I just checked out Issuu which lets you upload your PDFs and provides a really great, user-friendly way to read them. You can even embed them into webpages, like this:

I think I’m going to have to work these into tutorials, course pages and our whole instructional webpages redesign. These are too cool!

Upon further reflection: For some reason WordPress is stripping the flash out of the code I copy and paste. It worked on other webpages I tried it on. However – one thing I don’t like about the embedding so much is that the hyperlinks in the PDF get stripped out, and in our subject guides we link to the catalog and to databases very often. That won’t work so much. I still like the idea a lot, though!

Most of these images are without copyright too – so go ahead, tag, describe, remix and reuse!

Fortunately, I work with a really responsive group of colleagues at the library here at Baylor, who are up for trying new things, so when that Monday morning after reading the blog post, I shot off a quick email about possibly trying this, a few hours later we had it up and running in our catalog.

We use Innopac from III, and the way it worked for us was to put the widget on the Advanced Keyword Search page, since that’s the page that patrons get redirected to when they get no results. At the bottom of this page there was, and still is, a list of ways to search – basically a list of library jargon – and I highly doubt patron getting no results would scroll down there and think “Adjacency and proximity! Why didn’t I think of that?” Having the meebo widget right there for out-of-luck searchers will be extremely helpful.

However, we needed to tweak the placement of our widget first. Originally, we placed the widget at the top of the page, before the advanced search form. And immediately (during the afternoon after we’d put the widget on the page) we realized that wasn’t going to work. People started putting in their failed search terms into the chat form. We got one phrase, one title and one ISBN, as instant messages at the information desk. Just that info, no “hey, I can’t find this, can you help me.” It was kind of hard to believe, but people were mixing up the search form with the chat widget. And these decontextualized IMs were somewhat confusing for some of the reference staff.

So, the next day, we tweaked the placement of the widget. We put it to the side of the search form rather than right at the top of the page. We also changed the language a little – now it says “Can’t find what you are looking for? Ask here for help” instead of “Ask here for help with BearCat.”

What have the results been? Well, aside from those first three random search term IMs, it’s hard to tell whether the IMs are coming from the catalog or not. Since we use Pidgin to aggregate our IM clients, we can only tell if IMs come from Meebo as opposed to AIM, not from the individual widgets we’ve placed around the library website.

However, it’s possible to tell from the context of a few IMs that they came from the catalog – for instance, the one that wanted to know how to search for an individual music score, the one looking for books on a particular subject “but I get no entries found,” the one who wanted to find books on the history of gerontology and couldn’t find any (I know that one for sure, since I talked personally with the student who asked later that day), and possibly the one that wanted to know how to export to Refworks from the catalog.

(Of course, due to Jenny’s post mentioning Baylor, we also had lots of queries from people looking to implement this in their own libraries. Shout outs to the librarians from Yale, Spain, Nashua Public Library in NH, Louisa from Youngstown (I’m working on an email to you), and a few others who didn’t leave their names…)

We implemented this right as finals were starting, so it coincided with the traditional decrease of reference questions, but I have a feeling we’re going to get a lot more, since we had so many right when it first started.

What I would love to see in the future:

1. a way to put Meebo at other dead-end points in the catalog (in Innopac, if you get no results for a title search, it sticks you smack in the middle of a bunch of other titles, which is great if you just happened to misspell your title, but not so great otherwise)
2. a way for meebome to automatically pop open a new window when you first send a message so you can navigate away from your original page and not lose your chat. (It looks like some folks on the meebo forums have been working on some hacks, but it would be a great feature for meebo to implement. Unfortunately, they’re not always so responsive on their product fora.
3. some more training for our reference staff (we’ve only been providing IM reference for a semester now, it’s still pretty new) in dealing with some of the random IMs we could very possibly get in the future – fortunately, I’m in charge of IM reference training, so this could happen!

Update: reading through the comments, I’ve found this example too, though it’s got a teensy bit of javascript in it.

Little did we know when we booked the table that this particular Dr. Pepper Hour was open to numerous campus rental property companies to promote their apartment building complexes, lofts, condos and duplexes.

We felt a little strange at first, our little table of candy and IM stickers getting lost among the flashy tables giving away t-shirts and raffling off Wiis, iPods and even an iPhone (I put my name in for that one…) but we eventually came up with a good pitch:

Hey, did you know that whatever apartment you choose to live in, you don’t have to walk all the way across campus to get help from the library! You can IM us from your apartment! Just add “BaylorLibrarian” to your buddy list.

We got a lot of great responses from students who thought it was the coolest idea ever. We especially liked the student who stuck the sticker on the back of his cell phone, showed us and said, “This is how important you guys are to me.”

Came dressed as one of her World of WarCraft characters (really)

Became interested in WoW in 2005 and was asked to join a guild of virtual worlds researchers (made up of people who all know each other in real life and have a significant research interest in gaming and virtual worlds – a close knit professional community)

• Professional networking here was real – Liz was invited to become an author on this community’s blog (Terra Nova) soon after

Guild Drama

• Where do you draw the lines professionally and personally when it’s not just your friends, but also people who are reading your grant proposals or students who are taking your classes

Games, Learning and Society Conference (Madison, WI)

• People sharing both physical and virtual spaces

Colleagues in real life are playmates in virtual life

Is WoW the “new golf”?

• Many accomplished professionals are spending upwards of 20 hours a week on this game

Why does WoW work?

• nearly a million concurrent primetime US users — they’re obviously doing something right

Amy Jo Kim on Game Mechanics

• “putting the fun in functional”
• 5 game mechanics:

1. 1. collecting
      • we want to have things AND be able to see/show people these things
   2. points
   3. feedback
      • how do we know we’re doing the right thing?
      • this is a huge part of what makes an experience work – feedback needs to be quick and transparent so that we feel motivated to stick around
   4. exchanges
   5. customization

Lawley isn’t interested as much in how we can make games like the real world (like Second Life), but in how we can make the real world more like games – how can we be as engaged and delighted by real world tasks as gamers are about games?**

WoW demo: creating a new character

SecondLife demo: creating a new character

• Lawley’s not a big fan b/c there’s nothing she can do here that she can’t do anywhere else — it’s a solution in search of a problem
• Reminds me of what Paul Jones said a few weeks ago: you’ll get nothing out of Second Life if you’re not a builder

Game Mechanics and Goals: The first Five Minutes

• Understanding
  • Back story, context, information from characters
• Accomplishment
  • most things in life are never done (laundry, dishes, etc), but in the game, you can check things off; they’re finite
• Progression
• Acquisitions
• Communication

Nick Yee’s MMO Player Stages (managers also need to think about this — how can we take people through burnout and into recovery, where they can feel willing to accept the grind b/c there’s enough that’s interesting and challenging)

• Entry
  • newcomer euphoria
  • playing with someone
• Practice
  • ramping up/ progression
  • solo to group
• Mastery
  • leadership
  • competition
  • high-end content
• Burnout
  • grind burnout
  • nothing left to do
• Recovery

Pokemon – why can’t learning be as much fun as Pokemon for children?

• Why power through the grind?
  • b/c there are rewards
  • along the way, you also build expertise

Real world games

• summer reading
• super sleuth

Implicit Online Games

• ebay feedback
• MySpace/Friendster
• page rank
• Google Smackdown

Games that Blur Boundaries

• PMOG (passively multiplayer online game)
• Chore Wars (get points for doing chores)
• Seriosity’s Attent

Social Genius

How can we deal with the issue of burnout? There’s almost nothing that can’t be turned into a game, but it requires thought. How can we make people keep coming back to the catalog, tutorials, the library, etc? Can we design game-like activities that keep our users interested and engaged?

A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

**I like the way she puts this; it’s one of the main reasons that I’m so fascinated by gaming and immersive technologies as tools for learning. As Chad Boeninger said yesterday, games are undeniably hard. But they’re still fun and people will totally abandon their lives for a few minutes (or hours, or days…) to learn how to master them. Is there a way we can make research more like this? Now, I’m not totally naive. I’m aware that the motivators for starting a research project for most of our users are much different than the motivators for starting a game (boils down to: my professor wants me to vs. i want to). But I’m not ready to just give up and say, “oh well, research will never be as fun as gaming, so why try?” Still, it’s difficult to know exactly how to go about bridging — or attempting to bridge — this gap.

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Ruth Kneale, National Solar Observatory, ATST Project – From Static to Dynamic: Choosing and Implementing a CMS

CMSs – used to collaboratively and interactively create, manage, control, and publish information. Known by many other names.

We need them to avoid the “single point source syndrome” and to increase team collaboration, ease administration, increase functionality, improve presentation.

Her needs: LAMP setup (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP), content approval, WYSIWYG editor, friendly URLs, version control, content reuse.

Should haves: sandbox/staging area, mass uploading, site mapping/indexing

Nice to have: stats, events, photos, drag and drop

To CMS or to Wiki?
Looked at CMSmatrix.org and Wikimatrix.org, opensourcecms.com, experts-exhange.com, and did local evaluation

OpenSourceCMS – lets you play with CMSs without installing on your own server – Very nice!

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Amy Radermacher, Reference/Cataloging/Electronic Resources Librarian, Concordia University
May Chang, Head, Library IT Services, UMBC Library, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- CMS Experiences at CSP and UST: Same Application, Different Libraries

At both these universities, the CMS was handed to the library from the IT department.

Concordia:

across-campus CMS use: from a marketing standpoint, wanted to develop a more uniform website, increase the number of editors while maintaining design consistency.

The library would have liked to have been involved in the plan from the beginning, because library sites are much more dynamic than other departments on campus – they are constantly changing, constantly growing, constantly requiring new interactive tools.

Issues: the design was separate from the content, library site linked to many more outside sites (and the web services people had put all links across all the campus in one folder), weren’t able to make pages live immediately

University of St. Thomas:

Again, decided on a CMS because of marketing considerations. However, the library is a service point, not about marketing. Campus IT wants control and consistency.

Tips for success: get in early, negotiate flexibility, develop in-library technical expertise, communicate! Make sure you still create good folder structures, etc. even if you do have control over your content.

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One lesson learned: ally yourself with someone in marketing (since they have so much power over how the CMS got deployed) and argue your case for other functions from a library marketing standpoint.

Cautionary quote about folksonomies – “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate conviction.” -W.B. Yeats

Essentials of Folksonomies

• folksonomy is done by users, taxonomy is done by professionals
• basically what it comes down to is that it is metadata that users add
• key – social mechanism for seeing others’ tags

Advantages

• Very simple to use – no need to learn a difficult classification system
• lower cost of categorization – distribute the cost over a large population
• Open ended – respond quickly to changes
• Relevance – users’ own terms
• supports a serendipitous form of browsing
• easy to tag any type of an object – photos, docs, bookmarks
• better than no tags at all
• gets people excited about metadata

Disadvantages – related to quality of tags

• they don’t work well for finding – re-finding is of marginal value
• no structure, no conceptual relationships – flat lists do not an “onomy” make – there is only popularity
• issues of scale – popular tags already showing a million hits
• limited applicability – only useful for non-technical or non-specialist domains
• either personal tags (other’s can’t find) or popularity tags – lose interesting terms. Most people can’t tag very well. Tagging is a learned skill.
• errors – misspellings, bad compounds, etc.

Dangers

• Unwisdom of crowds, madness of crowds
• Tyranny of the majority, popularity drowns quality, narrowing of choices, lost content
• belief that hierarchy, taxonomy not needed

Will Social Networking make better Folksonomies?

• Not so far – the same tags are dominating on del.icio.us
• quality and popularity are very different things
• most people don’t tag, and don’t re-tag
• study – folksonomies follow NISO guidelines – nouns, etc. – but do they actually work to get you where you want to go? – no
• most tags are created by heavy computer users, who love to do this stuff – the regular users and infrequent users aren’t good taggers

Flickr Facets

• his organization analyzed flickr tag clouds – 90% of content falls into 6 different types of facets (place (40% of tags), events, dates, people, things/animals, color).
• Subject matter of photograph was less than 1% of the tags
• If Flickr added facets, it would be a whole lot more useable

Del.icio.us

• tags are not facets, they are subjects
• high-level topics – photography, news, education
• get related terms by popularity, not conceptually
• one type of facet stood out – “howto” “tutorial” “toread” “todo” etc.
• popularity is not quality – dominance of computer terms, tyranny of the majority – “design” – 1 million, “interior design” – 3,909
• top 25 – same set, slight order shift – social inertia
• folksonomy findability – too many hits, no plurals or stemming, personal tags like “cool” “fun” and “funny” – good for social research, not for finding documents or sites

Folksonomies are really good for social research

Improving the Quality of Folksonomies

• adding facets to Flickr
• Clustering tags – taxonomy/ontology, entity extraction, populate facets and subjects, types of relationships
• add a broad general taxonomy of most popular tags – tags as natural categories (dog, rather than “mammal” or “purebred golden retriever”)
• evolve quality of tags and emerging structure of tags – preferred terms, ranking tags

Folksonomies and Libraries

• Three contexts: Library Catalog, Internet Service, Enterprise (Knowledge Management) contributor
• PennTags, Stanford – librarians find good sites to tag
• LibraryThing – still high level concepts, not that much better at tagging, issue is the variety of terms, strange tags – 19,000 tags of “book”, combination of facets and topics, inconsistencies, redundancies

There is a lot of in-between between folksonomies and LCSH

What might work: semantic infrastructure and evolution, dynamic social rules, reduce the amount of “folk” and increase “onomy” (example: Wikipedia hiring editors, ranking articles), also can increase “folk” – not just see tags, discuss tags

“RSS is neither simple nor syndicated: discuss”

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I’m not going to blog all the notes, since his presentation is up on pbwiki: Presentation site

Some points of interest:

• You can analyze trends with Google Reader, find your subscription numbers (this is fairly new), share items (which creates a new page of shared items, and another RSS feed of those shared items – this could be a really great item for sharing information among organizations)
• Tumblr – can share snippets, images, other feeds (Twitter, blog RSS feed, Flickr) – again provides another feed – can grab stuff from lots of folks, again could be good for organizations sharing information.
• Windows Vista has an RSS feed directly on the desktop, IE directly on the browser.
• Libworm.com – searching the biblioblogosphere and beyond. Run search results and then grab the feed.
• Techmeme Meta RSS for Tech bogs
• Wesmirch – Meta RSS for celebrity gossip
• Page2RSS – can create a feed from any page, whether they have one or not.
• Ebsco databases have feeds for searches now – after running a search for someone doing a big research project, subscribe to the feed and email them with new articles that come out. “You look like a hero.”