typo(s), tendency and text

In 2008 I contributed to the department I work in by introducing wikis for collaboration on texts and documents, aggregating and sharing knowledge about projects. Before that, there were lots of Microsoft Word documents floating around, which was a problem when the number of people contributing to a document became too big. Keeping track of changes was difficult, and when a deadline came close, lots of emails were sent and people tried to write on the document all at once.

There was also a wish to give the collaborating libraries in four regions of Hordaland a tool to work similar with their documents, and on their projects and events.

Enter DokuWiki

I rolled out 4, eventually 6 instances of DokuWiki for library groups in the regions, our own department, a book project within the international library organization IFLA and for one local library. All of the wikis were closed for internal use and their content was visible for logged-in users only. DokuWiki is well-documented and the localization to Norwegian Bokmål (Nynorsk is required for official communication at my workplace, but this was an internal tool, and it was free) is acceptable.

DokuWiki is a Wiki software written in php, which most shared webhosting services support. The main difference to other big wiki applications is, that is doesn't  store the content in a database, but rather in plain text files on the server.  If you use the hierarchical "namespaces" in DokuWiki for sorting your content, DokuWiki puts your pages into folders named after the namespace they are in. (This makes it really easy to use those textfiles in real geeky ways over the command line.  But thats just a sidenote.)

In practice using the DokuWiki installation worked for a while, but there was a huge difference in how frequent it was used and for what purposes by certain users.

The wikis used by the collaborting libraries were used a bit or a lot in the beginning, but after a while people stopped using them. The IFLA-wiki helped to make the process of finding new examples of best practices in libraries for library guidelines editable for all contributors in an international group. But after its purpose was fulfilled, and the project done, it wasn't used anymore.

Two problems: Purpose/design of the tool & missing WYSIWYG

The wiki of the Hordaland State library was not readable or writable to the general public, but all colleagues in the department used it to update their tasks in one long document. Working with one long document was what people were used to before, but the wiki didn't help much to do that.  Certain co-workers used it more than others. Those who used it the least, said that they found it diffcult to use the WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean)- editor for the wiki pages and that it was difficult to remember the syntax, when they were not using the wiki often. Most people are used to WYSIWYG-editors for documents such as Microsoft Word provides. While this is perfectly inderstandable, many WYSIWYG-editors in web applications are known to produce horrible html-code, especially if they have a wide range of operations you can do with them. The existing WYSIWYG editors for DokuWiki match that description - and my time budget too limited to do something about it.

The purpose of what this tool was used for and the way it was used did not really match its design. The head of the section encouraged everyone to use the wiki, but required only the use and updating of the long reporting document before internal meetings. What happened was: The document grew very long. Typical deadline problem: Everybody wants to update the section about their work 30 till 5 minutes before the meeting.

DokuWiki makes it possible to edit a document sectionwise, but everybody edited the document at once. Since DokuWiki tracks changes in documents in order to show differences between the versions and to make an RSS feed of the changes, only one user at a time can edit a page. So people grew frustrated because they could not use the report page when they had to, because a co-worker was working on it.

The reason why I write this in detail is not to complain about the users, my co-workers. I take the difficulties of working with those tools seriously. Which is why after almost two years we decided to take a second look at what tools we wish and need.

Audience and organizational setting

Some difficulties to mention here are:

• The rules and regulations which public service organizations have to behave when giving buying goods or services companies
• Public service in Norway has to give access to records in general, unless certain circumstances are met under which the citizens' privacy has to be protected.
• Not everything that is being worked on is ready to be disseminated to potentially everyone on the planet at once. Personal learning or work documents should be able to be protected.
• The corporate brand and identity of the mother organization Hordaland fylkeskommune and its main communication channel on the web, hordaland.no, should not be overruled. Official communications by the library department should still be posted there.
• People working in the department: Their privacy and right to opt out of their work being cached, stored and fulltext searchable. This is a particularly complicated topic, where I am not sure yet where I stand, how to solve it or if it is sovable.

At the same time, especially in Norway, libraries have policies that make them about distributing information, knowledge and cultural narratives and technologies freely to all citizen to enrich a free democratic society. The Hordaland State library works towards enabling the libraries to continually fulfilling and developing their services and skills to meet those goals. So, opening up discussions and the dissemination of information of how we work, what we work with and which ideas we come up with would hopefully help the other library aiding organizations, librarians in the region, colleagues from other places on the cultural sector understand and learn from what we are doing.

Several other public service organizations like the City of Oslo are right now working on a social media strategy, and the Norwegian Department of administration and ICT has published Guidelines for communication in social media based on an open discussion in their blog.  The Norwegian administration discusses initiatives openly.

More specifically in the library field, there has been a library blogosphere for years now, the library lab tries to help public libraries to develop and adopt new technologies, and aids in implementing social applications to their data and media collections.  A good place to start if you want to dive in to the norwegian library blogosphere is this handy collection of library and library blog rss. Some libraries and librarians meet their patrons on facebook, twitter and other social networks.

Purpose

There is a need for collaboration on internal collection of facts, document, processes and progress of projects for official reporting purposes. But their is also the need to share knowlegde, write tutorials and discuss ideas, questions and problems within the process of developing libraries.

What I see as the most difficult task is to embed the reporting part into a communication tool, that is also open to all audiences. If you use a fine granulation of open for all/closed for member permissions system, this might be difficult to understand/remember.

Possible solutions: multiblog cms

We are still discussing options for which software (our preference is something php-based, free and open source software) to use. When we set the reporting task aside for a while, and look at the other things we want to do, we probably want a multiblog system like WordPress's BuddyPress (example install for a creative writing group at Bergen Public Library) or something like Drupal Commons/OpenAtrium, two Drupal-based distributions for collaborating in groups.

I am in favor of a tool, that we can own, as opposed to a tool that is a free service provided by a company we as a department use as long as the company lets us. Using a blog/cms software for the core discussions, and making it possible to let discussions on facebook and twitter get through to us, or let our discussions be linked to on facebook is my favorite way of doing this. That way we won't lose our data on terms of a third party. But I think this process needs some more thought, and some deeper diving into examples, and we need to include the opinion and the way people want to collaborate into realizing the way of communicating.

Two small community libraries, Fjell folkeboksamling and Meland bibliotek, have said yes to a new experience: Making a film about what people can find in the library.  Two groups of students from a seminar at the Institute for media and informations science, University of Bergen, had the task to find out what the libraries had - and how they could present the material.

The outcome is quite fascinating. While the one about Meland focuses on words and animations with the (very nice and sympathetic) head librarian as, the other one focuses on the youngest target group of potential patrons: A - mostly silent - kid boy with his curious discoveries in the library. Both the films are charming. I like the approach of presenting the librarian as a person and give the library not only a lot of meaning, but also show a friendly and smart human face. And I also like the approach of the other film that shows very well how you can go on a discovery in the library - and find besides the fishing rod (that you really can borrow at this library" and all the other stuff, what could be an interesting discovery for you.

The film about Meland bibliotek:

The film about Fjell folkeboksamling:

Siden vi i Hordaland fylkesbibliotek får for tiden mye nyttig fra Drupal-samfunnet, vil vi selvfølgelig gjerne gi tilbake hva vi kan. Noe som ofte er undervurdert av utviklersamfunn selv i veldig oppegående åpen kildekode-prosjekter er brukerdokumentasjon, ikke minst til end-brukeren.

Jeg er invitert til Fjell folkeboksamling i morgen for å gi opplæring i bruk av Drupal til bibliotekarene, som blir da redaktører på sin egen nettside. Jeg har derfor laget en redaktørhåndbok for å støtte denne prosessen og for bibliotekarene å ha den aller viktigste informasjonen lett tilgjengelig i deres travel hverdag.

Eventuelt er det interessant til andre Drupal-prosjekt å bruke og forandre teksten på håndboka. Den skal få en GPLv2-lisens, så gjerne forandre alt mulig, så lenge du pusher tilbake til Drupal-samfunnet. Og ta bort mitt navn og organisasjon, bare gi oss kreditt hvis du synes det er nødvendig. Last ned filene (zip, ca. 850k med bilder): Kilde til redaktørhåndboken

As the libraries in Nordhordland are preparing to get the "Aquabrowser" installed, a vendor-installed layer to their catalogues that is supposed to add advanced and eye-candy search possibilities to their collections, there is a very interesting module project for Drupal: The SOPAC, aka the social OPAC. It could provide a functionality that is comparable to that.

It is especially interesting, because what most of the libraries in the norwegian districts suffer from is lack of time and money - which often ends up forgetting how people tend to use - and how they are looking for media. Dividing your webside and the web interface of the catalogue is not helping.

This is a problem that all libraries want to fix, but not everybody is so lucky to have the necessary resources to do that. Still, library services are not less needed whether they are being online or offline.

You can get an idea of what the Social OPAC can do if you look at the catalogue of the Darien library.

I am testing viable ways to display media data in a way, that libraries can show what they have - which is not unproblematic at the moment with having many different libraries with different catalogue systems from different vendors - and as it is with working in the public services sector: a limited budget.

So here is a test with WordPress and the open book plugin, which pulls data from the Open Library and points to the WorldCat.

The problem is: Book data from norwegian books appear, but very little and almost none of the Norwegian books have a cover picture. I don't know if librarians are actively taking part in collecting data for this open database of books, or not. Problem nr. 2: There is a non-trivial discussion going on in library world about in how far the WorldCat tries to own data that libraries deliver to them. I don't know if this is the reason while there is no support for Norwegian libraries on the WorldCat.

Norway wants all public service to be accessible to everyone, regardless of disabilities. "Universell utforming" is the term that describes how every aspect of public service should be shaped to meet the needs of a diversity of people. Of course, also the web services in public service have to be accessible to as many people as possible. You can order and download (norwegian) brochures about this topic on the pages of the Norwegian Directorate of Health:

Tilgjengelige nettsteder:

1. Oversikt og innholdsproduksjon

2. Design og koding

3. Anskaffelse og kvalitetskriterier