I'm retiring next month, so it's time to stop blogging and prepare myself for the next phase of my life.

My dean has promised that this blog will remain available for at least the next year. Some of my entries are still being discovered by new readers. And the year will give people plenty of time to take down any links to this blog on their own blogs or Web sites.

This blog began as an experiment during my sabbatical last year. My initial purpose had been to use it as a way to explore what Library 2.0 was all about. I guess I can say that I'm still exploring it! Blogging has turned out to be much more valuable an exercise than I could have imagined when I first started. There's nothing like the process of regular writing, especially public writing, to get a person thinking in ways that thinking alone doesn't do. And it's been interesting to join the conversation of other librarian bloggers. I have some concerns about the nature and scope of blogging about 2.0, especially in the academic library world, but I also believe that it just isn't possible to be a top-notch professional these days without reading librarian - and other - blogs.

I know that this blog has a fair number of readers. I'm really grateful that people have found it worthwhile (at least some of the time!) to read what I've had to say. Although my postings didn't generate a lot of comments here, I've appreciated the comments that did come in. I've been impressed with everyone's cordiality even when - especially when - people haven't agreed with me. It's added up to a very good show of professionalism.

I've been considering if I have anything in summary to say about academia and Library 2.0 in this final entry. I think not. I'll let my 100+ entries speak for themselves.

Will I start another blog after I retire? I haven't decided. I think it's healthy to step back and take some time away from this. Letting go is a good thing.

Best of luck, everyone. Again, thanks so much for tuning in. Later.

Posted by Laura Cohen at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)
Posted to

A couple of recent writings have caught my eye, and for the same reason. They feature both wisdom and misapprehensions. The wisdom impresses me, and the misapprehensions concern me.

One of these writings is a blog posting, the other is an article in the January/February issue of American Libraries.

Let me start with the blog posting. This is John Blyberg's recent Library 2.0 Debased. John says some very smart things in this posting, but I also take issue with some of what he says.

First, John takes the 2.0 movement to task:

Then he gives us his advice:

I'll comment on this in a minute. But first, I want to refer to the other writing that caught my eye, Steven Bell's American Libraries piece "Design Thinking." Here, Steven advocates for the employment of design thinking (which he nicely describes and rationalizes) in creating "an exceptional user experience."

Steven believes that many of us are putting the cart before the horse: employing technologies before we figure out which problems they might solve:

Steven mentions the term "bandwagon" a couple of times in his piece. This term has connotations: a certain mindlessness, a lack of planning, and a submission to peer pressure, to name a few.

Believe me, I'm not here to defend every last practice of Library 2.0 as manifested in every last library, or every last conference presentation on the topic. That would be nonsense. But I think these writers - and others who have expressed similar views - give our experiments, our advances, and dare I say even our aspirations, too little credit. The truth is, there is plenty of sophistication going on within Library 2.0, in the rationale, planning, intellectual effort, and technological implementation of initiatives.

I don't know why something that is catching on in libraries is necessarily a bandwagon just because it manifests Web 2.0. Are Information Commons a bandwagon phenomenon? Group study areas? Café's in libraries? Or is the issue our concern that our 2.0 initiatives won't be used, or used wisely? John mentions the failure of user-contributed tags in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog because these tags disappoint his expectations. Believe me, I've seen some funny things go on in the group study area just outside my office. But no one is calling this area a failure.

There's no question in my mind that few libraries have done the fundamental recalibrating that John refers to. This will be the biggest challenge set out for us by the major changes in information culture happening all around us. But maybe this is a two-way street. In other words, maybe the slow build-up of new technologies and new physical environments in a library can have an effect on that library's culture. In a couple of John's responses to comments to his posting, he seems to be saying this, and I was glad to see it. I see this happening in my own institution. There are bits and pieces of recalibration going on, and these things are happening due to a variety of forces, some of them external to the library. I've been advocating for more, much more, but this place isn't ready to dig down deep. But there are ideas percolating, and initiatives emerging. I hope we don't stop moving ahead until we've met the ideal criteria for advancement.

I would love to see design thinking applied in my library. Among other things, it would represent my library's commitment to identifying and solving problems in a proven, systematic way. But I wouldn't want us to be limited by design thinking in all that we might do. This is because the introduction of a technology can evolve in unexpected, and unexpectedly useful, ways. You might carefully plan to solve one problem, and another one might be solved along the way. The ball starts rolling, ideas take root, examples emerge, small sparks of interest and even enthusiasm begin to spread. Just think about blogs. They began as "trivial" personal journals, and are now finding their way into the life cycle of serious scholarship.

I think it's important to understand that we can't expect students to envision how every new technology in the library might benefit them. The recent OCLC report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our Networked World recognized this by showing, for example, that only a small sample of college students surveyed think libraries should build social networking sites. These networks were defined by a number of different features.

Does this mean the end of the road for social networking in academic libraries? Think about it. If we allow student feedback to dictate all our innovations, then the game is over. This particular response would mean that academic librarians will play no visionary, groundbreaking role in the evolution of social scholarship.

This alone is enough to tell me that we need to look beyond student feedback and think more about leadership. No, I'm not saying we should abandon or dismiss student feedback. Of course not. But this is only part of a bigger picture that we need to consider as we recalibrate and design.

Posted by Laura Cohen at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Posted to Concepts

OCLC has been making some interesting moves lately. Last spring, Roy Tennant became a Senior Program Manager with the RLG Programs unit of OCLC Research and Programs. Andrew Pace is on his way to becoming OCLC's Executive Director for Networked Library Services. Then just a few days ago came the news that OCLC purchased EZproxy.

The EZproxy sale affects so many of us. Chris Zagar has been developing and supporting this product single-handedly from the start, and now it's used in over 2,400 institutions in 60 countries. I can see the benefits of putting a big organization behind the software. EZproxy has been evolving at a rapid pace in recent years in order to meet the needs of its customers in an increasingly complex world of vendor Web sites. Also, Chris has mentioned that vendors might be more cooperative with OCLC than with a single individual when authentication issues come up.

And the support! Those of us who, like myself, manage EZproxy in our libraries know that Chris has been exemplary in his tech support. "Exemplary" hardly describes Chris's responsiveness, individual attention, and relentless success in solving problems. In just my one small case, Chris wrote a couple of features into the software - and quickly - to meet a couple of my library's needs. Amazing. So it's a little nerve-wracking to imagine what's coming next, now that OCLC is taking over.

One of OCLC's plans is to create local instances of EZproxy on - you guessed it - WorldCat.org, aka Open WorldCat. This catalog has seen some really interesting developments. It's probably safe to say that its interface and features surpass what many of us offer in our libraries. And so, of course, there's Worldcat Local that's getting underway.

I could indulge in all sorts of speculations about what's happening with OCLC - how it's positioning itself, what its current interests are, what its intentions might be, and what might be the chances of success. For example, I can't help wondering if OCLC envisions that WorldCat Local will become the user interface of choice for most libraries, with EZproxy authentication built right in. Why not? Is it worthwhile for many hundreds of libraries to be customizing their own interfaces ad infinitem, especially when catalogs are not the holy grail they once were? Do these local efforts really pay off? Does Open Worldcat offer a promising alternative? These are legitimate questions.

And I wonder what OCLC might have in mind for social spaces, given its recent report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World. In the conclusion of this report, the authors state:

Those are some fighting words! I can't help wondering if they contain hints of things to come.

OCLC is active on many fronts. The products and services list on its site is a long one. There's NetLibrary, ILLiad, CONTENTdm, FirstSearch, a bunch of cataloging services, and QuestionPoint, to name a few. If OCLC does all this, and also becomes big in local catalog space, controls a primary authentication system for research materials, forges new ground in hosting/applying social space, and nabs some big library names in the process, well then: we might have a potential Google of the library world in the making.

If this is in any way on the mark, we need to be paying attention.

Posted by Laura Cohen at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Posted to Concepts

Since the early years of the Web, librarians - as well as teachers and instructors - have been posting criteria for evaluating content found on the Web. These have been designed as guidelines to help students figure out what to trust in a Web environment on which anyone can publish. I'm sure we're all familiar with examples. There's some very good, very insightful material out there.

The Web has gotten much more complicated since the days when garden variety Web sites were the sole type of placement for content, and when many of these guides were written. So I joined with my colleague Trudi Jacobson, Head of User Education at my library, to put together a guide that targets the 2.0 environment. We collaborated on a guide ten years ago, so she was the perfect choice to work with on this new one. Our original guide is charmingly outdated. This time around, we've covered Web sites (of course!), free research sites, document repositories, blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social bookmarks, and multimedia.

It was a challenging project to work on. In a way, it's fair to say that evaluative criteria don't really change based on the type of site or material encountered. While this may be true, it's also the case that students need help with looking for cues in different types of environments. In fact, some students aren't even sure what they're looking at. This is why we include a definition of each phenomenon and feature a section on how to tell the difference between a blog and a wiki. We also call atttention to such problems as content that has no verifiable authority, and RSS imports that might be undetectable. So there were new issues to address. Although Trudi and I set out to put together a guide to evaluation, we also found ourselves creating a basic teaching tool about the current state of the Web as a source of information.

Trudi and I are interested in feedback. We've shown the guide to a few colleagues, and would be happy to hear from a wider audience.

So, please take a look and tell us what you think: Evaluating Web Content.

Posted by Laura Cohen at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Posted to Research Tools | Social Scholarship

I'm sure that many of us remember the mantra of Bill Clinton's campaign workers back when they were running Clinton for president: It's the Economy, Stupid. I was thinking of this when I read the 2007 Horizon Report. This report succinctly predicts technology trends over the next five years that will affect higher education.

The conclusions:

• One year or less: user-created content
• One year of less: social networking
• Two to three years: mobile phones
• Two to three years: virtual worlds
• Four to five years: new scholarship
• Four to five years: massively multiplayer educational gaming

I was especially happy to see the item about new scholarship. But the mobile phones item caught my eye because I've been frustrated over the past few years by the fact that libraries haven't put much effort into optimizing their services for mobile devices, be they phones or anything else. My own library hasn't been much inclined to take this on for our Web site, despite my proposal to focus on this need.

I was struck by this passage in the report: "The ability of almost all phones to access email, instant messaging, the web, and calendaring increases the ways in which students and instructors can communicate—and is eroding the digital divide." Just take a walk around campus and observe the cell phones in use, and you can see the potential truth in this statement.

I think libraries need to look at serving mobile users in at least two ways.

SMS reference. The library at Curtin University of Technology is one good example of an institution that offers text messaging - Short Message Service (SMS) - for receiving and answering reference questions. If users trend away from instant messaging and toward phone-based text messaging, we need to be ready for them.

You may wonder why someone would use text messaging when she could simply use her phone to call the reference desk instead. In fact, the latter would probably not even entail a fee. This strikes me as a logical but moot point. It's like asking why users sitting at workstations ten feet from the reference desk choose to use the library's IM reference service rather than get up and go to the desk. Users make choices because they have choices to make. This is the name of the game. For us to ask what is logical in our eyes is to ask useless questions. Instead, we need to be asking how we can serve those users who make these choices.

Optimizing our Web sites for mobile devices. I think that every library should include mobile access in its next Web site redesign. This might include something as simple as style sheets for mobile devices to more sophisticated programming. NYU's Bobst Library has been at it for a while with The Arch.

We ignore this opportunity at our peril. We're already worried about decreasing use of our Web sites as students look elsewhere to do their research. We may have well-thought-out plans for establishing ourselves on external sites where our users congregate, but this in no way eliminates the need for, and usefulness of, library Web sites - if we make them responsive to the needs of our users. And users may be more interested in our content if we make it available on the devices that they use.

It may be true that most of our users these days use their cell phones mainly as, well, phones - to make and receive calls. I don't have any data on this, but observation tells me that this is the case. But I also know that the use of phones to access the Web, and to send and receive text messages, is on the rise.

I'd sure love to see scholarly publishers optimize their Web sites for mobile computing. We should lobby them.

It's the mobility, stupid.

Posted by Laura Cohen at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Posted to Library Web Sites

Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries has just been published by ACRL. This is the hybrid book/wiki publication that I've been editing for the past year.

You can buy the book online at the ALA Store.

Here's the official blurb.

I'm pleased about this publication for several reasons.

First of all, it's finished, always a good feeling for an author or editor.

Second, and even better, it's not finished at all because of the post-publication wiki. What I like best about this wiki - and the entire hybrid setup - is the fact that the publisher itself is hosting it. This is not something I had to go out and do on my own, a more typical model for those of us who want to carry on the lives of our books online. The wiki was a crucial aspect of my initial negotiations with the amazing Kathryn Deiss, Content Strategist at ACRL, who approached me about editing the book. Kathryn's excitement about the idea says so much about her and her vision. And score one for ACRL, and ALA too, for trying this model. Because of the nature of the topic, I doubt I would have agreed to edit a book of case studies about Library 2.0 projects. While snapshot chapters had the potential to be useful, it didn't make a lot of sense to stop there. We're in the early days of both Library 2.0 as well as these initiatives. Things will evolve. It will be interesting and worthwhile to track what happens. And speaking of evolving, it will also be interesting to see how the authors choose to use the wiki to present their updates.

Besides, some of you already know how I feel about the nature of completed publications.

Also, I think these cases show a seriousness of purpose, intellectual effort, institutional commitment, and applied creativity that are all hallmarks of the best of Library 2.0.

Finally, there's impressive work going on out there, and we need to know about it. Many of these projects will be new to readers, all to the good. This publication highlights a variety of successful strategies, goals, and scales of operation. There are many roads forward, and I think it helps to see this.

The wiki is just getting underway. Each page has an RSS feed for tracking updates, as does the entire wiki. Select the chapter(s) that interest you, subscribe to the feed, and watch the content come in.

Chapter 1: Discovering Places to Serve Patrons in the Long Tail

Patrick Griffis, Kristin Costello, Darcy Del Bosque, Cory Lampert, and Eva Stowers,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Chapter 2: Chat, Commons, and Collaboration: Inadvertently Library 2.0 in Western Australia

Kathryn Greenhill, Margaret Jones, and Jean McKay, Murdoch University Library

Chapter 3: Yale: Taking the Library to Users in the Online University Environment

Kalee Sprague and Roy Lechich, Yale University

Chapter 4: Delivering Targeted Library Resources into a Blackboard Framework

Richard Cox, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Chapter 5: Adapting an Open Source, Scholarly Web 2.0 System for Findability in Library Collections

Bethany Nowviskie, Elizabeth Sadler, and Erik Hatcher, University of Virginia

Chapter 6: Push and Pull of the OPAC

Daniel Forsman, Jönköping University Library, Sweden

Chapter 7: UThink: Library Hosted Blogs for a University-Wide Community

Shane Nakerud, University of Minnesota

Chapter 8: Discussing Student Engagement: An Information Literacy Course Blog

Gregory Bobish, University at Albany, State University of New York

Chapter 9: Building Library 2.0 into Information Literacy: A Case Study

Susan Sharpless Smith, Erik Mitchell, and Caroline Numbers, Wake Forest University

Chapter 10: IMplementing IM @ Reference: The GW Experience

Deborah B. Gaspar and Sarah Palacios Wilhelm, The George Washington University

Chapter 11: Taking the Library to Users: Experimenting with Facebook as an Outreach Tool

Dawn Lawson, New York University

Chapter 12: YouTube University: Using XML, Web Services, and Online Video Services to Serve University and Library Video Content

Jason A. Clark, Montana State University

Posted by Laura Cohen at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Posted to Social Scholarship

An article in Inside Higher Ed just caught my eye, "Pooling Scholars' Digital Resources ". The article described something that is hopeful for social scholarship, ominous for libraries.

The brief article describes the advent of Zotero Commons, a collaboration of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive. The purpose is to create an archive of scholarly resources, contributed by working scholars, in the public domain. The archive will offer a free optical scanning service to make the documents searchable.

Scholars will upload documents to the archive with an enhanced version of the Zotero plugin for Firefox. Imagine scholars contributing documents that they've annotated with Zotero and you get one of the great ideas behind this initiative. This version of the plugin will also allow scholars to collaborate on materials on a shared server.

Score one for social scholarship. Score a big one. But where are libraries in all of this? Andy Guess, the author of the article, has an answer. Here is his opening paragraph:

Bypass libraries entirely.

Apparently, we libraries are a) not innovative enough to solve the problem of access, and b) too caught up in copyright issues to be of much use in the age of social scholarship.

Is this a fair comment? On the face of it, not really. First of all, I'm not sure that access and copyright are the main things holding us back. And second, these are issues that concern us and rightly so.

I think the problem goes deeper. I see no evidence that academic libraries have it in them to band together to sponsor a project like Zotero Commons. We don't have the group vision. If we did, we'd be doing it.

There seems to be promise in the Open Content Alliance. The OCA is also associated with the Internet Archive and includes content from academic library collections. But here's the heart of the matter, the operative phrase "library collections". We need to be looking beyond the realm of our collections and figuring out our role in the process of scholarship. This is where our profession doesn't seem to get it. This is why an initiative such as Zotero Commons has no library involvement.

Our collections are our bedrock, but the notion - and reality - of collections are changing. The scholarship that makes use of these collections is changing. The Zotero Commons might contribute to that. " “I think it’s really going to have an impact on the way that scholarship is done.” So says the Center director. This may be overly optimistic, maybe not. But when two notable groups get together with this goal in mind, academic libraries should sit up and take notice. We should ask ourselves why we aren't involved. We should wonder why we didn't think of this ourselves. We should ponder what this says about us, and our role - and our concept of our role - on campus.

Bypass libraries entirely. It's so disheartening to read this.

Posted by Laura Cohen at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Posted to Research Tools | Social Scholarship