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Month: April 2007

The Future of Our Catalog

Published by Iris on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

I spent all day today at a school two hours northwest of my school meeting with a bunch of librarians of all kinds (including library directors) who work at private colleges in Minnesota. On the agenda: contemplating the future of our catalogs.

Four groups of librarians presented their visions of what this future might look like using a combination of examples already extant (WorldCat in many paid and free forms, Koha, NCSU’s Endeca interface, Google, LibraryThing for Libraries, etc.) and “what if” ideas drawing from the world of Web 2.0 and the hope that search algorithms will continue to evolve. Then we broke into groups to discuss what we’d heard and add our thoughts. And finally we reported to the group any ideas, concerns, questions, or random thoughts our discussion groups had generated.

Even more interesting than these presentations, though were two revelations. First, only one of us indicated she liked our current catalog (which is not a smear against any particular catalog, since we all used different ILSs, but against the ILS landscape in general). And second, we learned that when it comes to thinking up feature and function lists, there was a large degree of consensus, regardless of school affiliation or job description. We wanted all the usual social web features, web 2.0 discovery aids, and recommendations based on user behavior… all of that. Plus we wanted the option to search the full-text of our books’ tables of contents, introductions, bibliographies, and indices.

One group even decided that we need to ditch the name “Catalog.” In fact, we were so busy ditching names that all we could come up with was “up-pushing thing” (based on the idea that whatever tool or system of tools we come up with should be able to push relevant/important results up from a pool of articles, books, archival material, images, recordings, web pages, and anything else the library might care to point people toward). Oh, and this tool’s uber-descriptive name is only proper if accompanied by a hand motion that would take far too long to describe, but involves moving upward…

We still aren’t quite sure about a couple of things (the role of metadata, privacy, how long some of the transitional technologies and solutions we identified might need to be kept around, etc.). But we’ve only met once…

At the end of the day, the directors of our respective libraries stood up and reported where each library stands in respect to its ILS. These ranged from “thinking about thinking about changing” to “actively exploring alternatives,” but it was nice to get that up front. It was especially nice to get that cleared up because after that they called for volunteers to work on behalf of all of these schools to explore future options. And somehow (not quite sure what possessed me…) I ended up on this Think Group with 7 or 8 other librarians from around the state.

So here I am… thinking about thinking about the future of OUR catalog. I’m a little worried that this will be a lot of work, and that it’ll turn out we don’t actually do anything. (And I DEFINITELY don’t believe what one director said: “think as if money is no object.” We tried that for another and much smaller decision and got burned. Money is always an object.) But at the very least, I can contribute my year’s worth of accumulated information on this topic, and maybe set up a wiki for us…

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Best, Iris

Published by Iris on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007

As a child, I remember writing letters to grandma, having them carefully proof-read by my mom, and then copying them onto “real” paper before sending them off. Each letter was signed “Love, Iris” in that wobbly block writing of mine. In fact, that’s how I signed all of my correspondence. And it worked pretty well when I was writing to my family and friends, though not so well when I was writing to a new friend who had just fallen in love with me. (The feeling was not entirely reciprocated, so let’s just say that there was some confusion about my intentions. But it only took us about ten years to get that one cleared up…)

But then I graduated and got a job. I remember staring in some consternation at my very first out-going email as a professional librarian and wondering how in the world to sign off. “Love” just didn’t seem right when I was explaining off-campus database access to a faculty member. I’d seen “Cheers,” so I typed that one in, just to get the feel of it.

It didn’t feel like me. I wasn’t even quite sure what it meant. “Thank you” didn’t seem to work when I was providing a service rather than receiving it, and “Sincerely” was way to formal for me, though I did try it out, just to see. And closing with only my name sounded far too abrupt.

I wanted to sound professional yet also approachable, cheery, un-stuffy, and maybe even a little bit fun. That’s a lot to ask of a word or phrase followed by a comma.

After spending far too long trying various closing lines and becoming equally frustrated with the lack of options and my own obsession over getting this right, I finally typed “Best, Iris” and hit Send. “Best?” What’s that? Best what? Probably derived from something along the lines of “Best wishes to you and your family,” it’s definitely on the stuffy side. It tries to be hip by cutting off all the descriptive stuff and leaving the reader to fill in whatever he or she pleases. It’s even less descriptive than its slightly longer cousin, “All the Best,” which at least sounds more generous, though not any more enlightening.

But I was so relieved to have sent the stupid email without encumbering myself with either more or less affection than I meant, or sounding too earnest or too abrupt, that this abbreviated and incomprehensible closer has become my standard. I type it without even thinking any more, and it has graced the ends of dozens of emails a day for the last two years, varying only on those rare occasions when a more descriptive closer is absolutely necessary.

So if you get an email from me, scroll down to the signature. Your odds are pretty good that you’ll see this habitual signal of my capitulation to ethos over expression.

Best,
Iris

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Looking Back

Looking Back

Published by Iris on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007

One of the most interesting things about going to two conferences in three weeks is that the contrasts between them become much more apparent. Take, for example, the dress codes. ACRL was definitely on the business casual side. We all looked exactly like what we were: 3200 librarians. At CIL, things were a little more casual and a little more hip all at the same time. We still looked like what we were, but there was a subtle difference.

Then there was the session envy… At ACRL, if you were sitting in a session that only you and about 10 other people decided to attend, you had a pretty good idea that everyone else at the conference knew something you didn’t and had decided to attend one of the 10 or so other sessions that would have been better. At CIL, if you attended a session that was only one third full, you knew that everyone else at the conference knew something you didn’t and had decided to attend the one REALLY hot session that period. (On the other hand, sitting in your un-full session you also had a seat and didn’t have to sit on the floor in the hall outside of the overflow room, so it wasn’t all bad.)

But no matter which conference, there are always library geeks. “Lunch 2.0,” for example, can only happen in a group of librarians. (In order to achieve Lunch 2.0, you must walk from your hotel and turn right toward many restaurants every day, lunch and dinner, until the last day. On that last day, you must turn left toward different restaurants even though “we’ve never done it that way before.”)

Looking back over these two conferences, I’ve met so many wonderful people, seen some truly cool stuff, and generally renewed my conviction that I’m in the best job ever, and I’m in it with the best companions around. It’s not without it’s frustrations (and after hearing many variations on the theme of “I could never do that at my library” I’m even more grateful for my co-workers and working environment than I was before), but it’s pretty darn amazing nonetheless.

Now, back in my “real world” of Sunday reference shifts, burgeoning to-do lists, classes, consultations, and meetings, everything seems just a little rosier than it did a few weeks ago. There’s no good reason for this. I have even more to do than I did before, and even less time in which to do it all. But at least for now, that doesn’t matter so much. I’m jealous of everyone who gets to go to Internet Librarian, but I’ll see you all at CIL next year. Just don’t have too much fun without me in Monterey, alright?

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Federated Search on Steroids – but Still Broken

Published by Iris on Saturday, April 21st, 2007

Ex Libris vendors showed me Primo while I was at CIL. It workes on top of Metalib and your catalog to function as a search of everything available through the library. Shiny. Probably the flashiest thing they showed was opening a video and a text version of the same title in two side-by-side windows. If it weren’t for one small problem, I’d say I’d seen the future of library discovery systems.

The problem? After 15 or 20 minutes of talking to these vendors, I finally got them to understand the problem of searching subject and generic databases at the same time. Subject databases never index their primary subject, right? So “psychology” would return gazillions of results from catalogs, Academic Search Premier, ProQuest, etc. But it wouldn’t return anything from PsychInfo. That’s a problem.

When I’d finally gotten them to understand what I was saying, they agreed. But here are their answers: create custom views or scopes for each subject (so yes, make students chose their subjects first and then do searches, which still won’t compute if they search for “psychology”), and tell PsychInfo to include “psychology” as a subject term. What? That’s about as likely as catalog vendors moving their products to wiki platforms.

Why doesn’t Metalib or any other federated search system allow us to tag databases and then add those tags to the results that get fed from the database to the search system? That way we could customize for our communities AND get our patrons the most relevant results possible.

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