Monthly Archives: January 2008

As Federated Search Matures, What Is Possible and What Still Isn’t?

By IRIS Posted on by

Over the course of the past few months (well, years actually, but more recently it’s become a higher priority project and less of a “watch and see” project), Carleton and St. Olaf have been exploring federated search as a joint option for our two libraries. It’s entailed many meetings and informal discussions, quite a bit of research, and significant time imagining scenarios and functions and services.

The good news is that federated search products have improved, even compared to last winter. Metalib, for example, has what looks like a slick set-up which would allow me to quickly and easily select databases that might be useful at the course- or assignment-level and to create a search box that will let my students explore just those resources. In fact, this more focused use of the system strikes me as incredibly appealing. I can imagine using this for almost every class I serve, but especially for the interdisciplinary classes. I would also look forward to using a federated search tool to look up a known item. You know the kind of search… you know the author or the title but not where it was published, and you have to go searching through 25 or 30 databases just to get a complete citation. These frustrating sessions could be a thing of the past just like the similarly frustrating hunts for full text access were squashed by our link resolver.

Encouraging this kind of use of the tool while discouraging its use as a kind of Library Google wouldn’t be so hard, I think. It would mean limiting exposure to the “search every database under the sun” search box, and placing all kinds of subject-specific search boxes in the places where students will be likely to find and use them. I can imaging search boxes on every research guide, and I bet professors would be happy to put course-specific search boxes into their pages in our Course Management System. We’d have to be careful how we labeled and described these pages or we’d end up with the “every search box searches everything” problem all over again. But I think this could accomplished, and what’s more, I think it could serve our students well.

At the same time that these exciting possibilities exist, though, federated search is still not up to par as a Library Google, or even a tool for pointing students toward subject-specific databases. Not by a long shot. Do a keyword search for “psychology” and you still won’t get many results from PsychINFO, simply because the word “psychology” has very little descriptive value in a database wholly devoted to that subject, so it isn’t used very often in that database. Because of this, the tool can’t even serve as a pointing device to get students into a subject-appropriate database. All it’d point toward would be Academic Search Premier, and ProQuest.

But will the students be satisfied anyway? We hear all the time that they don’t want the “best” sources as long as they find stuff that’s “good enough,” so we should provide access to some system that would supply “good enough” easily. Well, I didn’t necessarily agree with that line of reasoning to begin with, but in the last couple of years my co-workers and I have repeatedly experienced proof that general results from ASP and ProQuest do NOT satisfy our students. We have students who refuse to search ProQuest because of the sheer number of hits, many of which are irrelevant to their needs. If I do an example search in class and come up with 500 hits, a common response is, “But how do you ask it for more specific things? Isn’t that a lot to look through?” Seeing students flock away from ASP and ProQuest makes me think that an even more general search tool would not go over well in the long run.

And, of course, there’s the problem of the frustration and instruction time involved in helping students navigate collections of collections, but I’ve already written about that at length here. All I’ll add is that the one class of freshmen described there ended up requiring multiple sessions of clarification in class, time spend writing up detailed instructions that could be linked from the Course Management System, 7-8 hours of one-on-one time in my office, and about 4 hours of reference desk time, all told. And all that to accomplish a simple exploratory assignment that lead them through a collection of collections. And while I don’t grudge that time at all (I learned a lot by helping them through it, and it gave me excuses to teach them so much more than navigating American Memory), I can only imagine the amount of instruction and desk time we’d sink into a poorly implemented federated search product. Far from being a time-saver, I think it’d be a time-sink.

So at this point in the federated search life-cycle, I think it’s finally become useful if implemented smartly, but it hasn’t yet become useful as a monolithic library search tool. If we end up getting one of these things, I actually look forward to coming up with a careful and creative implementation that will maximize its benefits and minimize its faults. I think we could end up having a positive influence on our students’ search experience and outcomes if we do this well, just as I think both the experience and the outcomes will be disappointing if we do this poorly.

I have only one goal, and that is to serve my students well. I just wish I knew exactly what that would look like at this point. Even though I’m on the committee that’s supposed to recommend a tool to our libraries and should therefore be in a position to know which way we’ll go, I’m waiting with bated breath to see what we decide. The suspense is killing me!

RSS Spam

By IRIS Posted on by

Warning! Everything I said here is apparently out of date. Two weeks ago this was all true, but kindly friends just pointed out to me that you can now go into “settings” and then “friends” and click “hide” next to each of your friends’ names. Yay!!!! Now please excuse me while I go slap my own hand for not double checking… Perpetual beta bites again. :-)

I’ve been happily reading my feeds in Google Reader all month, and this time, I think it’s matured enough that I’ll forget about my Bloglines account for good. I’m still experiencing oddness with the “all items” having phantom new items, but like I said, I’ve decided to find this amusing. But there’s one thing that I really really don’t appreciate. It’s the spam.

That’s right. Google Reader has seen fit to force us to receive feeds we didn’t subscribe to by pushing feeds from people in our Gmail address books into our readers. The only way to “opt out” of this gift that keeps on giving is to delete friends from our address books. Here’s what the Google Reader help screen says about managing your Google Reader Friends list:

Reader’s friend list comes from the list of people you can chat with on Google Talk or Gmail chat. To invite friends to see your Reader shared items, simply invite them to chat. To remove them, delete them from your Gmail contacts, or from your Talk list.

So there you have it. You can either have gmail/gtalk contacts or you can have a feed reader that only shows you the feeds to which you’ve subscribed. Odd.

Even though I like the people in my contact list, I did not subscribe to those feeds. In fact, I’m now getting some feeds that I’ve deliberately unsubbed in the past. I’m also getting duplicates of some feeds that I already have in my reader. In my book, these unsolicited messages count as spam. It’s information coming at me that I didn’t ask for, don’t want, and can’t turn off.

The first thing I did when I set up my account was to check to see what items I might be shoving in other people’s faces without meaning to, and then to turn that feature off where ever possible. I never ever click “share,” and I’ve made sure that my starred items aren’t shared (since that’s how I save items for later). I sincerely hope I’m not spamming my friends, and I’m so disappointed in Google for forcing friends to bend over backwards so as not to spam each other. Seems like it’d be such an easy thing to add a “do not show me friend’s shared items” option, or even a “show me only those shared items from the following friends” option.

Subversive Handouts: One Librarian’s Secret Weapon

By IRIS Posted on by

I’ve recently (within the last year and a half) taken to the idea of handouts. Real, printed, paper handouts. I almost never list specific resources on those handouts, though, since I save that kind of thing for the online guide that goes with each class (unless I have a good reason to think the class will want a paper cheat-sheet). That kind of handout works well with some teachers and some students, but I’ve never been able to pull it off to my satisfaction. Instead I create what I’ve affectionately termed “subversive handouts.”

Before you get too worried, I should say that the name came from my very first incarnation of this thing and is no longer an accurate description of the genre. I’d been asked one too many times to do an “everything the class will need to know about research in 10-15 minutes, please” session. All efforts to get more time failed, so instead I paired the class down to the two small tasks that I thought the students would need most… and I created my very first subversive handout. This listed the two things they’d learn that day at the top, continued with a lengthy list of catchy and interesting/important sounding skills they could ask me about later, and concluded with my contact information and the URL for my calendar at the bottom.

The idea was threefold:
1) Students would still get a little concrete information and a chance to see my face (invaluable if they’re supposed to come make individual appointments with me later).
2) They’d have their imaginations jogged about the kinds of things they didn’t know were possible, or the skills they didn’t know they needed to learn.
3) The professor would see that “everything they need to know” encompassed a whole lot more than the library catalog and finding journal articles. And I won’t lie; in this original case, this third point was the most important to me.

And you know what? It worked. I ended up staying 15 minutes past time as the professor and students asked me questions off of that handout during class time. That meant I had effectively doubled my face-to-face time for with that class, and everyone was engaged and asking questions.

Since then I’ve used the “Here’s what we learned today… Here’s what you can ask me about any time… Here’s how you can get help…” handout in many, many classes. And while they’re useful for lots of kinds of classes, they’re particularly good for two kinds of sessions: those like the one I described above, and those where the professors know full well that the primary goal of a short session is to introduce their students to me so that the students will be more likely to come see me with their research conundrums later. And my original experience of having professors and students alike ask questions from the handout while still in class has held true of almost every session for which I’ve created one of these. (Here’s an example of one I created for a class I taught earlier this week.)

Even though I almost never create these handouts with the primary goal of educating the professor any more, the name has stuck. It’s just so fun to knuckle down to the task of creating a handout and be able to rub my fingers together and imagine myself scheming minor subversion. (Imagine shifty eyes and a monologue populated with mutterings such as “They didn’t know they’d want to know about THIS…. Mwa-ha-ha-ha.”) This little bit of fiction is all it takes to make a mundane task feel interesting every single time. Which I suppose means that I’m easily amused.

The Joys of Journal Searching in the MLA International Bibliography.

By IRIS Posted on by

This morning’s class was one of those typical classes: Teach these students how to find journal articles in the MLA International Bibliography, please. Nothing very remarkable in that. But for some reason, today’s class went remarkably well. It was one of those classes where you leave feeling all glowy and like you’d actually made a real difference. And you know what I discovered? Of all things, I love teaching the MLA International Bibliography and citation best.

The MLA-IB is such a difficult-to-use database, and yet it’s the bedrock of almost all of the research done in language and literature (the disciplines that I serve). So to have finally figured out how to unlock it for my students has been such a huge relief! It took me more than two years of working with it and with my students to figure out how to tease information out of it and how to explain that process to students, but I think I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can say with confidence that I’m covering the important concepts and significantly changing my students’ searching capabilities in the process. I’ll even go so far as to say that I can usually pull this off in an interesting way… which is probably the glowy feeling talking, but I’ll go with it.

I can’t even describe how happy this makes me. I’ve struggled for a while to figure out what unique skills I bring to the amazing group I work with, and I think at long last I can say with confidence that there ARE search skills and strategies that are unique to my disciplines and that I now have some expertise in deploying.

I’ve also discovered another secret weapon, The Subversive Handout, which I’ll write about later. (How’s that for a librarian cliff-hanger?) ;-)

Come Work With Me?

By IRIS Posted on by

We’ve re-opened the search for a new (as in “additional” rather than “replacement) Social Sciences librarian.

From the job ad:

Carleton College seeks an innovative and energetic librarian to join us in our lively and imaginative program of information resources and services in a liberal arts setting. Within this dynamic library, the Reference and Instruction programs emerge out of and are informed by the skills, interest, and passions of the members of the Reference team. This is an ideal position for an individual who is 1) looking for an opportunity to work in a liberal arts institution focused on teaching, in collaboration with an unusually fine group of students, faculty, and colleagues; 2) committed to excellence in teaching and student learning; and 3) deeply rooted in and excited about a social sciences discipline.