From the conference program:
Elizabeth Goodman's writing, design and research focus on ubiquitous computing and the experience of everyday places and activities. She is particularly concerned with how information and communication technologies affect work and play in cities. Her current work at UC Berkeley examines new kinds of environmental sensing in urban neighborhoods.
As a design researcher with Intel, she was responsible for product research on mobile computing and nursing. Her design work has also been exhibited in New York, Paris, and San Francisco. Currently a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, she has a master's in interaction design from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University as well as a BA in Art from Yale University.
http://www.confectious.net/
From access to association: Making connections with electronic resources
Mobile computing changes the way people relate to space and time, as well as other people. For instance, nurses being able to get allergy information for a patient from a tablet computer at the patient's bedside instead of 50 feet away in a paper file changes the relationship between the nurse and the patient.
Libraries are very stable. The amount of stuff, information, personal information, etc, moving in and out of libraries is really stunning - it works because libraries are trusted institutions.
What new things could we do (keeping in mind that new technology doesn't mean changing the mission of the library). Adding new tools should allow libraries more choice in how they fulfill that mission and maybe glimpse new ways of fulfilling the mission.
Moving from Access to Associations
E-resources are mostly viewed in terms of access, with libraries/librarians as the intermediary between the user and the thing. Instead, libraries should be working to build relationships between things/around data, especially as more users gain access to more stuff. This gets at the 24 hr library - something is always accessible even when the library building is closed.
How fast do people perceive information to move around in a library? In terms of data transfer rate, people's perceptions, connections made - the bits of information fly around and connect people to each other, to stuff, to places, etc.
Information science fictions:
(not saying these three ideas are organizationally feasible, things we should do, or whatever)
She is telling some stories about ways we might want to start thinking about what we do. Telling stories! She said it! Data Stories is not out of the blue!
Fiction 1: Library activity displays
Making user activity publicly visible and imagined - her example is from the District of Columbia public library - a big tag cloud of what people have been looking for displayed in a public library foyer. Tag clouds can be turned into nice displays; can use to advertise what different groups are doing in the library. People can see that they're not the only ones thinking about or doing their own thing.
There are current trends of visualizing personal data (last.fm music listening graph, for example); community murals; big advertising screens in cities (could serve for something more interesting that ads).
Fiction 2: Patron matchmaking
Introducing patrons based on borrowing habits - builds on trust in libraries as institutions; actively facilitates intellectual partnerships; supporting informed privacy decision-making.
Some case to be made to letting patrons selectively release their intellectual activity for the library to share, in order to match up people with similar interests.
The idea is that the library is a broker between two people who can communicate about the interest anonymously until they're comfortable enough to contact each other.
Driven by receiving a recall notice - someone else wanted the same book she had; if she could have met that person, they could have negotiated some book sharing, discussed the book's content, etc.
(Non) fiction 3: Enhancing digital texts with relevant resources
(Actually happening at UC Berkeley)
Using digitized information to create new associations between digitized content and other sources of information on the same topic that are already online.
Automatically detecting the names of people and places
Assisting learning by links to other documents
Providing a new "reference room" for online research - it's something that a good reference librarian can help you do - match up content that you've already found to content that's important to the topic but that you don't know exists.
Shows an example - a brief biographic entry on Emanuel Goldberg - identifying people - matching names in the entry to pictures of those people; identifying place names - mapping the place names to show the place context of the person; identifying keywords - gathering artifacts that give more information about those keywords. It's Who, Where, When, What for an automated interface. She shows a demo from the Berkeley project to prove this is technologically possible - a way for readers to build up sets of intellectual connections for each other. The job of the library is not only (now) to help you create those connections for yourself, but to help you share those connections with people that share the same intellectual interest.
http://metadata.berkeley.edu/demos
Making associations flexible and durable:
Create a relationship between the physical library and the electronic library - we want as many connections between the two worlds as possible, within limits. Allow translucence, not transparency (don't show everything with regard to users' information use and habits).
Library activity displays need space and scale
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