MyLibrary

I have read with great interest the latest report from the British Library and JISC called “Information behavior of the researcher of the future”. [1] Some of the comments support the need for MyLibrary-like applications.

Purpose

The purpose of the study was to predict how younger (school and pre-school aged) people are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten year’s time. Consequently, much of the report reads like an American Library Association Annual Meeting Top Tech Trends session.

Interesting concepts

In the course of the report, they emphasize a number of interesting concepts. For example, the “Google Generation” is anybody born after 1993. Such people are more comfortable with keyboards as opposed to spiral notebooks, they are accustomed to reading computer screens, and just as importantly, they are constantly connected to the ‘Net. Another interesting definition is “power browsing” — a behavior characterized by instant gratification, looking for “the answer” as opposed to formats of information, horizontal scanning, flicking, and going for quick wins.

Behaviors and observations

Given these characteristics, plus evidence gathered from a CIBERstudy the report outlines a number of information seeking behaviors and observations:

• library-sponsored resources are not intuitive
• people are not evaluating information
• people find it difficult to assess relevance
• people’s information literacy has not improved
• there is a preference for natural language queries
• young people have unsophisticated mental maps of the Internet

Myths

The report also gives credence or not to a number of Google Generation “myths”. Some of those myths say that the Google Generation:

• are a set of “cut & pasters” — true
• are a set of expert searchers — a “dangerous myth”
• are more competent with technology — generally true
• have zero tolerance for delay — false
• think everything is on the Web and free — don’t know, yet

The report qualifies much of what it has to say with two things. First, more longitudinal studies need to be done, and second, the sorts of characteristics demonstrated by these younger people are not necessary age-related. Many people from many age ranges are exhibiting these behaviors.

Future

There are a few other thing in the future environment that need to be acknowledged. There are an increasing number of powerful brands on the Internet: Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo!, etc. The report thinks these brands will become more personalized, mobile, and intuitive. Print sales will decline as consumer demand will drive up the sales of electronic books. More and more content, especially user-created content, will become available. Blog postings. Wikis. Pre-published scholarly content. Etc. Library-sponsored will shrink in comparison and increasingly be seen as difficult to use — not worth the time to use. Virtual realities will be more of a… reality. Think Second Life. Finally, the “Semantic Web” — an interconnected, machine-to-machine language network for making decisions — will either be a reality or more of a reality than it is now.

Suggestions and challenges

Give such an environment, the report outlines a number of suggestions in the form of challenges. Specifically, libraries should:

• be less complacent regarding awareness of collections and services
• better integrate their content and services with the wider Internet
• design systems around user-behavior by supporting “power browsing”, getting away from hit counting, and investing in data collection/analysis
• design systems that are simpler to use
• emulate personal/social searching guidance
• get information [literacy] skills on the agenda
• move away from the one-size-fits all policy for library systems design
• shift from a content-orientation to a user-facing perspective and then to a outcome focus

MyLibrary

Believe it or not, MyLibrary is intended to address many of the suggestions and challenges outlined in the report. Specifically, MyLibrary is expected to support things like personalization, customization, user-centered design, integration with the wider network through social networking sites and Google, marketing, etc.

Again, MyLibrary is about three things: 1) information resources, 2) people (patrons and librarians), and 3) relationships between items #1 and #2. The addition of people into library information systems, coupled with a relationship-building vocabulary moves a library from a content-centric institution to a user-centric institution. I alluded to this concept in an essay written in 2003 called “MyLibrary: A Copernican revolution in libraries”:

Is MyLibrary a “Copernican revolution” for describing information resources? No, probably not. On the other hand, by creating local classification schemes rooted in the experience of the patrons and then describing information resources using these schemes, MyLibrary does turn classification a bit on its head. Instead of the classification process revolving around objective, one-size-fits-all terms, MyLibrary might allow classification to revolve around the patron and their personal knowledge and characteristics. Only time will tell.

MyLibrary as a digital library toolbox and framework allows librarians and developers to harvest and integrate content from the wider Internet. It allows librarians and developers to syndicate content to places beyond the library. By inserting people into the system, it allows librarians and developers to do things like “People who used this also used that.”

Finally, MyLibrary is not the tool to accomplish such goals, but it is a tool. MyLibrary truly does embody the philosophy much of what the report above suggests.

I never did figure out what and where CIBER was.

[1] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf

[2] http://infomotions.com/musings/copernican-mylibrary/

Tags: General Information //