For any project to get off the ground, a good name is a must:

The Art of Naming a Business

Interesting 4-part workflow describing a high-quality technique for copying audio from TechKing.

Networked Learning and Sympathetic Spaces in Libraries

Business Insider has an interesting argument indicating that Craiglist is being slowly, but surely, disrupted.

Generally speaking, Craigslist has been “good enough” to not be disrupted head-on. Nevertheless, the world moves on, and the gaps in their product (due to a stubborn obstinate refusal to invest in technology) grow wider and wider. As tablets, smartphones, etc disrupt, and craigslist doesn’t invest in those platforms, the feature gap grows wider.

The disruption that has happened has occurred on a category-by-category bases, as this graphic by Andrew Parker (http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/po…) shows:

That graphical analysis of sources for disruption is really interesting. What would the same type of analysis look like for academic libraries? Here’s a lightning quick example using the library I work at as an guinea pig. This image is not meant to be comprehensive, just a proof of concept. This doesn’t prove that libraries are imminently doomed to be disrupted, only that many services external to the academy would like a slice of the action. Let me know in the comments what I’m missing.

Active Sources of Library Disruption:

The Educause 2011 Horizon Report is out [ PDF ].

A key finding that caught my  eye:

The world of work is increasingly collaborative,
giving rise to reflection about the way student
projects are structured. This trend continues
from 2010 and is being driven by the increasingly
global and cooperative nature of business
interactions facilitated by Internet technologies.
The days of isolated desk jobs are disappearing,
giving way to models in which teams work actively
together to address issues too far-reaching or
complex for a single worker to resolve alone.
Market intelligence firm IDC notes that some
one billion people fit the definition of mobile
workers already, and projects that fully one-third
of the global workforce — 1.2 billon workers —
will perform their work from multiple locations by
2013.

I believe collaboration is a key component in networked learning. More on that soon.

Over the next year I’m creating a plan for investigating and implementing digital curation micro-services in some form. A first step in this project is a learning environment on the topic.

http://www.netvibes.com/stevemtzn#curation_micro-services_news

Archivematica is an open source digital preservation platform using the micro-services design idea “that allows users to process digital objects from ingest to access in compliance with the ISO-OAIS functional model”.

How powerful is the effect of social proof on middle-school aged football players? Fairly powerful as seen below.

Gartner has an interesting analysis of current technologies plotted against the Hype Cycle.

Gartner 2010 Hype Cycle Analysis

The Hype Cycle is a model for interpreting technology adoption. According to the model:

• Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
• Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
• Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
• Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
• Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.

It would be an interesting project to do this type of analysis with library technology. It is conceivable to first identify where a particular technology lives along the curve and then map out the different library institutions and where they tend to live in that life cycle.

An example would be the success of Wolf Walk at NCSU. I would say the project is an example of a technology trigger. For smaller institutions (i.e. those without technology R&D resources), we’ll need to wait for that technology to reach (at least) the Slope of Enlightenment before it will be feasible as a low impact, high return project. It’s possible we’ll need to wait for the Plateau of Productivity. The real value to what Gartner is doing is the timeline analysis involved in that wait.

Interesting DIY project using simple, consumer-grade cameras and an ingenious box frame to hold them. The project website is at  www.bookliberator.com. According to their blog, they will be using two pieces of free software: scantailor for post-processing and djvubind for OCR, metadata and conversion to the djvu format.

BookLiberator

An example of a final page image: