The Office of Undergraduate Research is again sponsoring the UR@UWM Summer Research program. Selected students are invited to campus for four weeks during the summer (July 12-August 6) to engage in cutting edge research with leading UWM faculty. Students will spend 20-30 hours a week in their research mentors’ lab settings, as well as meet twice weekly with the other summer researchers for a semester course that introduces them to the culture of university research. There will also be social activities with other incoming students to help make valuable connections and become familiar with the UWM environment. There is no cost to participate in this program, and room and board is provided.

The list of possible research projects is here, and my offering is copied below:

Library 2.0: Where Libraries Meet Web 2.0
Dr. Michael Zimmer

Library 2.0 attempts to bring the ideology of Web 2.0 into the library by incorporating interactive, collaborative, and user-centered web-based technologies into library services and collections. Examples include providing patrons the ability to evaluate and comment on particular items in a library’s collection, creating a dynamic and personalized recommendation system (“other patrons who checked out this book also borrowed these items…”), offering patrons the ability to share their borrowing activity with other patrons (and, of course, view others’ as well), and interfacing various library collections and services available within Web 2.0 platforms, such as LibraryThing or Facebook, and to leverage these online spaces to aid patron activities.

This summer project will help map the territory of Library 2.0. Students will assist in locating literature and examples of Library 2.0 activities online, and in the use of a Web 2.0-based reference program – Zotero – to create and manage an online database of Library 2.0 resources.

If you’re an incoming UW-Milwaukee freshman, you can apply for these opportunities here. And feel free to contact me with any questions.

Emerging Privacy and Ethical Challenges for Libraries in the 2.0 Era

Tuesday, May 4, 2010
3:00pm – 4:30pm
Golda Meir Library, West Wing, 4th Floor Conference Center
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Free and open to the public

Topics to be discussed include:

• What innovative online tools and services are libraries bringing to users, and what are the potential impacts on patron privacy?
• Are there privacy considerations for providing or controlling access to digital collections?
• How do current laws & policies protect patron privacy, and are any changes coming?
• What are the broader ethical responsibilities for librarians and information professions in the libraries of the future?

Featured panelists:

• Liza Barry-Kessler : privacy lawyer and co-author Privacy in the 21st Century: Issues for Public, School, and Academic Libraries
• Kristin Eschenfelder : associate professor, School of Library and Information Studies, UW-Madison
• Peter Lor : visiting professor, School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee, Past Secretary General, International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA)
• Michael Zimmer : assistant professor, School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee

The panel discussion is free and open to the public.

To complement the panel discussion, the UWM Libraries is also holding two days of hands-on workshops to help students learn about their privacy options on Facebook and related social media platforms.

[Facebook event page] [Promotional flier]

UPDATE: Video of the event can be viewed here.

On the Challenges of Implementing Library 2.0 Services
ASIS&T 2009 Annual Meeting
Tuesday, Nov. 10, 3:30pm PST

Today, many libraries are at a crossroads: several of the services they have traditionally provided within their walls are increasingly made available online, often by non-library, commercial entities. For example, Web search engines provide easy access to millions of Websites, online databases provide convenient gateways to news and scholarship, and book-scanning projects make roaming the shelves seem antiquated. Meanwhile, the traditional authority and expertise enjoyed by librarians has been challenged by the emergence of peer-produced and collaborative knowledge projects, such as Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, or Amazon’s personalized book recommendation system. Further, the professional, education, and social spheres of our lives are increasingly merging, marked by the rise of social networking services providing new interfaces for interacting with friends, the sharing of information, and professional collaboration.

Libraries face a key question in this new environment: what is the role of the library in providing access to knowledge in today’s digitally networked world? One answer has been to actively incorporate features of the online – “Web 2.0” – world into library services, thereby creating “Library 2.0.”

Library 2.0 means bringing interactive, collaborative, user-centered, and web-based technologies to library services and collections. Launching such Library 2.0 features, however, often brings unique challenges to librarians, administrators, and patrons alike. These include: technological constraints, issues of accessibility and diversity, staffing and cost, IP/copyright concerns, privacy and data retention policies, and the overall impact on the nature and culture of the library itself.

By bringing together a diverse collection of information professionals tasked with delivering Library 2.0 services, this panel discussion will outline many of the challenges of implementing Library 2.0, as well as illuminate some solutions and directions for the future. The goal of the panel is to help other information professionals navigate this uncharted terrain to foster the creation of innovative Library 2.0 services for their patrons, and reveal areas that require further attention by the profession and academia alike. This will be accomplished through guided conversation and sharing of ideas, not the traditional presentation of papers.

I organized this panel in an attempt to bring together professionals who have been “in the trenches” implementing library 2.0 systems and services at their libraries. Unfortunately, I am no longer able to make the trip to Vancouver to moderate and learn from this discussion.

However, I have created a wiki page for the panel, so anyone can contribute to the discussion. Please feel free to respond to the opening probes and share your own experiences with implementing library 2.0 services. The initial questions include:

1. What kinds of Library 2.0 services has your library employed?
2. What motivated the creation of these services?
3. What processes were taken to get them approved and implemented?
4. Have they been successful?
5. What roadblocks have you experienced in getting Library 2.0 services implemented?
6. What kind of policy/ethical issues have arisen in the wake of creating these services?

See you on the wiki…

You can follow the Twitter stream at #Lib20, and the ISP is liveblogging here.

The remarks I gave on the Ethics and Politics of Library 2.0 panel can be downloaded in PDF form: Library 2.0, Access to Knowledge and Patron Privacy: Avoiding a Faustian Bargain.

Update: The video for this panel has now been posted to YouTube.

Library 2.0 Symposium to Explore the Future of Digital Collections

The Yale Information Society Project will host the Library 2.0 Symposium on Saturday, April 4, 2009, at Yale Law School. The confluence of book digitization projects, user-generated content, and social networking applications is forcing us to rethink the role of libraries.  This symposium will bring together leading thinkers from libraries, academia, and legal practice to lay out a vision for the future of the library and digital collections; the ethical implications of Library 2.0, including data retention and patron privacy; intellectual property rights in user-generated and traditional digital library content; and the future of book digitization projects. Featured speakers will include Ann Wolpert, head of MIT libraries and the MIT press; John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School; Josh Greenberg of the New York Public Library; Jeff Cunard of Debevoise and Plimpton; and a host of other luminaries.
The Library 2.0 Symposium will take place in Room 127 of Yale Law School located at 127 Wall Street, New Haven, Connecticut. This event is free and open to the public but is expected to fill up quickly. Please register at your earliest convenience at http://www.regonline.com/Checkin.asp?EventId=705106.  More information about the symposium is available on the Yale ISP web site at http://isp.law.yale.edu.

The Library 2.0 Symposium is made possible by the generosity of the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School.

Panel discussions will include “The Future of the Library”, “Ethics and Politics of Library 2.0″ (which I’ll be on), “The Challenge of Copyright”, and “Digitizing Collections”.

The event is free and open to the public.