From Niche To Network

Editor's Notes

• #2: I’m Caroline Williams, Executive Director of Intute and Deputy Director of Mimas, based at the University of Manchester in England. I bring a service perspective, I’m going to explore some of the new challenges for the digital library in the context of the digital society, add another level detail to some of the keynote speakers opening points and some of the issues that Paul has started to explore. The reason for my title will become clear as I go on. My presentation is in the context of my work with Intute, which currently comprise the Internet research skills tutorials: Virtual Training Suite (VTS), Internet Detective, Informs, an Internet Resource Catalogue of hand-picked, quality assured web-based resources; which has been described as an academic search engine . Intute is created by a pool of librarians, academics, and researchers across seven universities but with many others. We work in a distributed way across over 70 partners, organised into subject groups and are therefore we tap into the psyches and connections of the academic community. We combine niche subject discipline focus and content, and aggregate it to deliver collective efficiency gains and economies of scale. Arguably also generating network effects. We are funded by JISC. Before I go any further - two important points to note: currently people get paid to create Intute, secondly it is planned, organized and managed.
• #3: The elements of information service creation and management which I am going to concentrate on in this presentation as I look to the future are around attention or usage, motivation leading to contribution. Currently, Intute staff and partners are motivated to contribute because they believe in our mission “to facilitate scholarly use of the Internet” and they select, evaluate, describe, create metadata in order to contribute to the database, and they are rewarded by a payment. Students search and browse this collection to help them find the best websites for their assignments. That’s our current : Attention – contribution – motivation cycle This is the model that is now under question in the digital society. (Concentration and gravitational pull, the phenomenon of the more you have the more you get Critical mass; Economies of scale; Value for money)
• #4: Now here’s the rub, our funder have asked the question: “ can you deliver what you currently do but with much less money and through free community contribution?” Is anyone else facing a similar situation – save money by community contribution? Forced by the current economic climate and threats to public funding, my funder have spotted what Clay Shirky describes as the “third alternative” for large scale group activity ( p47. ). These alternative are: The first is institutional or managed action The second is no action (because the costs of organising outweigh the benefits of that activity) And now the third alternative, I quote (next slide): “ Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”
• #5: So how do I turn Intute into a service created through collective collaboration without the financial incentive? What are the incentives to contribute? The current trend for Web 2.0 technologies and free contribution on the Internet as typified in, for example, Flickr and Facebook, suggests that there is mileage in a free, easily-editable community-driven model. Intute has already introduced a blog to its website which has a growing number of followers, as does the Intute Twitter feed and the MyIntute personalisation tool. The latter indicating a demand for new resource notification via Web 2.0 technologies. The existing Intute commenting system is already building a stock of user-generated supplementary information about resources (albeit gradually), which should generate network benefits in the future. But moving to this model poses fundamental questions: What does it mean for our current collection development processes and for our curation expertise? And to what extent will this jeopardise trust in and value of the service? And indeed will people contribute? It’s this last question upon which I’d like to spend some time on now, the whole motivation to contribute issue
• #6: On motivation, I’ve found this work interesting. Sohn, Social network structures and the Internet. He proposes that: The value of a virtual community depends on how much useful information is actively shared by the members. The more information is provided by the participants for sharing, the better for everyone in the group. From an individual’s point of view, however, it is more rationale to benefit from the information provided by other participants without making one’s own contributions, because no one, including noncontributors, is alienated for the benefit of the group/community. If the majority of participants behave in this way, the information traffic will be substantially reduced, which would lower the value of the community = communication dilemma (Bonacich, 1990). Sohn goes on to describe the (P xxvii) deteriorating effects of groups size on cooperation, because the bigger the group gets, the less responsible individuals become for maintaining the group. So how do we get over this communication dilemma in digital libraries and the size issue? He suggests one answer is to build a strong group identify or community to make individuals care more about collective than personal interests. But that this is difficult when numerous anonymous individuals participate in the community. So we need to think about different kinds of “pooling” and facilitating numerous combinations of one to many, one to one, triad, unilateral communication etc.
• #7: However, it is worth spending a little more time on this because it is difficult to predict whether a purely community-driven approach would be successful in terms of delivering a viable product medium to long term – the sustainability issue and there is contrasting evidence here. Drawing attention to the difficulties of motivating individuals to contribute to the Web, what Jakob Nielsen calls “Participation Inequality”: “ User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute). 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time. 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.” [1] So we can probably expect 10% of our users to contribute However, our recent survey revealed that 54% of respondents (who were largely from the library community) would contribute their own favourite Web resources. Many respondents stated that they would need to maintain their own lists of favourite resources if they did not have the Intute IRC to rely on, and could be encouraged to contribute to a collaborative resource. Respondents also indicated that a quality-assurance process would be essential in order to maintain trust in the service. The market research findings point to the need of incentives for contribution and if this approach was deemed to be a way forward then we would explore low-cost incentives for contributors of accepted resources. So not conclusive, but if people are going to do something anyway, see the benefit in sharing then it is likely they will contribute as long as the barriers to do so are not prohibitive (Second Life example this morning) [1] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
• #8: At this point, It’s worth mentioning the phenomenon of crowd sourcing. I’ve asked myself the question am I talking about crowd sourcing here? Or is it more about developing collaboration communities? What is crowdsourcing? Is this familiar to you – show of hands? “ Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users--also known as the crowd--typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions.” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_sourcing And here we have a handy step by step process … But I return now to another of my questions - What does it mean for our current collection develop processes and for our curation expertise? Clay Shirky’s example of crowd sourcing is iStockphoto p75 and he talks about the bringing together of the amateur and the professional photographers to illustrate how new communication capabilities are changing social definitions that are not tied to professions. So where is the librarian and the expert in all of this, what do we do about moderation, how do we and should we ensure quality? And indeed are we also grappling with new perceptions of quality (and what is trust) as described by Andrew Keene in the “Cult of the amateur”.
• #9: So how do I put all this together and create a new way forward for Intute: Here are the factors in summary: People’s willingness to share information can vary depending on the way the group communication is organized. A network of private media is better than publicly shared medium especially when a large number of individuals are involved. (to motivate for contribution) The role of the expert turns into one of mediator and a visible person in the network who motivate contribution by issuing calls for action/broadcasting the problem online (to mediate and incite action) And trust issues are managed by clear declaration of source of the content. There then may be a value in aggregation of the niche to support the lurker (or consumer of information) to deliver gravitational pull and network effects to drive sustainability. So for Intute this may look like subject discipline niche communities to contribute, with facilities for the sharing and conversations around resources (to add context), then aggregation later for the students searching. ( a model akin to Internet Archive at Berkley – powerful niches, weight of numbers)
• #10: So finally questions to leave you to think about in the context of your own work/digital libraries