Category: Tools and Technology

Catalogs that are Both Useful and Fun

Published by Iris on Saturday, April 21st, 2007

[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. :)

technorati tags: cil2007

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Blogging about Conference Blogging

Published by Iris on Thursday, April 19th, 2007

I’m so bad at napping that I nearly always give up the struggle, even when I’m completely exhausted. So here I am blogging rather than napping. And speaking of blogging, I was sitting there at Steven Cohen’s presentation (or rather, on the stairs outside of the overflowing overflow room), taking notes and using my wireless connection to show people around me the stuff Steven was showing but that none of us could see (thank goodness for Google). Oh, and it was a good set of tools, even if Fleck does kick CiteBite’s butt, no matter what Steven says. :-P

In fact, it was probably the intimacy of sitting on the floor together, hovering over a couple of laptop monitors, and getting all jazzed up over fun technology that led one of the other women near me to come up afterwards and ask how I manage to blog sessions. She said she’d seen me typing away at an earlier session, and she sounded more than a little skeptical that anyone could possibly type and listen all at the same time. So I showed her my raw notes (especially URLs for slides or other interesting sites), how I highlight in bold any portion of those notes that I think will make good inclusions in a blog post, and how I add parenthetical comments to remind me what questions or ideas the sessions sparked. Then I showed her how I take the notes and create posts around them whenever I get a minute (and some working wireless, which got pretty rare as the conference progressed).

“But you’re still typing,” she protested, “which seems like it’d make it harder for you to listen to what’s being said.” Thinking back, I only gave her one third of the whole answer to that issue. I explained that I can type a lot faster than I can write long-hand, so I actually hear more of the session than I would if I were writing on paper. But I didn’t explain that typing with an eye to synthesizing for a blog post helps me stay on task when I’m listening to presentations (as Nichole just blogged… it’s another inadvertent-blog-topic-convergence day). It forces me to look for the themes and primary points in the presentations. I don’t end up blogging every session, but I do end up taking blog-ready notes for almost every session.

And of course there’s the final third of the puzzle. When presenters end up explaining something I already understand, I can compose the actual blog posts while I keep an ear out for when the presentation moves on to topics or perspectives that are newer to me. The fact that I only posted a couple of times a day during this conference speaks to the general lack of such down-times for me, which is a good thing. But it did happen occasionally.

In the end, the skeptical woman walked away looking relieved that I wasn’t wasting my conference registration fee (or hotel costs, which was significantly more expensive). Maybe next year she’ll have a blogger banner on her name tag. :)

technorati tags: cil2007

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Keynoting in Multimedia

Published by Iris on Monday, April 16th, 2007

To get us off on the right foot here at CIL, Lee Rainie reminded us over and over, via numbers, YouTube videos, graphs, and screenshots, why we should care about Web 2.0. Before I launch into it, though, I was told to say this: “All you bloggers out there, please note, I adore librarians” (yes, that’s a direct quote from Lee Rainie). So there you have it.

Also, I love rooms where they set up the rows of chairs with room for real human to walk between the rows. You can even walk past the inevitable isle-sitters without sitting on their laps!

Anyway, Rainie gave a good basic overview of Web 2.0 (participatory… data-driven…long tail…all that), laid out the 6 hallmarks of Web 2.0 that matter to libraries, and laid out the 5 challenges of this technology for us and our communities. I can give you a list of all 6 hallmarks and 5 challenges, if you want it.

But I was struck by a couple of statements about how young people are simultaneously savvy and un-savvy about their online presences. Here’s what I mean. Rainie said that “most” students in their survey seemed to be more savvy about what they share on their facebook and myspace page profiles that has previously been thought. They often shift what they share depending on whether or not they’ve opened up their profiles to the world or have restricted access to friends only, for example, and they don’t share as much publicly as they used to. On the other hand, they still don’t get it that blogging is highly public, and so they feel invaded if parents, teachers, or prospective employers look at their blogs. Why this disconnect, I wonder? Is it because there’s something inherently artificial about a profile? Is it because privacy options are more and more often placed front and center in profile-creation pages?

The Pew Internet and American Life survey also found the primary cohorts of Wikipedia users: highly educated people. This group was closely followed by college students, and then by younger users. So it’s the people most able to read skeptically that are on there the most (which is good) followed by the people who are still struggling to read skeptically. I don’t have much to say about that, but it’s interesting. (They also found that users are likely to try to verify what they find on Wikipedia by doing more searches online, and if they’re still unsure they tap their social networks for help. I want to be in THAT social network!)

Oh, and newsflash: people with wireless or other always-on internet connections spend more time online. Take that and chew on it. :)

(Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t tend to blog raw notes. I’m not very good at taking notes that way. But I do take a lot of raw notes, which I’m happy to translate for you if you want them, so just ask.)

technorati tags: cil2007

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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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