Libraries mash up content, services and ideas

By Tom Storey

One of the fastest growing trends today is combining data and functionality from several sources to create new services that provide a unique user experience. They’re called mash ups. Think Google Maps. Yahoo Pipes. Facebook Plug-Ins. Libraries are doing Web mash ups as well: Meebo Instant Messaging. Library Lookup. Bookburro. And, in a way, they’ve been doing all kinds of mash ups for years. Think story hour, open-shelf access, cafes, book lockers.

As a changing social and economic landscape raised concerns about childhood literacy and children’s recreational reading, Caroline Hewins initiated a read-aloud, storytelling activity at the Hartford Public Library. She mixed children and families and books and stories from the rapidly expanding body of children’s literature. The result was a useful and fun new library program.

As new social and economic trends changed information discovery behaviors, Dave Pattern introduced a way to bring readers from a popular book site to the library. He mixed the library collection with the bookstore experience to reach a growing new audience with a creative new library service. The result was traffic for the library and convenience for the user.

Both of these examples show how libraries adapt and combine services and ideas to meet the needs and preferences of users. They are ‘mash ups,’ fresh concoctions designed to be informative, useful, fun and even transformative. One was programmatic, one was technological, but both were effective. Caroline Hewins’ story time, the first one of its kind, happened in 1882. Dave Pattern’s library look-up on Amazon.com was mashed up in 2006.

A traveler, far from home in a time of famine, comes to a small, poor town. A local woman comes to watch as he fills the pot with water and sets it to boil over a small fire. He then places a smooth stone the size of a fist into the water and sits back to wait. After a while, a few other curious villagers approach. A young boy finally asks, “Why are you boiling a stone?” The stranger replies, “I am making stone soup with my magic stone! It’s filling and strengthening... but you wouldn’t want any, I suppose, because the taste is quite bland.” One of the villagers says that he should add some cabbage for flavor. Another suggests carrots. The man shrugs, saying, “I have neither, or I would drop them in.” The two townspeople volunteer their ingredients, and soon others have added their favorites; potatoes, salt, pepper, onions, chicken and more. Soon, the whole village dined on the hearty soup, sharing stories and songs into the night. The next day, the stranger moved on, leaving his magic stone behind him as a gift for the town. And, of course, on his way to the next village, he found another magic soup stone by the side of the road ... The story of “Stone Soup” may be as old as the Crusades. But its message is appropriate to the modern, “Web 2.0” world of mash ups: individual resources get put to new uses when they are shared toward a common goal. The“magic” of stone soup is about creativity and cooperation.

Over the past several years, as the Web 2.0 movement has gathered critical mass, technological mash ups have garnered most of the attention, receiving lots of publicity and lots of programming effort. New mash ups are created every day, ranging from the popular (1,412 Google Maps mash ups) to the provocative (The Wheel of Food, which uses Yahoo Local search to find a restaurant. Enter your zip code, enter a cuisine, and the Wheel determines where to eat today.)

More importantly, however, mash ups illustrate how the architecture of the Web is transforming the way systems are built and services delivered. By allowing functionality and data from several places to be recombined and remixed to meet new needs, many believe mash ups represent the way the Web and software development as a whole are heading.

Nonetheless, mash ups in a general sense have been going on in the library for many years. In fact, the library world has been a leader in blending its programs and services with the latest trends and technology developments. When you combine different ideas and different services to reach different audiences or energize existing ones, new experiences are created, and traditional services become revitalized.

In that perspective, Web mash ups for today’s libraries are carrying on a tradition of innovation started in the 1800s, when libraries moved away from the closed organizations that they were into the vibrant cultural and academic centers that they are today.

Two of the oldest, most innovative mash ups

Story hour

Fresh from training at the Boston Athenaeum, Caroline Hewins came to Hartford in 1875 to begin a new job as librarian of the Hartford Young Men’s Institute, the predecessor to Hartford Public Library. She held this position for 50 years, transforming the 19th century private subscription association into a thriving 20th century public library. Along the way, Hewins earned a national reputation as an imaginative, spirited and dedicated leader.

One of her most notable achievements was the read-aloud, storytelling program started in 1882—essentially the first story hour in libraries. Concerned about childhood education and alarmed at the limited number of appropriate titles for children, Hewins brought the world of children’s literature into the library with story hour, a mixing that had never been done before. The program, along with a new children’s collection and a separate children’s room within the library, was the result of interactions among libraries, publishers, communities, schools, churches and other organizations.

Once introduced, the idea of story hour and library services to children grew rapidly. The Pratt Institute began holding story hours in 1896, followed by the New York Public Library and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library. Today, story hours are one of the mainstays of most public libraries.

Open-shelf access

In 1891, James Duff Brown, an influential and energetic librarian in Great Britain, published an article anonymously, “A Plea for Library Readers to Help Themselves,” a call to let library users peruse the stacks. He put his ideas into practice by introducing open-shelf access in his library at Clerkenwell Public Library. At about the same time, William Howard Brett, familiar with easy access to books in bookshops, convinced the board of the Cleveland Public Library to take the daring step of allowing readers free access to books stored on open shelves.

Without knowing it, Brown and Brett created the first self-serve library mash up by bringing nonlibrary functionality, open access, into the library. Library users loved the new service, but it took many years before this shift was accepted by librarians, whose traditional understanding of the library was a treasure house that protected books from untrustworthy readers.Today, the self-serve concept has moved into other librarian-only domains, such as book checkout and database searching.

The role of innovation

Since the first story hour in 1882 and the move to open-shelf access in 1891, libraries have continued to adapt and innovate to meet user demands and respond to changing circumstances. The key to their success and evolution has been focusing on the user, which is exactly where the emphasis should be, according to Michael Schrage, Research Fellow, MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business.

An expert in innovation, Schrage has redefined how many think about innovation by focusing on customer acceptance as the integral part of the innovation process. Innovation is not about technically sweet solutions, he says. “If you have a feature-driven notion of innovation and are focused on cleverer ways of doing things, you are going to have problems.”

Innovation isn’t what innovators do, it’s what customers adopt, he says. “It’s not about new or better ideas. That’s delusional. If it ain’t adopted, it ain’t innovation. I think good ideas are tremendously overrated. If you come up with better ideas and your customers are not using them, with all due respect, you are not an innovator.”

True innovation influences behavior, Schrage says. The most innovative organizations fuse “marketing” and “innovation” into an integrated strategy. The key, he says, is to understand how your inventions affect customer relationships and develop strategies that help customers embrace your innovations.

To thrive in today’s digital age, Schrage says, libraries need to be very focused and reexamine and revisit the fundamentals that have made them successful. “It is clear to me that libraries have a fundamental mission to perform in a new environment. They are the easy access ambassadors to information resources, independent of whether resources are paper or digital. They need to be positioning themselves as a value-added layer—the information ‘app’, a mash up, if you will. They have a remarkable opportunity to be resilient and robust by leveraging and building upon the competitive investments of others.”

Mixing lockers and libraries Books, CDs, DVDs and other library items are available 24/7 at the Arnhem-Presikhaaf Public Library, the Netherlands, thanks to new lockers installed outside of the building. This clever mash up of lockers and libraries allows users to pick up items at their convenience. An item can be reserved by phone or through the Internet and borrowers receive a message via SMS, e-mail or phone that the item is available in the locker.

Some of today’s innovative library mash ups

If customer adoption is an indicator of innovation, library mash ups are a big success, says David Lee King, Digital Branch & Services Manager, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library. King says mash ups provide a way for libraries to create value-added tools for their customers. “Mashing up a tagging and recommendation service with an ILS system gives customers more search options, since they can browse via tags or recommendation links,” he says. “And some tools, like placing an IM widget in appropriate areas of a Web site or a catalog, provide library staff a way to ‘be there’—to be where our customers are when they need us. That is huge.”

King’s library uses the Meebo Instant Messaging widget on its Web site and in its ILS system on the “no results” pages, which allows librarians to catch users who come up empty-handed, and help them along to the content they are looking for. In addition, the library uses a mash up of Google Maps with bookmobile routes.

“I see more services, even mainstream services, wanting to develop mash ups and widgets that place one type of content or service in another area, thus creating a better mashed-up product,” says King. “This is very much like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup—start with chocolate, say, Hennepin County Library’s ILS, mash it up with peanut butter, Hennepin’s customer book review database, and you end up with a powerful, popular product—reviews of books by library patrons!”

Mash ups are critical to reaching users, who now have to exit their preferred Web environments to come to the library and use its services, says Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost and Dean, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester.

“I think we have to accept that our library Web sites are not going to be a destination of choice for our students/patrons,” says Gibbons. “Rather, we have to be packaging and serving up parts of our Web sites in ways that they can be integrated into the users’ preferred virtual destination, whether that be Google, Facebook or Second Life.

“For academic libraries, mash ups provide us an opportunity to better integrate the library with the rest of campus, so that our resources and services are not siloed but seen as part of an integrated whole of the University.”

One system that Gibbons has targeted for mixing library content and services is the course management system. Back in 2003, she created, at a conceptual level, the River Campus Libraries, Courses Page system, a mash up of library resources and the courses being taught on campus. Each semester the library imports a feed containing the course number, department name and professor, and then matches those with library resources that are appropriate for a course of that department and level.

“I think the integration of library resources with individual courses on campus is crucial,” Gibbons says. “We need to serve up our content and services in a course management environment so that the library and librarians appear to be an integral part of the course, not an add-on.

“I am eager for the day when a student or faculty member comes to the library asking if we can give them some of our data that they can use for a mash up of their own—perhaps for a research project on publishing trends, such as pulling publishing info from our MARC data, or to trace topical trends in, say, the field of management through the circulation of management books and download stats of online articles. The best mash ups will be designed by our users—hopefully with our help.”

Here are a few other innovative library mash ups:

The discovery mash: University of Huddersfield

Customer adoption was on David Pattern’s mind when he created his library mash up for Amazon.com by mixing Web applications from Amazon, OCLC, University of Huddersfield and Seattle Public Library. Knowing that some 60 million Web searchers visit Amazon each day, he thought why not provide details of and links to library holdings in Amazon search results.

Most librarians he spoke to agreed that patrons found Amazon much easier to use than library OPACs. So, Pattern connected a discovery experience that happens completely outside the library environment, to a library location and fulfillment service, putting the library in the user environment.

“It made sense from a user perspective to begin getting library content ‘out there’ into the wider world,” says Pattern, Library Systems Manager.

And he didn’t stop there. Today, Pattern is mixing external data into the OPAC from a variety of sources, including:

• other edition links using xISBN and thingISBN

• book covers (Amazon Web Services)

• book previews (Google Book Search API)

• keyword suggestions (Yahoo Web Search API and Wikipedia)

They’re also making use of user-generated data to provide keyword and borrowing suggestions.

The legislative mash: Southeastern Libraries Cooperating

A regional library consortium in Minnesota, SELCO needed an innovative way to break through the communications clutter and get the attention of state legislators.

The answer was a mash up using the SELCO Web site, Google Maps and mapbuilder.net.

“We were just one of the zillion groups that tromp through the capital to advocate their cause,” says Mary Beth Sancomb-Moran, former Community Information Librarian at SELCO and creator of the mash up. (Sancomb-Moran now works for the University of Minnesota, Rochester.) “Legislators were intrigued by the mash up and a number of them went right to their office computers to check it out when they found out about it.”

The mash up presents the legislative district with links to each legislator’s Web page, any photos SELCO has of the legislator, and a link to every library in their district. The list of libraries was eye-opening for a number of legislators, Sancomb-Moran says, since they tended to think of only public libraries in their districts, forgetting about the other library types that they might represent. And the mash up created ownership.

“I mentioned to one legislator that the only photo we had of him was from his official Web page, and that if he would send me photos, I could add them to the mash up,” Sancomb-Moran says. “Right then and there, he called the House photographer to schedule a picture of the two of us!”

Library users find the mash up helpful as a way to look for their legislators, Sancomb-Moran says. “SELCO updates the mash up as legislators change. It’s been a great way to drive home to legislators that they represent libraries as part of their districts.”

Coastal area of Banda Aceh (map of 1894), the city that was damaged by the Tsunami in 2004, along with a Google satellite image of the area today. www.kit.nl/maps

The map mash: the Dutch Royal Tropical Institute (KIT)

To broaden access and reach users online, the Dutch Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) digitized its extensive collection of land and nautical maps of the Dutch East Indies (now Republic of Indonesia), the Dutch Antilles and Surinam.

Users can now search by geographical location and navigate through serial maps, and a mash up with Google Earth makes it possible to compare an old map with a new satellite image.

In the past, the collection, which comprises about 27,000 maps and over 1,000 atlases including topographical overview maps and map series, city maps, thematic maps and national atlases, was frequently consulted for scientific research and for planning development projects, emergency relief and peacekeeping missions. The digitization and mash up has resulted in a growing interest in the rich, historical collection among cartographers, researchers and other interested parties living in the former Dutch colonies and in other parts of the world.

New software in 2008 will make it easier to navigate through the maps and will also improve the ordering and printing facilities. Future goals include adding more metadata and enabling users to search all the KIT collections simultaneously to find not only maps and related documentation, but also photographs and museum objects.

The future

Story hour, open shelf access, Web mash ups. Since the late 1800s, innovations have constantly reshaped libraries. It’s certain to continue. What’s on the horizon? What’s the next innovation libraries will need to mix their programs and services with?

Conversation and participation, says King. “The physical library is moving from a publicly accessible storage facility to a community gathering place, and the digital library is moving from a digital brochure and listing tool to a digital community where actual conversations take place,” he says. “Libraries will need to learn how to communicate and participate in this new digital world.”

For those libraries that have already jumped into the new digital world of participation, he suggests that the best way to keep innovating is to not focus on innovation in and of itself but instead, do two things:

Trend watch with both eyes— one eye on general trends, and the other eye on your local community; and

Make sure to incorporate trends that your local communities are already doing or might be interested in.

Gibbons says that libraries cannot exist in a Web 1.0 environment when the rest of the Web is at a 2.0 level. “Our students and faculty are forming expectations for customization and personalization from their experiences with Web sites such as Amazon and Google. The wider the gap between the passive experiences of library Web sites and the interactive ones, the more ripe libraries are for replacement by disruptive technologies and services that we may not even be able to yet imagine.”

Libraries have always connected people with information in unique and creative ways. What tools, systems, services and features can we combine to deliver greater value to users? With enough imagination, everything we do can be thrown into the soup, mixed and mashed in ways that surprise and delight.

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