The Story So Far…

I started at the Society for College and University Planning in November 2010 after finishing my masters in information science from the University of Michigan in the spring.  My education and professional background was, up to that point, strictly on the people side of things.  Yes the library was an organization of curated information, but as far as I could see it, that information was pointless without the people connected to it (a philosophy I still believe above all).  So it was a bit of a risk that SCUP took bringing me on as their metadata specialist.

SCUP is pretty self-explanatory.  An affiliate of the University of Michigan’s School of Education, they’re a professional society aimed at promoting integrated planning and strategic thinking in higher education institutions.  To support this vision, and to promote the resources they’ve conceived of the “cybrary.”  As the name suggests, it’s a portmanteau of cyber and library.  At its most basic, a digital repository for members to come and draw from a myriad of resources including SCUP’s quarterly journal, Planning for Higher Education, conference proceedings, the collected campus plans links, webcasts, etc.  And while this sort of unidirectional content delivery service can be enough (users come in and query, and walk away with AN answer (maybe not the correct answer (more on that later))), it fails to encompass the scope premised in the name.

Being, as I stated before, a people-person first, and having a long history of reference and front-end patron experience in libraries, the concept of a library is for me inherently more than a collection of resources that people can access.  It’s a space people can gather to exchange knowledge and collaborate.  And in an organization like SCUP where your experts and professionals and knowledge holders are also your patrons, it would be remiss to not leverage their experience and their information seeking behaviors to add value and practical context for others coming into the system.

But enough with the philosophy espousing.  Let’s roll the shirt sleeves up and talk practical shit.

We’re planning our initial launch for early July 2012 (yikes that’s close) to coincide with SCUP’s annual conference in Chicago.  A rollout that includes some really basic functionality, and some sexy-looking web pages to get people engaged and excited.  Those core functions include:

• Search
• Upload/Download
• Personal Pages

Let’s unpack this a little.  The initial collection is going to be around 1,000 objects, mostly the journal articles from the past 30 years of Planning for Higher Education (a bread and butter collection to get people started).  Search function is pretty self explanatory.  If you can’t find anything, you really have no reason to be there (right?).  The upload/download function and the personal pages are fairly tightly intertwined, and it’s how we’re going to get started with leveraging that sort of crowd-sourced knowledge base and curatorial expertise.  Cybrary users will have the ability to upload notes, their own articles, etc. in a way that allows for public display to show off their knowledge and research, and in a private way allow them to have all their stuff in one spot.  The personal pages will be aimed at the user collecting resources found in the cybrary and grouping them in useful ways.  In the future we see this being fleshed out with notation features (think like soundcloud’s comment function but for PDFs etc), and shared collections, and a personal blog.

The project is aimed at being as cost effective as possible.  To wit, it uses open source software systems and architecture, dropping the cost to only hardware and labor.  The software too has vibrant communities of designers and developers providing a knowledge base for us to draw from, and real-world scenarios.

The structure of the cybrary is as follows:

• Linux Ubuntu Server (we’re using 10.04 right now because 12.04 hasn’t rolled out yet)
• Apache, PHP, Tomcat
• MySQL (we were using PostgreSQL, and will be using that for the deep archive storage,but dropped in favor of MySQL for the way it connects with wordpress and other bits and pieces)
• FEDORA Commons
• WordPress and MediaWiki (to handle the blogging, and personal pages)In the future we’re discussing adding in iRODS for handling multiple parts, connecting with SCUP’s CMS as well as preparing for potential integration w/ other institutions and associations.

Over future posts I’ll be discussing the metadata design, plans for digital curriculum and education, as well as some more nitty gritty details about searching, and how to piece all this stuff together.  Thanks!

In Defense Of Curation – Or Why There’s More To Information Than Google

I’ve got this aversion to academic papers and assigned reading.  For me it’s always been the instant insomnia cure.  So I want things to be a little less formal here.  A little more sleeves rolled up, slouch in the chair, sitting around a bar table shooting the bull (I apologize in advance if any profanity slips out, we’re going informal here).  We’ll get things started a little more unsourced and ramble.  Posits that I don’t necessarily have citations for (though that’ll probably come) and just my general understanding of information based off my current experience.  Kind of laying the building blocks for where I think we should be going and looking.  So here we go…

My posit:

The value of information is in its ability to manifest as relevant from the chaos around it.  What I mean by this is the old adage that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, or that there is inherent relevance in all information (i.e.: anything) if given the right context.  It seems pretty innocuous enough, anything can have value in the right context, but where it gets interesting is in how that information is made to manifest from the chaos around it.  This is curation.

As the title would suggest, I have a beef with google.  It’s an issue they’re working like mad to answer, and they’re doing it on a global scale, which is just damn impressive.  When Google first started blowing up all over the place they weren’t much more than content delivery.  They suck in information, mark it up, and push it back out to the people looking for it.  It’s a pretty unidirectional approach with a very blunt tool approach to curation, but it is curation.  And because it’s been automated, their curation standards can be gamed (see Google Bombing, and especially Dan Savage’s evisceration of Santorum’s last name).  At its core it doesn’t take into account the information seeker’s knowledge, and it puts the information seeker in the unsteady position of trust that Google is delivering the best information.  They’ve since implemented some really interesting algorithms that take into account search history, regional demographics, and profile demographics (the invasiveness by a corporation not withstanding).

In my current capacity as a metadata specialist (a bit of a misnomer considering all the other things I have to do (I keep lobbying for Cybrarian, but they’ve yet to give it to me)), I’m working with a very focused institution, the Society for College and University Planning, to create their institutional digital repository or “Cybrary.”  A digital repository seems like it ought to be a bit of a no-brainer at this point, but you’d be surprised how many organizations aren’t champing at the bit to jump on it (a gulf I’d love to exploit once this gets off the ground).  But beyond just slapping a searchable database of resources online for its user group, we’ve envisioned a far more robust and collaborative and interactive center that acts not just as content archiving and delivery, but as a place to come do research, and share your expertise.  Truly a cybrary.

One of the ways we intend to leverage this is not just through our own internal expertise, but through engagement with our user population by providing them the ability to recommend resources, curate personal collections, and help to create context for other users to perform search.  This sort of active engagement is great for an institution like ours with a limited population with a focused information need, and practical expertise.  By providing not only the resources, but the means for users to organize and connect the resources in meaningful ways, and share that expertise with other users, we’ll hopefully create a community where context is emergent and interactive (an intention of the library reference model).

A dream of mine would be to expand on this design in such a way that individual, focused organizations and people could provide targeted collection curation, while a sort of uber-organization could provide curation of the curation, connecting the collections in meaningful and contextual ways.  Building a web of information per se.

I know this was a little rambly, but It was just a rough idea that I wanted to get out.  As the blog goes on I’ll be targeting more specific issues, some in this sort of ephemeral philosophy of information sort of way, and some in a little more hands-in-the-dirt practical way.  Hope you’ll join me.