The Meaning Wrapper

I was reading about the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section conference of the American Libraries Association this week, held in LA.

Apparently there was quite a spring in everyone's step as rare books are seen to be gaining in importance.

This echoes a presentation I gave at the Museum Computer Network conference in Chicago a few months back. I picked up on a presentation at RBMS by Karen Calhoun from OCLC where she mentions a really important fact about special collections. She labels it "metadata +outreach skills=strategic assets".

In Chicago I billed it slightly differently. In a competitive knowledge economy, when users can go to multiple potential sites for the same content, what sets your institution apart?

My answers are:
- the special collections you hold
- the wrapper of meaning (metadata, interpretation, outreach, education) you put around those assets
- the user experience (including the online UI, the physical site and the facilities).

If you are just putting online material that will also be held elsewhere, people will go to Google. As Karen also highlights, 89% of all information searches start with search engines, not library websites (OCLC report, echoed by BL/JISC Google Generation report January 2008).

But if you can provide unique material, with a compelling user experience and toolset, bringing to bear some of the scholarship that your institution has, then you have a case.













If you can't you'll end end up a warehouseman. Bizarrely both Karen and I used this shot to emphasise this point.

Her slides are here.

Microsoft leaves the field

So Microsoft has decided to stop digitising books on behalf of partner libraries.

What does that mean for institutions who were hoping for a white knight to come along and fund their move to digital?

Well, you could argue from Redmond's point of view this is a good move - the kneejerk reaction to trace the footsteps of Google, wherever they might lead has been seen to be a futile exercise in this case. Being a fast follower is all very well, but where you're going has to make strategic sense.

Also, as a software company, what was Microsoft up to squatting in libraries with dozens of Kirtas scanners?

So it's back to plan A for libraries (unless you want to get into bed with Google). The advantages of this are that it forces institutions to think really rigorously about committing resource into becoming a digital entity and all that entails.

When you have to fund something yourself and sweat over getting the resources to do it, you normally make pretty sure you're doing exactly the right thing. If someone hands you a gift sometimes treat it more lightly.

Looking at the contracts with people like Microsoft and Google, treating it lightly would be unwise.

In a competitive knowledge economy with multiple potential sources for information, why will people come to your site rather than elsewhere?

Why you should care about .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta

It's not an exciting name I know. The sort only a mother could love. But .NET 3.5 SP1 promises to shake up quite a lot in online delivery of rich assets.

.NET 3.5 is a Windows component that installs, amongst other things, the WIndows Presentation Foundation, which Turning the Pages relies on for it's 3D version. It turns your PC into one capable of stunningly realistic 3D rendering right in the browser (Firefox and IE) without plugins.

Three things leap out at me:
- improved speed of startup and execution, so your apps, either as xbaps in a browser or executables will run quicker and things like animations will be smoother. Plus a load screen for xbaps (hooray...)
- cooler 3d effects like improved shaders and the ability to have interactive 2d elements on a 3d surface. More realism, more options.
- a lightweight and intelligent client-side installer that can be bundled with an app. This will be about the size of an Adobe Acrobat install, so now for clients with XP (ie no .NET 3+) we can just run the installer when they go to the app for the first time and they're done in a few minutes

The very wonderful and altogether English Tim Sneath over at Microsoft has a great post on it all here.

So why is all this so important?

Most clients I am speaking to have now figured out 2d digitisation, even if they haven't got too far with it. 3d digitisation is the next frontier. Photogrammetry or laser scanning of objects has been happening in a sporadic way in cultural organisations for a while, but without a compelling way of surfacing this content, why would you press on spending time and money in this area?

If you could scan and then publish with a simple production pathway, knowing that 95% of people could view the content at great quality you might think seriously about that collection of fossils or sarcophagi or sculpture.

Some people we know who are pushing forward great work in this area are 3DVisa, based at Kings College London. There's also an interesting-looking conference in the autumn which could be very timely.

2009 might just be the year of 3d in the browser.

The Public Library

Spring is sprung in London and here's the view from my desk. It's my local public library and very civic it looks too.

I wonder what goes on there as the nature of the use of libraries is changing so fast?

The other week I was in the Wellcome Library having a coffee with a client. The client wasn't the Wellcome, we just wanted to meet in a sympathetic space. Whilst I was talking to quite an eminent scholar, perhaps the leading Leonardo da Vinci academic in the country came and sat at the next table with his cup of tea.

All around people were not using this space as a traditional library.

Last week the British Library made the Times:
"The historian Tristram Hunt said that it was a scandal that it was impossible to get a seat after 11am when students were there. Many people travelling from outside London complain that they cannot get to the buidling any earlier. “Students come in to revise rather than to use the books,” he said. “It’s a ‘groovy place’ to meet for a frappuccino. It’s noisy and it’s undermining both the British Library’s function, as books take longer to get, and the scholarly atmosphere.”

Whilst the BL may be suprised, and indeed pleased, to be called groovy it highlights the changing role they, and all major libraries have.

As content has to move to digital, physical spaces can be used for other things and become expressions of what our commercial friends would call "the brand".

For those who love old school libraries though, I recommend a look here.

Back in Town

I'm back from Minneapolis and the Digital Libraries Federation conference.

Two things struck me. One is the phenomenal amount of work being done by some very smart people around digitisation, metadata and interoperability standards. These people are seriously laying down the groundwork for us all to have the libraries we want in the next ten years. I hope their home institutions realise how lucky they are to have them on board when they could easily take the Mountain View dollar.

The second was how little work is being done around innovative UI design (which I suppose is why I was invited along...). To my way of thinking, how you surface all this content is critical to a users experience and that experience will directly influence traffic and funding. Speaking to some delegates it seems this is something many people just haven't got around to yet.

Oh yes, there was a third thing - if someone suggests Minneapolis as a holiday destination, think very hard before accepting. I mean, snow in May...?

DLF - Digital Libraries (are) Fundamental

I'm speaking at the Digital Libraries Federation spring forum in a couple of weeks in Minneapolis (28th-30th April if you're interested).

The last industry event I was at had a real "bunker" mentality. Budgets seemed under pressure, people felt unappreciated and there was a dearth of great work. Same old same old I suppose, but in the presentation I gave, I tried to offer some hope.

In the library and museum communities we are currently sitting at a happy collision of a burning desire to have universal access to all human knowledge and the appearance of an array of tools that make that dream realisable. The people who will realise that dream were sitting in the room. How much more of an exciting challenge do you want in your career?

As we slowly make inroads into the vast mountain of paper than needs converting to binary information, libraries are moving centre stage.

I hope DLF Minneapolis is full of people excited by the challenge and not those wishing life was like it used to be - analogue.

Seadragon surfaces at last

In January 2006 Blaise Aguera y Arcas sold his company, Seadragon, to Microsoft. He'd built some pretty cool technology - it was imaging technology for the web that came with four promises:
- Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
- Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
- Transitions are smooth as butter.
- Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

Think about that. Pretty scary.

We met up that year in his swanky new Microsoft office up the Smith tower in Seattle, and what he was doing blew me away. Luckily he was kind enough to express admiration for what we were doing as well.

Anyway, Blaise and his team got sidelined to work on the Photosynth technology (post to come on that too...) and there was radio silence for a looong time.

Until last week, when Microsoft released Deep Zoom Composer, a technology that's related to, but not identical to Seadragon. Take a look at a demo: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

Does it deliver on the promises? Kind of. It's all inside a Silverlight 2 wrapper, so when the original Seadragon had 3D effects, this one doesn't. Also, I was REALLY hoping it would be using hdphoto, the new format currently undergoing ISO approval, and it doesn't - it's plain old jpegs. This is a big deal as hdphoto (or JPEG XR as it will be known) offers high dynamic range and compression twice as good as jpegs.

I know the softies wanted to keep the Silverlight 2 download as small as possible, but surely they could have snuck this one in?

Take a look at the demo and mentally swap Hardrock cafe memorabilia for 100 paintings from the Louvre, or 1000 stamps, or the entire works of Shakespeare.

Interesting...