Final Blog Reflection for Class

This class has certainly broadened my perspective of the online world considerably. I have gained knowledge in an area I did not participate much and I realize why social media is such “a big deal” now. Prior to this class I did not really think very much of it and wondered why so people spent so much time online. I did not realize how much time was spent on it by businesses, online websites designed to attract new users and, of course, and the importance of participation by libraries in social media.  As a librarian, I can see how ignoring social media would be a big mistake in today’s world.

Folksonomies and tagging was certainly an interesting topic for me. I believe there is far more to the folksonomies and tagging than just attaching a word to a picture, a document, a video, a blog, etc. If I decided to continue my studies in this area, I think I would concentrate on tagging. I believe tagging is not just the word an individual chooses to describe an item and then the modification and aggregation of those tags into similar words (i.e. the gardening); which to me seems to defeat the purpose of tagging by changing a person’s tag. Instead, I believe it is a way for the individual to express his or her own relationship to the item. The actual tag is not relevant because it is merely the representation or connection the individual has with the item.  Changing the word to something else by weeding it makes the tag useless. That’s why I believe it is just a representation of an individual’s relationship with the item. I also would look at individuals’ motivations and why people engage in tagging behaviors. This is a new field of study analyzing tagging behaviors.

Where are we going now? One direction is mobile applications on smart phones. Everyone will have them in the near future (the phones, other devices, and mobile websites). There will be a new demand for mobile websites that users can access on handheld or mobile devices besides a computer. Web developers will be called upon to write new code for mobile websites in addition to “online” websites browsed via a computer. This will allow anyone to access information from anywhere at any time with mobile devices.

I would say the single biggest thing I have learned over the past 10 weeks is that to there is no such thing as “free” online.  There is an expectation when an online entity offers you a “free” service, you do have to give up something in exchange to gain access to the service. I do not think many people really understand this concept and how their own private information is used for commercial gain or exploitation by the online entity. In a way, though, I am not saying this is good, bad, or evil (yet). I think now Google’s business model is (or was) based on either do no harm or do no evil. However, I do see this as a symbiotic relationship between people, their information, and how it will be used by companies in the online world either for profit, gain or a net positive result for the person. Each is living off of the other and one cannot survive without the other. 

You might think that an odd statement that a person cannot survive without his or her online presence, access, profile or whatever you want to call it. However, the online social media world is headed in the direction where an individual’s worth to society will be measured in his or her social worth or capital. Those with higher amounts will stand to gain considerably in prominence due presumably to having a higher influence over others in society. While those who do not participate or those that do but do it badly or with very little influence will be left at the bottom rung of the social media ladder.

Blogs due for July 21

Gaming in Libraries article by Prof. Suellen Adams

This is a very logical, straightforward analysis of arguments for the use of video gaming in libraries. It makes a good case by defining the purposes of the library (educational, social, and democratizing) and analyzing if video gaming can fit all three. It appears it fits the first two most definitely. As for the democratizing and “leveling the playing field,” I am not so sure. The playing field is your entire patron population. The playing field is not level because there is an underserved patron population. However, the amount of effort and resources to provide video gaming in libraries is aimed only at one patron age group. Does the benefit outweigh the cost?

It allows libraries to reach certain demographics or populations that are underserved. It provides an opportunity for individuals within that demographic, who might not have access to those services anywhere else due to economic circumstances, a chance to be able to have equal access as their peers that do. Does that level the playing field of the entire patron population? Yes, because it raises the service to be on par with the other patron populations who are already well served.

Does video gaming allow for anyone to participate or only those under 30? If this is democratizing and leveling the playing field for younger patrons, what about other patrons over 30 who might also have education and social needs which could be met by gaming? There is discussion of caregivers and young children participating in video games together in the library. In addition, the author describes video gaming for older adults but the setting is not the library. The setting is other institutional uses for older adults or mixed age groups for the Brain Age series of games and Wii.  These applications appear to be for other institutional settings but not in the library.  Libraries may need to develop other programs allowing equal or equivalent access of video gaming activities and services to other patrons leveling the playing field, if they are desired. If libraries are meeting the needs of those under 30, what then would be the equivalent for achieving the same result with those who are over 30? I think this is important to think about given our country’s aging population trend.

Information Literacy Games at Champlain Library

I think they authors’ intent was good but there was not enough sophistication in the design process. IL knowledge experts perhaps might have been consulted and who would work with software developers (not students) to create games that would cover the IL curriculum. Using the course syllabus or curriculum, each major topic in IL could have been mapped to a “game” students would play to learn the concepts. It seems like with just the two games, they are only beginning to incorporate a whole semester’s worth of topics into the new process. The authors also might want to consider the students as they arrive at college with a set of information seeking behaviors already developed. This might help with the design of future IL teaching games. 

Social Media in 2^nd Life

Interesting how real-life social media can be incorporated into 2^nd life.  I am surprised a 2^nd life office is used a as “container” to basically keep track of his online presence of flickr photos, blogs, research projects, webpages, etc. It is amazing to see how that can all be imported into 2^nd life. I am not sure how this would help anyone outside of 2^nd life. Inside of 2^nd life, maybe this would serve as a way for researchers/students to collaborate on studies.  Since the information exists outside of 2^nd life, I would imagine the information has a chance of being authoritative, credible and current.

Hegemonic & Subaltern

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/391990/july-14-2011/improvised-expressive-devices

After the commercial “watch this at 1:40 (one minute forty seconds) where he reviews a piece of art work by a “gitmo” detainee. He actually manages to use the same terms Dana Boyd used in her Class Divisions blog:  “hegemonic” and “subaltern” while reviewing a painting of a watermelon with a piece cut off of it. I thought whoever wrote that was brilliant (thanks Ron Weasely).

Social Media in Stategic Communications Contract

Remember back on July 1, 2011, I blogged about a hoax story about how the “government” put out to bid a contract for fake profiles on SNSs for warfare type purposes?

Well, here is a REAl ONE. It is happening out there. DARPA is soliciting bids on a $42,000,000 (over three yeas) contract(s) involving Social Networking Sites:

From:

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=6ef12558b44258382452fcf02942396a&tab=core&_cview=0

Added: Jul 14, 2011 2:48 pm

DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the area of social media in strategic communication. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice. See the full DARPA-BAA-11-64 document attached.
Important Dates
Posting Date: see announcement at http://www.fbo.gov
Proposal Due Date
Initial Closing: August 30, 2011, 12:00 noon (ET)
Final Closing: October 11, 2011, 12:00 noon (ET)
Industry Day: Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Here is the pdf: https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=260a47e592fc4e0bb25207af167c13f3

According to the pdf, this contract was initiated because SNS were causing problems with a recent armed forces tactical operation happening in real time with SNSs providing feedback to those outside of the authorized operation. This endangered the operation and caused problems in real time because of the nature of social media. Rumos spread quickly of the location and planned actions to storm the location. Personnel within the armed forces operation were monitoring the rumors and communications online through SNSs and were able to “dispel the rumors and averted a physical attack on the rumored location” by outside sources.

Here is some quoted from the pdf:

“The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semi‐automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accomplish four specific program goals:

1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.

2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.

3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.

4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.”

Program Scope:

“Technology areas particularly relevant to SMISC are shown here grouped to correspond to the four basic goals of the program as described above:

1. Linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis, narrative structure analysis, sentiment detection and opinion mining;

2. Meme tracking across communities, graph analytics/probabilistic reasoning, pattern detection, cultural narratives;

3. Inducing identities, modeling emergent communities, trust analytics, network dynamics modeling;

4. Automated content generation, bots in social media, crowd sourcing. Recent research has shown that traditional approaches to understanding social media through static network connectivity models often produce misleading results. It is, therefore, necessary to take into account the dynamics of behavior and SMISC is interested in a wide variety of techniques for doing so.”

Freedom & Culture Video

I think the talk about free culture and freedom to do what one wants to say, own or share is very important. These issues need to be looked at because of US laws. We are moving away from a society who believes it has rights to one where it has much fewer rights than it realizes. As I said in a response to my blog about the law library article, many rights we think we have are really privileges. As far as copyright and digital rights management goes, you are “leasing” (Alessandro’s term) or my term was you have a license to use a digital or electronic item you have purchased and it is not free for you to distribute additional copies to anyone else.

Culture can be freely created by some individuals who want their creations to be shared. They might wish to allow their creation to be shared collaboratively with others (creative commons license). This type of collaborative work allows individuals to share their own content with others to use, as long as they acknowledge the creative commons licensing.

Individuals by employing the Fair Use concept can sometimes use copyrighted material under certain conditions. It can help reduce some of these problems. Librarians need to know about Fair Use of copyrighted materials. This is important for libraries to be able to know when it allows individuals to use copyrighted materials under Fair Use concepts.

This is a simplification of very complex intellectual property laws and policies. Billions of dollars are at stake to protect these copyrighted and licensed materials. The owners of copyrighted materials are protecting extremely valuable assets. These technologies and laws were developed to protect the copyright owners.

Privacy and Generation Y

Social Networking Sites and Library Values

Libraries are embracing the SNS and using them to connect and communicate with patrons. This article discusses how willing Generation Y is to share private information but at what cost? It seems the author believes the cost Generation is willing to accept is minimal. I give you my information and I get to use your SNS. However, libraries might not be so willing to give up their own privacy information. For example, in the article, he does not discuss the US Patriot Act and its impact on libraries. He does mention that if a patron’s communication with a librarian monitored by an SNS that would be a problem. The US Government does not exempt libraries and bookstores from the act and the US government has granted its agencies the powers to look at patron library records. Does that include chats on Facebook? Libraries with Facebook pages should consider policies on keeping data available through Facebook’s applications like chat and messaging and anything else on Facebook. If possible, I would suggest a policy of purging Facebook messages periodically (i.e. once a day, once a week, etc.). This is a huge issue and one that the ALA undertakes on behalf of member libraries. See http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/advocacy/federallegislation/theusapatriotact/index.cfm

I think the electronic messages between patrons and libraries either public or private ones would be considered “library records” based on the Act. If so, those messages could be retrieved or pulled from the library’s Facebook page. Libraries using Facebook must consider the implications of such a scenario. However, removing the messages from the library’s page may not necessarily mean the messages are actually removed from Facebook’s own computer network and storage systems (i.e. warehouse). That is, someone may still be able to get to those electronic messages. I just don’t know for sure.

Five Guiding Points for Privacy for Library Facebook Pages

Thanks for this article. It has good points that are a bit more fleshed out than what I had been able to do so far for my final project which is a Facebook page for a 2500 volume, 1600-patron library.  I like the point about the tone. I definitely do not want to have employees linked to the library page as any updates from personal pages could make their way to the Library page. The library page tone should be professional at all times and should not favor anything over another (i.e. preference for Pepsi over Coke) unless you want to alienate your patron who happens to be the local Coke bottler.

As for patrons as co-developers, I am not sure how this will work with my project. Especially giving them trust as to what they might post. I believe it would just be the library making updates to the Wall page but the article says your fans will, too. How much will “fans” be able to post? I will have to work that out through the Facebook settings to see if there is an approval mechanism before a post is made. Much like when a Yahoo group member on moderation submits a posting for review before it is posted to the group.

Applications added to the Library’s Facebook page must be vetted and privacy settings checked before being posted. I was not aware of this until this week when Stacy posted the issue in our group about privacy settings and they talked about applications. I checked mine and found applications attached to my profile that I didn’t need or use (or even remember) so I immediately deleted them.

Law Library Blog Response

Library Law Blog

I just want to say about this blog that libraries are trying to adopt the ebook technology (and digital rights management laws) in a library lending model. This is probably not what the ebook technology is/was about. It is about selling ebooks to individuals for their own personal use, based on whatever terms they’ve agreed to by the seller. For example, I understand Amazon can go on to your Amazon ereader device and retrieve, delete anything you have downloaded. I learned in my colletions management class this recently happened when Amazon realized it had sold the wrong
version of the book 1984 (of all books) to its customers on their e-readers. Instead of notifying or contacting any of its customers, the next time the device was online it just reached out and deleted the book! The book the individuals bought and paid for! What do the e-reader agreements say? Do you even own your eReader or does the book seller really own it so they can do what they want with it when they’ve made a mistake? Selling the wrong copy they weren’t entitled to sell it was a problem. However, taking it back with no notification doesn’t seem right, unless you agree to that when you purchase a nook or kindl. I have never bought one so I don’t know.

It seems like you never really “own” an electronic copy of an item. It is intellectual property, not real property, like a physical book (but even that is just a copyrighted copy!). When you purchase an item for your e-reader are you buying the right to use just one copy of the work, the same as if you had purchased one printed copy of the work. Or, are you buying a single license to use the content, single use at a time?

How is it the laws do not protect individuals but instead the corporations? Who cares about the individual anymore? Not the people who make up these laws.

LSC”SHELL” 597

Well, this has been an interesting “week.” Started on moving to our vacation cottage… 10+ bags of pantry groceries and two coolers of items from the kitchen, plus everything else… Moved right in and got settled very quickly (our third season same cottage). Last summer I had just joined a community band so I brought my saxophone along, too. I practiced, practiced and then even drove home for one night just for practice. It is just so hard trying to remember how to play and keeping up with high school kids. 

This year, though, I came along with my tenor sax, my laptop (a new edition to my life!) and an electronic connection to my summer class. I am SO glad I didn’t take two  (or even three!) classes this summer. I took three last semester. One is definitely enough during summer!  When I hear about the cataloging class, I am SO glad I already took that with the couple co-teaching the class last year. They were awesome, interesting teachers (Rhode Islanders)! I am really looking forward to the non-print cataloging class next year!

In our 597 class, whoever wrote the name of their blog as ‘ a book, a beach, and a blog’ (or something like that) has been my life this week! It has been great having a break from being at home but being in class, I  am never far from homework, assignments, and papers! Plus of course, I try to read a REAL book on the beach every day and try to get at least an hour of music practice in every day (last year one of the neighbors came over. I was so afraid he was going to complain, I only would open the window to talk to him. He was so elderly, he liked the old style Sousa type pieces I was practicing. He said it was just beautiful and here I was thinking he was about to complain about noise or something). Anyway, I did take practicing yesterday off.

Today, I started up practicing early to get my teenager up. She was supposed to go snorkeling with her other parent and she was sleeping the day away. My band teacher would be happy to know I was practicing the beautiful French piece, In the Forest of the King. He wants us to play that coming up in just one week! I think our band will be ready. But seriously, the band is aimed at adults but a lot of high school students really make up the band. They are just the ringers, I think. But if it wasn’t for them, I’d be a bit lost. They are making my playing a lot better and are ready anytime I need help trying to figure out what I need to know playing in a band (again)?! (Now what is an Eb flat scale for a Bb flat tenor sax?) 24 years later. Sometimes, things just intervene and things don’t always work out as you planned unless you are privileged maybe or something else entirely has your life completely planned for you. Anyway, I never meant to give up music, it was just taken away but recently given back.

Our time away will be shorter than usual this year but we will make up for it later in the summer! It seems your kids activities (definitely a good thing) have a way of shaping how your summer will go. But in the long run, having your kids with excellent, appropriate activities always filling their time far outweighs them having nothing to do. Our middle high schooler is looking forward to her upcoming Cornell  undergraduate class on Appledore , one of the islands part of the NH-ME “Isle of Shoals” chain (it’s very small). It appears like everything else between Maine and NH, the shoals are also divided straight down the “line” some on one side of Maine and some on NH! I still think the “Portsmouth” Naval Shipyard belongs to NH when it is claimed by Maine. Why on earth would the “Portsmouth” Naval Shipyard be in Maine (on a Maine island claimed by Maine) in the middle of the river which divides the two states, since Portsmouth is NH’s famous historic seaport?

Our goal now is to enjoy the rest of the week and to eat all the food we brought/bought so we don’t have to lug anything home. So much for eating out!!! Wednesday I will work on my paper and final project (and practice, even if the sun is shining). I took last night off!

Use of Facebook in Academic Health Sciences Libraries

It seems that all these articles about social media sites like Facebook are victim of “short-term-itis.” That is, something that may be true today, but six months from now, it might no longer be the case. Everyone is trying to examine, study and define a moving target. For example, in this article it is generally discussed that Facebook use in academic health science libraries is not very popular. As the authors noted students did not use Facebook maybe to their maturity which would lead an academic health sciences library not to invest in Facebook. However, it might be the case that this demographic or current batch of medical students are just not as invested in Facebook as medical students just a year or two from now might be. These upcoming students might have begun using Facebook in high school and may use it differently when they become the “mature” medical students in the near term.