Richter Library Web Services Dream Design

Morphology and Information

In Biology, morphology is the study of form. A major challenge we have with regards to our academic library web services is that we have little understanding of the 'morphology' of our database usage or a visualization of the 'forms' of our website usage. While we have a larger understanding through scrolling list type statistics of various 'hit' counts of certain pages, this gives us thousands of numbers. It becomes difficult to see the larger picture, trends, patterns or relationships.

The challenge becomes visualizing the morphology of the 'information use. Again, the heterodox anthropologist/cybernetician Gregory Bateson is useful. His idea is that 'morphology' is dictated by environment. In a biological sense, 'animals' develop', 'adapt' and 'evolve' their morphology with regards to the environment. Abstracting this and taking it into the realm of information, our information architecture should evolve in natural symbiosis with 'user' needs and the larger information 'environment'. Perhaps this measurement involves a negative way. The Archimedean story is useful here.

Archimedes was asked by the King to determine whether a crown used by him was really all gold. He was to do this without damaging the crown in any way. Stepping into his full bath, he realized that the water overflowed displacing an equal amount in the water's rise. "Eureka, I found" it he yelled shouting through the streets.

Perhaps, here we can translate Archimedes "Eureka" into measuring information use by 'displacement' of information volume through hit counts. What are the feedback mechanisms that are built into our webservices. Can these be built as displacement mechanisms? How do we visualize the morphology of our website's usage to be able to better see' how this information is being used?

Information Ecology, Ecology of Mind

In Gregory Bateson's "Ecology of Mind" Bateson talks about an ecology of ideas - ideas dying, evolving and existing in a larger 'information ecology'. Much of this has relevance to our own academic library website 'information ecology'. Web services in the library exists in a 'virtual environment', an environment that is manufactured and created and lives in a certain ecology. What are the parameters and feedback mechanisms in which 'information bodies' are born evolve and die? In an academic library environment much of these virtual bodies involve data, web usability and information usage by 'people'.

Bateson makes an important and subtle distinction between 'computer' logic and classic logic. He writes:

The computer operates by cause and effect; it follows that when events inside the computer are used to simulate the "if. . .then. . ." of logic, the "then" becomes temporal. If I close this switch, then (almost immediately) the light will light." But the "if. . .then. . ." of logic contains no time. "If three sides of this triangle are equal to three sides of that triangle, then the triangles are equal". There is no time in that "then".
(The Birth of a Matrix, or Double Blind and Epistemology, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 204).

Keeping this idea in mind, add to this an important function from the image editing program "Photoshop". The function is called "Inverse Select". One uses a trace tool (brush or wand) to select the perimeter of an object, lets say a vase. After selecting the vase, if one presses "Inverse Select" one can then select everything in the picture that is not the vase - sort of a Zen method of selecting negative space. With this method it becomes easy to select the background of an image and recolor - something initially impossible to select by tracing outlines becomes easy.

Now, to look at this idea in terms of the previous ones about logic and information ecologies and our own academic library perspectives on databases. In our information systems, one way to set up the "If. . .Then" loop is with regard to feedback and our database usage. For example, "If the Students/Faculty use this database Then place this database nearer to the top of the list in our information architecture. Conversely, If the students/faculty use this database less, Then place this database closer to the bottom of the list in our information architecture.

To ask a question: abstracting with regards to our own academic information systems, is it possible to place an "Inverse Select" with regards to our databases exploiting this difference between 'causal logic' and 'computer logic'? Can the rules of negative space utilize an important but somewhat 'amorphouse' field of information seeking?

Cybernetics, Gregory Bateson, Information Science

The 'cybernetics' work of renegade Anthropologist Gregary Bateson has much to say for current large 'information system design' particularly with regards to 'the human' angle. The early work of Bateson marries ecology/information science/anthropology/engineering paradigms and tropes. While ahead of his time from the 40's to the 70's, there is value for rereading his work. Much of our work with larger 'information systems' in academic libraries regards questions of human/computer interaction and 'the environment' and information ecology in which we are creating in our systems.

Bateson takes a lot of tropes from control engineering (i.e. steady state processing, signal, noise, feedback) and transplants these into thinking about the human level of information systems. For example, in an engineered thermostat there is a temperature setting set to an 'ideal'. There is another setting which checks the 'actual' room temperature. The feedback between these two 'states' then modulates whether the 'heater' or 'air conditioner' should be on. Similarly, while our database or information systems are not build this way, they could use a heavy dose of 'feedback' state mechanism. Through a feedback monitoring of which 'databases' are being constantly used, these vendor contracts could be negotiated or renegotiated and the others discarded. This feedback data also impinges on how our 'information' is organized or 'self-organizes' with regards to feedback. Similarly, Bateson has a lot to say about 'noise'. Again, this could usefully be applied to 'information systems' and the 'surfing' which goes on in academic library systems (i.e. our own information commons)

My interest in Bateson was kindled by his association with the computer scientist Von Neumann. Bateson participated in Von Neumann's early cross disciplinary New York cybernetic conferences. His name again came up in a friend's referral with regards to him as one of the father's of cybernetics. Bateson's range extends from Balinese Ritual and Trance (film/photography/semiotics) to classical anthropology to communication and information science.

The connections here are also with another father of information science's interdisciplinary work with engineering/human computer interaction/information, Norman Weiner.

All of these thinkers noted and resuscitated are cognitively travelling early cross-disciplinary paths. They combine science/humanities paradigms on the level of information seeking in a way that today becomes necessity. In a sense, what these thinkers give us are paradigms to work with and implement on a hands on level with our computer systems today. While their thinking early on exceeded the bounds of practicable computing possibility, with the advance of today's computer power, ideas only discussed in theory now become useful and also 'necessary' in practice in large information web systems such as academic libraries.

Information Visualization Redux, Film Semiotics

What lingers from Ben Schneiderman's Craft of Information Visualization (2003, entry for September 03, 2003), is his theoretical admonition and generalizations in the final section of this book. The tropes that Schneiderman constantly falls back on for information visualization in this final section are largely visual (i.e. contextual maps, focus) but also come from 'film' analogies. Interestingly, Shneiderman seems quite unaware of the vast body of work with regards to film stylistics/narratology/film semiotics. Can these areas be fruitfully brought to bear on the organization of large information systems such as those present in academic libraries?

In thinking about "information visualization", the logical antecedent seems to be film narratology. Looking though books such as David Bordwell's Making Meaning or Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, the bridge to large information systems seems far and not quite fertile enough.

The more interesting area for investigation and build on Shneiderman from a wider angle is Bordwell's earlier more formalistically oriented work on film stylistics and aesthetics. The trick here becomes how does one take Bordwell's explanations on the masterpieces and masters of modernist film stylistics and use these 'visual tropes' in the context of large information systems with attention to the necessities of organizing data in meta-structures such as academic library web sites. The natural visualization tool with it new 'database' connectivity possibilities here is Flash. The work here has not yet been accomplished and paradigms unset. Currently, we are bound by a dominant paper based 'page' metaphor but Bordwell's stylistic work could be very applicable and fertile territory for moving information systems to a new paradigm.

Distributed Ownership, Emergence, Complexity

Steven Johnson's "Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software" has a few interesting ideas in developing large information systems. Because academic library web information systems are exponentially expanding, another way to go is a move away from centralized authority to one of distributed ownership. Technically, this is feasible through templates, style sheets, congruency in visual/font design. Johnson's book looks at the symmetries in self-organizing systems and theorizes possible 'building' models in large networked information hiearchies.

Johnson begins with 'ants' showing how complex colonies are self organized not through a central authority but through 'feedback' structures - 'pheronomes'. This argument is then extended to the physical architecture of 'urban studies'. Johnson looks at the self-organizational patterns of large metropolises and how patterns and 'districts' form through the factor of 'distance' and feedback. Through these examples, Johnson gives evidence of complexity arising not from central plans but from the bottom and self-organizational possibilities opened through 'feedback'.

Moving to information systems, Johnson posits that the 'internet' is currently largely without feedback mechanism to develop the the type of complexity possible in higher self organizing entities. Johnson later recants this on his current weblog where he talks about the new possibilities of trackbacks blogs and XML cross linking. He is still largely right that the web is without larger feedback mechanism.

On an information architecture level, Johnson's 'complexity' in information systems develops from the bottom up. Within the information design of large systems, the trick seems to be able to evolve complexity yet attend to a larger unity. Similarly, how can larger library web information systems benefit by looking afield to other 'self-organizing' complex information structures?

Innovation, New Technology, Experimentation

With the possibilities opened up by new technologies, new areas are opened up for academic libraries. The models for how to work with these technologies are not yet in place. In previous columns, this weblog has focused much on 'software innovation' enabling new library multimedia and interactive possibilities but what about innovation regarding hardware and how to reconceptualize the new technological possibilities opened up by this hardware with regards to the space and forum of academic libraries? Traditionally, libraries have been 'quiet' places for study and reflection. Currently, the academic library floor stack levels have become largely necropolises, underutilized relics of pre-computer culture.

Two new areas for innovation and possibility are opened up by cellular phones and PDA's. Not much work has been done here with regards to both technologies. Traditionally the 'cellular telephone' and the academic library have been at opposing poles. To play the dialectician, why not welcome the celullar phone and the communication, noise and technologies it enables and use it as a tool within the stacks and information commons. This breaks the taboo for the entire library being a quiet space but what about reconfiguring this idea too for nodes of quiet and 'noisy' communicative spaces to reconfigure the larger library space. Within the UM campus, it is rare to see a student without a cellular phone. Why not capitalize on this socio-cultural technologic fact.

For example, why not purchase 20 video/e-mail enabled cellular phones and have them placed at the reference desk as a new service. Subject and reference librarians would be trained and a period of experimentation with methodologies would follow. As students and faculty venture into the jungle of the stacks, librarians at terminals could provide mobile guidance from a remote computer terminal at the reference desk.

Similarly, 20 PDA's could be purchased that are e-mail or Flash enabled and while students or faculty are browsing the stacks, they could get on the fly assistance through these assistive technologies.

Research and development efforts here would be allocated towards the problems of interface design, 'library' 'databases', 'web services', smaller screens and challenges associated with these screens for different services. The new generation of devices enables. How could reference services be reconceptualized in terms of the new
mobile', 'nomadic' technologic cultures personified through generation Z++ attending college and university? How could a new symbiosis and interactivity be achieved between the now underutilizied academic library floor stacks and the possibilities for 'communication' enabled through these devices?

Flash 7, MX Professional, New Library Possibilities

While I don't want this academic library webservices weblog to get overly technical, it is important to note new significant developments in software which will directly impact on the possibilities for our own webservices. This entry will be a little more technically oriented than others. Macromedia announced today a new Macromedia Studio (2004). The centrepiece within this is a new version of Flash (Professional) and a new player. Again, this will allow new possibilities for interactivity and multimedia and open possibilities for academic library web services

Flash Professional

From what I understand, the new professional version of Flash is targeted towards Macromedia's push towards RIA's or Rich Internet applications and is closer to a Visual Basic model. This will be important for our own 'Web Services' and move towards dynamically driven back-end applications.

Also, the professional version gets rid of the timeline and puts in its place forms for creating applications! What will all the right brain thinkers make of that!

The hype here reads that the player is twice as fast as MX. On a practical level, the release of the new Flash 7 player gives the UM library system credence to move up to MX as we are always one version behind to provide higher user penetration.

Text formatting is also improved with CSS support and also better support for video. Now, it is possible to play a Flash Video file (FLV) from the web server without importing it into Flash This also apparently includes a new video encoder to export video from Quicktime to Flash. This is also worth beginning to beta test in the library as the time for video services through the web seems to be increasingly practicable.

There is also a new version of the programming language Actionscript with a more robust object oriented paradigm. Another feature is the use of components to build advanced interfaces (i.e. datagrid, calendar, menus) closer to a visual basic model. The component model introduces stronger data connectivity through XML. Similarly, this is also worth closer examination

Another apparent innovation is the new focus on developing content for devices and cell phones. Here is also another new point of entry specifically for academic library web services. There has been very little work as yet done to translate PDA, cell phone and device possibilities to the library and the technology here seems to be opening the door.

Dreamweaver 2004

Apparently, this version of Dreamweaver does not look as significant as the previous Flash Professional discussion (somewhat like the jump between Dreamweaver 3-4), but nonetheless it also seems worth perusing over at least the one preliminary feature I noticed: CSS improvements. The discussion of these improvements seem very technical but again these are also worth examining further as our entire Richter Library Website was recently redone with a new 'attached' CSS single stylesheet. Also, more robust cross-browser compatibility checking.

Reconceptualizing Subject Guides, Interactive Design Annual

A major part of the library's website is the E-Resources and the approximately 35 academic subject area guides. How can we reconceptualize these guides from essentially long scrolling lists of textual data to more innovative and usable set of lists. To put this into juxtaposition and synthesis, Communication Arts Interactive Annual presents some of the best examples of 'commercial level' interactive design currently being accomplished. Perhaps it is not a bad idea to take a closer look at this work being accomplished with regards to online design and abstract this onto the level of academic subject guides. What can we learn? How can we more effectively redesign our own subject guides?

The interactive annual list is divided into categories of Advertising, Business, Entertainment, Info Design and Self Promotion. All of these sites are centrally concerned with questions of 'information design'. Similarly, the judges presented in Quicktime vignette give one a heads up of the current possibilities within online webdesign, trends, innovations and directions.

What would be interesting would be to look at each of these sites very seriously in terms of reconceptualizing our own 'subject guides' and the 'visual possibilities' that these sites allow. Each of these sites presents several new innovative strategies in terms of the presentation of information. How can our own academic subject guides be made more robust and 'usable' through radical design innovation. Asst. University Librarian and Head of Digital Initiatives Jeff Berry points out, academic websites have only been around really for the past five years. The rules are not set in stone and although we seem encrusted here in 'print bound' metaphor and linear scrolling list, we are not tied to them.

What would it take to seriously begin thinking about these subject guides in terms of radical reconceptualization and innovation as presented in the sites here in Comm Arts Interactive Annual. What are the advantages or disadvantages of using these sites as blueprints for our own excursions and placing the library on a higher level of development. Also, this site presents breakdowns in terms of project timelines (how long each project took) and the 'team' structure required to generate each of these entities. This also merits a closer look for our own excursions.

Digital Libraries, Academic Integrity

(Sonia Delaunay, Avant Garde Book Cover)

The digital library interface for New York's Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934 is worth examining for our own exhibition presentations. The online exhibition for this digital library presents 112 of these books using Flash Five, Quicktime and a well thought out interface. Form follows function and an interactive multimedia site reflexively presents these books' subtle innovation. This digital library is somewhat visionary and worth investigating further if not to highlight and build on some of its mistakes then to begin thinking about possible future trajectories.

Looking a little more closely at the digital library presentation, the interface is worth reflecting on in terms of its construction to get an understanding of the accompanying digital library.

In the top left corner, books are divided into three period navigation bars: 1910-24, 1916-30 and 1924-34. From each of these rough periods, visitors can select from three different sets of themes and then examine a number of books in each category. After selecting one of the themes, a user is given a set of books which cover this theme and from here, they can peruse a few pages through Quicktime/Flash.

The innovation here is compression of a large number of texts into a very small information space. The long scrolling list problem is solved. In terms of critique, the scholarly rigor is not robust nor exhaustive. Instead of entire books scanned in full page, full text edition, the interface limits itself to a few pages of scanned text. Because of this, the scholarly value for a digital library diminishes. On the other hand, this interface becomes a great tool as a finding aid for scholars needing to quickly scan material which they might have an interest in perusing further. To give the interface justice, it does present a prototype of what is possible for a digital library with the proper resources.

(Mayakovsky, Avant Garde Poetry Book Cover)

The two lower sections are divided into a "Reading Room" and "Book Index"

The reading room allows one to go through a book. Four books have been scanned and an archival curator's white kit gloves present the text through a Quicktime/Flash movie. Two panels present the book in full page and in close up segments. The interface is beautiful but the navigation a bit confusing and more eye candy than scholarly use value. Having said this, this again could be easily cleared up and with the proper human resource element scanning these texts in full would not be difficult

Finally, another single page 'interface', 'a book index' allows one to peruse all '112' books by year, artist/author, publisher in a single screen interface. The compression of information here is outstanding and the multi-dimensional relationships generated through the subject coordinates again very useful to begin thinking about other academic digital library stratifications. The use of Flash for navigation again is excellent.

To step back, the map generated from this prototype is useful to begin thinking about future digital library possibilities and visualizations. Any subject matter can be taken here and the information visualized. What are the possibilities for our own Cuban heritage and archives and special collections? What are the innovations here? What are the antecedents? Where are the other radical examples of the marriage of interactive multimedia and digital libraries?

Evolving a New Site Design

In Fall 2003 University of Miami's Website design evolves a few steps further.

What are the innovations within this design?

Site wide consistency through attached cascading style sheets, Flash based sitewide navigation, a more interactive interface, deeper attention to visual design through metaphor.

Perhaps here it is possible to reflect on larger questions of what is possible within an academic library website design. What questions is it necessary now to begin thinking about in the long term:

A deeper attention to issues of visual aesthetics and information, a more thought out visual marketing scheme, a deeper more innovative conceptualized information architecture and a more robust and bold move into interactivity and the possibilities of multimedia.

What is now needed for the future evolution of the design? A deeper attention to flash, metaphor, narrative and the 'experience' of the site. Our culture has become providly visual, 'visually oriented' and visually motivated. Bringing information services to this level must be achieved on a thought out and more subtle level. Who are our audiences and how are they using the site? How can algorithms from 'games' and 'game theory' be used in the service of learning and developing more visual interfaces?

Information Visualization, Lessons from Maryland

Ben Schneiderman's Craft of Information Visualization (2003) is a compiling of a group of papers of the last ten years of the University of Maryland's Human Computer Interaction Lab. Schneiderman, one of the fathers of Human-Computer Interaction and shift towards interface 'usability' reflects on the work of the group and what it means to put together an information science 'web team' focused on innovation. The book is a compilation of the groups' important papers most of which form an emerging edge of information interface design.

What is important from this book for academic libraries and information centres:

First, Schneiderman's geneology of important works in the field. Bertin Semiology of Graphics (1983 English Translation), Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (Card, Mackinlay and Schneiderman), Spence (2000), Chen (1999), Ware (2000) and groups such as Xerox Park and the ACM special interest group SIGGRAPH.

Second, Shneiderman's summary of Information visualization: "The users of information visualization tools are interested in finding relationships among variables: discovering similar items; and identifying patterns such as clusters, outliers and gaps" (ix). This is key for academic library web services, catalogues and academic library information science.

Third, Shneiderman summarizes how a 'web services' team is to work to produce innovation with tried but true maxims. 1) Choose a good driving problem 2) Become immersed in related work 3) Clarify short term and long term goals 4) Balance individual and group interests 5) work hard. 6) communicate with internal and external stakeholders 7) Get past failures Celebrate success.

The book is divided into chapters clustered around the group's papers through eight subject headings. 1) Database Discovery with Dynamic Queries. 2) Seeing the World Through Image Libraries. 3) Preserving Context with Zoomable User Interfaces. 4) The World's Information in Digital Libraries. 5) Making Sense of the World Wide Web. 6) Understanding Hierarchical Data. 7) Innovating the Interaction 8) Theories for Understanding Information Visualization."

What is amazing is that much of the work from these papers is now being translated through "Flash" and Macromedia's rich internet application paradigm to web applications. What existed in 1991-3 at high end places such as MIT and Maryland has now become ubiquitous to anyone with a Pentium 4, Macromedia suite and web savvy.

Finally, Shneiderman reiterates his important theme from Leonardo's Laptop: "The devotion of many computing reserachers to purely algorithmic approaches to problem solving is a key issue for the future of human-computer interaction and information visualization research. These researchers are engrossed with novel ideas of statistical pattern discovery, genetic and neural net algorithms and machine learning, so they are not drawn to the challenge of user interface design. This central distinction between machine-centered and user-centered thinking remains a vital topic that will determine research priorities".

The most important thing in this book are the papers themselves, possibilities for implementation and remixing with our own information system. Brief links to online project pages (389-393) included.