Information is …Social

…People…Practical

iEdge 2007 KeynoteUniversity of Washington iSchool

March 28, 2007

Stuart WeibelSenior Research Scientist

OCLC Programs and Research

Some general questions on the theme of Information as people, social, and practical

Why people are problematic

Discontinuities in the fabric of social networking • What does it mean to be digitally practical for Library systems today?

The Problems of People on the Internet are primarily problems of Identify

Who are you? How do I know you are who you say you are? What do I know about you? What SHOULD I know about you? How do I manage what others know about me, and what I

don’t want them to know?

Even STILL, No one knows if you’re a dog…

http://www.windley.com/events/iiw2007a/announcementIdentity

Identity infrastructure on the Internet remains problematic

One-off authentication schemes lead to proliferation of passwords and unstable and dangerous data management practices that make identity theft a growth industry

I can’t remember my passwords

Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identityhttp://www.identityblog.com/

Laws of IdentityKim Cameron 1. User Control and Consent

Technical identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent.

2. Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained UseThe solution that discloses the least amount of identifying information necessary for a given purpose is best

• 3. Justifiable PartiesDigital identity systems must disclosure identifying information only to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship.

4. Directed IdentityA universal identity system must support both “beacon” identifiers for use by public entities and “unidirectional” identifiers for use by private entities

Laws of Identity (continued)

• 5. Pluralism of Operators and TechnologiesA universal identity system must support multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.

6. Human IntegrationA lucid model of interaction is important protection against identity attacks. Users must understand the model

7. Consistent Experience Across Contextsidentity infrastructure must guarantee its users a simple, consistent experience across many contexts

CardSpace is Microsoft’s Vista-based identity management system

Informed by the failure of Passport Part of an open framework for network identity

management (works and plays well with others)

Subjects (people who make claims about identity) Relying Parties (individuals or organizations evaluating

claims about identity) Providers (agencies that issue secure tokens to support

claims about identity)

David Chappell: Understanding Cardspacehttp://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480189.aspx

What about Identity ‘Beacons’

Public Identity is a prominent facet of all social systems A Website is an active public identity beacon making

claims:• This is who we are, what we do, what we believe, what

we sell…. Passive identity beacons are also important to us:

• Public claims about other people, who they are, what they have written…

• Telephone books, encyclopedia entries, DMV records, voting rolls….

WorldCat Identities (beta)Thom Hickey & Ralph LeVan, OCLC Programs and Research

20,000,000 names of people (real and fictional), organizations, and a smattering of animals (real and fictional)

Mined from OCLC records (100,000,000 records representing a billion plus of the common library holdings of OCLC’s global membership

AntiSocial Networking

Web 2.0 is hot enough to be Time’s Person of the Year

A recent Wired Magazine article suggested that 40% of Internet users want to contribute content

Blogs… photographs… ratings and reviews… tagging, and of course, videos.

We want to chat, share, recommend, play games, write book reports???

WEB 2.0 use at the University of OxfordDave Whitehttp://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/survey-summary.pdf

WEB 2.0 use at the University of OxfordDave Whitehttp://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/survey-summary.pdf

But…. Is Social Network Fatigue taking hold?

Don’t make me sign in again Don’t make me redo work I’ve done Don’t make me relearn everything to do 5 percent more Don’t make me remember a new password

Do respect my contribution Do respect my rights (to my own content) Maybe even give me a piece of the pie?

Rights Questions: Marshall Kirkpatrickhttp://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/13/the-new-multiply-30-vs-vox/

I own rights on my data; I want to be able to easily and quickly take it with me from one social network to another. If I want to have a single login across those different networks and perhaps even have multiple personas then I ought to be able to do so. No one is doing all of that well, but I expect consumers to demand all of it in time.

When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing - Tim Spaldinghttp://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/02/when-tags-works-and-when-they-dont.php

Tagging makes the most sense when you have a lot of something to remember. On LibraryThing:• Users with under 50 books seldom tag• Users with 200 or more usually do.

When you tag on LibraryThing, you're putting your library in order.

Amazon is a store, not a personal library or even a club. Amazon underplays the social. Tagging really kicks into

high gear when the personal blooms into the social Tags on book pages do not list their taggers. Users don't

"own" their tags. There is no way to export them.

Dog tags and dog house… excuses, excuses, excuses

Michael Braly’s scold about my Flickr pages:

I saw a picture of your dog. Your dog? I wondered what hisname is, glanced at the tags section and didn't see any.

What does it mean if the only metadata on Stu Weibel'spictures is the automatic metadata from the camera?

Technology? Social? Application?

Applications interoperating, or not? Will Lightroom change it? Would a different workflow change it?

Tagging Incentives: Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Blog)http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/comparing_libra.html

• Tim Spalding:• Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it

fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff.

• Joshua Schachter:• "You have to understand the selfish user" - user #1 has to

find the system useful or you won't get user #2. Systems that only become useful when lots of people are using them usually fail, because there's no incentive for people to contribute themselves."

• Jason Lefkowitz, in the first comment on Tim's post: • People WILL tag things if the tags are useful to

THEM. People WILL NOT tag things if the tags are useful to SOMEONE ELSE.

Are we Social or Antisocial?

We are mostly lazy and too busy• Make it as easy as possible and part of a natural work flow• NO NEW PASSWORDS!

The effort has to pay off for US first before you can get to the network effect

But still… people want to share!

Social networking systems need to move from the hyper-innovative stage towards some sort of platform interoperability to facilitate that sharing and reuse

Tools for Managing and Preserving My Web Presence?

Why don’t I have a tool that keeps track of what I’ve blogged, what photo’s I’ve posted, what books, articles, even comments that I’ve published?

Make my data portable, persistent, citable

Give me tools to assign and manage rights

Speaking of practical, durable systems…

Where are libraries in all this?

How are we doing at creating tools for managing and producing knowledge?

What do we need to be doing?

Users and Uses of Bibliographic Data MeetingMarch 8, 2007 Mountain View, CAhttp://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/meetings/2007_mar08.html

Nancy Fallgren summarizes:• Two main environments for bibliographic data:

• consumer environment• management environment

• Authoritative bibliographic data is necessary to support both environments

• Current bibliographic data do not fully meet the needs of either environment.

Bernie Hurley, UC Berkeley(reported by Karen Coyle) http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2007/03/users-and-uses-research-libraries.html

"Research libraries are spending a fortune on creating metadata that is mismatched to our users' needs."

MARC isn't flexible - it's hard to integrate new metadata into MARC.

Things like faceted browsing, full indexing, etc. are hard to do with MARC

We need to radically simplify MARC - we aren't using most of it. It could be used with other metadata, like DC, ONIX, LOM. METS already packages these together. It's not just MARC anymore.

Timothy Burke at the Bibliographic Futures Workshop (reported by Karen Coyle)http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2007/03/users-and-uses-research-2.html

… better off to just utterly erase our existing academic catalogs and forget about backwards-compatibility

lock all the vendors and librarians and scholars together in a room, and make them hammer out electronic research tools… with the intent of guiding users of all kinds to the books and articles and materials that they ought to find

a catalog that is a partner rather than an obstacle in the making and tracking of knowledge.

Timothy Burke at the Bibliographic Futures Workshop (reported by Karen Coyle)http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2007/03/users-and-uses-research-2.html

The tools he wants:• Clustering tools: what conversation the book was in,

where it fits. • tools that know lines of descent; chronology and

connections among texts• tools that facilitate unknown connections • tools that promote serendipity - hidden connections• tools that reveal authority• tools that know about real world usage (those who

bought x bought y; how many people checked this out?• tools that expose the sociology of knowledge; the

pedigrees of authors and institutions

The future of Library catalogs?

Evolving towards the network level Collections linked to people, organizations, global locations,

concepts, context, metadata, and social networking benefits

Fit into the flow of the work and social lives of patrons Help create a scaffolding for past knowledge and future

productivity

We have some serious problems in data design, backward compatibility, and sheer inertia, and we can’t just scrap it all and start again…

WorldCat LocalAppearing soon at a library near you…

Local Content• (OPAC, special collections, eJournals, article level

citations…) Branded version of WorldCat.org

• Global content provides context as well as path to materials unavailable locally, including group catalogs

Interoperability with local delivery environment• Circulation, interlibrary loan, access to other online

content

Customized, branded view of WorldCat.org

Holdings: Local, Group, Global

UW First

Then Summit

Rest of WorldCat

Full record display

Request

Full record display

Access to Online Full Text (via resolver)

Link displays based on e-serials holdings

Displays article from FS/ECO, if available

If not, links to resolver

Peter Brantley: Digital Library Federationhttp://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/shimenawa.php/2007/03/18/d2d_futures

The future… is not only born digital, but born networked As discovery services move to the network there is less

reason why libraries should maintain duplicative local data caches

We need more of the kind of graduates that our i-schools are producing… with a hefty dose of the public services and advocacy that are the highly valued morale heart of libraries.

Engagement in the development of curricula for the skills for network driven information services must be an urgent priority.

Web or Scaffolding?http://www.smart-kit.com/s291/what-spider-webs-can-teach-us-about-caffeines-effect-on-the-brain/

Web is a wonderful metaphor, but perhaps something a bit more durable?

We want more• Coherence and context• Mature, durable environments that will help us preserve

our work and fix it in the context of our culture• Trusted identity and transaction security• Typing

(of resources, concepts, and links… not passwords)

• The iSchool is part of the vanguard… go forth and fix!

Thanks for having me!

Find me on the Web at…

http://weibel-lines.typepad.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/weibel-lines/sets/ weibel@oclc.org