Category Archives: search and discovery

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?) ;-)

The Guide From Hell

By IRIS Posted on by

Researchers of Jazz are probably familiar with Lord’s Jazz Discography. It was one of those behemoth reference works that started had ambitions of several dozen volumes containing the most comprehensive collection of information about jazz recordings ever compiled. And they did publish volume after volume. But for some reason, our library stopped collecting after the middle of the Gs, and now the following volumes are out of print. This makes any kind of research rather difficult unless you happen to want to study an artist who’s name begins with A-Gha. Meanwhile, there are a couple of classes offered every Winter term that could really use this resource, if only it spanned the entire alphabet. You can imagine the frustration.

Well, this year, Lord finally came out with a web version of this resource. It wasn’t very expensive, and it made a familiar but unusable resource suddenly usable, so we snatched it up as soon as it hit the interwebs.

Unfortunately, the designers of this unique resource had never heard of interface design. I could go into details, but it would just make me cry, so suffice it to say that it’s almost unusable unless you’ve either designed the thing or worked with somebody who knows how to tease information from it’s unwilling and moody navigation structure. What’s more the “Help” spends more time describing 13 different types of screens you may land in at any point, the space-saving techniques (only relevant to the print version, by the way, but carried over nonetheless), and the wonderfully flexible numbering system that makes this whole dynamic index work without page numbers for reference… it spends more time on these kinds of things than it does on actually navigating the system or explaining that things like phrase searching are impossible. (I only wish I could make things like this up…)

Clearly, the professors and students who will be using this in 2 weeks’ time will need more than that as they begin their research, so I decided to make a user guide before announcing that we’d acquired the database. This guide would give enough information that the click-phobic could click away without worrying that they’d erase the database, and it would be pared down enough to fit neatly on the front and back of a piece of paper (or else nobody would look at it, and it’d be that much wasted effort). Well, I’m pretty good at figuring out systems, so I budgeted a day an a half for this project: half a day to figure out the system, and a day to design the guide.

HA!

I’ve now doubled that time and have only just figured out what it is that I’ll need to do tomorrow to finish up the project! I was not prepared to spend an entire day clicking on everything in sight to see what it did or didn’t do. (True fact: underlined things are not links, regular type is usually a link if it’s a name and not an abbreviation or a number, and the only glossary for the abbreviations that litter the screens is hidden in the “Help” section.) Even after all this time, I still had to educated myself on the history and conventions of the recording industry in order to make sense of the various alphanumeric codes that can accompany any given recorded tune. These things were not included in the “Help” section, by the way. I was not then prepared to spend another entire day trying to create a design for the handout that would distill the craziness down to easy steps and concepts. Today I spent every possible moment trying to make incredibly complex navigation structures seem less overwhelming through manipulation of font and color.

Hopefully I’ll finish this crazy thing tomorrow. But even so, I know that I’ve made this guide for an audience of professors and librarians. There’s no library or search jargon or anything like that, but it’s not nearly as task-oriented as a student would like. As soon as I hear about the assignments that students will receive, I’ll have to evaluate their needs and write up new guides.

Meanwhile, I’ve systematically erased from my whiteboard all the other projects I’d wanted to get to this week, leaving only the few that absolutely MUST happen. And one of those I’ll be doing this evening as I watch something brainless like Project Runway.

… And people wonder what we do when school’s not in session…

Desperately Seeking Search Boxes

By IRIS Posted on by

We’ve been planning to do some usability studies on our web site this year since it’s been a couple of years since our current site was implemented, and it’s time to check and see if the things that made sense to students a few years ago still make sense to them now. So I was interested to have several interactions with students over the course of the last week or so which indicated that students really are interacting with the site differently now. In short, they’re looking for anything that might look like a search box, and they’re using any and all search boxes in same way. More than at any previous time, I’m noticing that my students expect every single search box to be their point of entry into all library resources. At the same time, when they search through collections of collections, they’re highly frustrated. So what gives? (And I really mean that as a serious question. I simply cannot resolve these two frustrations in my head.)

But leaving that conundrum aside for the moment, here’s what I’ve noticed about the “any search box is the same search box and searches everything” mentality.

First, there was a student last week who was searching our catalog for “information on her topic” when what she clearly needed were newspaper articles, and she knew that. But, you see, we had a search box sitting at the top of our “Find” page, so that’s what she used. It’s quite logical, really. If I didn’t know what “The Bridge” is, the difference between a catalog and a database, or if I just didn’t bother to read the labels, that’s what I’d do too.

Later, another student who knew the difference between catalogs and databases came up because she wasn’t getting any results when she searched our article databases. Well… it turned out she was using the “search for a particular database from this long list of databases” box as if it were, you guessed it, a “search within these databases” search box. And it’s quite logical. That box simply says “search.”

Well, today was the kicker. I was teaching a class, and I got the whole class up into the reference room to actually use the Encyclopedia Britannica and to figure out what other subject encyclopedias might be useful as entries into their topics. I’d just shown them how to navigate Britannica’s index, and then showed them a custom search form I’d made so that they could find subject encyclopeidas to browse. Got that? I’d shown them Britannica. Ok. Well, one student clicked from the course guide I’d made into the catalog record for Britannica, and then was trying to use the search box there to search Britannica for his topic. I guess he figured that would be a much more efficient way than the way I’d just demonstrated. And he’s right… but that’s simply not possible from within our catalogs.

My conclusion? Somehow, every search box is a Google box. Every search box is presumed to query everything. And yet, when search boxes do query everything, the students are frustrated to the point of paralysis with the results they get. So basically, if we are to fix this problem, we need federated search that guides students so expertly through result lists and items and collections that they can actually find what they want in the mess that is “all available information.” Oh, and all content must be digitized. This is (currently) impossible. Which brings me back to my conundrum… what do we do now? with today’s library technology? Or is it just a case of needing to label our search boxes better? …. I’ve got no answers.

Collections of Collections

By IRIS Posted on by

Life and work and crazy deadlines on massive projects have all been ganging up on me lately to keep me from posting (or cooking, or doing my dishes, or sleeping much, or… really anything that usually makes up the rhythm of my existence). The bad thing about this is that I’ve never felt quite this overwhelmed before (though it sure is making me look forward to having another librarian join our team!). The good thing is that when so many things happen in such a short space of time, I can see patterns in the kinds of confusion my students face much more easily.

One such typical confusion that’s been brought to the fore in the last couple of weeks has to do with the concept of collections of collections. We deal with this concept all the time in libraries, and in academia in general. We know without thinking that special collections, archives, government documents, journal collections, and teaching collections in individual departments all have their own internal coherence. They have their own rules about what constitutes a relevant description and what doesn’t, what finding aids make sense, and what physical or digital organization makes finding and using the information hum along smoothly. Who would use the world “Carleton” to describe anything held in our archives like they would in our regular book collection? And who would organize our regular books by publisher like they do in gov docs, kind of?

Take that a step further and look at all our bibliographic databases. Some are indexing only (like MLA International Bibliography). Some include abstracts. Some search the full text of the article. Some ONLY search the full text of the article. No matter their structure and search philosophy (because I do think choice of primary access comes down to philosophy most of the time), each database has it’s own internal rhythms and vocabularies, strengths and eccentricities. We’re very used to approaching each new collection, probing it for clues to its vocabularies and strengths, and then mining it for insights into our research problems.

And this is just the way it is. (And incidentally, this is what makes federated search such a bear of a concept… but more on that later, maybe.) We are used to this state of affairs and navigate it as easily as we change our wardrobes to fit new seasons. Which is why, when we encounter digitized collections online, we don’t even blink. Of course they’ll have their own internal rhythms. Of course they’ll resonate to their own vocabularies.

But this isn’t the way the search-engine optimized web works. The new default order of things is that for any given search box to search everything under it in exactly the same way with consistent results. (I know, I know. This isn’t how it actually happens. But it is what people think happens, which is more to the point.) So faced with a portal like, for example, American Memory, what are students to think but that entering search terms in that little search box will search through all of the content and bring back relevance-ranked results? And yet, American Memory is a collection of collections, just like our library here on campus is a collection of collections. That search box is almost entirely useless and is causing students no end of frustration. They see result lists that are either 0 or 9 bazillion, and both results bother them so much that they’ve been coming the reference desk in droves to find out what they’re doing wrong. They’re confused and frustrated, and they absolutely “know” that the fault lies with their search abilities rather than with the problem of having a cute little search box that is desperately trying to search the contents of hundreds of collections that have about as much in common as Medline and the MLA International Bibliography, or as our musical recordings and our map collection. Up until this point in their lives, Google has searched web pages for them and delivered understandable results. They’ve never before had to consider the implications and complications that discrete collections present.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, explaining the concept of collections of collections, and explaining how to use the cute little search box to find collections rather than items has relieved frustration so far.)