TSRT

Registration is now open for the TSRT/ITART Spring Meeting, which will be held on Friday, April 13, at Bellevue University. If you would like to attend, please complete the online registration form. Payment can be made by Paypal or by check.

A schedule for the day can be found on the TSRT Spring Meeting web page.

Building the Digital Library
Bellevue University, Bellevue, Nebraska
April 13, 2012

Technical Services Round Table and Information Technology Round Table are seeking presentations for their 2012 spring meeting, which will be held on the Bellevue University campus on April 13, 2012. The theme is “Building the Digital Library,” and we invite you to submit your proposals for presentations, panel discussions, and posters focusing on the various aspects of creating, building, sharing, and collaborating on digital libraries and their collections. Desirable topics include metadata, digital archiving, management and storage, and digital curation of electronic formats from books and documents to journals and music. Presentation length of time desired: 50 minutes.

Please submit proposals to casey.kralik@bellevue.edu. The deadline for submissions has been extended to January 31, 2012. Include the following information in your proposal: Presenter name, session or poster title, session or poster description, technology needed, and your contact information.

Building the Digital Library
Bellevue University, Bellevue, Nebraska
April 13, 2012

Technical Services Round Table is seeking presentations for our 2012 spring meeting, which will be held on the Bellevue University campus on April 13, 2012. The theme is “Building the Digital Library,” and we invite you to submit your proposals for presentations, panel discussions, and posters focusing on the various aspects of creating, building, sharing, and collaborating on digital libraries and their collections. Desirable topics include metadata, digital archiving, management and storage, and digital curation of electronic formats from books and documents to journals and music. Presentation length of time desired: 50 minutes.


Please submit proposals to casey.kralik@bellevue.edu by January 16, 2012. Include the following information in your proposal: Presenter name, session or poster title, session or poster description, technology needed, and your contact information.

The slides for Meg Mering’s presentation, “RDA: A Practical Approach” are available here.

The NLA Technical Services Round Table presents a one-day workshop on the proposed cataloging rules,  Resource Description and Access (RDA)  with UNL Librarian, Margaret Mering. Come learn about RDA and try out the RDA Toolkit.

The workshop will be held at Creighton University, in Room 111 of the Eugene C. Eppley Building.  Space is limited to 40 participants. 

Register for this workshop by filling out the online registration form.

Observations and opinions by guest editor Angela Kroeger.

I attended the ITART/TSRT Joint Spring Meeting “eBooks: Readers Wanted” on Friday. It was a very enjoyable and informative meeting.

For the first session, Michael Sauers provided a history of ebooks, going all the way back to Project Gutenberg in the 1970s. We think of ebooks as new, but really, they’re not. They’re just evolving.

One of the problems today is competing standards. For ebook readers, we’ve got Kindles, Nooks, and Sony Readers, with a few other brands on the side. There are also people who shun a dedicated device in favor of reading ebooks on their computers or phones. Of course, sometimes to read ebooks on those computers or phones, users have to get apps that mimic the devices. So you can read an ebook from Amazon via the Kindle app on your phone, but that ebook is still wrapped in Amazon’s DRM and you can’t read it with any other company’s app.

Michael showed us images of at least a dozen new ebook readers that will be on the market later this year. If all of them have their own proprietary ebook format and their own DRM wrappers, then who wins? If a person buys forty ebooks for their Kindle before deciding to switch to a Nook or to one of those soon-to-be-available new devices, what happens to those forty ebooks? Well, the person isn’t going to be reading them on their new device, that’s for sure. So while I’m not sure who wins in a format war, I’m quite certain about who loses: the consumer. And in this instance, libraries are on the consumer side of the fence.

If the problem were just formats, then someone could write a program to convert ebooks from one format to the next. But the problem isn’t really formats–it’s licensing. Because of DRM and copyright law, it is illegal to convert an ebook to another format. Even if you paid money for it, breaking the DRM is considered piracy. After all, you haven’t really purchased the book. You’ve only licensed it. No matter how much you (as an individual or as a library) paid, you own nothing. And, as we saw with the George Orwell incident, Amazon giveth, and Amazon taketh away.

Someone asked if there was any hope for a standardized format, and Michael suggested that EPUB seemed poised to become a de facto standard, but even that is far from certain. And EPUB-formatted books can still be locked up with DRM.

After Michael got our brains all juiced up, Joyce Neujahr offered a session with practical, nuts-and-bolts advice based on the Criss Library’s experience circulating Amazon Kindles. She talked about how the Kindles were first used as an Interlibrary Loan alternative, and later as a venue for offering popular books not usually available in an academic library. She covered everything from circulation to cataloging to acquisitions to collection development. In the interests of full disclosure, I confess my bias: I work with Joyce at the Criss Library, and Jan Boyer and I were involved in cataloging the Kindles when we first got them. Joyce was honest about some of the problems we ran into, and some things we could have done differently. But when we started circulating ereaders, there weren’t any other libraries out there doing it, or at least not any who were putting their wisdom out on the open web. So Joyce and her team made the best decisions possible at the time.

Then we had a couple of representatives from Borders show off two of the three Sony Readers they offer, the Touch and the Pocket edition. Unfortunately, they didn’t have live versions to demo–they had not-yet-activated floor versions that we could take out of the box and look at the physical design, test the weight and feel of it in our hands, and such, but not actually view a book. They mentioned that Borders has entered a partnership with Kobo and will be offering Kobo Readers by the end of May for as little as $150. In fact, by the end of the summer, they expect that Borders will have eight different ebook readers for sale.

After they left the stage, a Barnes & Noble representative came up to show off a Nook. Unlike other ebook readers, the Nook has both an e-ink screen for the book itself and a small LCD touch screen for the rest of the user interface. Also, the Nook is currently the only ebook reader which allows the user to lend their ebook to another user. It’s a one-time loan, limited to two weeks, during which the book is inaccessible on the lender’s device, and after which the file self-destructs on the borrower’s device. Those are tight constraints, sure, but it is truly something no other vendor offers.

Something the Barnes & Noble rep didn’t mention, but I learned about from Tim Spalding’s LibraryThing blog, is that Nook owners will be able to read any ebook in Barnes & Noble’s library for free while they’re in the store, but the ebooks become inaccessible as soon as the person sets foot outside the store (unless purchased, of course). That’s a very interesting development that certainly bears watching.

In addition to the Sony Readers brought by the Borders people and the Nook brought by the Barnes & Noble guy, attendees got to check out an original Kindle and a newer Kindle 2, both of which Joyce brought from the Criss Library. So people got to feel out several different devices.

After lunch, we separated for breakout sessions. I went with the catalogers (a rather huge group at this meeting). While we started out talking about cataloging, we branched off into acquisitions and other issues, too. We tended to focus a lot on how-to and has-anyone-done-this kind of questions, and we spent a good portion of the discussion on various large packages of ebooks offered by vendors, from NetLibrary to specialized medical collections. While few libraries are loaning ebook reader devices, almost all libraries offer ebooks through such subscriptions, so there was a lot to share on that front.

Instead of a second breakout session, we reconvened as one huge group. (A convocation rather than a breakout, really.) There we discussed any ebook issue that came to anyone’s mind, and we covered quite a lot of ground. Someone brought up the old Rocket Books and other vanished ebook readers of days gone by. Some libraries still had their Rocket Books tucked away in offices or cabinets of obsolete curiosities. It was observed that the library world has gone through this ebook reader device business before, and we might consider looking to the past to see what lessons were learned, rather than reinventing everything from scratch.

Lastly, in a moment of unbridled geekery, I asked Michael Sauers if he had a favorite free ebook app, since he and I both use Android phones. He recommended Aldiko, and then used App Referer to put a QR Code on his screen, which I then scanned with Barcode Reader on my phone. Bingo! My phone came up with a link to the direct download of Aldiko from the app market. If trading apps is this easy, then trading ebooks should be just as easy. Before you shout, “Copyright!” consider that he didn’t actually give me the app, he gave me a link to that app at the store. It could work the same for copyrighted ebooks. However, for public domain ebooks, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to trade the actual files with a quick bump of our phones or readers or iPads or whatever future devices we may find in our hands. It’s just a matter of time, and probably not a long time, either.

Anyway, since the meeting on ebooks, I have actually been reading an ebook on my phone. (The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, because it came with the app and I like H.G. Wells anyway and I figured “why not?”) It’s not an unpleasant experience, even with a tiny backlit screen. Personally, I really do believe multi-function devices are eventually going to win out over dedicated ebook readers, because they’re easy and people already have them in their pockets. And when you’re sitting around in some waiting room thinking, “Man, I wish I had something to read,” wouldn’t it be nicer to say, “Oh yeah, my phone,” instead of, “Darn, I left my ereader at home.” Yes, this presumes one has a web-enabled smartphone, but I think already more people have smartphones than ebook readers.

But whatever the device, whatever the format, ebooks have finally taken off. I don’t believe print will go away, because too many people like books. Movies didn’t kill stage plays, television didn’t kill radio or movies, and the internet hasn’t killed television or radio or movies or stage plays. There’s no reason to believe ebooks will kill print books. People have diverse interests and tastes. The world is big enough for print books, ebooks, video books, phone novels, and whatever else may come. And libraries need to be there to help people find what they need, sift the wheat from the chaff, and provide access for those who lack the means.

Register here for the TSRT & ITART Spring Conference on e-books, April 23, 2010 at Bellevue University.

The preliminary schedule is:
8:30 Registration & welcome

9:00 NLA Presidential address by Scott Childers

9:15 eBooks overview by Michael Sauers, ITART chair

10:00 break

10:15 Circulating e-book readers at UNO: What we know…for now by Joyce Neujahr,

11:15 Vendor presentations

Noon lunch

1:15 1st breakout session

2:00 break

2:15 2nd breakout session

3:00 ITART & TSRT business meetings

The Spring Meeting out in Aurora, Nebraska, was pretty good this year. The overall topic was “Spelunking or Serendipity: Discovery in the Catalog.”

Jeffrey Beal, in his keynote address, “Metadata: Promise and Practice,” talked about the need for rich metadata to make online catalogs and other search interfaces work well. He addressed the ideas of “search fatigue” and “Google rage” and posited that we are nearing the point where users will demand better, more accurate search results, the key to which is good metadata. The growing popularity of faceted searching suggests the rising importance of building and maintaining solid metadata for an increasingly diverse body of resources. He compared the strengths and weaknesses of deterministic searching (exact match), stochastic searching (full-text), metatext searching (catalog records and other metadata), and metadata-enhanced stochastic searching (full-text searching using metadata for limits and facets). He suspects that Google’s advanced search limits on language, file type, usage rights, etc. are likely metadata driven, but of course, Google’s staff-mode, like their ranking algorithm, is a well-guarded trade secret. He finished off with an exploration of Gresham’s Law.

Gresham’s Law originated in the realm of coin collecting. If two coins have the same face value, but are minted with different metal content, people will hoard the coins with a higher metal value and spend the ones of lower value. Thus, as the “good money” disappears from circulation, the “bad money” becomes the only money. (Think of pennies. Pre-1982 copper pennies are beginning to grow scarce as people squirrel them away in jars, while post-1982 copper-clad zinc pennies are deemed essentially valueless by collectors and remain in circulation.) Applied to other disciplines, the idea is that when something of lower quality becomes popular due to its low cost, the counterpart of higher quality increases in price until it is driven from the market or becomes accessible only to the elite. In this way, it appears that there is a present trend wherein cheap and abundant keyword searching is replacing expensive and accurate metadata searching.

But perhaps next-generation catalogs which rely on facets will reverse the trend, as facets require metadata or “metadata surrogates.” (I’m not sure what “metadata surrogates” would be. Wouldn’t any new descriptive encoding scheme be, by definition, metadata? Of course, eventually the word metadata will go out of vogue, and then we’ll call it something else, even though it will be the same fundamental concept, much in the way that metadata itself is just the trendy name for cataloging.)

After the keynote came the first of the breakout sessions. Jan Boyer and I presented “Classifying Music CDs: Unearthing the Collection,” showcasing our recently-completed music CD project. We had about nine people in attendance, and it seemed to be well received. No one threw vegetables at me, anyway. Some of the attendees had done similar projects with CDs or DVDs, and so I learned some new and cool things while talking to them after the session.

The majority of folks went to “Image Indexing: A Philosophical Approach” by Peter Konin. I have heard that this was a fascinating session. The subject material is certainly cool. I would imagine that cataloging images so they could be indexed and searched effectively with keywords would be very challenging, not to mention fun.

After the first breakout session, we had the TSRT business meeting, followed by lunch. Then we had the second breakout session. Jim Shaw presented “Broken URLs and Access to Content via the Catalog.” I am sure he did an awesome job, but I attended “Connecting Print Titles with Their Electronic Alter Egos in the Catalog: Analysis and Full Disclosure” by Judith Wolfe, Dana Boden, and Joan Konecky of UNL. I figured, I need to learn all I can about electronic resources and about serials. They presented a project they did to find and correct various searching problems and disjoints between their catalog records. Sometimes the record for a print title would make it appear that it had ceased, and there would be no link or direction of any kind toward the electronic record that superseded it. They had a fairly diverse range of problems they encountered, from simple missing URLs to garbled, misleading records.

The majority of attendees, picked the third option for the afternoon session, Sue Ann Gardner’s “LibraryThing and You: One Face of the Future of Catalogs and Cataloging.” By all accounts, this was an excellent session. I would have loved to attend that one, as well as Jim’s presentation, however the nature of breakout sessions is that sometimes you have to choose and bypass something else of interest. How sad. Everything on the program looked interesting.

Overall, it was a good and worthwhile meeting, even with the high winds whipping the cars all over the interstate on the way to and from Aurora.

What a good conference!! I have a lot of new ideas to take back to work (like barcoding DVD’s inside to force people to check for a disc at CKI and CKO). Like it’s ok to have teachable moments at the catalog rather than dumbing it down (or googling it up, whichever). Like there are a lot of us out there struggling with the aboutness and itness of things and how to explain that to non-librarians let alone make it useful to them. Like Gresham’s Law and precision and recall, each of which will come in very handy when trying to explain to the PTB why libraries matter and what what catalogers do matters…

Just getting home after a side-trip to see my mom & brother. If you’ve never been to Aurora’s Leadership Center, and the opportunity arises – go see the place. Stay the night – preferably when the weather is nice enough to explore the grounds. Nice facility, comfy bed, great wireless in the main facility. Only drawback – no Dr Pepper products. If you’re a Pepsi drinker, you’ve got it made in the shade…

And yes, Deirdre, I really WILL blog about the dangerous ideas session from PLA soon
Laura

To me, a conference or workshop is successful if I have learned something new, have been inspired, or have been introduced to tools I could utilize to perform my job better. Since Angela Kroeger’s posted a fantastic, thorough review below, especially on the keynote address, I will focus on specific aspects of sessions I attended that fulfilled my requirements. To me, they were successful in the following ways:
Through a glass darkly: Divining the “Next Generation Catalog” – Drawing on his vast experience with library databases as a vendor and as a systems librarian, speaker Mark Andrews offered fresh insight into the advantages and disadvantages of open- source ILS systems. Since library systems should be chosen based on user needs, Mark warned us that “free” open source systems are not really free – some do not have acquisition and serial modules and some can or cannot be tweaked to fit system needs. A “next generation catalog” is one that goes beyond being an index of information – instead it should be a dynamic, efficient process for the end user. Mark provided valuable insight into the features and shortcomings of Koha, PHPmylibrary, OpenBiblio, Evergreen, Solr, and other open-source systems; this input contributes toward making an informed decisions about these much-talked ILS alternatives.

The Next Generation Depository Library: Addressing Public Access to Government Publications in the Electronic Era addressed the issues surrounding selection of government documents, the availability of online access to government publications vs. downloading records, and the maintenance required when adding internet links to catalog records (validity and stability of direct internet links). What I learned from presenter James Shaw about the latter issue was the advantage of choosing links that utilize PURL, a service that attempts to check broken links for you. One significant resource that reduces the amount of time searching for and cataloging new government documents and points us to e-docs alert lists is the Nebraska Library Commission’s State Documents page. As a new librarian, new to Nebraska, and new to conferences, I returned from this conference eager to apply the concepts and tools I learned!