Mortenson Distinguished Lecture2010

Shifting Terrains, Crossing Boundaries Digital Libraries are Personal and Social Again!Shalini R. UrsInternational School of Information ManagementUniversity of MysoreMysore, Indiashalini@isim.ac.in

AgendaShifting Terrains of the library profession Crossing Boundaries of knowledge Digital Library—Grand ChallengesDL 2.0 and its potential and possibilities Some Examples and Exemplars

ShiftingTerrains““The More Things ChangeThe More They Remain The Same”

The Library In the ancient times, libraries were essentially places for scholarship, archives of government and business transactions, and places for intellectual discourse, in addition to being social and cultural institutions.

Nalanda Library ( 4th Century India) The library of Nalanda, known as Dharma Gunj (Mountain of Truth) or Dharmagañja (Treasury of Truth), was the most renowned repository of Buddhist knowledge in the world at the time. Its collection was said to comprise hundreds of thousands of volumes, so extensive that it burned for months when set aflame by Muslim invaders.

Library as a Metaphor Library is a metaphor for dynamic spaces for human information interactions (informational experiences )This is the notion that we get when we consider the libraries of Alexandria or NalandaThe library is a metaphor for that space(physical or cyberspace )This metaphor is quite old ( even in traditional societies such as India)

Library as a collection In the post Gutenberg era —we seemed to have moved to the idea of library as a collection And organising the collection and findability took centre stage Access became the “mantra” and libraries became synonymous with documentary collections The idea of a meeting place continued but more as an adjunct rather than central to the notion of library.

Library as Social Knowledge/Public MemoryBased on and extrapolating the notion of Science as Public Knowledge (Ziman, 1969) libraries have been considered as social knowledge – accessible and available to one and all, while individual knowledge /individual memory is accessible and available to only oneself ( Kemp, 1976).Invention of writing helped civilisation to externalise the individual knowledge

Library as an outsourced personal information store Historically, libraries are one of the early ‘out sourcing’ business modelsCustomers( users) began to outsource their information store and activities to librariesInformation activities transited from ‘private’ places (individual activities) to public places (outsourced to professionals/profession)Libraries moved from being private places to “public places”

Libraries as cultural institutions David Carr (2006) in “ Minds in Museums and Libraries:The Cognitive Management of Cultural Institutions” examines the shared cognitive dimensions of cultural institutions like museums, libraries, and parks, and suggests that they make similar situations for transmitting information.Libraries (archives , museums, parks …) are places that offer cognitive experiences to people integrating the past with the present bringing a history of knowing, reflecting and understanding .

Crossing Boundaries The concept of boundaries has been used frequently over the last decade in organisational studies, information systems and communication research. Boundaries can be thought of as discontinuities of some form.

Crossing boundaries of various kinds is an essential feature of networked world. In an increasingly globalised and networked world we can expect boundary-crossing in all our interactions —both formal and informal communications .Crossing Boundaries Understanding the significance and diversity of these boundary crossing phenomenon, and ways of variously exploiting or overcoming them, is likely to be of increasing significance in all forms of knowledge transfer. The network metaphor and its fusion of a range of theories( including the Social Networking Analysis) provides a useful perspective on interpreting the role and position of digital libraries against the wider background of research into the networking phenomenonCrossing Boundaries Research across various disciplines, reflect this trend – boundary crossing and has also led to the notion of “ Networked Individuality.”

On the one hand the new economy and work force is organized around global networks yet on the other hand the work process is increasingly individualized.

This is also true of individuals and societies — it is both a case of distributed public cognition and a personalized individualized cognition.Digital Libraries Digital Libraries (DLs), a field that is coterminous with the Internet, has entered teenage and is on the cusp of changeIn the first era technical aspects dominated research and discourse and researchers were immersed deeply in confronting the technological challenges of building DLs. Thus in the beginning digital libraries seemed cold and impersonal. Ackerman (1994) cautioned “… be careful not to carelessly obliterate some of the important features of current libraries… (Do not) remove social exchange and interaction, focusing narrowly on the technical mechanisms of information access.

Digital Libraries Ackerman said “ This is not only unwise, it is unnecessary since we could provide mechanisms for social exchange and interaction within our systems.”The second era, is witness to a renaissance of the social dimension of libraries with the realization that DLs are to be usable and engaging.With the advent and adoption of web 2.0 paradigm and technologies, DLs are crossing borders and are back to being personal and social again. The web 2.0 technologies have helped turn the realization into a reality.

Digital Libraries The contemporary digital libraries transcend geographical and disciplinary boundaries, cross over diverse content types from scholarly to trivia and document genres of every kind and embrace digital objects of different hues and formats from manuscripts to maps, from to datasets to courseware, from images to music, from presentation slides to laboratory notes. The notion of metadata is transformed and fine grained to include everything from author to annotations to access modes.

Digital Libraries Examination of the some definitions of digital libraries then (first era) and now (second era) reflects this transformation/ avatar of digital librariesDigital Libraries are personal and social again!

A working definition of digital library"Digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities".(Digital Library Federation , 1999)

DELOS Digital Reference Model and manifesto"The DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries now envisions a Digital Library as a tool at the centre of intellectual activity having no logical, conceptual, physical, temporal, or personal borders or barriers on information. It has moved from a content-centric system that simply organizes and provides access to particular collections of data and information, to a person-centric system that aims to provide interesting, novel, personalized experiences to users.

Contemporary Visions of DLs Its main role has moved from static storage and retrieval of information to facilitation of communication, collaboration, and other forms of interaction among scientists, researchers, or the general public on themes that are pertinent to the information stored in the Digital Library."

Contemporary Visions of DLsIn its new “avatar” of digital libraries, the emphasis has shifted from technical to social aspects of personalisation, interaction, collaboration and co-creation of content and commentaries. “Co-creation” model advocated by management gurus C.K. Prahalad and VenkatRamaswamy exemplifies a landscape where in, “Knowledgeable, web-empowered consumers will usher in … (a system) characterized by "co-creating value through personalized experiences unique to the individual consumer."

Contemporary Visions of DLsFrom open source and open access movement to wisdom of the crowd movements, today’s world is characterized by mass collaboration. Digital Library 2.0 are characterised by - “being everywhere”; “no barriers”; “spirit of participation”; “flexible and best-of-breed systems”; being “human and recognizing that its users are human too”The new DL is all about collaborative network of different digital libraries, and networking of DLs with clients. DL 2.0 offers a personal learning landscape—MyDL: a personal and personalized digital library.

Why DL 2.0 ?Do we need to develop DL 2.0 just because we want to join the new whizz kid on the block? Not necessarily. Web 2.0 is not just about new tools for content co creation and management, but also about ‘wikinomics of DL’.The “ crowd sourcing” and the “Wikinomics” model is the zeitgeist thing. Zeitgeist, referring to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era characteristic of an age or generation has some similarities to Thomas Kuhn's idea of scientific paradigmsIt is about a sustainable and scalable economic model for digital libraries(Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everythingby Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, December 2006)

DL- Indian Scenario Indian DL Conferences :Pre Web digital content issues was the InfoTex 93 - An International Conference on Database Production and Distribution: Resources, Technology and Management, held at Bangalore, 28 Nov - 1 Dec 93 organized by Informatics India Limited. The first digital library conference of India was the SIS 96 – the 15th Annual Convention and Conference, 18-20 Jan 1996, Bangalore organized by the Society for Information Sciences.

The major conferences that following the web and the Internet era and events which created the buzz around the field of digital libraries were the ICADL 2001 held in Bangalore(www.icadl2001.org) ICDL (International Conference on Digital Libraries) organized by TERI (the Energy Research Institute) during 2004, 2006 and now in 2010

The digitization and digital library projectsDigital Library of India (DLI) Initiative is the Indian part of the Universal Digital Library and the Million Books to the Web projects. The Million Books to the Web project is a collaborative project between the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and many more organizations across the US, India and China

The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is a knowledge repository of the traditional knowledge setup by the NISCAIR ( National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, CSIR The objective of this library is to protect the ancient and traditional knowledge of the country from exploitation such as bio-piracy and unethical patents (http://www.niscair.res.in/).

The Muktabodha Digital Library and Archiving Project was begun in 1995 as a manuscript microfilming project focusing mainly on photographing at-risk and rare palm-leaf Vedic Shrauta Ritual manuscripts from both private collections and from libraries. (http://www.muktabodha.org/).Kalasampada: Digital Library- Resource for Indian Cultural Heritage (DL-RICH) project sponsored by Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) (http://www.ignca.gov.in/dlrich/)

Vidyanidhi digital library and eScholarship portal project at the University of Mysore (www.vidyanidhi.org.in), which began as a pilot project in 2000 to demonstrate the feasibility of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) in India. Today Vidyanidhi funded by the Ford Foundation is one of the largest repositories of Indian theses with more than 15000 full texts and 150,000 metadata records.

DL : the grand challengesPersonal information managementLong term relationships between humans and information collections and systemsRole of digital libraries, digital collections and other information services in supporting teaching, learning, and human developmentActive environments for computer supported collaborative work(Clifford Lynch : Dlib , July 2005)

Grand Challenges…Flat applications and liquid content New social and service affordances New business and organizational patterns The new information hubs The long tail and attention (Lorcan Dempsey, Ariadne, 2006)

Grand Challenges …Expand what can be searchedUse context for information retrieval Integrate information spaces into everyday life Reduce data to actionable informationImprove productivity through information access. (Ronald Larsen, NSF Workshop , 2003)

Digital world is redefining scientific theory‘Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database and now Google and like-minded companies are treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. ( Chris Anderson, 2009)It is time for us redefine (revisit) the library idea and look at libraries as information spaces seamlessly integrating formal and informal communication crossing boundaries of all kinds.

Future Aspirations ???Internet Safari program at ISiM

Reaching the Unreached through mobiles and social mediaHow do we help the emerging world/society/markets to benefit from the opportunities that DLs provide for inclusive growth especially education for all. How can DLs be the platform for learning and participating in the economic activities through ecommerce?

The Unseen Power of Billion HandsreCAPTCHA is a system, originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University that uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of booksreCAPTCHA supplies subscribing websites with images of words that optical character recognition (OCR) software has been unable to read. The system is reported to solve over 100 million captchas every day (as of October 2010)** Wikipedia

Realizing the power of billions The reCAPTCHA program originated with Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn, who realized "he had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles."[Google acquired reCAPTCHA in 2009 and is using reCAPTCHA for digitizing the archives of the New York Times.Twenty years of The New York Times have been digitized and the project hopes to have the 110 other years done by the end of 2010Google itself is an example of monetizing the billion clicks

Participatory model …One of the important focus areas for digital libraries is the preservation of cultural/ heritage materialsHere is another example of the social web strategy for the same UNESCO World Heritage Artstor

Some Examples from India (AvaajOtalo )Avaaj Otalo (literally, “voice stoop”) is an interactive voice application for small-scale farmers in Gujarat, India.

Avoice-based system accessible through mobile phones

The most popular feature is asking questions and browsing others’ questions and responses on a range of agricultural topics.Some Examples (AvaajOtalo )For all 51 farmers this was the first experience participating in an online community of any sort.

A lively social space with norms,persistent moderation, and provide for both structured interaction with institutionally sanctioned authorities and open discussion with peers

The simple menu-based navigation was readily learned, with users preferring numeric input over speech.Nokia – Ovi Life ToolsInspired by the vision of transforming society beyond selling mobile phones, Nokia has begun a programme called Nokia-Ovi Life tools in various parts of the word including India

Targeting the 15-45 age group ( urban, semi Urban and Rural) with mobile phones, this programme is aimed at addressing the knowledge pains across four verticals – Agriculture, Education, Entertainment, and HealthcareNokia – Ovi Life ToolsAgricultureEducationBridges the Information GapsEntertainmentHealthcare

GyanpediaGyanpedia is an online digital content repository generated by children and teachers of rural government schools across India. Gyanpedia-an initiative of Digital Empowerment Foundation with support from Media Lab Asia, is a Comprehensive, multilingual, dynamic virtual platform for country wide content exchange program for the learning community – children as well as teachers.

GyanpediaGyanpedia allows anyone with an Internet connection to download or upload any knowledge/information in any form whether word, power point, video, image etc

Some Efforts at ISiMPersonalized, Social Digital Libraries to support individualized learning

@ ISiMGoogle has introduced an internet based learning / teaching environment, called Google Gooru.The Gooru pilot project in India has been started with 11 different schools, assisting grade 5 teachers in their teaching and making the learning experiences of students better and enchantingISiM has been given the unique opportunity to implement Gooru for the first time, in the higher education milieu

Google Gooru — FeaturesGooru is an innovative – interactive learning/teaching environment offering several features that have the potential to significantly enhance the learning experience of studentsThe key feature and functionality of Gooru is its ability to cross borders by integrating the class room teaching, rich web resources, digital text book with annotations, and leveraging on the social web to provide a networked learning experience.

1. Live Classroom / Guest SpeakerFacilitates either the teacher (or a guest speaker) to log in and address the class.The learning experience of a class enhanced by a guest lecture who is brought in by the teacher.

2. ClassplanA basic plan for a particular class or a particular lecture session. Gooru allows the teacher to create a teaching plan and enhance it by suggesting additional resources and videos, which would augment that session

3. ClassbookClassbook gives enhanced classroom learning experience that leverages on the social web and extend the teacher directed social learning beyond the classroom into the digital textbookPersonalize the textbook with notes, bookmarks and highlights, share their notes with their classmates, discuss a topic or ask a question bring the magic of classroom learning into the digital textbook.

Fluidity by integrating web contentTeachers can very conveniently use rich web content organized as a playlist and guest speakers to make the classroom very engagingWikiGyan Data for development and democracyEducation | Empowerment | Engagement

WikiGyanWikiGyan is a portmanteau of the words-Wiki (Hawaian) meaning "quick" and Gyan ( in Sanskrit) meaning “knowledge”.

Premised on …“If Knowledge is power, then information is empowering”Data …data everywhere …but no information and no insights

Data EcosystemQuite a lot of open dataOpen Set of Services and Applications ( APIs)Consumers and Creators of data Data usually is quite free ( Census Data, Elections data; development data…)Social Media ( huge resource of data and metadata) Most of the time accessible directly through APIs

Where ???Governments, Non Government Organisations, Academic researchers and others routinely collect data on different aspects of society – such as poverty, literacy, education, health, and others. These data generally end up in tons of reports, and spreadsheets. In case of Government, most of these data are public domain, in case of others; they are generally ready to share.

Some very good examples and exemplars Dataplace - one-stop source for housing and demographic data about your community, your region, and the nation( www.dataplace.org) Timepedia Chronoscope (Turning Tables into time machines)(http://timepedia.org/chronoscope/)Freebase ( www.freebase.com)Many eyes from IBM (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/)Swivel (www.swivel.com) Gapminder ( www.gapminder.org)

Eliminating Information Friction—why?Information Friction impedes –Economic transactions (Ex. Farmers selling their produce without having access to market information). Policy choices and prioritizing (Policy makers taking decisions without right socio, economic, and demographic data).Development Choices and making use of opportunities ( Ex. rural women not aware of the government welfare schemes for women; students using online learning materials, when it is not available locally/ or on campus)Effective Management (epidemic control and management disaster management, terrorism management …)

Now some gyan about WikiGyan WikiGyan is a project to build such an information sharing platform for development data. What is envisaged is a system that enables people to upload their data, tag and add metadata, integrate data, visualize the trends and mapped data. Specifically - WikiGyan enables people/organizations to share data on the society (elections, health, education…) and gain insights through data analytics and intelligence.

Gyan about WikiGyan…It is a suite of the tools that lets people to upload spreadsheets, down load them, build databases, enable data warehousing, visualize data in different ways, and gain insights through data analytics. For simplicity, we call it a combo of a YouTube for spreadsheets and Wikipedia for structured information

Wikigyan@ISiMEducation | Empowerment | EngagementEducation | Empowerment | EngagementWikigyan isa common platform people to upload/download the data, automatic integration of data and visualization on a large scale.

We believe such a platform which can offer actionable insights to the public at large.

Our platform will achieve this through an online Internet- based data warehousing system that can scale to a large number of NGOs, verticals, data formats, visualization needs and consumers (typically the common public).

When the user uploads the excel files of structured data integrates the same into the data warehouse.

Once the data integrated, then provides for the visualization for the same updated data.WikiGyan Process ModelRedeeming the wasteland of class projects. Turning student class projects into powerhouse of tools development. Harnessing students’ power. The vast majority of the student community across the nation, continuously build, refine and fine-tune the system and enable NGOs, Governments, and researchers to put ‘ data to work’Kindling the social responsibility nerve. Voluntary involvement of industry, and academic experts. Empowering the Government and the NGOs in their mandate of transforming society

Xampp for Linux 1.6: XAMPP is great because integrates open source components like Linux, Apache server, PHP, MySql and takes only a few commands to get a fully integrated LAMP system up and running. Mediawiki 1.13.1 :MediaWiki offering a host of features, including an optional file upload feature, a very comprehensive mark-up, very good internationalization support has been chosen. MediaWiki is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database. Installation is incredibly simple. It is built to work in almost any Web - hosting environment where HTML can also be used.

Pentaho BIPentaho BI - is a is Open Source application software for enterprise reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining, workflow and ETL capabilities for Business Intelligence (BI) needs. It is easy to use and scalable and is being endorsed by the open source community. It has comprehensive capabilities include data integration, data mining and business intelligence and reporting. Kettle and WEKA are integrated parts of Pentaho

Wikigyan@ISiMEducation | Empowerment | EngagementEducation | Empowerment | EngagementWikiGyan Work Flow:

Data Visualisation through charts

DL 2.0 - Five key characteristics

Crossing over boundaries DL is NOT a collection, it is an information space and an experience. No boundaries or borders of content types or such confining /limiting notionsCatherine Marshal (2004) defines a boundary—in the context of digital libraries—as, "...something that tends to separate, to interpose; a boundary is a perceptible seam in the social fabric, the technological infrastructure, or a physical setting or may span all three", and goes on to urge “...we should design creatively to get around the interpretative boundaries like document, collection, and metadata boundaries.”1

Co-creation Management Guru C K Prahalad popularized the notion of co-creation . According to him product innovations happen at those companies that are working with their customers as activists and collaborators in the creation process.DLs are no longer about collection building, it is about collection sharing and co-creation.Look at examples – Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr, slideshareDLs also need to/ have moved towards this new paradigm. 2

Interaction Today the mass media such as TV have become interactive. They provide for participation and viewer interaction. Annotations are one form of interactions. To "annotate" is "to make or furnish critical or explanatory notes or comment”.In the digital library context, annotations can serve broadly to createnew information resources, to interpret existing ones, to access resources in new ways, and to support the effective use of resources 3

Annotations as a sign of engagement Study of Marginalia in English Renaissance texts shows that students of the time were routinely taught that simply reading a book was insufficient. In order to have a "fruitful interaction" with a text. Marking it up with one's thoughts and reactions was considered essential. Marginalia and other signs of engagement and use – even such apparently content-neutral additions as food stains –were considered as valuable evidence of reader reaction, and the place of the physical information object in people's lives. Providing users the ability to annotate digital content also creates new streams of naturalistic evaluation data, evidence of engagement stronger than a page view or a link to the collection item from another page.

Dynamic Content to personalisationInformation resources do not come neatly packaged as indivisible ( atomic) Units. Some of the content is real time observational data. As Svenonius points out in her book the intellectual foundation of Information organization – documents with uncertain boundaries which are ongoing…have identity problem…you cannot step into the same river …DLs need to confront the challenges of this flowing stream of content without boundaries and leverage on making it personal and contextual 4

DLs are social again As cautioned by Ackerman (1994) in one of the early DL94 conference position DLs have “to be careful not to carelessly obliterate some of the important features of current libraries… (Do not) remove social exchange and interaction, focusing narrowly on the technical mechanisms of information access. This is not only unwise, it is unnecessary since we could provide mechanisms for social exchange and interaction within our systems. Simply put, we do not need to remove the social world from our systems”.With web 2.0, DLs are very much social again. We can perhaps make it more social than ever before 5

Digital Libraries: Future Scenarios DLs are to be information spaces offering information experiences to users. A combination of Mobiles and “wisdom of the crowds” model.Information Experiences are affordable, personal, and accessible through MobilesWe can leverage on the mobile revolution sweeping across the world (India: more than 600 million cell phones) for mobile learning. With mobiles the last mile of connectivity has been overcome. Mobiles and internet will be the silver bullet for social transformation.

Mortenson Distinguished Lecture2010

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Mortenson Distinguished Lecture2010