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May 30 Another way into the catalogMichael Lee at Tame the Web provides a link to a new project from Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. The folks at the Jacobs University Library have implemented a widget which you can use to search their catalog. The widget can be used in a variety of portals such as iGoogle (my current favorite), Netvibes and Windows Live.
I use iGoogle for my home page, but I don't spend much time there. This widget surprised me, but it's a good example of the principle that a library should be everywhere -- or at least everywhere the users are.
The widget is designed to be portable and the team (person?) is working on porting the widget to other libraries and other catalogs. It's good to be surprised by how fast libraries are changing. May 29 Searching for direction, part 3The director of the local library is retiring, and the search is on for a new director. The trustees have been asked to think about what questions they should ask candidates, and I'd like to play as well. Here are my not completely serious ideas for questions for the candidates, part 3.
My first question is rhetorical, more or less: Why is a library like a supermarket?
It might be easier to ask, how is a library different than a supermarket? Well, supermarkets sell things, and libraries don't. Libraries are at once the foundation and the keystone of civilization, and supermarkets are just stores. Having said that, what else? Perhaps not much.
Supermarkets don't make much money on each individual item, but as the old joke goes, they make it up in volume. It matters a lot if the people who live about halfway between two supermarkets stop going to one and start going to the other. A supermarket can compete on price, but not too much. It also has to compete on how easy it is to find items, how long the lines at the checkout are, whether the lighting and the temperature are comfortable, and whether the staff are friendly and helpful. It has to be easy to shop there. If it's not, you might continue to shop there, but you'll be looking for alternatives.
Libraries are part of the attention economy, and they're also measured on volume. People will choose to spend time composing opera, building sundials or reading books. Each minute spent on opera or sundials is a minute not available for books. You can try to make the argument that books are somehow "better" than watching wrestling on TV, but that won't make much headway with the opera buffs and sundial fanciers, and it won't work with the wrestling fans either. So my next question for library director candidates is, How are you going to make library services more popular?
There are all sorts of ways that libraries can make themselves more attractive to people, but the first hurdle is to acknowledge that making the library more attractive is a good and worthwhile thing to do. There are a few ways of looking at this. One way is a focus on customer service: when a patron needs help, is it provided quickly and effectively? Alternatively, is the library an open and friendly community space (a phrase I stole from Brian Herzog)?
I think it starts when a patron walks in the door. Mark Hurst of Good Experience has some good thoughts about website usability. This applies to a library's web site, but it's also applicable to any of the tasks that a library patron performs in the course of using the library. I discussed signs in a previous entry: can someone get from the front door to books about Indian cooking without help?
So my final question for this post is, What will you do to make using the library a great experience? May 28 Nice Library web sitesHere's a library system front page that really blew me away: Washington County in Hillsboro, Oregon.
It's clean and easy to use. Everything is right there one the page, one click away. But the thing that impressed me the most was the two categories, "Lending Library" and "Library Services". It makes it clear that the library is about more than just lending, but it's clear what link to follow if lending is what you want. And they're good examples of Library Terms that Users Understand. May 27 Searching for direction, part 2The director of the local library is retiring, and the search is on for a new director. The trustees have been asked to think about what questions they should ask candidates, and I'd like to play as well. Here are my not completely serious ideas for questions for the candidates, part 2. I'll get to questions eventually, but first I want to set the stage. The technical name for the way you find a book seems to be "discovery application", which is at least an improvement over anything with the word 'catalog' in it. The UPenn Library has an "ILS and Discovery Systems" wiki with a page of example applications. The wiki itself is a project of the Digital Library Federation. Already we can see the shadow of a confusion: are we looking at digital search or digital materials? Well, yes. North Carolina State has a discovery application with the nice feature that it will search for both physical books or electronic books. I've looked at a few university libraries and this is becoming more common, or perhaps universal. NCSU also has the nice feature, which I mentally associate with Amazon.com, that you can refine your search using terms listed automatically on the left hand side. Amazon lets you choose between books, music and movies, for example, but at NCSU you can choose more esoteric categories. You can look for ebooks in Latin! The local library is a member of a library network and it also has access to many onlines resources, so the the answer to "where is such and such a book?" can be quite complicated:
Patrons at the local library can get digital books using a Boston Public Library ecard, and they can get access to pages from ebooks in "databases" from Infotrac or Thomson Gale, but they have to search each of these sources separately, in addition to separate searches within the library network and the virtual catalog. And if you're looking for information on, say, Australia, it doesn't make a lot of sense to be asked to choose which "database" you want to search. The aswer is pretty obvious: you want the databases that have information about Australia! Within the computer industry, this sort of thing is pejoratively referred to as "information silos" where different information sources are treated as separate kingdoms, but it's not really a technical problem. It would be straightforward (but not free!) to develop a discovery application that would search all these sources and return integrated results to the user. The real problem is political: it needs someone, or several someones, to drive this forward. The new library director will inherit all these existing relationships. So my question is: What are you going to do about improving user access to these multiple catalogs and sources of information? And because this is a political problem, I'd want to see some evidence of negotiating skills, of pushing political problems forward. Since I have a background in computer software, I tend to put a high priority on issues related to software and the Internet, but I have no particular background in libraries, and there's no reason to believe that everyone shares my priorities. I'd also want to ask candidates: What priority do you assign to improving computer and cell phone access to online information resources, and why? I don't think the exact answer is important, as long as it shows a real commitment to managing rapid change in the library environment. May 21 Think globally, act locallyI'd like to read Iain Banks's latest novel, Matter. Our local library has a copy, but it's out. Why can't I wait for THAT copy to be returned?
There are copies available at other libraries in the network, and I could request one of those, but that would mean someone would have to put a copy on a truck and use time and gas to get it to my library. I love inter-library loan, but it's not free. I live within walking distance of my local library -- one of the reasons we bought this condo in the first place -- and I want THAT copy! May 19 Searching for direction, part 1The director of the local library is retiring, and the search is on for a new director. The trustees have been asked to think about what questions they should ask candidates, and I'd like to play as well. Here are my not completely serious ideas for questions for the candidates, part 1. As part of this game, I reviewed many job descriptions for library directors, and I was depressed by how conservative they were. This was expressed in one of two ways: either "Don't rock the boat"; or avoid "change for change's sake". Well, I'm in favor of change for change's sake -- I call it an experiment. How could you not learn something? This doesn't mean that a library has to be using this year's technology. But I don't think a library can afford to fall further behind each year, either. A library whose services are based on, say, two-year-old technology has to be adopting new technology at the same rate that it's being introduced, or in a year or two it will find itself running three-year-old technology. I think the most important quality that the new director is going to need is the ability to accommodate rapid change. Bruce Sterling put this in a clear and clever way (paraphrasing): 2013 will be as different from 2008 as 2008 is from 2003. So my first question is: What does this mean for public libraries? My answer is that it's going to mean delivering services in different ways to different populations, and specifically in new ways to younger patrons. By the time the next director retires, the library will be providing services no one has thought of yet. The new director is going to have to get his or her head around current services quickly. The following questions aren't meant to be used during an interview literally, but it's important that candidates be aware of the possibilities: Name three ways in which you can access
Google using a cell phone. Name five ways in which you could access
library services using a cell phone. What would you do?. The answers for Google are voice (1-800-GOOG-411), text message (to GOOGLE) and from a web browser. The answers for a library are voice (by calling a librarian!), text message, web browser, IM and email. Coming along with the need for change is a responsibility to support two different populations: people who for one reason or another aren't keeping up with changes in technology, and people with no or limited access to technology (phones and computers). Although I think a library has to keep up with technological change, patrons aren't going to. That means the distance between the most-up-to-date library service and the least-up-to-date patron (a phrase I'm allowed to use since I joined the AARP) is going to increase. It's not enough to continue existing services to existing patrons -- in the area of information services, the library has a responsibility to educate. My next question is: Explain what you would do to help legacy clientele access library services via phone. Finally, what about people who simply don't have access to a computer or phone: What have you done to bridge the digital divide?
(End of part 1) May 16 Books in piecesDailyLit is a new service that will send you a book by email, a piece at a time. They say this is for people who spend more time reading email than they would reading a book, but I think it's also a great idea for reading on a smaller device, like a phone or Bl*ckb*rry.
Now they've branched out and will send you a daily email from Wikipedia articles on a particular topic, such as wine or Oscar winners. I think this is a great idea and I think our library should do something like this. They could, for example, do a series on the history of the city.
I get a daily email from Spanish word a day, too. I probably spend as much time reading actual books as I do reading on a computer or similar, but there's a clear trend to more of the latter. This is something that the library will have to figure out sooner or later, preferably sooner. May 14 Another university library tagging serviceThe University of Pennsylvania also has a tagging service.
Without an account, I can't delve into it too deeply, but it seems similar to the UMich service. Good stuff!
And as Arlo Guthrie might say, if three libraries do it, they may think it's an organization ... and if fifty libraries do it, they may think it's a movement.
Forty eight libraries to go! May 04 MtaggingI may be a few minutes late arriving in the twenty-first century, but I think this is extraordinary. I've never seen anything like it. The University of Michigan library has implemented a system allowing their patrons to tag any web page they like. This really breaks out of the catalog/database paradigm for a library web site and creates an information service. The best thing about it is that it's up and running, so that people can try it out, play with it and use it in different ways. And the library can learn from it and tune it to accommodate the ways that people use it. As long as you have a blog somewhere, you can create a web page for the express purpose of tagging it. (By "you", I mean "you lucky people at UMich who have access to the system".) Each tag has an RSS feed -- populated by each item that's given the tag. This means that the system is a way for writers (who add tags) to publish information to readers (who read the RSS feed). Anybody within the UMich community can publish anything to the cloud. One obvious use for the system is for classes to organize their reading material. You can see that this has already started in the School of Information: there are tags for SI 500, SI 501 and so on, as well as "si core curriculum" and "si foundation". But anybody at UMich can use it to organize anything. Campus organizations can use it organize their online resources. Events can be announced using an 'events' tag. Keggers could be organized using 'keggers'. You could organize a dating service using 'dating' (or more probably, 'hook up'). Students could tag their facebook pages -- students could tag each other's pages! You could use it as a rating service. One person has already tagged Bert's Cafe with 'yum', but you could also use 'poor', 'fair', 'good' and 'excellent'. The system seems to count tags, so you could see the same data as an Amazon-style ratings graph. You could use it for voting (on anything). I said this is extraordinary, and it's wonderful that the UMich library went ahead and did it, but I can see things I would have done differently. The present system has three different kinds of things: collections, tagged pages, and users. You can search for tags, and you can search for users, but you can't search for both simultaneously. In a tagging system, it makes sense to make everything a tag, including collections and users. The interface has a nice way of selecting or de-selecting collections just by clicking, but to search on multiple tags you have to type them into a search box. Del.icio.us, for example, lets you add and delete tags from a filter by clicking, although the interface is a little clunky. The system raises some interesting questions ... At the moment, integration between the library catalog (Mirlyn) and mtagging is one directional: you can tag catalog pages, but you can't search the catalog with both tags and catalog attributes (like author, title or subject). When you're logged in to the catalog, you can store catalog entries on 'My Shelf' within your account. Can you put tagged items on 'My Shelf'? (Not havaing a UMich account, I can't check for myself.) If you're looking at a web page, should there be a mechanism for showing what tags it has? (Again, I'm assuming you're running inside the UMich hive.) This would be particularly "interesting" for facebook pages, as well as the faculty directory at UMich. Are the library staff going to clean tags? For example, there's a tag for 'Resources on Korean Studies at UM', where 'Korean Studies' might be better. (In fairness, if you search for Korean, you'll get a link to the longer tag.) Similarly, there are tags for 'paper textbook' and 'online textbook' which feel like they should be three separate tags. What if the cloud becomes polluted? Do tags age? Even if tags aren't removed from the cloud, what seems important to students this year will be ancient history in four years, so perhaps the way the cloud is displayed should take that into account. Should the system include private tagging? There's a tag for 'ask_a_librarian' which takes you to the page where you can ask a librarian, but that seems very roundabout to me. If you could add a tag which only the reference desk could see, you could send any web page (including catalog pages) to the reference desk and ask your question in the tag comment. The right way to do this isn't to restrict private tags to librarians, but controlling private tagging within a public resource feels like a hard problem. Is there an API so those students can build new applications on top of the engine? Is there an RSS to texting bridge so that students can get a feed on their cell phone (important for organizing keggers). The internet has become an information stream as well as a place. |
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