The Catalogue is Dead, Long Live the Catalogue, Part 5

The conclusion of my series exploring catalogue developments will look at open source tools and catalogue hacks. This fifth and final post in this series about the library catalogue admits that these tools are complex and difficult to redesign. Some of the ideas that I have discussed earlier in the series such as faceted search and visual search would likely require a major upgrade to new software, no easy task by any means. I have been told by academic librarians that upgrading a catalogue (and the ILS that goes with it) can easily take a year or more. Beyond upgrading the catalogue itself, what can users do to make catalogues more useful to them? I have three ideas: learn to use advanced search like a rock star, experiment with LibX and consider Social OPAC.

Using advanced search options may not seem like the traditional idea of hacking; you’re not modifying the technology for your own ends (my preferred, ‘classical’ definition of hacking) nor are you using technology to commit some sort of crime (the other definition of hacking). That said, I think you are hacking expectations of how people typically search. The power of advanced search can vary quite a lot; it is instructive to contrast Google with something like Factiva. Constructing a good search can take a bit longer at the beginning but I cannot recommend it enough. Instruction in searching is a traditional strength of librarians and it is something that we can continue to do.

Some weeks ago, I learned more about LibX – the browser plugin for libraries – and this is a great idea that I would like to see more of. LibX represents an alternative way to improve the user experience of search. Rather than coming at the problem from the server side and the ILS, LibX changes the experience from the user’s end through the installation of a browser plug-in. LibX has several good features to recommend it, but I would focus on two that are best likely to be understood by users: Support for xISBN and Support for Google Scholar. Say you have LibX installed and you’re checking out the latest releases on Amazon. LibX will read the ISBNs of books and turn them into a link to the institution’s catalogue. Likewise, if you are looking for academic articles using Google Scholar, LibX connects you from a citation you find in GS directly into the journal or database where the article can be read in full text. This makes the user experience of locating materials less complicated, with fewer steps.

I will close this post and my series on the catalogue with The Social OPAC. The creators of the Social OPAC describe it as, “an open source social discovery platform for bibliographic data.” As I understand it, the software stands between the user and the catalogue. Interesting features include support for SMS (i.e. you look up a book and instead of having to scribble a note on scrap paper, you just send the relevant information in a text a message to your cell phone), “RSS everything” (potentially, this could be a could way for people to stay informed about works by authors of interest or subjects) and a “Recommendation engine.” I am not sure how the recommendation engine in Social OPAC is powered but I very much like the idea of this. To see the Social OPAC in action, have a look at the Palos Verdes Library District in California. When one does a search there, faceted search is integrated on the left side (“Refine Your Search”) while there are tags on the right side. It looks like the tags are not specific to a given search though, which makes them a bit less useful in my view.

Thanks for reading this series. I have found it interesting to look at some of the major developments in catalogues and searching. As the title of the series suggests, I think the catalogue is going through a transition and that it can only become better.

Read the rest of the series:

The Catalogue is Dead, Long Live the Catalogue, Part 1

The Catalogue is Dead, Long Live the Catalogue, Part 2 (Faceted Search)

The Catalogue is Dead, Long Live the Catalogue, Part 3 (Visual Search)

The Catalogue is Dead, Long Live The Catalogue: Part 4 (Ideas for New Features)

The Catalogue is Dead, Long Live The Catalogue, Part 4

In today’s post, I will consider several features that I would like to see in library catalogues. For purposes of this post, I am thinking free form as in how would the catalogue look if we could build whatever we wish. In reality, I am aware that catalogues (and the related infrastructure) is a complex tool that is very difficult to upgrade in many cases. Several of these ideas are obviously inspired by Amazon, the major retailer of books and many more things. The fundamental presumption underlying these ideas is that catalogues can gain from involving their users further.

Reviews are often helpful in deciding whether or not to buy something – whether that buying involves time, money or something else. In using reviews, there are at least two models in integrating reviews in catalogue entries: reusing previously published reviews (from journals, newspapers etc) generally few in number or a high volume of user submitted reviews which can vary widely in quality. I like both for different reasons. Based on catalogues I have looked at, selecting a handful of quality reviews from publications appears to be the favoured approach. Such reviews are safe and often quite insightful. The case can be made for using user submitted reviews especially if these are limited by community. If I know that users like me found something useful, then would be great. The format of the reviews could have written comments, a star rating system and then some additional meta-data (e.g. for non-fiction, indicate level of background you think is needed).

Building on reviews is another idea that would be great to see in catalogues; what has my fellow academic/student/co-worker found of interest in the catalogue? This recalls a research technique I was taught as an undergraduate; “mining the bibliography.” Once one found a good book (or article), one then mined the bibliography for further sources. There is still great value to this method, but what about extending it to the catalogue. A user could enter all the usual search criteria (title, subject etc) and then have a social option (“show me all the catalogue records examined by graduate students in health sciences”). In this context, the Library is facilitating community between people of like interests. Implementing a system like this would require sophisticated infrastructure; detailed profiles on users and their habits (make this opt-in and protect it with a robust privacy policy) and a powerful database. The idea needs some further development but it is something I would like to see in use.

The final idea I have in mind is inspired by Flikr and Library Thing, two social cataloguing services that thrive on organic taxonomies generated by the user. From my own use, I like the Library Thing model best as it combines formal cataloguing (both Dewey Decimal and LC) with user generated tags; have a look at the Library Thing tag cloud. I have used the service and found it interesting. With over 800,000 members, there is certainly evidence to show that people like to catalogue and share their views with others. LT is also noteworthy for its achievements in building communities around reading; various authors (mainly fiction) have a presence in LT, there are free books for review and more. Such successes in engaging readers is something that librarians ought to take an interest in.

The question for today’s post is whether or not the social proposal advanced here is legitimate. It would represent a substantial change in the way that catalogues operate and the experience it provides. From a certain standpoint, this might appear a deviation from the purity of the catalogue as traditionally presented. I think such a change is due and that it has the potential to raise user engagement with the Library and meet expectations that users are forming from other services.

The Catalogue is Dead, Long Live the Catalogue, Part 3 (Visual Search)

Despite the advent of graphical user interfaces about thirty years ago at Xerox PARC, most catalogues are built on text. Libraries had their origins in text, books and other written documents and, in many cases, that is what our institutions are still known for (despite the fact that libraries do much more than that. The focus on books and text in our collections has also influenced the design of our catalogues. From my unscientific sample of major and minor library catalogues, I find that almost all catalogues are fundamentally drive by text: all the fields are in text, input is text and all the results are textual. Don’t get me wrong – I love text. As Thomas Jefferson remarked, “I cannot live without books.” Reading and writing is my preferred learning style (though I very much appreciate a well crafted lecture) but I recognize that other styles exist out there and it is important for me to learn about them even if they don’t feel natural.

In my understanding of the concept, visual search can mean at least two different results: searching for and/or displaying images or displaying search results using visuals that go beyond lines of text. Although some researchers are working on searching images directly, most systems I am familiar with (e.g. Google Image Search) use meta-data such as HTML tags or catalogue details to locate images. Such searching on Flickr can often produce interesting ideas and amusements though the results are uneven in quality. The other type of visual search is more about interface – showing results to the user such as tag clouds (e.g. tag cloud of the books at LibraryThing) or other methods. Of the two, I think that libraries are more likely to be interested in working on visual display of search results but the other type is certainly still of interest, particularly as large collections of photographs are digitized.

Based on experimentation with a few different Web search engines (are there library catalogues using it out there? If so, please let me know in the comments), my impression is this feature is not ready for prime time. Of all tools I tried, I found Spezify to be the most fun if quirky (it mashes together tweets, with images and webpages; doing a search on a city is fun). This kind of search is still only of interest to those who enjoy experimenting with such tools – I don’t know that it could be used to find something specific as yet. The experience of visual search could best be described as akin to browsing the book stacks of a library; accidental discovery is the order of the day but not much more.

Has anyone out there found a really good visual search tool? How does it work? I have a feeling I may have missed some good examples of visual search – would anyone care to correct me with a stellar example?

The Catalogue is Dead, Long Live the Catalogue, Part 2

Today’s post will investigate faceted search, an innovative that streamlines going through search results. I first discovered faceted search by using the catalogue at the University of Toronto where I studied for my Master of Information Studies degree. It was introduced as part of a major catalogue upgrade and it is the feature that I use most. As the Library has such a vast collection, I almost always use facets to limit by language (as I did in the example at the top of this post but I also often limit by library and publication date. Some of this could have been accomplished with the advanced search options but faceted search lets me eliminate results that I am not interested in. Based on some recent OCLC research, it looks like I am in the minority however; users they studied like the option but rarely used it.

Technologically, faceted search only became available this decade but the concept has a deeper history. Noted Indian library theorist S.R. Ranganathan is credited (who proposed a colon based scheme) with inspiring one company, Endeca, in the development of its faceted search tools. This is another example of the long and productive inspiration that library science has provided to IT development – I have also heard that citation analysis served as inspiration for the founders of Google. Some may think that the arts and sciences of librarians are under threat from computers and search engines, but this view could not be more mistaken. Collaboration has been the rule in the past and that looks set to continue.

Why is faceted search important for libraries? It matters because it encourages thinking about taxonomies and how information is organized. This is one of two major types of information retrieval according to the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval of the Association for Computing Machinery which stated in 2006 (Thanks to Wikipedia for pointing this out to me):

* Navigational search uses a hierarchy structure (taxonomy) to enable users to browse the information space by iteratively narrowing the scope of their quest in a predetermined order, as exemplified by Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, etc.
* Direct search allows users to simply write their queries as a bag of words in a text box. This approach has been made enormously popular by Web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! Search.

I’m sure that most searching people do involves the use of direct search methods, so any switch to taxonomy based methods will be difficult. Facets can help organize information better, but people resist them as they are unfamiliar. The other reason that I think facets are worthwhile is that the better demonstrate the different criteria by which a given item is catalogued. When working with millions of books or other documents, this type of organization makes the task go by faster. It is especially needed in a large research institution where the very richness of the collection can defeat efforts to find something relevant. The example shown at the top of this example is organized as a series of text boxes, but that is not the only way to display it.

My question for readers today is whether you find faceted search to be an improvement over non-faceted systems? For librarians; does it make it easier to educate users about collections are organized?

The Catalogue is Dead, Long Live the Catalogue, Part 1

“Electronic catalogs, wherever you go in the academic world, have become a horrible crazy-quilt assemblage of incompatible interfaces and vendor-constrained listings… I’m to the point where I think we’d be better off to just utterly erase our existing academic catalogs and forget about backwards-compatibility, lock all the vendors and librarians and scholars together in a room, and make them hammer out electronic research tools that are Amazon-plus, Amazon without the intent to sell books but with the intent of guiding users of all kinds to the books and articles and materials that they ought to find, a catalog that is a partner rather than an obstacle in the making and tracking of knowledge. – Professor Timothy Burke, Swarthmore College, January 20, 2004

My first experience with a library catalogue was at my high school library in the late 1990s. The interface was a series of text menus (white text on a blue background, if memory serves) and it was not a pleasant experience. Jumping from one catalogue record to another was difficult and I found navigating by subject confusing compared to Amazon’s subject headings. Even though it left much to be desired, it was not enough to deter me since I loved libraries so much and always found them a pleasant place to be. My dissatisfaction with the library catalogue (or, if you want to get technical and specific, the OPAC) is nothing new. I think part of the reason that catalogues are problematic, in terms of user experience, is the need to serve two masters; the librarian and the user. The librarian looks at the catalogue as an ordinary tool that he works with every day and understands in and out whereas most users probably are confused. Even experienced users such as Professor Burke – see the quote at the start of this post – find catalogues difficult.

This is the first in a five part series where I examine the state of the modern library catalogue, mainly drawing on examples from public and academic library context as those are publicly accessible. Even though Professor Burke’s compliants may still be true in some institutions, catalogues (and search technology more generally) have come a long way in five years: faceted and visual search offer some pointers on where library searching is going. Despite this progress, librarians face an up hill battle in many cases. To quote Burke once more: “This is not just about availability, but about the near-impossibility of teaching undergraduates the kinds of search heuristics that will reliably produce useful material on most research subjects.” Burke mainly blames this on poorly design tools – technology and cataloguing standards and practice are in his crosshairs – and that’s something to keep in mind constantly. However, I also think that librarians can make the case that doing truly through research calls on complex skills that go beyond throwing a few words into the first search box you see.

In the next four posts of this series, I will investigate innovations in search tools, research on how people approach searching for information (a vast body of literature that I can only begin to assess here) and suggestions on hacking the catalogue. Oh, by hacking, I mean the old original sense of adjusting and modifying something to improve it, not anything disreputable. Stay tuned this week for the rest of the series.

My question for readers today is: Do you remember your first use of a library catalogue (or any other information searching tool like a search engine or card catalog)? What do you remember most about it? Good? Bad? Tell me.

Thinking about Chris Anderson’s book FREE

Over the past week, I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Chris Anderson’s recent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson is something of a guru on Internet issues as he works as Editor-in-Chief of WIRED magazine and has previously authored a book on the impact of the Internet on business models (The Long Tail). Most of the ideas in FREE concern business again, but there are some interesting ideas here. In short, Anderson argues that the Free (especially important in the digital environment) is ever more important since the cost of Internet infrastructure (processing, storage and broadband) declines rapidly. In keeping with the spirit of the book, I downloaded one of the many different free versions that have been provided (an unabridged audiobook available in the iTunes Music Store) which I would recommend. One quirk at play here is that the free text versions of the book are mostly limited to US-based users, but the iTunes Audio version (and the downloadable MP3 version) do not have such geographical restrictions.

These musings on free and the many interesting examples Anderson raises (the Chinese and Brazilian examples he discusses are new and very thought provoking) has some important applications to librarianship. One common though misinformed view of libraries and related services is that they are not necessary since “everything on the Internet is free.” Factually, that is still false; the free Web lacks many important materials, journals and other materials that you may need. However, for the sake of argument, let’s grant the claim. According to Anderson’s argument, this abundance creates a scarcity elsewhere. What does that mean? Well, what about the time needed to find what you want? What about determining how an article, dataset or the like applies? Free can look like a threat but one need only to think of Anderson’s observation – “Every abundance creates a new scarcity” – to think through the problem.

Book Review: The Accidental Library Marketer by Kathy Dempsey

Disclosure: I received a free copy of the book to review directly from the publisher, Information Today.

The latest in Information Today’s Accidental series is Kathy Dempsey’s book on marketing, The Accidental Library Marketer. Kathy Dempsey will be well known to many readers as the long serving editor of the Marketing Library Services (MLS) newsletter (also published by Information Today),  which is frequently quoted in the book. You can get a sense of what the book offers from the book’s website which provides the introduction, links presented in the book and more. In brief, I found the book to be informative, useful introduction. Though I found some of the examples  and cases (e.g. using Census data for market research) to be focused on the experiences and needs of public libraries, the general principles and ideas advanced in the book can be applied in other contexts.

The greatest strength of the book is Dempsey’s argument that marketing is a process with multiple steps including research, promotion and evaluation. Many equate “marketing” with “promotion” but this misunderstands the true scope and capabilities of a full fledged marketing strategy. The book also does well to argue that marketing, properly understood, addresses the whole organization. Dempsey makes a good point in observing that many in the profession equate marketing with promotion (promotion is defined as “… furthering the growth or development of a product or service” whereas marketing is defined as, “… taking steps to move goods from producers to consumers. It’s determining what people want, delivering it, evaluating consumer satisfaction, and then periodically updating that whole process.” – 16).

Read the rest of this entry »

How To Foster High Value Librarianship: Learning from the evidence-based literature

Yesterday, I was reading some articles from the very interesting Evidence Based Library and Information Practice which has me thinking about how librarians and information professionals deliver their services and the value of those services. Over time, I have seen movement away from low value services (e.g. automated circulation machines are now common at public and academic libraries rather than having somebody stand at a desk all day) to value added advice and service (i.e. designing research tools, performing patent research to save money, improving the quality of medical treatments and more). Without further ado, let’s look at two case studies.

The first article – A Librarian Consultation Service Improves Decision-Making and Saves Time for Primary Care Practitioners – was written by Heather Ganshorn (a librarian at Health Information Network Calgary, University of Calgary). This article reviews a recent study published in a medical journal (Just-in-Time Information Improved Decision-Making in Primary Care: A Randomized Controlled Trial, published November 2008). The article examined the impact of primary care practitioners submitting questions to librarians from mobile devices when treating patients. Health professionals saved time and, “63.7% of the answers were rated by participants as having a high positive impact on decision-making…” This type of study – applying the rigour of a medical clinical trial to librarianship – is innovative and worthy of replication. There’s another evidence summary on the positive impact of librarians in the intensive care unit (ICU) as well. Yet more evidence that shows that librarians make a measurable, positive difference in delivering health care.

In order to make greater room for service innovation, one must assess some of the long standing services we offer. One candidate for adjustment is the reference desk. Many people in the field will tell you that many questions (particularly in public and academic libraries) tend to involve directions, technology problems (“The printer is not working!”) and the like. One cannot take action on anecdotes though. A recent evidence review (Staffing an Academic Reference Desk with Librarians is not Cost-effective by Cari Merkley, Librarian at Mount Royal College in Calgary) found that out of close to 7000 reference questions (phone, email and in person) sampled through this decade at Stetson University found that 36% of queries related to printer/copier problems and only “Only 11% (784) of questions logged were deemed sufficiently complex by the researcher to require the attention of a librarian. The remaining 6175 transactions (89% of all those logged) could most likely be handled by a different staffing complement.” The evidence review does raise some methodological questions with the validity of the study, but I think there is something to this. When people want to see their physician, they have to make an appointment. The same thing applies to lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. While I suspect that these findings are generalizable to many academic and public libraries, it would be best to conduct similar investigations of reference desk interactions. Besides, the SLA Alignment Project reveals that many executives tend to value embedded research in working teams more than sitting around in the library or information desk waiting for a question.

A Comic View of Open Access in Science

I read and enjoy PhD Comics a great deal. Recently, the comic has done a series of comics exploring two of the world’s most well known science publications, Science and Nature (yes, that’s right, I read comics about science and publishing!). The fourth comic covers the recent history of open access in science and how it may impact the existing models. You can find part one, part two, and part three of the series on the Phd Comics website.

The comic refers to PLOS (Public Library of Science), a series of open access journals in biology, medicine, computational biology, Neglected Tropical Diseases and other topics. Open access in this case does not mean without fees though; authors have to pay publication fees that range from $1350 to $2900 USD. I gather that such fees are so common in science that these fees are often built into grants, so perhaps that is not much of a problem. In terms of copyright, PLOS uses a Creative Commons Attribution License: “Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLoS journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.”

Fall Conference Season: Access & Internet Librarian

Most of the large professional associations hold their annual conference in the summer months (e.g. ALA in June, SLA in June and CLA in May/June), but those large events are not the only ones worthy of attention. For some time now, I have been looking into two fall conferences: Access 2009 to be held September 30-October 3 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island and Internet Librarian 2009 to be held in Monteray, California which will be held October 24-28. Attending both would make for a very exciting and education fall season certainly!

The Access conference describes itself as, “Canada’s Premier Library Technology Conference.” Though there are still quite a few TBAs in the conference schedule, it looks promising. I like that such conferences are in parts of the country I’ve not yet visited – it makes them doubly appealing. The opening keynote will be given by technology columnist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow. I’ve read several of his novels and his non-fiction work on intellectual property (his novels are available for free under Creative Commons) with interest, so that makes it quite interesting. I also have the impression that it is a smaller event than SLA and CLA which means it should be easy to meet people and connect.

In contrast, Internet Librarian is a large conference that has been fully planned out for some time. There is even a video trailer for the conference (something I’ve not seen before in any other context) to promote it. The keynote is given by Vint Cerf, known as one of the architects of the Internet who now works as “VP & Chief Internet Evangelist” (quite possibly one of the most interesting job titles I’ve ever seen) at Google. There are different themes to the conference covering digital libraries, content management and innovation. The conference’s title is, “Net Initiatives for Tough Times: Digital Publishing, Preservation & Practices.”