Category Archives: catalogs

Catalogs that are Both Useful and Fun

By IRIS Posted on by

[Update 4/27/2007: LibraryThing for Libraries tour available here.]

[Update 5/14/2007: The Danbury Library catalog has LTfL active in it's catalog (sample record here).]

I went to the exhibit hall the last morning of CIL, had a great time talking to Tim Spalding about Library Thing for Libraries (demo link coming soon to his blog, he promised). I want it. I need it. Gimme gimme gimme!

I almost always come out of vendor demos feeling a little like I need a shower. Stuff always looks great but there’s always the point when I ask a question and the vendors try to pretend they didn’t hear me, or understand me, or that I’m silly to think that would be an issue. Not so with this thing. There’s no downside. It doesn’t take anything away from the current functionality of our catalogs (and it’s “platform agnostic,” according to Tim, so it should work with any type of catalog out there), but it adds a whole lot of information and fun. You can see the most relevant tags (i.e. often used and cleaned up by a poor, overworked librarian at Library Thing) that Library Thing has for a particular work (not book). You can browse tags and retrieve your catalog’s holdings that match specific LT tags. And you can see related items! What’s not to love?

Anyway, when I’d finished drooling, I went back downstairs to sit around and wait for the next session to start: “Catalogs of the Future” starring Tim Spalding and Roy Tennant!!! (Did I have a good morning or what?) I sat down next to Jason and Michelle, who were also hoping to get good seats for that presentation, and was just about to blog about the coolness that is LTfL (I can acronymize ANYTHING) when Tim showed up and sat with us. Well, you can’t blog about somebody who’s sitting crosslegged on the floor four feet from where you’re sitting… And besides, that would have meant missing out on hearing how his colleague was speaking at the National Library of Australia that day, and how he was speaking at the Library of Congress the next day. Very cool.

This was one of those sessions that needed overflow rooms for the overflow room… but it was well worth the squeeze. Tim asserted that while we’ve been concentrated on fixing the three known problems of our catalogs (lack of usability, findability, and remixability), we haven’t paid much attention to increasing it’s funability. He argued that while the ILS may dis-integrate sometime in the future, we need to look toward making what we have NOW fun. Enter LTfL, stage left. LT increases by over 60,000 tags per day, and that’s enough to really DO stuff with. More is more when it comes to tags.

But even beyond that, our catalogs need a whole boatload of lipstick, blush, and mascara. Add pictures (and he is definitely still working on an open database of images, but he can’t say more than that just yet), allow inbound links (permalinks are essential), link out (Google, Amazon, you name it), and get your data out there.

These last two points were particularly interesting. He pointed out that we don’t want to be like big malls, were all the stairs lead to other places in the mall, and the exits are incredibly hard to find. “That’s how big corporate web sites work; the sites you want to leave immediately.” Instead, he said we’ll likely garner trust and become more useful if we are generous with our patrons’ attention.

Not only that, but if we’re generous with our data all the “bored programmers” out there who haven’t yet discovered library data would love to sink their teeth into our data and figure out ways of manipulating it. But they won’t struggle through MARC. We need mark, and our catalogs need MARC, but programmers don’t. So we need to figure out some way of opening our catalogs up and feeding our information out there in something other than MARC.

Then Roy spoke. His main theme? “Future? What Future? Catalogs ain’t got no stinkin’ future.” That’s not to say that we need to start over or throw out what we’ve got. We still need the ILS to do our work well. And contrary to what some people say, we still need good, detailed cataloging. But we don’t need to show this thing we use to the public. They need something different. They need a discovery system that manipulates our data for their benefit.

He also had a more is more theme. Maybe WorldCat is our future, and we should all sign on for WorldCat Local especially now that Open WorldCat has article-level records. (This would privilege the large libraries that actually submit their holdings information to OCLC.) This isn’t because they are the be all and end all of catalogs, but because they have enough aggregated information that they’re starting to be able to do really interesting things with all that data. (Things like WorldCat Identities, which I hadn’t played with before but which could be very useful.)

So I’m officially a Tim and Roy groupie. Can we start a fan club? I know a guy who can hook us up with T-shirts.

It was too bad that Tim was working on his presentation for LOC that night. We were all hanging out for our last evening together, and he worked. Too bad.

(This is a really bad picture of Tim working while we play.)

p.s. Did I mention that Meredith signed my copy of her book with Tim’s pen?!? I’ll allow visits to the book by appointment only, so call ahead if you want to see it. :)

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WorldCat Even Slicker

By IRIS Posted on by

I just got an email from WorldCat saying that I could update my blog widget (see the bottom of my sidebar) so that it’s no longer a bright blue on my tan-ish/yellow-ish background. But the really cool part is what’s included in the rest of the email:

  • Automatic geographic location by IP address
    WorldCat.org library results for a particular item now determine the geographic location for a user based on IP address, even when the user has never before entered a postal code.


  • Users can expand faceted browse results
    The faceted browse feature of WorldCat.org search results now allows a user to expand the abbreviated results within each facet via a “Show More” link. Faceted browse allows a user to dynamically filter search results by categories, or facets, using the left-hand Refine Your Search panel, helping users narrow a large result set. Each facet in its initial state displays only the five most relevant results. The “Show More” link lets the user incrementally reveal 25 additional results at a time, up to 100 results within the facet.
  • More visibility for evaluative content and Web resource links
    Individual item records reached from WorldCat.org search results now include links to supplemental Web content at the record level. Previously displayed beneath the “Details” tab, these links can include publisher-provided item descriptions, author biographies and Web sites, tables of contents and content excerpts.

    Additional links may be provided with the heading “Web Resources,” which may give a user access to content related to the displayed item. If the displayed item is a digital object—such as an electronic book, or a digitally preserved photo, document or artifact—the link may provide direct viewing or retrieval of the object.

They’ve also added a Chinese language interface, and made it so that you can embed a keyword, subject, title, or author. That url will then lead to a result list as if you’d done a keyword search or a search on those common indices. A tutorial on that is here.

I Knew It!

By IRIS Posted on by

Remember last year when I wondered what letter would become popular next? Remember I said it would be “s” for “social?” Looks like there’s a possibility I was right. John Blyberg is working on the SOPAC — the social -er- catalog. And man, oh man, does it look good. And you don’t even have to be a library card holder to participate!

But that’s not even the good part. No, the good part is that he’s made his code public.

So let me be among the first to say, “Me too! Me too! I like this idea too!”

[Update: As I suspected, this is getting major buzz in the biblioblogosphere, so I've created two ways to keep up with it. You can see (and subscribe to) the posts I've read on the topic here. And you can see (and subscribe to) a libworm search for the topic here.]

Open Book Cover Images?!?

By IRIS Posted on by

The amazing people who actually contribute to NGC4lib (as opposed to pure lurkers, like me), got tired of talking about license agreements, money, license agreements… oh yeah, and license agreements when it came to getting book cover images into library catalogs. So they’ve decided to create an open database of book cover images.

At first, when they put together a wiki page to think about the project and then started thinking about how to match images with books, I figured it would be like most of the other discussions that happen on listservs: it would unearth a whole bunch of interesting questions, start a plethora of interesting discussions, and then die a slow and painless death.

But then Tim Spalding from LibraryThing and Rob Styles from Talis both offered to host the database. Spalding is checking to see if he’d be able to contribute his hundreds of thousands of user-generated images to the database, and everyone is talking about easy ways for libraries to contribute new images to the database. This could happen, folks! And if it does, I would LOVE to add images from it to our catalog.

[Update: Since this remains my most frequently visited blog post, I thought I'd just mention here that as of 8/7/2008, LibraryThing is offering free user-generated book cover images to libraries and bookstores. See the LibraryThing blog post for details.]

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Catalog Enhancement: The Struggle Continues

By IRIS Posted on by

I’m a member of the Public Access Working Group (PAWG, which rhymes with frog, tee hee hee) comprised of members from both Carleton and St. Olaf. We’re in charge of making decisions about our shared catalog, and among other things, PAWG has been working on two decisions this year: whether or not to upgrade to Innovative’s WebPac Pro catalog interface, and whether or not to include “record enhancement” in the form of book cover images from Amazon.

The WebPac Pro decision proved to be easier than we thought. Turns out, the ranking algorithm for it’s much-touted relevance ranking stinks. If any of you are making this decision right now, try searching for the keywords Global Warming. You should notice that even though there are some books that have this exact phrase as a subject heading, they get buried pages and pages down your result list unless the exact phrase “global warming” appears in the title. No kidding. Effectively, the default search is a keyword in title search. Now, you can get around this if you put quotation marks around each word (i.e. “global” “warming”), which deactivates the relevance ranking altogether, but there’s no way I’m going to start teaching that in my instruction sessions. So we’re not “upgrading.”

But the more interesting decision is yet to come. Will we include book cover images from Amazon in our catalog? I’ve heard a lot recently about the benefits of allowing one-click access to book reviews, and I’ve heard that our students are used to seeing images on web pages, and I’ve heard that we should do our best to make the experience of searching the catalog as enjoyable and visually interesting as we can. I agree with all of these arguments. Absolutely. After all, as librarians we’re supposed to aid in locating, collocating, and making decisions, right? And book reviews and book covers both move us in the direction of making decisions much more effectively than, say, the height of the book’s spine in centimeters.

But I think our students are used to much more than pretty pictures. They’re used to everything on a screen being clickable, and everything doing something meaningful and more or less useful. Imagine what you would think if you saw an image to the left of a title in a result list. You’d click on the image, right? I would. And I’d get sucked to Amazon. Talk about mixed signals.

Now, I would realize that this wasn’t what I wanted or what was expected of me, and I’d hit the nice little “back” button in the browser and click on titles from then on. But my co-workers and I have noticed a distinct trend among our students. Instead of using our A to Z list to see if we subscribe to a journal or magazine, they find the publisher’s web site. Then they come to us and ask, in all seriousness, if the library has a fund that will help them buy this article online. They’re usually very happy when we point out the A to Z list. But last week one poor kid came back to me after he’d verified that we did not, in fact, subscribe to his journal and wondered if now I’d help him pay for it from the publisher’s site. That lucky kid learned about the A to Z list and interlibrary loan all in one evening.

These students who expect to be able to do whatever it is that site they land on tells them to do. What’s more, they expect that we expect them to do these things. The web isn’t just about seeing things; it’s about doing things. And if we put something in front of our students that implies they should do something that we don’t actually want them to do, that’s a problem.

Of course, we could by images from places like Syndetic Solutions, but that’s expensive. Still, this would be a way to make our records look pretty without threatening mass confusion.

So the upshot of all of this is that I’m willing to be convinced, but I have grave reservations about the amazon solution to our boring catalog. If we’re really interested in providing what users are used to, we’d have to redesign everything, not just slap on some pretty pictures. And that “everything” would have to include all sorts of clickable and interactable options.

But in the spirit of being convinced, is anyone willing to share their experience with the amazon lipstick option? I’m particularly interested if you have any statistics to show how often those images get clicked on. Do your ILL stats change?

Just as a side note, we’re also pondering how best to configure our link resolver… To offer choices of electronic options or not to offer choices, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to privilege one-click access to beauteous PDF full text or to deepen the understanding of young minds as they develop access preferences from among the panoply of database options. To learn, perchance to dream. To dream of other uses to which they can put databases that appear often in their list of options….

Sorry Will. You’re writing was a lot better, and certainly more moving.

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