Widgets & Bundles &Web Apps – Oh My!

Allan R Barclay, Rebecca J. Holz, Christopher Hooper-Lane, Stephen M. Johnson, Rhonda Sager, Ryan

Schriver, Erika SevetsonEbling Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Midwest Chapter MLA/MHSLA 2008 Conference Troy, Michigan October 20, 2008

Current Awareness – Not JustTables of Contents Anymore

Journal literature is nice but slow, limited

Its only what gets published or vetted

What about all the stuff before and after publication?

Its only a small part of what goes on in a field

Its what controls tenure, hence controls faculty

Its largely controlled by content publishers, not content creators

Oh yeah, now there’s audio, video, notebooks, etc

Range of Information Available

“Fixed” Knowledge

Practice Guidelines

Systematic Reviews

Continuing Education

Moves slowly

Formative Knowledge

Clinical or bench research

Case studies

Synthesis of existing info

Moves faster

More scattershot

Knowledge Discussion & Sharing

Editorials

Blog posts

Information Sharing

Moves faster still

Even more scattershot

Can encompass other forms of information

A Brief Historical Digression…

The current publishing and distribution model is a historical aberration from the Industrial Age

The facilitators are often now the bottlenecks

Their business model and your awareness model are largely incompatible (scarcity vs. plenty)

Passive consumption of your own creative works is perverse (and copyright law keeps getting worse)

Performance is the new eminence - reputations need to be retooled regularly & anyone can be a star

Read Glut, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Cathedral and the Bazaar for more

Levels of Engagement with Information

Awareness (“its out there, it exists”)

Acquisition (document delivery, bookmarking, easy retrieval)

Assimilation (reading, watching, listening to the damn thing)

Assessment (was that a valuable use of my time?)

Sharing and synthesis

Librarians can help with some of this, individuals must do the rest for themselves (as always)

Are you an information consumer, producer or both?

Information 2.0 – Shared Knowledge “Canonical” information on level playing field with

everything else

Can be infinitely flexible in distribution, arrangement

Signals intelligence, “big data” metaphors

If this info-singularity gives you heartburn check out the Long Now Foundation for some perspective

Plays on existing strength of social networks (i.e. “one’s colleagues”, “peer pressure”, “keeping up with the Jones’”)

Can also be very iconoclastic

Group and individual tools work together

Have I mentioned lately how tired I am of “2.0”?

Does Current AwarenessNeed to Look Like This?

No, it doesn’t have to bethat bad!

What We Did (and why)

We started with our existing Online Journals list

What We Did (and why)

We divided the feeds by subject/discipline

What We Did (and why)

We created OPML bundles and working links for “top” journals in a

field/discipline

What We Did (and why)

The really sexy part – custom processing of the feeds to add formatting and social tools using

SimplePie

Why OPML Bundles?

Use them wherever you prefer – Google Reader, Bloglines, Thunderbird, etc.

No product or site lock-in here!

But Wait, There’s More!

While we’re at it why not add news feeds?

But Wait, There’s More!

And perhaps some podcasts while we’re here?

What about non-text content?

The UW School of Medicine & Public Health providesaccess to many videos for free

What about non-text content?

You can subscribe to those too!

Where We’re Going Next

Custom bundles, maybe a shopping cart

Smart feeds using Yahoo Pipes

Feeds are fine but gadgets make us giddy

Toolbars are a great community tool

Scripts can add functionality even to other people’s sites

Mobile makes sense for many types of content and communication tools

Creation of group tools, individual tools and hybrids

Avoiding the “Epic 2014 trap”

Gadgets!

We provide a selection of gadgets we’ve createdand other select health gadgets (NLM, CDC, etc)

Gadgets!

Create your own portal, and let your contentmix and mingle with other people’s

Toolbars!

Organize your most popular resources for a specific audienceand pull together disparate things in one tidy package

EBM Toolbar

General Library Toolbar

Levels of Evidence 2.0 Have I mentioned lately how tired I am of “2.0” lately?

Fixed knowledge, formative knowledge & knowledge discussion/sharing have different speeds, bandwidths and usefulness

They all contribute to awareness and tools can let you mix and match them, allowing for constant re-evaluation and assessment

Let’s work on redefining what it means to be “on top of” or “ready for” a field and let individuals decide how much, how little and what’s best for them

Let’s work with vendors and each other to make more, better tools – for individuals and groups

Small nimble tools and über-portals of death can complement each other nicely

Don’t isolate your evidence – give us feeds and APIs!

That’s all - thanks!

abarclay@library.wisc.edu (me)

http://ebling.library.wisc.edu/rss/ (feeds page)

http://projects.hsl.wisc.edu/rss/ (feeds project)

http://ebling.library.wisc.edu/toolbars-extensions.cfm (toolbars, gadgets, plugins)

http://www.longnow.org/ (Long Now Foundation)

Images courtesy of:

PBS (Clockwork Orange - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/theater/clockworkorange_big.html)