LITA Forum, Day 1

I'm in Cincinnati for the Library and Information Technology Association National Forum. Here's my first report; I'll be posting every evening. Opening General Session Tim Spalding, LibraryThing.com "What is Social Cataloging and Where is it Going?"  Spalding got a laugh off the bat by promising not to define the term "Social Cataloging"—accompanying his villainy with a photo of Dr. Horrible (from the recent online film Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog) and a rendition of Dr. Horrible's well-trained evil laugh. The gesture wasn't pure fandom, however. Spalding also told how LibraryThing users worked together to catalog Dr. Horrible's bookshelf, a collection shown out-of-focus and on screen for only a few seconds. That's an example of "Collaborative Cataloging," the top rung of what he termed the Social Cataloging Ladder. Users start with personal cataloging, move to exhibitionism and voyeurism by sharing what they read and looking at what others read, and then self-expression by adding book reviews. From there, they move to implicit social cataloging, using tags, reviews, and ratings to better categorize their books. "When everyone catalogs in their own separate room, but the rooms are all connected, something emerges," he said. LibraryThing features that use this information include the UnSuggester, which suggests books that would be diametrically opposed. (One such pairing: Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason vs. Sophie Kinsella's Confessions of a Shopaholic.) Beyond implicit social cataloging lies social networking, sharing, and explicit social cataloging, which includes capturing data like locations, characters, first and last words, or places the author has lived or tying equivalent or near-equivalent things together (Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, for example). Spalding said LibraryThing users make about 1,000 of these combinations each day. "They're doing it to help other people; they're doing it because it helps them. It's really kind of remarkable." Librarians can be cheered, Spalding said, by the "amazing store of passion out there." But "Library catalogs are fundamentally not open to the social web," a problem and a threat. Meanwhile, Library 2.0 is in danger by libraries "concentrating on what they can do, not on what they can do best." Spalding recommended fighting back with free services that work with libraries' strengths, like incorporating book recommendations from library holdings in search results, user reviews, and tagging. "I wish that some of these efforts were directed at the most important digital representation of your assets, the catalog." Concurrent Session 1 "User-Centered Design for Humanities Collections Within a Digital Library" Mark Phillips and Kathleen Murray, University of North Texas Phillips and Murray described their IMLS grant-funded IOGENE project, which studies how genealogists interact with the UNT Library's Portal to Texas History. The site has grown dramatically since 2004—from 489 items then to 40,089 today—and the library has a revamp underway to incorporate information from three focus groups. "We might say that our digital library is very standards driven and the genealogists are very content driven," Murray said. Requests from the focus groups included name searches (made difficult because names could appear in metadata in many different places—as the subject, the author, the photographer, and more), additional search fields, improved relevance weighting, and improved search results for serials. UNT has divided requests into four groups: Two phases of improvements that will be made, one group that may be outside of technical feasibility, and one group that may well be unwise to impose system-wide or that is already available and users need improved information to be able to make it work. Wireframes for the first phase have been built, and the first release quality assurance process is scheduled for February. Concurrent Session 2 "Portals to Learning: What Librarians Can Learn from Video Game Design" Nicholas Schiller, Washington State University and Carole Svennson, University of Washington Schiller and Svennson proposed that gaming literacy and traditional literacy can complement each other. "I really don't think it's helpful to see this as a zero sum game," Shiller said. Many games are complicated information systems just like libraries. "At the end of the day, the content is very different, but the databases are exactly the same," Shiller noted. Therefore, libraries can adapt techniques that these games use to keep students engaged when learning and using library systems. One of these techniques is an emphasis on pure knowledge rather than authority. "[Librarians and professors] are used to being the authority figure in a classroom," Svennson said. "In World of Warcraft, it was the peers in the game who had the best information. There were official channels to request help, but that was the last place you'd turn." Adapting that concept would entail the creation of long-term knowledge bases, such as wikis, where students can share information with peers and with future students. "It feels like giving away the answers, but the truth of the matter is, that's how students learn," Svennson noted. "You're not giving them the answers, you're helping them get to the next stage. Other techniques include a level concept that provides "scaffolding" to build on already-gained skills, social functions and the ability to collaborate, intrinsic motivation by demonstrating the rewards and offering options, and persistence through failure—the ability to build on failures rather than repeatedly reaching dead ends.