Travis Ennis's Work Blog

Is late really better than never?

2007-02-27T17:12:00.000-06:00

October 24, 2006 is when I made my last post here indicating that I would soon have a new blog running on my own site. It is now February 27, 2007, nearly four months later. The new blog is finally ready.

travisennis.com

If you only knew what has happened in those four months. Regardless, if I still have a few subscribers, do join me at my new blog. I promise it will be more active, although the topics I may discuss there could be different than what I discussed while here.

Update

2006-10-24T13:10:00.000-05:00

An anonymous commenter asked how I was progressing on my new website. Well, I can say that I am, but slowly. It's been over a month since I said that an announcement would be made soon. A lot has happened in that month and school, which is the primary user of my time, has been extremely busy. However, progress has been made, a few decisions have been changed, and new ideas have been born - some to die and a few to flourish. I've changed a few of my assumptions that I possessed about what I wanted from my own website. Some of those changes might, when all is said an done, prove to be quite radical for me. Yet, at this time, all I can say is something should happen soon and I'll post here when it does.

Announcement coming soon.

2006-09-21T15:46:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm moving forward on finally having my own website where I have a measure of control of how the site is layed out, what CMS I will use, and the graphic design of the whole mess. It's lot of work, but there is a certain measure of satisfaction in knowing that when I'm done I'll have a place of my own on the web. My new site has an address, but I'm not announcing it yet. There is still work to do, but soon I'll have something to show for it.

Plans are moving forward

2006-09-07T12:42:00.000-05:00

My plans to start blogging again are moving forward, albeit very slowly. I've decided to do things differently this time around. No more of these free blogging services like Blogger or Wordpress.com. I've decided to go with my own site and blogging software on a hosted service. Now the next step is to decide where to host my site. I believe I'v narrowed the field to either Dreamhost or Media Temple. Media Temple seems to have a sexiness to it that is appealing, but Dreamhost appears to be the better deal. However, Dreamhost has had problems over the last few months that I can't be sure have worked themselves out. Some posts indicate that they have.

Once I get this stuff figured out, I'm going to publish my new address here on this blog. Until that time, look for updates and postings about the process and the new site here on this blog.

Musings on Time and Priorities

2006-08-25T16:30:00.000-05:00

I've still to decide where I'm blogging, but I do want to start blogging again. The thing is that there is so much I need to accomplish and just not enough time. School start next week. It's my final semester for my dual-degree in Library and Information Science. I'm looking forward to the end. Once December gets, I will have been in graduate school for two and half years. It's not a long time; it certaintly went by fast, but it's still time. Outside of school, I'm currently working four jobs. It's too much and within three weeks I'll trim that down to only three. However, they keep me busy in their own right. Finally, I'm redesigning my own website so that is current, reflects me and my interests as they stand now, serves as my portfolio, and holds my current resume. Job searching is coming very fast. In fact, it's already started and having a website I can use during that process is a high priority for me.

That's just work and school. Somewhere, I'm trying to find time for blogging, especially since I still have some readers. You can't imagine how happy I was to receive comments to my last post. Thank you.

Tags: Blogging, Career, School, Time

Might I give this another shot?

2006-08-17T09:26:00.000-05:00

After nearly eight months of hiatus in which nearly everything about me has changed, I'm considering giving this blogging habit another go. My first, somewhat successful, attempt was here at Blogger. According to Bloglines I have about thirty subscribers left who use there service and who knows how many of those actively use their accounts there. Consequently, I'm considering a switch to the hosted Wordpress service. Let me hear from you if you still are subscribed to this blog even though it has been silent for so long and once I decide where I will start blogging again, I'll post it here.

Tags: blogs, habits

The string is broken...

2006-01-31T11:52:00.000-06:00

Last week marked the first time I missed the Library 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up. Everthing surrounding school and work has kept me so busy that I didn't even realize I hadn't put the wrap-up together until this past weekend. I quickly did a look back to see what I missed, but what I found was a continuing trend of less and less discussion of 'Library 2.0' as a term or movement. Walt Crawford mentioned that he also sees the same trend and that he believes the conversation has diversified into different areas of interest and work, something which I've also said needed to happen. The thing is it is now happening and with it I believe I'll no longer continue writing up the end of week review. I too have some specific areas of interest that I would like to explore in more detail and I'll try to do so over the next weeks and months.

Use of "Library 2.0"

2006-01-25T20:34:00.000-06:00

Jim Milles published a podcast (link to podcast notes page) earlier this week where he briefly discussed my wrap-up last week. He payed particular attention to my comment that the conversation surrounding Library 2.0 had already started to wind down only in my third week of doing my weekly wrap-ups. Here is the Technorati graph:

Posts that contain "library 2.0" per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

While not authoritative, it points to a definite down-turn. I can only speculate as to the reason why.

This Week in Library 2.0

2006-01-20T12:04:00.000-06:00

Updated

This week I'm going to try something new. While the discussion this week didn't seem to be as intense as the previous two weeks, I'm still going to change the format. Instead of covering the hot posts from the last seven days, I'm going to discuss a topic that interested me and received some attention in the week leading up to these regular late Thursday/early Friday posts.

Library 2.0 has been described as a reaction to a crisis, a crisis created by the Web and the astonishing success of search services from the likes of Google and Yahoo. The fact is that with or without the label, libraries are being forced to rethink how they do business. As Casey Bisson noted this week, "people are making the internet a part of their daily lives and in doing so it is changing us." This is not a Library 2.0 question. It's more general than that. Libraries as a whole need to respond, no matter the label this response falls under. This past week, I saw several suggestions on what that response may be and that is what I would like to talk about in this post.

The first think I noticed this week is that Roy Tennant is going to give a talk at next month's code4lib conference. His proposal says:

Libraries face tremendous challenges to create effective and responsive institutions in a Googlezon world. But the type of leadership we need so far hasn’t materialized. If it isn’t going to come from the administrators, let it come from the coders. In this talk I will build a case for establishing Code4Lib as a nonprofit library software cooperative. A financial structure would allow us to put real resources—both financial and human—into bringing libraries into the 21st century.

I discussed this earlier this week, but I think such an idea, if it receives the support it deserves, could do a lot to reshape what libraries do and how they are perceived. Already, there are libraries that are working on software and services that are attempting to change how their users interact with information. Just this week, Indiana University announed along with the University of Michigan that they had received a grant to expand the open-source course manangement software, Sakai, so that it could bring in deep web resources to students and professors. A more wide-spread push in the direction of software and services development and following the model of the OSS community could produce significant results.

Eric Lease Morgan posted an interesting article this week entitled, Library services and in-house software development, in which he says,

With the increasing number of library-like institutions providing library-like services, it is important for libraries to differentiate themselves. Libraries need to adapt to the changing environment of networked information and changing user expectations. Libraries need to grow beyond the the creation and maintenance of collections. Everybody creates collections. Everybody has collections. Everybody provides access to collections. Collections abound.

In reponse, he says that libraries and librarians need to do two fundamental things: become more familiar with the technology that provides access to information and become innovators in using that technology to build services, which will provide new and useful ways for interacting with information. Richard Ackerman responds to this idea with several suggestions that I think are worth thinking about in some depth. Richard's focus and mine are more on academic libraries. Let me repeat here what he says,

For an academic/research library, the services should be very much researcher-centric. In fact, I can imagine the library providing much of the support infrastructure for the research workflow. While this may seem like an expansion of the library's role, it's quite logical: if I break research into Discovery (of background information), Reference (to the found knowledge), and Creation (of new knowledge) then the library has a role to play at each stage.

If you agree with this as I do, then the library becomes less a collector of information and more a provider of tools and services that allows individuals to interact with information, no matter where that information is found.

As a student of Library and Information Science, I recognize that as a profession we could promote ourselves more as innovators in working with information, understanding information. Information visualization, data mining, bibliometrics, etc. are activities we could adapt for users, empowering them to take control of their own attention with regard to their information habits. Services that would allow users to see what resources they look at; to track changes in research interests; to derive recommendations from that attention; and to aggregate, manage, and share that attention with others are, in my opinion, what we should be looking at.

Finally, I would like to mention a development that I've been watching and have taken a great interest in. If you are unfamiliar with the microformats movement, it is a group of developers seeking to create specifications for semantically rich data that is found all over the web. Their intention is to create marked-up data in XHTML that is readable by humans, but can be parsed by machines. Anyway, work is being done to create a citation-microformat. To find out more, check out these pages from the Microformats Wiki:

cite

cite-formats

cite-examples

citation-brainstorming

Also check out these posts from Ed Summers and Daniel Chudnov on this topic:

OpenURL as Microformat

OpenURL as microformat for structured blogging journal articles

Further reading for this week:

Rethinking how we provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California [pdf].

Technorati Tags: TWiL2.0, library2.0, L2, microformats, libraryservices, Sakai

Technorati Charts

2006-01-16T22:06:00.000-06:00

Technorati has unveiled charts that show the activity in the blogogsphere for particular search terms. They provide code that you can copy into your website. The charts will automatically update. Pretty cool. So, here are two charts:

Posts that contain Library 2.0 per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Posts that contain Code4lib per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Technorati Tags: technorati, technoraticharts

OPML Reading Lists

2006-01-16T09:38:00.000-06:00

In my post looking for an OPML file of library bloggers, Steven Cohen left a comment telling me about the work Dave Winer is doing with OPML Reading Lists. I had been reading about Reading Lists back in the Fall and I knew there was a lot of potential in the idea, but there were no implementations available to play around with. Since that time, I forgot about the idea. However, as Steven pointed out, Dave Winer is now working on an implementation in his new aggregator and it probably won't be long before other aggregators implement Reading Lists as well.

So, what are Reading Lits? In short, they are OPML files that you can subscribe to. Say you enjoyed what I read, then you might subscribe to my OPML Reading List in your aggregator and as I add and delete feeds in that Reading List, then your subscription will update to reflect those changes.

Now, my reading habits may not interest very many people, but what if you could subscribe to the Reading Lists of experts in a certain domain. Would that interest you? I know it would interest me and it should interest all librarians. We already create subject guides and pathfinders. How interesting would it be if we could maintain OPML Reading Lists for our patrons on subjects they were interested in? Or for us who work in academic libraries to also encourage faculty and academic departments to maintain Readings Lists for their academic and research interests.

I think there is a great amount of potential in this idea and it wouldn't hurt to start looking into now.

Technorati Tags: OPML, ReadingLists

Request for Library Blogger OPML file

2006-01-15T19:25:00.000-06:00

I'm working on a little project and I'm trying to find an OPML file that attempts to be a comprehensive list of librarian bloggers. I've found the one Steven Cohen maintains at Pubsub, but I was wondering if anyone is maintaining one that is possibly more comprehensive.

Leave a commment or contact me at travis.ennis[at]gmail[dot]com.

Technorati Tags: libraries, blogs, OPML

TWiL2.0: Library 2.0 Weekly Round-up

2006-01-12T23:18:00.000-06:00

Here is the second weekly round-up for Library 2.0 commentary and events. It's been a busy week and as some of my previous posts indicate I am both a bit overwhelmed and a bit confused by all that has been said. Nevertheless, here is what was posted this week (1/6/2006 - 1/12/2006).

The week was nearly bookended by the publication of two important documents. First, Walt Crawford published a special issue of Cites & Insights on the topic of Library 2.0. Second, Stephen Abrams published his Web 2.0 – Huh?! Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0 (PDF file) just in last few days. Walt Crawford's document has already been discussed widely and certainly the same should happen to Stephen Abrams'.

This week, we also find that Jessamyn West has put online a presentation she gave entitled, Tech Trends in Libraries: the Good News and the Bad News and why library 2.0 is no big deal [and not that new], which is worth looking at.

You may also want to look at this diagram posted on Flickr by Thomas Brevik that represents a model of Library 2.0. He has invited comments and suggestions and the model surely deserves them.

Also, several events were announced over the last seven days:

Library 2.0 open space workshop at the Ann Arbor District Library on Feb. 23.

Web 2.0 and Talis on BBC Radio 4, which is available online now.

A SirsiDynix Institute Conversation: The 2.0 Meme - Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0, a webinar set for February 22, 2006

Paul Miller announced he would be giving a paper, The Web 2.0 Challenge to Libraries, at Computers in Libraries in March, 2006.

Now, on to the posts. One of the big topics this week was the meaning of Library 2.0 and one of the strongest posts on this topic was made by John Blyberg, 11 reasons why Library 2.0 exists and matters. However, from a different perspective, we also saw Meredith Farkas' post, Label 2.0, which put forth the position that moving forward and making improvements to libraries is more important than the Library 2.0 concept itself.

These were only two of the many excellent posts made over this past week. Stepping back from them all, I was able to see that some agreement among posters can be found, but mostly there is a wide variety of opinions and positions expressed. Over at the Panlibus we find Library 2.0, and a penchant for lists. From Chris Armstrong at info NeoGnostic comes Meaning(s) of Library 2.0 and in response this post, again from Panlibus. Jenny Levine posted What Is New about Library 2.0 over at the ALA Techsource Blog; Richard Ackerman responds to Jenny's post and offers some of his own thoughts on Library 2.0 in his post, Welcome. You've Got New Library. Luke at Gordian Knot posted Two point oh, which puts forth the idea of the "read-write library." Thomas Brevik gave his views on the topic in his post, What do I think Library 2.0 is?, which appears on his new English-language blog. At Endless Hybrids, Jeff Berry discusses how he believes Library 2.0 is dangerous. Steve Lawson talks about the Library 2.0 hangover, which makes some insightful comments and connections (I particularly enjoyed this one). Finally, Steven Cohen posted L2 Ain't Nothing Without W2, which is a response to Dion Hinchcliffe's look at Web 2.0 spinoffs.

The disagreements found in these posts were also addressed this week. David King, in his post, Confrontational Aspects of Library 2.0 Discussed, points out some that caught his eye and offers a reason. Meredith Farkas makes an excellent post on this topic as well, suggesting that instead of arguing over a definition of a term ,we should move towards implementing some of the ideas that make up Library 2.0 and sharing our success stories.

This is only a selection of the posts made in the last seven days. As I went through the posts I collected this week, I realized I wouldn't have the time to point to all of them, even though others deserved to be pointed out. Even now, I haven't provided many comments on the selections I did choose. Hopefully, they will speak for themselves.

But, in order to provide a little commentary, I would like to end with two quotes. The first helps me as I struggle with my own inconsistency on the topic of Library 2.0, which has ranged from enthusiastic to a bit wary. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. The second is a quote of a quote (of a quote?) that very nearly reflects where my own thoughts are heading now.

"Since the fall, I’ve pretty much been processing my thoughts about Library 2.0 on this blog in real-time. If one is going for ideological consistency, it’s probably not the best way to do things, but it is the most human way. I’ve been learning and reflecting and sharing those reflections with you."

-- Meredith Farkas

"Roy Tennant (and, indirectly, Dan Chudnov): "Moving beyond silo-ized "destination" systems to expose our information and services in a wide variety of methods to a diverse set of consuming applications is a good thing.... If that's Library 2.0, then so be it. Call it whatever you want, just stop anguishing over it. As Dan Chudnov says, "Now stop boring us, and help build it."

-- from Walt Crawford's C&I issue

And with that, we conclude another week of Library 2.0. Again, I would like to invite comments and suggestions. I mentioned earlier this week that I might quit doing these weekly round-ups, but I've decided to keep at it. It proved to be good fun. However, being a full-time student and working two part-time jobs, I'm not sure I have the time to really delve into the topic like I tried to do this week. I made the mistake of trying to track too many conversations and I think the round-up this week reflects that; I would prefer to delve into some theme a bit deeper instead of skimming the surface. So, look for next week to have a different format and a different focus, but for it to still be about this idea we call Library 2.0.

Technorati Tags: Library2.0, TWil2.0

Library 2.0: A Term's Life.

2006-01-11T22:40:00.000-06:00

I also said on Tuesday that I would comment on whether I thought Library 2.0 would go away as a term. I wish I hadn't done that, but I'll go ahead with anyway and learn to think a bit more in the future before announcing I intend to do something that doesn't need to be done. Why? I expect two things to result from this: I'll upset someone or people just won't care. However, I'm not stopping now.

My own thoughts on the matter, based on little more than a gut feeling about these things, is that it has to go away. Maybe by the end of the year and maybe sooner, but it needs to go away. Why do I say this? Well, I noticed several things this week. I noticed several posts that openly disliked the term, others that were wary of it, and others who felt necessary to defend it. I'm not the first to say this, but if what we have become focused on is the term itself then we have lost focus on what is important here. With time, I believe several ideas or movements will emerge from the Library 2.0 debate; maybe they will be a set of best practices, maybe it will be a push for more social software in libraries, maybe it will be something involving data (microformats, unapi, etc.), or maybe it will be the development of an open-source community of library coders and developers who begin to create new and interesting tools for libraries and their patrons; it could be any number of things. These different areas of interest and work will come to the forefront and instead of defining and defending a term, people will switch to working on implementing ideas. The former step of defining and defending a term is not bad. I don't want that to be what you come away with here. It is a necessary step, but only a first step. Eventually, we will take the next step and that will be the really exciting time to be involved in libraries.

Technorati Tags: Library2.0

My Perspective on Library 2.0 (and the realization I don't really have one)

2006-01-11T20:34:00.000-06:00

I mentioned in a post on Tuesday that I would give my perspective on Library 2.0. I've been tracking a good number of posts this week for tomorrow evening's Weekly Wrap-up and today I got my first opportunity to really sit down and read what was being said. There is a wide variety of opinions, outlooks, and even definitions of what this 'thing' is that is being called Library 2.0. It's been a bit daunting.

For my part, my own perspective on the matter was weak in the first place. I haven't read enough, nor wrote enough on the topic to really have made up my mind how I would approach Library 2.0. Couple that with the fact that I'm a student with limited amount of experience working in libraries, much less a deep understanding of what pressures libraries are facing on a day-to-day basis, I'm beginning to feel even less and less confident that I can say much on the topic at this point.

I know which ideas that have emerged from the Web 2.0 movement appeal to me, I have a few ideas both as a user of libraries and as a student of library science of what I would like to see happen with libraries and library software, and I recognize good ideas when I see them. Yet, even with that or despite that, I still don't feel qualified to comment on Library 2.0. Not yet anyway. I simply can't frame my comments within that context. So, for now, I won't.

Technorati Tags: Library2.0

code4lib Conference

2006-01-11T18:19:00.000-06:00

I was just looking at the schedule for the code4lib conference. It looks like it will be an amazing conference. I wish I could go. The following talks seem particularly interesting to me:

Connecting Everything with unAPI and OPA

AHAH: When Good is Better than Best

Anatomy of aDORe

Two Paths to Interoperable Metadata

I also noticed that the description of Roy Tennant's talk, The Case for Code4Lib 501c(3), says this:

"In this talk I will build a case for establishing Code4Lib as a nonprofit library software cooperative. A financial structure would allow us to put real resources—both financial and human—into bringing libraries into the 21st century."

It made me remember a comment I made in December . In my post I said:

"Just today I noticed that Thom Hickey announced that OCLC Research would releasing software under the Apache 2.0 License. I hope we see more of this and not just from organizations like OCLC, but from library developers everwhere. If you are working on a project, then why not make it open source? With proper licensing, you could develop for your own library, but make the work available to other coders who can improve it, adapt it, and implement it elsewhere. A community of practice that believes in this kind of development model is necessary for any of this to happen. As Richard Akerman commented, there are components already in place to make this possible and I think code4lib could potentionally develop as the center of this community with it's code4lib planet, IRC channel, and upcoming conference."

I'm glad to see there is discussion on this possiblity.

Technorati Tags: code4lib, code4lib2006

Cites & Insights: Library 2.0

2006-01-10T21:43:00.000-06:00

Walt Crawford's latest Cites & Insights is entirely devoted to the topic of Library 2.0. I got a mention in it, albeit a small one, but I appreciate that Walt has been reading my blog and found something in it worth commenting on, whether he agrees with it or not. If you are interested in the post that Walt cited, you can find it here.

I did want to make some comments in response to what Walt quoted me on. For example, Walt says "Ennis doesn’t care for “Web 2.0” but likes Library 2.0." Back on December 16, I had said, "So, [am] I as turned off by Library 2.0 as I am by Web 2.0? No, not really." At the time, I did not mean it to be a ringing endorsement. It was akin to being asked if you like a person and responding that you don't dislike them.

But, I was open to the idea and Walt recognized that. However, I was open to the idea based on certain conditions. I saw and still see Library 2.0 as being, if not an extension, then, at least, inspired by Web 2.0. I still dislike the term 'Web 2.0,' which is now little more than hype used by venture capitalists and entrepeneurs with the simple business model of build it and then hope to sell it to the Googles and Yahoos of the world. Yet, as I've said before there are several things that have arisen out of the Web 2.0 movement that have true staying power and will become the questions we (we being anyone who works in, around, or with information technology, including librarians) will seriously have to grapple with over the next few years and beyond. Those things are the concepts of attention, identity, reputation, and trust; the rise of the social side of the web; and open data models (the 'small pieces loosely joined' idea). I'm still working on these ideas, trying to understand them and their implications, and trying to figure if Library 2.0 will have something to say concerning them. That was the most important point, I believe, about the December 16th post that Walt quoted, but I didn't express it properly.

Since that time, I warmed to the idea of Library 2.0, written a few posts on the topic, and started a trial run of a weekly round-up. While Walt was entirely correct that a few dozen bloggers is 'certaintly not all' librarians (a unintended exaggeration on my part), the term has taken off. While tracking Library 2.0 posts this week (since January 6), I have gathered a little over 60 posts that range from significant comments down to interesting opinions and quotes. That's not even an exhaustive list, only what I think may be interesting to post about. It's still relatively small, but, in its own way, it's significant.

What does have me worried is the direction that conversation has taken. Over my next few posts, I'm going to take a look at Library 2.0 from my perspective, decide whether, as a term, it's doomed to extinction, and explain why this week's Library 2.0 Weekly Round-up may be the second and last in the series.

Technorati Tags: Library2.0

Response to Library 2.0 Wrap-up

2006-01-06T14:02:00.000-06:00

I noticed the first response to my idea for a weekly wrap-up of Library 2.0 commentary from Steven Cohen at Library Stuff. I quote him in full:

"Travis Ennis has started a weekly wrap-up of L2 commentary. It's pretty easy to do now as not that many librarians (and library lovers) are talking about it, but if the idea becomes part of the library-lexicon (and I hope it does, for the sake of history), this is going to be much more difficult. But G-d bless Travis for trying. I've subscribed to his blog in case my blog searches don't come up with everything I want to read on the topic."

I'm glad he subscribed and I hope the effort proves beneficial for him and for others as well. I have to admit, though, that Steven's post does worry me a bit. It had already seemed to me that the Library 2.0 meme had taken off, but, if Steven is right and, like him, I hope he is, then if it really takes off then I can at least be thankful I'm not trying to cover Web 2.0.

Thanks, Steven.

Technorati Tags: Library2.0

Citation Microformats

2006-01-06T13:42:00.000-06:00

I just recently ran across work that is being done on a citation microformat. Edward Vielmetti is one of the individuals working on it. He maintains two very interesting blogs: Vacuum and Superpatron. Over the last week or so, he has written two interesting posts that has made me think about what a citation microformat might accomplish: here here.

Edward is the kind of patron than any library technologist would love to have. Let me explain. His vision for a citation microformat is as an addition to the library catalog, which would provide a means for patrons to reuse the data in their own applications, something he refers to as 'patron applications.' The question I have is whether the effort put forth in this area would have a significant return on investment. Edward has done some amazing things using data from the Ann Arbor District Library. His experiments are an excellent proof-of-concept of what can be done.

However, in the end, his experiments only benefit patrons of the AADL. My point is that to make a citation microformat useful to all, it would have to be included in all library catalogs. Unless an ILS vendor adds this to their product, then this is unlikely to happen. And even if it did happen then any individual library would need to have someone on staff or a creative patron, such as Edward, to make use of it, which is something, as I've said before, not all libraries have the good-fortune to have.

If the citation microformat is not made available through the catalog, then it might go the way of COinS, which embedds bibliographic metadata in HTML and then uses OpenURL link resolvers allowing individuals the opportunity to see if an item is available in their library. Tackling the problem from this direction, which just requires us to look at it from a different angle, may be workable, but only if applications are created to recognize this embedded metadata and transparently do something with it that is useful to patrons who do not want nor care to know how or why it works. However, I don't know where all this data is going to be created in the quantity that will make it ubiquitously useful. If it's created in library catalogs, then what number of people do we expect to be searching other libraries' catalogs to find what is their own library's catalog? Given this, this data needs to exist outside of any one library so that is pulls people toward libraries. Yet, who will do this? Would Amazon do this? Not likely; they want you to buy books from them, not check them out at the local library. OCLC or RLG? More likely, but I haven't seen any discussion on it (it's still quite early in the process, though).

None of this is new. These issues and problems are being looked at and attempts are being made to solve them by people who know much more about them than I do, but these are the issues and problems that I haven't found satisfactory answers to yet. What will be the tipping point? Who will create the data to really make a citation microformat take off? What will be the 'killer-app' that makes it useful?

Technorati Tags: library2.0, microformats

This Week in Library 2.0: Weekly Wrap-Up

2006-01-05T23:31:00.000-06:00

I'm going to take a shot at doing a round-up each week of posts relating to the Library 2.0. There are other examples of this around the web. Danny Ayers does one for the Semantic Web and Richard McManus maintains the popular Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up. I understand this will require some time and effort that may not, despite my best intentions, be readily available once the Spring semester starts next week, but I'm going to try nonetheless. I'm interested and I already try to follow what is being said, but, hopefully, this will be useful to others as well. Finally, I more than welcome advice and additions from others who are also interested in Library 2.0 (I know there are more than a few of you).

(The first weekly wrap-up is far from complete. First, I only decided to go with the idea after midweek, so I may have missed a few posts. Second and also because of time constraints, I've applied little to no editorial commentary. By this, I mean I have not grouped posts by conversation or theme, which is something I would like to include in future weekly wrap-ups. This week, I list the posts in chronological order.)

So, here's the first Library 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up (12/30/2005-1/5/2006):

Steve Cohen at Library Stuff:: Library 2.0 - Questions and Commentary
Michael Stephens et. al. at Tame the Web:: Update: Defining Library 2.0: Is it More than Technology?
Michael Casey at LibraryCrunch:: Born in the Biblioblogsphere
Mark Lindner at ...the thoughts are broken...:: My 1st L2 comments
Sarah Houghton at LibrarianInBlack.net:: Library 2.0: New or No?
Laura Crossett at lis.dom:: low tech library 2.0
Michael Casey at LibraryCrunch:: We Need a Web 2.0 Integrator
T. Scott at his blog:: Why I Dislike the "Library 2.0" Tag

Technorati Tags: Library2.0, TWiL2.0

Dan Cohen Writes about Creating his Own Blog

2006-01-05T22:45:00.000-06:00

Interesting set of posts if you are at all interested in what it takes to create blogging software. Dan Cohen has posted 5 of ? in a series in how he created his:

Creating a Blog from Scratch, Part 1: What is a Blog, Anyway?

Creating a Blog from Scratch, Part 2: Advantages and Disadvantages of Popular Blog Software

Creating a Blog from Scratch, Part 3: The Double Life of Blogs

Creating a Blog from Scratch, Part 4: Searching for a Good Search

Creating a Blog from Scratch, Part 5: What is XHTML, and Why Should I Care?

How much do you know about Web 2.0?

2006-01-02T23:03:00.000-06:00

I got 8 out of 10 correct. See how much you know. Take the test.

Technorati Tags: web2.0

Performancing for Firefox

2006-01-02T01:44:00.000-06:00

If you haven't seen this already, Performancing for Firefox is a

full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

I've been using for about a week or so now and I just can't say enough for how well it works and just how cool it is. I highly recommend it.

Technorati Tags: performancing, firefox, blogging

WebPatterns.org

2006-01-02T01:41:00.000-06:00

Here is something that is probably worth looking at. A new site called WebPatterns.org, which

is a place to discuss, document and collaborate on patterns for web design and development.

I saw it via the Microformats mailing list, where the name 'macroformats' was used to describe the iniative. Admittedly, I haven't really looked through the site and there isn't much there yet that really gives me a sense of what they are trying to accomplish, but the idea intrigues and I think it's worth a look.

However, this essay, WebPatterns and WebSemantics, does a very good job of describing what a web pattern is, and although I haven't fully digested it yet (for example, I was unfamiliar with the term pattern language, my intial impression is that what Microformats has done for small bits of data, WebPatterns will do for design at the site level. So for example, you would have pattern language for a blog or a directory, etc.

Also see Dan Cederholm's SimpleQuiz, which this iniative acknowledges as an influence.

Technorati Tags: webpatterns, semanticmarkup, webdesign

Preparing for the new year

2005-12-31T00:11:00.000-06:00

This has been a good week that was preceded by a good Christmas. Now, tomorrow is New Year's Eve and I guess I need to begin thinking about what I want to accomplish over the next year. First and foremost, I want to graduate, which barring some catastrophe, should happen next December. That's two semesters and two summer sessions, 27 credit hours, and who knows how many papers and projects away. Not that I'm counting down. I'm enjoying school, but graduation is my major goal for the coming year.

Lesser goals, relatively speaking, include improving my skills with programming languages, get involved in or start a development project, submit and present a paper at a conference, get my blog listed on planet code4lib, and do a better job of posting to my blog once school restarts in January. They may not all happen, but they are doable.

Now, I know all of those goals are pretty school/career oriented, but not much else fits in until I graduate. It's okay; I've learnt to deal with it. Of course that would be a good resolution: accomplish something not related to school/career goals.

I'm going to think about that more. I have another 23 hours.

Technorati Tags: newyears, resolutions, 2006resolutions

Happy Holidays!

2005-12-23T22:03:00.000-06:00

I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Holidays. I believe this will be my last post until after Christmas.

"Self-intoxicated ether of the blogosphere"

2005-12-23T17:40:00.000-06:00

Mark Rosenzweig's opinion:

"To me it speaks volumes (if I dare use so print-centered a word) of the narcissistic sensibility of this self-absorbed blog sub-culture, so close to being a cult of sorts that it is something which to my mind is to librarianship much as Star Trek conventions and Trekkies are to space science."

I haven't taken part or even followed the dicussion that prompted this comment, but it seems odd to me that there can be such a gulf between "blogger" and "non-blogger" librarians. He also says:

Apparently, unlike the rest of the profession, the blog-people have created an alternative universe in which they are "stars" to each other and ,reciprocally, "fans'of each other. They are the proverbial "legends in their own minds".The problem is they want us all to bow to their own illusion.

For me, my biggest concern is that if it is the 'self-absorbed, sub-culture' of librarian bloggers who support L2, then our biggest problem will not be technical, but in convincing those whose view of the profession is so drastically different than our own.

Via Jen at the Canuck Librarian.

More on Library 2.0

2005-12-21T22:00:00.000-06:00

John Blyberg has written further on the topic of Library 2.0 and whether or not libraries need to have coders and developers on staff in order to make L2 (Like John and because of him, I prefer L2 instead of Library 2.0 because it serves a placeholder for a set of ideas) happen. Part of what he says:

For medium-to-large size libraries, having a developer on staff is just part of the L2 face and shouldn’t just be considered a luxury. We need to accept that, and get used to it because it’s just part of a larger strategy by which libraries take back the creative development process. I’ll say it until I’m red in the face: if we want to be pertinent, the curent model needs to change. The model that we should be adopting looks more like a meta-coop in which libraries work together via a developer’s network using a set of platform independent, standards-based tools to create open-source projects, programs, and snippets. That is the real Utopian vision.

I'm happy to see that John has a similar vision to my own (or, perhaps, I have a similar vision to John's, because he has thought about this topic far longer than I have). The success of the open source software movement is indeed a good model for the kinds of development and software projects that are being sought when people discuss L2. If I understand John correctly, he doesn't want to wait on vendors to provide these tools and, frankly, would prefer for them to get out of the way. If they would provide tools that allowed interoperability between systems and the ability to tinker to create what a particular library needs, then the utopian meta-coop he writes of would be allowed to foster.

Just today I noticed that Thom Hickey announced that OCLC Research would releasing software under the Apache 2.0 License. I hope we see more of this and not just from organizations like OCLC, but from library developers everwhere. If you are working on a project, then why not make it open source? With proper licensing, you could develop for your own library, but make the work available to other coders who can improve it, adapt it, and implement it elsewhere. A community of practice that believes in this kind of development model is necessary for any of this to happen. As Richard Akerman commented, there are components already in place to make this possible and I think code4lib could potentionally develop as the center of this community with it's code4lib planet, IRC channel, and upcoming conference.

However, I think there is one final piece that needs to considered and that is how do we give new librarians, current LIS students, the skills and tools necessary to make this vision reality? One answer is to learn what you need to know on your own. But, John says

Ultimately, MLS programs are going to have to start offering CS electives and eventually requirements. The profession itself is changing with the industry. Databases and networks, increasingly, are information’s domain and if we want to be part of the vanguard, and if we want to call ourselves the stewards of that information, we darn well better know how to work with it.

This development will probably be necessary if only because it will help redefine the profession. However, how difficult it may be to get MLS programs to teach students the technical stills we need to make L2 happen is a question I can't answer, but I would venture it will have a lot to do with the kinds of potential employees libraries are looking for in new graduates. What I can say for certain is that my own program does not offer these kinds of classes within the library science degree, but it does offer them in the information science degree, which is the main reason why I'm doing both. I'd be interested to see how other schools fair in this regard. Is anyone in an MLS program that requires you to take networking, database or programming classes?

TREC 2006

2005-12-19T16:06:00.000-06:00

Sometime in the last week the call for participation was issued for TREC 2006.

It was only in the last year that I became familiar with TREC and ,so far, that extends only to the knowledge that I know it exists and that is one of premier conferences for information retrieval.

However, next year, I'm hoping to get involved in TREC research that is done at SLIS. The research falls under the direction of Kiduk Yang and his WIDIT project.

Given this I was particularly excited to learn that there is a new track being explored this year, called the Blog Track. So far, there is not a lot of information, only this short description:

The purpose of the blog track is to explore information seeking behavior in the blogosphere.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on what kind of work is done for this track. Looking back over the history TREC, one can find a lot of interesting work that has contributed to the current state of the art in the field of information retrieval.

Working with hAtom

2005-12-17T12:01:00.000-06:00

David Janes has been working on the spec for hAtom:

"a microformat for content that can be syndicated, primarily but not exclusively weblog postings. hAtom is a strongly based on a subset of the Atom (http://www.atomenabled.org/) syndication format; every concept in hAtom has a corresponding definition in Atom."

I've been working this morning on implementing hAtom on this blog. I'm still not real comfortable with the spec, but, in all honestly, I'm not terribly comfortable with what is based on, the Atom Syndication Format. That's easily remedied, but I mention it here because I'm not entirely sure my implementation is exactly right. For example, I still have some concerns on how I've marked-up the date components of the blog entry.

However, David Janes does offer some tools that make this process easier and I used them to double check how well I implemented hAtom myself. First, he offers a template rewriter that allows you to plugin in your Blogger, Moveable Type or Wordpress template and then have an hAtom comformant template spit back out. I tried it for this blog and had several problems, mainly arising from the fact that my template must not have been XML well-formed. Once I stepped through that, it worked fine. I used it's output to double-check my own work, but you could just paste it into blogger and be done with it if you don't feel like messing with template yourself.

Once that's done and if you are using Firefox and Greasemonkey, you can install this user script that David wrote up:

http://www.trinityanne.com/tools/greasemonkey/microformat-action.user.js

It will detect hAtom and several other microformats as it encounters them on the page and place a button near that content, which can be clicked to parse that information using Janes' own Almost Universal Microformats Processor.

What's interesting about this is that implementations such as these really help me understand specifications like hAtom and provide me with opportunities to think about how things, such as microformats, could be used in other ways.

Finally, since I do try to write about things my be of interest to fellow librarians and library students, I want to say that microformats might be more pertinent than you first realize. To see a similar project, which is definitely useful for libraries, check out OpenURL COinS.

Library 2.0

2005-12-16T20:22:00.000-06:00

Back in October I said I was sick to death of Web 2.0. Since then, the meme, Library 2.0, L2 if you are in the in-crowd, has really taken off and discussion is happening everywhere. For example, see here , here, here, and here for what has been said recently. So, I'm I as turned off by Library 2.0 as I am by Web 2.0? No, not really.

While I felt that Web 2.0 had evolved into a marketing slogan, I feel that Library 2.0 is more of a change in thinking among some librarians, although certaintly not all. What is ironic is that the ideas and changes that fall under the label of former are a driving force behind the latter. That's good for now, but I think there needs to be more to the whole idea in the long run and perhaps we will see it as Library 2.0 matures and more people absorb its implications.

I said before that there are some positive changes resulting from Web 2.0; I mentioned that attention, identity, reputation, trust and people are new areas that are being taken seriously, but another important aspect is data. Where do libraries fit into this? How will they respond and in what manner? I'm not sure I'm in a position to answer that at this time. There are questions that I need to have answered before I can really see where this is going.

There are some things I can mention now. For example, if Library 2.0 is not about technology, then it surely is an important part of it. Who will be the coders and developers that create new services for partons, who enhance our interfaces to the OPAC by adding tagging, commentary, etc., Not all libraries have the good fortune to have these kinds of people on their staff, so what kinds of communities will emerge to develop and share these applications? Do we need to develop a community akin to the open source community where applications are created among skilled library technologists from around the world that can be easily used by any kind of library operating under a myriad of limitations. And, if we don't develop applications, which may not even be necessary, how do we support libraries everywhere who want to implement these kinds of changes to the services they offer? Will we rely on vendors and hope we have the good fortune that they roll out what is needed in their ILS systems and database interfaces or do we start now and create a community based support network?

I know that I'd like to see the answers, but I've yet to even see these questions asked seriously.

Recalling the past

2005-12-14T20:03:00.000-06:00

Through my own stupidity I lost all of my posts several months ago. (Don't ask, it's a long story). Tonight I did a search through Bloglines and found my old posts in their archive. I retrieved the ones I thought were worth keeping and tried to repost them under their original titles and close to their original dates. I don't know how the Blogger feed will handle that. It'll be interesting to see. Anyways, I think I posted all that was worth keeping, but if there is something missing that you just have to read, then let me know.

The semester is over

2005-12-14T15:49:00.000-06:00

After the problem I had with my blog (of my own making) about two months ago, the semester really took off and I never had time to really get back to posting. However, I'm on break now and I want to get back into the swing of things. So, what better way then giving a recap of what I did this semester.

My time over the last few months was taken up with two rather large web redesign projects. For my Design of Information Systems course, I worked in a group to help redesign The Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce's website for their annual Business Expo event. The prototype we came up with turned out pretty well, in my opinion. If you are at all curious what we came up with you can find the prototype at:

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~tlennis/expo/site/

The second project involved redesigning the website of the Indiana University Librarians Association, which I did for my class, Information Architecture for the Web. This project has proved to be far larger and, in this case, I'm the only one working on it. However, it's been an excellent experience and may even evolve into a project that extends into next year depending on whether it is approved to go live. The address for the prototype is at:

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~tlennis/inula/site/

If you have any comments about these sites, I would really love to hear them. Send me an email at travis.ennis [at] gmail [dot] com.

Outside of these projects, I've been working on learning the Python programming language. In the past, my experience with programming largely involved Perl or Javascript, so Python has been a pleasent surprise. Truly object-oriented programming took me some time to really get, but as I get more familiar with it, I'm learning to really enjoy it. One of the things I've been wanting to do with Python is work with, on one hand, syndication feeds, and on the other, with GRDDL and Microformats. Now that the break is here, I'm hoping to dive right in and see what I can accomplish.

It's the new home.

2005-11-09T06:08:00.000-06:00

I guess. The new home is the same as the old home of Travis Ennis' Weblog. Different title.

a test

2005-11-09T06:05:00.000-06:00

a test, test, test

Open Standards of the new web.

2005-10-18T13:20:00.000-05:00

Marc Canter has written a series of articles entitled Breaking the Web Wide Open! The link takes you to the first of what I believe will be four articles in the series. Three are published already. Worth the read and reflects what I mentioned I believed was important about Web 2.0 last week.

Knowing where I'm going

2005-10-18T01:17:00.000-05:00

I'm an MLS student, but back over the summer I decided to take advantage of my school's dual-degree program and also become an MIS student. The advantages of this seem to me, at least, obvious. Over the course of my career I can expect that technology will be become an increasing aspect of the a librarian's work. You could argue that it already is, and that I'm preparing for what the field is currently experiencing. I can't argue with that, but I can say that the need for librarians that are technologically oriented will never go away and will likely increase. An observation that doesn't border on profound, but, for me, was strong enough for me to decide to spend more time and money for the extra education.

The IS program at my school provides four tracts: information architecture, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, and social informatics. For you librarians out there, the choice of which of these tracts that would be most appropriate for someone who wants to work in libraries probably seems extremely obvious. However, it wasn't obvious to me. This is surprising because my interests lie in XML development, digital libraries and the semantic web. Yet, in my IS program I believed that my interests lied with information architecture and, while I find that field extremely interesting, I realize that information retrieval is really the tract that most closely follows my interests.

Well, duh. I heard you say it. Well, I agree. This is a lesson I've learned early in my IS education; only half-way through my first semester. While we were going over IR during my Intro to Information Science class today, I realized this is the field I want to explore during the rest of my time in grad school. Nothing profound about this; I am just happy I figured it out and wonder why it took me this long.

FRBR and Topic Maps

2005-10-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

I'm increasingly interested in the intersection between library science and the semantic web. Both David Bigwood at Catalogablog and William Denton at The FRBR Blog pointed towards Alexander Sigel's collection of resources on FRBR and XTM.

These resources intend to answer

How can FRBR used for the modelling of bibliographic relationships, using Knowledge Technologies like XTM, OWL/RDF?

What are Published Subjects for FRBR to be used as shared vocabularies for XTM and OWL/RDF?

Librarians go forth and code

2005-10-11T22:35:00.000-05:00

Via This Week in Library Blogland I noticed that a conversation was happening on whether or not more librarians should be coders. That they should be is a conclusion that I've been coming to on my own in recent months. At my own place of work, and I'm sure this is something one can find in numerous libraries, I know that many of our patrons our experiencing our services through our web pages. This is not surprising to me, but what is surpising is that my place of work isn't doing more to enhance this point of contact. The library website is and will become an even more important part of any library, especially academic libraries, and if we have librarians who are coders then we can build services on our websites that enhance the experience our patrons have there. And I'm not just talking about designing web pages, but designing and coding systems accessed through the web that provide greater functionality and greater access to the information that libraries provide.

The original post that sparked this conversation was by Dan Chudnov. I've been reading Dan Chudnov's blog for some time now and his enthusiasism for Python is one of the reasons that I'm learning that language. Read his blog if you want to see why should learn a programming language and what you can accomplish in your library and in your own work once you know it. The possibilities really are endless and exciting.

On this topic, read:

Dan Chudnov "more librarians need to be coders" by Jessamyn West.

Librarians as coders by Karen Coombs

Also see this Comment by Dorothea Salo on Dan Chudnov's post on the difference between coding and developing.

Other people to read if you are interested (not a complete list, by far):

Ross Singer at Dilettante's Ball

Kevin S. Clarke at Kevin's Worklog

Art at LibraryCog

Ian Davis at Internet Alchemy

Leigh Dodds at Lost Boy

Actually, I just remembered this, but it might be the best place to start: planet code4lib.

What's important about Web 2.0

2005-10-07T21:58:00.000-05:00

Web 2.0 is pervasive. I first ran into the term reading tech blogs and sites, but now I'm even seeing librarians taking up the topic. ~~I'm not going to bother providing links (I'm tired)~~ (Check out the current This Week in Library Blogland, which has a good roundup of what has been said on this topic recently) , but if you read librarian blogs you'll have noticed that several posts have been made in the last week on what Web 2.0 is and what it might mean for libraries themselves. I'm all for the library community to embrace Web 2.0. RSS, blogs, wikis, social-bookmarking, etc. are changing the way we use the Internet (at least I know it's changed the way I use it). I've long been of the mindset that libraries need to adapt to the Internet and how it is changing how people search for, consume and disseminate information. The average web surfer processes so much information without even realizing it. In libraries, the average user does realize it. Searching the catalog, online databases, following citations, etc. is a conscious effort that is resisted by many library users (I'm primarily thinking of students in academic libraries and I know that most don't find library research fun. Not fun like building relationships of the data they produce day in and day out in a Web 2.0 application like Facebook.).

Roy Tennant has been pushing the idea that we can't put lipstick on a pig. He reiterated this point recently at the LITA conference. The main point of this is that the traditional ways libraries have of providing access to information needs to be rethought, and I believe Web 2.0 will drive our rethinking in an even more aggresive manner. Hence why librarians are taking an interest in just what Web 2.0 means.

In this way, Web 2.0 is providing a valuable push to my field, but, you know what, I'm just about sick-to-death with Web 2.0. It's become a marketing label; a way of promoting new web companies. New ones are popping up every week, from collaborative document creation applications to ways of creating web-service mash-ups. I can't keep up and even though many of these new applications obviously provide new ways for people to communicate, work and play together I just don't have the time to explore every new innovation. Reading feeds in my aggregator is becoming a job in itself. I'm constantly rethinking what I subscribe to, how I subscribe to it, etc. Related to that, my Del.icio.us bookmarks are growing out of hand (I have a terrible problem with collecting more and more with respect to many things I do, but I guess that is a whole other post).

I've been thinking more and more lately of just what is important and what I should focus my attention on when it comes to my activities online. Many of the things that have driven Web 2.0 are now overwhelming me with too much data. Is part of this information overload my problem? You bet. I overdid it when I jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and now I'm entering a maturation process where I'm refocusing where I want to put my efforts. In a similar way, I think Web 2.0 is being overdone and with time what is important will emerge from this particular phase of Internet development.

Paul Miller at Thinking about the Future has recently posted on what he took away from this week's Web 2.0 conference. What he found important about the conference is, in my mind, what will probably be what we take from Web 2.0: attention, identity, reputation, trust and people. To me these are what we should be focusing on and the first four are necessary because the web is becoming more and more about the last one.

~~[I'll come back and add appropriate links as I should.]~~ Sorry that I didn't link to the conversation on this topic before, and I apologize that I'm not linking to it better now.

Carnival: Why Do We Blog? MLS/MIS Students.

2005-10-03T19:56:00.000-05:00

A little over a week ago, I asked why do we blog? I wanted to hear from both current and past MIS/MLS students to see why they, as students who juggle school, work, and a personal life, find time to maintain their blogs. It's not that as students we are any busier than anyone else who makes the time to write, it's just that I thought that we as a particular sub-group of bloggers might have interesting reasons and inspiration for doing what we do. I wasn't disappointed. So, without further ado and in no particular order:

Lindsay at I Like Dust has a post on why she blogs:

In my very first post I described why I created this blog: to document my experience as an MLS graduate student, specifically as an MLS graduate student in an archives track/programâ€¦

Jen at the Canuck Librarian answers what Everyone wants to know...:

I was on my co-op term during my MLIS at an academic library when I started blogging. One day a librarian was in my office, showing me the chat reference software and telling me all about how to do virtual reference and then somehow we started talking about blogs...

Joy at Wanderings of a Student Librarian tells why she blogs:

My blog started out, in the summer of 2004, as a kind of annotated bookmark keeper--with maybe half a thought to eventually being a kind of electronic portfolio. I formulated a new mission for my blog around January of this year for several reasons...

Another response comes from Mark at ...the thoughts are broken... who says:

This question seems to be one that I have to constantly revisit myself as it recurs across the blogosphere in different contexts, and in my own life. The answer is an ever evolving one for me...

Last, but not least, Laura at lis.dom gives her own reasons on why she blogs in her own unique style:

The snarkier part of my nature is of course tempted to say "Because I can" and/or "Because I'm good at it"--two responses often given by Famous Authors who have been asked Why They Write. I am not a Famous Author (I mean, really, I'm not even dead yet!), and such a response would seem pretty obnoxious even if I were...

I'm tempted to give my own reasons here, but you already have five excellent posts to read through today, so I'll leave it for another time. But, I can say that part of the reason I blog is for this exact kind of collaboration. Blogging gives me an opportunity to meet really great people who are intelligent, thoughtful and expressive. People who I may have not met otherwise. There are other reasons, but that one stands out.

Why do we blog? MLS/MIS Student bloggers that is.

2005-09-22T22:37:00.000-05:00

A month or so back, Joy at Wanderings of a Student Librarian posted a list of MLS students in the blogosphere. Inspired by Joy's list, I thought it might be interesting to know why MLS/MIS students blog. I passed that thought by Joy and she thought it was a fine idea. So, I ask, if you are a MLS or MIS student, why do you blog? For fun, to communicate, to learn, to share? But, I don't want to limit this to current students; if you have graduated but blogged while in school I'd like to hear from you as well. Post your thoughts on why you blog or find a post in the past that sums it up for you and send me the permalink at travis.ennis[at]gmail[dot]com. Send them to me by October 1 and in the first week of October I'll post a Carnival of MLS/MIS Student Bloggers.

Hand coding and semantics

2005-09-20T20:59:00.000-05:00

A recent post at 456 Berea St. recently asked about hand coding HTML and CSS. When I first began making web pages I used, of all things, MS Frontpage. I didn't know any better, but I realized as I used that piece of software that it just didn't give me the control I desired when constructing my pages. Part of it is that Frontpage inserted some terribly bloated markup. So, without ever being influenced by the debate of hand coding vs. WYSIWYG, I chose hand coding and for years used Notepad to code my pages (I use TextWrangler and SubEthaEdit on the Mac, now). As the post I mentioned above wondered, I think I hand code because buidling a web page is, for me, a craft. I like to work with the raw materials of web pages and build it, mold it to a finished product.

Recently, in one of my classes my professor implied that coding was something that no longer required a lot of thought. In a re/design project, the work of the information architect, the back-end developers, the graphic designer are where the real creative work takes place. If I misunderstood his position I apologize, but this gives me a chance to offer a different view. Coding is a craft that requires much thought and knowledge, as much as the database devoper and the graphic designer. The debate on semantic markup is a good example, in my opinion, of this craft. I think the efforts of many to futher semantic markup is an indication that many coders have a long way to go. In many pages, I see table elements used for layout, <br> tags used for paragraph seperations, list tags used where definition tags would have made more sense, etc. Such questions as where to use header tags and which ones for which purpose requires much thought, especially when you're designing a larger site with varied content. How consistent you want your site to look among varied content pages is largely dependent on the choices you make in what tags you decide to use and when.

HTML code not only allows a page to display in a browser, it also is the entry point to applying style sheets, using javascript to create dynamic pages, transversing the DOM, etc. Semantic markup makes all of this eaiser. It also makes it easier for people to read your code, which in the long runs means that a site is easier to update.

As a librarian I realize that good metadata makes data easier to use. Semantic markup is good metadata that makes the content of your pages easier to read, parse, style and update. So, to combine both thoughts, I now continue to hand code my pages because I want the control over the making decisions on what tags to use for certain purposes. I trust that my decisions will make my pages more semantically rich than a WYSIWYG editor. And, even if a a WYSIWYG editor would allow me to obtain that kind of control, I find I take more satisification when I do it myself.

Microformats

2005-08-30T13:11:00.000-05:00

I've been interested in Microformats lately. I appreciate the simplicity of being able to semantically markup discrete bits of data within webpages that could then be culled and downloaded into other applications. As many of you may know if you been following discussions on microformats, the purpose is to seperate data from applications themselves, so that individuals and not applications own this data.

Microformats are created to solve specific purposes. In other words, their are no microformats created simply just to be microformats. One such microformat that I've used myself is the hCard. You can see it in this page and when you view source you can see how I've marked it up.

What I've been wondering lately is if Microformats can be used to solve anything in the library world. Honestly, I haven't thought of anything that could be or even needs to be solved using Microformats, but that doesn't mean that their might be. Any ideas?

Summer's at an end

2005-08-28T21:26:00.000-05:00

Class starts for me tomorrow. Since I'm just now starting my information science degree this semester, I'm taking the Introduction to Information Science. My other classes are Computer Programming for Information Management, Information Architecture for the Web, and Design of Information Systems.

Four classes coupled with two jobs is going to make it a busy semester. I might mention my jobs in more detail later.

[Update: sometime between making this post and today I realized I might be out of my mind, so I decided to drop the programming class. Even so, it will still be a busy semester.]

Tagging and categorization

2005-08-27T18:39:00.000-05:00

There have been a few posts recently on folksonomies and categorization that have drawn my attention. I don't believe I'm entirely qualified to speak on the subject, because the issue touches on my topics that I'm only now starting to consider. However, I'll give it shot, if only to try to make some connections that might help me better understand the issues involved.

The first post I saw was by Dan Chudnov, whose post, The End of the Library Bubble, argued that many of the tools for personal information management, including folksonomies, will be ephemeral. They are contributing to the development of the Web 2.0, which he says is great, but, soon, people will find other things to spend their time on, especially as it relates to what we do in the library world. That is entirely possible.

He argues that soon, maybe in a few years, we won't find tagging so interesting and we'll discard them as easily as our class notebooks from college. However, I'm not sure I would dismiss folksonomies so quickly. Kevin Clarke has posted that he believes folksonomies have their place and will probably continue to do so. He quotes David Bigwood who recalls an idea that categorization will occur in levels with more important materials receiving professional treatment and less important, ephemeral material being categorized with Dublin Core or even folksonomies. However, David points that these more important materials will receive MARC, EAD or a similar treatment.

This is where I become confused. I don't relate MARC or EAD with folksonomies. I believe Kevin Clarke rightly points that folksonomies are more similar to LCSH. MARC, EAD and Dublin Core are metadata schemas and, although I could be wrong, rely on classification schemes, such as LCSH, for the information they contain. In contrast, MARC is not a categorization schema but a record format. I may be misreading David's argument, but it does make me think about exactly where folksonomies fit into cataloging as defined by librarianship.

Now, I do want to point out that in all three posts, folksonomies are not outrightly dismissed and are accorded their place. However, that place seems to be at a level somewhat lower than I think it deserves. Clay Shirky's essay, Ontology is Overrated, brings up some very interesting points. Having just recently taken a theory class on categorization and classification, I was aware of the limitations of Library of Congress Classification, Dewey Decimal, and LCSH. Clay Shirky even points out the well-known fault in Dewey with respect to how religion is classified. What I take from his essay is that whatever faults folksonomies possess, the professionally created classification systems possess faults of their own. And, as Clay Shirky, points out folksonomies possess strengths that are not found in traditional classification systems. Because of issues of hospitality, many of the traditional systems, most especially LCC, run into problems as their collections grow. As Shirky says,

in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality, the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.

Tagging, unlike traditional classification systems, provides a flexibilily, timeliness and collaborative quality that is not found in the latter.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this, because I'm bringing up more issues than I can successfully deal with in a single post, but it seems to point to the fact that folksonomies have something to teach use in the act of categorizing. And, I believe this despite that fact some people tag things 'interesting,' 'todo' and 'toread' for example. As folkosonomies grow, these kinds of tags are weeded out and do not lessen the usefulness of the system. Folksonomies, over time and through use, tend to lessen this signal loss as Clay Shirky suggests.

Of course, I'm not the first to say that we can learn from folksonomies. Not even the first in this conversation. I trust Kevin, Dave and Dan's opinions on this topic, but I guess I have more optimism on what folksonomies might offer us in the library and information science field, and I guess I have much more to think about concerning this topic.

Libraries without books

2005-08-25T23:25:00.000-05:00

Christopher Harris has written about the role of books in libraries over at his blog, Infomancy. He takes definitions from the OED and Wikipedia to show that libraries are not necessarily collections of books and periodicals. As he says, books are simply the most recognized and familiar technology for collecting, dissiminating and storing information. Despite the format, libraries are in the business of giving access to information. So, it would seem, to me at least, that a library without books is still a library.

The only library that I've read about in any depth that could be considered bookless is the in-house library at The National Geographic Society. There, because their people may find themselves anywhere around the globe, the library collects most of their information in electronic format for easy dissimation anywhere. But, this is a special case. Will public and academic libraries ever be in a similar position? Possibly, but not anytime soon. The book is still king, especially in those contexts.

Yet, I think the most important bit of information to be taken from Christopher's post is that we, as librarians, must not constrain ourselves to the notion that what really defines the space we work in is the collection of books. It is information and how we provide access to it that is the real purpose of librarians and libraries, and such a definition provides us with the flexibility to work with any format.

And it may be things like this that eventually change everything about libraries as we know them.

Libraries and technology

2005-08-21T17:00:00.000-05:00

In today's world, whenever organizations deal with large amounts of data, you know that technology is involved. Understandably, libraries, which provide access to large amounts of information everyday, are no different.

When I first started grad school, I didn't realize how much technology a librarian should be aware of. And, out of all that technology, much of it requires more than a passing familiarity. A year ago, I realized none of this. I wanted to be a reference librarian. The most technology I was introduced to in my first classes were databases. Not how to design them, but only how to use them. Then, I took an information retrieval course. The class was designed to make us better searchers, but it made me think about how data was stored, how search engines were designed, how information was shared, and how the Internet fit into all of this. If you check my Del.icio.us account you can see where my interests have ranged since then.

I first started designing web pages when I was in high school. I stopped when I got to college. I didn't have the time. However, now that I'm in library school, I have the desire to start again. Not only am I working on relearning web design, but library school has sparked my interest in metadata, web services, information retrieval technology and other areas. All of this, in my opinion, is directly relevant to modern librarianship, or, at least, the kind of librarian I imagine myself being.

Now, not all librarians will need to know all of these technologies. I'm not arguing that to be a librarian you need to know the difference between SOAP, REST, and SRU/SRW. Or that you should even know how IE renders CSS differently than most other modern browsers. Honestly, if these kinds of questions are all you care about, then why be a librarian? There's more money in IT. Really, all I'm saying is that a librarian should know some of it. Others have argued similarly:

Meredith Farkas at Information Wants to be Free

Jenny Levine at The Shifted Librarian

Chad Boeninger at Library Voice

Dorothea Salo at Caveat Lector

Eric Morgan over at the LITA Blog

In reading these posts you should notice that they raise two excellent questions. What technology should we, as librarians, learn and, once we know what to learn, then how do we learn it? Part of the concern that inspired a few of these posts is whether library schools are doing a proper job of preparing librarians for technological change. In my experience, I would say that they are not. That is part of the reason I decided earlier this summer to pursue the MIS degree in addition to my MLS. This fall, I'm taking classes on web design, information architecture, and programming for information management (using Perl). However, I think it is important to point out that I didn't pursue the second degree just to learn about technology. There are other reasons that factored into my decision. Nonetheless, if you are currently a library student, there are better ways to learn about technology than starting a second degree. I would suggest that you read what Dorothea Salo advises, which is to learn on your own. She gives two very good reasons. The first is that what you learn today, say in a course, maybe be useless five years from now. Technology changes. Second, you can learn on your own. It's well within possibility. With some patience, time and determination, it is possible, and, in many cases, once you have the computer it is completely free. HTML and CSS require nothing more than simple text editor and a browser, both of which are already on your computer. Want to learn how to administer a web server? Apache is free. A relational database? MySQL.

If I had to say what direction this blog will take initially, then it will be along the lines of this post. I hope that maybe we can find out what to learn and help each other learn it together. That's my hope.

Hello, World!

2005-08-21T14:35:00.000-05:00

Well, I've finally started my blog. I've been meaning to do this for about a year since I first found out about blogs and what they were. That fact seems quite amazing to me now that I realize that people have been blogging for years. But, I'm quite new to all it and this will take me awhile to get used to.

So, to get started, I'll introduce myself. I'm a library student at SLIS at Indiana University. Actually, I'm a dual-degree student pursuing both the MLS and the MIS. This fall will mark the beginning of my second year in the program and, hopefully, my half-way point. It's really quite amazing, because two years ago I never would have seen myself as a librarian, but now that I am on my way to becoming one I can't imagine myself doing anything else. It's a wonderful field to get into and nothing like I ever imagined it to be. In fact, I would guess that most people don't know what librarians do these days. The image in their mind's eye is of the old lady with a bun who never speaks above a whisper. When I tell people I'm going to be a librarian, I know that image pops into their head. I used to correct it, but I found that if I explain to them all of the different things librarians do then their eyes glaze over. So, I've decided to just let it go and have a quiet chuckle knowing they are picturing me with a bun.

Anyway, I'm happy to join the blogosphere and the little community within it that Karen Schneider dubbed the biblioblogosphere.