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Category: Tools and Technology

Libraries and Social Software

Published by Iris on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

Four colleagues (from three schools) and I will be presenting on Thursday on the topic of social software, what role the library can play, what networking tools the library can infiltrate -er- participate in effectively, and who is responsible for teaching (and learning) these tools.

This is my first experience collaborating on a presentation with people from more than one school, and it’s quite a challenge. How do you do all those little negotiations, so dependent on voice and body language, to figure out who wants to present what, what our shared goals are, and how to present our topics effectively? How do you put together an outline, divvy up jobs, and ultimately get this thing done without ever meeting in person?

These challenges pretty much prevented us from planning much until today. And yes, the presentation is on Thursday, but such is life. Honestly, none of our schedules meshed very well until today, but even so I think we could have stepped up a little sooner if we’d been working in the same building.

But a couple of weeks ago we did manage to get a wiki going, and as is par for the course, it’s developed kind of a life of it’s own. It has the standard stuff: the speaking outline and notes about our ideas there. But we’re also going to use one page (currently called “Our Presentation“) in place of a PowerPoint or other projected presentation guide. It’ll include a rough sketch of our outline plus all the links we need for our live demonstrations (pray for happy internet gods that day!). We’ll also have our handout up there so attendees can go back and find it later, should they ever want to. They’ll also be able to see the wizard behind the curtain, since they’ll have access to all our brainstorming and speaking notes… but I hope that’s a good thing.

It wouldn’t have been practical for us to put everything together without actually talking to each other and performing all the little negotiations that are necessary, though. It would have been to slow. So today we spent some time in conference chats with each other and then even more time actually talking to each other on a conference call. We all talked, and I took notes into the wiki, which worked out rather nicely.

Now I just hope the presentation itself goes smoothly…

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Wish Me Luck: Tackling One of the Least User Friendly Databases We Have

Published by Iris on Thursday, February 15th, 2007

Tomorrow I have to teach a WilsonWeb database for the first time. I’ve recommended databases we get through Wilson to students but never had to concentrate on one before.

It’s just a simple class… 8 students, two databases, simple assignment. We’ll be meeting in the reference area and working on our big SmartBoard together, and then we’ll move to individual computers in the reference area. Even so, I’m feeling the need to dig into WilsonWeb tutorials (which, by the way, if you click “help” and then “tutorial” when you’re in a database, it asks you if you’re using a Bibliographic Database, Full Text Database, Biography Database, Image Database, Standard Catalog Collection Development Database, Multiple Databases, or a Facts Database… What the… Even I had to back out, go figure out what kind of database I was in, and then come back before being able to access the stupid tutorial! Shouldn’t “help” know what kind of database I’m in?!? Yeesh.)

So, to help me should I ever have to teach this stuff again, here are the more-or-less helpful things I’ve found so far.

Maybe one of these will explain why I can never navigate these databases without hurting my brain, why when you think you’re opening a single citation you’re actually just switching to the “full” display of the result list, and why the thesaurus is so clunky to navigate. And it’s a good thing we’re not working on a full text database. The HTML full text option from those is incredibly bad. All formatting in those full text articles appears as multiple question marks.

Don’t get me wrong. The interface is better than it was last year. But still… (Oh, and the page that announced the enhancements listed in the link above included the URL as text, not a link. Seriously.)

Sorry… I’m more than usually grumpy at the moment. It just seems like the vendor of our library-related databases should be more usable. As it is, it’s a sad irony.

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Feeding the Free Web

Published by Iris on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

As more and more rich, wonderful, authoritative sources go up on the free web, the trick becomes finding it, organizing it, and making it available. And I’m sorry, but I’m not going to bug our catalogers every time I run across a great site online, no matter how accommodating they are whenever I’ve decided to go that route. But handing them anywhere from 5 to 50 links per week would be a prohibitive pain in the neck, even if formal classification in the catalog would provide the best access, or even if we could be sure that the URLs would be stable. I just wouldn’t do it. I’d spend more time than I have to spare agonizing over whether or not it was “worth it” for each site, and in the end they’d just pile up and become one of the looming projects that I always know I should be getting to but never seem to actually do.

So I’ve been trying to keep track of these things in my del.icio.us library, and now that I’ve got a mini curricular and professional library building up, I’ve started feeding the annotated links to web pages attached to my research guides.

So far I only have two up and running. One is on my subject guide for Art and Art History here, which encourages students to see recent items here, or just play around on my del.icio.us library for themselves.

It’s not a perfect solution, and I’m still having trouble standardizing my tagging practices… And I’m not sure if students will ever actually USE the links. But in my imaginary world they’ve all (even the pre-majors) flocked to the newly updated pages and are gazing in wonder at the amazing-ness that is an RSS-fed page of annotated links.

Hey, a girl can dream.

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WorldCat Even Slicker

Published by Iris on Thursday, February 1st, 2007

I just got an email from WorldCat saying that I could update my blog widget (see the bottom of my sidebar) so that it’s no longer a bright blue on my tan-ish/yellow-ish background. But the really cool part is what’s included in the rest of the email:

  • Automatic geographic location by IP address
    WorldCat.org library results for a particular item now determine the geographic location for a user based on IP address, even when the user has never before entered a postal code.


  • Users can expand faceted browse results
    The faceted browse feature of WorldCat.org search results now allows a user to expand the abbreviated results within each facet via a “Show More” link. Faceted browse allows a user to dynamically filter search results by categories, or facets, using the left-hand Refine Your Search panel, helping users narrow a large result set. Each facet in its initial state displays only the five most relevant results. The “Show More” link lets the user incrementally reveal 25 additional results at a time, up to 100 results within the facet.
  • More visibility for evaluative content and Web resource links
    Individual item records reached from WorldCat.org search results now include links to supplemental Web content at the record level. Previously displayed beneath the “Details” tab, these links can include publisher-provided item descriptions, author biographies and Web sites, tables of contents and content excerpts.

    Additional links may be provided with the heading “Web Resources,” which may give a user access to content related to the displayed item. If the displayed item is a digital object—such as an electronic book, or a digitally preserved photo, document or artifact—the link may provide direct viewing or retrieval of the object.

They’ve also added a Chinese language interface, and made it so that you can embed a keyword, subject, title, or author. That url will then lead to a result list as if you’d done a keyword search or a search on those common indices. A tutorial on that is here.

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