I was recently at the University of Virginia for a week, taking a class at the UVa-hosted Rare Book School.  Much of that time, I spent in various of the university libraries, and I was quite impressed by the service-oriented, friendly yet professional, and how can I say, fun and cool atmosphere. I mean, cafe space over much of the main Alderman Library’s big front lobby, with comfortable armchairs — I’d be owning one of those armchairs.  Helpful staff set me up with borrowing privileges for the week.  Ample computer facilities, set up for what you want to use: check.  (many in the main lobby:  I’d be owning one of those too).

But what I liked most of all, and what stays with me, is the most excellent print material done by the UVa Libraries Communications & Publications department.  I admit, I am a brochure-taker;  I am one of those print predators who sniffs a brochure rack at 2000 yards and hones in for a kill.  But discernment, too, was rewarded.  Consider the lovely library annual report:

The general  “Welcome to the University of Virginia Library” brochure starts thus:
“Hello. Welcome to the University of Virginia.  We hope that your time here is both fun and productive.  The University Library is here to help, so pelase let us know what you need and we’ll do our best to provide it for you.”

How great, right-on, and yet uncommon is that succinct vision-statement-in-the-form-of-a welcome?

Finally, below is from a nice spread in the annual report:

What do you do with the books you’re thinking about reading, are reading, or recently read?  What should or might you do with these books, to maintain and change reading priorities, to maximize recall, to enjoy the cover art, etc.?  I think the structure and presentation of this reading space, as it might be called, probably has an important effect on our reading and thinking.

For me, cueing up books-to-read-next is a crucial activity, which might extend over many years between hearing of or acquiring a book, and finally reading it.  Cognitively, it may be inseperable from reading.  So I’ve used designated bookshelves, and sometimes variations on the proverbial “bedside reading pile”, plus many lists.  (such as my Amazon wish list, or long term Reading List).

The book shelf or pile has never seemed satisfactory, though, perhaps because these stow the books so only spine titles are visible — the same way books are stored permanently.  Shelved books are back in the ranks — they don’t seem active, ready to launch, and if you have a lot of books, the cued-up books are not distinguished from any others.

So, as an experiment, I decided to put together a little 2′ x 4′ reading rack to mount on the front of a bookshelf, pictured above.  It needn’t be on a bookshelf, but this seemed convenient.

It’s just a 2′ x 4′ piece of plywood, some moulding, two hinges to mount it directly onto  bookshelf front, and a hinged extender to push the bottom out and make the rack sloping.

The dimensions and slope are such that small books (e.g. mass paperback) will fit in flat, but trade paper or larger will overlap the row above.  Goal is for each book to be accessible, the cover art/title to be readable, while maximizing number of books per unit of rack space.  The slope keeps the books laying in place, even if they overlap the ledge for the row above.

I judge it… a success.  I think reading is enhanced by keeping the recently read and to-read on hand for reinforcement.  My prototype rack is set up to be visible from my primary workspace, just to the right of my sightline to computer monitor, so I’m sure to casually and/or unconsciously survey it often.  Next time around, I’d probably make the rack the same width as the book shelf (3 feet here), i.e. if I were starting from scratch rather than using only existing wood pieces as-is.

I like that front-mounting a book rack on a book shelf not only a) uses unused airspace, but b) hides the books behind it, thus achieving a further pruning or attenuation of the book load.

more photos of the University of Virginia, campus and buildings designed by Thomas Jefferson. These were taken on the sunny day following the night I took the previously-posted set of night photos. .

night photos at University of Virginia, old campus — Jefferson’s “academical village”.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/contextobject/sets/72157619712826710/

Roy Tennant in Library Journal writes about the newly-unveiled Google Wave platform and protocol. Wave proposes to expand email into an integrated “hosted conversation” capable of incorporating email, IM, documents, etc., and allowing flexible sharing and the replaying of interaction histories.

Observing how Wave’s model is more open and real-time than email, Tennant says: “those of you out there who are just as social as you wish to be at the moment….your world is about to be blown wide open.” (“Just How Social Do You Want to Be?”).

To me, that is a rather disturbing thought… are we such captives of technology or our employers that we’d want or let our whole communicative behavior be “blown apart” because a new tool comes along?

Anyway, adoption doesn’t usually happen that way. The body of research on innovation diffusion, as summed up by Everett Rogers, suggests that adoption generally happens slowly, partially, often not at all, and usually by social networks rather than by imposition. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovation).

Rogers on key factors in adoption: “Innovations that are perceived by individuals as having greater

• relative advantage
• compatibility
• trialability
• observability
• less complexity

will be adopted more rapidly than other innovations. Past research indicates that these five qualities are the more important characteristics of innovations in explaining the rate of adoption.”
— “The Diffusion of Innovations.” (Amazon).

From what I’ve seen, Google Wave is truly innovative and potentially game-changing. The Google Wave video demo is well worth watching if you have any interest in collaboration methods, or the future of work.

My first impression is that they’ve gathered many innovative, existing communication models — such as real-time collaborative editing, wikis, IM, threaded email discussions, tagging, social networking, Twitter/microblogging — and woven them together into something elegant and broadly usable. Given the open design (based on a public protocol, with complete API set, etc.) and Google’s tremendous reach and execution skill and global mindshare, perhaps they can bring these communication models to much wider adoption than ever before.

On the other hand, outside of the early adopters, people generally “satisfice” their needs with the tools that are the simplest, most trusted, and most supported by their peers. If Google Wave is an extension of email, and most people are comfortable with and used to email, how quickly could the additional value of Wave motivate widespread adoption across the whole online population?

Also, regarding the “opening” of social behavior, we must recognize that for most people, everyday life requires a degree of dissembling, non-accountability, and rationing of social attention — and we probably woudn’t want things otherwise.

Call it slack (Tom DeMarco), or “necessary illegality” (Foucault), or evasion, secrecy, or social exclusion, this is human nature, or human nature in our world, at least — which we shouldn’t expect or want to be easily blown apart by Google Wave.

full article A Web Services Taxonomy (PDF 84k).

A Web Service, according to a standard definition, is “a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.” 1

To put it another way, a Web Service is some useful service offered (usually) on the Internet, designed as a sort of building block you can use any way you want.

So, for example, Google Maps, a free service that dynamically draws maps of any location and locates addresses, has been used by thousands of people to build new services such as crime-report maps and real-estate listing tools,

Another way to wrap your mind around Web Services is to consider a range of well-known ones and what they do.  That’s what I’ve done in the chart below, with services such as Paypal, Google, Twitter, and Sabre, the airline-reservations system.  (click on chart to see full-size):

This chart represents a taxonomy, or classification, of Web Services, constructed by characterizing all services according to two factors:

1. Data quality: from simple/commodity to complex/unique
2. Transaction level: from basic lookup to real-world transaction.

In my full article, A Web Services Taxonomy (PDF 84k), I define what I mean by those terms, and discuss representative examples of Services that exhibit varying degrees of these characteristics.

Based on this, I suggest that the Services with the most usage, customer value, and/or revenues typically have more complex/unique data, and/or are more transactional. In other words, the typically-cited data lookup services are not where most of Web Services value lies.

See also the above chart in full size, or the full article (PDF 84k).