 Good morning everyone and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live, the weekly online event from the Nebraska Library Commission where we talk about anything and everything of interest to libraries. I'm your host today for this month's episode of Tech Talk. I'm Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission, and I am really, really excited about today's session. Some of you may know I personally do a blog called The Travel and Librarian, which means I travel not as much as I used to, but as much as I can. And I got to say that in my travels I meet lots of interesting people, one of whom we have on the show with us today. Before we get into that, just start a little bit of housekeeping. If you have any questions during the show, feel free to type them into the questions area of go-to webinar. Also, if you have a microphone attached and you would like to ask a question, we will feel free to raise your hand and I can turn your microphone on for that. Generally, we leave the questions for the end of our guest presentation, but if you feel free to submit them through the Q&A as you have them, and I will happily pass them along to our guest. So back in 2008, in that summer, so almost five years ago, I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Accural Conference, which is the Association of Caribbean University Research and Institutional Libraries in Jamaica. And one of the sessions I attended was called the Internet Social Networking and Information Literacy, and one of the gentlemen on that panel was Mark Shane Scale, our guest today. Mark Shane is from Kingston, Jamaica. He has his Masters in Library and Information Studies from the University of the West Indies, and he is currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. Welcome, Mark Shane. Thank you very much, Michael. Yeah, I have been kind of following Mark. I don't know if he remembers actually meeting me at the conference, but we... Definitely, I have not forgotten you. Thank you. We kind of stayed in touch on Facebook on and off, and I read his blog Small Island Librarian, which I highly recommend. It's probably the only blog I read where he actually cites his sources and has a bibliography at the end of most posts. And one of these projects I heard about that he's working on lately is called Narrating the Opaque, and I thought that sounded really interesting, and I wanted to hear more. So I've invited him on the show today to give his talk and explain to us what he means by narrating the Opaque. So Mark Shane, why don't you just introduce yourself, give us a little bit about your background, and take it away. Thank you much, Michael. Yes, I... As Michael said, I'm from Kingston, Jamaica, and I'm currently here in Canada called NART to do my PhD. And one of the projects that I am working on that I'm interested in is storytelling and narrative analysis, especially how librarians can use it to improve our communications, our online communications. And so today I want to talk to you a bit about narrating the Opaque. How can storytelling and narrative analysis improve the user friendliness of our flagship... What I consider a flagship product of the library service or online public access catalog, the Opaque. So basically my goals, I'm persuaded that libraries and librarians have many stories to tell, and we have rich sources in our collection that we want for users to find out about. So my goals are to basically persuade you to think about our catalog differently and see how we can narrate our collections through the Opaque and perhaps get us to see the broader perspective, how we can apply storytelling to all our library communication, especially online. And my premise, this premise is that while new media and technologies create new forms of storytelling, we can still incorporate ancient storytelling practices that can impact design and development of new technologies. So even though we have the Facebook, the Storify, the blogger, the YouTube, that people are using to tell stories, we can adapt those same storytelling principles to our own online communication. Organizations are now creating online artists. If you saw this article in the New York Times where Coke is Coca-Cola, the company is revamping its website. So it's got to tell its story, so it's making its website more into like an engaging online magazine so that persons can actually get a story out of it. So it's changing the way that they create their, tell their story online. And I believe that libraries too can actually adapt those principles. So my question is, can the same principles be applied to inform and design the library's Opaque? Traditionally, our Opaque has been considered a resource discovery tool that tells a narrative about human knowledge, a narrative of the knowledge accessible through the library. So let's look at the literature a bit. Storytelling, genres of science fiction, folklore, and even mythology has impacted the development of new technologies such as the Space Age program. NASA got a lot of its insight into how to design spacecraft from science fiction as well as the Old Testament Bible. Various works indicate that storytelling narrative can be applied to technology for purposes of information provision. There are some research done that shows that you can use folklore principles to organize how we communicate and document information regarding new software, et cetera. Within our own field, our own literature, our narratives and storytelling, I want to start with Bates who talks about the very picking theory, our very picking idea. She argues that online databases are not designed for how people actually conduct searches. Rather than searching for a one query tool, a one result to answer our questions, people usually pick up fragments of information from various sources and they construct a final story in their mind to organize bits and pieces of information that they collect from various sources. Also, the sense-making theory. There have been sense-making metaphors that discusses the fact that narratives and stories are some of the means by which people reduce uncertainty and bridge information gaps and meet their information needs. Also, Fisher's theory of the information grounds discusses that we create spaces where we exchange stories along with information. So stories and information go together. That story can create opportunity for information seeking to take place. So let's look at some literature on stories. For education, it has been acknowledged that the way that people approach new knowledge acquisitions through the reliance of stories from others, usually experts, combine with their own experience in order to learn something new. As it relates to organizational storytelling, Boucher gives differential stories and he usually argues that stories are not one narrator or one voice, but usually a multitude of voices. Gabriel also gives a differential of stories, arguing that stories are not necessarily factual, but are wishful-filling fantasies between fiction and reality. They might be reality-based, but not necessarily truth or facts, but it might be the artful manipulation of facts. So let's just look at the OPAC. Usually when computer scientists look at the computer, they consider it a tool, but this author Laurel critiques the metaphors of the computer as a tool and proposes instead the metaphor of the computer as a medium. Secondly, if we think about Fisher's information grounds idea, a liminal space for exchange of stories as well as information, and we combine it with Laurel's idea that our computers are not tools, but a medium, then we can have a new view of the OPAC, not as a tool of resource discovery, but as a medium facilitating storytelling about humanity's knowledge, as well as facilitating resource discovery. So I want to look at some technology prototypes for storytelling. Generally, we are accustomed to the first person, the journalistic narratives in digital storytelling, which usually includes either video performance or text and images, especially photographs. And then there are the timeline approaches. There is a beginning, middle, and end, and you can scroll through, see how a story unfolds. But today I want to focus on two main prototypes that I feel have great relevance to even our OPAC. Let's start with Laurel, who wrote the book Computers as Theatre. And she focuses on fictional, personal storytelling. Now, Laurel developed this prototype for a multimedia database where people navigate the database not through click-in true links, but actually through three characters, three Asian characters that guide persons to different information in the database. These three characters embody three different perspectives. There's the front-stairs man, a Native American and a settler woman. And they both guide people to different sources of viewpoints about the history of the North American expansion. So these agents are cast as storytellers, and they perform in video formats. And they represent it and provide context for the information sources in the database. The sources of these accounts are derived from diaries and journals of real historical persons that experience the expansion. And they dealt with the first-person narrative account of these incidents and topics. These agents, they introduce themselves by a video describing their real-life professions, the source materials used, and lessons learned. And according to Laurel, this established agents as storytellers rather than fictitious characters, thereby reinforcing their credibility. Again, we talked about them represented viewpoints and multiple representation of events and knowledge within the database, or the knowledge base. Laurel argues that this approach is natural in that in the real world, human beings do not navigate to information but rather experience information coming to them from a variety of sources, especially in the case like, for example, we talk to people and we are talking to people, natural flow of information takes place. Somebody tells you their story, and from their story, you get insight about all different things or a different world or a different point of view. So again, Laurel argues that it's more natural to represent information through these narrative characters rather than having people click through links. Another prototype of great interest to me as I see so many applications live is not just to our OPAC but even to the way that we tell stories about our spaces is the Lombardo and Damiano's cultural heritage spider tour guide. They have a spider tour guide with a fictional Italian anthropomorphic spider who access a virtual guide to a historical site. This one is designed for mobile devices. Carlito represents the interface of the application and he guides the visitors touring an old Italian palace. He's a single character narrator and he performs dramatically communicating both fact and fiction about the places and objects within the site. Now, Carlito being based on the mobile phone when a person steps into one room of the palace he comes up on the phone and he tells persons about the room and he gives them facts about the rooms and it looks and also tells them about his own fictional story as a spider or his family is what he did in the room. So it makes it quite very interesting. With Carlito, the fictional world is superimposed on the real world. He follows the visitors by a webcam by which he can give contextually relevant information to the current room in which the visitor occupies. User being present in the room is an input to Carlito to provide information on the location. And so he reacts to user's location on the mobile screen through scripts that are pre-written and not all information is provided once. In case a person goes back to another room that he just came from so Carlito has some more information to give them some new information to give them about that room and developers use an ontological approach to communicate the knowledge to you and from the most general to specific. So using those two prototypes, Lorel and Lombardo and Damiano what can we learn from them? The idea of representing viewpoints in our information sources. Secondly, we could learn that non-fiction information is presented by imposing combining fictional representation with real world factual information. That such an effort can create an unforgettable experience for those who also access the information. For example, with Lombardo and Damiano's prototype people remember the spider and they were attached to the spider and they remember the story of the palace based on their attachment to that personal character of the spire's tour guide. My method, I decided to do a query to find information resources on restaurants and I designed two narratives. The first narrative is fictional and it's based on imagination about how the world should be and it's considered similar to the philosophy's taught experiment where it's a sense making of future possibilities using historical advances. Then there's also the second narrative which is created from dialogue with an artificial intelligent conversational agent. These are not so intelligent as at the moment but I use it to base the storytelling on and modify the agent's response to more interesting and relevant responses. The second narrative is more sense making of the present about how the world currently operates and some of the problems. So let's go to my first narrative. Fictional story. In a parallel universe, John, a designer steps into the virtual public library to use its online catalogs to search for information resources on restaurants. He types into the search box and launches into his search. On analysis, he realizes that live's catalog retrieves three categories of results nonfiction, life writing sources and fiction sources. Under nonfiction results, John sees the following. Magazines and newspaper articles which review great restaurants or have new features on restaurants. Books. Hospitality, industry textbooks, food and beverage service textbooks. It's called the journal articles. Under life writing sources, John sees the following results. Autobiographies or biographies. Books and newspaper articles, company documents and publications from restaurants and industry and trade associations for restaurant service providers. Analysis of the results that John sees. So let's pause and analyze these results. Each category of the results reflect various viewpoints on restaurants inside or within the restaurant business. That is usually reflected in their memoirs, autobiographies or biographies. The scholar studying the restaurant business more in the scholarly journals or even hospitality textbooks. The administrator wants insights into restaurant management or the customer that just wants to find a particular restaurant to check out. He reviews more viewpoints. Someone wants to explore career opportunities in a restaurant. He wants to find out about the life stories of restaurant employees or even founders. A journalist who wants to cover story in restaurants might want to... We should know what is already out there. So right away we see there are a number of viewpoints that could be harnessed from our collection. I now turn over to Michael to play the journalist. If he tried Laura's approach to presenting such results what are some of the ways we could see the results presented? Go open. Hi, I am Jay McDonald, a journalist from the Public Library Press. I have a number of media articles on restaurants to bring to your attention. Breaking news on trends in the restaurant industry. Reviews and reports of restaurants. And special news features on restaurants. And there are other perspectives. He could present the video presentation of the Jack McDonald, a professor at the Public Library School of Hospitality. And he could talk about the hospitality base, the more scholarly base resources. We could have Jay Chin restaurant owner. And he could talk about the biographies and the autobiographies and other life writing sources. Jay Fisher, the customer of restaurants. He would talk about the reviews of restaurants. Tips on etiquettes. Tips for eating out at restaurants. Consumer guides. And there are a variety of viewpoints that we could represent with different narrators. And there is also a practical application of results page. We could potentially use a solution of Facebook's principle of view as a specific person. That person could view the results based on the type of narrator that more represents what they are looking for. Or the information source that they want to find. Next we move to narrative two. So an actual search in the real world. Let me tell you about what happened to me the other day when I was searching the library catalogue of the London public library. I hear that England is a great place. No, not that London. London in Canada. I'm sorry. First thing that comes to mind when I think London is England with tea and scones. Anyway, the other day I experimented with the library's online catalogue and typed in restaurants. And in my analysis of the results, I noticed that the first assumption of the system is that user wants non-fiction information. First, and then articles. Isn't that something you would expect? Well, the person using the library catalogue may not want to see non-fiction first. I'm quite sure that the system provides some way of filtering results so that you can find just fiction. To be fair, I also noticed that to one side one can select format. Fiction, picture book, DVD, etc. That might not be sufficient. I checked out the non-fiction section, for example, for a life-writing source. I curiously noted the title, Writing in Restaurants by David Mamet. So I checked it out on Amazon to see what it was about as well as any reviews on the book. Here's what I found based on Amazon's book description. I know there are even predecessors. If you're not dying committed to the theatre, but you honestly can't see a unique view of the world as you see. You see, titles are often misleading. The book entitled Writing in Restaurants by Mamet has nothing to do with restaurants at all. While the book is indeed non-fiction, it is more life-writing or reality-based and should not, in my view, be confused in the non-fiction information category. Next, I checked the fiction category. Key to my observation was whether or not I could find a fictional work set in a restaurant setting. For this, I saw a few results that matched what I was expecting to find, like these two resources that showcase fiction stories in restaurants. So I clicked on the title, Simmer Down, and further found a library in its subject description as a category for restaurants on the fiction. I'm not sure persons would be looking for fiction works based on settings. I don't think that would be a normal expectation for any fiction reader. Perhaps not, but do you also see that this fiction book contains recipes? Wouldn't that be useful information for somebody? Hmm, I get you. So people can find non-fiction information out of supposedly fiction books. That's right, but I still had some unanswered questions. Like what? How do we observe reality-based writing or, more accurately, life-writing set in a restaurant setting? What is provided by the system to facilitate discovery of restaurant life-writing? In my view, there's no direct ways provided to the user to locate autobiographies and memoirs of restaurant CEOs, owners, or employees in book formats if they do not already know the titles or authors. What I'm sure one can modify the query to get more specific results. You're right. Indirectly, one can expand the query term or stir up to include no term with it. Story ends. Stories have a representational value, placing information in the context of viewpoints. Another point I want to summarize from our learning is that storytelling also makes sharing and accessing information an experience. My major conclusion is that we can tell stories about our collections. And I ask four questions for the hope of the future. One, can we have fictional, imaginary, historical, or even re-characters as narrators representing the perspective or perspectives of information resources or knowledge available through the library? Two, can we combine a timeline view for browsing purposes or use a view as interface to filter the results that show up in our catalog searches? Three, can we base narrators on the demography of our users, creating characters that are imagined experts or others that represent people that users would consult for advice based on their task requirements? Four, can we represent the dialogic voices or disagreements or disputes over knowledge? Neutrally, we don't take in size and let the users decide which voice our voice is to listen to. There are other questions and issues. Can such principles be used for information literacy sessions and training? Another issue is that once exposed, users may no longer need a storytelling tutorial or guide to use OPAC. After one exposure, they might understand very well how OPAC works and the types of resources they can get. Another question though, should the OPAC storytelling be an opt-in or opt-out experience considering that some users are already experts and do not need guidance? These are some of the questions and issues that I raised based on the actual look at the literature and how we can potentially apply storytelling to our narratives. I now open the floor for comments, criticisms, and queries or questions. Wow, Mark Shane, thank you for that. I wrote some stuff down and I'm still trying to put together my questions because there's so much here to... I mean, you've got me thinking so I'm trying to put them together. I will remind everybody who's listening in live, please feel free to submit your questions in the questions area or raise your hand and I can turn on your microphone for you. Let's start with maybe an easy one at least for me to ask while I try to put together the rest of my thoughts on this. Very early on in your presentation you mentioned that databases are not designed based on how people actually search. Maybe for our audiences, this might be preaching to the choir but could you expand upon that just a little bit? What do you mean by that? Okay. Well, actually comes from Vitz who argues that we design databases to deliver results to a single question or query that somebody types into the search box and the results that... and basically the results that persons access, we don't take into consideration the fact that we don't necessarily want a single source. Certainly just for a single source. You want to see different sources and pick some things from some and some things from the other. You perhaps want to even look at a source and go through its bibliography, its references and citations to other sources. The way that we want to use the results from a database search is not necessarily done based on how... the way that is designed is not done how we actually want to use the results. It doesn't make it easy to use. We still have to navigate from what we can only view one source at a time. Basically, again, how people actually use information is that we take fragments from one source, fragments from another source, fragments from a number of sources and combine them. We use different parts of it. Sorry. I hope I answered your question. That was good. I guess here's my other large question. This is the one I'm just myself having trouble putting together. So if I ramble a little bit, please forgive me. You keep saying OPEC, which I get, but as you were describing it, my mind kept wandering to more databases of primary source material. Here in Nebraska, we have Nebraska Memories, which is scanned documents and photographs where we have... whether it's actually indexable or not, we have the full text of the content, whereas in your traditional OPEC today, we have records but not the actual content. How much more would you need to add to an OPEC record to make something like this work? Are the subject headings enough or would we have to start putting in content? Good question, Michael. Again, as I see, I recognize that these storyteller principles can apply to all databases that liars have, especially archives who have collections that we still use as well. So for even our OPEC, we already have reviews, although we be careful of Amazon reviews, definitely we have subject headings. We already do some level of details talking about what the different materials provide. We have, I think, some amount of data that we can actually use to start the process, but still we could actually put in a bit more content to give more perspective to the source. We could give more context of the source, especially the point of view. Because one thing that I know that libraries need to do is we can provide signals of content to our materials, already for movies and so on. We know about a rating system that buys people about the type of content, whether it's one graphic content, et cetera. I think libraries could adopt a similar principle and provide some certain signals that give users some idea about the type of content that is in our works beyond what we normally do. We could talk about this... Well, I'm out of ideas now, but definitely I see that more... We have to put our information resource, not just the subject heading, but we have to put it into a greater context. I will give users the clues about what to expect if they access this resource, what fragments of information they can take out of it. Sure. And when you were talking about the dramatic spider, which is making me laugh every time I think dramatic spider, and similar tours of museums that I've been on, where you get kind of a similar system where you have the headset on, and as you walk through the museum, it knows where you are. But most of that seems to be, or definitely is, kind of pre-recorded canned material, and it's just playing back to you the material based on where you are. How much, for lack of a better term, artificial intelligence do you see would have to be built upon that to kind of get to what I think is where you're trying to ultimately go? Okay. Again, narratives... We have to infuse it with some more narratives that we'll call it to people, characters. Not just presenting non-fiction information. But a little fiction information to create an experience out of that entire tour of our sites. Again, we can... It's about creating that character that can appease the people, and a storyline as well that the character can communicate the story as well as provide non-fiction information. We want to combine both a little entertainment and a little education. We want to do both in order to make the... It's not just an experience where you're just learning, but you're also connecting it to a real or imaginary experience of somebody else, as an imagined other, who's telling you their story as well, or getting you to see the objects or whatever you're viewing in another way. But not just pushing out information out there. Again, we have to make it an experience of getting persons to connect. Because we connect to people when we hear people's stories. Right. Well, and something just popped into my head to maybe... I'm now trying to figure out how could you do something like this right now? And what's popping into my head is sometimes maybe the simplest level I can think of is a book trailer for a piece of fiction, or even non-fiction, where I've seen some that are done not just saying, hey, you should go read this book, but it's actually like a character from the work introducing themselves and maybe taking... If that's on YouTube and then just linking to that or embedding that right into the record for that book adds that little bit of narrative and adds that little bit of context. That's right. That's it. That's a good idea. Right. It's starting to form in my head. I'm getting it. All right. And one other question. A few months ago on this show, we had some of the folks from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Love Library here in Lincoln, where they have an artificial intelligence interface to kind of do online reference called pixel. Are you familiar with that? No, not familiar with pixel. Familiar with the artificial intelligence conversational... well, conversational agents. Yeah, it's kind of a chatbot. Yeah, it's a chatbot. Right. Right. So pixel. Okay. So I'll look up that one now. Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, you go ahead. Yeah, I think it's pixel.unl. Go ahead. You can finish it. Yeah, you should be able to find that. I think there's a possible connection here because pixel kind of has a personality. And you can even insult her and she will refuse to answer until you apologize. It's quite interesting. A reminder, our live attendees, if you have any questions, feel free to type them into the questions area or raise your hand. I can turn on your microphone. So the one other one I had specific to this project that I wrote down here is have you spoken to... and maybe this is, you know, further down the road, definitely, but have you spoken to anybody who actually creates ILSs yet about these ideas and working them into actual products? No, not yet. Yeah, not as yet. Okay. I'm still working on the ideas. I'm still working on it. Get the PhD first, then go talk to the vendors. All right, no problem. I don't think we need to get it. We need to get more recognition from the scholars. Sure. Yeah, hey, that's great. So let me switch views on you here a little bit and from some of the other things you've written on your blog, not specifically related to this project, and one actually is your latest blog post and I just want to ask you a question or two about some of the things you wrote. It's titled, What Should the Library's Primary Priority Be in this Time of Austerity and Digital Media? Right, right. And you talk about some of the more creative things that have been making the news that libraries are doing lately, ranging from there was a How to Slaughter a Pig at one library, and another library that was teaching pole dancing. Right. Definitely kind of the extremes of examples. And I'm going to quote just about three sentences of what you said and I would like you to talk about it a little more. The first part was, in my view, such libraries are selling their souls for worldly gain. And then near the end you say, however I am convinced that the path that many libraries are taking is not in our own interest. Paths to making the library an institution that provides entertainment as our major service is, in my opinion, the wrong direction. Libraries should not continue to feed consumerism habits and users that are uncritical consumers of entertainment products. Leisure and recreation, while part of our mission should not be the primary mission, our goal pursued. Now I won't say whether I agree or disagree here, but that's some pretty strong language. So I just wanted to maybe, if you could fill me in on why you've come to that conclusion. Well, because if you're, well, I'm somehow connected to the entrepreneur world, the business world. I'm not in business, but if I understand the culture of business and the culture of entrepreneurs and the culture of the administrators we'll be running and funding the libraries of the, my views are more we align ourselves to leisure and entertainment and recreation is the more that those who fund us are going to be in conflict with what we are doing, especially since we have the recreation industry, the leisure or entertainment industry is worth a lot of money, billions of dollars. And we have different and it's supposed to be our industries. Again, our library is competing against a business industry. It is a major question once we final if we are competing with that business industry. Those who fund us, it's a big question, the funding that the need for us are relevant in the funding. However, if we are seeing us adding value to the, not competing against industry but adding value to the economy by creating workers, creating new innovation, creating new small businesses and so on, there's less question of our relevance. There's less business persons and boards are even in government to say, the question whether or not we need libraries. That's just my concern and fear because I see if libraries continue going towards recreation for people, the person saying, we are going to be coming against industry, that industry and we know the power of industries and lobbies in politics. So I see it that we need to perhaps straighten out our priorities and know that we want to continue to exist, we want to continue to give value to persons and to develop our communities and we should go that appropriate way, the appropriate way of ensuring that those who fund us and those who have money and power will see our relevance and not question it. That's it. Sure, no that's great. Like I said, you've again given, I'm not I'm not sure I have an opinion yet. I get your argument, I also get the arguments that say, you know kind of do what your patrons want and if that's what they want but you do have to consider the opinions of the folks who are funding you also. That is very important. Darmea on the line said, libraries have always competed and she puts competed in quotes with bookstores. So yeah, there is kind of been that traditional competition with business on a certain level. I know of a lot of libraries in the past that didn't stock videos and compete with the local video store and now we start looking at talks regarding reselling of digital materials and digital materials expiring after 26 checkouts and various things. There are a lot of issues here and definitely your point of view is very well thought out. I can't argue with it on its merits. I definitely see where you're coming from on that. It is something we definitely have to think about. So I don't see any other questions coming in from the audience. Mark Shane, I want to thank you very much for this. This was wonderful and I'm going to be thinking about this a lot. Thank you. That's the goal. We can think about it. It's good. That's the goal because again, these are just ideas on the surface. The literature is clear that organizations are moving to creating online presence that tells stories. We see infographics moving and growing. So a lot of storytelling is taking place online and libraries need to start thinking how can we evolve and go where the technology is going and where people are expecting us to go. And where if people want to follow along with what you're doing and writing out in the future where should they go online for that? What's the best way to follow? Two places. You can go to Twitter MScale or you can go to my blog subscribe to my blog. Sorry about the Google Reader Congratulations. I'm going to talk about that moment. Well, I don't know. Google, that's the thing we can't fully depend on Google for all our services because again, they will cut some, they are business so they are going to do what they need to do. That's why libraries have to develop archives and other things that will keep certain resources that we are not fully dependent on any business. We have to maintain our own collection. We still have to back up all that. My blog Smile and Librarian and my Twitter account at MScale. I'm going to quick take control back here and put your blog up on my screen here so everybody should be seeing that momentarily along with my little smiling face in the corner here. SmallIslandLibrarian.blogspot.com Mark Shane, thank you once again and for that presentation, like I said, I think you've given us lots and lots to think about. Folks, I just want to spend another couple of minutes what I usually do at the end of each of these tech talks and give you some tips and tricks and some websites that I found and some news and so I will switch over to my delicious account here for this month's links and we will be providing all of these links in the show notes so you don't need to try to write down all these URLs but we will start with the big one that Mark Shane just mentioned. Google Reader is being pulled as of July 1. People are kind of scrambling to find alternatives. Bloglines, basically at this point if you do a, and I almost don't want to say this if you do a Google search for Google Reader replacements many people are writing articles about those so just something if you're not aware of it, your Google Reader user that is something you want to keep an eye on you will need some sort of new RSS Reader in the next couple of months. A few other things, the LA County Metropolitan Museum, I believe is this, LACMA they have actually been photographing many of the items in their collection and they have just provided over 20,000 free, high quality digital photographs of items in their collection that you are available to use for free, they're available to you you can search, you can browse by object type if you are looking for high quality photographs of historical objects for used in blog posts anywhere else on your website, this is a great site that you might want to take a look at. Also with that I have found a new website called Pixabay and this is also public domain images, mostly LeanSports clip art I have found at the moment I don't even have an image coming up on their home page. There is also photography in here, here is one of the Flamingo all available for you to use. So we got a couple of image resources for you this month one other one I am going to mention here there is always a couple more but let's see the secret door, this is a very interesting site, you are going to hear some music kind of come up in the background here and I am going to go ahead and mute that and you click on the door and what this does this pulls data from the Google Street View project but Street View inside buildings so each time you go through the door you get another kind of high quality online, scrollable and movable inside of a building, sometimes the buildings are really nice sometimes the buildings are run down but it is just kind of a very interesting way to explore and move around and if I return to the door and open it again I will get a completely different one this time and up here we are in a museum in this case the Tate Museum in London from the looks of it. So just I am going to be honest with you, other than just kind of playing around and looking at really interesting places not 100% sure of what a library could specifically do but thinking back to what Mark Shane has been talking about some sort of narration along with this would be probably spectacular you just have to do a little bit of recording, a little bit of video to go along with that so that is the secret door and that is actually through a window company I believe in the United Kingdom so an interesting thing to do two others here that I have for you, one is a free online OCR service. This is something that I have played with a little bit to be honest I have mixed results but the idea here is that if you have an image that you want to turn into text you can upload that image and output it as either a pdf, a word document text document or rich text format it accepts jpegs, bitmaps, tiffs and gifs for uploading, does say here that as in guest mode without registering it allows you to convert only 15 images per hour but if you don't have the software that will do this because sometimes that software can be a bit expensive this is a service you might want to try like I said I have had mixed results the clearer the source obviously the better the OCR is going to come out but it is something that you might want to try and lastly I want to mention this new type of SD card and so we are going to get a bit geeky here on this one this is a 1 gigabyte SD card called a worm card or write once, read many and the concept here is that you can write data to the card and then you can read it back but it can't be erased it stores the material securely and traceably and if you look at the product description down at the bottom what they are kind of marketing it for is say police needing to take photos of an accident or a crime scene and then ensure the integrity of those photographs so that they have not been manipulated and they are the originals that were taken on site pricing I am going to scroll down here I am not sure there is actually pricing in here these are not cheap but when I was shown this I was kind of mulling over the idea of maybe another archival format for libraries with digital content they are also supposed to be good for something like 100 years of storage things like that it is not magnetic it is not optical so you don't have scratching you don't have degradation of the magnetic media just something I am kind of throwing out there maybe something if I tweak a little interest might be something that you would want to take a look at so with that those are my links for this month and my news so Google Reader being the big one and thanks Mark Shane for bringing that up that reminded me I was definitely going to talk about that so I am not seeing any other outstanding questions or comments from the audience so I am going to take this moment to thank everyone for attending and thank Mark Shane once again for participating in this session like I keep saying he has given me a lot to think about and I like it when that happens and come as live as every Wednesday morning central day light time at 10 o'clock or central standard time as the clock may be we have upcoming sessions here get ready to celebrate El Dia de los Niños next week dig into reading this year's summer reading program on April 3rd and easing information anxiety teaching information literacy strategies and skills for college readiness on Wednesday April 17th so you can find all of our recordings here on the Encompass Live site just Google that also Encompass Live has a Facebook page we welcome you to like us on Facebook and join us there where we will post information about upcoming episodes when the recordings are released and as always if you have any idea for presenting whether yourself or somebody else you would like to hear from in Encompass Live please feel free to send those in either via the Facebook page or directly to Krista here at the library commission so with that I am going to say thank you to everybody once again thanks for attending and we will see you next week on Encompass Live