I really shouldn’t be that surprised, I guess — but you would have hoped that the government agencies might have gotten a little farther on this since our GovStat project (http://ils.unc.edu/govstat/). Guess there are still some opportunities there . . .
Shneiderman, B. (2007). Creativity support tools: Accelerating discovery and innovation. Communications of the ACM 50(12), 20-32.
This articlegives an overview of creativity support and what that means in terms of research and in building software tools. Of course, this is something that is very important to me, but I think we still have a ways to go. And there are a lot of different types of creativity — artistic creativity, scientific creativity, just plain radical thinking about existing problems. It seems like there are a lot of points at which support is needed — which of those points are under the information science umbrella?
Well obviously in the search/exploration phase. Shneiderman mentions annotation and faceted search specifically. I am particularly frustrated by how difficult (read impossible) it is to have a single annotation system that can handle multiple file formats. So I can annotate straight HTML pages using one of a number of different Firefox plugins — but what happens when I get to a PDF? It doesn’t help me to have a different annotation system for each different file format. They all need to be accessible from the same interface.
Then if you had robust annotations, they could be used in concert with the annotated content to structure richer “more like this” searches. So that you could build up a collection over time of background material.
So this would support more structured creativity of the scientific discovery variety, as would different kinds of information visualizations. I am less clear on where IS fits into the world of artistic creativity support, I’ll have to cogitate on that for a while.
Some thoughts from this program at Providence College on 11/15/2007
Jill Stover: Off the Wall but On the Mark
How do you get started generating useful ideas?
Looking for the “white spaces” (kind of like negative space in art) — places where there is a need and no current functionality to serve it.
Creative process: Divergent thinking –> Incubation –> Convergent thinking
Dangerous to skip the incubation step! Must “live with” an idea for a while *before* rejecting it.
Access is important — but we need to find how we add value.
Creative people have “a beginner’s mind” — cleared your mind of the baggage of pre-conceived notions.
Idea of being observant to things that might normally escape notice. Example: a cup of tea with the tea bag string wrapped around the handle. Is this white space? Is there opportunity here?
Rules for brainstorming — withhold judgement on ideas; encourage wild and exaggerated ideas; quantity of ideas more important than quality; building off the ideas of others; be supportive of all ideas
John Blyberg — Innovation
Need to have rock-solid infrastructure before you can support innovation (John is coming from an IT in libraries background).
John says that if staff in his library want to do something with technology — he never says no! But — he does let the staff know what is involved and demands that the staff make a commitment to the project in the long run. Sometimes knowing what resources are going to be required is enough for the staff member not to pursue it.
Jessamyn West — Sleeper 2.0: Agitprop Problem Solving
http://librarian.net/talks/agitprop
Interesting perspective on the Seattle Public Library — may be really striking and beautiful, but not really very easy to work in — if book truck is on the spiral staircase, no one else can use it.
Some wrap-up thoughts — we are a field that has a tension — we are both very traditional and on the cutting edge technologically. Putting innovation in place can be difficult in traditional environments.
Important not to get too personally invested in any particular project. Some will succeed, some will fail — but that’s ok. There have to be failures in innovation.
Reddy, M.C., & Spence, P.R. (2008). Collaborative information seeking: A field study of a multidisciplinary patient care team. Information Processing & Management 22(1), 242-255.
This article is part of reading I’m doing to increase my understanding of various aspects of health informatics. The biggest thing I gleaned from this paper is to start thinking about how to incorporate collaborative tools in information-seeking environments. I’m already unhappy that it’s so difficult to find annotation tools you can use for documents you run across on the Web — mostly because I haven’t found one that handles PDFs seamlessly. So what I want is something that integrates into Firefox that lets you highlight and add sticky notes to any kind of document, be it HTML, PDF, PNG, etc. But I haven’t found that yet, and it frustrates me. So that’s one piece. Another would be the ability to “annotate in chat”, so that if you had a shared screen information seeking environment, people could comment on the information-seeking process and perhaps add information that was not available formally. As Reddy & Spence argue, this is extremely prevalent in the patient care environment — a great deal of information seeking there goes on verbally and face-to-face, but how does this transfer to geographically dispersed patient care teams, which are likely to become more common in the future?
Petrelli, D. (2008). On the role of user-centred evaluation in the advancement of interactive information retrieval. Information Processing & Management 44(1), 22-38.
This article is part of an IP&M special issue on user-centered evaluated for interactive information retrieval. This particular article makes the uncontroversial (I hope) argument that information-seeking research, information retrieval systems research, and interactive information retrieval research need to be more integrated. It argues that both formative and summative, qualitative and quantitative methods need to be used at various stages in the process. More formal, fixed-task approaches can be used in the formative stages to improve a prototype design, while more naturalistic approaches (that will tend to be more qualitative) should be used at later stages both to understand use in the particular context and to ensure that the design supports tasks the user brings with her as well as those that the designers can predict.
Of course the hard part is getting all the research communities on board with this kind of framework.
So I’ve needed to get started on a research journal for myself for some time. But I found out a couple of days ago that a colleague is moving *to Australia* to take a research position there. We never really got to collaborate, and now that is my main incentive for trying to get this started!
I suppose a brief introduction is in order. I’m Sheila Denn, and I am an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. I am just starting my second year in this position — but things have settled down enough that I am trying to get a research agenda up and running for myself. Hence, this blog. 
Random things I have been thinking about:
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