libraries, saas, the cloud and more: participate in our survey

evidence, library2.0 6 Responses »
Oct 202009

A colleague and I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking and chatting about libraries’ use of SaaS solutions and free, third party proprietry cloud-based services to host their systems and software. We’ve thought about it so much that we decided to take that one step further and do a spot of research.

At the VALA 2010 conference (one of Australia’s leading ITish conferences for librarians), we’re presenting a paper called ICT as core business: will we prosper or drown? Here’s the abstract:

Information Communications Technology (ICT) is core business for libraries. Every day, libraries deliver ICT services to their customers, in the form of public access computers, wireless Internet connectivity and technology training programs. We increasingly rely on the Internet and the World Wide Web as a core service and collection delivery channel. And ICT is the single most important set of tools in allowing us to carry out ‘traditional’ library functions such as collection management and circulation.

At the same time as we are seeing our dependence on ICT reach new heights, we are also seeing IT departments locking down and standardising organisational ICT environments in response to an increasing need for control in order to meet efficiency and governance requirements. Often, these efforts occur in response to the organisational needs of the parent organisations to which libraries belong, not in response to the library’s needs. The move towards shared service models for ICT services means that libraries have to compete for ICT services and support, and as a result, do not always obtain the needed support.

Libraries are surrounded by tools and systems that provide new and exciting options for service delivery, but that require a move away from the traditional ICT model. The authors’ conversations with colleagues throughout the industry, commentary in the biblioblogosphere, and even the library literature, suggest that with the proliferation of these new tools and their uptake by libraries, there has been a disconnect between some libraries and their IT support groups. Many libraries are adopting, or at least investigating new models, including Software as a Service (SaaS) options for major systems, cloud computing for hosting of services and resources, and open source systems and software solutions. How does this fit within the broader ICT framework of parent organisations? Often, it simply doesn’t fit at all.

Why is it that libraries have chosen to position services in the cloud, to move core systems to SaaS environments, and to seek out open source alternatives to proprietary software and systems? This paper considers whether the adoption of these tools and environments by libraries has occurred as a result of a lack of appropriate and necessary ICT solutions and support within our corporate ICT environments. Did the disconnect cause libraries to seek out new models and tools, or did our adoption of the new models and tools cause the disconnect?

Given that libraries are adopting strategies and implementing services in this new ICT sphere, what do libraries need to consider in order to ensure sustainability, supportability, and ultimately, success? As the end users become controllers of ICT – as libraries implement ICT solutions quite independently of the ICT groups within their broader organisations – is it enough for library staff to be able to depend on the intuitiveness of the tools, or are there skill sets – ICT, writing, publishing, design and other skill sets – required by library staff, skills that have perhaps been taken for granted as being provided by the organisational ICT group?

If you work with IT in libraries, if you adminstrate a library management system, if you’ve ever implemented a blog or wiki or Facebook page for your library, then we need your input to get a clear understanding of why libraries are looking for alternative models for system and software hosting, and what that means for skill requirements.

If you’ve got 15 minutes to spare, we’d really appreciate you taking the time to complete our survey.

Tagged with: , , ,

Walt Crawford's Public Library Blogs: essential reading if your library is (even thinking about) blogging

evaluation, evidence 2 Responses »
Dec 132008

This weekend, I’m working on the bordering-on-mythological paper on mpow’s blog pilot. To that end, I’ve been trawling the interwebs looking for blog posts, articles… anything documenting libraries’ and the corporate world’s strategies for evaluating the success or otherwise of blogging projects. I’ve been trawling for a while, but I live in hope that it’s just my search skills letting me down, and I’m going to miraculously find the very article I need at the eleventh hour.

As I’ve lamented earlier, libraries are not publicly documenting their evaluations of blogging projects, which is a problem because it makes benchmarking near impossible. Sure, you can still come up with a bunch of metrics and work out a number for each, but how do you know if the number you’re getting it good or bad?

Luckily, through a serendipitous Twitter experience, I’ve managed to track down a couple of people who were willing to share their data. But I need more. More, I say!

Enter Walt Crawford’s Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples. I have to confess, I’ve been meaning to buy and read this book for ages. I finally did buy and read it today, and I wish I’d read it a while back. If you’re responsible for a blogging project, you need to read this study. Especially useful is the grouping of the examples by population served – this allows you to compare your library’s blog’s performance for key metrics against like-sized libraries. I think it’s also a useful tool in setting realistic expectations, especially when it comes to converstatinal intensity (or the number of comments libraries tend to get per post). I wish I’d bought this and shared it with our staff ahead of the pilot.

While Crawford didn’t have access to usage stats, this is still an incredibly useful book.

I do wish, though, that someone would go begging to the library community at large to supply site visits, page views, links clicked and a few other metrics besides, so that we could have a ginormous study alla Walt Crawford’s that includes the kind of statistics he unfortunately didn’t have access to. PhD thesis, anyone? Even to do it for a grouping of libraries (say, public libraries serving populations between 400,000 and 500,000 – obviously, my reasons are entirely altruistic) would be incredibly useful, and you could extrapolate for libraries of different sizes.

As an aside, I love that I can buy a book online and be reading it within two minutes. I wonder if publishers will ever sort out the DRM debate and get pricing right on eBooks so we can do this with anything we might want to read.

Right, enough procrastinating.

Tagged with: , ,

a blink, a metric and some thinking out loud

evaluation, evidence 4 Responses »
Nov 092008

So, I blinked… and suddenly six months went by without a peep on this blog. Life has been doing what it does best – barreling along while I try to keep up. Where have I been? Right here, but buried under a pile of projects, a gaggle of committees, and a series of attempts at getting non-library, non-technology related hobbies.

Life’s not easing up but blogging has been on my mind lately, in more ways than one.

In my last post, I raised some questions measuring the success or otherwise of 2.0ish projects. I’m still thinking about this stuff – constantly. The time for me to evaluate mpow’s new blogging project is rapidly approaching, and I’m starting to look in earnest for literature on other libraries’ evaluations of similar projects. I’m still not turning up a lot.

I’m spending a fair bit of time thinking about what success for a project like this looks like. It’s a difficult thing to conceptualise. And obviously it’s something that needs to be conceptualised before you can figure out what sort of data you need to measure that success.

Of course, success for this project will be measured against our aims and objectives for the project – some of which relate to topics quite apart from the level of usage the blog has garnered, including aims like trialling blogging as a service delivery platform, and providing staff with an opportunity to get familiar and comfortable with blogging in the public domain (and with the technology itself).

But what other things should we be looking at? What, in general terms, makes a blog successful?

Conversational intensity

This is something I think a lot of bloggers get hung up on, so it gets its own sub heading. To what extent is success in blogging about “conversational intensity”?

We’re not getting a great deal of comments (I’ve got a theory about why that is, which I’ll probably blog about later), and I’m not particularly phased by that at this point. I had a chat with a colleague about the appropriateness of using blogs without being too concerned about generating conversation. She indicated she thought that a blog without multi-way conversation (ie with little commenting) misses the point of blogging. Her feeling is that conversation is a fundamental element of blogging.

I think I agree, to a certain extent, but I’m not convinced that blogs that exist without active commenting don’t have their own role to play. After all, we know that there are lots of different types of participants in this participatory web: consumers of information; occasional content producers (commenters); active content producers; and so on. (And this doesn’t even take into account the idea of using a blog as a CMS of sorts – people do great stuff with WordPress-driven websites. But that’s a little different.) Does it really matter if you don’t get a whole host of comments? Is there a ratio of comments to page views* that indicates a blog is successful in facilitating conversation?

In my opinion, level of conversation is a measure you should get hung up on only if it’s a primary aim for your blogging project.

Attributes of a successful blog

So, if the success of a blog does not hinge on conversational intensity, on what does it hinge (other than the blog’s aims and objectives)?

According to Asterisk, a successful blog is:

  • Well written
  • Frequently updated
  • Consistent
  • Open
  • Responsive
  • Well designed
  • Aware of its audience
  • Varied in topic
  • Personal
  • Thick skinned
  • Honest
  • Accountable
  • Funny

Are these the kind of success measures against which libraries should be assessing their blogs? Are subjective measures like these valid? And how do we measure against them? These measures do appeal to me. Or some of them do – some are obviously personal preference things, and dependent on the type of blog (like funniness, for eg) but others could be useful.

An obvious thing to measure is readership – subscribers, site visits, post views and so forth. But how do you decide whether the level of readership is enough to mean success? And, in the case of our project, whether the level of readership is enough to warrant a transition from pilot to permanent service? Do we work with a ratio of site views for the blog versus site views for the library’s website? And if so, do we compare to page views for the library’s home page, or do we look at page views for the young people’s page on our website and compare to that? Do we look at site views for the blog versus population in our region for the target audience?

Is their any validity in looking at participation in polls? What if we created polls for the express purpose of getting a feel for the number of people who might participate? What would that tell us?

Clearly, my thoughts on evaluating blogging projects are still fairly nebulous, and I know I need to do some research outside the library field to see how (or even if) other industries are evaluating the success of customer facing, service oriented blogs. But I do want to here from other library-types on this, and it appears I aint gonna find what I need in the literature.

So now that that I’ve just suggested that conversation may not mean much in an assessment of a blog’s success, I’m going to try and start one. Tell me, readers (if there are any of you left, after my six month hiatus): what do you think the markers of a successful library-land blog might be? What are the attributes of a successful blog? If you were evaluating a blogging project, what data would you be collecting and what would you be comparing to? How would you decide if your blog is a success?

* Conversational intensity is often measured by dividing total comments by total posts, but I think another useful metric would be to get a feel for the number of visitors who feel compelled to get involved in a conversation.

Tagged with: , ,

a blogospheric frenzy of the google order

Uncategorized No Responses »
Dec 152007

Google has announced a new service, currently in private beta, called Google Knol. A frenzy has ensued. Go check out the original announcement on the Google blog, and have a look at the number of links back to the post. Try a Technorati search on the subject. Watch as the Wikipedia entry evolves. Everyone is talking about it.

Why? There’s widespread concern that Google is attempting to usurp Wikipedia’s prominence as the reference tool of choice for a majority of internet users, and to make some money out of it. The argument goes that this is perhaps a little out of sync with their “do no evil mantra”. But is this new project any more or less “evil” than anything Google have done in the past? Duncan Riley at TechCrunch, self-acknowledged follower of the Google religion, points out the difference between Google’s entrance into the knowledge hosting/creation domain, as opposed to some of it’s other recent forays:

Knol on the other hand brings the power of Google into a marketplace that is already rich with competition, and a marketplace where Google can use its might to crush that competition by favoring pages from Knol over others, on what is the worlds most popular search engine.

There are a lot of issues here, undeniably. I’m not going to get into the revenue debate or the “big bad Google” line of questioning. Lots of other people have done it really well already. What I do want to say it this: yes, this is clearly an attempt to gain some of the Wikipedia market share and to make some money out of it.

But if we set aside the ‘evilness’ (or ‘business’) aspect for a moment, I think the really interesting thing about this project is the departure Google is making from the basic tenets that underpin the Wikipedia model – tenets which some librarians have rallied against.

The return of the author; or, the masses may not be so wise
There seems to be something of a departure from the idea of the wisdom of the masses in this new venture from Google. From the official Google blog:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

Now, I love Wikipedia, and I am decidedly not one of those “stick your head in the sand and decry the evils of user generated knowledge” type librarians. But, one of the key arguments against Wikipedia has been that the masses might not be so wise; that without knowing who authored an article, it’s impossible to verify its credibility. So, does this new project from Google not offer something that we’ve been lamenting the loss of? The return of the author. The ability to see who wrote an article, go off and Google them, use a citation tool to verify their credibility, check an OPAC to see what else they’ve written, head off to the website of their organisation to see what biases they might have… Interesting.

But is it anti two-point-oh? Maybe, but Google has indicated that community tools like reviews, rankings, submission of edits and questions will be prominently featured. So it seems like there’ll still be potential for debate, criticism and discourse. We’ll need to watch to see how this plays out.

Multiple articles on a single subject will present multiple points of view
Now this could be interesting. Knol will not present a single encyclopedic, be-all-and-end-all entry on each topic. Rather, following this idea of the return of the author, it will present multiple articles on a topic, authored by different people, and quite possibly providing differing viewpoints.

I read one blog post this morning that suggested the result might be an unusable web of confusion. And this might well be the case. But it might also lead to people being exposed to differing viewpoints and being forced to critically evaluate and analyse what they’re reading. This is a good thing, right? What kind of impact will this have on our customers, and on us? An increased need to assist our customers develop their information literacy?

I’m not sure that we should be so ready to poo-hoo this concept of multiple articles on a single topic before we see how it plays out. Who would’ve thought, ten years ago, that a free, collaboratively written and edited encyclopedia could be a useful reference tool? Wikipedia has seen us break away from the idea of leather bound volume published by a reputable company as centre of the reference universe. We’ve embraced the concept of a sea of words cobbled together by the masses as legitimate reference source.

It might end up a useless mess; it might end up a mess that we can use as a teaching tool, to illustrate the need to critically evaluate information; or it might end up as a valuable site for debate and discourse, where no single opinion or voice can be edited out by the loudest group, allowing for a presentation of opposing viewpoints. We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.

The end of Wikipedia?
I really like the way Wikipedia works. I think the masses are essentially pretty wise. And I really don’t want to see it’s demise. But I don’t think that Google Knol signals the end for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a strong brand, with a legion of loyal followers and contributors who believe in what it does. The Google Knol model is pretty significantly different, and I don’t think it’s going to do Wikipedia any real damage anytime soon.

Good vs evil: can we get past the revenue issue and see the potential?
Yeah, the whole revenue issue is quite shudder-some. Google is clearly trying to make some money out of something Wikipedia does “for the greater good”.

But if we put that aside for a second, I think this Google project has some interesting potential. I’ll be keenly watching to see how it plays out. For one thing, won’t it be nice to do a search for some basic reference material and not have the same Wikipedia article reappearing on five different websites in your top five results?

And you never know, perhaps the world of Knol authors will prove to be altruists who’ll opt out of the ad revenue stream.

At least the frenzy will keep us amused as we wait to see how this plays out.

Tagged with: ,

free, commercial web 2.0 services: should libraries be relying on them?

library2.0, soapbox No Responses »
Dec 042007

A participant in a Learning 2.0 program recently posted on his course blog and to an ALIA elist about libraries’ use of free, commercial web 2.0 services. He analogises that libraries’ use of free web 2.o services like Blogger, del.icio.us, YouTube and the like is “privatisation by osmosis” and he is concerned by the lack of debate about this issue.

He’s right – there hasn’t been a great deal of debate in the biblioblogosphere, but I’m sure this is an issue that many libraries and librarians have grappled with on a local level.

There are a few points I’d like to make on this issue… But first, I should point out that I agree that (where possible) libraries should be developing infrastructure to support their 2.0 services. So, onto my stream-of-consciousness response…

Libraries as content producers

The author of “It’s the Queen of Darkness, Pal” suggests that libraries’ use of commercial providers might mean that they don’t see themselves as content producers to the same degree as they have historically:

It seems to me that libraries used to see themselves as content providers, actively providing tools for finding information. At the moment, it feels more like we have resigned ourselves to using the services of the private sector.

I’d like to suggest that libraries’ use of third party providers doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t producing content or don’t see themselves as content producers. In fact, in some ways, I think use of free third party providers can free us up to produce content, because we spend less time maintaining the back end of the systems that house the content. Indeed, libraries’ quick up-take of content-based technologies like blogs seems to me to indicate that we are very concerned with developing content.

Sure, we mightn’t want to rely on third party providers to maintain a record of our business transactions or our content for the purposes of records management. I would suggest that any library using a third party provider for any 2.0 (or 1.0) service should be exporting content for archiving in their local records repository. But I’d also suggest that a library with, for example, a blog hosted on their own server, should also be doing this.

Yes, libraries should build and host their own infrastructure for 2.0 services, but…

The author asks why libraries aren’t hosting their own web 2.0 technologies, and he also suggests an answer:

The superficial answer is, of course, that libraries don’t have the funds. The deeper underlying answer though is that, really, our society has decided that it’s information is best entrusted to and run by the private sector on an advertising funded basis.

Do we (as in society) really think our information is best entrusted to the private sector? I’m not so sure about this. I know that I personally am often a little nervous about entering or display personal information in/via web apps or tools. I think it’s more that it’s very easy to entrust our information to the private sector, and the private sector seems to be very good at providing tools that work for people. I think libraries have been so quick to use commercial web 2.0 services for exactly the same reasons as individuals have: they work and they’re easy to implement and use.

Should libraries be hosting their own 2.0 services? Absolutely! It would be awesome if, for example, a library offered a social bookmarking tool that their customers could use as an alternative to del.icio.us. But as the author of “It’s the Queen of Darkness, Pal” acknowledges, there are hurdles libraries need to jump in order to be able to do this sort of thing. It’s not just about money – we all know there are robust open source options for a lot of the technologies we’d like to implement. There are many other issues, too, which impede libraries in building 2.0 infrastructure, such as:

  • lack of library staff with the technological expertise to allow for implementation and maintenance of the technologies
  • the need to respond to new technologies and user demands quickly often dictates that we need to find fast solutions, and hosting the technologies locally can result in time lags between identification of demand or need and implementation – an externally hosted commercial service might be a great interim solution in instances like this
  • the need to work with and within in-house enterprise architecture requirements
  • cultural and organisational factors, including policy, procedures, history

Some libraries are in a position to independently develop their own Web 2.0 infrastructure. Some are in a position to work with their parent organisation’s IT services to work towards the development of such an infrastructure. But some do not fall into either of these categories.

As one response to the recent thread on this topic on the NewGrads elist pointed out, it’s technically possible to buy a domain name and host your library’s virtual services entirely separately from your parent organisation’s web presence and without any input from your local IT people. But many libraries are not in a position to do that, often for the same reasons as those listed above.

Is commercialism really an issue?

Consider the other commercial services libraries make use of every day – particularly those that involve data hosting and end-user service provision. We purchase subscriptions to online resources from third party vendors. Many libraries also use “software as a service” models for external hosting of their LMS or other systems. How do these two examples differ from, for example, delivering a blog via a free service such as WordPress? Other than the fact that the first two cost money while the latter is free, I’m not sure that there is a great deal of difference… Or is there? Is the fact that the Web 2.0 services are free an issue? Is the fact that they are mainstream (ie non-library) services an issue? How about a service like LibGuides? Where does that fit in?

Scattering the breadcrumbs

I think there’s one other very important reason that libraries use commercial Web 2.0 services rather than build our own infrastructure, and it’s a reason that means a lot of libraries will continue to use these commercial services: we’re attempting to meet our users in their own space. We’re “scattering the breadcrumbs” and placing our services where the users will see us – that is, in the spaces they inhabit. If we hosted our own services, would we be able to do this as effectively? If we created a social network space on the library’s website, we might create a space in which those users who actually come to our websites could interact with each other and the library, but we wouldn’t be reaching out to, for example, the users of Facebook who’ve never even contemplated visiting the library’s website.

Should libraries be using free, commercial Web 2.0 services?

The answer? I don’t know if there is one. Perhaps it’s that where possible, libraries should use a combination of local infrastructure or locally hosted services and commercial tools that can position us in the user’s space.

But I think what must be acknowledged is that, as it stands right now, there are some libraries for whom implementing their own locally hosted services or infrastructure is just not a possibility, or not a possibility that will be realised any time soon. For those libraries, free commercial services are their only option, if they’re to make use of Web 2.0 tools at all.

Finally…

I’m really glad that there is finally some debate happening on this topic. I hope it continues and some other people weigh in. This is something I’ve been pondering at length recently, and I’d really like to hear others’ thoughts.

Tagged with:
© 2013 virtually a librarian Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha