With Thursday Threads coming on a Thanksgiving Thursday, it seems appropriate to use a theme of what I’m thankful for. So, in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads I’m offering three things: open source software, the internet, and public libraries. Reading this on Thanksgiving? Feel free to offer what you are thankful for in the comments.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Doc Summit Wrap up: 4 Books written in 3 days!

In mid October a Document Summit was held at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California where documentation teams from 4 open source projects, KDE, OpenStreetMap, OpenMRS and Sahana Eden as well as a few documentation ‘free agents’ gathered to a write 4 books in the course of three days and take part in a two day unconference. [In this blog post], one of the dedicated documentation volunteers and the FLOSS Manuals founder/organizer recount their experiences over the course of the week.

- Doc Summit Wrap up: 4 Books written in 3 days!, Google Open Source Blog

One of the striking similarities I’ve found between the library profession and the open source movement is an innate desire to share amongst ourselves. In the library world the sharing ranges from our ideas for techniques and tactics to our materials and metadata. In the technology world it is best exemplified by the open source “gift culture” of creating, sharing and supporting a community of developers all scratching a common itch. I’m thankful for the open source developers, the documentation writers, and knowledge sharers that enable libraries to efficiently and effectively share the knowledge and services under their care.

Cybersecurity in the Balance: Weighing the Risks of the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act

The Senate bill S.968, or the PROTECT IP Act, and the House bill H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, have raised a great deal of controversy. This paper does not deal with the questions of economic value, free expression or other issues raised by advocates on both sides. Instead, I highlight the very real threats to cybersecurity in a small section of both bills in their attempts to execute policy through the Internet architecture. While these bills will not “break the Internet,” they further burden cyberspace with three new risks. First, the added complexity makes the goals of stability and security more difficult. Second, the expected reaction of Internet users will lead to demonstrably less secure behavior, exposing many American Internet users, their computers and even their employers to known risks. Finally, and most importantly, these bills will set back other efforts to secure cyberspace, both domestically and internationally. As such, policymakers are encouraged to analyze the net benefits of these bills in light of the increased cybersecurity risks.

- Cybersecurity in the Balance: Weighing the Risks of the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, by Allan A. Friedman, Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Earlier this month there was a groundswell of opposition to hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In my own way, I registered my opposition to the pending legislation, as did thousands of others. I am optimistic that the bill will not become law, and viewed now from the perspective of the holiday I am thankful for that thing we call The Internet. That it was architected to put creative opportunity at the edges of the network, and that we have seen creativity flourish. That there are engineers and technicians watching the blinking lights around the clock to make sure they blink in the right sequence to get my bits from here to there. And that there are enough people concerned about tampering with the fundamentals of the internet that “strange bedfellows” in Congress now come together to state their opposition to the draft bill.

For Their Children, Many E-Book Fans Insist on Paper

Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books.

- For Their Children, Many E-Book Fans Insist on Paper, by Matt Richtel and Julie Bosman, New York Times

I’m in the same category of parent as those in this article, although I’m not sure it is a conscious decision. My 10-year-old daughter reads about a quarter of her fiction on my iPad and begs me to buy more. I bought a couple of iPad picture books for my 6-year-old son for vacation last year, but after the novelty of turning pages with the flick of finger wore off, he wanted to go back to the physical books. Most of what my children read come from the local library, so in the last place I’m thankful for my local public library. (And, well, thankful too for the opportunity to attend ALA conferences and pick up good deals on children’s books during the last hours the exhibit floor is open.) Thanks Michael Casey for posting a link to the New York Times article on Google+.

I’m in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the Access 2011 meeting which starts tomorrow. Coming across from the eastern timezone I had to come a day early, so — being a self-confessed library nerd — I checked out the Vancouver Public Library. I’m impressed with not only the physical structure but also the obvious degree of community engagement. The Central Library was very busy on a Tuesday afternoon, and first impressions are that it is beloved by its patrons. Included below are some pictures and some notes; some of the pictures have annotations — you can mouse over the boxes to see them. You can also click on the pictures to go to larger versions on Flickr.

Outdoor Entrance to Library Atrium

The central library is a huge building with a unique atrium feature. The main entrance to the library itself isn’t open to the outside. To get to the library, you have to first enter these side doors to an atrium. Inside the atrium are a number of commercial businesses and open seating in addition to the library entrance itself.

View of Library Floors from Inside the Atrium

The atrium goes down a level from the ground floor and up an additional five floors. Lots of glass lets in plenty of light. The entrance level also has a friends-of-the-library bookstore. The most impressive architectural detail, though, (from my admittedly nerdy perspective) is that each floor of the building has a raised floor above the concrete. The annotations on this picture point them out, and you can see a closer example in the next picture. The glass extends below the raised floor, in places you can see the infrastructure under the raised floor.

Raised Floor Under Shelves

This picture was taken on the steps between the main floor (level 2) and the children’s library (level 1). It more clearly shows the support braces holding up the raised floor and the heating and air conditioning ductwork. This infrastructure is exposed in many parts of the building, and in some locations you can also see power and networking installations as well.

Compact Shelving

The Central Library has lots of compact shelving. Some of it is open to patron use and other sections are locked down to staff password entry on a keypad at each shelving range. The last place I encountered this much compact storage in open shelving spaces was in the Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University. The only part of the collection that wasn’t in compact shelving when I worked there (in the late 1990s) was current periodicals. The use of compact shelving isn’t quite so extensive here, but it is quite pervasive throughout the building.

Compact Shelving over Raised Floor

Kelvin Smith Library also made use of raised flooring as a way to flexibly reconfigure space as needed, but the Central Library is the only place that I’ve seen where the compact shelving was put on raised flooring. (At Kelvin Smith Library, the concrete floor platform was raised to the raised floor level where the compact shelving was installed.) This picture shows, though, that the same heating and air conditioning ductwork exists in the compact shelving ranges. The floors under the compact shelving sounded a lot more solid — less “give” when you walked on them — but there was still a bit of an echo. The subfloor bracing must be significant to hold not only the shelving units but also the weight of the books.

Community Information and Library Guides

I don’t remember encountering a library before that had so much signage for the library as well as places for the community to post information. There are 8.5″x11″ pieces of paper mounted everywhere in the public spaces of the building. (I didn’t get a picture of the elevator, but the sides of the elevator car were covered with plexiglas sign hangers announcing library programs, services, and policies. This picture has a community information bulletin board and a rack of library guides.

Community Newspapers

Another point of community engagement is this location on the fifth level that is a distribution point for many community newspapers.

“Zine” Shelving

The main entrance floor of the library has two sections of shelves dedicated to displaying “zine” publications. A “zine” is “most commonly a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images. More broadly, the term encompasses any self-published work of minority interest usually reproduced via photocopier. A popular definition includes that circulation must be 5,000 or less, although in practice the significant majority are produced in editions of less than 1,000, and profit is not the primary intent of publication.” (Thanks Wikipedia!) There are several hundred on display here. Each has been cataloged with a barcode, a spine label and an RFID tag. The Vancouver Public Library Zine brochure even describes an effort by its special collections department to collect zines of significant local interest. This is serious stuff!

Barcode-to-RFID Conversion Stations

Clearly the Vancouver Public Library is in the process of migrating its collections to RFID tags. These two stations were parked on the third level at what looked like a charging point. The self-checkout stations were still using barcode readers, so the process must not be complete yet. And yes — that is a 3M logo on the bottom of the cabinets.

Overall Impressions

My first impressions are very positive. I hope Vancouver citizens realize what kind of treasure they have.

Two entries on big data lead this week’s edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. The first is at the grandest scale possible: a calculation of the amount of information in the world. Add up all the digital memory (in cell phones, computers, and other devices) and analog media (for instance, paper) and it goes to a very big number. The authors try to put it in perspective, which for me brought home how insignificant my line of work can be. (All of our information is still less than 1% of what is encoded in the human DNA?) The second “big data” entry describes an effort to make sense of huge amounts of data in the National Archives through the use of visualization tools. Rounding out this week is a warning to those who run public computers — be on the look-out for key loggers that can be used to steal information from users.

If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

How Much Information Is There in the World?

Video with author of paper (4 minutes)

So how much information is there in the world? How much has it grown?

Prepare for some big numbers:

• Looking at both digital memory and analog devices, the researchers calculate that humankind is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. (Yes, that’s a number with 20 zeroes in it.)

  Put another way, if a single star is a bit of information, that’s a galaxy of information for every person in the world. But it’s still less than 1 percent of the information stored in all the DNA molecules of a human being.

• 2002 could be considered the beginning of the digital age, the first year worldwide digital storage capacity overtook total analog capacity. As of 2007, almost 94 percent of our memory is in digital form.
• In 2007, humankind successfully sent 1.9 zettabytes of information through broadcast technology such as televisions and GPS. That’s equivalent to every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every day.

Feeling swamped in data? You probably don’t have it too bad. Also see a video interview (4 minutes, embedded above) and a podcast interview (12 minutes) with one of the authors that briefly describe some of the findings in the original paper (subscription to Science Magazine required).

A Window on the Archives of the Future

In collaborating with NARA, members of TACC’s Data and Information Analysis group developed a multi-pronged approach to address technical challenges. The overall goal of their research is to investigate different data analysis methods within a visualization framework. The visualization interface is the bridge between the archivist and the analysis results, which are rendered visually onscreen as the archivists make selections and interact with the data. The results are presented as forms, colors and ranges of color to assist in synthesis and to facilitate an understanding of large-scale electronic records collections.

This article from the Texas Advanced Computing Center describes a research project to visualize the volumes of digital data in the National Archives. The visualization provides information about the amount of particular types of information, an assessment of the risks to files in the archive based on file type, and other metrics. A brief paper from the Society for Imaging Science and Technology “Archives” proceedings last year, Visualization for Archival Appraisal of Large Digital Collections [PDF], goes into more detail.

Hardware keyloggers discovered at public libraries

USB Key Logger, courtesy of Sophos

Public libraries in Manchester, England, have been advised to keep their eyes peeled for USB bugs after two devices were discovered monitoring every keystroke made by every user of affected PCs.

According to local media reports, the small surveillance devices were found attached to the keyboard sockets at the back of two PCs in Wilmslow and Handforth libraries.

Sophos, maker of internet security software, posted this notice about key-logging devices attached to public library computers in the U.K. This device would make it possible to capture usernames and passwords typed at the keyboard by patrons. The article goes on to suggest actions: conduct frequent checks of hardware and to plug keyboards into USB ports on the front of computers for easy visual inspection. [Via Jessamyn West]

Screenshot of Sample 'Web Presence for Small Libraries'

They created a sample library called Loremville, TN public library to demonstrate key aspects of the service. I did not ask them how long that particular example will be around, so you may follow that link at a later date and not find it.

This “Library Website in a Box” is a concept that has been around for many years, and the latest trigger to try something was a resolution from the last OCLC Members Council to make scaled-down versions of OCLC services for “small and rural libraries.” The Innovation Lab group conducted some research about the existing state of public library web presences by sorting the IMLS-reported data from 2008 by number of volumes held and number of library staff. They looked at the lowest quartile (roughly 20,000 volumes or less and staff size in the low single digits) and found that there was generally no web presence for these libraries. In the second quartile there were instances of library websites, but they did the library no credit (outdated, poorly constructed, incomplete information — as was said at the meeting, these libraries had a presence on the web but probably shouldn’t). Some had automation systems supplied by large groups, but others didn’t have evidence of an automation system. So the project charter was to find an easy and inexpensive way for a library in these quartiles to create a desktop and mobile device web presence.

One of the unique aspects of the project development was to first set the approximate lower ($5/month) and upper ($40/month) price boundaries and find a way to provide the highest level of service possible at those price points. The Innovation Lab team tried techniques such as a farm of WordPress sites but found they couldn’t make the revenue-versus-cost equation to work. In the end they constructed a custom database-driven content system in PHP. Institutional data is initially pulled from sources such as the WorldCat Registry, and there will be some process for a library to “claim” its site. There might also be a way for a library to create a site for itself if no registry data yet exists.

There are four levels of site authorization: public (unauthenticated) viewing, a registered patron, a staff member, and an administrator. Content from the pages are edited by the administrator at the subscribing library with a WYSIWYG¹ editor. There are content boxes for the library’s location, staff/volunteers listing, events calendar and news, hours and phone number, policies, and service information. The library’s address is fed into a Google Maps service to display a map of the area surrounding the library.

The dynamic parts of each library’s website could have a list of books from various sources like the New York Times and Oprah’s book group. The service also envisions offering a “default digital collection” using public domain works in text, PDF, and mobile reading device formats from sources such as Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.

The inventory and circulation module is simple and straight-forward. Each item has only eight full-text fields with the intention that the description will likely be done by a volunteer without professional library training. Cataloging can be done by typing in the information or scanning the ISBN with an app on a mobile device; item information is pulled from WorldCat if found. The cataloging application does not attach holdings to WorldCat, but the OCLC number is kept and might be used to facilitate offloading MARC records in cases where a library outgrows this simple circulation module to a more functional integrated library system. The circulation functions are check-in, check-out, renew, place hold and cancel hold. There are no financial functions in the system.

At these price levels, the system needs to be highly automated and self-supporting. The cost to OCLC of one call to a customer support phone number could easily run through all the revenue OCLC would receive from the subscribing library in a year. A widely adopted implementation at the targeted price points means that OCLC could dedicate one or two technical staff to support and upgrade the system in addition to the hardware and support service amortization.

One unresolved issue is domain names — what is the URL that will be used for each library’s site. OCLC is investigating options such as partnering with a domain registrar company (someone like GoDaddy), becoming a domain registrar themselves, or putting all the sites under one domain. The economics of each of these options will be a factor. The sometimes cumbersome aspects of migrating domain names from one service to another may make that activity cost-prohibitive as well.

Mike Teets noted that this was at a “project” stage, not a “product” stage. My paraphrasing of what this distinction means is that the technology to create a product is largely done, but the decisions on the final formative pieces of the technology and the surrounding support infrastructure — is not yet done (and might never be done). There isn’t even a formal name for it yet; it is being called “A Web Presence for Small Libraries.” One desired additional feature is to add e-mail boxes for library staff/functions to the site. Those in the room, including me but more importantly others who are more closely aligned with the target “small and rural” public library population, were pretty excited about it and wanting to talk further about if what we saw could be made a reality.

Personal Impressions

Like others in the room, I came away impressed by the project demonstration. It is definitely fits the bill as a basic library website and even a starter inventory and circulation management system. I see that libraries could start with something like this for the cost of a couple of books added to the collection (roughly estimated at $60/year). At this price level, OCLC thinks they could sustain the costs of operations plus have some left over for investment in incremental improvements. I also think that because a library would pay a minimal fee for it, they would feel a tangible sense of ownership over the site and would keep them up-to-date. From this a library could “graduate” to another service — their own Drupal or WordPress site, to a shared ILS or Webscale Management Services.

The content areas seemed the most appropriate for the target audience. The web page design is modern, and I could see options for future enhancements as time and revenue permit such as providing limited options to personalize the template (change colors, adding picture — or adding links to pictures that might be stored on services such as Flickr).

One attendee at the session suggested that rather than OCLC prepopulating a digital content library of all public domain content that the set be limited to those that are the most downloaded so as not to overwhelm the user with a lot of unused (and/or unusable) digital content. That sounds like a good suggestion to me.

OCLC Staff are looking for feedback on this project. They say that the system is “production ready” with all the software controls and data recovery features of OCLC behind it. What they think is missing is community support to have local engagement with the targeted libraries to show them what is possible. That is an area where OCLC needs help. (I can only imagine the shocked silence of a volunteer at a small library to get a call from OCLC — if they even knew what OCLC was — with an offer to create a website for the library. “Only $5/month…sign up now and we’ll throw in a second one for free!”) There is an e-mail address — innovation@oclc.org — that goes to all the OCLC Innovation Lab members, and a WebJunction group for public discussion.

About the Innovation Lab

For this project, the Innovation Lab sought out cooperation from OCLC staff to build prototypes and components of the service in their spare time. Each Monday the self-selected group would get together to show what had been built and discuss ways to move the project forward in the following week. In this way they rapidly iterated over ideas to come up with what was ultimately proposed.

The text was modified to update a link from http://expreimental.worldcat.org/ to http://experimental.worldcat.org/ on January 12th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.webjunction.org/923 to http://www.webjunction.org/923 on January 12th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.clicweb.org/e_discover/e_discovermarc.html on June 9th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get, meaning as you edit the document with styles like bolding, underlining, and bulleted lists, what you see in the editing interface is exactly how it will appear in the viewing interface.

I love my local public library system, the Columbus Metropolitan Library. I’m a big fan of its helpful staff, plentiful collections, and convenient delivery service. Today I appaud it for coming up with what I think is the best terminology for our patrons to understand what we mean when we say databases. In a box on their homepage with the heading “Beyond Google” the CML says “Your library card is all you need to access our premium online resources!” What a great phrase for those things — premium online resources. By using the word “premium,” this phrase points out the notion that these are things with added value. That added value may come from the fact that the resources are licensed and are therefore beyond what you would get just looking at the open web. Or it could mean that it is a curated collection created and offered to the open web by the library itself. Some may waver over the use of the word “resources” but I think that is a meaningful phrase

To really see this phrase in action, though, take a look at how it appears in their metasearch form. There are two radio buttons — one for the “catalog” (which is also a link to their home-grown ILS) and one for “premium resources” (which links to an alphabetical list of databases). With the heading “Find It” and its positioning in the upper left corner of every page, this search form really gets to the heart of the information discovery in today’s libraries.

Way to go, CML!