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July 24 Readercon 19Last weekend, I went to Readercon 19, a Science Fiction and Fanstasy convention at the Burlington Marriott, outside Boston, MA.
Here is my conference report and book list.
Which goes a little way towards explaining why things have been a little quiet around here. July 07 Showing resultsWhen a library patron searches the catalog, how should the results be displayed? Over at Juice Analytics, Zach Gemignani has a great post about displaying query results. He comes from a different starting point, but his examples are quite applicable to discovery applications:
He compares Travelocity to Kayak (another travel site), and Omniture SiteCatalyst to Google Analytics, including some very telling screen shots. I strongly recommend Kayak, by the way, partly on the strength of its search interface.
The one thing that struck me very strongly was that comparing the 'winners' (Kayak and Google) to the 'losers' (Travelocity and SiteCatalyst), the winners devote half or more of the screen to helping the user change the query they started with, in a single click. Less than half the screen is used to display the query results. July 03 Nice library web sitesThe American Library Association have just finished their annual conference, and many people have posted information about particular sessions. Anne Heidemann of the Public Library Association posted on the PACs in the Library 2.0 World session, and the following caught my eye:
quoting Ross MacLachlan from the Phoenix Public Library on their experience after implementing Endeca. This certainly sounded like a candidate for "nice library web sites", so I went and took a look at their catalog. I haven't provided a link to their catalog since you can search for books right from the front page, like you should.
Before I say too much about Phoenix, in case anyone from Massachusetts is still reading this blog, I'm aware that the Phoenix Public Library is a system for the entire city of Phoenix, and they probably have more money than several handfuls of Massachusetts libraries put together.
On the Phoenix web site, searching has a couple of features I really like. Search terms are automatically spelling-corrected. Search results include both books and electronic documents, and you can access the electronic documents directly from the search results page. The results include books that the library doesn't have, making it easy to request them, although it doesn't appear to include books that don't exist, or for that matter books that DO exist that are inexplicably missing from the LoC catalog.
The web site includes something that's definitely going on my Christmas list: permanent sharable book lists, just like on WorldCat.
The interface is available in both English and Spanish, although it looks like when you switch the interface to Spanish, the search is limited to books in Spanish, which is odd, yes?
The search results don't display availability in the way I'd like, with the number of copies and holds. In fact, the results don't distinguish between books that are out and books the library doesn't have at all - both are flagged in an attractive maroon color. So the Phoenix system is nice but not my ideal.
At the same time, I noticed that the North Plains Public Library (in North Plains, OR) appeared in this blog's logs, so I went and looked at their site. They have a very simple site organized around a Wordpress blog with some static pages. But simple is good! The site is very friendly and easy to navigate, and events at the library are immediately obvious.
NPPL is part of the Washington County library system, which I commented on a short while ago (presumably how they ended up in my logs). Because I'm nosey, I took a look at their catalog, which happens to be Polaris PowerPAC. It's not very pretty (although my opinions on matters aethetic aren't worth the pixels to display them) but otherwise there's a lot to like.
The search results put the number of copies of each book and their availability right in the results list. It doesn't tell you which copies are where, but there's a link to click on which will give you that information, and when each copy is due back, as well. Who knew that was something you were allowed to see?
It does appear to have the weaker sort of book list -- one that only lasts for the browser session -- but it's possible that you'd get the permanent sort if you were a logged-in patron and not a snoopy visitor like me.
And the interface works in either English or Spanish, searching materials in either language.
You have a good 4th of July. It's time for me to start on my Christmas list. July 01 How clean is your dataWelcome to July! Nancy Kress published a new book today, Dogs, which you can get from Amazon.
The book has a Worldcat entry, which is just as well, since otherwise I couldn't add it to the rapidly expanding list of science fiction books I want to read. Unfortunately, the entry doesn't include the author, which is going to make it hard to find for Kress's fans.
And the Library of Congress catalog doesn't have an entry at all, at least not one I could find.
How clean is your data? |
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