Videos of Belgrade Lectures: Scholarly Identity 2.0 and Research 2.0

The videos of the Belgrade lectures are now loaded on the University of Belgrade Library’s YouTube channel.

The second day’s presentation was the more interesting topic and a better presentation overall, so I am going to highlight it first.  A written overview of the highlights, key diagrams, and slides is here and the playlist for the second lecture is embedded below:

The first day’s presentation was titled From Academic Library 2.0 to (Literature) Research 2.0.  A written overview of the highlights, key diagrams, and slides is located here and the playlist is embedded below:

I look forward to any feedback you might have on either presentation.

On Facebook, identity, and control

,or, The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Identity

I am a little late on this topic, but feel it is important to add my 2 cents. Fred and Terrell have already laid the groundwork for what I am going to say by focusing the conversation away from privacy to identity. While much of this repeats what they have already said, I believe my point is a little different. This post will first examine what could have been done differently and then look at the underlying causes of this issue. Lastly, I will examine what this experience teaches us about how we should implement Library 2.0 services.

It has been interesting to see students’ reactions to the “new” Facebook. It appears to me that Facebook’s biggest mistake was rolling it out as an automatic opt-in feature. Chances are that if they quietly added it in the background, it would have spread virally without a peep.

For example, lets say Facebook added a little link somewhere on the page that says, “Want to make it easier for your friends to stay updated on what you are doing, try the new Facebook feeds?” A few students would notice this and think, “Cool now I can use this new feature that no one else knows about.” When one of their friends visited their page next, they would see the feeds complete with the notification that their friend had begun using the feeds. In this way most students would have first been introduced to the service by invading their friend’s privacy and not their friends invading theirs.

The final ingredient for a successful implementation strategy would have been to give students control over what aspects of their Facebook lives they want to share through the feeds. By turning all the feeds on automatically, students were shocked to see something they thought was private broadcast to their networks. For example, many students might be glad to share new groups they joined or friends they have made, but some students might not want all of their comments immediately apparent. To summarize:

  1. Bait early-adopters. There were students waiting for this to happen who would have chosen to turn the feature on immediately and then pressured their friends to do so.
  2. Let students choose to turn the service on based off their experiences with the profiles of early-adopters.
  3. Let students choose what aspects of their life they want to highlight and which they would rather slide under the radar.

This brings us back to the title of this post. When it comes to our identities, we like having control over how we present ourselves to the world. That is one of the reasons that social networking sites are so useful to college students. It is a way to mold your identity so that you can determine who your friends are to be. Social networking profiles and interactions present us as we wish to be seen. Given this, students were using Facebook to present different versions of themselves to different friends. When this illusion was broken, they in effect lost control of their identities. I would thus argue that the underlying concern of most students is not a loss of their privacy, but a loss of their identity. Students don’t mind sharing their personal information with the world, but want to have control over when and how it is shared.

However, if this experience gets students to think more about how they present themselves in their virtual communities, it is a good thing. So far, this experience seems to have done more to drill home the reality of online life than either university instruction or the press.


So what does this mean for Library 2.0?

First, we might want to change Rory Litwin’s primary problem of Library 2.0 from privacy to identity. This might be a better way to explain these principles to a group of students who are accustomed to sharing their data. Privacy is how we think of these issues, but is it how our users think of them?

Second, we can use this as a guiding principle when developing Library 2.0 systems. What people are researching and reading for pleasure presents a remarkable amount about their identity. We need to design systems that allow users to have control over how they present their identity. If a user wants to appear as though they read Joyce and not Grisham, then we need to allow them this choice. We also need to create ways that users can mask their identities or create multiple identities. For example, this blog is a central part of my professional identity and my MySpace account is a central part of my (online) social identity. While I have chosen to attach my real name to both, it is comforting to know that I could have chosen to present one or the other anonymously.

Third, it shows that we have a long way to go in integrating content creation skills into our information literacy programs. However, we now have an excellent example to use when discussing responsible content creation. In my previous response to Rory’s privacy post, I highlighted three information literacy skills that I felt we needed to teach as a result of an increasingly read/write world. Given this movement in understanding from privacy to identity, the three skills we need to teach would now be:

  1. Identity
  2. Ownership
  3. Security

To gain a further understanding of why I feel these are the three primary principles, I encourage you to read my original response to Rory.

Technorati tags: facebook identity privacy socialnetworking web20 library20

Notes from BarCampRDU, Part 2: “Sex and the Death of Advertising”

For session 2, I attended “Sex and the Death of Advertising”. From the wiki:

My name is Martin Smith [email protected] and I learned to sell soap for P&G and candy for M&M/Mars. Selling soap was harder by the way. Sex & The Death of Advertising will discuss what we, as marketers, do when tried and true market creating strategies cease to work. What are the implications of the death of the Advertising Industrial Complex? Will new tools such as search engine marketing (SEM) eventually end up in the same tangled mess due to pressure from advertisers fleeing now unsuccessful channels such as TV, Radio and Infomercials? Is there something fundamentally different in new “pull” ad models that will prevent SEM from losing reach like television and print? We will discuss selections from The Attention Economy by Davenport and Beck, Gonzo Marketing by Christopher Locke and All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin. If you have a favorite marketing author or new marketing theory, please bring it to our discussion. Our session’s draft goal will be to brainstorm key elements of our new marketing paradigm and identify what’s next.

Martin did a good job of leading a discussion. He began with a brief introduction to his theory. Essentially traditional push advertising no longer works because people have become numb to the overabundance of messages they are exposed to. Generations raised with TV and the Web are great at blocking things out.

Another problem faced by advertising in general is what Martin demonstrated with the example of infomercials. When everyone starts using a certain method of advertising, the price for said advertising goes up while the effectiveness goes down.

After the introduction, he asked other participants to share their current experiences with advertising. We talked about Google AdWords for a little bit. During this part of the discussion, I feel that we hit upon a lot of the major points of the discussion:

  • “Word of Mouth” is extremely important. Martin discussed his experience with magnetic poetry. That was a product that largely sold itself through word of mouth. Martin pointed out that what took him 5 years of marketing then could probably be accomplished in 6 months now.
  • The Long Tail“: We spent a lot of time discussing the importance of being able to reach niche markets. Why pay for AdWords if you hit the top of the rankings anyways. This also lead to a discussion of ->>
  • Purple Cows“: Is it purple enough? Am I explaining it in a purple enough way?

In addition to these major themes, the discussion covered a number of other ideas. I am going to outline a few below:

  • Martin was a fan of the saying “Live by PR, Die by PR.” He used a number of examples from his career where a product was successful due to positive editorial press. For example, the magnetic poetry was picked up by the Washington Post. He also gave some examples of how bad PR, or no PR, can then destroy a brand.
  • We talked about the idea of a “Free Prize Inside”. Martin pointed out how the practice of giving away web services and product trials is similar to giving away a free prize in a Cracker Jack box, in that everyone expects a certain ammount of free. A lively discussion about free trials ensued. One interesting point someone brought up was that after six months with one software trial, it was integrated into his life. It seemed that there was a general concensus that we were all at least partially in the “business of giving away”.
  • Customer service is extremely important. Given the speed customers can share bad experiences, wer are only as strong as our weakest link. This is also really important because of so many products are now free that the service is what keeps customers. Furthermore, barriers for new competitors to enter are low. In a later talk on Social Browsing, we discussed how it will become easier to export settings and information from one service to another. This will make customer service event more of a defining factor.
  • We discussed the importance of inventory. This related to the last point: If Amazon and its competitors both have all the books, then customer service is what sets them apart.LIBRARY ASIDE: This made me think about how libraries need to market our inventories better. Everyone at the session seemed surprised that most of the Barnes and Noble and Borders books only sell one copy a year. Libraries have much larger stocks than your typical bookstore. It was pointed out that Amazon has 11 million or so books for sale. We have over 5 million in the libraries at UNC. Of course that doesn’t count what we can interlibrary loan. We need to promote WorldCat more than we do. Open WorldCat at least should help publicise our services a little. If inventory and free are this important, then libraries should be able to perform considerably better against our competition.This discussion of book inventory also tied in well with the ideas behind Lulu.com‘s philosophy (an event sponor) and the discussions of alternative publishing at a later session (I will post on this session later).

Technorati tag: barcamprdu

On Democracy, Trust and Libraries

One of the primary characteristics of Web 2.0 is that it involves trusting one’s users. As librarians, we have always placed immense trust in our users. As defenders of intellectual freedom we have defended freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to meet, and so on. We have collected the most unpopular and crude materials alongside those that are popular and beautiful. We collect political commentary from all sides of an issue. It has always been my belief that we do this because we trust in our patrons to be curious, intelligent, and compassionate readers. Our democracy is founded on the idea that, given both sides of an argument the majority of people will be able to distinguish what is good and true from what is bad and false. We have always trusted that this majority of our readers will be able to distinguish the good from the bad. Moreover, we have trusted our patrons to use the knowledge they have gained outside of the walls of the library. Like the press, libraries expose people to all ideas and expect them to use this knowledge in political, academic, and social discourse. Towards this mission, we not only collect different points of view, but open our meeting rooms. We let all groups use our meeting rooms, but allow all patrons to attend, whether in support or protest. As librarians we are neutral. At the reference desk, we attempt to give our patrons whatever resources they need to discover the true answer to their problems. We let them decide for themselves. This is extreme trust. How then is Library 2.0 different?

Traditionally, excluding our meeting rooms, we expected our patrons to use the knowledge they gained outside of the library. Eventually ideas would trickle back in through traditional media sources such as newspapers and books. The read/write web has sped this process up. Now it is possible for readers to feed their knowledge back into the system in real-time. Libraries have always been considered places of reading. Library 2.0 is a place of both reading and writing. I would argue that it was always our idea that patrons would write their ideas down and that they would eventually reenter our libraries as part of the historical record. We always trusted that the majority of our writers strive to distinguish that which is good and true. Library 2.0 now requires us to maintain this trust in the majority. We must continue to trust that most readers are curious, intelligent and compassionate. The only difference is that the evidence of this will now be created and stored on our servers. It has always been easier to put hate group propaganda in the stacks than it has been to host hate groups in meeting rooms because the first can be obviously lost among the true and good arguments around it. In fact, it is only noticed when we search for it. In the meeting room or on our blogs, that hate speech is in your face. However, I guarantee that if any such bigotry is posted to a political discussion hosted on our blogs, it will quickly be drowned out by the voices of more responsible patrons. Moreover, those citizens will cite other sources on the web and in our collections. They might even make a compelling enough argument that the minds of a few lurkers are changed. This is what democracy is all about. This is what libraries have always been about. Web 2.0 has just changed the dynamic of how intellectual inquiry and democracy operate. In this way Library 2.0 speaks to some of the best of traditional library values, and, in so doing, defends the library as a cornerstone of democracy in a networked world.

To me Library 2.0 is not revolutionary, but instead evolutionary. As my Academic Library 2.0 Concept Model suggests, I believe the main goal of Library 2.0 is to figure out how to carryout the libraries’ traditional roles in a read/write world.

I was just about to post this and noticed that Barbara Fister has touched upon these ideas in a post titled Gathering Intelligence on the ACRLog. She proposes the following in a discussion of Wikipedia:

Wikipedia could be a useful and familiar metaphor for the collective intelligence in the library – and for the social networking that has gone on for centuries.

I also noticed Learning is essentially a social activity by Judy O’Connell:

Ultimately, it’s not just about skills and competencies in isolation, but about skills and competencies within the greater context of our global society. The reality is that the web environments of social networks are very empowering when utilised to develop ideas, share resources, hone knowledge and empower creativity.

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In my next post, I am currently planning to explore how we might use the principles of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Web 2.0 to harness the collective wisdom of our patrons.

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