MLibrary 2.0 : Peter Morville

Peter Morville
Ann Arbor resident – SI faculty. “Information Architecture.” Latest book: “Ambient Findability.”

my thoughts in bold

“Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found.”
Information Architecture: the structural design of shared information environments. They way a library website is set up. The way the library is set up.
Thinking about a software problem and as an structural system – these two work together to form information sites.
Tough questions: is this useful? Is it usable? Need to conduct usability – but also, need to “emotion and design” (who authored this?) – need to conduct desirability testing. “Can users find our website? Can they find their way around? Can they find our products and services despite our website?” – accessibility.
DESIGN ELEMENTS that influence trust: making it pretty matters to get people to see it as professional. It’s like dressing professionally. New generation where physical appearabnce is not so important, but virtual is.
Conducting a credibility audit
Does being in facebook increase credibility? Does it just mean being in more places? Is there a credibility boost by being ubiquitous?
Mission: not make a great website. Mission: make this awesome set of information findable and credible.
Learning from the past, designing for the future. Designing legacy systems of tomorrow.
Ambient Findability: object and system levels. “What are all the different ways people can find this object? How can we increase that?” Does being ubiquitous make us more finable? Being in Facebook, in MySpace, high in Google, in the DOCS app, -- these make us more findable.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” – Herbert Simon, economist
Alternative interfaces to digital information – think Ambient Orb, Ambient pinwheel, microsoft’s table, etc.
Are people becoming “okay” with sharing details about location? People are becoming more connected all the time.
How do others use this information? How do we use this information?
Davin Brin – “The Transparent Society”
Metadata is sexy! Folksonomies. Ways to make folksonomies and controlled vocabularies work together. Make the old and the new work together.
PACE Layering. How fast systems change: nature, culture slowly. Commerce, Fashion, quickly.
“Tagging works when people tag “their” stuff, not other people’s things.”
We learn through search (Bates’ berrypicking). Guided navigation. NCSU Library catalog provides example of search/browse model.
It’s tough to do this in the public sphere because the contolled vocabulary / taxonomies don’t exist. They do exist in library sites, in commercial sites, etc.
PODZINGER: searchable podcasts -- !!!
Delicious library.
Neighborhood library! Here’s all the books the library owns.
Julian Bleaker – A Manifesto for Networked Objects

Q&A

Q: Future of location: Tremendous push for local information in the coming years.
A: Virtual tours of a park. Finding nearby restaurants or people. Walking is a new form of search!

Q: Are classification systems (LCSH) over? Or is there some use for them?
A: No – new stuff depends upon and coexists with current infrastructure.

Q: Private sources for data – also, a ton of government data (free). How do these two sources converge economically? Leaving out chunks of the world.
A: Concerned about commercial aspects of this – conversion is not only form physical to digital, but also from public to private (think: Google’s power and amounts of data, and they have lock in to those data. They can shape those results). Libraries are somewhere in the middle. We ares responsible for mediating this.

Q: DON’T MAKE ME THINK. This is scary, right? How do we get people to think before doing things like tagging? Is it our duty as librarians?
A: Example: In the 90’s, when designing search interfaces, no one wanted complex search – just wanted keywords. GUIDED SEARCHING is promising. They can do their three keyword search, but gives them a next step – it answers the “what do I do now” when searchers get to the results screen. Branch out from that starter query.