P'unk Avenue Window

Last week, I posted some thoughts on what a modern library should be, and promised to follow it up with a post on how a website could support that mission. In case you didn’t read the previous post, it can be summed up as: learning needs a clubhouse, so why not the library? Of course, libraries have always been a place that supports learning with it resources, but I envision a place where the library community facilitates that pursuit further.

This is where the website comes into play. I envision a library website that has an Ebay reputation system, a Digg voting component, a room reservation system, a Google Books repository, a WorldCat list and notes feature, Amazon reviews and Facebook profiles. (I realize that it can be annoying to read a sentence like that if you do not have intimate knowledge of the way the sites work. However, it is good short-hand for me as I explain what I mean.)

Let me start with the obvious. Everyone assumes that a library website should have digitized information. I do not disagree, and in many ways that part it is a forgone conclusion that sites like Google books will replace the need for extensive physical repositories. Recently, Steven Johnson wrote an inspiring story about how he used Google Books to research his recent book, The Invention of Air:

An amazing number of Priestley’s original writings (along with other texts from that period) are available from Google as downloadable PDFs, with scans of the original page design and typography, along with full-text searching. Many of these are texts that would be very hard to find even in a major research library, and of course, even if you could find them, you wouldn’t be able to search them. (You’d barely be able to turn the pages, given how old the books are.

Online repositories are better in lots of ways. They allow for searching, hyperlinking, multiple displays of the same information, aggregation and calculation to be done on them, and they are more accessible. Libraries should be glad that they can get out of the boring business of maintaining acid-filled pieces of paper and cardboard as a means to preserve human knowledge. If we, as a collective society, can move our stored knowledge to a more searchable and accessible medium, I am all for it. I don’t think it is valuable to be sentimental about the codex book format. At one point, it was the most convenient portal medium for spreading human information, but its day has come.

I think it is fair to say that information that you would formerly access at a library is already online, and that it is only going to get better. With this in mind, I ask once again, what should a modern library’s website be?

Before I answer that, I am going to take another step back to talk about how professors earn their rank and reputation. The basis of the promotion and tenure system for universities is peer review. This process of having other peers read or review your work has a long history, but it is not without fault. At its root the process is intended to provide a mechanism for checking the accuracy of work before it is published. It has been accused of slowing things down and bringing up petty disagreements, but when it is working well it embodies the possibility for mentoring and sharing.

There is no reason why this type of peer-based reputation system could be not be brought over into the library environment. In last week’s post, I brought up the idea of peer learning, mentoring and apprenticing happening at the library in a Barcamp-like style. One way to facilitate that process would be to have an Ebay like reputation system built into the library website. It would provide a publicly accountable way to track the quality and integrity of one’s contributions to this learning community. I see it as a way to bring out the best in people since they know that if they lead a session without doing a little research and preparation in advance, they might get rated poorly. Everyone has the potential to lead a discussion session, so there is less incentive to be malicious. (What comes around goes around in this system.) Pragmatically, these reputation ratings help people make decisions on what sessions to attend or who to approach for information in this community in the same way that people use Ebay reputation ratings to decide to buy an iPod from this seller verses that seller.

Reputation can also be increased by making thoughtful commentary to the online collection. I find the story of marginalia to be romantic and often talk about it. In short, it is the notes that scholars would write in the margins of manuscripts. Other scholars would often travel to certain libraries to read the marginalia of a respected scholar. (In my mind, I envision a scholar making an arduous journey to read the notes of someone that passed away 100 years ago for the sake of sharing in human knowledge pursuit.) A book could exist in multiple places, but the marginalia was only in a specific library. Digital marginalia is much more accessible. (In many ways, the reviews that people write on Amazon products are a commercial cousin to this scholarly practice.) Digital marginalia also has the potential to be voted on. In a Digg-like way, commentary can be rated or voted up so that the well regarded posts rise to the top. If you make a lot of respected comments, your rating would increase (and vice-versa.)

Another component of the system would be a way to track your own progress. WorldCat lets you create public or private lists of books, cds, dvds or articles you recommend, have read/viewed, or any other custom list you determine. It also lets you review it, share it and tag it. Features like this should be folded into your personal profile on the library website. It will allow you to track your progress and also allow people to see what type of interests and expertise that you possess. So for instance, someone may connect with you because they have read the same book. In the course of their interactions they may realize that you have a lot of knowledge to share in the area and then encourage you to lead a session at the library so that people can gather to talk and learn.

You agree and you go over to the room reservation section of the website and reserve a small informal space since it is a more focussed topic. This reservation triggers an announcement to the community of people that have opted in to get notified about this subject. It also goes on the library calendar and shows up on your profile as an upcoming way to connect up with you. If someone signs up in advance to attend, their profile page would also note that they are attending.

I think you get the point.

If you think about it, this proposed website would allow for an alternative university or educational environment to exist. (I discuss this in more detail in my previous post on modern libraries.) The system replaces the functions that the administration at most schools provide. This is not to say that this will replace all formal schools or universities. They certainly have their roles in our society. Much in the same way that vinyl still has a role in the digital music age. (It has a unique sound quality, but it is not a necessary medium for most people that want to listen to music.)

As an aside, I would see this as a positive in terms of quality of experience for those that are part of a traditional university or school environment since only those that want that experience would attend. I could imagine a decrease in the size and number of these institutions, but on the positive side they would be freed from the mission of trying to be everything (job training, scholarly training, coming of age facilitation) for everyone and have the opportunity to focus and refine.

The library would also evolve in new and rich ways. It would provide the physical local gathering hub, the clubhouse, for all of this activity. The website would provide access to information, track reputation and progress, augment the exchange of information and ultimately encourage people to get together in real space.

A couple of things should be noted. These kinds of online interactions can already happen if you have Facebook and WorldCat or other combinations of social media accounts. I know that people are already connecting over shared interests and engaging in peer learning and mentoring. If you are not, I would certainly encourage you do so. Also, there is a good chance that libraries will be able to tap into existing web infrastructures through the use of APIs and plug-in architecture as they build out these modern websites. This will reduce the investment and time necessary to get these websites up and running.

The real value add that the library provides is that physical space that already has a long history with encouraging and supporting self-learning.

There are lots of nuances to the role that the website could provide that I want to delve further into, but I will stop now because I want to hear from you. What do you think? Can we make this happen? What would you add?

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I wanted to add a quick addendum. We are going to be holding a Junto on rethinking the library on February 5th at 6pm. Hope you can make it to continue the conversation.

I won’t bore you with too much of a history lesson, but through a certain sequence of events we (you and I) have taken over the role of industry (since industry totally sucked in 2008).

For the purpose of this post, “media” and “technology” are going to mean the same thing. (Everyone and their mom should totally read Understanding Media, it’s excellent.) They both represent any extension of humans, like a wheel lets us move around quicker and easier, extending our range. Paper, the same thing, you can give a note to a messenger and he or she can deliver your thoughts to someone very far away. All media until the telegraph had an explosive effect on humanity—better roads made for faster travel, the printing press let thoughts travel those roads, money allowed for power transfer and commerce to spread across regions. This explosion facilitated nationalism and shortly thereafter imperialism.

Electric media had the opposite effect, the complete implosion of culture. The telegraph connected people across the atlantic, making global synchronization possible. The radio, telephone, movies, television, cell phone all furthered the trend.

The addition of the Internet to this equation has curbed the implosion, or at least interfered with the trajectory of all those imploding particles. Many of us no longer rely on strictly one-directional broadcast media for news and other information. The internet has facilitated a retribalization of culture, not based on geography, but interest. I can read the hipster pinko news and chat it up with my post-conceptual photographer friends, while someone else can join a vintage rifles of famous assassinations message board.

One more step back before the final step forward. All this media is primarily used for political power, the variable is how it derives influence. Mechanical technology: making war and moving that war around faster. Early electric technology: making sure the war is going well because it’s really far away now. Broadcast electric technology: unify the masses by entertaining them with all the same entertainment, it will create fraternity. Consumerism: the war is over, let’s use all this industry to sell things to people and keep the economy going.

A long long time ago we all made everything we personally needed for survival (or at least someone in the family made everything). Then we got caught up in all that war and imperialism. Then we didn’t know how to make things, but we could go to the store and get everything we need. But we felt a longing for making things. In the last two decades there has been a trend of “creative consumption” or “authentic consumption.” Thinkers like Sharon Zukin posited that we buy the sneakers that express how we feel about ourselves, shopping is a creative act.

More recently this has changed. Buying culture wasn’t enough. We still feel empty. We need to create. We have entered Post-Consumerism. I refuse to buy stuff for the logo, the logos are all crappy. The shoe companies don’t design their own shoes, they have contests to have us design them. The number of tshirts has outnumbered the people buying tshirts.

So, we have in-a-way reentered an age of localized production and mass creation, but not for the same reason. I don’t create out of necessity, I don’t create for the process, I create in order to be consumed. We enter the world of Post-Modernism, scary. We all need a consumer base. We all are that consumer base. I have a flat file full of my friends’ art. Geoff has two. We have taken over the role of industry. I can buy handmade and feel good about it. The authenticity in consumption is restored. But only as long as we keep up both ends of the bargain. We are producer and consumer, so we can’t stop doing either. The economy would collapse.

Thus enter the Weapons of Mass Reproduction. We need factories: magcloud.com,
blurb.com, lulu.com, cafepress.com, threadless.com. We need storefronts: blurb.com, lulu.com, threadless.com, etsy.com, shopify.com, our own wordpresses. We need consumers: us!

The start of a new year allows us all the chance to reflect on all the things we did in the last one. In this age of ubiquitous data collection methods, this habit manifests itself ways that can be exciting and sublime.

Perhaps the most classic example of this is the Feltron Annual Report. This year’s edition is maybe less visually impressive than in years past, but it’s still both a beautiful demonstration of information design and a fascinating look into someone else’s life. Really spend some time going through his data and in your head you might find yourself imagining all those dinner parties, cab rides and drinks out with friends. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a book of statistics worth? Can a year really been distilled into eight pages?

I found myself even more excited about Feltron’s progress with his Daytum project. Still in private beta, it opens up the tools for any user to collect this same kind of data about themselves. Simple and elegant, just like the Feltron report itself. (Mycrocosm is another tool that does this.) And people are into it:

“It’s a natural progression from people sharing things like movies, photos and videos,” says Dennis Crowley, founder of Dodgeball, an early social-networking service for mobile phones which was sold to Google in 2005. “What’s left to share? Basic data.”

Even more: this year, Dopplr is sending personal annual reports to their members that show “data, visualisations and factoids” about their travels for 2008.

For my money, the most beautiful of these long zoom moments come in a form that is a hybrid between this data sharing and those more typical mediums from which it has progressed.

Every day in 2007 my friend Sonja took five seconds of video. She then edited them into a single, linear timeline and exhibited them in a Swiss storefront. The result was wonderfully effective. I can only imagine what kinds of detailed memories will be evoked when she goes back to watch it in a decade or so. Really, who needs a journal anymore? (I’m still waiting on her 2008 montage to be finished.)

For 2009, I have my eye on One Sound Each Day. It’s these tiniest of details that can really snap the bigger picture into focus.

What other year-end recaps have you been enjoying?

Last week, Ed Tettemer (formerly of Red Tettemer) gathered together a group of people for a charette to rethink the Free Library of Philadelphia’s website.

A little back story is probably necessary. Ed and I met last year as members of Mayor Nutter’s transition committee for the rebranding of Philadelphia. (Yes, Ed and I seem to do a lot of re-ing.) Nothing really seemed to be making sense in this effort until Ed and I hit upon this idea of Open Source as the brand and also as the mind-set for Philadelphia’s new administration.

With this in mind, Ed brought together a group of people from various interactive and branding agencies, as well as, entrepeneurs and members of the Free Library staff and board to openly discuss, in a blue sky way, the future of the website. As part of the backdrop for our conversation, it was pointed out that the library is in the process of fundraising for a new addition (see above) to house:

a Children’s Library with a Preschool Center and a Craft Room; a first-ever Teen Center; a new 550-seat auditorium; two new Internet Browsing Centers, outfitted with 300 public-access computers; a new Business Department, with presentation space, online resources and a complete curriculum in business development; and a soaring, glass-enclosed pavilion with shops, a cafe and ample space for community gatherings.”

Instantly, our task changed (in my mind, at least) to be more of a rethinking of what a modern library should become.

Admittedly, I was looking for an excuse to open up the dialogue (as my Twitter post from the day before the session indicates), but nonetheless, I jumped at the opportunity.

Taking a step back, I believe that the post-World War II government-supplemented higher education system that has its origins in the funds of the GI Bill of Rights to be financially unsustainable. Not only that, I think that higher education is becoming less relevant to many people. I come across more and more college drop-outs or those that never attended college working in high tech and traditional white collar jobs. While I appreciate my college experience, I see it as almost a finishing school (in its best sense), and not a job training center.

As colleges become more expensive and government support continues to dwindle, it makes it harder and harder for the average person to take on that expense. (Keep in mind we are talking about graduating with debts in excess of $100,000.) However, the need to be educated has not diminished.

What better institution to fill this gap be than a place like the Free Library of Philadelphia?

If one accepts that conceit that a well-informed populace is vital to the operation of a democracy and considering that Ben Franklin founded the first lending library in North America here in Philadelphia then it is very compelling for the Free Library to be a place that embodies the future of education. (At minimum it makes for a very good story.)

And, I don’t mean as simply a resource (a.k.a. repository) to supplement education pursuits. The library should be a center for learning. In many ways, what I am proposing is an old fashioned idea. I would like the library to be a place of peer learning, apprenticing and mentoring. I am inspired by “unconferences” or open conferences like BarCamp where the attendees lead the sessions. There are no predetermined speakers. It is a great example of peer learning. The library can be the physical place that houses these sessions in an on-going way. Barcamps are usually only a day or two. This type of learning and sharing needs a home if it is to be an effective as a learning hub.

So back to the original point of the charette. What should role should the website of the Free Library play in this scenario?

I want to answer that question in a future post, but let me seed it with this quote from Mark Pesce’s essay Inflection Points:

When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students. The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication. The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?

Technology can be used to coordinate the logistics of this information exchange in the library of the future.

I will expand on this idea in my next post.

To be continued!

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Update: The continued post on what a modern library website should be is now live.

Generating some excitement at P’unk Ave this week is Steven Johnson’s new book, The Invention of Air. From the cover:

It is the story of Joseph Priestley—scientist and theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson—an eighteenth-century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the invention of ecosystem science, the discovery of oxygen, the founding of the Unitarian Church, and the intellectual development of the United States.

I am in the middle of it right now and it feels very apropos in light of the energy that has been galvanizing the Philadelphia tech community over the last few years.

Here is a passage from the book that I especially liked:

You can tell the history of the world through the lives of individuals, or groups of individuals, and part of that explanation is no doubt true. But you can also tell that story with the humans in a supporting role, not the lead. You can tell it as the story of flows of energy: growing, subsiding, being captured, being released. Think of those flows as a vast, surging ocean, and the individual human lives of history crowded on a sailboat in that turbulent water. The humans can still steer their vessel, and exploit the waves and wind that happen to be pushing in the direction they wish to go. But the humans are largely subservient to the conditions set by those oceanic forces.

When I read articles like this latest one in the Philadelphia Weekly, I enjoy putting things in the perspective of a similar long zoom view. In this quote, Johnson attempts to illuminate a facet of the entirety of human history, but why can’t we look at more local developments in the same light? No doubt the causes and effects of these conditions are more complicated, and at a much different scale, than something as huge the planet’s carbon cycle. But so much has come from so many serendipitous relationships between people and organizations, connections that only seem to be explainable when you step back to look at these larger flows of energy behind them.

If this is the same kind of energy that helped thinkers like Priestley and Franklin contribute so much to society, then what will we be able to do with it?

Steven Johnson will be speaking at the Franklin Institute tomorrow, January 9, at 7pm. Hope to see you there.

In some ways this post is a public service announcement. It turns out you need to lubricate your cross-cut shredder every time you empty the bin. If you are not doing that, you should start now. You can get shredder oil or shredder lubricant sheets.

In most other ways, though, this post is really about the value of design.

I always assumed a shredder needs no maintenance. You plug it in, turn it on and it is ready to go. However when our shredder stopped working, the customer service person at Fellows told me it is critical to lubricate a shredder. Critical.

Let’s take a look at how this critical information is communicated. Note the red arrow and gray box I added around the maintenance section in their manual:

The type that explains the importance of lubricating the shredder is in 8 point (or smaller) and not highlighted in any way. If I was designing this manual, I might make everything else in the manual 8 point and make that section much larger.

This is really the same issue that was tackled by Deborah Adler for her SVA thesis project. Her grandmother accidently took her grandfather’s medicine since most prescription bottles look the same. Traditional labels represent all information at mostly the same size. The medicine, dosage, doctor’s name, pharmacy name, and all other information is not differentiated in any way.

Her redesign places real emphasis on the drug name and dosage instructions. The critical information gets weighted more.

In the prescription bottle case, design is the difference between life and death. In the case I am describing, it is the difference between spending another $50 and filling up the landfill with a broken shredder. I certainly recognize the difference, but I can’t help but think that designing the shredder manual better would not have been that difficult.

Once again, design matters.

Oh, by the way, in case you want to know what the lubrication instructions say, I blew them up for you here:

Recently Google Calendar changed the way you hide and show a calendar.

It used to work with check boxes. Checked is visible. Not checked is hidden.

The system worked well for me and I used that feature all the time to hide my civic association’s calendar, for instance.

Currently you click on the name of the calendar to hide or show it. The check boxes are gone.

The issue I have is that I was never informed that this change was made. I just figured the feature was removed. It confused me that it was gone, but I did not have the time to dig deeper at the moment. (For the record, I like the change.)

It occurs to me that Google could have used the interface to inform me of the change.

Imagine this scenario:

You log-in to your calendar and the check boxes are still there.

You click on a check box and a little bubble of sorts pops up and says, “Hey, we have changed this feature. From now on, you can just click on the name to hide/show it.”

The check boxes then disappear.

How cool would that be?

And, it would be informing you of the change at the time you need to know.

If you did it this way, there would be no need for documentation to be created.

To all of our fellow interface designers out there, what do you think?