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From the “to blog” folder
By Meredith Farkas | July 22, 2007
When I find a post or article interesting and think I might want to comment on it, it goes into the “to blog” folder. That folder is getting pretty darn full, and I think it’s time I accept that I’m not going to blog all of these things and maybe should just point to some of them:
- Discord Over Dewey – a Wall Street Journal article that avoids lame stereotypes and presents a very balanced look at the Maricopa County Public Library’s experiment with replacing Dewey classification with “plain-English subjects.” Lots of librarians you might recognized are quoted. All in all, a rather good article.
On a personal note, I don’t have really strong opinions about the library’s decision to get rid of Dewey. I applaud the fact that they made changes based on user survey data. I think it’s great that they are trying something that hasn’t been done before. I don’t know if it will make things better or worse in terms of patrons being able to find what they’re looking for. I suspect it will be a little bit of both. I wonder if the burden on staff will increase. I know it wouldn’t be a good solution at every library and I don’t see it as being quite so innovative as some have said. I’m definitely curious to hear about how it’s gone after a year and I wish them well.
- Vu Find – I saw something about Vu Find on Roy Tennant’s blog, played with it for a few minutes thought “that’s cool” and then went back to the zillion other things in my aggregator. That might have been it if Winona Salesky of UVM (we presented together at a Vermont Library Association meeting on Friday) hadn’t spoken about it as well in her presentation and mentioned that it was designed to go on top of Voyager catalogs (which is what we have at Norwich), much like the Endeca interface goes over NCSU’s OPAC. I looked over at our Head of Technical Services and our brand-new Electronic Resource Librarian and am pretty sure that they were thinking the same thing I was.
Here’s the description from the website.
VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library’s resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:
* Catalog Records
* Locally Cached Journals
* Digital Library Items
* Institutional Repository
* Institutional Bibliography
* Other Library Collections and ResourcesVuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of the components. And since it’s open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings.
It’s definitely a project I’ll be following!
- Librarian 2.0 – Interviews on the future of librarians – Like many, I completely forgot that I had done this interview for Degree Tutor until someone pointed to it last week. I am only one of almost 30 librarians who were interviewed for this series (most of whom will be familiar names to you). It’s really interesting to read people’s thoughts on libraries, librarians, the future of libraries and their own work.
- When To Use a Wiki? – This great post from Online Community Report discusses some conditions under which a wiki is a good tool to use. A lot of this echoes the advice I’ve given in the past regarding wikis, but these tips can’t be stressed enough. A wiki isn’t the right tool for every collaborative job and it definitely needs to be presented to people in the right way.
- STEP ONE: STOP CALLING THEM DATABASES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! – Amy Kearns really wants us to stop calling our online library resources databases. I heartily agree, but am not entirely sure what a good alternative would be. When I redesigned our website last year, I called them Online Library Resources (and further broke them down into ebooks, articles and reference works), but I think even that is insufficient to explain what they really are. To me, “databases” are the tip of the library terminology iceberg. In our periodicals section, I recently noticed a sign that says “Periodicals Do Not Circulate.” Now, what part of that sentence would the average Freshman understand? How about “do” and “not”. I think we could be doing better with terminology in a lot of areas and we really need to go into our facilities and systems thinking like someone who has never visited a library before.
Topics: Wikis, free the information!, librarianship, libraries, our digital future | 8 Comments »
July 23rd, 2007 at 4:57 am
Hi Meredith,
Great idea to just get it all out there, I often find myself ditching good ideas because they’ve gone past their sell-by-date and news/tech has moved on. So I’ve taken your cue and done the same on my blog, with a couple of links going your way. Thanks for the inspiration!
Oh and if you enjoyed the “when to use a wiki” post, you might find this image helpful, I know I have: http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/images/2007/07/21/usingwikisforlearningcommunities_3.gif
All the best,
James
July 23rd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Hmmm… I have pondered the databases question myself… I tried to think of what we call them in the library. Books and journals. But “online books” sounds odd to me, maybe because it seems like a book loses some of its bookiness when it’s encased in ones and zeroes instead of paper and twine. But I’m o.k. with “online journals” or “web-accessible journals”, maybe because with a scholarly journal it is the content that matters, more so than the format.
Web-accessible is always pleasant — patrons seem to like knowing that they can actually get the entire work on the computer (rather than just a citation). But, then, that still leaves us in a sticky spot when referring to those-utilities-formerly-known-as-databases, because they aren’t always full-text. So “web-accessible journals” is out.
Then again, maybe we can lose the “online” and “web” and “Internet” stuff altogether — patrons ostensibly already know they’re online when they are using it. What about something like “Resource Search” or “Journal Finding Tool” or “Choose a Giant Money-Hungry Publisher’s Website in which to Search for Articles and Other Resources”?
But, yes — “databases” needs to go as a term, not least because, well, they aren’t databases, they’re database-driven web sites.
July 23rd, 2007 at 5:57 pm
What about “journal search engines” or “resource search engines”? That does, I think, describe what they are pretty accurately, and even uses up-to-date terminology.
Maybe we should just call them “Fred.”
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Fred, I like that.
Some good ideas there, Heather. I think that there are definitely better options than “databases” but no matter what we do, I think there will be confusion on the part of some of our patrons.
July 25th, 2007 at 12:26 am
I rather dislike having a ‘databases’ link on our homepage myself (though not as much as I dislike the term ‘serials’). One problem is in both cases that for obvious solutions (eg ‘finding an article’ and ‘journals’ respectively) the law librarians point out that it’s not just journals and not just articles: they’ve got case laws and, um, I forget, but lots of other stuff that intimidated me. Which is a nuisance, because ‘databases’ and ‘serials’ intimidate our users.
Going over to the Library Garden to comment more there…
July 25th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Well, we will have to agree to disagree about whether the post-Dewey approach at the Perry Branch is innovative. The part I consider most innovative about it is that they started backwards from the user, surveying people, then asking what works and how can we adopt this? Think of how much in LibraryLand is done by voodoo science… In the focus on Dewey/not-Dewey, the novelty of the *approach* has been lost.
I’m also disappointed how little attention has been paid to the other deDeweyfication project I wrote about (see my ALA Techsource column): using BISAC headings in the OPAC at Phoenix Public Library.
But opinions make horse races, or something like that
July 25th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Hey Karen, I just read your ALA TechSource post yesterday (excellent, BTW) and I was surprised that I hadn’t heard anything about the project at the Phoenix PL until then. I guess it’s like most things; one example will get tons of media attention while another (that is perhaps less “sexy” or something) similar project gets very little attention. Then again, I talked about the Maricopa County PL Dewey thing at a Vermont Library Association mini-conference on Friday and most people hadn’t heard anything about that either.
I think what they did (“starting backwards from the user”) isn’t particularly innovative because it’s what we all SHOULD do (and some already do). I think it’s great. I think it’s smart. I think more libraries should make decisions that way. But innovative? I guess it’s probably more a difference in how we define the term than any difference in the way we see the project.
July 25th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Yes, how we define innovation is key… I see it distinct from invention, in many cases better than invention. Approaches and processes can be innovative, too. Just because we should put a wheel on a cart and use it to move firewood does not mean that the first person to do that is not being innovative. Maybe I simply see outcomes as essential to innovation. To talk about something new (and in some areas of librarianship, to talk and talk and talk about it) is one thing; to do it, another.
I think it’s not as easy for people to grasp the Phoenix project, but it’s significant that Phoenix is doing the same exploratory work *in parallel* and with similar conclusions.