I’m sure anyone working in an academic library has already heard that the JSTOR interface was changing this summer. Well, how nice that they wait to finally make the change live the week that students are coming back to most schools. One of our librarians attended a webinar on the new interface and reported about it to the rest of the staff so we were pretty prepared for what was coming in terms of the interface change. But the thing that’s a really big deal is that JSTOR is now going to display everything in their collection by default. That probably doesn’t matter to a large University that subscribes to every JSTOR collection known to man, but for libraries of small to medium size that only subscribe to maybe 4 or fewer collections, your students will suddenly be seeing a lot of results in JSTOR that they can’t access. I did a search on World War II and Poland and out of the first 10 results there were only 2 that were in the JSTOR collections we subscribe to. If a student clicked on one of the eight of ten results that did not have a green check mark to the right of it they would see this:

What’s interesting is that we actually have many of these articles available in full-text through other databases.

I know what you’re probably thinking — “every database displays things that aren’t available in full-text. You can just enable your link resolver and students will be able to link to the full-text.” That would be nice, but JSTOR has decided not to make that possible. The response we got from tech support was “OpenURL links are not currently available when your users arrive at articles in collections that you do not license.” So, we can link out from full-text articles in JSTOR to versions of the same full-text in other collections, but we can’t link out from articles we do not have the full-text of in JSTOR to full-text in other collections. Either a lot of smart people don’t understand the purpose of OpenURL or they really don’t want to make it easy for students to figure out that their library has access to these resources through another database.

The other response we got was this: “At this time it is also not possible to change the default search to just your licensed collections.” Students can check a box on the Advanced Search page only that will “Include only content I can access”, but how many students are going to 1) notice that check box and 2) know what it really means? Especially when the default option (the box already checked) says “Include links to external content” and the explanation next to it says “JSTOR displays citation information and an outside link to the full-text of some recently published articles on external sites.” It makes it sound like students can get more full-text content that way when the reality is that they’ll just get more results that ask them to pay $12 or $30 for the article.

The tech support person went on to state “I will make sure that your suggestion of setting default search limits, and expanding OpenURL links to cover all non-licensed content, is passed on to our development team for consideration.” I have to call BS here. I can’t believe that these were not conscious decisions on their part. Was this developed by one lone dude in a shack with no input from other designers and librarians? I have to believe that they can’t be surprised that libraries would want these features.

I refuse to believe that all of the smart people at JSTOR have no idea how OpenURL works and have no idea how pretty much every other database vendor in the known world operates these days. Even if they were clueless, JSTOR has advisory boards made up of librarians who could tell them how things work. So my first thought was clearly they want to confuse students into paying for access to articles they could get through another database or ILL. But then I remember that this is JSTOR. They’re a not-for-profit. Something is clearly going on behind the scenes that we’re missing the boat on. And the first thing that pops into my head is PUBLISHERS. Are the pressures of publishers pulling out of JSTOR to pursue lucrative deals with EBSCO become to much? Did you have to make concessions that benefit your publishing partners but hurt the end user? I do understand that this change will make it easier for people not affiliated with a library to search JSTOR (helping to increase their base of individuals purchasing articles), but there is no reason that they couldn’t at the same time give libraries the ability to customize the default at their institutions or to make OpenURL work across the board.

So which one is it, JSTOR? Are you really that clueless about how modern databases and OpenURL link resolvers work? Are you out to make a buck off confused Freshmen with credit cards? Or did your publishing partners force you into it? Either way, you’re putting the customer dead last in this equation and, IMHO, breaking a trust relationship you’ve had with librarians for many years. I know that my solution to this will be simple. I just won’t teach JSTOR to social science majors here and will encourage students to use WorldCat Local. JSTOR articles are indexed in WC Local, so students can find the articles there and use Serials Solutions 360 Linker to link out to whichever database holds the full-text. Problem solved. And I doubt I’ll be the only librarian looking for a way around teaching JSTOR in information literacy classes if JSTOR doesn’t make a change ASAP. Way to make yourself less visible to future scholars, JSTOR!

I’ll be really curious to see how this shakes out, because I can’t imagine we’re the only library that’s going to be very negatively impacted by JSTOR’s bad decisions. I hope they make a change, and soon, because my History and Political Science info lit classes are coming in just a couple of weeks.

Update: For those who think that this is already resolved or have mentioned that you’re seeing a link resolver link to some articles, let me explain what you’re looking at as I’ve done a bit more digging. There are three types of results you can get right now in JSTOR, and you’ll see each in this screenshot (sorry for the size, my computer is being wonky — just click on it to expand it):

JSTOR results

The first (with the gray asterisk) is from a journal that is not in a JSTOR collection we subscribe to. There will be no link resolver link that lets patrons easily get to the article in another database to to our library’s ILL form. Frequently, there will be something that tells the user they need to pay to access the article. Otherwise, it’ll just be a dead end.

The second (with the green check mark) is an article that is in our JSTOR collection. Students can click on the title and get to the full-text.

The third (with the yellow arrow) is from a journal this is in our JSTOR collection, but it is not from the date range of full-text that is available through JSTOR (in this case, the article is from 2006 and JSTOR’s coverage goes to 2005). Clicking on the title of this type of result will provide a link resolver link so that the patron can check to see if the library has this in full-text elsewhere.

For those who are seeing link resolver links right now, what you are seeing is the third type of link. You may just have too many JSTOR collections to easily get a result in the second category which is very lucky for you.

So, Google used to have a blog just for librarians called Librarian Central. I remember hearing about it from lots of folks way back when, but I didn’t read it because I figured if Google came out with something cool, I’d hear about it from someone’s blog. Apparently, the blog has not been updated since late June 2007, right after ALA Annual in DC. Google also didn’t exhibit at this year’s ALA Annual, which is probably even more glaring because it was a short plane ride away from their headquarters.

Some people are up in arms because they feel that Google has some obligation to libraries beyond the contractual obligations to those they’re working with. Some people feel like librarians have been used. I must be missing something, because I don’t feel anything of the kind. Marketing is designed to make you like a company or product. Their marketing worked.

It seems to me that between 2005 and 2007, Google was making a big push to get partner libraries for their book scanning project. To do that, it made good sense to market to libraries, which is why they exhibited, gave talks, and had a blog. Perhaps they have enough partners now to keep them busy for a gazillion years. Perhaps they’re realizing that this wasn’t such a great market to get into. I have no idea. But I really don’t see anything more nefarious or insulting behind that blog ceasing its existence.

Maybe I’m not so up in arms because I never actually thought that Google cared about librarians. Google is a company. Their goal is to turn a profit. Even when they are engaging in activities that benefit people and where we can’t exactly figure out how they’d make money from this, their goal is to make money. It’s just like any of our vendors. Readex, for example, digitizes old journals that they get from libraries all around the country. When they have a big enough collection of digital content, they sell it for BIG BUCKS. At least we’re getting Google’s products for free (well, with a heapin’ helping of ads of course).

So, there are all these libraries with awesome collections that aren’t being digitized. Google comes in and says “hey, we’ll digitize your books for free and let you have the digital copies for your students.” Google was not doing this for the good of those libraries; they were doing it for the good of Google. But clearly the Universities also saw how this project was in their best interests or their lawyers wouldn’t have signed off on it. These Universities now have tons of their books in digital format that students, faculty and staff can enjoy from anywhere. University of Michigan makes them available in their catalog. It’s awesome. Maybe I’m naive, but none of this really gets me up in arms.

As someone who supports distance learners studying military history, I am insanely grateful to Google Books (and the Internet Archive). So many of the pre-1923 works that my students are looking for are available online! It’s saved us money. It’s also making our special collections materials more accessible to our online students as so many of the books up there (which can’t circulate) are in Google Books. And now with the API that Google released, we may soon be able to have links to Google Books show up in the catalog. Google Books has benefitted my library and its students tremendously… and it’s cost us nothing. Again, awesome.

I was asked to be on PBWiki’s Educational Advisory Board way back when. Trust me that I wasn’t honored to be asked, nor did I think that PBWiki truly and genuinely cared about librarians and educators. They just wanted to get our feedback to make their products better. And that’s fine with me because I thought I could help make a product I liked better meet my needs. Win win. When they started to ask me to talk up PBWiki to the press and to basically do their marketing for them, I quit. But it’s not as if I was disillusioned. They never gave a damn about librarians other than what the could get from us. And you know what? I didn’t care about PBWiki beyond what I could get from them either. My only feelings for PBWiki come from the quality of their product, which has gone rapidly downhill with their new 2.0 wiki.

Where does this “Google punked us” idea come from? What were we expecting that we didn’t get? How has Google left “us in the information dust to rot like an old microfilm machine?” People are making it sound like these Universities who got into bed was Google were like some poor drunk co-ed who thought the guy she was sleeping with really cared about her, but wakes up to find him gone. I obviously wasn’t privy to the backroom machinations that went into these deals, but I don’t think these major Universities went into this deal blindly. I’m wondering if any people working at the libraries involved in the Google Books project feel like Google cheated us.

I like Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google Custom Search for my work in libraries just as much as I did before. I like them not because Google told me to or gave me a shirt (which they didn’t) or said nice things about libraries in a blog. I like them because they’re useful to me and to my students. End of story. Who actually promoted Google’s products only because of their marketing specifically to librarians?

If we’re promoting companies because they’re nice to us, then we are doing a disservice to every person who reads our blogs. Folks from PBWiki asked for my address several times so they could send me schwag and I ignored each of those emails. If I like a product, it’s because it works, not because the people who created it were nice to me or nice to librarians. My love isn’t for sale.

Some very cool things about it:

• RSS feeds for every search you do. Want to create an ego feed for your name? See when other librarians write about LibWorm or GoogleCSE or wikis? Just do a search and subscribe to the feed, baby!
• The ability to search by date or by relevance. That’s very important when you want to see the most recent posts on a subject.
• Feed Categories – groups of blogs and other sites gathered together by categories that David assigned to them and that can be browsed as a group. Not sure if they can be searched separately from the other blogs and Web sites, but that would definitely be cool. You can subscribe to each of these groupings, so if you wanted to receive podcasts from all academic libraries, you could easily do that with a single RSS feed. HOT!
• Subjects – pre-made searches for certain subjects such as Library 2.0, wikis, ALA, and OPAC. Rather than searching just for wikis, the wikis search searches for wikis, wiki, wikipedia, etc. And of course, you can subscribe to each of these searches.
• LibWorm has a built-in aggregator function where you can subscribe to feeds and read them right in LibWorm.

I think Technorati is great for a lot of things, but when I subscribed to a search for wikis there, I ended up with a ridiculous amount of stuff that was totally irrelevant to what I really was looking for. Considering the limited net this search engine is casting, the results are much more likely to be relevant. Congratulations to David and Frankie! You have created an amazing resource for the library community!

I’m sure most of you already know that ResourceShelf is a amazing place to find quality online resources that you may never have found otherwise. Docuticker, its sister site, offers links to quality reports and publications from the government and think tanks. I remember way back when that ResourceShelf was the very first thing I ever subscribed to in my aggregator (ahhh… those lazy days when I was only subscribed to 10 or 15 feeds!). It’s a site I frequently consult to find useful Websites on timely issues. Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy have really developed one of the most valuable resources online for librarians and researchers.

Jimmy Atkinson recently e-mailed me to let me know about his article Research Beyond Google. It is a really nice guide to 119 authoritative resources on a variety of subjects, both academic and practical. Worth checking out and maybe showing to your patrons.

Another terrific resource that every librarian should be using is the Librarian’s Index to the Internet. LII is a collection of hand-picked quality online resources that is browseable and searchable. You can also subscribe to their New This Week newsletter to get updated weekly on the great sites they’ve found and added.

A resource I frequently use to find quality resources on a specific subject is the subject guides of other libraries. Why scour the Web trying to reinvent the wheel when you can just see what resources the librarians at the Kansas City Public Library or Yale University chose in that subject?

I’m sure this is redundant to most of you, but I think we can’t stress enough how important these resources are. We don’t need to be an expert in the best Web resources in every subject, but we do need to know where to look when we need that information.

Another great way to help students find quality resources on the Web is to use something like Google Custom Search or Rollyo. Imagine being able to create a search box that searches only the Websites you choose. You could handpick Websites in a certain subject and stick the search box on your subject page. Google Custom Search is great because you can actually create neat custom ways that your users can refine their searches by assigning markers (categories) to the chosen Websites. The first thing I thought of when I heard about Google CSE was “wow, that’s going to be a Rollyo-killer” and, especially with the custom refinements, I think my initial impression may end up being correct.

I haven’t explored Google Custom Search as much as I’d like, but I have a feeling that I will be using it in the future to develop a way for our distance learners to search a bunch of high-quality Websites in their subject area. The biggest complaint I always get from students is that they can’t search everything from a single box. Well… this isn’t a perfect solution (and we can’t search the databases with it), but it’s a pretty darn good solution. If you want to take a look at some real examples of librarians doing stuff with Google Custom Search, check out the following:

• “Scholarly Science” search at Christina’s LIS Rant
• LISZEN (which I mentioned a few days ago)
• David Rothman’s Consumer Health and Patient Education Information search
• Luke Rosenberger’s English-language DOAJ search engine

Hot X 4!

I get very nervous when I hear professors and librarians telling students not to use the Web when they do research — though it usually comes out in the form of “don’t use Google to do your research!” Sigh. There are so many incredible resources on the Web in so many different subjects… we need to make it easier for patrons to find the best ones out there rather than making them afraid of anything they find on the Web.

I had a student come to the reference desk who was doing a paper on a certain historical photograph. He needed eight sources about this photograph and all he had so far was something from the Wikipedia. I had assumed that he was just using the Wikipedia entry to get basic background information — who the people in the photo were, etc. We found some stuff on the photo in JSTOR and Academic Search Premiere and I also pointed him to some books in the library that described the historical event that this picture was depicting. He then started asking me about how to cite all this and I told him how to cite stuff from databases and from the Web. He then asked me “I’ve been trying to find the author of this article from the Wikipedia so I can cite it. Do you know where I can find it?” Yikes! I explained to the student that the Wikipedia is written and edited by everyone and anyone who wants to, so hundreds or thousands of people (some reliable, some not) could have contributed to this article. I asked him how he felt about using that in his paper. “Ummm… ok.” I was shocked that he still planned to use it, even though he knew that the information may or may not be true. Yes, I know that more likely than not, the Wikipedia article was right, but this student really didn’t care if it was right or wrong. He just wanted to get those 8 sources as quickly as possible and didn’t really care how “authoritative” they were.

I guess what surprised me the most about this was that his teacher had never mentioned what kinds of sources she wanted (or didn’t want) in the paper — what was acceptable and what was unacceptable.

To recap what Paul, Ken and David discussed: Paul started the discussion by talking about how flat the world of research literature looks to someone who has only seen it online. And I agree. Students don’t know what to look for to determine if the resource they are using in their paper is from a scholarly publication, a trade magazine, or some yahoo’s very professional-looking, but utterly worthless Web site. Paul thinks that students need more of a sense of where these resources are physically coming from so that they can understand the differences. Ken agrees with Paul’s assertions and remembers his own experience, in the pre-full-text database era, when he himself likely picked the three easiest-to find resources without thinking about authority. Ken then muses about what could be done with RSS feeds to indicate to people how authoritative the source is.

David had a somewhat different take on this. He argues that this issue is not a result of so many of our resources being online, but that it is just another manifestation of the age-old struggle to get students to be critical of information resources. Even when we only had print resources available, we still had students who didn’t care (just as Ken said) whether the sources they were choosing were the most authoritative ones. David argues “all that has changed is the container and/or delivery method.” David argues that teaching students about authority by trying to make online resources emulate print resources is pointless because more and more, students will be accessing resources online. To me, it’s like teaching people born in the 1930s about cars by relating them to horse and buggies. It might have worked to explain it that way to their parents who grew up with horses and buggies (and that’s why we have the term horsepower), but it makes no sense for people who have no relationship to that reality and never will. What we need to do is teach them the subtle clues they need to determine whether an article is authoritative or whether it is not something they should be citing in their paper. Because, no matter how similar things may look, there are plenty of clues that will let someone know whether an article is something they should be using in their paper or not.

I taught a few English 101 information literacy classes last semester and I incorporated a little activity into the class. I broke the class up into four groups and gave each of them an article on a certain topic. One was from the Wikipedia, one was from a government Website, one was from Newsweek and was found in a database, and the last one was from a peer-reviewed journal article found in the same database. I asked the students to tell me if they thought this was a good article that they’d use in a research paper. All of them, including the Wikipedia folks, thought that their article looked good enough to use (the only group that was even a bit skeptical of their work was the one with the report from a government Website). I then told them about the things to look for when evaluating a Website, article, or other resource for quality. At the end, I had them go back and critique each article. The students could then see that they had no idea who wrote the Wikipedia entry or what the qualifications were of the person who wrote the Newsweek article. They saw that the article from the government Website was sponsored by the government and written by two PhDs. They came out with a much better sense of what to look for when they’re doing their research on the Web or in the databases.

But the question is, even with that knowledge, do they really care whether what they are citing is authoritative? In most cases, the answer is no. That student whom I educated at the reference desk about the Wikipedia still may use it in his paper. Why? Because he needs eight sources and his teacher never told him that he couldn’t use the Wikipedia as one of those sources. What does he care about authority? Ultimately, I think if the professors keep accepting stuff from the Wikipedia and other less-than-authoritative sources of information, students will continue not to care where they get their information from. I hear the professors complain about students turning in stuff with citations from the Wikipedia, but until they mark their grade down for it, the students will continue to cite it. We can educate these students until the cows come home, but ultimately, we don’t grade their papers. It’s the folks who give them a grade who really can shape the sort of research the students do.

There is an instructor in the Criminal Justice program with whom I work frequently on developing information literacy instruction for the distance program in Justice Administration (he’s the program director). He also teaches undergraduate classes, and some of what I’ve been telling him the past year has definitely had an impact. He is now asking his students to attach the abstract or front page of every resource they are citing in their paper. That way he can see if it is of sufficient quality and if it is even relevant to their paper topic. I think that’s brilliant. In so many classes, so long as you have a bibliography, you’re in good shape. So many professors just don’t check. While I’m sure his students grumble about it, he is doing them such a huge favor because they will be so much better equipped than other students to do scholarly research in subsequent classes.

I agree that it’s important for us to teach information literacy skills to students. But if we do this and the professors continue to accept garbage citations from their students, I don’t think much of what we say is going to have much of an impact.

Update: I just wanted to make it clear that I don’t think the Wikipedia is useless in research. I often use it with students to get background information on a topic (just as I do Google) and to find links to more authoritative sources on the subject. But I do not think it should be cited in a college or higher-level paper for two reasons: 1) the information has not been verified and 2) I don’t think college students should be citing any encyclopedia in their paper.

I haven’t really looked much at federated search tools since my post on using MetaLib well over a year ago. So I was very interested to hear Jeff and Frank talk about the recent developments in federated search technology and how many federated search companies are partnering with search companies outside of the library world to bring their customers better ways to manage results.

Goal of Federated Search – Provide a single interface for information resources

Federated search – sits between the patron and the databases. It queries a bunch of resources at once and then presents the results from all of them to the user. Isn’t clear to the user which database they got the info from (is that important to the user? unlikely in most cases).

Features
Support for multiple protocols (Z39.50, SRU/SRW, OAI)
Simple and advanced search (search by specific field)
Post processing of results (combined results)
Integration with other software (courseware, bib management tools)
Advanced result display (clustering, visualization)
Context-sensitive linking (OpenURL)

Open URL is a standard for persistently identifying content. Linking from a citation to the full-text. Finds which databases we have the full-text in and shows the user where it is (or takes them directly to it).

All of these services don’t have to come from the same vendor.

Top Vendors for Fed Search – Ex Libris (MetaLib), WebFeat (PRISM)

New stuff
Built into content platform – CSA Illumina
Visualization of Results – Vivisimo, AquaBrowser, MUSE
Express services – WebFeat

WebFeat EXPRESS is targeted for smaller libraries.

CSA – has federated search built into the product. Searches all databases provided through CSA without the user even knowing.

Endeavor – dumped their own in-house-developed federated search and OpenURL resolvers. New product suite is Discovery Finder and Resolver based on TDnet technology. Has on the fly clustering of results.

Aquabrowser – used to just be for searching the catalog. Now moving into the federated search market. Aquabrowser has really neat visualization of results.

Grokker – Visual search in EBSCO databases. What was funny is that when they tried to pull up EBSCO’s visual search, it crashed IE. lol!

Vivisimo – focus on clustering of results. Used by NLM. Ex Libris is going to be incorporating Vivisimo into MetaLib (HOT!).

OVID Search Solver – uses Muse Global’s technology with custom refinements.

WebFeat – two products. 1) PRISM – custom solution for libraries. Expensive and more for larger libraries. 2) Express – more affordable ($7950 annually). OpenURL compliant. EBSCO A to Z integration. Interface choices. Bowdoin uses it if you’re looking for someone to ask about it.

Keystone and OpenSiteSearch are open source federated search tools.

Federated search really increases full-text retrievals of resources. Jeff talked about how federated search is the best way to really increase the use of databases by patrons. I have certainly heard a lot of students and faculty ask why can’t they search all databases from a single search box, so it is certainly something people at my school are looking for.

Trends: (think I missed a few) Integration with bibliographic management software. More integration of visualization and clustering tools. Federated search is also becoming more affordable, which is a big deal for small and medium-sized libraries whose patrons are also clamoring for these sorts of tools.

We have talked about purchasing a federated search tool at my library in the past, so this was a really helpful talk for me. I’m very happy to see that the companies seem to be focusing largely on how to make it easier for patrons to deal with the results using tools like clustering. Nice to see that prices are getting a bit closer to what a library like mine can afford. Thanks Jeff and Frank!

We really don’t have any other databases that specifically find literary criticisms, so I could have spent the next 30 minutes searching various databases looking for stuff about Tom Robbins that was of high enough quality to go into this gal’s paper (most of which would not have been of high quality). Instead, I decided to try a trick that I often find useful when doing reference work — depending on the subject. I know that there are people who are big fans and scholars of authors, wars, historical events, and other subjects. Some fans are passionate enough to make bibliographies of all the works they’ve found on their subject of interest. Sometimes I can do a search in Google/Ask/Yahoo! and find a bibliography on a subject for which it was difficult to find articles doing a regular database search. So I tried doing a search for Tom Robbins and voila! The first result was a “fan site” for Tom Robbins complete with a bibliography of his works and works about him (separated into books, magazines and newspapers, scholarly journals, and theses and dissertations). Yes, the bibliography was a bit dated, but still, it was extremely comprehensive for the years it covered. And since the student needed only three more works and their date did not matter, we were sure we’d find plenty of these in the databases or the catalog. The books about Tom Robbins (he was discussed among many other authors) we would never have found in the catalog because he was not a subject term nor was his name mentioned in the title. The articles I may have found had I searched every conceivable database, but it worked a lot better to find the bibliography, check our A-Z product to see if we have the journal, and find the article in the database that journal is held in. While this trick doesn’t always work, since there aren’t always such fans/scholars for every subject, I find it’s often worth trying if I can’t find enough stuff in the databases. If I don’t find anything, I’ve usually only expended about 1-3 minutes of time.

This is why I never buy the whole Google/Ask/Yahoo! is something librarians should avoid using bit. I always start with the databases, but the databases don’t cover every subject well. Sometimes I can find good things in Google/Ask/Yahoo! because I know what I’m looking for. And I know that my search skills will get better as I face more challenges at the reference desk. But honestly, I think most librarians brush up on their search skills when trying to answer difficult reference questions. Any librarian worth his or her salt will learn something new every day that they are on the reference desk. It’s so important to be flexible and not to only try searching the three things you always search and then give up if you can’t find anything. We have to not only be familiar with our own databases, but with how to search-smart on the Web, and which Web sites have useful subject info. I work with a lot of Masters students in diplomacy and criminal justice, and these students often need to use the Web to find a lot of the statistics and government information they use in their research. Our Criminal Justice Abstracts and Criminal Justice Periodicals are good, but they don’t always meet the needs of our students.

I can’t even believe how much I’ve learned in the past eight months by doing reference, teaching information literacy classes, and creating instructional materials for the online grad students (much more than I could have learned in any class). It’s crazy! So while Steven Cohen tells us to brush up on our search skills instead of “working on that library MySpace account [and] posting pictures of your book collection on Flickr,” I think most of us work on our search skills just by working with patrons (and are those really your options at work? Mine usually are slightly more urgent and necessary). Yes, I look at Resource Shelf and LII, but just like my students, I learn a lot more by actually using what I’ve learned in practical situations. I agree with Steven that online searching should be a core course in library schools, because I’ve seen bad/half-assed searching and that’s why I am so proprietary with reference questions from the online graduate students. And at my school, with many older staff members, we have the opposite problem, where some people ONLY search the databases and never venture out on the Web. And sometimes I wonder if perhaps people who aren’t committed to going the extra mile for their patrons will never make the effort, whether they are search savvy or not. Maybe I’m just a young, overconfident or totally naive librarian, but I honestly think that by being flexible about the resources you use, knowing about your library’s databases, relevant Web resources, and search engines, and always being willing to go the extra mile for your patrons, you’re going to do pretty good reference work.

Roy and Andrew both took the word OPAC out of their presentaton, because it’s library-speak and is indicative of the thinking that led to our problems with library catalogs in the first place.

Roy spoke first.

What catalogs do well

• Inventory control
• Known-item searching

What they don’t do well

• any search beyond known item (subject)
• anything beyond books and journal titles
• displaying results in logical groupings
• faceted browsing
• relevance renking (how are things displayed?)
• recommendations (people who borrowed this book also borrowed…)

How did we get into this mess?

• automation began in the back room with circulation, cataloging and acquisitions. It was designed for librarians
• then they thought “hey, why can’t we stick this out in front of the public?” Patrons were an afterthought
• We continue to ask vendors for things that fill our needs but not our patrons’ needs
• We don’t use/reuse information well

Key problems

• we ignored discovery to focus on management of data
• we created stovepipe systems that don’t allow our systesms to communicate and share data
• we’ve abdicated responsibility for our systems
• we share materials, but not the responsibility for building/improving system

Assertions

• library catalog is only one finding tool. We can provide other information through databases and the Internet.
• The catalog should do what it’s good for. we don’t need to squish everything into the catalog
• users may not only be invested in what you have in your building (they may want consortial materials, ILL)

The future of the catalog

• one system among many that interoperate
• should function as part of a unified library finding tool
• refocused on local collections and interoperability with other tools
• will not be the most important finding tool

Signs of life:

• Report of the University of California Rethinking how we provide bibliographic services for the University of California
• Library of Congress study, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration With Other Discovery Tools
• PINES project
• Red Light Green
• OCLC’s Curiouser project
• CSU San Marcos X9 Books by David Walker
• NCSU’s Library Catalog

Catalogs for the Future – Andrew Pace

State of catalogs: We are overly obsessed with kw searching and authority searching.

Next gen searching/catalogs: Vivisimo, Endeca, AquaBrowser, ExLibris’ “Primo,” Innovative’s WebPAC Pro, Polaris, Talis, PINES, etc.

Andrew did a search with NCSU’s Catalog to show some of its features:

• Ability to refine search by subject, format, library
• can actually browse the entire catalog by leaving the search box blank
• can sort by circ status
• advanced searching
• browse search
• spell checking
• relevance ranking
• automatic stemming
• true LC browsing
• much more!

Endeca was behind the systems at Barnes and Noble and WalMart. They partnered with NCSU for mutual benefit. Endeca’s ProFind co-exists with their SirsiDynix Unicorn system. Endeca indexes MARC records exported from Unicorn and is refreshed daily while the system is up. MARC records are transformed into flat text files for the Endeca product, creating the opportunity to manipulate data on the back end.

The interface:

• started with lots of radio buttons and other options but then simplified it. Users can do refining post-search.
• brief view and a full-view option for viewing the results.
• 10 dimensions from MARC records
• using LCSH in new ways
• FRBR = “record rollup” outside of libraries
• creeping featuritis (realising they can’t do it all)
• most used dimensions: LC Classifications Subject, LC Classifications Topic

It’s great to have talks like this at conferences with diverse groups of librarians. There are many people who don’t know that our systems could be better and what we should be demanding from our vendors. It was also useful to show the positive examples — how catalogs are starting to improve and what we should demand in the future.

[tags]cil2006[/tags]

I was as excited as everyone else when I heard that the WorldCat wiki was live in Open WorldCat and that people could start adding reviews, tables of contents, and other notes on books. It will add tremendous value to WorldCat! How easy is it to look at most online catalogs and know whether or not a book will meet your information/recreational needs? More often than not, when I am helping a student find books relevant for his/her research that s/he will need to order through ILL, I will first check WorldCat to find books on the subject and will then check Amazon to get an idea whether or not this book will meet the student’s needs.

So, yes, I am excited about this new functionality in WorldCat and I hope it will soon come to our FirstSearch version of WorldCat. But I wouldn’t really call it a wiki.

Lorcan Dempsey at OCLC has since retracted the claim that the new WorldCat functionality makes it a wiki, but Thom Hickey still insists that being somewhat wiki-like makes something a wiki:

I can certainly understand someone objecting to calling this a Wiki, but it is a Wiki in at least a couple of ways. Some of the material is available for general editing (notes and tables of contents). There was general agreement here, though, that people should ‘own’ their reviews, so reviews are not open to everyone to edit.

Well, I’m like a cat in a lot of ways. I have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, the ability to give birth to live young, etc. But the last time I checked, I didn’t have a tail or pointy ears on top of my head. So I’m probably not a cat. Similarly, WorldCat may have some characteristics of a wiki, but it has other characteristics that make it not a wiki.

First, let’s define what a wiki is. Here’s a definition from the Wikipedia:

a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows others (often completely unrestricted) to edit the content.

and from Ward Cunningham (the creator of the wiki):

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.

Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.

Like many simple concepts, “open editing” has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.

I’d say a wiki must essentially have three things:

1. It should be very easy to create and edit content (ie. you don’t have to know HTML)
2. Members of the community (whether large or small) can edit content
3. New pages are created simply by creating a link to them

Can anything that does not meet all of these criteria be considered a wiki? It’s one thing to protect certain pages in a wiki from edits, but people should still have the ability to edit content. Otherwise it is not really a wiki. If I can’t go back and make changes even to my own review, I am clearly not working with a wiki. It’s true that anyone can edit the notes and the table of contents in any entry, but nothing in a wiki should ever be irrevocable. That’s what I love about wikis — you can always fix your mistakes. Saying that WorldCat is now a wiki is like saying a blog is a wiki if anyone can comment on a post. Sure, anyone can easily add content (comments) and create links, but in a blog, no one can edit anyone else’s content (nor their own), so it’s not really a wiki. There should be no individual ownership in a wiki. The content is owned by the community of users. It’s a very foreign concept to most people (and perhaps sounds a bit “communistic”), but for certain projects, it works. And for others, a wiki isn’t really the right thing to use.

The new functionality in WorldCat is undoubtedly cool, but I’d say it’s more like Amazon.com or Netflix than like a wiki. People can add information that will allow others to make more informed decisions. I agree with Thom Hickey that people shouldn’t be allowed to change other people’s reviews in WorldCat. But that’s exactly why it’s not a wiki. A wiki would not work well in a WorldCat or an Amazon.com. Wikis are terrific tools (and are certainly the hip thing here in 2005) and I’ve used them for a variety of projects, but they’re not well-suited for something like WorldCat or Amazon or Netflix where there is some content you just wouldn’t want to open up to the community. I’m certainly one of the biggest wiki-evangelists in libraryland, but I don’t think a wiki is a “cure-all” and that is should be used for every project.

OCLC, what y’all did is still really cool… and all the better (in my opinion) that it isn’t a wiki.