Post-password future?

Probably the single most frustrating thing in my work with students in the library is seeing them give up trying to use online subscribed resources and ebooks because 'it's all too hard'. This could be in regard to setting up accounts, forgotten passwords, slow or unreliable internet, the perception that it's complicated or too time-consuming, Google search is an easy alternative, uncertainty about how to search within and reference online materials, or a combination of these factors.

This week's ANZ 23 mobile things topic is Adobe ID. Students at the academic library where I work have to create an account with Adobe to access ebooks on the free Adobe Digital Editions software for the desktop or laptop, and also to use an ebook reader app such as Overdrive or Bluefire on a mobile device. The Adobe ID allows them to transfer books protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) on to their computers. Next, students have to create an account with our ebook provider Ebsco, and then they have to sign in with their college password to access our online resources. That's 3 user names and 3 passwords to download their first ebook. Also, every time there is an update for an app that uses Adobe ID for authentification, the ID password needs to be re-entered. It really takes persistence! I've heard this type of cumbersome process described as a 'usability chore'.

There's no way around passwords. They are needed in the academic library context to limit access to subscription resources to enrolled students, and to connect a student with their personal information such as current checkouts. Students also need passwords to login to Mendeley reference manager, software that is installed on the library computers, their cloud-based email, individual databases in order to receive alerts, and so on - it's never-ending. In an average day at work, I login to around 15 password protected sites or programs. My computer has many of them stored, but for students using the library computers there are no stored passwords.

*A scary note on Chrome's password security - did you know that you can see every password that has been saved in the browser in the advanced settings page? And you don't need a password to get access to that! Just don't leave your computer unattended if you use Chrome and value your privacy...

Some questions circling in my mind:

Is it sensible or bad practice to suggest they use the same password for data that is not especially sensitive/confidential? (The more passwords students have to remember, the more likely it is that they will a choose a single simple password, or no password. Do you password protect your laptop/tablet/phone??)

Has my organisation made it easy to use a single login for multiple services / products?

How often does having to sign up and log in dissuade someone from accessing a service or product?

Why haven't we moved into the post-password future that has been hinted at by the likes of Google and Apple? (fingerprint logins, ring logins, etc.)

Are passwords only about security/access or are they just as much about collecting data?

Are password apps as trustworthy as they claim to be? 

Social Curation

My family and friends think I'm nuts because I don't have a TV and I don't read the paper or magazines (unless they're free!). But I've noticed time and time again that I hear the latest news before they do, and manage to keep hyper-informed about issues that matter to me, be that current news, or things that I'm personally or professionally interested in. I admit I spend a lot of time glued to the screen (either my desktop at work, or my phone or laptop at home) but I'm a very selective consumer of information and I know how to evaluate it. Also I love discovering new sources of information and I'm not overly attached to any one source - if a website that I like starts to fill up with advertising at the expense of content, then they've lost my patronage. To be honest there is another reason why I don't have a TV or pay for content - it's because I can think of a million other things I'd rather spend my (limited!) money on and the internet offers everything I need. I pay for fast and reliable internet and I choose the content. And speaking of choosing content...

Image by Aivar Ruukel on Flickr, creative commons licence

Actually, this post was supposed to be about social curation tools because that's the topic for ANZ23mthings for this week - Thing 14: Curating with Pinterest, Tumblr, and Scoop.it and co-incidentally it also happens to be the week that we are launching our PD reading project at work, using the lovely Scoop.it as a platform. As part of the process of choosing which of the many social curation tools to go with, we analysed and compared a whole bunch of them. We rejected Delicious and Diigo as being old school in the way that they displayed content - visually uninteresting - although they did have better group and privacy settings. We rejected Pinterest on the basis that it was more suited to images and browsing rather than deeper reading, and we weren't that impressed with the web interface although it's great on a tablet or smartphone. Everyone was impressed by Flipboard but felt that it was once again more suited to the touch interface rather than the desktop, and didn't have enough scope for commenting on articles on the desktop version. Although I've decided to use it for my personal use and totally loving it.

We ended up being happy with our choice of Scoop.it although we are still in the early stages of our project. The aim is to get the whole team contributing articles of interest to our work, read the one's that spark our interest, and comment on them. The emphasis is on the reading and commenting part rather than merely collecting. We've got a controlled list of tags to make searching by topic easy. For me, the best part of this project is that we are all working in the same context (i.e. we are aware of the current library landscape outside of our immediate work environment) and we are all engaging in PD which is not daunting and hopefully will become a part of our daily or weekly routine.

The page we've created is pretty much just for our group so I'm not going to provide and links or details. We did notice that there wasn't a visually exciting social curation site that offered exactly what we needed - a space for a private group to collaborate. The trend is social, so you have to share! Let's see if what we have suits our needs...

Lara's wondering where my TV is...

ANZ 23 Mobile Things had a fun one for us this week - it's augmented reality!

I think the technology is really awesome, and you will be blown away like I was if you watch this video, but I really can't imagine walking around a city pointing my iPhone at buildings to find out what's inside, or at restaurants to get reviews. Or wearing Google Glass. Yet. A big part of me wants to shout out - we're moving too fast! It's unnatural! I want to go live up a mountain and never look at a screen again! But another part of me says, that's actually pretty cool. 

So I haven't been in my apartment that long, and I've been buying one piece of furniture each time I get paid and I haven't got a TV yet. See, here's Lara wondering why the hell a TV wasn't one of the first things I bought.

I'd quite like to know what it would look like in the space though, and I'm also wondering whether I should get a smart TV or just a plain old digital. (Or if I even need one at all...). I got the Augment app free from the Apple app store (must be running IOS6), took the short in-app tutorial and then uploaded a tv into my living room. How does it look?

My library is also due for a bit of a makeover. With augmented reality I could choose furniture, move it around and see how it looks before purchasing anything. I also love the part in the video about the photocopier maintenance instruction. I could really use that when it comes time to replace the toner cartridge...

Goodreads and LibraryThing

I love Goodreads AND LibraryThing! But only certain features...

Renee Stokes's bookshelf: read



More of Renee Stokes's books »

I used to work at a library supplier and catalogue the new books for public libraries and when I saw a book that I wanted to read in the future I would covertly open up the Goodreads app on my phone, go to 'scan' and scan the barcode and then add it to my 'to read' folder. Then I'd put holds on them at the library, naughty me! Sadly I no longer work there...

With both social reading sites I really like that I can keep a record of the books that I've read and the dates I read them and it's nostalgic to look back over the list :) I don't like reading reviews of a book I'm about to read though because I want to read it with an open mind and some of the reviews are overly critical I find. So I read them after I've finished the book and often see the book in a different light, one that I hadn't previously considered. I don't use many of the other social features, but may do in the future. I've only been using the Goodreads app since the beginning of the year, so not many books in my collection yet.

I've got quite different reading habits to most people. I pretty much stick to fiction, written in the past 10 years, and often translated into English. My appetite is for the foreign novel - it's like travel for the mind while sitting on the sofa and I'll never tire of it as long as it's well written. If it's good enough to get translated then it usually has merit. At the moment I'm really into Japanese and Chinese writers, although I'm reading a Nigerian writer now. Why is there never a section for international fiction in the library :(

I've gotten off topic. I read the excellent Library Thing vs Goodreads by Amanda Nelson and she discovered that LibraryThing came out better than Goodreads on almost all criteria, concluding that LibraryThings was the more serious tool and Goodreads was the more social. LibraryThing doesn't have an iPhone app and I need to have access on-the-go without requiring the more serious features, so Goodreads is fine for me, but I still (sometimes) maintain my LibraryThing catalogue too. It's could take over my life, the amount of detail you can catalogue in and the other fun functions.

Oh one more thing. I've been trying to make the Goodreads widget thingy work on my blog. Firstly it was really difficult to locate the widget section on their site, and then it doesn't update. Will look into it. Feel free to add me as a friend on Goodreads, especially if you read international fiction.

12. Google kisses and library advertising

Hehe I just did something fun. Do you use Google Chrome? Do you have someone you want to send a kiss to? Google and Burberry have teamed up to make a cute 3D message service. As explained on the official Google blog, they've come up with some cool kiss-detection technology using the camera in your laptop, tablet or phone or the touchpad technology in these devices (recommended to wipe first!). Technologies used in this ad - mapping, email, video, code, animation, camera... and many more I'm guessing. Using multiple technologies to multiply possibilities of what can be done.

So you create your kiss, then choose who you want to email it to, attaching a short message if you want. Then you send it off and watch the little 3D movie thing they've made to show it going on it's way. You can watch it on the map as it travels, and see everyone else's too. The Burberry part comes in when you can choose to apply one of their lipstick colours to the kiss.



Do you ever get freaked out by the speed that Internet technology is developing? I do. All the time. I just watched a video made by Google that contained personalised content for me, from real-time data that it got from my computer. Yep, a video. Wanna try? Here it is. Usually I hate ads and one of the main reasons that I don't own a TV is that I can't stand the constant advertising, but that I liked that one.

What a coincidence that I should come across this in the ANZ 23 mobile things video week! Are there some ideas for advertising libraries that can be gleaned here? I'm off to play with the video apps :)

11. PD - why I say yes

I read Octopus Librarian's excellent post on work / life balance and thought about all the things I've said 'yes' to and why, since graduating six months ago. That made me remember all the other times I've started something new, and how useful it was to say yes.

Like when I went to teach English in Austria with no German language skills whatsoever. My Austrian colleagues obviously felt sorry for me because they invited my to everything going - I joined a rock-climbing class, took up indoor hockey, went to art shows and cafes in Vienna, learnt to ice-skate on a frozen lake, and babysat Austrian children.

Me in the middle, on a frozen lake. Hungary in the distance.

I said yes to all the invitations, stumbled along with the language, and my confidence grew - this despite the fact that I'm a total introvert. But before long I felt confident enough to say no to the activities that I tried and didn't like (out of all of the above, the only one I didn't like were the Viennese cafes - too smoky!), or when I felt like I was too busy. I even said it in German. My point is that participation really accelerates learning and confidence.

Since I started working as a librarian, my favourite thing to say yes to is PD. I'm full of energy as new grads are - I'm like a sponge, just want to absorb all the information. Overload? Bah! I'm not sure if I'll still feel this way 10 years into my library career (but who knows?), so I'm making the most of it. In the past 6 months I've signed up for

• A 10 week TAFE / ALIA course
• ANZ 23 Mobile Things course
• A 1st year unit at the college where I work called History of Healing
• Copyright training
• 2 MOOCs
• RDA intensive training weekend
• A whole bunch of database webinars
• A TAFE course to become a Justice of the Peace (why not?)
• The ALIA PD program with Health Specialisation

Some of these I can do in work time, others I do in my own time. None of them cost me (personally) any money. And I'm really enjoying them all, and learning heaps! None of them stress me out (well... wait for assignment time, um..) and so far, nothing is infringing on my life outside of work. I'm more wary of signing up for things that are on-going (i.e. no end in sight... committees, minute taking, etc.) or things where I won't learn anything new (e.g. volunteer cataloguing). These are the criteria I use to make a yes or no decision regarding whether to take on something new. 

8. A bit more history

As I was rushing through the city today to meet a friend and do some shopping in the mid-year sales, I remembered that I wrote on yesterday's blog post that I'd take some photos and post to History Pin. I whipped out my iPhone as I got to the cultural heart of the city, took a pretty average picture of the old facade of the W.A. Museum (which happens to have the word LIBRARY carved into it) and rushed on. Although it's just the one photo, it has been uploaded to History Pin, and they informed me that I'll be able to see it there in about 6 hours. Mission completed!

Actually, I love this building. The site and also the building have gone through a huge number of changes, even since I toured through it with my school classmates around 30 years ago (unfortunately, nothing has been pinned to History Pin as far as I can see...). Some things I didn't know, or had just a hazy awareness of:

• In 1850 it was a JAIL and housed convicts
• In 1891 it became a geological museum, and housed geological specimens
• In 1899, on the back of the gold rush, the old building was knocked down and up went the Jubilee Building, and housed the state's Library, Art Gallery and Museum.
• Various bits and pieces of the museum and other cultural building were demolished (the Francis Street Building was destroyed because of the danger of asbestos) and new work generally came on the back of mineral booms.
• The Museum Grounds are where the Francis Street Building used to be, and now they are the awesome venue of the Perth International Arts Festival's Festival Gardens.

And the biggest thing that I didn't know is that in May 2012 an announcement was made to the effect that a new museum will be built on the site of the old Francis Street Building, with a completion date of 2020! I must have had my head buried in the sand, but now that I'm a resident of the City I'm taking an interest.

I've been inside a few times since I came back from my 10 years overseas sojourn. I really love the sense of history in the main hall, which used to be the library. You can still see the old wooden bookshelves lining the walls. And I love the enormous modern glass wall they've constructed to connect the two old buildings - the wall is constantly changing as they stick up new exhibition posters. There have been some great exhibitions lately too.

Speaking of new buildings, Perth is getting a new city library, due for completion in 2014! It's going to cost more that $33 million to build, and the design looks pretty interesting. See what it will look like here! It's all happening in this booming state - the changes in the City of Perth are staggering. Almost every time I go for a walk around the city there's new construction going on or new shops opening up. Certainly it seems to be a good time for new projects like the Library and the Museum too. 

7. I give my permission for you to...

I haven't had much time this week to engage with the 23 mobile things topic of photos + apps + maps. This weekend I plan to do a walk around town and take some pics. For now though, seeing as copyright is in my head following on from yesterday's post, I thought I'd have a look at the copyright issues around adding photos to Historypin and WhatWasThere. Here's the discussion question posed on the ANZ 23 mobile things blog:

What happens with the photographs you are uploading to these sites? Do you still own the content? Are there any issues with copyright?

The answers to these questions are available in the terms of service (TOS). These aren't found in the apps themselves, but are easily found on their websites. They are rather long, complex documents although I think some effort (especially in the case of Historypin) has been made to avoid legalese and use common language.

public domain image

It's clear from the TOS that you continue to own any images that you take and upload in regards to both of these apps. But through the act of uploading it (publishing it) you enter into a licensing agreement with the companies that own the apps which basically says that you give them permission to use, modify, reproduce (and so on) your image in a variety of ways. Historypin actually lets you choose the type of license you want to have for your content, which is great! WhatWasThere on the other hand, doesn't. Also Historypin is a non-profit organisation whereas WhatWasThere is not. Just remember, licenses and contracts override copyright law, which is why it's so important to know what you're signing up for when you contribute content to sites like these.

In regards to copyright, the most dangerous thing you can do is upload an image that you didn't take, and for which you don't hold copyright. By uploading it to the site, you are claiming it as your work, so you'd better make sure that's really what it is!

Also, better not modify an image in any way - don't use a photo editor to paint the town hall red and then post it to the site! Not having read the TOS is not a good defence if you've breached copyright...

One annoying thing they tend to say in the TOS is they can change it at anytime, so check back regularly. They really hold all the cards, don't they?