ALA Midwinter, Readex Breakfast, Denver, CO Sunday 25 January 2009 By David Seaman Associate Librarian for Information Management, Dartmouth College

1. Readex Breakfast, ALA Midwinter
Sunday 25 January 2009
Denver, CO
David Seaman
Associate Librarian for Information Management
Dartmouth College

2. David Seaman

3.  STM departments have embraced digital preprints and
articles and transformed their (inter)disciplines; the
humanities are still often book-bound and solitary.
 The physicist and the philosopher have never been
further apart in working methods and information
architecture needs.
 Students come in with radically different network
habits and privacy values than faculty.
 All this is a challenge for libraries: many audiences to
serve. New habits and old habits of work and service.

4.  A constant state of partial
attention.
 Convenience and the
path of least resistance.
 “Good enough”
information retrieval.
 Impatience at ponderous
pace of change and
service innovation.
 Irritation at the complex,
disjointed information
retrieval landscape.
David Seaman

5. David Seaman

6.  We currently have a super abundance of resources
accessed through a complex, disjointed discovery
layer.
 Filtering of results and personalization of features are
poor or absent.We need much simpler ways to find
much more relevant information to build much better
knowledge.
 Next generation services must radically enhance
resource integration and move us on from the isolated
data silos of the present.
David Seaman

7.  Specificity, selectivity, and convenience are often of
much higher value than undifferentiated bulk.
 Customized feeds of information are increasingly
necessary as the available material grows in number
and complexity. We should explore services that
harness staff and faculty expertise – “canned
searches” designed by experts, for example.
 The abilities for users to add reviews,
recommendations, and “folksonomic” metadata
would be useful.
David Seaman

8.  In a world of growing resources and no more time, and
we ignore convenience at our peril. Most users most of
the time take the path of least resistance.
 We make our users work too hard. Embed services
where the users are through widgets and APIs that
allow programmers to bypass an interface and address
services directly.
 Forcing users always to go to “destination” web pages –
to leave the catalog to go to the ILL, for example – is
frustrating.
David Seaman

9.  We need to be sure we have broken from the
“curatorial thinking” of the pre-internet library.
 Discovery services need to foreground availability –
they should answer the basic questions “when can I
get it?” and “what can I do with it?”
 This may favor a “World Cat Local” approach over the
current library catalog, which highlights that which we
own or to which we subscribe.
David Seaman

10.  Users trust the library to make good use of user data if
it allows for richer, more personalized services or more
relevant filtering of results.
 Personalization is not threatening as long as it is
optional and under the user’s control.
 Treat different communities to different info portals.
 Services that use knowledge of one’s prior activity
and/or one’s membership in a group are of increasing
value. Such “recommender” services are
commonplace in commercial services such as Amazon.
David Seaman

11. David Seaman

12.  Discover/gather/create/share -- a good framework
within which to think about library services.
 Which primitives do we serve and enable?
 Next generation systems should extend our service
reach beyond “discover.”
David Seaman

13. David Seaman
University of Minnesota Library: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Academic
Support: A Final Report. http://www.lib.umn.edu/about/mellon/UMN_Multi-
dimensional_Framework_Final_Report.pdf

14.  Eight intangible values (“generatives”) that we buy
when we pay for something that could be free:
Immediacy
Personalization
Interpretation
Authenticity
Accessibility
Embodiment
Patronage
Findability
 “It costs nothing to make a pill.We pay for Authenticity and
Immediacy in drugs. Someday we'll pay for Personalization.
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html
David Seaman

15.  Service design and assessment processes need to be
quick, agile, ongoing, and iterative. Next generation
systems must be defined by users and not librarians,
which means we must be more sophisticated in
uncovering what users need and what they do.
 Open up beta testing of new features in systems to
interested users. Make it clear that they are trying beta
releases.
 We need to be braver about letting users opt to try new
features while we are evaluating them, even when they
have rough edges .
David Seaman

16. David Seaman

17. David Seaman

18.  The next generation library systems need to be nimble,
personalized, relevant, and convenient.
 Our library organization needs to fully embody these
traits too.
 The library must get used to competing for attention
through ease of use as well as excellence of content.
 Services should to be accessible from within whatever
online space a user inhabits (iGoogle; Facebook;
Blackboard) and on whatever networked device.
David Seaman

19.  Access, Discover, Select, Filter -- Current systems
focus on the first two at the expense of the second two.
 The digital library is still a tale of mass and
malleability, but we need much better selection and
filtering services to help us limit the massive result sets
that result from the current generation access tools.
 Primitives and generatives can be helpful
touchstones to remind us of the needs beyond “find”.
 It is time now to experiment, innovate, and act.
David Seaman

20. David Seaman
Associate Librarian for
Information Management
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire
david.seaman@dartmouth.edu
David Seaman