Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators :: Beth Jefferson on BiblioCommons

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators on November 30, 2007.

This week’s ITConversations show features Beth Jefferson, founder of BiblioCommons Inc., a company that aims to reinvent and federate the online catalogs of public libraries. She’s thinking very creatively about the social forces that such a federation could marshall. The idea is not to create yet another social network. Instead, she wants to promote the social discovery — and social cataloging — of books, CDs, videos, and other kinds of library resources. Social networks pivot on interpersonal relationships. A BiblioCommons-enabled network would, in a complementary way, pivot on those resources.

How would such a network achieve meaningful scale? Beth has found some data which suggests that if you federated lots of public library catalogs, the combined user population would rival some of the web’s largest sites. Enabling those folks to connect with one another, in the context of resource collections that share common metadata, would be a big deal.

The BiblioCommons software is only now entering its first trial phase. But you can see some of what it does in Beth’s presentation at code4lib, a conference for library technologists.

Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators :: Barbara Aronson

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators on August 30, 2007.

In this edition of Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators, host Jon dell speaks with Barbara Aronson, program manager for the World Health Organization's Health InterNetwork Access Initiative (HINARI). Thanks to this program, qualifying hospitals, universities, and other organizations in 70 of the poorest countries receive free access to many of the best biomedical journals. Another 43 somewhat less poor countries pay token fees to access the journals, an arrangement that has drawn criticism from some open access advocates. Barbara Aronson argues that the developed world's notion of open access is too narrow, that HINARI is an important form of open access, and that it has also become a laboratory in which publishers can explore a tiered pricing model that may ultimately apply to developed countries too.

The economics of scientific publishing notwithstanding, HINARI represents a revolution in poor countries' access to current medical research. And researchers in those countries aren't just consuming the information. They're also processing it to produce new research that reflects their own very different circumstances.

Download MP3 35:41, 16.3 mb

Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators :: Timo Hannay

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators on July 5, 2007.

As director of web publishing for Nature Publishing Group, Timo Hannay is applying web 2.0 principles to the realm of science. His projects include: Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists; Nature Network, a social network for scientists; and Nature Precedings, a site where researchers can share and discuss work prior to publication.

The social and collaborative aspects of these systems are, of course, inspired by their more general counterparts on the web: del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn, the blogosophere. But while the general web provides useful models, science doesn't yet provide the same incentives to participate. Change is coming, though, and Timo Hannay and his team are doing everything they can to accelerate it.

Download MP3 46:14, 21.2 mb

Resources:

• Connotea.org
• Nature Network
• Nature Precedings
• Timo Hannay's Nature Profile
• Podcasts from Nature.com
• Nascent Blog

Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators :: Bob Glushko & AnnaLee Saxenian

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators on April 13, 2007.

This week I got together with Bob Glushko and AnnaLee Saxenian to discuss their new program in services design at UC Berkeley's school of information. I had earlier interviewed Bob Glushko about the book he co-authored, with Tim McGrath, on document engineering. Now a professor in the school of information at Berkeley, Bob headed up Commerce One's XML architecture and technical standards activities from 1999 to 2002, and is now a member of the OASIS board.

AnnaLee Saxenian is the dean of Berkeley's school of information. Her 1996 book, "Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128", is the classic and often-cited study of how gregarious engineers in the Valley created social capital that produced a competitive advantage for the region. In 1996 she followed that with "The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy."

To commemorate the announcement of their new program, Information and Service Design, a symposium was held in early March. Graduate students gave presentations based on papers they'd written, and in preparation for this podcast I watched more of the videos of those presentations than I had planned to. These are mostly older students who have returned to school with a combination of work experience and an appreciation for the contemporary digital lifestyle. Now they're learning how to apply those perspectives to the new interdisciplinary science of service design. You can see, in those videos, that they're having fun learning about this stuff. And you can hear, in this podcast, that Bob Glushko and AnnaLee Saxenian are having fun figuring out how to teach it.

Resources:

• A conversation with Bob Glushko
• Document Engineering, co-authored by Bob Glushko
• Books authored by AnnaLee Saxenian
• Announcement of Information and Services Design
• Information and Service Design at U.C. Berkeley

Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators :: Art Rhyno

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators on April 27, 2007.

Art Rhyno is a systems librarian at the University of Windsor, in Ontario, Canada. He's a self-proclaimed library geek with a passion for innovative ways to make library information systems more useful.

In this conversation Jon Udell and Rhyno discuss the themes that emerged from the recent code4lib conference. They also talk about Rhyno's ongoing interest in making connections between systems that live on the desktop and systems that live in the cloud.

Rhyno and his wife are also the owners of the Essex Free Press, a weekly community newspaper that's been published since 1896. They reflect on the mission of local newspapers, and on how emerging Internet technologies can support and extend that mission.

Resources:

• code4lib Conference
• Essex Free Press

Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators :: Geoffrey Bilder

Originally posted on IT Conversations on April 6, 2007. See also Jon Udell's blog posting about this conversation.

Although Tim Berners-Lee once famously declared that "Cool URIs don't change," factors beyond our control make it hard for most of us to avoid link rot. Geoffrey Bilder is the director of strategic initiatives for CrossRef, a company whose mission is "to be the citation linking backbone for all scholarly information in electronic form." CrossRef, in other words, is in the business of combating link rot.

The world of scholarly and professional publishing revolves around reliable citation. In previous podcasts with Tony Hammond and Dan Chudnov I've explored some of the technologies and methods used by these publishers -- including digital object identifiers and OpenURL -- to assure that reliability.

CrossRef plays a key role in that technological ecosystem. In this conversation, Geoffrey and I discuss how everyday blog publishing systems could offer the same kinds of persistence, integrity, and accountability provided by scholarly and professional publishing systems. And we explore why that might matter more than most people would think.

Geoffrey Bilder is Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, and has over 15 years experience as a technical leader in scholarly technology. He co-founded Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group in 1993, providing the Brown academic community with advanced technology consulting in support of their research, teaching and scholarly communication.

Bilder was subsequently head of IT R&D at Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2002 to 2005, he was Chief Technology Officer of scholarly publishing firm Ingenta, and just prior to joining CrossRef, he was a Publishing Technology Consultant at Scholarly Information Strategies, where he consulted extensively with publishers and librarians on emerging social software technologies and how they may affect scholarly and professional researchers.

Resources:

• CrossRef
• A conversation with Tony Hammond
• A conversation with Dan Chudnov
• Jon Udell's Blog

Jon Udell :: A conversation with Lou Rosenfeld about search analytics, information architecture, and designing for usability

Originally posted by Jon Udell on June 30, 2006.

Lou Rosenfeld is my guest for this week's podcast. Fellow superpatron Edward Vielmetti put me in touch with Lou, with whom I share an affection not only for Ann Arbor, Michigan, but also for a cluster of topics including information architecture, search analytics, print and online publishing, designing for usability, tagging, and microformats. We had a great conversation!

Jon Udell :: A conversation with Peter Suber about open access

Originally posted by Jon Udell on August 18, 2006.

Peter Suber, the leading chronicler of the open access movement, joins me for this week's podcast. Since the dawn of the blog era, it's been obvious to me that the modes of knowledge exchange we bloggers take for granted are also a natural fit for scientific and academic publishing. That idea has matured more slowly than some of us had hoped. But as you know if you follow Peter's blog, Open Access News, it has now taken root and is growing at a healthy rate.

In this conversation Peter defines open access repositories and open access journals, and he discusses the history, economics, and cultural practices driving the open access movement. We also discuss the ways in which scholarly open access is both like and unlike blogging, in terms of technologies and methods.

Jon Udell :: A conversation with John Wilkin about the Michigan/Google digitization project

Originally posted by Jon Udell on December 1, 2006.

My guest for this week's podcast is John Wilkin. He's the director of the University of Michigan Library's technology department, and coordinator of the library's joint digitization project with Google. It's been two years since Google began partnering with the University of Michigan and with other libraries, including Harvard and the New York Public Library. In this conversation we talk about the UM's earlier (and still-ongoing) efforts to digitize its 7-million-volume library, about how the partnership with Google has radically accelerated that process, and about what this is all going to mean for libraries, for publishers, for Google, and for all of us.

Web resources mentioned in the podcast include:

• JSTOR, a Mellon Foundation project chartered to "build a reliable and comprehensive digital archive of important scholarly journal literature"
• Making of America, "a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction"
• The Michigan Digitization Project, and in particular the contract between UM and Google
• Distributed Proofreaders, which "provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the digitization of Public Domain books into Project Gutenberg e-books"

Jon Udell :: A conversation with Ed Vielmetti and John Blyberg about superpatrons and superlibrarians

Originally posted by Jon Udell on February 2, 2007.

Last fall, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I gave a talk entitled Superpatrons and Superlibrarians. Joining me for this week’s podcast are the two guys who inspired that talk. The superpatron is Ed Vielmetti, an old Internet hand who likes to mash up the services proviced by the Ann Arbor District Library. That’s possible because superlibrarian John Blyberg, who works at the AADL, has reconfigured his library’s online catalog system, adding RSS feeds and a full-blown API he calls PatREST.

I’ve written from time to time about Eric von Hippel’s notion of user innovation toolkits and the synergistic relationship between users and developers that can develop around such toolkits. What Ed Vielmetti and John Blyberg are doing with Ann Arbor District Library is a great example of how that relationship can work.

Update: I meant to call out some of the excellent work that John’s been doing lately. This catalog record is an example of an Amazon-like recommendation feature: “Users who checked out this item also checked out these library items…” Nice!

You’ve also gotta love the experimental card catalog images.

Jon Udell :: A conversation with Tony Hammond about digital object identifiers

Originally published by Jon Udell on January 26, 2007. Jon posted a follow-up to this podcast on his blog.

Tony Hammond works with the new technology team at Nature Publishing Group. His company publishes a flock of scientific journals in print and online including, most prominently, Nature. It also operates Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists. In this week’s podcast we talk about digital object identifiers which are, in effect, super-URLs designed to survive commercial churn and to work reliably for hundreds of years.

Many of us are becoming publishers nowadays, and we’d like to imagine that all our stuff could enjoy that level of consistency and durability. Few of us are prepared to make the necessary investment, but it’s interesting to hear from someone who has.

Jon Udell :: A conversation with Dan Chudnov about OpenURL, context-sensitive linking, and digital archiving

Originally posted by Jon Udell on February 16, 2007. Ryan Eby has made a transcript of the conversation available on his blog.

Today's podcast with Dan Chudnov is a sequel to my earlier podcast with Tony Hammond about the Nature Publishing Group's use of digital object identifiers. I invited Dan to discuss related topics including the OpenURL standard for context-sensitive linking.

I'm not the only one who's had a hard time understanding how these technologies relate to one another and to the web. See, for example, Dorothea Salo's rant I hate library standards, also Dan's own recent essay Rethinking OpenURL.

I have ventured into this confusing landscape because I think that the issues that libraries and academic publishers are wrestling with -- persistent long-term storage, permanent URLs, reliable citation indexing and analysis -- are ones that will matter to many businesses and individuals. As we project our corporate, professional, and personal identities onto the web, we'll start to see that the long-term stability of those projections is valuable and worth paying for.

Recently, for example, Dave Winer -- who's been exploring Amazon's S3 -- wrote:

I have an idea of making a proposal to Amazon to pay it a onetime fee for hosting the content for perpetuity, that way I can remove a concern for my heirs, and feel that my writing may survive me, something I'd like to assure.

Beyond long-term storage of bits, there's a whole cluster of related services that we're coming to depend on, but that flow from relationships that are transient. When I moved this blog from infoworld.com to wordpress.com, for example, InfoWorld very graciously redirected the RSS feed, but another organization might not have done so. I could have finessed that issue by using FeedBurner, but I wasn't -- and honestly, still am not -- ready to make a long-term bet on that service.

For most people today, digital archiving and web publishing services are provided to you by your school, by your employer, or -- increasingly -- by some entity on the web. When your life circumstances change, it's often necessary or desirable to change your provider, but it's rarely easy to do that, and almost never possible to do it without loss of continuity.

There are no absolute guarantees, of course, but a relatively strong assurance of continuity is something that more and more folks will be ready to pay for. Amazon is on the short list of organizations in a position to make such assurances. So, obviously, is Microsoft. Will Microsoft's existing and future online services move in that direction? I hope so. Among other things, it's a business model that doesn't depend on advertising, and that would be a refreshing change.