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Intermediation in the new user environment

Chris Beckett

The content of this presentation is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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Agenda

The Good Old DaysThe Dysfunctional Present

– The Library Response – ish– Some conventional responses for

Publishers

A Digression on FeaturitisSocial Software and the Web 2.0

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When Librarians organised the library……..

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Library collections assessed by:

QualityComprehensivenessRelevance to the institution

and organised by:Subject

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When Publisher’s organise the library …….

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Wiley

Silo

Springer

Silo

Elsevier

Silo

Blackwell

Silo

Sage

Silo

T&F Informa

Silo

Online Public Access Catalogues (pre-date digital)

Link resolvers

A-Z lists

A&I indexes (pre-date digital)

Federated Search Engines

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David Seaman -DLF

Every publisher (and library production unit and web archive?) is an island; we produce silos of data that play badly with others.

Little ability to work with content or even metadata cross-publisher and cross-aggregator. Or cross-library.

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David Seaman -DLF

The need to have content that encourages local re-organization and creation of services, and that permits “beyond browsing and searching” engagement by individual users (NB MASHUPS AND SOCIAL SOFTWARE)

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It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to find a library website that is usable and friendly and provides services rather than talking about them in weird library jargon.

THE USER IS NOT BROKEN: A MEME MASQUERADING AS A MANIFESTO K.G. Schneiderhttp://freerangelibrarian.com/2006/06/the_user_is_not_broken_a_meme.php

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It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to find a publisher website that is usable and friendly and provides services that haven’t been co-opted by a weird marketing agenda.

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Possible Navigation Route Target Content

The Publisher’s view of the User in their site

Possible Navigation Route Target Content

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Bypassing On-site Navigation

Search EngineRSS

Readers and BlogsLink Servers

Possible NavigationRoute

Target Content Unused Navigation

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Link servers don’t really work that well……

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Cal State San Marcos and Cal State Northridge study

52% of the time users just closed the window

Still too complicated – compared to Google

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Bypassing On-site Navigation

Search EngineRSS

Readers and BlogsLink Servers

Possible NavigationRoute

Target Content Unused Navigation

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Some conventional solutions for publishers…..

Develop an article level (i.e. within the full text) branding strategy, to compensate for the bypassing of branding that tends to result from deep linking by link servers.

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Some conventional solutions for publishers…..

Review metadata strategy to ensure that it includes abstract, subject, ISSN and page number information in its z39.50 records– So that Federated search engines

present your content in the best possible ways

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Some conventional solutions for publishers…..

Features are best used if placed on the landing page – i.e. at article level

Out of the ordinary features will not necessarily be tried

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AND…..Nielsen’s Law

“Users spend most of their time on other sites and form their expectations based on their aggregated user experience.” http://www.useit.com/jakob/

Most of the interfaces to your content that your users will encounter will be those created by others.

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Featuritis

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The USB Hotplate

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Headlight LCDs: 2 Fast 2 Useless

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High-Tech Carpet Knows You are

Fat, Old

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Some advice for Publishers:

Ignore the competition

From Creating passionate users blog: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/

From Creating passionate users blog: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/

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But where is the “iPod”?

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But where is the “iPod”?

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The User as the intermediaryweb 2.0

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DEMO

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Implications

What person X is bloggingWhat person X is bookmarking- on several social

bookmarking sites (e.g. del.isio.us, Connotea)What person X is listening to (e.g. Last.FM)What person X is taking pictures of (e.g. Flickr)What person X's travel schedule is (e.g. iCal)What books X is reading or planning on reading

(e.g. Amazon wish lists)

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Implications (Academic)

See the realtime annotated bibliography of Dr. W

Show all the ways in which people that you trust have categorized resource X

See how your taxonomy compares to the taxonomy of Dr. Y

See all the resources that your trusted colleagues are categorizing as Z

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Mash Ups

Google Earth and Ant Web

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Mash-Up of Google Earth and Ant Web

User driven and controlled Based on open API’s that allow in simple terms Google Earth and the AntWeb datasets to interact in real time

DEMO

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Conclusions

For all but the biggest players the users side tools will disintermediate the intermediaries

The biggest players will survive by adding utilities around the content

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References

From Journals in the Time of Google By Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born — April 15, 2006 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6321722.html

Euan Semple on social computing at BBC [MP3, 24min, 11,1MB] The Myths and Realities of SFX in Academic Libraries by Jina

Choi Wakimoto, David S. Walker, and Katherine S. Dabbour:The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 32, Number 2, pages 127–136

http://www.antweb.org/nature_mashups_439006a1.pdf

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The End