable by our users.
He mentioned that the idea that something can be innately intuitive is a lie. The ability to use something is based on a learning process–learning how to read map symbols, learning how to use silverware, etc.
Have a legend. Stick to it. If you change things and make them difficult to understand, your users will leave your site.
Abram notes that librarians are spending a lot of time defending the book unnecessarily. Circulation is up, reading is up, booksales are up. Why are we so freaked out about the book? It’s the one thing that’s working for us. The dominant image of libraries is that we’re book-focused and that’s it. We have a librarian image problem. We have a problem getting across to users that we are community and learning based. That’s what we should focus on.
Millions of books are being digitized. 50% of any book ever written in Chinese is online already. They estimate that all the Chinese corpus will be completely online for free by 2010. Google’s Book Search, however, is the U.S.’s main project and being driven by private industry. The Open Content Alliance is the main competitor in the U.S. Are our OPACS including MARC records for all these free books online? Why not? How can we do this? [Sarah's note: Project Gutenberg is developing MARC records for all their digitized books...haven't herad any news on that in a while though]
If you do a Google maps search for "books" you find only bookstores, not libraries. This is not acceptable. We need to implement search optimization on our websites to find our resources more findable by services like this. Or our users will miss us entirely, and not even know we’re there to give them the very services they’re looking for.
Abram talked about how the U.S. electrical and wireless infrastructure is pathetically behind the rest of the world, due in large part to lobbyists in the U.S. getting the government to let them continue to make money on sub-standard services. He talked about bidirectional wireless modules, which allow you to be on broadband if you’re on the electrical grid at all.
He talked about Google Local, and how it knows where you are physically and gears information to you accordingly. How will libraries fit in with this? How can we get our resources and services into this space, which is where our users will certainly be?
He talked briefly about gadgets and recent developments: ePaper, laser keyboards for portable devices, Google Checkout, streaming media exchanges, voice search, etc.
Secure broadband wireless will be the norm very soon. It’s a transition to a service-oriented architecture, real-time infrastructure, and low-power consumption and mobile display devices.
Abram noted that Millennials are the smartest generation in history–they have higher IQs, they’re using more parts of their brain, have more ganglia, etc. Millennials have more frieends, are more diverse, and respect intelligence.
CDs and DVDs are going away soon. Are we experimenting now with streaming media? Are we ready for what comes next (and which, incidentally, won’t take up any shelf space or manual circ-ing)?
He mentioned Singingfish, which transcribes automatically spoken words in audio and video. It includes news casts, political speeches, random video and audio content found on people’s websites; it’s amazing how much is there. [Sarah's note: I love this site and teach it in my online reference sources class.]
Abram asked what are we going to do as libraries if Google Scholar actually works? If it can incorporate subscription-database content seamlessly, virtual reference, eBooks, etc. What is our role at that point? Google is buying up social networking spaces, and launching word processing, spreadsheet, and other software resources in attempt to fold these into Google Scholar as well.
What are we going to do if search gets better (e.g. Google Search)? He talked about Grokker’s visual search interface and how librarians don’t like it but users do. Visual learners get it and like it. Librarians, at least now, tend not to–we’re text-based learners instead, even though only 20% of the general population are text-based learners. Abram has posted on his blog a test that lets you find out your own learning style.
He talked about how our users want to find not search. We offers search skills class, but not finding skills classes. Teaching "information literacy" classes are worse–asking people to acknowledge a form of illiteracy.
Here are Library Expectations 1.0–search, retrieve, print, link, navigate, read.
This is not just about Library 2.0; it’s about Web 2.0, which is moving to a platform which will not be contained by wires. The library can only exist in its helpfulness in the places where the users are–not on our websites, but out on websites and services where they are–IM, MySpace, Google.
If we look at what we do well: we improve the quality of difficult questions (health, business, learning), our reference interviewing skills, our ability to see people and help them, is our strength. That’s where we belong. If we keep pushing things out onto websites, without having a librarian present, is like setting ourselves up to be back-room information tellers and not actually interacting with our users. We need to know what our people are doing. Create immersive, socially rich experiences and participate in them.
Abram presented a slide with a rich list of Web 2.0 tools: RSS, wikis, AJAX, API, blogs and blogging, recommender functionality, personalized alerts, web services, folksonomies, tagging, tag clouds, social networking, open access, open source, open content, commentary and comments, personalization and my profiles, podcasting, MP3 files, streaming media–audio and video, user-driven reviews, ranking and user-driven ratings, IM, virtual reference, photos (Flickr, Picassa), socially driven content, social bookmarking.
Currently, we put the library at the center and try to get our users to come to us. Not okay. We need to put the user at the center and invest our time in the processes, services, and resources that will be most relevant to our 21st century users.
Abram closed by noting six specific areas to discuss:
- Intense Cooperation–we need to cooperate internationally, with libraries of all types
- Radical Trust–trust our users, trust each other, return privacy rights to the user and don’t make decisions for them ourselves
- Homework Support–With damage to school libraries, we need to address this immediately. Test scores in areas without school libraries go down dramatically.
- Productivity–What are we producing in our back rooms, and would this time be spent better out in other areas?
- Supporting Edgelessness–The library doesn’t end at its walls or in its specific community.
- Seamless finding (OpenURL)–One search box that will allow us to search everything in our libraries, seamlessly and preferably visually.
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