Category Archives: search and discovery

I Really Wish It Were Easier

By IRIS Posted on by

Tipping point: reached.

Up until maybe the middle of last year, it was pretty easy not to worry too much about the problems of doing “real” library research on the free web. “The kids are doing it” was a phrase that simultaneously helped us to worry about the state of information literacy in this web-ified era and to dismiss the problem as one that “the kids” would outgrow, like braces or a lisp or chicken pox, as they became better versed in scholarly research practices.

Well, it’s not just the kids any more, folks. Enough journal publishers have opened up their indexing and abstracts to the free web that it’s now possible (especially in some fields) to actually do “real” library research on the web. And so people are doing just that. This year, our new faculty orientation session brought questions about Google-friendly access right to our door-step in a big way, and part of this rather disorganized thread on FriendFeed brought it up again.

And yes, ideally everyone could use one nice, big, easy search mechanism to do everything from the most broad to the most narrow topic and then get instant access to the full text of whatever they find. Too bad that’s impossible.

Google is more familiar and forgiving, it’s faster, and there’s a lot of good stuff in it (particularly if you’re searching for something that hasn’t had any controlled vocabulary assigned to it, yet). But currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of collocating like items based on something more robust than the author’s choice in vocabulary and PageRank. Currently, disciplinary databases do a better job of allowing scholars to leverage their disciplinary vocabulary and a better job of helping novices stumble upon key vocabulary terms. Currently, disciplinary databases are the only things that can offer relief to my students who say that there are just too many false hits in everything from Google to JSTOR (free text search may be what they’re used to, but they’re often relieved to leave it behind as soon as they’re shown controlled vocabulary).

But all that aside, neither option does the “access to full text” piece of the equation very well. Unless your library subscribes to the publisher versions of pretty much every eJournal out there (an expensive proposition) Google can’t actually help you get to whole swaths of full text, and even then you’d have to be on campus or logged in to your library’s proxy server or something. And even if researchers are in a disciplinary database, they’ll still often have to step outside of that database to get the full text, and while a link resolver is a wonderful thing, it’s still a long way from being a perfect solution to this problem. Either way this lands you at the A-Z list figuring out if we have access to the particular issue of the particular journal you want.

I wish it were easier. I wish access issues didn’t make researchers jump to the conclusion that we’re “hiding” stuff from Google, or that we’re being unnecessarily silo-ish, or that indexing is over-rated, or that you have to do “complex” searches in library databases. I also wish that we could bringing together disciplinary databases in ways that allow easy cross-searching without giving up the time-saving specificity of disciplinary focus and vocabulary.

Right now it feels like we’re balanced precariously on that tipping point with a precipice on each side.

Anti-Choice (or Pro-Simplicity) is Nice When You Can Get It

By IRIS Posted on by

We’re knee-deep in our MetaLib implementation project, and as we do our best to make decisions about our interface, we keep removing all the extra links and options and tabs that clutter up the default interface. Do we really need two different ways to get to the database list? Do we really need both Simple and Advanced Search options when the Advanced search only adds one search box to the already existing search box? Do we really need a button to switch languages when we only have an English interface? Little by little we try to strike a balance between simplicity and function. One by one, buttons and options and tabs disappear and the interface starts to make a little more sense.

Then, today, I watched a TED talk in which Barry Schwartz talks about his theories about how increased choice does not, in fact, make for better decision-making outcomes. Apparently greater choice means (unsurprisingly) more brain time spent making decisions, but even beyond that it raises our expectations that the outcomes will be wonderful. When the outcome is just good and not absolutely amazing, we’re more easily disappointed now that our expectations have been raised. So while our decisions may actually be better, we’re less happy. If you want the long version of these theories, he has a whole book out: The Paradox of Choice. (Also, if you watch the TED talk you’ll notice at about minute 6:10 that even TED people don’t get wifi at their conference hotel. This makes me feel just a teensy bit better about every conference I’ve ever been to. But I digress.)

Being a librarian with search interfaces on the brain, I couldn’t help but think about all those calls for beautiful, simple, Google-like, single search boxes. It’s not a perfect analogy, but in both cases people hope that by reducing options, the experience will be improved. With the single search box, there’s never any doubt what you’re supposed to do or how to do it at least minimally effectively. It’s such a wonderful goal.

But there’s a catch. The simpler the interface is, the more powerful the behind-the-scenes mechanisms have to be. They have to do more interpretation of search terms, smarter retrieval, more robust relevance ranking. If I can’t specify how things should look when I’m done searching, then things had better be done in a way I would have anticipated to begin with or I’ll get frustrated with the lack of options to “fix” my results. Google didn’t get famous because it had a single search box. It got famous because that single search box yields consistent results based on an algorithm that’s incredibly complex and equally secret.

So while I’d love to be able to reduce our interface down to just a couple of well-chosen elements, we still have to compensate for the fact that the behind-the-scenes mechanisms just aren’t up to that kind of challenge. And so we’re left doing our balancing act: how much can we strip away in the interests of removing excess choice, and how much do we have to leave so that people can manipulate the system enough to get it to spit back results they can use.

These are a few of my favorite things

By IRIS Posted on by

I found myself listing my three favorite e-resources today. Usually I have trouble coming up with my favorite of anything, but these three popped into my head with little effort.

Ulrich’s
I hate trying to figure out where an obscure serial has been indexed, but Ulrich’s makes this easy (most of the time). But even beyond that, I absolutely love it for solving a major problem for my students. For the last two years, I’ve taught this as a cheat sheet of “print sources.” I had the hardest time coming up with an easy way to explain how to tell if what you’ve found online (on the free web or through our bibliographic databases) counts as a “print source” when print vs online is becoming a more and more murky distinction every year, and really makes no sense at all to students (or librarians, really). Students were paralyzed thinking they couldn’t use eJournals because their professors had banned “web sources,” and professors wondered why their students were using out-of-date and only-barely-relevant journal sources in their papers. It was because their poor students had been confining themselves to our print journal collection, which is only a fraction of our total journal collection. So now I get up in front of a class and show them the cheat sheet. If you can find a publication name (and I show them how to hunt one down), look it up in Ulrich’s. If it is listed, it counts as a “print source.” Problem solved.

OED
I love word histories, and this is the most comprehensive dictionary of word histories. Ever. I don’t often have much call to use it in my day-to-day work, but I love it for all those late-night “I wonder when we started using ‘research’ as an intransitive verb” moments I have. It has also solved many a word squabble in my family (which has at least 4 discussions about word usage, etymology, or relationship over the dinner table each week).

MLA International Bibliography
I love this because it’s such a treasure-trove of articles, and (please don’t laugh) because it’s incredibly quirky. I know that we’re supposed to love it when students can use resources on their own. You know… usability and stuff. But this thing is a bear to use well, and I’m pretty comfortable with it, which makes me feel useful. And I love feeling useful.

Another Reason Our Legacy Systems Must Evolve or Die

By IRIS Posted on by

In a not-so-recent New Yorker that I hadn’t yet read, I ran across this sentence about Google’s emerging advertising markets:

Two vital markets are television, which is ‘easily attainable,’ and mobile phones, which are ‘more personable’ and more ‘targetable’ than most advertising. (Auletta 36)

This resonated with something that John Riedl (keynote speaker extraodinaire) said at the Midwest Library Technology Conference about mobile computing. He said that because screen real estate is so precious in the mobile computing environment, the challenge is to make sure that the content that shows up on those tiny screens is exactly what you care about, exactly what you wanted to see. There’s just no room for false hits.

Up until very recently, I haven’t been too worried about mobile computing in the library world. It’s been a little bleeding edge for me, a little too easily turned into a superficial discussion of Those Millennials and Their Gadgets. But in the last couple year and a half or two, mobile computing has entered the mainstream in my little world. My friends of all ages have cool little devices that keep them online all the time no matter where they are. Our college IT department is pushing the iPhone as the next Palm Pilot. In the near future, even I, in my iPhone-less state, may have a little handheld wireless device.

Meanwhile, the library catalog will fail miserably at any request for targeted responses to one or two-word queries (nobody wants to type long search strings into a mobile device, not even the most dedicated advanced searcher). So here’s the rub: I want it all ways. I want a robust system that’ll let me, my comps students, and my faculty advanced-search the heck out of it. But I want a smart enough and light enough version that’ll work well for mobile searching. Unfortunately, right now I have a system that does neither of these things well, but doesn’t do the second thing at all.

Auletta, Ken. “The Search Party: Google Squares Off with Capitol Hill Critics.” New Yorker. (January 14th, 2008): 30-37. (online version here)

Collection Development Choices: the Example of JSTOR

By IRIS Posted on by

Here I am at the reference desk for one of my Sunday shifts this term.* Sitting here, trying not to think about the tornado watch we’re under, or about cook-outs, or about holidays in general, I started thinking about JSTOR and what a perfect example it is of a whole cluster of things I’m sure my students rarely think about. Namely, the role that collection development choices make on the kinds of information to which they’ll have easy access.

JSTOR, like any other collection, was developed and continues to evolve based on choices people make about what to include and what to exclude. I’m not privy to the inner workings of JSTOR, but I don’t have to know those details in order to know that decisions must have been made to exclude some journals from the collection and to seek out other journals for inclusion. There’s no way around it.

Students, though, assume that it’s comprehensive. If anything, they may know that it doesn’t have much recent content, but they often figure that if JSTOR doesn’t have what they need they’re sunk because probably what they’re looking for doesn’t exist. I’ve seen this assumption loom it’s frustrating head in classes, at the reference desk, in my office, and now again in a set of focus groups we had done. Truth be told, it’s not just the students that think of JSTOR as The access point for scholarly articles in the library… we’ve heard the same assumptions bubbling up from some faculty.

But if you only search JSTOR, how might this affect your views of the scholarly discussion on a particular topic? A PoliSci professor on campus loves to point out that the journals in JSTOR for his discipline come, by and large, from one particular theoretical framework within the world of Political Science. I’d never thought about this until a couple of years ago (when I heard him say that for the first time), so I thought I’d take a closer look at the Language and Literature journals there. And sure enough, there are a couple of interesting trends in evidence.

First of all, there’s a distinct preference for journals published in the United Kingdom or the United States. I know other English-speaking countries publish high-quality, peer reviewed journals on language and literature, but vanishingly few show up in JSTOR.

Then there’s the question of dominant theoretical frameworks. Well, after admitting in the comments on my last post that distinguishing theories of reading is difficult, I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I pain in broad strokes here. That said… all the ways of reading a text (which I define very loosely, but which is easier to type than “mode of expression”) choose some method by which expression and meaning interact and dub it the most important or interesting site of meaning to explore. Some look to the text itself and exclude other contexts while others look to the reader’s interaction with the text or to the cultural context surrounding the text’s creation. JSTOR journals tend heavily toward the cultural-context option and exclude, almost entirely, the text-by-itself option. (Interestingly, the curriculum in the English department here has historically tended toward the text-by-itself option.) So if, as many undergraduates are, you’re looking for examples of ways that scholars have interpreted a given text, JSTOR will only give you a piece of that story because it seems to have chosen to develop its strength in contextually based criticism.

Of course, none of this is meant to imply that JSTOR is trying to pull one over on its subscribers, or that it’s not valuable, or anything like that. They can’t digitize everything, and they do have many of the absolute core journals in my disciplines. My point is just that students think it’s comprehensive, but it’s not. This is why we subscribe to more than just JSTOR. Each collection, physical or virtual, has it’s strengths and weaknesses, and remembering that this is true is a key part of becoming a savvy researcher.

* Life at this college only gives passing glances to holidays as it plunges headlong through 10-week terms. In the case of Memorial Day, this glance takes the form of an email message from the college president urging us to “take a moment” to honor those who died defending our nation, a vigil in the campus chapel, and probably sidewalk art. We enjoy sidewalk art here.