Information Takes Over

While walking round the Business park, some time ago now, Richard and I got to talking about enquiries that you get in libraries from the great unwashed book reading public.   One I mentioned was the classic:

“I borrowed a book three months ago.  I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but it was blue.”

So we got to thinking about how you could construct a search in a modern online catalogue to help with this query.  And that is how www.colourphon.co.uk was born.

We are building what will become a service, to take an image and return the most frequent colours in both a human readable and machine readable form.  If you have a look at the example links below, you will see results of our weighted ’scan’.  This analysis attempts to add weight to colours that it finds most frequently toward the centre of the image.

Need an example?  These examples will take a moment or two to calculate…

Try this one: Test number one. An ISBN lookup.
This one: Test number two. A Weigted URL
Or this one: Test number three. Another URL

Thought provoking? We’d welcome your comments over on the colourphon blog.

I know you’re curious; yes I am settling into my support analyst role quite well. 

A modern librarian, you see,  is more of a study help and technical support assistant than anything else.  Less modern librarians - the ones I have known anyway - are generally pretty pleased to be able to help you too, though maybe not so speedy at aligning paragraphs in word (that has got to be the most asked question near a public computer). 

My new role in support for a (principly) library domain software company is much the same, although the posers put to us are more akin to “why is my authority control button not working?”.

Anyway - in my new found role, being the supporter rater than the supported, I am beginning to think that both ends of the phone-line have misunderstood each other.  Maybe I work for a drastically different sort of company, I’m not sure - this is the first company I have worked for where I am not cleaning the toilets or emptying waste bins - so my perspective is perhaps a little naive. But… I am starting to wonder why the customer perceives a tension between us. 

As a customer once myself, I have found that the support of people who know more than me is valuable.  I have brought a server to it’s knees with seemingly innocuous 6-lined SQL queries.  I know what it is like to ring someone and admit that actually I think it was me that set that script going that is hogging the server’s resources.  I have been the one who uploaded a file full of the wrong sort of carriage-returns and stopped anyone being able to login.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit all the above when my employer likely reads this.  But I think it is this openness and ability to admit mistakes - and be willing to learn from them that allows me to improve.  Whatever my job title.

But what else did I as a customer do?  I trawled the company’s website in search of little titbits of information that would allow me to gain a greater understanding of how the thing worked.  I read enough to be able to write scripts that created thousands (and I mean thousands) of loan rules governing who could have what, where and for how long.  I asked questions on the forum.  I joined in queries on the email list.

Within Talis there are exciting moves toward a platform that will allow the creation of applications that will use founding principles (if there are such a thing set in stone) of the semantic web.  It opens a whole new set of doors and opportunities, and it makes those who think about supporting those applications - both those built by Talis and those built by others on the same platform - think about the future.  It’s web based - it could easily be global - So how do we support it 24 - 7?

This is where we come back to being a librarian, I don’t work in a library any more, but the library is still in me.  If companies are going to offer the 24 - 7 global support that the customers might require, then they are going to have to offer the following:

• findable resources - i.e. the content is not just searchable.
• step by step guides / how to’s - knowledge broken down into little specific easy to digest pieces
• and perhaps most of all solicit, capture, encourage and incorporate the experiences of the user. They use the thing more than the developers ever will.  They know how it works for them.

The mistakes I have made in the past, are mistakes that I can warn other’s of today.  The things I have fixed in the past are the things that - if I capture them - will help somebody else tomorrow. 

That’s 24 -7 support, and, much as it galls me to say…, Have you ever rung the Microsoft helpdesk?

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I notice with enthusiasm, that the Talis Platform Bigfoot API documentation has been released.

Must clear my schedule… now, where’s my text editor…

“As I see it, in the world of the library management system, amidst the turmoil of takeover and merger, the only constant is the fact that experimentation is free.”

That’s what I started to write in this post, but then I thought, actually no it isn’t.

I was originally thinking along these lines after a conversation I had with Richard Wallis from Talis while marching back to the station last thursday. I was aking about the practicalities of creating a Herefordshire specific union catalogue based on the Talis Platform. The upshot was that I could experiment, but then at the point when the service went live, there would probably be a cost. Therefore experimentation is free.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not getting all petulant that I can’t have totally free stuff. It’s just that I realised that in my excitement I was getting carried away on the experimenting part and forgetting the service delivery and maintenance part.  Both very important in the planning stages!

But why change my mind and decide that experimentation is not free?

Experimentation - in the web 2.0 world - is not free. The code may be freely available, and the APIs may be openly accessable, and the data may be sitting there waiting to be openly mashed, but, when you think carefully about what is happenning, you see the strings.

Let’s deal with some specifics…

1. The code is free, but you need to understand the code. I forget the amount of times when I have downloaded a toolkit to have a look-see; and thought it beyond me. I’m not a programmer, I am a tweaker. I know what I want to achieve, and I can usually get there if I have a good body of code and some examples to tweak.
2. But I have only so many hours in the day. Time - isn’t free. I have bills to pay, and a job to pay them with, but that doesn’t leave a huge amount of time if I want to have a social life too.
3. There are also usage strings attached. Yes you can use Amazon jacket images in your site, but only so long as they point back to Amazon.
4. Finally, there is the cost of moving from experimentation to live service. You need to maintain the code, the API calls may change. The API may vanish, or no longer be supported. The licensing may change.

Perhaps I shoud say “experimentation is low cost“.  And it is that low cost prototyping that is going to allow us to feel our way towards the solutions that we crave.

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