Presentation at the NFAIS Humanities Roundtable

I had a great time yesterday at the NFAIS Humanities Roundtable, where I got to hear a number of interesting folks talking about digital humanities and web 2.0. I'm glad to have finally had the chance to meet Jill O'Neill, from NFAIS, who I first met via Twitter (she and I are friends in FriendFeed, too).  It was also nice to meet John Houser, whose interviews on the PALINET Podcasts have been much played in my MP3 player over the last year).

I was asked to give the keynote address at the end of the day. You can see (or download) my slides on Slideshare.net or view them here in this post. If you download the slides, you'll see that the slides include my presentation notes, which may make the slides a bit more informative.

My biggest regret about my presentation was not giving more credit to Aaron Schmidt for his presentation at the annual meeting of NFAIS this past spring (my last slide makes note of his blog post about the presentation, though). Aaron's mockup of a social database gave me a number of ideas about what I wanted to focus on.

As a librarian, I really enjoyed having the opportunity to speak directly to a roomful of representatives of major database companies and journal publishers. Among the companies and publishers represented there were EBSCO, Proquest, Oxford University Press, OCLC, ARTstor, MLA, RILM Abstracts, Annual Reviews, Alexander Street Press, Harvard University Press, Atypon, and a few others I had not heard of before. Although there were a number of topics I would have loved to focus on (open access publishing being at the top of that list), I was commissioned to respond to the themes and ideas mentioned by the presenters who preceded me and to expound on how approaches to discovery and access are being reshaped by the web 2.0 world.

Social Discovery, Social Access

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: authentication databases)

Knowledge bases and reference services

The next meeting of the Virtual Reference SIG (sponsored by METRO) will be on October 31 from 10 am to 12 noon. Margaret Smith (Physical Sciences Librarian at the Bobst Library at NYU) will lead the discussion with a presentation on how libraries are currently using knowledge bases to support reference services. For more details see the Virtual Reference SIG wiki page on this event.

There are a number of large issues that I hope our discussion might cover:

• Maintenance. How can you design a workflow that keeps older content accurate and fresh. Many URLs that you provide will be subject to link rot. Resources that are recommended may no longer be accessible or still the best ones to consult. Who will be authorized to add content? Just librarians? Librarians and patrons? Librarians, patrons, and the whole world?
• Privacy. If you are adding patron's questions (even highly edited versions), how can you be sure that a patron would not be annoyed upon finding his/her question publicly findable?
• Findability. How will librarians and patrons discover content in the knowledge base? Will there be metadata added to records? If so, what kinds of metadata would be helpful? Will search be the main way that users navigate or will browsing be available (or even privileged over search)?
• Content. What exactly could go in? Transactions from email reference? face-to-face reference? chat reference? reference consultations? FAQs? Saved searches from databases and the catalog? comments and reviews appended to items in the catalog (and even databases, were database vendors to allow such functionality?)
• Placement. How will you alert librarians and patrons about this resource? Should it be added to any list of subscription databases? Group it in with any federated search tool? Keep it set aside on the library web site in location where tutorials, help guides, ask a librarian services, etc. are featured?
• Nomenclature. What should such a tool be called? And as far a librarian jargon goes, is it better to follow the more popular convention of spelling it as two words ("knowledge base") or does one word("knowledgebase") read better and mimic the word "database" in useful ways?

I hope that I'll have a chance to bring in some of ideas expressed by David Lankes in his presentation at ALA Midwinter 2008, where he discussed an interesting vision of a tool for capturing knowledge, recording it, and making it findable (scroll down this OCLC page to the link to the January 12, 2008, event).