The Search Principle blog

It has been one year since the launch of the Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/), a wiki or online reference source that aims to create “the world’s most trusted knowledge base.” The innovative non-profit project combines free-wheeling, open wiki collaboration with real names and guidance by expert editors.

Since October 2006, more than 2,100 people have joined as authors and editors and 3,300 articles are under development. The project has tripled its article count since its public launch last March. Also, the rate at which it creates new articles has tripled in the last ten months and doubled in the last one hundred days.

“We’ve grown nicely, and are now clearly accelerating,” said the project’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Larry Sanger, who is also co-founder of Wikipedia. In a progress report (http://www.citizendium.org/oneyearandthriving.html), Sanger used the occasion to “debunk myths” about the project, discuss significant progress and announce several new initiatives for the expert-guided online project.

He also makes some bold predictions. Read the press release here:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Citizendium_Press_Releases/Oct302007

Here it is, in ten minutes, a gem of a mini-lecture by the virtual reality expert, Dr. Randy Pausch. Essential viewing. Tell your friends. And your loved ones. – Dean

A science librarian I know ends all of his e-mails with something that makes me chuckle every time I see it:

“No….I am not on Facebook“.

Cynicism aside, the truth is that Facebook is an important outreach space for academic librarians who want to communicate with users on their terms, to engage them in chat and be social with them. Facebook is “the” platform at the moment for creative reference librarians.

Facebook’s 1.6% sale for $250 million dollars is a win-win for twenty-something CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who decided last year to pass on Yahoo’s one billion dollar Facebook bid. This means Facebook is valued at about $15 billion dollars, wow. Zuckerberg – now armed with so much cash – can put his ideas for Facebook expansion into action and prepare for an initial public offering sometime in 2009.

While 23 year old Zuckerberg says he won’t go public for at least two years, Facebook will be an advertising mecca in the interim by increasing its audience of nearly 50 million active users who connect daily to friends through microblogging, photo-sharing and other social activities.

Microsoft’s acquisition of such a small part of Facebook is a symbolic win over rival Google. After all, Google has outpaced the operating system giant throughout 2007, in profits and mindshare of web searchers. Microsoft’s social networking site, Live Spaces, has attracted about nine million users, and its Academic Live Search tool (now embedded in the name of this blog) is all but forgotten in academic circles.

Microsoft knew it needed this win. From here, watch for more convergence of social software and search tools in sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The question is: will libraries follow suit?

On October 22nd, several hundred medical journals worldwide [see Open medicine story] will simultaneously publish articles about global health.

As a way to humanize global health issues, Dr. Victor Castilla who authors Web 2.0 and medicine, writes below for UBC Google scholar blog about his observations of children in his hometown, and his work in family medicine.

“I grew up in Grocio Prado, a small, poor, rural town in Peru. A place where children can play and walk on streets late at night, but where they have no shoes, and where sanitation is poor. Open canals carry contaminated water to the harvest fields and children can swim in those canals with no awareness that the water will make them sick.

This patient wanted to follow an ADA diet, but she could not, because the food that she ate every day was given from charity. Something that she could not select or refuse because it was the only thing she has to survive. This experience showed me how essential prevention is and how important it is to have good communication with our patients to avoid big problems in the future. I realized that care of patients extends beyond the office door.”

Being in the moment…. Sometimes, that’s what blogging is about.

For the past ten months, I’ve been more in the moment with blogging as time out of my day has been spent responding to things, changes in search environments and my own insights into learning. Biblio-blogging (blogging by librarians) can sometimes be about specific things in our work, such as information dissemination, outreach and learning but it can also be about finding a place for reflection, and taking a minute to step back from it all. I’ve come to really appreciate the luxury.

Search – and how it affects medicine, physicians and their decision-making – is a fascinating area to think and blog about; I’ll likely never tire of it. I am already working on my next concept piece for the British Medical Journal about changes in the information landscape of 2007. Its publication will mark a return to my work as a hospital librarian, and medical librarian, something that I value more now.

Will I continue to blog about teaching and learning? About educational technologies? Adult learning theories as they apply to my work in information literacy? Yes, but with renewed vigour and interest in my work with physicians and health workers at Vancouver Hospital. I’ll return there in early January 2008.

In the interim, notice that I’ll be blogging too at Open Medicine about other medical topics. Visit me there sometime, if you have a moment.

My sabbatical year has not been exclusively about scholarly activities. It’s also been about exploring new ideas, career directions and areas of expertise. I have learned a lot by re-examining my work, and my positionality at the UBC Library, and academia. However, I think I’m heading back to the hospital, and my work as a biomedical librarian. Here’s why:

Ten (10) Reasons Why I’m Returning to Hospital Librarianship
1. I enjoy physicians, nurses and pharmacists (and other hospital staff)

2. Patients and clinical care (because it matters)

3. The UBC Biomedical Branch Staff – Carol, Darko, Kim, Yuko (and a team of SLAIS students)

4. Medical information from circulation, reference services and document delivery (because they make a huge difference to patient care and medical research)

5. Vancouver hospital’s new Diamond Centre (because we earned it, after years in the dungeon in Heather Pavilion)

6. Medical students (who are really great, smart and our future carers)

7. Health librarians (because we, as a group of professionals, band/stick together)

8. Open Medicine journal (which I am really enjoying, and want to continue)

9. Hospital library spaces (always busy, fun, evolving)

10. Finally, because I’ve earned it.

Enough said. See you soon, Dean

Allan and I are working on a conceptual piece about the semantic web which grew out of our random thoughts on the matter published recently in the Semantic Report. This week’s Social software class was an extension of our thoughts about Web 2.0, and the tensions it introduces for librarians, educators and students.

One tension around social software that I wanted to revisit is the notion of socializing to learn. I believe humans are social beings and learn best from each other. (Check out the photo to your right – that’s a social pod of whales navigating waters in the Pacific.)

A media guy named Morgan, who attended our session, challenged some of my ideas around socialization as a learning activity. We even got clarity around our definition of socializing from Nancy (who googled and provided definitions). I take their points that socialization is not necessarily educational or a part of learning.

However, my point is that a lot of knowledge-creation is inherently social. Think of how we work together on projects and how children learn in pods. I challenge the idea that solitary acts of knowledge-creation (ie. an expert writing a book, let’s say) are superior to thinking-working-doing with others. And contest the resistance to social software in the educational and library contexts.

Some educators and librarians (even some government organizations that block social tools) don’t get Web 2.0, or see its potential. This, to me, was why we did our session this week. To show how social tools can be used to raise awareness and start conversation. Sorting through problems with each other is a first step to thinking together, which is a social act, I argue, and a precursor to knowledge building, and the sharing of new ideas.

Today, Eugene Barsky, Allan Cho and I are doing an exploratory ‘hands-on’ session for a group of SLAIS students, some members of the CHLA/ABSC Student Interest Group and a few EDST students who I have invited to the session to mix things up a bit.

Here are some important/relevant links for the session:

1. Eugene and I gave a similar, longer session at the CHLA/ABSC Conference in June 2007.

2. Physician bloggers, medical librarians, and edubloggers.

3. What is microblogging?

4. UBC Health Library Wiki; the Curriki Wiki: global education & learning community; other wiki projects (Brian Lamb’s Toward Open Education).

5. Facebook groups that I follow…. like Classroom 2.0 and Librarians Who Support Open Access.

“To be an open educator today is to embrace contradictions. Online activity is increasingly being fragmented and integrated. Open culture takes giant steps while forces of control tighten their grip. The future has never been brighter nor so perilous. Can we inhabit irresolvable dilemmas and still manage to act?”
- Brian Lamb’s Keynote, Open Education Conference, 2007.

Irresolvable dilemmas is about right. This is what I experience most about being a librarian circa 2007, and what I discuss with SLAIS students – a mix of discomfort about the hegemony of technologies, and a technocratic zeal for them at the same time. Brian Lamb is a kind of intellectual swing at UBC (think Broadway swing, or Figaro as factotum), a technocrat in both the positive and pejorative senses of the term, and now a vermin virtuoso. You gotta read this post.

Related links from The VV:

1. Links from the Keynote – http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Its_All_Coming_Apart
2. abject learning Blog – http://blogs.ubc.ca/brian/

My colleague Allan Cho and I recently wrote our ideas down about Web 3.0 in an article called The Semantic Web as a large, searchable catalogue: a librarian’s perspective in which we explore our ideas about Web 3.0, also known as the Semantic Web.

In general, the Web (in its current state of disarray) is not unlike print libraries of the 19th century before the Library of Congress and Melvil Dewey introduced classification systems (and better methods of organizing materials on library shelves) – parallels worth exploring. Of a more recent vintage, check out the OCLC and its work in developing Semantic Web technologies. We suggest that the techniques of bibliographic control which have figured so prominently in the training of librarians for more than a generation should be applied to the coming Semantic Web.

Think about the rise of the graphical web since 1995. Computer scientists and engineers created the pre-Google Web and Web 2.0 using various free social software tools, but it will be professionals in the library science and information science field who will play prominent roles in Web 3.0. Although we are still coming to grips with the implications of Web 2.0, we are in a liminal stage. Folksonomies, social tagging, wikis, blogs, podcasts, mashups are building blocks for the coming Semantic web.