I realize this isn’t actually so hard. I’ve done it before. Which left me wondering why I’m rather obsessively going back over details, shuffling things around, thinking up better examples, and then reworking things over and over and over and over. And as odd as it seems, I think it’s because I’m nervous.

I’m not nervous about presenting to the workshop attendees. Goodness, I do that nearly every day. I’m not nervous about my content, though I do think it’s probably of a different tone than most people will be expecting. No, I’m nervous about my co-presenters seeing me present. These are people I’ve looked up to for years. These are people that I look to for inspiration, for clarity, for affirmation. These are people I’ve come to consider friends. Who wouldn’t be nervous revealing their public-speaking selves to such an audience?

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I can’t wait to see what the other authors wrote about, but I can tell you that Ann and I wrote about individual student consultations, how they fit into a research service alongside reference and instruction, and why we think they’re pretty amazing.

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Here’s the basic content of my ten minute part of this presentation, fleshed out slightly from my speaking outline:

Introduction
Our task force on the future of the catalog grew out of a series of conversations our libraries had been having over the course of last year about our catalogs. After one particularly interesting meeting at which 5 groups proposed their idea of a next-generation catalog, our directors commissioned us to formulate a plan that would propose solutions for the current problems with the catalog, and would suggest how we might enact those solutions.

It’s important to note that we only discussed the front end (the user interface). We deliberately chose to ignore the “back room” functions in the hopes that a narrower focus would give us a useful entry into the broader set of ILS issues and a sturdier framework for further discussion.

The Problems
The problems we identified can be loosely grouped around the three purposes of library catalogs, as described by Charles Cutter back in 1876. Remember that catalogs exist to locate, collocate, and advise (to find things, find things like a given thing, and help researchers determine the usefulness of things). So, how do our catalogs measure up?

• Locate: Our systems do a decent job at this if and only if our researchers find their way into our catalogs.
• Collocate: Our systems work decently well as gathering toolsas long as researchers want to gather things according to author or subject heading, and as long as the available subject headings resonate with the researcher’s information need. But with the rise of interdisciplinarity and with increasing amounts of information available on the free web, these institutionalized gathering systems are becoming less and less comprehensive.
• Advise: Our catalogs do not do a good job of providing flexible and robust ways of assessing an item’s value and recommending further action. It seems like only yesterday that tables of contents were a luxury, and even now they are unevenly applied. Modern systems, though, are capable of much more robust description (to the point of showing the thing itself, the full text), and they are capable of learning from user behavior and from other supplemental data to recommend action.

In addition to these rather fundamental problems, our researchers are becoming used to working with systems that leverage massive amounts of data (data drawn from all that information we’ve been adding to records for years but never using… data drawn from user behavior… data drawn from all sorts of new places) in order to create rich and personalized experiences online. They are also increasingly expecting to be able to search at the collection level, the item level, and even within items. And they need access to these collections from sources that help them make wise and informed decisions about which collections, items, and parts of items will fill their information needs.

Our Conclusions?
Unsurprisingly, our taskforce concluded that our catalogs are not flexible enough to meet these goals. What’s worse, we learned that the underlying structure of our systems is restricting enough that simply adding little widgets will not fix the fundamental, silo-ish tenancies of our catalogs.

So we set out to describe solutions to these problems, but decided to back up and envision these solutions from the ground up: from the philosophies and architectures that make up our “Catalog Credo,” the three fundamental principles on which we believe future systems should be built and against which any system we adopt should be measured. You have the report that we drafted, so I’ll skip the details and just hit the highlights.

Principle 1: Flexible data feeding flexible tools
Freeing data is, perhaps, the most important of our three principles. Basically, this means that we want to become a useful part of the Internet rather than re-invent the Internet. We want to feed our data out to other systems rather than incorporate “all useful information” into our system. This way, we can maintain the powerful and important coherence of our selected material without developing barriers between this material and the free web or other information tools our researchers use.

According to this principle, we advocate that libraries provide “an” access and discovery system rather than “the” access and discovery system. This system is essentially an interface capable of interpreting a wide variety of standards-based data that can be drawn from many sources, including our inventory. We of all people recognize that metadata is fundamentally communicative, so we should allow it to communicate.

This principle also assumes that our inventory could be fed to other systems. This way researchers can mash our content up with other content that they find indispensable, or with programs that fit their workflow.

Principle 2: Intellectual connectivity between resources
This principle relates directly to the “Advise” purpose that Cutter identified. It means that our new catalogs should guide researchers through the system and through the web of related resources. Things like FRBR, faceting, citation linking, and recommender systems (based on user-generated content, user behavior, and who knows what else) could help our catalogs fulfill this principle.

Principle 3: Interactivity
Our system should be able to interact with other systems and with our researchers. Researchers should be able to add content to the system (tagging, rating, etc.) and suck content out of the system (saving, sending, bookmarking, etc.). In this way, researchers can help us build the intellectual connections between items that we mentioned in Principle 2.

(At this point, I turned it over to my colleague who explained our timeline for change and what our next steps would be.)

I just have to say that after all of this I had my first opportunity to hear Josh Ferraro speak about Liblime, Open Source ILSs, and Koha, and may I say? Impressed. The rate of development, the flexibility, the “of course, you always have access to your SQL database,” the flexibility… and did I mention the flexibility? The rate of development? Yeah… Impressed.

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I’m doing the presentation on Meebo Rooms, and my name is listed there right next to people who’s names make my eyes pop right out of my head! I had NO idea. None. Wow! (Now I’ll have to spy on their presentations as they go live and make sure mine isn’t totally lame in comparison.) But lame or not, here are the relevant links:

• The LITA Blog announcement of the project
• The Social Software Showcase itself
• My presentation
• My presentation’s accompanying Flickr image set
• An example library meebo room and it’s embedded versions

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This is my first experience collaborating on a presentation with people from more than one school, and it’s quite a challenge. How do you do all those little negotiations, so dependent on voice and body language, to figure out who wants to present what, what our shared goals are, and how to present our topics effectively? How do you put together an outline, divvy up jobs, and ultimately get this thing done without ever meeting in person?

These challenges pretty much prevented us from planning much until today. And yes, the presentation is on Thursday, but such is life. Honestly, none of our schedules meshed very well until today, but even so I think we could have stepped up a little sooner if we’d been working in the same building.

But a couple of weeks ago we did manage to get a wiki going, and as is par for the course, it’s developed kind of a life of it’s own. It has the standard stuff: the speaking outline and notes about our ideas there. But we’re also going to use one page (currently called “Our Presentation“) in place of a PowerPoint or other projected presentation guide. It’ll include a rough sketch of our outline plus all the links we need for our live demonstrations (pray for happy internet gods that day!). We’ll also have our handout up there so attendees can go back and find it later, should they ever want to. They’ll also be able to see the wizard behind the curtain, since they’ll have access to all our brainstorming and speaking notes… but I hope that’s a good thing.

It wouldn’t have been practical for us to put everything together without actually talking to each other and performing all the little negotiations that are necessary, though. It would have been to slow. So today we spent some time in conference chats with each other and then even more time actually talking to each other on a conference call. We all talked, and I took notes into the wiki, which worked out rather nicely.

Now I just hope the presentation itself goes smoothly…

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But it wasn’t a catalog. It was a stack of copies of an article I wrote with one of my library school professors and which has just been put out by Online Information Review. Suddenly the day doesn’t seem quite so dark and dreary.

Zhang, Jin and Iris Jastram. “A Study of Metadata Element Co-Occurrence.” Online Information Review. 30.4 (2006): 428-453.

p.s. This is also my 200th post!

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I think I managed not to alienate anyone, but I know that my message got through to the audience because people came up to me afterward to discuss the pros and cons of getting bits of functionality from different places. If anyone wants to see my PowerPoint presentation, it’s here. I’ve added some fleshed out speaking notes to it because there really aren’t any words on the slides. (I prefer to make slides composed mostly of “pretty pictures,” many of which move.)

I presented right after Dinah Sanders, who talked about the Library As Community, and who mentioned all sorts of cool things that are coming in Millennium Encore (2007). Here Comes Tagging!!!!! (Not to mention reviews, ratings, relevance ranking, faceting, and a whole lot more.) I’m sure she remembers what she actually said while up there on that stage…

After that day, I went home and sat on the porch for a few hours doing absolutely nothing. Then I watched stupid TV till my eyes bugged out before crawling into bed. Friday and Saturday were the first real days off I’ve had in a long, long time. And it was great to spend them with my parents. (The dog and the cat even called a truce for the first time in their lives!) And today I’m back at work for the last Sunday reference shift at the end of the school year.

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Luckily, after Thursday morning I won’t have to slog away at this any more. It’s all a head game, I know. If I hadn’t been surprised to see my name listed as one of the two-person KEYNOTE panel at the conference (when I’d thought it was just any old panel discussion) I’d have finished the stupid thing by now. What I’d give for a brain transplant some days. All I want is to be brilliant, confident, and witty, and I suppose charming wouldn’t be a bad idea either… Is that too much to ask?

What a way to enter into the conference presentation arena… I’ve never presented at an event before.

On a happier note, my mom and dad and wonderful, huge, 100-pound dog are going to be arriving any second now, and they’re staying until Sunday. I just hope the dog and the cat can make peace by then, though that’s doubtful. I can see it all now: after two days of them going after each other my neighbors will collectively petition to have me evicted.

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Here’s the abstract:

Metadata is designed to improve information organization and information retrieval effectiveness and efficiency on the Internet. The way web publishers respond to metadata and the way they use it when publishing their web pages, however, is still a mystery. The authors of this paper aim to solve this mystery by defining different professional publisher groups, examining the behaviors of these user groups, and identifying the characteristics of their metadata use. This study will enhance the current understanding of metadata application behavior and provide evidence useful to researchers, web publishers, and search engine designers.

Our second paper (about patterns in metadata elements that show up together in the source code of these web pages) has been accepted by Online Information Review, though there’s no word yet on when the article will actually be published. And little by little I’m still collecting data for one (or two) more papers.

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