Librarians are no strangers to the blogging world and some of the earliest blogs i followed where indeed written by Librarians. The Librarian in Black blog by Sarah Houghton-Jan a Digital Futures Manager for the San José Public Library is definitely one that i have been keeping an eye on in a Library topic folder in my RSS reader over the years and always find interesting and valuable information.

Recently Sarah wrote a post on her blog that caught my attention about a new book published by LibWorld titled "Library Blogs Worldwide" in which she has written a chapter covering the United States Library blogging community (page 187).

The book was published via the Infobib LibWorld project and is available as a free download or a paperback from Lulu online publishers.

It offers thirty commentaries by local librarians on the state of library-related blogs in 29 countries! The forward by Walt Crawford provides a good summary of the volume and diversity that global library blogs offer.

In Sarah's chapter she asks the question "which came first, the librarian blog or the library blog?" She writes that the librarian did because they "began sharing information with each other and as more of us saw the power of the blogging medium, we began adopting the same techniques at work.". I agree with that answer and it probably mimics a lot of other industries and professions who have adopted blogging as part of their work 'duties' in the same manner.

Another good resource for comprehensive lists of blogs is the Blogging Libraries Wiki and an output of the LibWorld report is available from the LibWorld delicious account where they have tagged all the blogs mentioned in the book by country.

[This post was originally posted on the Synaptica Central team blog]
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fumsi is a digital and print publication that provides resources and tools for people who "find, use, manage & share information" . They are part of the FreePint family of resources for professionals in the Information Management field. If you watch or subscribe to the Synaptica Central RSS feeds (right menu) you probably saw the recent pointer to the rich write-ups by James Kelway also published on fumsi on Creating User Centred Taxonomies. Jame's personal Blog User Pathways is also another must read blog if you want to learn about information management from a information architecture, interaction design, and user experience perspective which i believe is extremely important to do in today's user driven information experiences.

This Sunday morning's reading lead me to catching up on my multiple feeds and one that caught my attention was this article in fumsi by Silver Oliver who has a background in Library Science and is currently an Information Architect at the BBC titled How the Semantic Web Will Change Information Management: Three Predictions

Prediction number 1: a move from the pull to the push search paradigm, or more ‘context-aware’ applications

Today's information consumption, still starts mostly with information seeking and retrieval- processes that in today's fast moving, overloaded information companies and cost saving conscience enterprises are simply not sustainable in order to be competitive. If you happened to be a defrag this year and listened to my presentation on Pulling the Threads on User Data you heard me speaking about the need for context aware applications and standards to make data portable- ultimately leading to one of Silver's first predications that "The Semantic Web could assist in this area, by publishing data in a way that smart applications can take advantage of and so improve smart context aware recommendations. The right thing, at the right place and at the right time".

Prediction number 2: the battle of the identifiers or the age of pointing at things

Recently here on Synaptica Central, Christine Connors- Director of Semantic Technologies at Dow Jones, published a post that touched on this subject titled "Taxonomies are a Commodity " in which she ended her post with the following:
"I actually like the fact that taxonomies have become commoditized. Why? Competition drives improvement - in quality, in focus, in security and in usability. These are areas that the semantic web community needs to focus on - in my experience, security and usability need attention NOW. Good fences make good neighbors, and when we've got good fences, we can make more links and learn to trust. Icing on the cake!"

Prediction number 3: the changing role of the information professional

Silver ends this prediction with the following statement: "The skills of information professionals will be essential in populating and managing the Web of data and, to make this happen, we must make the shift from thinking repository-scale to thinking Web-scale."
Back in January 2008, i wrote a post over on my personal blog titled " Sexy Hot Trends for 2008 and Beyond- Librarians" where i highlighted some of the opportunities I saw for people with library science degrees (and no you don't need to be female and wear purple tights!- i just love that Super Librarian image!). So i obviously agree with Silver's prediction- the skill sets and experiences that information professionals can bring to the Semantic Web can be huge and I certainly hope that the Semantic Web community continues to cross-populate even more with the InfoPro communities- here at Dow Jones we are committed to doing our part to make sure that happens. Working with our InfoPro Alliance Group (headed by Anne Caputo the new SLA president ) we are looking to provide some Webinars in the new year to address Semantic Web issues that need to be addressed in Enterprise- by Information Professionals as well as other parts of the organization- so watch this space for more info as we finalize those sessions!


Image|Flickr|Leo Reynolds

Super Librarian Image above is from from the NJ State Library which includes the great Super Librarian Comic Book . You can also buy Super Librarian gear if you are so inclined.

Back in February i stumbled across a blog that i thought had a good purpose and blogged about the Practical Advice being offered on that Blog focused on Library staff on How to Learn About the Semantic Web. The blog is titled Semantic Library Blog and it is authored by Fiona Bradley an Australian Librarian working for IFLA in the Netherlands.

It seems like i wasn't the only one that found it. Yesterday on my walk to the beach i tuned in to what Fiona had to say during her interview with Richard Wallis at Talis. I enjoyed their conversation and thought the point Fiona made that the cataloging community will be the first in the Library to have to deal with Semantic Web is probably on the ball.

She also posted an expanded post on why she got interested in Semantic Web as a follow-up to the podcast in which she writes:
Beyond these issues, I’m interested in what’s next. I think libraries are a natural fit for the Semantic Web because of its emphasis on RDF, and data and metadata. In some ways it’s a return to what we do best - organising information, provenance, databases.


I am a big fan of what Talis has been doing in the Semantic Web community including their talking with Talis Podcasts and their Nodalities blog with Danny Ayers' This Weeks Semantic Web Posts and always enjoy their often focus on the Library world. (and ok i am very big fan of Danny Ayers (Talis Community manager and his DataPortability and Me Video submission to our project!).

Bonus: From This Weeks Semantic Web Lesson, Teaching a Six Year Old About Triples (not to be confused with Triplets- and why every parent should buy their kids a whiteboard)

302 Semantic Web Videos and Podcasts for review, another $15 million in funding for Twine (and at least three Twines on the subject already for Beta users!), a new ZDNET blog covering The Semantic Web, a weekly post by Danny Ayers with links related to Semantic technologies that could take a week to review, my Semantic Web folder in my RSS reader is bursting and there is just so much more out there around Semantic Web that sometimes i don't know which way to turn- and i don't think i am the only one.

But even so according to google trends the topic is still not at the level it was in 2004 (i also wonder if that is because specific semantic technologies are now being discussed separately from the 'semantic web' phrase?).


So how can anyone that is not working directly on Semantic Web Technologies but needs to keep up manage to do it? That is one of the items that the Semantic Library blog is trying to address for Information Professionals by exploring the meaning of the Semantic Web and how it might be used and developed in libraries

In a recent post on When and How to Learn about the Semantic Web, Fiona Bradley writes:
"it is difficult to find time to learn new things, particularly if you have no way to apply them in your current role. I learn best when I have a project I can apply my learning to, so for example, I started to use wikis in my work with library associations long before I used them in my job."

Great advice and her Blog the Semantic Library blog is going to be a great resource for information professionals trying to do just that.

Josh Catone has a post on ReadWriteWeb titled Will Social Bookmarking Pay Dividends with Search Result Augmentation? that points to research out of Standford University that seeks to provide some answers on whether social bookmarking can augment traditional search results on the Web.

The report titled "Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?" includes eleven experiments using del.icio.us designed to evaluate "different aspects of social bookmarking and their impact on web search". The main end results lead to the issue of needing critical mass which is still not here- the paper's authors estimate that only about on tenth of the web has been bookmarked and tagged in del.icio.us and therefore (at least when using only this domain) tagging is not yet ready to make a significant impact on search results.

However the report makes some interesting points that i highlight below that they believe can still be used to improve how search engines work.

• about 25% of URLs entered into del.icio.us are not seen in search engines for 4 weeks to 6 months after publishing. So one of the conclusions is that social bookmarking could be used "as a (small) data source for new web pages and to help crawl ordering.". I think that especially for niche vertical search engines this would make a huge impact- and could help them win traffic over the general search engines
• Users of social bookmarking sites are probably acting largely out of self interest rather than in concert. This means that their actions are largely uncoordinated. del.icio.us has relatively little redundancy in page information for perhaps 50% of URLs and high redundancy for perhaps 20%. Once again i think that bigger benefits could probably be seen in the vertical search space and SPECIFICALLY in the Enterprise space- where users tend to be more community and task focused.
• Tags might be able to help a search engine if tags can be matched to a user's query. This is applying traditional taxonomy search engine optimization models which have proven to provide great value. The report states that the tags that users are applying are on the whole accurate- of course the definition of 'accurate' is wholly dependent on the users and what and why the tag was applied to. For example, a tag of 'produce' could mean a banana or a command for the user- so when a user searches for bananas a work order to produce an art commission might come up so further disambiguation is the key.
  
• del.cio.us is already experimenting with including bookmarked results results as art of the Yahoo! search interface so it will be interesting to hear more about this from them
  

One thing the report did not evaluate is the display of the results when the tags are applied- which i believe makes a big impact on usability.

The last item that i thought was very interesting (and of course if you have been reading my blog for a while you will know why!) is this one conclusion around Domain tagging in which their recommendation is to 'pay' librarians to tag entire domains.

We also asked our users in our user study whether tags applied only to the URL involved or whether they applied to the entire domain. Our users said that about one in five tags applied not just to the URL in question, but to the domain as a whole. Both of these statements, both in terms of prediction and in terms of our user study suggest that a well financed search engine could pay "librarians" to tag entire domains rather than single URLs. Our broad conclusion was that paying such librarians would be more efficient, and might obviate the need for about 20% of the tags on URLs bookmarked.

I would like to start off this post by saying that even last year and the year before and the years before that i have always thought Librarians were hot (and that i put the world sexy in the title to drive traffic)- but it certainly puts a smile on my face when i see the topic coming up in blogs recently and agree with the trends that we are seeing.

No one can dispute that the skills that Librarians have are becoming more valuable as more and more content is being produced on the Internet and sense needs to be made out of it.

When i first went to Library School i was pretty sure i didn't want to sit behind the reference desk- but i really didn't know what i wanted to do or what a MLIS (Master of Library & Information Science) would equipment me for. I had a strong feeling that it was what i wanted to do so i trudged through all my classes - sometimes bored out of my mind and sometimes fascinated - but always learning important principles of information finding and i admit i cried after my cataloging final (but got a B anyway!). An adjunct professor by the name of Doug Riecken from IBM Watson Research turned me on to intelligent agents and Marvin Minsky and it was enough to convince me that this was the right path for me.

The hot trend we are seeing is that Librarians, Information Professionals, Information Scientists etc. (those with MLIS background) are increasingly being recognized as having important skills sets for dealing with the information overload. It really isn't a new trend, I think one of the earliest cheerleaders of Librarians on the internet was Peter Morville ( a Librarian himself and one of my heroes). I recently re-listened to the Talking with Talis podcast from this summer in which Morville ends the conversation by explaining why people should definitely consider a career in Library Science.

The hipness facture however probably started last year with this article in the New York Times back in July on "A Hipper Crowd of Shushers"- wow cool people are librarians as well!

Over on ReadWriteWeb Marshal Kirkpatrick blogged about the hotness of Librarians twice first with Sexy Librarians of the Future Will Help You Upload Your Videos to YouTube where he writes a sample scenario about how Librarians can make the social content you are producing more valuable by addressing findability aspects. He also embeds a quick 3 minute section of an interview that Microsoft's Jon Udell did on the Talking With Talis podcast (these guys are everywhere!) in which Udell talks about how "the librarian of the future will help a growing number of citizen media producers to classify their online media and get it connected to other related content in ways that will increase its discoverability". And the second post highlighting a recent Pew Internet study that highlights that the Library and the Librarian are far from extinct (although many follow up conversations are questioning why young people are going to the physical library).

So when issues of privacy come up like those that have been raised by the recent Scoble Facebook incident why wouldn't we look at some of the principles that Librarians have established and continue to fight for? Who among them have not, at one point or another fought for the privacy of their patron's data without limiting access to information? Starting in the 1930's the American Library Association (ALA) recognized the need for librarians to take privacy issues seriously and they have never stopped.

As Librarians create and participate in online communities they are acutely aware of the issues of privacy and are applying those well learned privacy skills to these new domains. I just pulled this report from OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World- relevant chapter that i reviewed Privacy Security and Trust provides an interesting look at the topic from a global perspective across a large age set of over 6,500 participants addressing privacy rules (starts pg. 16)

• The majority of respondents feel that it is important to have controls over their personal information on the Internet, such as the ability to remain anonymous, specifying who can use and view it, and knowing there are privacy policies in place.
  
• Respondents frequently do not take advantage of privacy controls that are available.
• Respondents want to control their identities online; they want to remain informed on how their information will be used and they want to be able to set parameters around who can view and who can use their personal information
• Less than 40% of total respondents review privacy policies on social networking, social media, commercial and library sites before registering

I would like to see some of these Library organizations participate in the Dataportability.org initiatives that are starting to take shape so we can leverage their experience with issues of discoverabilty, sharing and privacy. That would be Hot!

(note: i am one of the original Dataportability workgroup members but not on behalf of any organization)

And i just had to add this: While searching for sexy librarians, I found this great site by a fellow Rutgers SCILS alumni and author Holly Black- Librarians are Sexy, Smart, Radical, Famous (did you know Karl Marx was one?).

Super Librarian Image above is from from the NJ State Library which includes the great Super Librarian Comic Book . You can also buy Super Librarian gear if you are so inclined.