Richter Library Web Services Dream Design

New Models, Libraries, Technology

(Raphael Detail)

What are the larger structural elements for augmenting library web services for the new millenia. A good exercise would be to deconstruct the larger structural elements of a few of the current generation of new media academic library/technology/faculty collaborations beginning to pop up at leading edge academic institutions (Smithsonian, University of Virginia IATH, Columbia VMC) to think more deeply about the epistemic coordinates for ourselves at the University of Miami. How can we build on the strengths of these nascent structures while taking advantage of our unique socio-cultural coordinates and possibilities for radical and leading edge innovation?

Take the structure of Columbia University's "Visual Media Center". The mission statement of this centre is 'to explore material culture, vision, media and pedagogy in the broadest sense to connect faculty research and student learning through the creative application of technology".

The players within this archival/library/university collaboration involve academics and their research but then also a whole infrastructure that must be created. This infrastructure has traditionally been the academic library as a multidisciplinary collaboratory nexus point for the larger academic community. The enabling tools for these centres become new media technology, the undergirding structure the digital library and archive and its role as information storehouse. Different from previous centuries, rather than simply a physical storehouse the library reverts to a more historical analogue becoming an enabling center for a diverse circle of academics interested in bringing the new possibilities of interactivity and multimedia (i.e. sounds, images, video, database connectivity) to their corpus of work.

These types of centers consist though of more than technologists but, similar to renaissance librarians of generations past, information architects capable of designing bodies of information for storage and retrieval. This design of information requires a fundamental leap past cataloguing for Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress Subject Headings but working more closely with members of the academic community to bring out the new media potential of their work. These centres hinge on questions of information literacy. The other key component becomes 'user and 'learning communities generated through this creative application of technology. What are the other parameters involved and what other roles has the library to take with regards to this reconfiguration?

Reconfiguring Library Web Services, IATH

What is incredible about the University of Virginia's IATH is the breadth of work in its goal to explore the potential of information technology as a tool for humanities research. From academic historical multimedia projects involving the Salem witch trials to Ed Ayers "Valley of the Shadow" to literary projects such as the Melville Electronic Archive and Whitman archives to ethnographic projects dealing with Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe to more visual and art historical projects such as The Blake and Rosetti digital archives, IATH is expanding the definitions of what a library and university in the new millenium should provide for the academic community and how academic work should be carried out and conducted. How can we build on this at UM in Miami?

The mission of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is to provide scholars with the techniques to produce long lasting contributions to the human record in electronic form. Interestingly, the historical impetus comes out of a redivivus of the Jeffersonian notion of the university "to build a completely integrated educational environment that encourages intellectual exchange across disciplinary boundaries and that brings people together in new configurations". The idea of interdisciplinarity as opposed to compartmentalization has large resonance to twenty-first century academe. The ideas here also harken to an earlier entry regarding information scientist Gary Marchioni's prescription for the new millenia library to exist as an 'exploratorium', 'collaboratorium' and 'sharium' (See July 17 entry) to revalidate its central position in an academic university environment.

What is necessary is to begin thinking how we at the UM library system can begin to integrate current millenia ideas regarding information design and information management in tandem with academic projects and the traditional role of the library as central repository of the university's information sources - the academics. The larger idea is to begin to rethink an academic libraries role in the new millenium with regards to the potential and specificity of the language of technology and 'new media'.

Image Maps, Libraries, Information Space

An interesting example of a new type of 'information interface' is Washington Smithsonian Instutiton's, History Wired: A Few of Our Favorite Things. Essentially, the visual interface introduces visitors to some of the three million objects held in the National Museum of American History in a single screen space. What is fascinating is the 'information visualization' being used deriving from the treemap displays developed at the Graduate school of Library/Information Science under Professor Ben Schneiderman and his very innovative Human-Computer Interaction Lab

Why is this mapping and visualization interesting for academic libraries? First of all, it compresses a large amount of information into a small easily visualized space. Second, it is interactive, visual and fairly easy to navigate and find 'objects'. Third, it is very easy to 'remap' or reconceptualize the Smithsonian's object categories (accomplishment, art, commerce etc.) as library database or subject guide categories (i.e. anthropology, biology, engineering etc.).

Now, what are the problems. On the one hand and perhaps most importantly the Java implementation here is very clunky and fickle. Everything here can be done much more felicitiously and with quicker downloads and less hassle in Flash MX. There is a database being connected to here through Cold Fusion and again this overly long code implementation in Java and browser requirement can be much more quickly devoloped through a Macromedia Dynamic Database Paradigm (i.e. Flash front end, opensource mySQL PHP back end) and simple and faster Flash MX plug-In.

The more complex problems are more conceptual, theoretical and larger. How do we go about beginning to reconceptualize our own academic library interfaces so that they are more usable and easily navigable. The single screen space idea instead of long scrolling lists here is important as is the idea of digging deeper into the information structure while preserving context (zooming). What is progressive in this interface is that the 'entire' context of a body of information is preserved through a 'map' and zooming metaphor. Here again, the new 'Zoomfyer' discussed in an earlier blog could be of use. What is needed is development time and the larger space to begin implementing and experimenting with these kind of projects in an academic library environment towards our own projects.

Cultural Specificity, Information Architecture

Miami is a nodal, nexus and meeting point for many different cultures, most evidently the launch area and centre for initiatives and communities operating between North and South. Many academics from Latin, South, Central America and the Carribean use Miami as their natural North America base because of language and the larger cultural communities present. What implications does this have for library web services, digital information architectures and the academic infrastructures in an academic library. Most apparently, this issue comes up in terms of language (English/Spanish) but what about more subtle issues regarding cultural specificity, web design and cognitive taxonomies?

Within Miami there are many different academic cultural communities and information structures in those communities that act as bridges to and from 'other' places - physically and intellectually. What role has University of Miami Library Web Services in facilitating academic bridges between North and South? Is there anything to be learned on the level of visual design from other cultures that could be applied to the library website information structures or to the way that our information is stratified and organized?

Society and academic library web services is quickly expanding from digitization of textual based media forms (books, archival material) to visual (photography, art) and multia media based forms (film, video, audio). How should this digitization take place with regards to other cultural communities and how an academic library provides web services? What should be the role in web services with regards to facilitating this more digitally cultural specific dissemination of information?

Cuban Heritage and Digitization

(Cuban Heritage Photography Collection)

What are the implication for academic library web services regarding special collections, archives and digitization? Today, Maria Estorino of UM Richter Library's Cuban Heritage Collection gave a presentation regarding the last four years of digitizing the treasures of U Miami's Cuban Heritage Collection. Maria pointed out that statistically the most hits for the Cuban special collections are those that have a 'visual' (photographic, pictoral) component at their core.

Maria also emphasized the quality of design within the framework of digitizing the Cuban Heritage Collection and necessity of finding aids as 'access points' to otherwise unavailable archival information. How are adequate funds allocated for digitization and how do human resources impact on the quality of a digital library project? As Maria pointed out, because more adequate human resources were assigned to the Cuban heritage project with a dedicated designer to focus on visual design, more innovation was possible. This directly affected web popularity.

(Cuban Heritage Theatre Collection)

The web is necessarily a visual medium and fundamentally different from books. One of the future projects of the CHC is a History of Cuban Theatre Archive being developed with the content management software, Content DM and implementing a range of media artifacts: text, audio, visual images and video. Similarly, a good special example of web/library/digital innovation was Dr. Holly Ackerman's annotated bibliography on "Moderate Cuban Politics" vividly brought to life by Dr. MacCorkle and her visual interface and search tool for this bibliography. The emphasis and lesson to take away here was the shift from strictually textual 'content' thrown onto the web to presentation of the content. What the example of the Cuban Heritage Digitized collections pointed out was the essential necessity of information 'design' and attention to the visual artifact's presentation and visualization. From the hit counts experienced by UM libraries CHC, the lesson learned seemed to be that an attention to visual artifacts and visual design directly result in library access and use increasing.

Interdisciplinarity, Visual Thinking, Information

The Visual Thinking Strategies Institute was a progressive interdisciplinary endeavor between the University of Miami School of Education, Lowe Art Museum, Otto G. Richter Research and Educational Services and Miami Dade School Division. The purpose of the institute was to instruct teachers in how to implement larger sets of visual thinking strategies into the teaching curriculum for k-12 students. Through the use of art history and interactive media technologies, teachers were taught 'visual thinking strategies'. Through the Lowe Art Museum's permanent collections and Otto G. Richter's databases, the institute was predicated on discovery and learning 'new visual ways of thinking' through innovative educational methodologies.

Twentieth century culture has largely been visual. Children learn to read the visual grammars of film and television largely before they can read and write. The current rising trend in academia has been toward 'inter' and 'trans' disciplinarity which traditional 'compartmentalized' ninenteenth and twentieth century university departments had shunned. At the University of Miami, the president Donna Shalala has commented that while this is the orientation, convincing and moving faculty towards these necessary ideas has been slower than as Truman put it, 'trying to move a graveyard'.

Through collaborative constructivist strategies, teachers were taught at UM's Summer Visual Thinking Strategies Institute in a progressive fashion that sought to transcend boundaries between disciplines and cross traditional academic borderlines. I was very happy to participate and collaborate with the Lowe art museum, Art historians, Educators and Research Librarians on the Visual Thinking Strategies Institute endeavor.

To note, an academic libraries innovative and visionary potential as an academic collaboratorium was brought out here in facilitating 'transdisciplinary' endeavors and creating a 21st century transdisciplinary curriculum. Richter Library Research and Educational services faculty presented sessions on "Using Online Databases as Art Resources", “Internet Search Strategies and Evaluation of Images”, “Web Page Design and Visual Thinking Strategies” and “Understanding New Media Design Techniques through Visual Principles". Complementing this, art historians and curators gave sessions on "Image Selection and Aesthetic Development" in tandem with education professors who gave sessions on "Visual Understanding in Education".

The Institute final's component was a synthetic workshop that gave the opportunities of the 'new' for the students, many of whom were from an older generation and had not had wide experience with 'Information technology' much less web design or the potential of interactive media with regards to visual thinking.

I was able to teach the institute's middle to ending components which began with an overview set of presentations on "Visual Thinking Strategies and Web Page Design" and then moved quickly to " Understanding Design Techniques through Visual Principles". In the second part of this workshop, the students moved to a more directly hands on 'constructivist' model. In the library's information literacy laboratory, the workshop centered on Web Page Design. This culminated in a final project where the students were able to take all that they had learned in the Visual Thinking Strategies Institute and actualize it in a final web development project that will ultimately reside as a larger website hosted by the library.

The final section of the Institute was a moving event where students, many of whom had never done webdesign, showed to their colleagues and the professors present, the results of their strenuous labor. Older professors and younger student teachers who had worked with perserverence and faith produced web pages in diverse topics such as "Women Renaissance Artists", "Cat Images and Modernism", "Picasso" and "Chagall and Visual Thinking Strategies".

My feeling about this type of endeavor is that in the twenty-first century, the library is 'an academic hub and natural resource center' for digital artifacts, information resources and methodologies. Academic libraries with regards to technological resources and 'information' should be involved in a lot more of these type of projects. Web services for an academic library provided here the academic foundation, technology and resources for bringing out the hidden potential in both a very creative academic community and the students wishing to benefit and learn from that community.

Mathematica/The Other Side of Information Mapping

In the past few weeks, this weblog has talked about the potential of Flash as a tool for information mapping and revealing relationships in large datasets such as those found in academic libraries. The other end of information architecture doing starting from the engineering and mathematical side of things is Stephen Wolfram's, Mathematica. Mathematica is for mathematicians and engineers what Flash is for visual artists and graphic designers. Perhaps correctly, both programs meet on similar grounds but come to things from two traditionally varying directions. What potential does Mathematica have for academic library web services?

The reclusive physicist/mathematican/computer scientist, Stephen Wolfram has recently written a 1200 page book called "A New Kind of Science". Apparently, in this work that took 10 years to complete, Wolfram is dealing with visualization, math and information science and using new methodologies opened by the computer to find new and unexpected 'patterns'.

Wolfram is also picking up from the Austro-Hungarian mathematician Johnny Van Neumann and his last works on the potential of computers through 'cellular automata'. Briefly, the theory of cellular automata combines mathematics/computer science and simple biological rules to create on the one hand virtual self-replicating automata, patterns and algorithms and on the other the reason for structures that we find visualized in nature (i.e. fern leaves, trees, mountains etc). This is a reduction and simplification of the theory which has a wide berth of uses from AI to Information Science.

Using Mathematica, Wolfram visualizes various unexpected symmetries and organizational structures by starting with simple rules and then generating complex and sometimes counter-intuitive phenomena. This has wide application to information architecture and finding hidden relationships between large datasets such as those found in academic library catalogues. Apparently, Wolfram is advocating a new kind of science arising out of visualization and simple sets of 'rules' to generate complex structures. This again could have wide application to library databases.

Wolfram's also has literary antecedents here. In Herman Hesse's "Magister Ludi" (trans. "the Glass Bead Game") Hesse writes a novel about a futuristic land called Castalia where the adherants play a scholarly like game based on the synthesis of mathematics and musicology - the Glass Bead Game. The parallels with this game playing and a visual pattern language are rich and the application for library and information science unexplored. What is needed is a remapping onto library and information science paradigms. By reimagining what a catalogue can do, we can open up new pathways of knowledge for scholars and researchers. What is our purpose in presenting a catalogue through the web and through a database? Is this 'new kind of science' that Wolfram is talking about, a new kind of information science or how can information science benefit from this type of visualized pattern seeking?