Here’s the source.

The purchaser role was described in the survey by the statement “the library pays for resources I need, from academic journals to books to electronic databases,” the archive role by “the library serves as a repository of resources – in other words, it archives, preserves, and keeps track of resources,” and the gateway role by “the library is a starting point or ‘gateway’ for locating information for my research.”

It’s certainly not a surprise that the library as gateway is being disrupted by public search services in the minds of faculty. This is evident in the findings where faculty are decreasingly likely to rate gateway services as “very important”:

I’ll be honest, the first thing I think of regarding gateway services is federated searching. It’s not surprising that faculty are considering this service as decreasingly important. The fact that 60% still think it’s very important leads me to believe (hope) that there is still time to address the problem. Another facet is that the science grouping, followed by social science, is leading this trend:

It makes sense that everyone values the “buyer” aspects of libraries. But in terms of gateway services, the humanities may still be reliant on libraries because of a preference for monographs. If the Kindle, or something similar, starts to gain traction then the humanities may follow science’s lead in finding their own gateway services.

There is a lot more to the study and it is well worth a read. They recommend shoring up the visibility of library services, concentrating and customizing for different faculty user groups, and taking advantage of network solutions (especially for smaller libraries.)

The transcript can be found here: http://craphound.com/cambridge_biz_lectures.txt

A few key quotes:

The Internet turns out to be much better at allowing people to form groups than it is at allowing people to copy. … The dream of universal access to all human knowledge - the notion that we can take pieces of information, stick them on the Internet and that they can pervade every corner of the world, almost instantaneously.
…
This is a pretty amazing thing, and it’s understandable that we got very, very, very excited about this, but the thing that the Internet is even better at than providing universal access to all human knowledge is nuking collaboration costs - getting rid of the cost of getting people together to do stuff, and getting people together to do stuff is even more important that universal access to all human knowledge, because getting people together to do stuff is what allows us to be literally superhuman.
…
And this is fantastic, because it used to be that if something was likely to turn out to be shit, you couldn’t do it, and if you did do it, you certainly couldn’t do it in a way that would be reachable by other people.  The cost of failing was so high that you had to be reasonably certain of some form of success before you’d venture to do anything.
…
Most of the things that we now think of today as very successful and interesting at one point were thought of as ridiculous, and it was only someone who was confident enough that the cost of failure was outweighed by the potential benefit of success that allowed these things to come into existence; from the archway to the railroad, to lighter-than-air travel - every one of these at one point was pooh-poohed as probably a ridiculous notion, certainly never to catch on, and it was only the fact that someone was convinced they could afford to fail that allowed these things to come into existence.

This ability to fail with little consequence makes me wonder if self-publishing will take off pretty soon. I was messing around over the weekend with feedbooks.com while investigating the epub format. I was surprised to come across Doctorow’s short story “The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away” on this site. Since he’s made the story open source it is now spreading out across the web and accumulating its own communities. This makes me wonder what value publishing houses are even offering anymore. Walking through Barnes & Noble this weekend I was struck by how dead it feels. The Science Fiction section is slowly being taken over by fan fiction (star wars and Forgotten Realms, etc.) and it was really difficult to get excited about anything.

When you combine the new ebook formats (epub, mobi, kindle, etc.), the increasing number of platforms available for access (like the Kindle, Sony PRS505, blackberry, palm pilot, and iPhone/iPod Touch) with the inherent viral qualities of the Internet I’m wondering what downsides there are to self publishing? Plus, reading Doctorow’s short story on a laptop using Adobe’s Digital Editions was actually a fairly pleasant experience.

If the cost of publishing continues its trajectory towards zero, the potential for, and ease of, creating reader communities continues to increase, AND the social-proof value of publishing house sponsorship diminishes, then it’s quite possible that self-published fiction will really take off.

**UPDATE**

This isn’t really fiction, but I think furthers the question: 20 free ebooks about social media

]]> http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2008/08/18/is-self-published-fiction-becoming-fail-safe/feed/ http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2008/04/28/clay-shirky-web-20-speech/ http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2008/04/28/clay-shirky-web-20-speech/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:52:51 +0000 Steve McCann http://librarydigitalprojects.com/2008/04/28/clay-shirky-web-20-speech/ A quick bookmark post on Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 speech from last week. It’s a great read in its entirety. Here are my favorite sections:

So I tell [a television producer] all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

The “masking” in that quote refers to the place television holds in our post-industrial revolution lives.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.

But this takes the cake:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Free-time web-surfing as “cognitive surplus” is a great concept. Shirky talks about a potential model for the social web as:

But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

A site I stumbled upon tonight that shows this tendency perfectly is Young Me - Now Me. One look at the site and you understand it, you want to view all of the pairings, you want to create your own, and you want to share.

—

Update: Jay Rosen weighs in with a thoughtful piece.

It works great, but what I’d really like to do is turn the whole synchronization over to the cloud. SugarSync is an interesting tool that will synchronize any folder on your computer (Macs included) doing much of what Synctoy is doing, but without a thumb drive.

It works well, and may be a good solution. It’s fee-based and you get 10GB space. The only drawback being that you can’t execute portable firefox remotely (which makes sense.) I’ll keep testing, and waiting for Zotero 2.0.

This fits in nicely with several assumptions I’ve had regarding the audience we serve at our academic library, and may be true for most academic libraries. It’s a nice way to contextualize the personas being delivered and I bet helps sell them as well.

He’s saying that our conception of the “audience” is moving away from a simple media consumer towards that of an actor with real power. He has a couple good examples, especially this quote by a subject of a flashmob’s anger who said “You and what army?” As it turned out, the “army” ended up being a worldwide audience, and the police were forced to step in on a case they would normally ignore; (It involved a stolen camera.)

This past weekend another good example came up. A Vespa interest group held a rally on a California highway the same day a Lexus interest group held theirs. Unfortunately one of the Vespas was run over and the rider was sent to the hospital:

The very next post was a request for the license plate, and eventually a photo of the driver was posted. They then found a link to the sponsoring Lexus IG forum and a back & forth between forums broke out.

Ideally this kind of thing would result in a collection being raised to help pay for medical bills. What I hadn’t considered before was the potential for an “audience” to get out of control. I’d be willing to bet that governments around the world are starting to think along those same lines as well.

Methodology: Using Archive.org and Google’s list of academic websites, I semi-randomly selected a group of websites (around 276) to see how their browse structure and search placement was organized. The goal was to analyze a group of libraries from a wide cross-section of resource-enabled entities in order to get an idea of how the library community is thinking about library website design. Here is how the various categories were broken down:

Browse strategies: (i.e. if there’s such a thing as “browse DNA”, what is it? I personally don’t have a preference between these two groupings.)

• Splash home pages: (i.e. the top page browse structure disappears once secondary pages are reached)
  • Grid: Home page links are grouped along an x:y axis
    • random example: http://library.csudh.edu/
  • Cascade: Links are grouped in a cascading structure either along the x or y axis
    • random example: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/
  • Radial: Links are grouped along the radius of a circle
    • random example: http://library.hartford.edu/

• Frame home pages: (i.e. the browse structure is persistent from the the top page to the secondary pages)
  • random example: http://www.ulib.niu.edu/

Search strategies: (i.e. how is search implemented from the home page?)

• None: search might be available, but it’s usually a text link
  • random example: http://lib.harvard.edu/
• Site-search: search box that searches the library site, but not catalog
  • random example: http://www.library.eku.edu/
• Catalog: search box that searches the catalog
  • random example: http://library.citytech.cuny.edu/
• Site/catalog: search box that searches either the site, catalog, database(s), or all of the above
  • random example: http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/

Browse Findings: (the “error” result indicates a problem with archive.org data)

When I started this, I expected to find the “grid” structure to be gaining in popularity. I was surprised to see that the idea of persistent framing is definitely a trend with legs. When grid, cascade, and radial are combined (as “splash”) the trend is still there, and still surprising:

Search Findings: Here’s the results for search placement on the home page. There’s a definite trend towards placing a one-stop search box directly on the top page, where patrons won’t have to click through to use:

Conclusion: The way things are going, if you’ve embarked upon a library site redesign you would have the most company if you adopted a persistent browse structure with a comprehensive search box located on the home page.

Data:

This library website analysis data [2007 Academic Library Website Analysis (spreadsheet)] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The same goes with all images above, as well as the original list of library websites found here.

I vividly remember learning in Library School that everything is not miscellaneous. That point was brought up repeatedly and emphatically. But if that’s true, why is the rest of the Internet blithely ignoring us? It seems that Librarians have lost the authority to assert the claim because the users have routed around us and built their own structures based on miscellany.

From Everything is Miscellaneous:

[The business value of content organization] creates a conundrum for businesses as they enter the digital order. If they don’t allow their users to structure information for themselves, they’ll lose their patrons. If they do allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organizations will lose much of their authority, power, and control.

The Paradox is already resolving itself. Customers, patrons, users, and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information. And we’re doing it not just as individuals. Knowledge–its content and its organization–is becoming a social act. [p. 133]

Our users aren’t waiting on Information Scientists to organize their world because they are their own authorities. For a vivid representation of this zeitgeist, see this photo of street art found via StumbleUpon:

In Cialdini’s book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion he talks about the enormous influence of Social Proof. Here’s the cartoon version found on page 120 (it reminds me strongly of how Digg, Del.icio.us, and other tagging systems work) :

In that cartoon, I love how even the Gods (Angels, whatever) have to start paying attention eventually. This type of behavior is happening all over the place. Take for example the ongoing effect the internet is having on Journalism. Old-school journalists are being forced to start paying attention to the opinions and reporting of bloggers, their own opinion pages are losing authority, their classified advertising model is basically dead, and it’s all because of the phenomenon addressed in that cartoon. It’s simply more profitable for a user to pay attention to their peers than to traditional authorities.

According to Cialdini, what’s going on is the “awesome influence of the behavior of similar others” [p. 152], i.e. Social Proof. By now we all know the drill for finding “similar others”: in order to find anything on your topic, consult with others similarly interested (usually via wikipedia, the popularity indexing of Google, Digg, Technorati, etc., maybe even a bibliography.) The technique is so successful, why worry about the authority of what you’ve found?

It seems clear to me that some type of social similarity ranking mechanism needs to be made available by librarians for their patrons. Either that or we wait around for them to build their own, because they will and they are.

DoshDosh has a good writeup on Social Proof from a marketing perspective.

Researcher Nikhil Bhatla has a highly technical (but fascinating) take.

Columbia professor Duncan Watts appears to be researching in this space.

Another business-related writeup, this time from Take Back Your Brain!