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Month: April 2007

I’ve Seen the Future of LexisNexis

Published by Iris on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

When I was at ACRL I went to the LexisNexis lunch and took a bunch of notes. Overall, the new interface and functionality seems great. The notes below highlight some of the differences between old and new. Here they are, in their semi-raw form.

Smart Indexing:

  • Index concepts, not words (huh? I didn’t understand that.)
    • Can use English to search foreign language documents
    • Especially good for those times when country names change because any name will point you toward the current “correct” name. (He kept saying there are no “see also” references, but I think he means that this is all done for you behind the scenes.)

Search and terms:

  • New “Power Search” available, though the main search page also allows all the advanced search techniques, it just doesn’t lay them all out for you.
  • Direct quote…. “Power Search has lots of pop-ups to make your life easier.” What it means is that there are a lot of help features available, if you click on the right things. Some tell you how to do something and some help you build your queries by allowing you to click on terms that then get added to your search.
  • Index terms are hierarchically inclusive. Click on a higher level term and it will automatically search lower level terms.
  • Search box is natural language search (unless you do a segment search), so it automatically looks for other versions of the word (truncation) and synonyms, and you have to put quotation marks around phrases.
  • There are index terms for “editorials,” “engagements & weddings” and other kinds of newspaper pieces, so you can search these more easily.
  • There are many more date limiter options.

What you can search:

  • Academic now includes Company Dossiers, so you can find company codes and histories.
  • Newspapers are now grouped differently and with more nuance. You can search “All News” if you want (and if you get more than 3000 hits you can tell it to go ahead and retrieve the 3000 most relevant hits, which results to a relevance-ranked set).
  • Things like “All News” are “Group Files” because they search groups of newspapers. When you select a group file, you can look at the titles you’ll be searching, but you CANNOT click into those titles to see coverage dates or other information about the title. You have to go to their A to Z list. If, however, you choose an “Individual File” (i.e. a file that only has one newspaper in it), you can see all the bibliographic and holdings information. Individual File icons have one piece of paper and Group File icons have two… not easy to distinguish. This also means that if you want to find out which segments are available for searching, you have to find an individual file that’s of the same type (newspaper, transcript, etc) as the documents in your group file. Grrrr.

Search Results:

  • Allows faceting by many things, including language and source type.
  • Will suggest “Did you mean…” for searches. But these are not “smart” or based on the system knowing that there would be more or better results if you use the suggested term. It simply means that you have used a search term that is commonly confused with another search term, and it’ll ask if you meant that other term.
  • Can print, save, or email multiple documents at the same time.
  • No search alerts available.

Other Random Notes:

  • URL API isn’t working properly let. When it does, it will help with the task of Open URL linking. We can also create custom search forms and (possibly) result lists for people. But this is not and will not be something that our faculty or students could use on their own, so they won’t be able to find or create permanent URLs for Moodle or web pages.
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Final Thoughts on ACRL

Final Thoughts on ACRL

Published by Iris on Saturday, April 7th, 2007

Looking back at ACRL, random impressions flash through my mind, connected only by my vague impressions of how well or poorly they impacted my experience.

  • iPods – not cool: (Unless you win them from vendors, of course, but that never happens to me.) It seemed counter productive to have people going from session to session, or wandering through the exhibits, with ear buds stuck in their ears. I love my iPod, but when you’re at a conference I thought the idea was that we could randomly exchange thoughts on sessions while walking from place to place. Plugging in defeats this almost entirely.
  • Colds – not cool: If you’re sick, feverish, oozing anything from any orifice of your body, hacking up a lung, or wheezing, don’t sit next to me and don’t take over half my seat. Absolutely do NOT then decide to lean over and read the notes I’m taking, even though it’s strange and interesting to see us crazy young-uns taking notes on laptops.
  • Free wireless – very cool: The coolness of free wireless needs no explanation. And the signal was always strong, and all of us bandwidth hoggers didn’t clog the system. Very cool.
  • Clickers – awesome: I’d never used a clicker before the session on federated search. In fact, I had always thought of them as kind of silly gimmicks. But I’m changing my tune. They’re FUN, and they really did get us involved in the content of the presentation.
  • Misunderestimitating food – not cool: Sitting for an hour while everyone else eats isn’t fun, especially when you’re going to a ticketed event. Shouldn’t they have known how many tickets they sold?
  • Aquarium reception – cool: What’s better than colorful fish, information desks turned into bars, and lots of librarians with whom to shoot the breeze?
  • Poster session mosh pits – not cool: I went to the first poster session, couldn’t move, couldn’t get in or out without elbowing people, and never went back. I know I missed a bunch or really amazing posters, and I even missed posters presented by people I knew. I just couldn’t make myself go back.
  • Vendor post cards – not cool: I’ve already written about this. Now it’s starting again for CIL. Grrr.
  • Injured cheer leaders – not cool: I saw too many young girls carried away or pushed around in wheel chairs, tears streaming down their cheeks. Every time I heard sirens I shuddered to think what had happened to another girl downstairs.

I have a bunch of notes from sessions, but what I don’t have is jottings down of the little things. Things like the confused sparrows. Things that I now wish I could remember better (and it’s only been a week!). So next time I travel, I’ll try to do better at taking notes on those fleeting moments.

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5 Library Heroes

Published by Iris on Friday, April 6th, 2007

I’ve been of several minds about posting this. I read a ton of amazing blogs by people I respect and admire. I know my aggregator’s feed count doesn’t compare with a lot of other people’s, but it’s more than enough to keep me busy, most days, and if you’re in my aggregator, you’re definitely one of my heroes. I’m pretty ruthless about weeding out feeds that I don’t actively look forward to viewing every morning before breakfast, every day when I get the chance, every evening after dinner, and every weekend. So my five blogs list is more about personal connections than about professional value (which is not to say that these have no professional value, of course).

So here they are in what I’d call chronological order:

  • Meredith Farkas: I met her by accident at CIL 2006 when we were both part of a group that famously defected from a dine around without realizing that this might cause our dine around host some difficulties with the restaurant. I had no idea who she was, but people were talking about her blog the same way my fellow English majors talked about Shakespeare. So when I got back to my hotel that night I Googled her, read most of her blog all in one sitting (yes, I was up very late), and decided to figure out this “aggregator” thing I’d heard people talk about so that I could keep up with her. And she’s continued to impress me with her thoughtfulness, genuineness, and kindness.
  • Walt Crawford: I’d been blogging for about a month when he popped into my comments and said really nice things. (I’m a sucker for people saying really nice things to me.) Then mid way through this year of blogging, he did the same thing when I was having blogging doubts. He’s even mentioned me a couple of times in C&I, putting my name right next to the names of other bloggers I respect no end! And you’ve gotta love a guy who takes both the content and the look of the printed word so seriously.
  • Steve Lawson: I’d been reading his blog for a few months when all of a sudden he popped on IM one day to relieve my workplace isolation (all my co-workers were at ALA). Good thing he couldn’t see as I tried to collect myself off the floor and reacquaint my jaw with the rest of my scull! It was my first total fan-girl experience. And the rest is history, as they say. I’m constantly learning how to blog by reading what he writes. He’s got the tone and voice that I aspire to. And beyond that, he’s just a good friend to me.
  • And speaking of friends, Mark Linder has become quite a good one. And he’s almost always online, so when I’m frustrated or lonely or bursting with news that I just need to tell someone, he’s the one I bug.
  • Dorothea Salo: I’m not an IR person, or a systems person, or anything like that. (We all know how much trouble I have grasping basic HTML and CSS. Evidence of ignorance.) But Dorothea’s authorial voice keeps me coming back for more, no matter the content. I’m equally happy listening to her talk about the weather or about mysterious tech-ish script-ish things that I don’t understand at all.

So that’s five, though there are about 10 times that many that I could have included. And I promise not to get this sappy on all of you again (at least, not any time soon). If you don’t like it, blame Walt for getting us all started. :P

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