Using Tech to Engage Library Users Sparks ITHAKA Conference
By David Rapp Sep 22, 2011A focus on using technology to engage with library users kept participants tuned into the second day of the nonprofit ITHAKA's Sustainable Scholarship Conference 2011 in New York on September 20. Thoughts on how to find out what users want, how to provide more materials for them, and how to implement new ways to interact with those materials, coursed through a program that ran the gamut from public-domain accessibility to ebook searchability to crowdsourcing—all keenly illustrating how cutting-edge tech is transforming the library and publishing worlds.
Looking closely
What could have been the motto of the day—listen to users, and learn from them—was the simple but powerful message delivered by Susan Gibbons, currently the university librarian at Yale.
She got granular about gauging user needs as she spoke about a study she coauthored while associate dean at the University of Rochester, NY (see LJ feature here). She pointed out that that it was important to realize the difference between what a librarian perceives users' needs to be, and what their actual needs are. A key is simple communication—directly asking users what they want, and then finding the best way to provide it.
Those needs often intersect with technology. In a survey, for example, the library found that many graduate students were asking for access to online citation management tools, such as EndNote and RefWorks, but once offered, they largely went unused, Gibbons said. Looking closer and asking students questions allowed the library to understand that it had introduced the new tools at the wrong time of the academic year—after the students were embroiled in their dissertations and unwilling to alter their work methods. The library reintroduced the tools at the very beginning of the academic year, and they were then used extensively.
It's not enough to simply listen, however, Gibbons pointed out. If users' feedback doesn't lead to "real changes," she said, "they are going to stop participating."
Giving users what they want
In order to meet user needs, libraries have to have the materials that users want. Content in the public domain, when combined with search tools, may help provide them. The opening panel of the day focused on how libraries and publishers can make more public-domain materials available, in a way that is useful to users—a much trickier proposition than the slogan "information wants to be free" would suggest. As more than one panelist pointed out, it costs money to digitize content and make it searchable and useful.
Issues surrounding copyright had particular resonance for panelist Paul Courant, university librarian at the University of Michigan (UM), in light of the recent suit brought by the Authors Guild and others against the HathiTrust, UM, and four other universities, which charged them with infringement for, in part, digitizing in-copyright works.
Clarifying that the university's orphan works project would be continuing, though it would be slowing down so that the university could revise its processes, as he told LJ last week, he also reaffirmed UM's commitment to making public-domain materials available to the public. UM has, in conjunction with Google Books, digitized many of its public-domain works—but digitization on such a scale may be harder for smaller libraries. "It's expensive to do this stuff, and it's expensive at every turn," said Courant.
Partnerships can help offset costs. Ellen Dunlap, president of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, and a former director of the Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, has tackled its early American materials' digitization by partnering with several commercial providers, including 11 digital for-profit publishers. "We simply didn't have the resources to digitize it ourselves," she said.
Once digitized, material has to be usable in a tool, which is a role publishers can play, noted Alexander Street Press president Stephen Rhind-Tutt. He noted that even if materials are free, they may not be very useful without additional tools to analyze it, transcribe it and make it searchable—all features that add value, and that for-profit interests can bring to the table. "When all is said and done, it is extremely important for us to work together collaboratively," he said.
And public domain does not mean free, of course. Robert Wolven, the associate university librarian for bibliographic services and collection development at Columbia University Libraries, said that although Columbia owns a large amount of public-domain content—and spends about $500,000 per year on digitizing that content—it also pays about $1 million annually for access to public-domain materials from other sources.
Although it was not greatly touched upon by panelists, the JSTOR digital archive, part of ITHAKA, recently made about 500,000 public-domain works freely available for use by "anyone, without registration and regardless of institutional affiliation." But, much like Wolven and other ITHAKA Conference panelists, JSTOR has pointed out the cost of providing access to public-domain materials. In a FAQ released earlier this month, JSTOR wrote: "We do not believe that just because something is in the public domain, it can always be provided for free. There are costs associated with selection, digitization, access provision, preservation, and a wide variety of services that are necessary for content to reach those who need it."
Reading nonlinearly
But what happens when users have the materials they need? How they can the engage with it more fruitfully? One panel tackled how technology can allow users to read materials in profoundly different ways—freeing them from the need to read books cover-to-cover by enabling them able to jump to a section or reference they need instantly.
Barbara Rockenbach, director of the humanities and history libraries at Columbia University, talked about how in multiple surveys, students had said that ebooks were more useful than print books when it came to finding references. Indeed, many people—and academics in particular—use books in specific, directed ways, that can be assisted and accelerated by technology. Publishers, she said, should be encouraged to produce text in flexible digital formats to encourage these uses, and help students imagine new possibilities for research.
A tool can change the relationship between user and text in subtle ways. One example is the popular web app Readability, created in 2009. The app allows web users to extract stories off of web pages, and then retools them into an easy-to-read format for later reading. Seventy percent of the revenues the company collects for the fee-based version of the Readability app are shared with publishers, said Richard Ziade, a partner at the consultancy Arc90, which makes the web application.
The Readability app has been integrated into several prominent tools, including the Safari web browser and Amazon's Kindle ereader, and since its launch more than 25 million unique articles have been accessed using it. The app does appear to be a success, and it points to the overwhelming popularity of "free" content on the web.
But what does such popularity mean for publishing, and libraries? Ziade said that such popularity may indicate that the notion of paying for content—particularly magazine content—will give way to a model in which readers pay for access instead, in the vein of Netflix's video streaming service.
Crowdsourcing: the next generation
The most radical notions of how to engage users, tapped toward the end of day, explored the concept of crowdsourcing—that is, using technology to enable members of the public to volunteer their time for massive online projects.
Alistair Dunning, the digitization program manager at UK-based advisory committee JISC, likened the idea of crowdsourcing to having "10,000 members of the public milling around the entrance to the library." The challenge is how to engage them.
Two projects showcased by Ben Vershbow, manager of NYPL (New York Public Library) Labs, helped fill in the gaps. The projects are: What's on the Menu?, in which website visitors have so far transcribed the names over nearly 565,000 dishes from 9,827 vintage menus in the NYPL archive; and the somewhat more complex Map Rectifier, in which users have helped align more than 3000 historical maps from the NYPL collection with modern online maps:
Chris Lintott, chair of the Citizen Science Alliance at the University of Oxford, UK, is director of Zooniverse, a group of projects started in 2007 with Galaxy Zoo, in which 300,000 online users have helped classify millions of photos of galaxies by shape. Another project, Old Weather, has volunteers transcribe weather observations on World War I-era Royal Navy ships' logs, to help create a historical weather database. More than 648,000 logs have been done so far.
According to Lintott, only about .25 percent to four percent of the transcription data has been judged not useful and thrown out, as often many people see transcriptions, and keep them accurate. A Sloan Foundation grant will soon be used to fund 22 more projects, Lintott said.
A user survey that Zooniverse conducted may provide a clue into the underlying power of crowdsourced projects: more than half of 10,000 users said that they were taking part in the project because they "wanted to help research."
