The future of readers' advisory: Will technologies usurp this role of libraries?

So I am now back from my social media break and ready to blog again, especially about the interesting things I am reading and discovering on the Web. One such reading that I found interesting this week is the article by Grant (2013) on  Trapit (Siri's relative) and an iPad app that uses natural language processing to recommend content to read. In short, Trapit offers the possibility of readers' advisory, a service that has traditionally been offered by libraries.

For the uninitiated, readers' advisory is a service provided by libraries, whereby librarians, based on an understanding of the reading or information needs and preferences of their users, provide guidance or advice about resources or readings that users should consider reading next.  Reitz (2012) explains that such a service is provided by:

an experienced public services librarian who specializes in the reading needs of the patrons of a public library. A readers' advisor recommends specific titles and/or authors, based on knowledge of the patron's past reading preferences, and may also compile lists of recommended titles and serve as liaison to other education agencies in the community.

While traditionally, reader advisory would be a service offered by libraries, technology is rapidly usurping that role. With Internet developments, such as recommender systems provided by Amazon and Google Books, users do not need to interface with library personnel in order to get suggestions about what to read next. Technology now offers to look at what we have read in the past and our preferences, using these to predict what else may be of interest to us.

Going back to specific app called Trapit, I already see application of this software within large companies with many documents. Grant (2013) suggests that Trapit has the capability to personalize business news and internal reports, for employees to quickly access information relevant to them without searching for it.

Prior to learning about Trapit, I was of the view that artificial intelligent conversational agents (or chatbots) could also play roles as readers' advisors if programmed to ask questions and recommend books based on user responses. However, to explain this, I will need to write an entire technical paper and not just a blog post. Sufficient to say that Rubin, Chen & Thorimbert (2010) have already proposed that libraries use agent for storytelling and for even leading book discussions. Hence, agents can talk about books, though requiring initial and continual human investment in time to update and make them useful. Trapit in contrast, promises to require little or no input from staff, but only end users.

To conclude, the readers' advisory service of libraries seems to be one that will change in the near future. As more persons adopt tablet and other computing devices, our libraries will perhaps play a role in training users to use and customise the technologies for content recommendations, rather than actually engage  in face-to-face dialogue for making recommendations of titles for reading. In fact, such services could also be built automatically in our future (if not present) online catalogues and other electronic systems.


Reference:


Grant, R. (2013, April 3). Content-recommendation app Trapit grows up, enters formidable world of publishing. VentureBeat. Retrieved from http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/03/siris-little-brother-trapit-grows-up-enters-formidable-world-of-publishing/

Reitz, J. M. (2012). ODLIS: Online dictionary for library and information science. Retrieved from http://www.abc-clio.com/ODLIS/searchODLIS.aspx

Rubin, V. L., Chen, Y. & Thorimbert, L. M. (2010). Artificially intelligent conversational agents in libraries Library Hi Tech, 28(4), 496-522.

Searching for entrepreneur blogs: Online Techniques

As comprehensive examination preparations are now on my agenda, one of the area that I contemplate is the area of methods for locating entrepreneur blogs. While using Google Blog Search or Technorati is a no brainer to me, (as these already have developed obvious tools to locate blogs), it is essential for me at the PhD level to look into the academic theories involved in justifying the use of these tools. For this task, I have contemplated looking at the theories of Bibliometrics. One such paper that influences my thoughts about the possibility of using bibliometric techniques and methods to locate blogs of interest for my study is the paper by Vaughan, Tang, & Du (2010). Alternately, there is the paper on selective blog mining by Rubin, Burkell and Quan-Haase (2011), which does not purport to use bibliometric methods, but dubs the study as a grounded theory analysis. 

However, using some techniques for searching the Google search engine from  Vaughan, Tang, & Du (2010), I ran the following experiment. I wanted to compare Google blog search with a site search using the domains of two well known blogging platforms, Wordpress and Blogspot. I did this in order to compare the results with the Google blog search. The results (collected as of the date of this post) are as follows:



Google blog search "entrepreneur" -About 26,400,000 results (0.18 seconds)

site:wordpress.com entrepreneur- About 1,590,000 results (0.19 seconds)

site:blogspot.com entrepreneur - About 2,740,000 results (0.31 seconds)

Quantitatively the results differ. Blogspot domain search has more than Wordpress. Yet combined, both produce less than 5,000, 000 results, which is not even a fifth of the blogs retrieved using the Google Blog search. This raises the question as to what are the other domain names that Google indexes as blogs. It also raises question about how do these results differ qualitatively. These are questions that I do not intend to answer just now, but do wish to explore in the future.

References:

Rubin, V.L., Burkell, J. & Quan-Haase, A. (2011). Facets of serendipity in everyday chance encounters: A grounded theory approach to blog analysis. Information Research 16(3) paper 488. [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/16-3/paper488.html] 

Vaughan, L., Tang, J., & Du, J. (2010). Constructing business profiles based on keyword patterns on web sites. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(6), 1120-1129. doi: 10.1002/asi.21321 

Corporate online storytelling: for libraries?

I found an interesting read on movements towards corporate online storytelling this week in my Twitter feed. In Elliot's (2012) article for The New York Times, I discovered that Coca Cola is about to rebrand their online presence as an online magazine. In doing so, Coca Cola's new Web site is to reflect its marketers recasting 'communications with consumers as storytelling rather than advertising.' I quote:

'Just as attention is being paid to developing content ...for brand storytelling, an appetite also exists for corporate storytelling.'

Storytelling on Coke's Web site will be 'subjective, not objective...favorable to the brands, products and interests of the Coca-Cola Company.'

'Although the content comes “with a point of view,” Mr. Brown acknowledged, “we want to be a credible source.”'

Coca Cola is also not afraid to make mistakes with their online storytelling and magazine type site. The informant Ashley Brown, director for digital communications and social media at the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, states:

“I’m sure we’re going to make mistakes,” he said, “and readers are going to tell us.”

Implication for libraries

I think I am ahead of my time in LIS: advocating online storytelling for library websites when the field's not quite ready for it. Currently there have been moves within library schools to dispense with storytelling courses from LIS curriculum and library education (Sturm, 2010). Further, within LIS, librarians have predominantly seen storytelling as a service to children (Sturm, 2010). This is despite the fact that there is a growing interest in storytelling and the professionalization of storytelling for adults (Sturm, 2010). In fact, there is also growing interest in corporations for corporate storytelling (Greene & Del Negro, 2010). Hence, while business schools are becoming more interested in offering storytelling courses (Marek, 2011), library schools are thinking about getting rid of them altogether.



In my view, there needs to be a course within library schools that will deals with institutional digital storytelling. This is because, in the age of social media and Library 2.0, libraries need to move online and tell their stories. Libraries need to find ways of connecting with their users and potential users in the online world. We need content on our websites and a social media presence that is constantly updated and engaging, reminding our users that we are a channel to credible information sources. Our Websites must now be more like blogs or online magazines, with a constant flow of information. We should not only tell users what we have, but also post commentaries and view points, to represent the information that we have within our collections. In short, we need to take a page from Coca Cola's book on corporate storytelling. If Coca Cola is thinking about becoming a publisher, why not libraries?

Libraries are already telling stories within their walls. We have countless exhibits and exhibitions within our walls and some libraries have taken these and posted them on their websites. However, our practices are all being done without examining the theories of good storytelling, digital storytelling and even the theories of institutional or corporate storytelling. My questions are:

• Are library professionals equipped to tell good stories online and offline? 
• Are library professionals able to recognise what stories are worthy of being told?

Storytelling can be fictional, non-fictional or a mixture of realism with fiction as in the case with life writing or organisational storytelling. Libraries can use parables to tell stories that convey a truth about how libraries work. Libraries can tell stories to workers within the libraries or even to the users and other outsiders of the library.  In fact, I have written 3 blogs posts about how libraries can use storytelling to their advantage (See blog post 1, blog post 2 and blog post 3). However, none of these posts even begin to speak to how libraries can use online storytelling to attract library users and engage them in using the library's online or physical services. This is a gap that I am also studying at current.


At least one LIS scholar, Marek (2011) has begun to develop a body of knowledge on organisational storytelling for libraries, though aimed at library managers and administrators (see my blog post on Kate Marek) Hopefully, I will be able to develop a course after completing my comprehensive examinations and research proposal that will also address this issue. For indeed, from the start of my PhD program, my original interest has always been in using the Web and folklore to design a more engaging experience for library users. And so far, I have felt that my extensive readings have equipped me with the theoretical knowledge to do so.



References:

Elliott, Stuart. (2012, November 11). Coke Revamps Web Site to Tell Its Story. The New York Times. Retrieved from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/business/media/coke-revamps-web-site-to-tell-its-story.html?_r=0

Greene, E., & Del Negro, J. M. (2010). Storytelling: Art and technique (4th ed.). Santa Barbara, California, Denver, Colorado, Oxford, England: Libraries Unlimited.

Marek, K. (2011). Organizational storytelling for librarians: Using stories for effective leadership. Chicago: American Library Association.

Sturm, B. (2010) Storytelling. In  Bates, M. J., & Maack, M. N. Encyclopedia of library and information sciences (3rd ed.). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. 

Musings on my readings: Approaches of the humanities needed for designing online library services

The new summer term has begun, and so has my readings on the folkloric aspects of my thesis idea. Generally, I expect my readings now to furnish theoretical perspectives to inform my research. Hence, for the rest of the summer I immerse myself in readings about folklore and storytelling to discover theories that can apply to online information provision.


With this, I've come across a website that I like that has given me various definitions of folklore over the centuries: University of Missouri's Department of English's Folklore, Oral Tradition and Cultural Studies course website: http://folklore.missouri.edu/whatis.html. The site contains a sampling of definitions of folklore from 1884 to 2007.

Part of the readings I've done also have informed me include Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre and Theodore Roszak's (1986) The Cult of  Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking. Both authors are instructive of discussing the need for a more humanistic approach to information. Laurel discusses that engineers designing human computer interaction do not produce good humanistic design that will please human beings. Roszak discusses how information as defined by mathematicians and telecommunication engineers which help to spark the development of the computing industry separate it from humanistic and everyday meaning. As such, both writers have helped me to see that a mechanistic approach dominates computer human interaction and design, rather than the approaches of the humanities.

As such, I see as part of my mission in the thesis to discuss the need for online library services to be designed for human beings using the approaches of the humanities. For my particular thesis, my emphasis will be on discussing the approaches of folklore and storytelling to informing such designs of online library services. I look forward to this challenge. Stay tuned for more.

Trickster folkloric characters and my evolving thesis idea

I read an excerpt that I find interesting especially as I consider folkloric characters such as Anansi, Sly Mongoose and Doctorbird as possible options for the AI conversational agent.

"Trickster has particular purposes within cultural stories as educator and teacher. The trickster typically teaches by making mistakes so listeners can hear the stories and learn from the mistakes so they do not have to make them themselves. Trickster typically has some human and some superhuman characteristics and possibly some animal characteristics as well that allow him to get into situations that otherwise would not be possible thus allowing stories to consider complex cultural, emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual domains." (Iseke-Barnes 2009)

Interesting ideas. I never saw it that way. I saw Anasi stories as teaching us the qualities of deception and deceiving other people which I felt ingrained corruption and 'conmanship' in the African diaspora.

My discovery that Native Canadians (or the Indigenous people of Canada) also have trickster stories also makes my thesis idea more relevant to not only Jamaica, but to Canada as well. Hopefully I can establish that AI conversational agents based on one's cultural stories may be effective in the online world in transferring knowledge and information, and in helping people make sense of their activities or world.



Reference:

Iseke-Barnes, J. (2009). Unsettling fictions: Disrupting popular discourses and trickster tales in books for children. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies,

Preliminary thoughts on creating a chatbot to answer business questions from Jamaican government online sources

I am currently exploring the process of creating a chatbot for information provision, with view to apply it to my thesis and secondly to discuss its application to libraries in providing a new small business online information service.

So far, I am basing the chatbot as a question answering interface to Government documents for business users. My hope is to create the interface to answer questions by users regarding a Government process. In a sense, this moves into e-governance and the access to e-government information/ or simply the access to information.

So far, one of the issues that I have come across is the issue of updates. When basing the information for a business query on a government online source, in the case that I am doing, the particular Jamaican government agency has had a name change. Since the old/former name is in the document that I am attempting to use to feed my chatbot, one wonders when last the site was updated and how this could be a liability to libraries providing this service.

Stay tuned within the next few weeks for more on this matter.

Library online radio

Libraries in the 21st century are now publishers, making accessible content in digital formats. As such the line between libraries, publishers and media houses have become blurred. The main distinction in my mind  is that unlike the media houses, libraries do not seek advertisers to sponsor the information that they make publicly available. Unlike both publishers and media houses, libraries are theoretically uninfluenced by those who are driven y an interest in profit making or profiteering from information shared.


It therefore stands to reason that some of the very tools that media houses and publishers use to share information can be adopted and applied by libraries (without the advertisements and profit motives of-course).On this regard, radio broadcasting is perhaps one such under-explored are for libraries as a way of sharing information and meeting the information needs of its clientele.


The question to be asked is:

    What about a library radio station?


This can be an internal radio station (accessible only in the library) or can be one globally available through the Web.


In times gone by, broadcasting equipment was expensive, but in today's world of pod-casting, anyone can broadcast information across the Web for a large and even global audience.



For Jamaica, radio is the largest mass media that reaches most persons. Stone in the nineties, suggested that  media audience for electronic media grew faster than newspaper readership. He explained that this was not surprising as ‘50% of voters experience problems reading the written word’ (Stone columns 145). Entertainment radio on the other hand had a growing radio audience (Stone columns 146). Stone also felt that word of mouth in the nineties remained a very important communication channel for Jamaicans (Stone columns 146).

Under these circumstances, it is evident that the conditions more favour library providing access to oral based information sources rather than print based sources to reach the masses. Long once declared that the need for  publishing a magazine arises when ‘people of common interest want to communicate information that they find difficult to say in spoken conversation’ (cited in Ford 1969 v). For this author, the same may be true for all print materials. Print publications arise when people find it difficult to communicate intended messages through spoken conversation.

As such there are difficulties in providing access to printed publications in Jamaica. Nationally, Jamaica has little history with the adoption of print based information sources which coincided with literacy skills at the period being nationally low. In addition, by the nineties, Jamaicans were exposed to growing electronic media including radio and television, which further competed with the need to access information in printed form.

If the premise still holds today, that in Jamaica the leading mass media is radio, then Jamaican librarians should not just be concerned about capturing and sharing our print based media, but definitely seek to capture and archive, provide access to and share our orally/aurally based media.

Today the Internet has made it possible for libraries to venture into broadcasting. Before the Internet,  one would have to purchase the same infrastructure that radio stations invest in.
For a library broadcasting programme, the library is equipped perhaps not to broadcast as a traditional radio station, but with the possibility of broadcasting digitally through the Internet, the library is able to venture into this popular Jamaican media for reaching the orally and aurally based folk of Jamaica.

I therefore propose that Caribbean libraries create broadcasting programmes to reach their audiences.

Not only should such a broadcasting programme be one controlled by the library where, the library produces the content to be aired and archived on the web, but the programme should also be interactive, in the sense that persons can call in to ask questions and broadcast their own questions, to be answered by the library experts or for the library personnel to get the experts to reply and provide the answers.

Such a programme should also involve the library allowing users to respond to other users questions and provide comments that help to create new knowledge, or capture knowledge in the heads of library users persons  or provide unique experiences/knowledge that has not yet been published  or documented.

The library could also utilise their radio station to advertise library events and services, thereby exposing the users to what the library has to offer. Further, libraries could utilise this inborn media to show case some of the audio resources that they have in their collection or provide orientation and other instruction to new library users, just like some airports, where instruction is delivered through the intercom/public announcement system.

Since Jamaica has a very strong oral tradition, in which the singer and story-teller are held in high regards (for their gift o orally and aurally sharing information), Jamaican libraries must focus then not on acquiring a largely print collection, but one that caters to the traditions of the nation.


It is not that reading is unimportant. However, if Jamaican libraries focus on a largely print based collection, then whose interest are these libraries really serving? whose culture is being transmitted and facilitated through Jamaican libraries full of print materials, when the masses are largely interested in oral information sharing?





Works Cited:

Ford, James L. Magazines for millions: The story of specialized publications. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

Stone, Carl. The Stone Columns: The last year’s work: A selection of Carl Stone’s Gleaner articles, January 1992 to February 1993. Rosemarie Stone (Ed). Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s Book Stores, 1994.