So what’s a librarian to make of all this? Well believe it or not, there is some common ground between the hacker community and us information science professionals. Chief among these are copyright (especially now with all the digitization occurring in libraries), The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), censorship, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) and the ever popular Wikipedia. There are more parallels between library science and hackers than you would ever think possible. We have similar concerns such as: accessibility of information, the sharing of information, collaboration and community outreach.

Hackers get a bad rap. I always had a soft-spot for them, even the nasty ones, as they show great ability to think outside the box and open up previously closed discussions on security and our rights. At the con there were no phones stolen, no re-wiring of the hotel elevators, no malicious hacking, or anything of the like. At the end of the 3-day con I was not surprised to hear this, from the session I had attended and the people I met, I learned a lot about hackers and their community. Hacking from a positive prospective brings attention to topics that definitely need more discussion, RFIDs and electronic voting for instance. Their act of exposing security flaws becomes shared knowledge within the community. They bring to light the shortcomings of processes and systems we depend upon, making way for improvements. Today, many hackers have jobs where they keep our precious data safe by testing systems, exposing vulnerabilities, looking for back-doors and ways to compromise the system, resulting in systems that keep our data safe.

So what can the hacker world bring to the library community? One thing that came clear to me during my attendance at the con was that hackers love to share their knowledge of technology with others. Hackers create community spaces fittingly called “Hacker-spaces” and lots of cities across the world have them, you just may not know it. Visit Hackerspaces.org to find one near you. Many of the attendees to the session I attended on “hacker-spaces” brought up questions such as “I run a hacker-space, how can I get more involved with the community?”. “How can we sell ourselves to schools and institutions as safe places for kids to learn about technology?”. Technology presented the wrong way can be boring, for instance “…so now open your Excel spreadsheet” to quote from one of the talks. However, if you present it properly it can be much more interesting. If libraries or schools are looking to spice up their community learning programs, they could do no better than to get into contact with some of the folks running “hacker-spaces” in their communities and set up an exciting series of technology talks.

There are some very cool projects that speakers at the conference are working on that are great resources for librarians. Take for example Virgil Griffiths “Wikiscanner”. In non-technical short, this tool lists anonymous Wikipedia entries and shows you who’s editing them, what corporations are involved and their page edit histories. Check out some of the great stuff this tool has uncovered and read Virgil’s FAQ. In his talk Virgil also discussed other interesting Wikipedia centric projects such as: Coloring text by Trustworthiness by the UCSC wikilab. In which “The reputation of authors is computed from content evolution: authors who provide lasting contributions gain reputation, while authors whose contributions are reverted in short order lose reputation. Thus, the reputation system provides an incentive towards constructive behavior.” The other fun project is “YouTomb” co-developed by brainaics from Harvard and MIT as part of the MIT Free Culture student organization. In short it “tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation” creating patterns of information that can be used to gauge current copyright practices and trends.

What can librarians do for hackers? We have lots of knowledge that we could share including, our research abilities, our knowledge of government and corporate organizational processes and our ability to organize information. Lots of projects involved the gathering and recording of data and/or data-mining. Who knows metadata standards and controlled vocabularies better than librarians?

So if you’re a forward thinking librarian or digital archivist out there, support the hacker community and spread the word about its projects. The library and information science community needs to know about great tools like the “Wikiscanner” and “YouTomb” and many others on the horizon and one of the best ways of doing that is to become more involved in the hacker community. I’m not encouraging random “friending” of hackers, but rather encouraging information science professionals to start paying attention to the hacker community especially its projects and conferences. Hackers and their curiosity of all things mechanical, social, technological brings important issues into the public venue and we as librarians are often on the same fightin’ side. They know where the lines are drawn, because they take chances walking really, really close and some times even stepping over them. I take their approach that you can learn much more by breaking something open than you can by just sitting there and watching it work. This thinking “outside the box”, initiates creativity, change and results in a better, safer, more informative world for us all.

To read a more journalistic review of the H.O.P.E conference, here’s a recent Cnet article “HOPE Conference Highlights Everyday Hacking”.

Cnet or rather Elinor Mills, was nice enough to take my picture watching the coffin go by, at the conference as well.

Here are some fantastic shots of the con from alice_zero.

Permalink: UNC Information in Life Series on Youtube

“The human natural tendency in information seeking is to fallback on passive and sampling and selecting behaviors derived from millions of years of [evolution]” [1]

–Marcia J. Bates

Today, the relationship between information retrieval (IR) and its human counterpart is seen as both important and necessary in any realistic discussion of information-retrieval models. In “The design of browsing and berry-picking techniques for online search interface[s]”, Bates proposes a shift from the machine-like classic information retrieval model to a more organic, user focused retrieval model. In 1989, when Marcia Bates wrote her article on “Berrypicking…” a user-centered searching model was a revolutionary idea. Prior to the induction of Bates’ model, IR models were often systems-centered rather than user-centered. If one takes this user-centered concept and applies it on a wider scale it makes even more sense. Society in general has been moving toward creating computer models that function more like humans. Take, for example, the military computer WOPR in the 1983 film “Wargames”. In this film, the major character matches wits with a computer gone awry, this computer has been built to emulate human-like thought processes and therefore reacts in a more organic and changeable manner to the main characters (the users) actions. This is exactly the type of IR model that Bates suggested six years later with her “berrypicking” concept. Bates suggested a more organic, ongoing, transformative process of answering queries in response to the users input, rather than the rigid, linear process of the classic IR model.

The essay is divided into five sections: “Introduction”, “A Berrypicking model…”, “How and where users search for information…”, “Search capabilities for a berrypicking search interface” and the “Conclusion”. Most sections are accompanied by useful graphs and examples that help to relay the information that Bates is presenting to the reader. She is direct and to the point and uses very colloquial language that supports her purpose of IR being discussed not only in the realm of scientists, but also in the realm of library professionals. The largest portion of the essay is devoted to the explanation of “six methods of search” and how these search methods should be incorporated into information retrieval systems. They are used by Bates to illustrate how search patterns vary organically rather than strictly following a linear pattern. The six main search strategies that Bates discusses are: “footnote chasing” (looking to the footnotes of a paper for more sources), “citation searching” (looking for other papers that cite from the same source), “journal run” (methodical searching through each journal for the intended topic), “area scanning” (physically searching items/documents in the vicinity of the original document of interest), “subject searches” (scanning subject indexes for relevant material) and “author searching” (finding additional works by the author on the same topic). Bates also goes forward to state that these methods are not used singularly but often are used in conjunction with one another. Discussion of these types of search methods supports the main idea she presents in her article, that IR models should be more organic and less linear and that users generally do not find just one type of searching method sufficient to meet their information needs.

Essentially, the essay focuses on comparisons of her “berrypicking” search model against the traditional, linear IR model. Her model essentially differs from the traditional model by stating that “the nature of the query is an evolving one” and “the nature of the search process…follows a berrypicking pattern, instead of resulting in a single set” (p.6). Bates’ model proposed in 1989 is still very relevant to society in general and even more specifically to Library Science. Elements of the concepts introduced in Bates article are represented today in various internet and computer applications. For example, del.ici.ous (http://del.icio.us), a popular internet based application, attempts to link users with like interests together, therefore allowing the user to browse others users’ favorite links as a kind-of relational search method. In the library setting, Bates’ model helps put into context the types of searching capabilities that users might apply to any given IR system and thus helping developers build better systems. Bates’ concept of “berrypicking” also has strong and weak points; strong in the sense that it is malleable and can conform to different types of search methods in many different types of settings (internet, physical, electronic) and weak in the sense that it is a very difficult concept to apply systematically as its very nature is inconsistent. Overall, Bates presents us with a very though-provoking concept; many results of this can be seen in various IR systems today. In the end, Bates leaves us with something to think about. How can we, as library science professionals, provide our users with the most interactive and organic searching methods available?

[1] Moreville, P. (2005). Ambient Findability. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc. (p.61)