Monthly Archives: May 2007

Maybe the Easiest Virtual Reference Set-Up Ever

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I’ve been playing with Meebo Rooms today in between student appointments and crazy-hard research questions. For the two or three of you that haven’t heard of these things, they’re a brand new feature of Meebo and you can read more about them on the Meebo blog. Basically, it’s a free and easy chat room where you can also push links and video and you can embed the room on a web page (such as the Research Help page of your library?). What’s not to like?

I can easily envision this on the library site. We could be logged into meebo and hanging out in the room in case anyone had a question. This would alleviate a problem we’ve been facing: how to make it easy for students to ask IM questions even though we all have separate IM addresses and are not considering having a single “reference” account that we’d all log in and out of. And yet, students could ask questions without having an IM account. Perfect.

Except… We’d have to figure out what to do about the fact that anybody looking at the embedded room could see the questions we were working through, and anyone who logs in can see the last 50 or so lines of chat history. I’m the least privacy-concerned librarian I know, but even I think we’d have to have a warning about this posted prominently.

And then there are the ads. Every so often we are asked to “please enjoy this sponsored video,” which stinks. We could turn the media area off, I guess, but that seems like a kill-joy.

I can also not choose any options other than “only You can add video” and “anyone can add video.” I’d like to be able to authorize people to push video out onto the library site… just cuz I work on a college campus with, you know, college students.

But I’m still thinking we might be able to make this work. I’d love to make this work. Even if we only do the text part of it at first and save the cool media-pushing-thingy for later.

[Update 5/16/2007: I've embedded a few sample reference chat room configurations here. One cool thing is that people can copy the code for the room and paste it where ever they'd like, so they could easily add it to their own pages and have us right there in their own space if they wanted. The magic happens if you click "Copy Chat Room."]

On Making It

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Nothing says “you’ve arrived” quite like having you and your department figure as the protagonists in comedy skits by students. Well, we’ve arrived.

Last night a student approached my co-worker at the reference desk to invite her to the comedy show, and my co-worker got on IM and told me about it, and next thing I knew I was driving back to campus (for the third time that day, btw) to attend the 10:30 showing. Man, oh man. The general outline of the skit was as follows.

Student brings food into the library. SuperLibrarians pool their super powers in the hopes of discouraging such disrespectful behavior. SuperLibrarians unfortunately incapacitate each other by inadvertently triggering each other’s vulnerabilities. By this time, the student with the food has finished what he was doing and left.

My favorite touch was that as the librarians transformed themselves into SuperLibrarians, they took the poses that we took on our cards. Actually no, that was my second favorite touch. My favorite touch was that the show’s programs each had pictures of our cards on them, and when my co-worker and I arrived they made sure to give us programs with our own cards on them. They also seated us in places of honor and introduced us at the beginning of the show.

Now I’m sleep-deprived and contemplating an extremely busy next 72 hours, but it’s Friday and I’ve been spoofed. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Proving I’m Not Very Smart

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I just realized it’s taken me two years to figure out that I could change my bookmarked URL for my library to the proxified URL… It doesn’t interfere with my on campus clicking because it realizes no proxy is necessary from there, and it automatically prompts me to log in when I’m off campus (which cuts down on the “find good resource — click into it — be denied — navigate back to library log-in page – log in – re-find useful resource” cycle when I’m putting together classes over the weekends). Now, if it took me this long to figure out (and I teach people how to log in to the proxy server every day), I bet most of my faculty haven’t figured it out. Now’s when I wish I had a newsletter… or a blog… ;)

Also, about the no-posting thing that’s happing here lately. I’m sorry. I’m busy. Freakishly busy. But I’m keeping notes about what I would have blogged about and I hope to get to at least a third of them when things settle down later.

Information Literacy and Foreign Language Curricula

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Earlier this week I was invited by the language faculty at my school to attend a lunch presentation they had organized. They had asked a faculty member from the German department of Wayne State to come talk to them about the importance of information literacy in foreign language curricula.

It’s always informative to hear professors talk about info lit, and it was good to hear from somebody who has thought a lot about how and why it’s important for language professors to squeeze even more into their curricula. For instance, she explained that even though languages classes are jam packed with grammar, vocabulary, culture, and literature, without information literacy their students will just become really good tourists, and language departments will continue to struggle under the perception that they are “service departments” on their campuses. Information literacy is what gives students access to the deeper cultures of their chosen languages. Without it, students may not realize that one issue can be viewed very differently in different cultures, or that there are alternate argument structures, or that these alternate structures are fundamental to people of other nations and cultures. This deeper level of understanding, this advanced fluency, is not accessible via grammar alone.

She also emphasized that information literacy is not something students learn in freshman comp in the English department. It was good to hear somebody else saying that this isn’t like a vaccine; you can’t get a good shot of it once in your freshman year and then be good to go for the remainder of your college career.

It was also good to hear that this is something that faculty members can easily work into their classes. I’ve said time and again that if everyone relies only on librarians to get every student up to speed, the librarians will burn out and the students will never get as rich an experience as they would if these concepts were worked into most if not all of their classes.

But I was surprised at how much I squirmed as I listened to the presenter give examples from her classes and argue for better inclusion of “my” field of expertise into language classes. It reminded me that I’d failed to adequately convey to my faculty exactly what I can do, or exactly what I can teach them to do, for our students. Did they realize as we sat there that I love to explain the disciplinary conventions of citation and how it is one expression of the interpretive communities their students are trying to enter? Did they know that I, too, have worked with students to understand the value of book reviews? Did they realize that evaluating web sources and figuring out what kinds of sources will be acceptable for specific topics and interpretive communities is what I walk students through every single day? And did they or the presenter know that I’m good for more than identifying and training students on appropriate databases?

Unfortunately, I think not. And that’s entirely my fault. I’ve got a lot of great excuses (I’m new the field, new the campus, and I’m figuring out all this stuff as I go… the list goes on and on), but in the end, I worry that they’ll copy the examples this other professor (which were wonderful, by the way) rather than working with me to figure out how to get the same benefit within our curriculum and with our students.

And then I slap myself in the forehead and remind myself that this is a wonderful thing. My faculty are actively engaging the question of how to develop their students’ higher reasoning skills, and they’ve latched onto info lit as one of the methods for accomplishing this. And this isn’t actually “my” turf. It’s our turf.

I just wish I knew the most effective way follow up after this experience. I want to be more than tech support for bibliographic databases.

Human-Assisted Computer Coolness – or – Computer-Assisted Human Coolness

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I realize that I promised a post long, long ago (4 days, to be precise) and never delivered. There are good reasons for that. But not interesting reasons. Short story: life is busier than usual at the moment.

But anyway… Monday was ARLD Day here (that’s the Academic and Research Libraries Division of the Minnesota Library Association as well as the local chapter of ACRL). And ARLD Day did something very, very right. They got John Riedl (who has a blog at GroupLens) to talk to use about creating the social web. Specifically, he looked at the top ten web sites in the United States (as ranked by Alexa)* and delved into their social aspects, and used this framework as a way to talk about research that’s happening among the developers of the social web.

For example, when he talked about the number one site, Yahoo (because it owns so many sites), he used Flickr as an example and talked about tagging. Did you know that initial research suggests that items get tagged with a few tags that almost everybody uses, and then a lot of tags almost nobody uses? Doesn’t sound so radical until you think that there’s no real curve if you graph this phenomenon. Statisticians would expect one of the tapering-off curves that we’ve come to associate with the long tail, but that’s not what happens here. Here there are simply a few tags that get used all the time for any given item, and a lot of tags that only get used a couple of times. Nobody knows what this means, but researchers are looking for ways to predict what those popular tags will be, or ways to help computers learn from early user tagging to predict which tags will become most useful as tagging continues. This. Is. Huge. Imagine pre-populating any catalog record with 5 to 7 useful tags! Imagine using this understanding of user tagging to revise and augment LSCH. The possibilities seem endless.

He also asked the question: Is tagging fundamentally a selfish behavior? This is important because you want tags in quantity and from multiple users. But how do you motivate users to add tags? Do you want the user to get something out of it or to feel the he/she is giving something to the community? If it’s a combination of the two (which everyone suspects is true), what’s the perfect mixture that will encourage as much useful tagging as possible? Well, so far the research shows a mixture, but that users are much more likely to add tags if they think this will help other people as well as themselves.

Not only that, but they had the best success getting users to add content (tags, ratings, and reviews) if they told the users a specific population their content would benefit, and if the system recommended items to which it thought you could add good content. (i.e. The system picks a movie that you will likely enjoy based on past behavior and tells you, “your review of this movie will particularly help fans of comedies and historical dramas.”) This combination of having targeted recommendations for community involvement and being told exactly who in that community you’ll benefit, was vastly more successful than more passive approaches.

Not only THAT, but they found the best content was submitted by users who knew their work was going to be looked at by another user. BUT, it didn’t matter if the peer reviewer was going to be an expert or not. Anyone will do. You just need peer review.

So far they’re testing this idea of teaching computers which tags are useful using their system MovieLens. Their users tag movies and then rate each other’s tags with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And so far, initial results indicate that tags receiving thumbs down ratings are, in fact, poor, rarely used, and generally perceived to be poor. However, there’s not much pattern yet to the tags that get thumbs up ratings. They’re continuing to explore this.

One other aspect of this amazing keynote (probably the best keynote I’ve ever attended… no kidding!) that I think is particularly applicable to libraries is that as users rate and comment, they teach the company (or the library) what is important to them. I can envision combining failed search data, commonly used search terms, click-throughs, and direct participation (such as ratings) to figure out what research is being done, what kinds of sources are hot right now, and other such information that could inform collection development practices.

But as with any other social site, library applications would need an active community. Riedl pointed out that when Google bought YouTube, they paid for the community. They already had what he considers to be a better product, but they didn’t have the user-base, and that was worth more money than I can comprehend.

The community is also important because computers are bad at making judgments. They’re bad at looking at content and understanding what it is and what it’s about and how it’s related to other content. Humans, though, do this exceptionally well. So what the computer can do is find patterns in human behavior and crunch the statistical numbers for you. Computers calculate; humans judge. And figuring out how to maximize on these two skills is the subject of much research and development. And then figuring out how to trigger people to participate in these online collective efforts… that’s another who avenue of current research (see Karau and Williams in the bibliographical note below).

He talked about a lot of other things (such as how they’re working on the problem of keeping these user communities from gelling as only like-minded people can and instead encouraging people to see connections between their interests and either people or information that they might not agree with but that they will be interested in), but this is too long already. He also provided citations to a couple of articles,** but there are lots more listed in the research section of GroupLens or on his CV (PDF).

*In descending order: Yahoo, Google, MySpace, MSN, eBay, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Craig’s List, and Windows Live. He actually didn’t talk about because Windows Live because it’s “just another Google rip off,” so he included number 11: Amazon (for which he helped write the original recommender system!).

** Some references he mentioned:

Karau, S. J., and Williams, K. D. “Understanding individual motivation in groups: The collective effort model.” Groups at Work: Theory and Research M. E. Turner Ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2001. 113-41.

Khopkar, Tapan , Xin Li and Paul Resnick. “Self-selection, Slipping, Salvaging, Slacking, and Stoning.” Proceedings of the ACM EC 05 Conference on Electronic Commerce in Vancouver. 2005. 223-231. (Preprint PDF here) [on the methods of decreasing user reputation on eBay, and how people go about avoiding this]

Resnick, Paul, Richard Zeckhauser, John Swanson, and Kate Lockwood. “The Value of Reputation on eBay.” Experimental Economics 9.2 (2006): 79-101. (Preprint PDF here) [on why reputation is important on eBay]

“Making a Guitar in Second Life” and “Suzanne Vega Concert in Second Life” (two YouTube videos about how craftsmen and artists are important even in a virtual world)

p.s. And since I’m a librarian, I also found this article on …. well, read the title.

Ling, Kimberly, et al. “Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10.4 (2005). Online only.