I had the recent honor, privilege, and pleasure of attending WiLSWorld (July 21-22, 2010 in Madison, Wisconsin), and this posting outlines my experiences there. In a sentence, I was pleased so see the increasing understanding of “discovery” interfaces defined as indexes as opposed to databases, and it is now my hope we — as a profession — can move beyond search & find towards use & understand.

Wednesday, July 21

With an audience of about 150 librarians of all types from across Wisconsin, the conference began with a keynote speech by Tim Spalding (LibraryThing) entitled “Social cataloging and the future”. The heart of his presentation was a thing he called the Ladder of Social Cataloging which has six “rungs”: 1) personal cataloging, 2) sharing, 3) implicit social cataloging, 4) social networking, 5) explicitly social cataloging, and 6) collaboration. Much of what followed were demonstrations of how each of these things are manifested in LibraryThing. There were a number meaty quotes sprinkled throughout the talk:

…We [LibraryThing] are probably not the biggest book club anymore… Reviews are less about buying books and more about sharing minds… Tagging is not about something for everybody else, but rather about something for yourself… LibraryThing was about my attempt to discuss the things I wanted to discuss in graduate school… We have “flash mobs” cataloging peoples’ books such as the collections of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ernest Hemingway, etc… Traditional subject headings are not manifested in degrees; all LCSH are equally valid… Library data can be combined but separate from patron data.

I was duly impressed with this presentation. It really brought home the power of crowd sourcing and how it can be harnessed in a library setting. Very nice.

Peter Gilbert (Lawrence University) then gave a presentation called “Resource discovery: I know it when I see it”. In his words, “The current problem to solve is to remove all of the solos: books, articles, digitized content, guides to subjects, etc.” The solution, in his opinion, is to implement “discovery systems” similar to Blacklight, eXtensible Catalog, Primo & Primo Central, Summon, VUFind, etc. I couldn’t have said it better myself. He gave a brief overview of each system.

Ken Varnum (University of Michigan Library) described a website redesign process in “Opening what’s closed: Using open source tools to tear down vendor silos”. As he said, “The problem we tried to solve in our website redesign was the overwhelming number of branch library websites. All different. Almost schizophrenic.” The solution grew out of a different premise for websites. “Information not location.” He went on to describe a rather typical redesign process complete with focus group interviews, usability studies, and advisory groups, but there were a couple of very interesting tidbits. First, inserting the names and faces of librarian in search results has proved popular with students. Second, I admired the “participatory design” process he employed. Print a design. Allow patrons to use pencils to add, remove, or comment on aspects of the layout. I also think the addition of a professional graphic designer helped their process.

I then attended Peter Gorman‘s (University of Wisconsin-Madison) “Migration of digital content to Fedora”. Gorman had the desire to amalgamate institutional content, books, multimedia and finding aids (EAD files) into a single application… yet another “discovery system” description. His solution was to store content into Fedora, index the content, and provide services against the index. Again, a presenter after my own heart. Better than anyone had done previously, Gorman described Fedora’s content model complete with identifiers (keys), a sets of properties (relationships, audit trails, etc.), and a data streams (JPEG, XML, TIFF, etc.). His description was clear and very easy to digest. The highlight was a description of Fedora “behaviors”. These are things people are intended to do with data streams. Examples include enlarging a thumbnail image or transforming a online finding aid into something designed for printing. These “behaviors” are very much akin — if not exactly like — the “services against texts” I have been advocating for a few years.

Thursday, July 22

The next day I gave a presentation called “Electronic texts and the evolving definition of librarianship”. This was an extended version of my presentation at ALA given a few weeks ago. To paraphrase, “As we move from databases towards indexes to facilitate search, the problems surrounding find are not as acute. Given the increasing availability of digitized full text content, library systems have the opportunity to employ ‘digital humanities computing techniques’ against collections and enable people to do ‘distant reading’.” I then demonstrated how the simple counting of words and phrases, the use of concordances, and the application of TFIDF can facilitate rudimentary comparing & contrasting of corpora. Giving this presentation was an enjoyable experience because it provided me the chance to verbalize and demonstrate much of my current “great books” research.

Later in the morning helped facilitate a discussion on the process a library could go through to implement the ideas outlined in my presentation, but the vast majority of people attended the presentation by Keith Mountin (Apple Computer, Inc.) called “The iPad and its application in libraries”.

Conclusion

Madison was just as nice as I remember. Youthful. Liberal. Progressive. Thanks go to Deb Shapiro and Mark Beatty. They invited me to sit with them on the capitol lawn and listen to the local orchestra play Beatles music. The whole thing was very refreshing.

The trip back from the conference was a hellacious experience in air travel, but it did give me the chance to have an extended chat with Tim Spalding in the airport. We discussed statistics and statistical measures that can be applied to content we are generating. Many of the things he is doing with metadata I may be able to do with full text. The converse is true as well. Moreover, by combining our datasets we may find that the sum is greater than the parts — all puns intended. Both Tim and I agreed this is something we should both work towards. Afterwards I ate macaroni & cheese with a soft pretzel and a beer. It seemed apropos for Wisconsin.

This was my second or third time attending WiLSWorld. Like the previous meetings, the good folks at WiLS — specifically Tom Zilner, Mark Beatty, and Shirley Schenning — put together a conference providing librarians from across Wisconsin with a set of relatively inexpensive professional development opportunities. Timely presentations. Plenty of time for informal discussions. All in a setting conducive to getting away and thinking a bit outside the box. “Thank you.”