Today, we are going from 12,598 records to more than 94,000 in our collection online and this increase represents a substantial change in the way we are releasing information on the web.

With the launch of the collection online in July 2008, we began with a policy to release only records that had been properly vetted.  The curatorial staff felt that the data released needed to be both accurate and best reflective of the various collections, so in our original spec we created a multi-layered approval process to publish an object.  The vetting process would start in curatorial, allowing them to vet certain parts or an entire record, then the final release would come from our collections staff after an additional once over.  Even though the vetting process worked very well, we were finding that it was taking an awfully long time to publish objects to the web.  For instance, in July 2008 we started with 5168 objects, but eighteen months later we had only grown to 12,598.  While that represents a substantial amount of good data going online, behind the scenes we were seeing long queues of objects ready to release, but hung up somewhere along the way for little bits of final approvals.  In the end, keeping up with the demand of approving records was causing us a great deal of work and getting information out the door was problematic, so we’ve changed course.

At this point, records get published by default and information is added or corrected as we go.  While there are still tons of records that are restricted for various reasons, what we are seeing at this point is much more representative of our holdings. Of course, the release of more records means we had to rethink some aspects of the user experience, so I’m going to run through some of these changes now.

Record Completeness Meter:

One of the most important changes is the visual meter that indicates the completeness of the record.  We want to give our users a very visual way to understand where a record may stand in terms of the overall picture of our data.  As you move your pointer over the meter, the ratings are explained in a tool tip.

Release of Study Images:

Given that we have a lot more records going online, one thing we are lacking are photographs for many of them.  Often our curatorial staff will take study shots with point and shoot cameras just to have something on file for reference.  Internally, we find these shots very helpful and figure that our web visitors may feel the same, so many of these images are being to be released with an explanation regarding the quality.

Comments Overhaul:

We’ve had comments enabled on our object records since the beginning and have received an entire range of responses.  One of the things we noticed is many of the same questions pop up over and over again, so we’ve overhauled the comments area to include a FAQ.  We are hoping this will cut down on some of the more routine questions by putting the information right where people are asking for answers.  Here’s a great example showing why we enable comments on collection objects—you just never know what will come by allowing this kind participation, but we hope the added FAQ will provide better communication all-around.

Browsing, Searching, Sorting:

When browsing, quality records are being pushed to the top of the pile.  When searching, we default to showing relevant records, but users can re-sort the results on demand by relevant or complete.

Posted by Tamar Fruchtman, Senior Corporate Counsel

Last month, Stanford University announced an expanded partnership that takes advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to people across the United States.

Recently, University of Virginia joined our other partners in expanding its partnership with Google. If the settlement agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from U.Va's library, along with works from Stanford, the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Texas, who also expanded their original partnerships with Google.

Time for the annual pilgrimage to Austin for South By Southwest. I've been on panels before but, with zero disrespect to previous co-panelists, the one I have currently lined up is going to be really freaking good, maybe the best ever. Here's detail.

Tuesday, March 16
11:00 AM
Room 9ABC
Austin Convention Center

[Add to my.sxsw.com or sitby.us.]

The panel is a great cross-section of perspective on networked urbanism. We got non-profit, academia, start-up, city government, and faceless mega-corporation (me).

Ben Berkowitz runs SeeClickFix.com, a tool that allows communities to report non-emergency issues to those responsible for the public space. This app has changed the conversation around civic engagement and prompted a number of municipalities to rethink their 311 strategy. Also, NPR likes it.

Assaf Biderman is the Assistant Director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT. The work from the lab itself is amazing (flying LED robots, trash-tracking, city bikes that are also environmental sensors!), but it also approaches art, having been featured at the Venice Bienalle, Centre Pompidou, and Ars Electronica. Also, he's the suavest panel member.

Dustin Haisler is the CIO and Administrative Judge for the City of Manor, Texas. Words can't do justice to the amazingness that is Dustin. But a link might. He's just completely rewritten the rules of city governance and engagement. Also, he's younger than you.

Jen Masengarb is an Education Specialist at the Chicago Architecture Foundation where she educates the public about cities and the built environment. Jen gets what it takes to translate the urban world for its citizens and is a template for how we might do so in our second cities of data. Also, she's the femalest member of the panel.

And then, me, of course. I'm just stewarding the awesome above.

We're going to tackle three question areas, broadly.

1. What is the physically-built urban environment's relationship to the digital environment that is being built atop it? Put another way, is there a mandate for information architects to be thinking as critically about cities as they do about websites?
2. What is the design imperative: how do we train the makers of today to think about the city as a platform?
3. What is the role of citizens in this design? This is different than focus groups and user studies. Citizens shape the machine that is the city in completely indirect and informal ways.

If you'll be in Austin for South by Southwest -- and you're hanging around until the last day of Interactive -- I'll bet you a taco and a beer you'll learn something from this panel.

Recap post and podcast to follow.

It seems like in the past few months Google has relentlessly released new applications, some of which perhaps could have used some more baking in the oven before they were unleashed on the general public. To some it's becoming a tiresome exercise simply to try to keep up with everything that Google is doing week in and week out. But there is a method to the madness, and it has a lot more to do with Google's bottom line than you may think.

We all know that the way the search engine giant makes money is through advertising - over $23 billion in 2009 - but what may surprise you is that its advertising-based revenue comes almost exclusively from sites that are owned by Google.

Sponsor

Guest author Daniel Cawrey is a freelance writer and tech enthusiast, among other things. You can check out his latest musings in blog form at thechromesource, where he writes about Chrome browser, Chrome OS and just plain Google in general.

Take a look at this graph from the Silicon Valley Insider that depicts the location of advertising and the dollars associated with it:

Ever increasingly, Google is relying on itself to make money through its own real estate - places where it can position the ads that advertisers purchase. This is a concern for publishers that rely on Google for revenue through Adsense because there has to be a point at which this is no longer a profitable exercise for the company.

If it reaches that point, Google will essentially be subsidizing publishers. And it may not have a choice but to keep doing so. Because without fresh content creation, what is there for users to search for on the Internet that is of value? The main tenet of the search business is to provide quality results, and while that may be the case now, if publisher's Adsense revenues were affected, one can wonder what kind of effect that would have on content.

So although Google may have made some mistakes with applications like Buzz, along with the half-hearted emergence and now slow death of features like Gears, expect them to continue to increasing space for content to grow, even if that means one of several strategies:

Become an ISP

An experimental program has been announced whereby Google will provide gigabit service via fiber directly to homes in select markets. Interested municipalities and community organizations are encouraged to submit a proposal for this right. At the World Mobile Congress, CEO Eric Schmidt talked about the goal of this program being purely experimental, which means showing infrastructure operators such as cable companies that this is possible, rather than Google becoming a full fledged ISP. But once the fiber has been rolled out, it doesn't roll back in, does it? How long does the "experiment" last?

Trounce the Competition in the Browser Wars

Google's Chrome browser is getting a lucky break over the next few weeks. That's because Windows users in Europe who use Internet Explorer will be getting an update to their machines notifying them about browser choices that they have. This is in response to the European Union's ruling that Microsoft's practice of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows restricts competition. While the update offers many browser choices, the result will be a boost to market share for Chrome. It has steadily grown in popularity and already has roughly 5% of the market since emerging in 2008.

Offer Computing Architecture to Device Manufacturers Completely Free

We've seen this already with Android, and it appears that the no-cost operating system has basically saved Motorola from a fall to obscurity with its release of the Droid. Expect to see more of these developments as 2010 unfolds with Chrome OS attempting to break into not only the netbook market, but also tablets and smartbooks, which fill the gap between a high end mobile phone and a netbook.

So when you hear these new announcements of applications and services that Google rolls out, think of content. Think of how they can better deliver information to users. They want it to be as easy and as seamless as possible. While sometimes these initiatives don't always work out, they aren't going to stop trying.

Discuss

Last weekend I made a trip to NYC (with fellow Mainer, Alice Barr) to attend the TEDxNYED conference.  When I signed up (or should I say “applied” – I have never had to “apply” to a conference before) to this conference, I wasn’t sure what kind of conference it would be.  As the date got closer, the speakers were chosen and there became a lot of twitter energy around “TEDxNYED”.  I, too, got excited to listen to these speakers – most of which I have never heard in person – and I was very interested in what they had to say as I have followed their words in the digital world.

I was not disappointed.  The speakers were terrific.  When I first looked at the schedule I wasn’t sure if I could handle the format – each speaker presenting for 18 minutes, one after another, with several breaks in between.  But I have to say, it worked.  The organizers of this event did a great job with the conference – from the schedule, to the food, to the number of attendees, and of course, to the live video feed which I heard was flawless. (The recorded video of these talks will be posted in a few weeks).  It was also the first conference in a long time when I didn’t pull out my laptop.  Sure, I was checking Twitter, etc on my iphone from time to time, but for most of the day I scribbled notes with the pen and paper they gave me when I registered that morning.

In reading some of the redux of the conference these last few days I am disappointed in some of the quibbling going on.  Some people had a problem with the conference format – that it was against what we are all striving for in the classroom (lecture) and that there was little time for conversation.  Yes, I agree to some extent but I thought it worked because we all connected with the speakers and were engaged with the content. (And who doesn’t liked to hear passionate speakers like Lawrence Lessig, David Willey, and Jeff Jarvis).  For me, it was reaffirming to hear these messages at this time of year.  Yes, they were preaching to the choir but sometimes I need that continued inspiration to remind me why I am pushing for change.  Each speaker had a different message (and maybe slightly different solutions) but to me the theme was the same – we need to push education forward, out of the 19th century where it has been stuck since the industrial age.

Here are some takeaways from the day (there were so many great one-liners, I could start a bumper sticker enterprise):

Andy Carvin (NPR) started off the day with the right tone.  He spoke to the increased ability for people to organize and rally behind a cause/disaster.  He showed the “power of participation” in the newly developed “Crisis Camps” that emerged out of the Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina and more recently the development of openstreetmap.org from the earthquake in Haiti.  All fantastic resources.

Michael Wesch sent a great message (one I plan to share with some Administrators) that people cannot “opt out” of the changes brought about by technology.  He told a wonderful story about living in a remote village in New Guinea and how that village (its culture, the relationships, and its people) was transformed by the development of the census – houses/huts were knocked down and reconstructed in rows to correspond to “numbering” and people were forced to have a “fixed” names.  After setting this stage, Wesch moved on to talk about how this translates in his classroom through several projects: a documentary, where each student is responsible for a small part of it and instead of a syllabus, the students are involved in creating and constantly revising a “research schedule”; in another project,he has students working on a world simulations game where each student is responsible for becoming an “expert” in a region of the world, then they are responsible for coming up with the “rules” of interaction between these countries and cultures.  Wesch described teachers roles as helping students move from becoming “knowledgeable to knowledge-able“.

David Willey (of BYU) gave a rousing call for “openness”.  He said openness and sharing is a must in education and the best educators are the ones who share the most successfully with students.  Right now, we have very powerful technology (technology that makes it extremely easy to share) but we have very outdated thinking.  He stated, “(if there is) no sharing, then there is no education”. His notes on his talk can be found here.

Lawrence Lessig hit the stage with a call to enable sharing in a way for people to have a “freedom to create while still maintaining a respect for the creator”.  I can’t possible do respect to his presentation by paraphrasing so visit his presentation here.

I enjoyed listening to Jay Rosen’s message from journalism that we “learn best by doing something that is difficult and that knowledge comes out of difficult problems”.

Jeff Jarvis took the stage by storm sans projection/presentation and (after berating the format of the conference) called for us to “move students up the education chain”.  Jarvis thinks teachers need to “do what they do best and link to the rest” – we should be using/curating the resources online for our students and turning our schools into incubators rather than factories.  Jarvis shares his notes from his talk here but wait for the video on his session, it’ll be worth it.

After lunch there were some great sessions on “practice” by Dan Cohen, Dan Meyer, Amy Bruckman, and Chris Lehmann.  All great messages especially Dan Meyer who encouraged the teaching of “patient problem solving” and he summed up his remarks with five suggestions – use multimedia, encourage student intuition, ask short questions, let students build the problem, and be less helpful. I think everyone left wishing they had Dan as a math teacher.  Chris Lehmann presented a passionate plea for change.  In it he explained that the “illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn”.  What better way to end the conference?

What now? Well, I have returned to work as usual with no magic bullet for change but I have been recharged with words, wisdom, and connections from this weekend.  I will continue to make baby steps toward change, engage in conversations, and keep pushing that rock up the hill!