A while ago now, Jodi Schneider floated the idea of setting up a Planet for Semantic Web and Libraries. I had some trouble with various flavours of the Planet and Venus software, so instead I put something I’m calling a ‘Planet Lite’ together in Yahoo Pipes. Let me know if you like it! And feel free to suggest additional blogs, I have only listed a few to start.

Semantic Web & Libraries ‘Planet Lite’: JSON and RSS also available.

Last week, I attended Mash Oop North, an one-day unconference about mashups in Huddersfield, UK. It was a great event, which I wrote up in much more detail over at Libraries Interact. One of the best parts of the day was being able to spend some more time with Yahoo! Pipes, and the Planet Lite is the result after much tinkering and experimenting after I got home. Hooray for action-based outcomes!

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Despite advocating for neutral design (not tied to one particular platform or device), I have been interested in libraries that are looking at iPhone/Touch/Pre applications to provide catalogue searching, collection information and so on. What I would love to see is a general library app that helps librarians and users find and access libraries all over. As anyone who uses public libraries knows, that information can get buried on council and municipality sites, and even academic libraries have found that their homepage links have been disappearing in increasing numbers.

What could such an app include?

• Maps of all publicly accessible libraries near you (location aware) and at a given location worldwide
• Information about access - can you use the Internet without a membership card? Are there access gates? Are books on open access shelves?
• Are there local traveller services? One thing that has always struck me in all of my travels is how few libraries make available information about the local area in a prominent spot. So often I have had to be buried in the collection to find street directories, local maps or local travel guides, or ask at the reference desk for the librarian’s copy. It has always seemed like an obvious and easy service that libraries could provide since they have the resources already and because libraries are so often located in key areas in cities and towns.

What else would you be interested in?

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Today I find myself perched in the foyer of the British Library, without enough ID to get a reader’s pass so instead of working, I am making the most of the free wifi here. Or at least I would, but for the service not working on my, ahem, brand new iPod Touch.

Those who follow my Twitter feed would know that I have gone back on forth on the why or why nots to get a Touch or an iPhone. An iPhone didn’t work for me because I don’t use cellular service very much at all, and the price plans didn’t seem logical. I had been holding out for a device that would function as a replacement for a laptop at conferences - eg ability to make videos, take photos, blog on the go etc.

So why did I get a iPod Touch, which doesn’t do most of those things? Apple in the UK are offering the Education bundle which includes a nearly-free iPod Touch, and so I got one yesterday. So far, I’ve loaded it up with RSS readers and social networking apps, but I am hoping to use location aware services that tap into semantic search, like a more accurate Urban Spoon that picks a restaurant for you based on where you are now or the quickest Underground route to get somewhere else.

A barrier to location aware services though is the availability of wifi. At home I can share my (somewhat poor) mobile broadband connection with my iPod using my MacBook. But when out and about, I rely on being able to pick up a connection. Connections with have an authentication service behind them, like that here at the British Library, are problemmatic. The SSID does’t show up (BL), or security apps need to be installed (UTS, Athens airport, EduRoam), or accounts need to be created in a browser (eg The Cloud). While organisations have good reasons for requiring authentication and acceptance of terms and conditions, it can make getting online with a Linux or Mac based system hard, let alone trying to do so with a mobile device. My mobile phone has wifi that I hardly ever use because of authentication layers.

It is very difficult to support platforms like mobile devices which have enormous diversity in operating systems, features and usage in different markets. I have noticed that Blackberries seem to be more popular in London than iPhones were in Sydney, and Push to Talk really does seem to be a feature that only those in the US use. Phones are completely different again in Japan (though I would buy a Japanese phone if I could) and serve very different needs in the African market. How can an organisation possibly provide a service like wifi that will enable all devices to connect easily and securely? How can we steer away from designing apps and authentication just for PCs, Android, or Symbian, or Palm and design universally? Is it even possible?

Beyond authentication, the dream of city-wide wifi seems to be long dead, with many announced project never coming to fruition and existing services mostly being run by a variety of subscription services that greatly restrict where you can get online. For example, I can use The Cloud with my mobile broadband account, but there are no hotspots near me. Yesterday, Ofcom in the UK released a report about Internet take-up across the UK. Turning the figures around, there are a lot of people who don’t have Internet at home (I currently am one of them - there is no phone line in my flat and cable Internet is not wired to my floor). There is a need to provide Internet in and out of the home other than private subscription, and wifi is one way to do it.

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With all the distractions of my move across the world, it wasn’t until now (thanks, Jenna!) that I saw “Discovering Linked Data” was published in Library Journal last month. I aimed to cover a few different areas that Linked Data may be useful in, especially research support and discovery layers for catalogues, areas that I was working in at the time of writing the article. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Open catalogue data is an an issue that arose when I first started working in libraries. I worked in a multicultural music library. I catalogued in more than 60 languages, all original, because our systems didn’t interface with cooperative cataloguing systems (and we had a non-standard cataloguing record, to boot), and the uniqueness of our catalogue in Australia did not make it worthwhile. But surely, there would have been other libraries across the world that we could and should have shared our data with. And I would have liked to share my work, knowing that we were duplicating work with our sister library in another city. We would have been able to identify collection strengths across the world, share resources, and perhaps even find partners to share our collections instead of having to do extensive legwork in obtaining materials in the first place.

I think Linked Data will have a big impact on larger institutions, but smaller ones also have a lot to gain by sharing in ways that were not possible or practical before.

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The blog may have been quiet of late, but there has been a great deal happening out there. From linked data developments (especially at the Library of Congress) to some great new mobile tools, it’s been a busy couple of months.

Regular blogging on these developments and others will resume in the next couple of weeks, as I’ve been otherwise occupied by a move to London. I will leave Australia (again, I moved back in August last year) next week. I’m thrilled that the timing means I will be able to attend Mash Oop North in early July and will report back on that event here.

Amusingly enough, what has occupied quite a bit of my attention in the move is working out what to do for broadband and mobile service. I have been debating the pros and cons of buying an iPhone, or a netbook, European data roaming and mobile broadband. I have decided to be sensible and stick with my current hardware, but a lazyweb question if I may. Does anyone know of a good provider for mobile broadband roaming across Europe? Something like Vodafone Passport for broadband?

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Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in computing. Hooray! Read more about great women in computing at ACM-W.

One of the things I love about librarianship is that there are so many opportunities to do amazing things with computers, from social networking, to blogging, to sysadmin’ing, to programming. And I’ve been inspired by so many others, irrespective of gender. Some people who inspire me right now are on the list at Shovers and Makers doing wonderful things every day.

I’ve been the only girl in the university computer club, and I’ve built computers out of spare parts, and typed up programs from the back of magazines in the 80s, but ‘computing’ never seemed like an actual career option at the time. So I’m glad that librarianship has so many ways to explore your interest, no matter whether that’s putting on exhibitions, helping people at the refdesk, or writing about data. And a lot of that has to do with the inspirational people who have led the way in defining what this profession is about.

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Last night I was watching a few news clips on the BBC News website, and at the end of each video was links to “more like this”. I made a comment on Twitter:

“End of BBC news videos on their site suggests ‘more like this’. Don’t really want to watch ‘more like this’ if I’m watching sad news.”

Jodi Schneider responded:

“@blisspix That suggests mood-based recommendation for news outlets. Interesting! “More like this” “Opposite mood” etc.”

Now that’s an interesting idea, and it got me thinking about recommendation systems in general. Mostly I’ve been unsatisfied with everything from Amazon to iTunes Genius. Their algorithms are, to my mind, too blunt.

Etsy’s explore options (colours, pounce, time machine, geolocator, etc) are an amazing leap forward into more meaningful browsing and recommendation. Whether you are into handcrafts or not, this site is an excellent example of making the most of metadata.

But we can go much further, radical recommendations, and I think it’s something librarians can and should be involved with. We have a longstanding strength in readers’ advisory and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a librarian who has not heard of Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust.

There are other efforts already to provide online recommendations on what to read next, like ReadMe from MetaFilter, What do I Read Next? from Gale, and both human and automated recommendations in LibraryThing. Yet they are not at the depth I would like to see - the depth that people like Nancy Pearl provide. Now to be clear, I don’t want to replace humans and the strength of emotion and individuality in recommendation, but I do want a more reliable way to explore what I should read, watch, or listen to next. And that’s likely to be people-generated. I do want a recommendation that will take into account mood, but also things such as -

• Am I buying this item for the library? Then I care about how durable the book is, how up to date it is, how relevant it is to courses.
• Am I buying this item for me, to read or listen to on a train/plane trip/while sitting by a pool on vacation? I’m going to want something different for all of those.
• What are the instruments being played in the music? I don’t really like auto-tune or drum machines, for example.

The very human nature of recommendations though, is exactly what makes it so difficult.  I find music recommendations particularly troublesome, whether from AllMusic, Amazon, iTunes Genius or Last.fm. They are usually too broadly applied to really be of use or don’t reflect how I feel. For example, the ‘mood’ for my favourite band, Radiohead, includes the following:

• Cold
• Epic
• Sprawling
• Austere
• Paranoid
• Tense/Anxious
• Cathartic
• Distraught
• Insular

And I don’t feel that way at all when I listen to their music, so these options really don’t help me.

How can we use the strength of individual listeners and readers? And how can this be done while protecting privacy? In libraries, we have been stepping into recommendations at the catalogue level only tentatively, both because we don’t actually have any of that data most of the time and to protect the privacy of individuals. Is there a way to collect deep, meaningful recommendations about people who like particular books + videos + websites + information without creating a dangerous profile? That will be a key challenge of the Semantic Web.

So how can recommendations be improved, made more granular, more relevant? Small, distributed pockets may be a way. Information collected at the listening level (eg last.fm, iTunes Genius) could be queried against opinions of dozens of reviewers, and hundreds of fans, and against statistical data like “bands that have supported this band on tour”, “bands that covered this track” (available in MusicBrainz) and information about what guitars they play with. There shouldn’t be just one entry on AllMusic for a band, but rather many different pieces of information scattered across the web, connected using Linked Data giving strength and flexibility to be able to say “I am looking for happy music made in a cold climate in the mid 90s with slightly political lyrics that has a similar instrument profile to Ride” and in the next minute want to listen to dance music, and be able to find just what you’re looking for.

Much of this is part of the vision for the Social Semantic Web, Alexandre Passant from DERI has a great slidedeck on this topic:

On a related note, the author of Collective Intelligence in Action was recently interviewed by ReadWriteWeb about recommendations, particularly in the US service, Netflix.

Do you have ideas or examples of great recommendation systems? Leave a comment!

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I’ve spent the past few months completely absorbed by the catalogue as we built a new interface. It’s been exciting and frustrating all at once to get to grips with the possibilities of what we can do with the concept of a catalogue, and what options there are now to expand it (and what options aren’t yet there) and make it more relevant for library users. If you’re not already a subscriber, an email list I recommend is NGC4LIB, the mailing list that discusses ideas about the future of the catalogue as well as some of the software options out there.

Discussion has recently turned to the potential of Linked Data for libraries, and it’s a subject I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about lately. More on my thoughts later, but for now take a look at this spot on post by Eric Lease Morgan -

“Finally, the use of linked data is yet another example of how librarianship needs to change its methods. We still need to describe materials, but we need to do it differently.”

What is exciting, and slightly eerie at the same time, is that the people who are thinking and writing about Linked Data and libraries are all pretty much in agreement about how it works and what the possibilities are for us. Unlike all those messy discussions about ‘what is Library 2.0′ of a couple of years back, there’s agreement about the concept, and good solid debate here about things we can do with it. I think this will make going forward very positive and productive.

Roy Tennant has also recently written about the potential of Linked Data in Library Journal, and the last 3 months’ worth of podcasts from the Semantic Web Gang are well worth a listen for an overview of what different sectors are doing with Linked Data (eg businesses, and government) and has some great insights from people behind the Calais project.

The more I read about Linked Data, the more I think it is something that has a great deal of potential for libraries. This could really be huge. I look forward to sharing ideas on the blog.

In the meantime I’m also keeping my eye on id.loc.gov the new service from the Library of Congress which will release LCSH, MARC relator codes and other data as Linked Data (an official release after lcsh.info last year).

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We’re well into 2009 now, but there’s always time for trends!

Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter recently compiled a few of the trends that have been making the rounds on library blogs last month.

Cloud, Semantic Web, and Linked Data abound in predictions and in posts emerging through the first two months of the year. It’s looking to be a big year for the Semantic Web in libraries. Add this to the growth in data curation, digital preservation, and eResearch in libraries and there are interesting times ahead. Most of these issues and trends are also mentioned by other contributors to LITA’s 2009 Top Tech Trends.

So what are my predictions for the rest of the year? I’m going to be conservative and just name four. What are yours?

1. The cloud goes desktop

People are getting increasingly worried about losing what they have created. Whether it’s Facebook changing Terms of Service so that even stuff you delete is still owned by them, or Ma.gnolia taking a catastrophic dive and losing most of its data, slowly but surely I think we will start to see people want to be able to synchronise the data they keep online either with other services or with their desktop. This is of course, but one possible use of Data Portability. People are still not aware of the need to back up their desktops, but i think they’re going to want a button to push to back up their cloud.

2. The rise and rise of metadata

Metadata is cool again. Whether you are working in research services, preservation, or reference, metadata helps you find and get stuff and that’s pretty essential to sift through all the crud out there. I’m not talking MARC - I’m talking EAD, PREMIS, SEPIA and much much more. I will be interested to see those that continue to move beyond metadata and start to expose collections beyond their institutions using methods other than OAI-PMH, like linked data.

3. The death of mobile sites

If you are building a specific mobile site or looking at buying a mobile module for your OPAC, stop. The number of sites built specifically for mobile devices has plummeted, not only due to the popularity of the iPhone and other smartphones with browsers, but because it’s a pain to have to build and maintain these sites. The .mobi domain seems to be slipping but m. is gaining hold (eg m.facebook.com). Smart sites are using content negotiation and web standards to display sites on mobile devices, without having to build separate sites to display less information. The mobile web isn’t second-best any more.

4. Librarians get personal

Many of us are now so familiar with blogs and wikis it hardly seems worth mentioning them as shiny new things any more. So what’s next? The library blogosphere has been in a bit of a lull of late, with few major shifts or emerging technologies for everyone to band around. But for me, this is the year more libraries have to get personal. - Not only designing websites that can be personalised, allowing you to save favourite resources, pages and references, but also in building tools for you - LibX for you, not just the institutional level, more subject guides that feature the human librarian that you are talking to behind the email, and even allowing you to personalise the physical space. And this is something I think we can all band around.

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Regular blogging will resume soon, but in the meantime, something completely different.

I’m a big fan of mashups and information visualisation. This link comes from the Pitchforkmedia music blog. Promotion for this year’s Grammy Awards focuses on some very eye catching visualisations of some of the nominated artists, made up of the names of some of their favourite songs. An amazing mashup between structured data, tag clouds, and the style of ASCII art you might have made a decade or two ago. Click through to the article to view some examples of the ads (no CC/free versions available). The LA Times has more about how they were created -

“A Grammy spokeswoman says each artist was asked to give the Recording Academy 10-20 songs that influenced or affected their life and career. The lyrics and song titles are then featured in the print and television ads.”

I attended a seminar today that asserted that data is not sexy, but I disagree. Data like this isn’t just sexy, but it can even be beautiful. If you like work like this, Information Aesthetics is one of my favourite blogs on the topic.

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