Earlier this month Kathryn Greenhill coined the term “LibPunk” in her blog:

“Librarians using non-proprietary products and groupings not based on institutional alliances to practice their craft and communicate their practice? Open, collaborative enterprises based on not making money, but often on increasing social capital or extending knowledge?”

It’s about DIY librarianship - using freely available web tools and mashing them up with proprietary systems to facilitate discovery of and access to information and social networks relevant to your field. E.g. David Pattern’s OPAC hacks which provide recommendations, ratings and comments (and much other functionality too); and the provision of access to information services within social and personal spaces (e.g. Facebook, Ning, iGoogle, Pageflakes etc.) via api’s and rss feeds.

EduPunk has been around for a little while longer than LibPunk. According to Wikipedia, the term was first used on May 25, 2008 by Jim Groom in his blog. Martin Weller’s EduPunk video inspired me to create a LibPunk slidecast:

Primarily just for fun, but I will probably use it at work to generate discussion around the directions that we should be moving in (not that we all need to be colouring and spiking our hair). It includes screenshots of our newly launched “Library toolbox: Externally provided tools list” (powered by delicious) and references to “Everything is Miscellaneous” by David Weinberger. It is set to the song “All the Small Things” by Blink 182. It’s a DIY dub; you need to run the song (e.g. on YouTube) at the same time as the slides.

I decided not to embed the song with the slides due to potential copyright issues. I did try automating the slide transitions in powerpoint but gave up because I couldn’t get it to sync to the song on re-play. The table below should help with the timings. Unfornately slideshare can’t cope with the punk-kid font, and this shows up capitalisation errors here and there. I will hopefully get around to editing it and posting a better version

Having read various blog postings, including one by Martin Weller about “Everything is Miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder” (EiM for short), I asked for a copy for my birthday. I am currently 1/2 way through it and think that it is set to become a classic, a must read for anyone with an interest in information. It is easy to read and thought-provoking: Is everything miscellaneous? Should we aim to make everything miscellaneous? Should we be allowing our users to categorise everything? How should we do this?

The book is quite challenging. A few years ago I managed the implementation of document management policies and procedures supported by a document management system in the Library that I work in. We produced a folder structure and a set of file and folder naming guidelines. These aim to help us to organise our information effectively, retrieve documents more easily and reduce document duplication. One of the things that we said was that staff must not label folders “miscellaneous” or documents “Joe Blogg’s report”. Weinberger asserts that organising information in folders is not efficient in the digital world. Every person has a different view of the world. Assigning multiple (unlimited) tags is more efficient; file names become less important.

I am so enthusiastic about “Everything is Miscellaneous” that I want everyone in the Library where I work to read it so that we can discuss it and work together to decide how to shape our strategies for both our online and physical information resources. I would like staff to look at the challenges that we are facing and think about how we should move forward. I have enlisted the help of a couple of colleagues to spread the word and help to enthuse other people. So far we have managed to persuade 17 to buy the book (currently we are eagerly awaiting a bulk Amazon order); at least 4 more are going to read the Library’s copies. So almost a quarter of Library staff will be reading the book and hopefully more will join us.

For fun we plan to ask people to take pictures of themselves with the book in interesting places (whilst on holiday, or away at conferences for example) and we will put these into a flickr group. We will be asking staff to share their favourite quotes from it.

Karen G. Schneider’s post at ALA TechSource: “This is, I repeat, a dangerous book. Ban it, burn it, or take it to heart. The most dangerous part of this book is not that Weinberger says these things, and so much more: the danger comes if we don’t listen.” http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2007/05/weinbergers-well)-ordered-miscellany.html sparked off an idea. With the help of a few colleagues, I am going to set up a “dangerous” literature group for Library staff. The group will read and discuss things that it’s dangerous for people working in libraries not to read. EiM will be the first book.

We will also be doing a “dangerous” literature display for the Library staff room, to include EiM and other literature relevant to libraries, the information profession & the digital revolution (e.g. “Wikinomics” by Don Tapscott and “Ambient Findability” by Peter Morville). We will summarise each text and our thoughts on it and will include our favourite quotes from it.

Like Brian Kelly, I came across the University of Southampton’s “iSoton” website via Lorcan Dempsey’s blog posting.

Having had a look at iSoton, I wondered why an organisation would choose to create such a site rather than make something almost identical within a PageFlakes ‘page’ or within an iGoogle ‘tab’ for example (for free)? People could then add and delete applications from their version of the ‘page’ or ‘tab’. New applications produced by an organisation could be publicised via an rss feed (and viewed in the Pageflake or in iGoogle or elsewhere).

The comments on Brian Kelly’s blog post’s include a response from the manager of the iSoton Project.

Personally, I would like to be able to drag one or more applications from within an organisation’s page (e.g. the catalogue search box on my Library’s website; or the new BBC homepage’s news and weather sections; or a flickr photo collection) into the tool that I use - currently iGoogle.

A selection of blog postings re eBook readers and Libraries: 

Kindle and libraries see: http://rochellejustrochelle.typepad.com/copilot/2008/01/never-mind-lega.html

http://freerangelibrarian.com/2007/11/19/kindle-doesnt-light-my-fire/

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/12/olpc-and-the-kindle.html

The I-phone: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/01/the-iphone-as-an-ebook-reader.html

…any phone: http://alibraryisalibrary.blogspot.com/2008/02/3845-cell-phones-novel-sources_17.html

Apple eBook reader speculation: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/reading-steve-jobs/

PROWE has been quoted extensively in this major JISC report.

Charlesworth, A and Ferguson, N and Schmoller, S and Smith, N and Tice, R Sharing eLearning Content: a synthesis and commentary.

http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/46/

I’ve just had a quick go on a few games on the Arcademic Skill Builders site, having read a blog posting by the Shifted Librarian “The Three Wii R’s“.  Arcademic Skill Builders are providing free educational ‘arcade’ games for (younger) children that can be accessed over the web, or using a Wii browser and ‘mote.   There are single-player and multi-player games available.  So up to 4 children anywhere in the World can play against each other.  I’m looking forward to trying this out with my daughter on our Wii. 

I was just reflecting on my “study/working tour” of UK universities ;-D, which began in 1995, starting with the University of Sunderland, when I thought that perhaps it would be a nice idea for someone to create a Facebook app along the lines of ‘Universities that I have visited’, similar to the ‘Places I have visited’ and ‘Cities I have visited’ apps. [If there isn't one already that is.]

Here is a list of the Unis that I have visited so far, roughly in date order (most recent last):

Western Kentucky University, UMIST, Manchester University, Cambridge University, Lancaster University, Bradford University, Birmingham University, The University of Hull, University College St. Martins, Leeds University, The University of Sunderland, The University of Northumbria, Newcastle University, The University of Durham, The University of Central Lancashire, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool John Moores, Edge Hill University, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, The University of Northampton, The Open University, Cranfield University, Oxford Brookes, Henley, SAID Business School, Aston University, Southampton University, The London School of Economics, London Business School, The University of Hertfordshire, Loughborough University, The University of Strathclyde, Robert Gordon University, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, The University of Nottingham, Manchester Metropolitan University, The University of Edinburgh, South Bank University, University College London, Kings College London, The University of Leicester.

This post is further to my earlier post on Journal articles: ratings and comments (7th November, 2007).

Yesterday I attended the JIBS workshop: “Is Library 2.0 a trivial pursuit”. The presentations were all excellent. They included one by Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager at the University of Huddersfield: “Making the catalogue a good place to be: Lipstick, cowbells and serendipity.” I asked the question:

“How long will it be before people can rate and comment on articles aswell as books; and how long will it be before we can find out ‘people who read/downloaded this article have also read/downloaded these articles’ ” and “Are fed search providers e.g. Exlibris looking at doing this sort of thing?” No-one was aware of anyone doing anything in this area.

However, Ale de Vries, Product Manager, Elsevier, in his presentation: “A publisher’s view of Library 2.0″ mentioned 2collab, a beta system that will enable sharing and collaboration between researchers in particular fields. Ale’s presentation also included a last-minute slide (following my question earlier in the day) on how they are going to provide article download/useage information and rankings based on this. So perhaps the rating, recommendation and review of journal articles and papers is not far off.

Personally I think that this would work best as a mash-up of a del.icio.us type-system with a LibraryThing/Zotero type system so that you can save the references to the articles (and add your own tags and comments/reviews to them) wherever you have found them (e.g. within a web-based bib database to which your library subscribes or in a web-journal, e.g. Ariadne) and share them with your colleagues wherever they are based.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Anyone else blogging/writing elsewhere about this? Should I patent the idea?

How long will it be before it is possible to rate and comment on articles and papers and see that people who read this also read…  these papers and these books and want to read these ones?

Following on from “The Machine is Us/ing Us” (March 2007) Wesch’s latest video is “Information R/evolution”: