On Wednesday 22 November 2006 I gave a talk on “Web 2.0: What Is It, How Can I Use It, How Can I Deploy It?” at an ASLIB Engineering Group seminar on Engineering information: today and tomorrow. This was a very successful event, and provided further evidence that academic librarians are aware of a change in the Web environment and that this will necessitate a change in their culture.
The event was aimed at engineering librarians working in academic, public and private institutions. The sessions looked at present and future resources available to the engineering community, with talks covering the needs of users of engineering library services and some of the resources available, including grey literature and validated data,ways of keeping up to date and the importance of an information literacy strategies, especially in a Web 2.0 environment, with a growth in the amount of user-generated content. In addition to my talk, which provided an overview of Web 2.0, Roddy MacLeod gave an amusing and informative talk on a user-centred vision for access to resources in which the technologies become invisible, and the users are presented with a user-friendly interface. This talk was based on a proposal for the ‘puntasticly’ named TicToC proposal (ToC referring, of course, to Table of Contents), Paul Needham, an electronic information specialist at King Norton Library, Cranfield University spoke on “From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 in the engineering information world – yesterday, today and tomorrow” (and has demonstrated his willingness to evaluate emerging technologies by uploading his slides to Slideshare).
As one might expect at an event aimed at librarians, there was much discussion about the quality of resources. This discussion reminded me that we had this discussion over 10 years ago, when Web services first became widely-deployed within our institutions. I think there is now an awareness that, rather than seeking to control access to resources (“you’ll be safe if you stick to resources catalogued by services such as Intutute“) we know that users will wish to seek resources for themselves (and, indeed, carry out other transactions on the Web, whether that’s buying goods on eBay, or even seeking a partner on an Internet dating site). From these examples, we can clearly see the importance of providing our users with the skills to evaluate and select information for themselves.
It was very pleasing to attend an event in which there seemed to be an awareness of a changing culture and the need for a profession to engage in such changes. It also brought home to me a valuable aspect of the way that the ‘Web 2.0’ term embraces the need to ‘trust the user’. This sentiment was made by several people at the event – if ‘Web 2.0’ had been defined only in terms of technologies such as Blogs and Wikis I think we would have lost the opportunity to highlight trust issues in this way.
A suggestion I made before leaving:
Look back at previous projects (e,g. projects funded by the JISC eLib of IE/DNER programmes, for example, or projects funded internally) and give some honest thought to the successes but – more importantly – failures and limitations of the projects. And think about how you might do things differently. As Paul Needham described, there are so many (now aging) experts in the defence industry. Being able to tap into and collate such expertise can (in an example mentioned by Paul) potentially save millions of points. So look to not just update an aging service with an AJAX interface, but at tools such as Blogs and Wikis to allow the users to provide information for themselves.
My presentation on Journal Current Awareness is aalso vailable on Slideshare at:
http://slideshare.net/libram99/journal-current-awareness
One thing I came away with from the meeting was the confirmation that different subject communities have different needs.
For example: it was pointed out that, in some instances, the last thing that many engineers want to do is share their information. Rather, they want to exploit their own ideas.
Also, think of ‘grey literature’ which is important to engineering, and which was discussed at various times. Technical reports, Standards, patents, etc. Bibliographic control of Technical Reports in the UK is very loose, despite th eimportance of such reports. Often, Patent descriptions are not designed to help the searcher, but rather to protect ideas.
Also, think of blogging, engineering and information professionals. It would be much more difficult for an information professional to write a blog which discusses the latest engineering news, than it is for an information professional to write a blog in, say, the social sciences. The latter could take newspaper headlines in politics, economics and society and summarise them, point to relevant websites, etc, and the results would be quite useful. Not too difficult if you have some knowledge of the subjects and an information professional’s knowledge of sources and search techniques. What is the equivalent for the engineering information professional – there’s simply too much very detailed news out there, that will only be of interest to relatively few people specialising in those areas. The equivalent would be, really, a trade journal. There are plenty of those in engineering. Maybe this is why there are far fewer blogs in this area.
WRT previous projects, the important thing is not to produce even more information which people don’t have time to consume, but to find ways to personalise it, so that information overload is reduced. That’s surely where the future lies.
Hi Roddy
Yes, I would agree with you – I also came away from the meeting with a better understanding of the differing needs within the community. There’s a danger of getting too caught up with the open standards, open source, open access; Web 2.0, etc. rhetoric – and ignoring important sectors within HE for whom such isues may not be of interest.
The discussion on grey literature was also very interesting. This is very relevant within the Web 2.0 environment – how will people find resources contained in Blogs, Wiki, IM transcripts – and even photos of flip charts held on Flickr.
I’m not sure about your final point, though. In a teaching context, I would argue that it is important for students to be responsible for generating content and not just being consumers. Simillarly there will be many dsiciplines in which Blogs and Wikis will play an important role. Rather than seeking to minimise the production of such content, for me the import think is being able to find it.
Bring on the librarians who know about Technorati and Google Blog search, and not just Google and Google SCholar!