Library day in the life, round 4

After rereading my posts from the last Library Day in the Life I didn’t want to do a blow-by-blow sort of thing again, so I’m going to content myself with this single post. It would have come closer to the end of the week except that the forecast is for either a snow or an ice storm on Thursday (depending on which forecaster you choose to believe). This being Oklahoma, there’s a good chance that any such storm will shut everything down, so I’m busily trying to get to all the must-do stuff. Here are the highlights:

On Monday morning the job search committee I’m on decided which candidate we wanted to offer the position to, in the afternoon I did my usual Reference Desk shift, and in the evening I worked on our federated search implementation.  In between I mostly attempted to clean out my email inbox (an ongoing project). Basically, email is my to do list. Common things that come into my inbox are: requests for trials/pricing, invoices and licensing agreements, “report a problem” notifications from our link resolver, and messages from various listservs, including three that I keep a very close eye on: SERIALST and the discussion groups for SFX (link resolver) and MetaLib (federated search engine).

Listservs can be annoying, yes, but they can also be your friend. I’ve learned a lot from the SFX one in particular — including, on a couple of occasions, when something isn’t working and no one’s told me.

Anyway, today it really sank in that there’s a good possibility work will be closed at least one day this week. And since I’ll be in Austin for ER&L most of next week, there’s lots to get done. So today I:

• ventured down to the basement to go through the donations in my collection development area (education) to see whether any were worth adding to the collection. Turned out that someone in the field had recently cleaned out their personal collection. Jackpot!
• helped one of my staff fill out the semi-annual performance reviews for the two people she supervises. We have a very non-intuitive program for this that seems to cause great confusion for most of the people who use it. It doesn’t help that we only access it twice a year.
• had conversations with our director and the WestLaw rep regarding an unsatisfactory clause in the renewal. I’m guessing it will go to both our legal departments to be resolved.
• had two random reference moments. Tracked down the Italian version of The Divine Comedy, and explained how to find information on constructing a survey.
• talked with the ProQuest rep.
• gathered together everything I’ll need to take to ER&L (well, the stuff that’s at work, anyway).
• futzed with the federated search stuff some more.
• freaked out about the press release regarding the state budget. It doesn’t look good folks, but at least the legislature finally conceded that it’s bad enough to dip into the rainy day fund.

Tomorrow, I’ll be spending the morning at a bookstore, buying books. We have a fund specifically for purchase of popular titles and January is my month to go on a little shopping spree.  The list of books I’d like to get far exceeds the funds available, but then it’s rare for a bookstore to have everything on my list anyway.

 

Books and me: 15 things

Steve re-started it.

1. In one of the many albums packed into the bottom of my parents’ secretary there’s a photo of me, age pre-7 (based on the house it was taken in), sleeping with a book spread open, spine up, across my chest. I recall it as a large blue book, but keep meaning to find the picture to verify that.

2. I learned to enjoy reading romance novels the first year I worked in Ryle Hall’s little bitty one-room library. Something like seventy percent of the books in there were romances and they were quite popular with our stressed-out student population.

3. For the eight years prior to that, my primary genre of interest had been fantasy, with some science fiction thrown in for balance. Blame it on The Hobbit, which I read in fifth grade. Starting with Tolkien must be something akin to starting with moonshine.

4. Prior to and overlapping with the early SF/fantasy years I read a LOT of biographies. As in, every one I could get my hands on. There was a whole wall of them in my elementary school’s library.The only ones I remember, though, were about Wilma Rudolph and Babe Didrikson.

5. After spending five years in my twenties working in bookstores, I had quite a collection of books. In February of 2005 I gave away or sold approximately 97% of them (along with all my furniture and lots of other things) before packing what was left of my possessions into my Geo Prism and moving from Idaho back to Oklahoma.

6. I reread fiction, but not nonfiction. My top rereads are: Anne McCaffrey’s Harper Hall trilogy; Pride and Prejudice; and Jane Eyre. Oddly enough, I first read all of these in eighth grade.

7. I write in books. Generally in pencil, but not always. When reading library books I first make sure there is no writing implement within reach.

8. Paperback science fiction cover art from the 60’s and 70’s is misogynistic, tacky, and dated. And I love it.

9. The first time I read Tarzan, I laughed out loud. Repeatedly. Did you know that he teaches himself to read by looking at books? Seriously.

10. The only textbook I still have from my undergraduate English degree is an anthology of British Renaissance poetry from the first major course I took. The next-to-last, an Old English textbook, didn’t make the cut in the purge mentioned in #5 and I still regret it. (It’s the only one I regret not keeping.)

11. I take S. R. Ranganathan’s “books are for use” quite literally. Two books each are under my two side-table lamps in the living room.

12. After graduating from library school in the summer of 2008 I found myself unable to complete any book that wasn’t a Regency romance. For 18 months. (Yes, this just ended.) I have a very large stack of partially-read books next to my bedside table.

13. My maternal grandmother’s masters thesis is the one book I can never see myself willingly parting with. No matter how rare, every other one is replaceable.

14. My most recent book acquisition: the new edition of the Larousse Gastronomique.

15. Due to a short stint working as a shelver in a public library, I know Dewey better than I do LC.

 

SIGALO fall meeting (rough notes)

Anne Prestamo (represents the Americans regional council to OCLC)

OCLC New Governance Structure

As OCLC became more international, more of a need for greater representation. Also, less and less cataloging focus—added e-resources, ILS, etc—and now have more non-library institutions as members.

7.1.09: Global Council and three regional councils replaced Members’ Council; Americas Council includes both South and North, plus Carribean—“bodies of the whole”

-Global Council has 48 delegates w/ each region guaranteed 4; remainder allocated based on revenue (designed to change yearly as needed); one f2f mtg per year

-Regional Councils get 2 members on executive committee

She thinks OCLC is looking for a better way for member organizations to have an avenue of communication with OCLC

Past and curret: difficult to be sure community colleges and school libraries are represented (didn’t specify why)

They’ve been transitioning—each regional council had to determine for themselves how they were going to operate. Under the new structure, *every* OCLC member organization has a seat and a vote at the Regional Council (new)

Emphasis on communication and advising OCLC—two-way relationship btwn members and OCLC

Meetings currently taking place in conjunction w/ ALA (so Boston for Midwinter, and first business mtg at ALA in DC in June). This won’t always be the case—trying to account for small travel budgets at the moment and there’s a critical mass of libs at ALA. In future, will do other mtgs, including Canadian. Will also do virtual meetings.

There are several positions that will be filled for positions starting July 2010 (see slide). Some geographic and institution-type requirements. Anyone from any member library is eligible to seek election. The election will be virtual. Each library will be asked to designate a voting representative—if none specified, then it’s the director. Results will be reported at summer ALA.

They need *all* libraries to be involved with this process. OCLC very concerned with this process and its results—all about communication.

Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records—this was a surprise to the Members’ Council, too! OCLC did eventually back off; review board appointed; their report made clear that more time and study were needed (see slide for link); very frank report: large proportion of people who responded said that OCLC had broken members’ trust by handling this the way they had. Transfer to new governance structure was already in process but took on a whole new importance.

New: Record Use Policy Council convened 9.09; charged with recommending a new policy “aligned with the present and future information landscape.” [mentioned III’s new cataloging thing—might be a sharing tool? hadn’t heard of this]

Federal gov’t libs and state libs were particularly worried about the record use policy because of conflicts with their missions

In the past, those involved with OCLC tended to be tech services people, but they need pub services people as well—can affect entire library

What does it mean to be a member of OCLC? What do you expect from OCLC? What are member organizations’ responsibilites back to OCLC?

Q&A

Q: Why did OCLC shunt aside the regional organizations like AMIGOS in favor of a more direct relationship with the members? Why do they want to hear from us yahoos out in the hinterlands? And how long will it take until they’re sorry? A: Members Council had no input into that. The network model didn’t exist in the international community, nor was the entire US covered by organizations similar to AMIGOS. So it was a business decision to move away from network/middleman relationship. Will take some time to discover how this will work out. Anne wants to know what our experience is with the customer service at OCLC now that we’re going direct to them for support. This is hard for AMIGOS because of the loss of the OCLC surcharge—new membership fee structure and they’re actively looking at areas that libraries still need support (just added 3M as a vendor partner). They did loose a few memebers due to new fees, but for most libs it was a wash. Getting back…She doesn’t think OCLC realized how big a job they were going to be taking on—had to hire new people to cover the support aspect. Her opinion: it was an unwise decision to cut out the regional newtorks. Some of the regionals are now getting into support for open source, as well as more consortial licensing and joint physical repositories (AMIGOS is looking into this).

Q: The restructing sounds very deomcratic on the surface, but seems more like a stockholder-type situation. How fast will the Americas Council actually be able to move/respond? A: These things do just take time, and OCLC doesn’t have a track record for acting quickly. The meaningful commincation will increasingly take place virtually, and so there can still be regional-specific activities within the bigger structure. Languages will also be a barrier. She doesn’t know if it’ll work, but it’ll definitely *not* work if members don’t participate and OCLC is offering the opportunity for us to be active participants. If we don’t speak up, it’s never gonna happen.

Q: When can the libraries expect to get communication from OCLC? A: Get on OCLC Abstracts mailing list. Should have already been or will be very soon a letter going out to primary contact of record—most likely director/dean-level.

Comment: Lirbarians used to take WorldCat for granted, so the recent flap was a wake-up call. Many of us didn’t realize there was any value in them. Response: If an organization like Open Library finds a way to mass-harvest information from WorldCat and then turns areound and sells it, neither OCLC nor any libs get anything from it. OCLC has agreements with GoogleBooks, for example, so it gives something back. They want to protect intellectual property. Bungled it, but she hopes that the outcome (in form of the new use policy) is worth it. Feels that we have a vested interest in OCLC.

Q: GoogleBooks and OCLC: snippet cataloging: commercialism and appropriateness? A: We don’t know how that will pan out until the settlement is complete. Academics can at least use the snipets as a discovery tool—can always ILL instead of buying [although that’s unlikely given the ease and familiarity of purchase model]. Also, there will be some sort of subscription service for libraries—just don’t know what it’ll be yet. Sarah: OCLC does seem to get that people just want the information, and don’t always care about buying it; we can’t just be about what’s in libraries anymore. Anne: Recently at an Abstracting and Indexing (publishing) meeting, was in a discussion about what Google is doing to them. Particular publisher had numbers on addition to their bottom line that happened when they started allowing Google to crawl their articles, so links to abstracts were available and people were buying the full text. Important for us to have our link resolvers registered with Google, so our users can get back to the library and not have to pay.

Q: Anybody know about state database agreement? A: State purchasing made ODL rewrite the RFP, which is why it’s so late. The 6-mo extension is up at the end of Dec. Bonnie says the choice has been made and the paperwork is in process, but that’s been the case for about a month. OCALD renewed PsychInfo; Newspaper Source Plus, BSP, ASP are new—agreement for five years.

Discussion: Paper to Electronic Workflow Changes

Barbara: At OSU (serials) 1997; 11,000+ current serials titles—maybe a handful of electronic. Now 53,799 titles w/ only 5,000+ in print. Intentional shift. Head of Acq 2002 (Louisa came in as serials); as of July doing more serials. Voyager library. Was 11 staff, now 6—loss mostly through attrition. Digital Library srvcs became new dept—web site, Serials Solutions, e-access. Periodicals keeps moving as the physical holdings shrink (bound periodicals are interfiled). Physical w/ e-access are going to annex; it’s very full.

Ila: OU does have remote storage—it’s almost full.

Barbara: Bindery and students taking more responsibility—receiving, tagging, shelving.

Faculty were the ones who didn’t want them to get rid of the paper(Michele: “They had a small cow.”); students more comfortable w/ online. Also, ARL counts volumes still.

JJ: Does anyone get microformats? Most do, but it’s minimal. This is the last year for her, except for NYT. (discussino went to ProQuest’s new digital—universal scorn due to lack of search). Cultural aspects of wanting print or film (preservation). Tulsa World isn’t indexed! They use TCity-County’s vertical file!

Barbara: They like packages. Allowed them to pick back up some titles that they had cancelled in paper prior. Some vendors don’t deal with EBSCO for e-only (and a few aren’t dealing w/ EBSCO at all anymore—this is still a minority). Lots are switching to Cox: OK Christian; Tulsa City-County; Southeastern (they do edi; no problems w/ title selection; smooth, easy switch). OSU will probably have to bid their periodicals in the next year or two. Sarah and Sandra both had to pull teeth to get EBSCO to respond to the new bid.

Louisa: They looked at the commercial e-resources managers and didn’t like them, so they built their own. Brandon Boils currently the database manager for it. Access and SQL w/ Cold Fusion (maybe). All packages, reps info, licenses scanned in and analyzed according to NISO standards (wanted to make it easy to switch if they ever do get a commercial). TCCL is going to start using ERMS.

Louisa: OSU catalogs their databases and all the ejournals, and their use stats show that people do indeed access them that way.

JJ: OK Christian uses LibGuides, which allows tracking use. Changes them each semester. Students seem to like them; suspect they’re getting used more than trad. web page.

General lack of statistics on how people are getting to particular journals. We have full text stats, but not where-did-they-come-from stats.

Junie: Because of their student population, they have to know the major to know what they have access to (OU-Tulsa). Their IP is attached to the Health Sci side, but there are plenty or Norman-affiliated students there too. “Collection development doesn’t really mean much any more.” Students don’t use what we thing they’re going to use. Scope has become an issue.

Also, issues with ILL and Reference, and how we interact with those departments. License issues for ILL. Course reserves and course packs, too. Uof Tulsa has deflected ILL from their ejournals. OK Christian has limited the number of ILL requests per time—were having problems with students doing searches and bulk requests, then not wanting them (print costs, time costs).

Michele: We’re lending more than ever.

Louisa: Difficulties with transmitting items that need the color images (art, diagrams, etc.). Junie’s medical folk are fine with the pdfs, but the architects still want paper, so it’s harder—the color printers aren’t always quite good enough.

Junie: Instructional librarians are having a hard time, too. Setting up the LibGuides was a start—there’s just too much for the students to sift through. Louisa: Students don’t understand how much they’re missing. JJ: tunnel-vision on topics; they won’t either expand or redefine their searches. Louisa: Johns Hopkins case where a doctor didn’t get subject-specialist help with a search and killed a patient because he missed something that was common knowledge from 40 years ago.

JJ: They’ve picked up Credo and the students love it (in answer to demand for more e-books). They got 100 titles and will add on each year. Anything they get through Credo they won’t get paper.

Sarah: TCCL is going more toward downloadable books, too. They’re not touching the catalog records for these—just batch load MARC for ebooks and ejournals and hope for the best. They’ve got 2 full time and 1 part time cataloger, plus her. Not enough time to do those and the books. 7500 titles is too much to even check the title and author. The items are getting used—they have the usage stats—but if there’s soemthing wrong in one, they won’t catch it. They’re spending so much time on kids books (which don’t get searched in the catalog and have a short shelf life)—she admits they need to look at a switch to spend more time with the records that the item is only available through electronic means.

Michele: Co-Ming still has them check some things in downloaded records.

Junie: We still treat electronic as ephemeral.

General problems w/ ILSs. Costs—switch to open access and pay a programmer instead of a company. If AMIGOS is going to support open access, then it’ll make it easier for smaller libraries to make that switch.

JJ: NetLibrary doesn’t always work with non-IE browsers, and their campus has gone Mac—lots of students using Safari, FF, Chrome. They’ve got a student position for programmer.

Junie: It’s sure not any less interesting!

 

Brick and Click rough notes session 5

Academic reserves via ReservesDirect (as implemented at NCSU libraries)

-opensource

-functional requirements list: global, administrative, user, course, item, statistics

-contenders: Equella (not suited), Docutek e-res (no trail of versions over the semesters), Ares (good tools for the staff but not enough for faculty), ReservesDirect

-works through authentication (login); enrollment based for students (pull datafeed from registrar’s office); for profs, can only see own classes, not edit anyone else’s—can add their own documents and URLs; searchable, so faculty can see what is on reserve for other classes

-admin side: the’ve added ability to add a video; can see who has used a particular article over time; way to make links non-breakable as they move across platforms

-needing to educate faculty about metadata so the search function wrks better (or cean it up for them)

-good, useful canned stats with limiters for admin; faculty also get a report as to which items have been opened, how many times, and by how many students (but not which ones)

-pilot test summer 2008 w/ 4 faculty and 1 instructional designer; bug reports led to fixes (if had to do over, wouldn’t use faculty, just more instructional designers, since the one was the only peson who really gave useful feedback)

-full release fall 2008; lots of positive feedback from faculty

-migration: datamap, 17 gigs of data, broken links (all of them!), confused document icons, wayward data, safety net

-ran some instrution session for faculty, but they don’t take them—only the instructional design people. Made office calls in order to do one-on-one training. Also has a video tutorial.

-www.reservesdirect.org/wiki

 

Brick and Click rough notes session 4

How to be the Bad Guy Without Being Bad (now with LOLcats!)

-You have to have the right group of people with the right attitude in order to have everything work right; any other group of people makes for an entirely different group of people.

-She’s had 52% turnover in 3 yrs but now has the right mix of people.

-Poor performance eats at an organization, rendering it unproductive, slow-moving

-Basic responsibility: productive and well-disciplined individual (then they’re happy)

-3 types of issues: performance issues; attendance; beahviour/conduct

-punishment failures: uncertainty, inconsistency (favouritism), long-term disaster (looses power); breeds apathy

-performance improvement discussion: know your org’s process; serious and planned; specific goals; structured (one goal: have the person agree to change the behavior)

-prepping for discussion: identify the specific difference between the actual and desired performance (the person has to take responsibility, and that won’t happen without specifics—too easy for them to rationalize); anaylyze the impact of the problem (why to solve); identify consequences (“further disciplinaty action” isn’t enough—be specific); determine appropriate action plan

-actual vs. desired performance: type of problem (if there are multiple, limit to highest priority); be specific and limit to facts

-first conversation is about the behavior and opportunity to change; second is about failure to change (consequences)

-disciplinary: change in workflow, physical location, or whatever might be incentive

-5 questions: Did employee understand the policy that was violated? Did the employee know in advance that such behavior would be subject to disciplinary action? Was the rule violated reasonably related to the safe, efficient, and orderly operation of business? Is there substantial evidence that the employee actually did violate the rule? Is the action planned reasonable related to the seriousness of the offence, the employee’s record of service, and the action taken with other employees who have committed similar offenses?

-Conducting the discussion: Somewhere private; as soon as possible; give enough time for discussion (but don’t want it to be endless, either); Go straight to point—no sense dragging it out since they’re already freaking out or worried; let them talk about it from their POV and be an active listener; gain agreement; end on positive expectation of change (and follow up in writing)

-2 causes of performance probs: 1) lack of knowledge (training issue) and 2) lack of execution (clarify expectations)

-execution problems: clarify expectations; remove obstacles; provide feedbac; arrange appropriate consequences

-attendance problems: cause is irrelevant; only the effect counts. Individual responsibility—coming to work is a condition of employment, as is coming to work on time. Address as you would a performance issue: logical consequences; gain agreement; personal choice; further action.

-attitude probs: (other than psychotherapy, religious conversion, and brain surgery) Handle it same as others. Just don’t *tell* them they have a bad attitude! They’ve heard it before. Just get the expected behavior in writing.

-Discussion difficulties: “yeah but,” “I’ll try,” silence, irrelevancy. You’re going for a concrete answer. Keep the conversation on track.

-Dismissal (aka “No Fault Divorce”) Sometimes the best thing you can do is fire someone. It isn’t a judgement on them as a person—it just means that the fit is bad. Dismissal should not be a surprise to anyone involved. Lots of meetings, feedback, and written documentation. There is no other choice.

-Have a plan. Pre-meeting; meeting; post-meeting. Know org’s requirements.

-Run it by a jury first if you feel at all uncertain. Was employee aware? How do you know that they knew? Do you have documentation? Were they given time to improve? Was training provided?

-Write a script. Short and to point. Listen to response. Repeat as necessary. Anticipate questions and concerns.

-Avoid misdirected compassion. No one enjoys doing this. Don’t let that stop you from carrying out the process. Their actions have had an impact on your org. The time and effort is only worth it if the behaviour is fixed or they leave.

 

Q&A

-how do you deal w/ unions? Doesn’t have to do so now, but in past union was very supportive as long as there was cause.

-Before the divorce, do you consider moving them elsewhere within the org? Yes. Sometimes it works, but sometimes there are other issues. Act in good faith.

 

Brick and Click rough notes session 3

Usability Testing for websites and other applications

-focusing on tutorials and user guides

-started out as making sure web sites cohered to design standards, but has gradually morphed to include how users intact with the site—really have to think about how to include testing in implementation process

-ISO def’n: extent to which a product can be used by specified users…

-don’t forget the consent form! might have to talk w/ IRB, too

-Card sorting: use, perception, demand; have participants sort cards w/ headings, then have them come up w/ own headings, then interview (from soc and psych); can lead to navigation redesign; time consuming to test and analyze results (can take pictures of the cards post-sort to help)

-heuristic: best practice (Jakob Nielsen); need outside experts; evaluate for specific criteria (ie, match beween system and real world [library jargon]); fix now/soon/someday; hard to find experts (and $$); high learning curve; can be hard on the site designer due to negative focus

-Assessment testing: users complete tasks; objective or goal-oriented; review for duplication; arrange from easiest to hardest; best method for feedback on functionality and navigation; can be formal or informal; remember to debrief the participant

-choose right method: demographics of users, purpose of testing; need lots of user groups represented; use incentives to recruit (also, neutral location and timing) [do lib staff and librarians separately, since they use the site differently and staff might be more willing to be open w/out libs in the room—can be good to have outside moderators for some groups]

-testing 2.0 apps: Focus! assessment tests work best for this. specific audience; greater depth of test; user population may have no prior experience with the application, so have to account for that in the questions

-content testing: focus on info; tasks based on learning objectives; interfae independent

-software testing: focus on navigation; tasks based on finding info; interface dependent

-Be sure to be focusing on Content, not software (unless you’re doing OA, you can’t do anything about the software)

-pretest: use to refine questions; small sample user group; screen captures can really help; repeat until results are consistent; methods: interviews after, screen capture, filming

-designing test questions: be specific and task-oriented; pretest for validity and clarity; broad or narrow scope—keep to middle ground; longer is not better—don’t want to tire people out or have them get bored (on side of paper seems to be good; it looks do-able)

-samples:

-find book: Does the lib. own a copy of ____?

-access a db: Does the lib. have access to _________?

-find lib. hours: What time does the lib close on _____?

-find contact info: Where is liaison’s office?

-Use back button: How do you get to previous material?

-Nielsen says doing 5 should be plenty—diminishing returns after that. But they aren’t so sure.

-implications: highlights user interaction relative to design; focus on important content; indicates higher maintenance items; underscores tast complexity; potential redesign

-figured out that students were having different interactions w/ the info depending on the librarian who had created the libguide, so they’re going to write some standards for the guides based on their findings.

 

Q&A

-What type of 2.0? Tutorials and guides are the only ones they’ve done testing for.

-signifiant diff in user groups? Yes! Esp. btwn patrons and librarians, w/ libs not understanding what patrons want (user testing can debunk lib myths about what students want)

-institutional standards in the website redesign? yes. colors, header, and a few other things dictated by the school (Wartburg College) so they had to work around, but their head guy was ok with a little switcheroos

-how much time? card sorting: one afternoon (used magnetic board and handed out candy bars while at the ref desk);  assessment takes much longer, esp. w/ pretesting, plus fact that application are often new to the user (and sometimes the lib!)

 

Brick and Click rough notes session 2

Serials Evaluation/Advanced Excel “magic”

-They’ll post a sample spreadsheet to the blog that will have the formulas in it

-Filtering (highlight entire sheet befoe clicking on filter [in sort area]) – like Scott uses

-IF statements, esp. in conjuntion w/ formatting rules

-Makes the review process easier since all info’s in one place and can filter and sort as the discussion goes, as needed

-Easier to update since they’re now more familiar with the process.

-Can use icons instead of shading for conditional formatting

-downloaded info on journal formats from EBSCOnet so they wouldn’t have to flip back and forth

-use data to tell the story rather than text—takes up less space

-Data validation; list; =[named column of info {such as Action: New, Review Next Year, Format Change, etc.}]

-icon sets are under “conditional formatting”; create new rule; choose icon sets when formatting; can use different colors for diff levels of use (just have to decide what levels are what)

-COUNTER compliance makes it easier to standardize our workflows

-Don’t worry so much about “making the wrong decision”—can always reorder something.

 

Q&A

-Faculty involvement? Not for cancellations. They’ve moved to trimester and enrollment is up, so faculty are very busy.

-Do they use these spreadsheets as justification? Yes, for audits, chancellors, and other outside groups. easy to hide columns that don’t apply.

 

Brick and Click session 1 rough notes

Cataloging and User Experience

-What users want

-info changing at umprecedented rate, but we’re not changing fast enough to keep up

-OCLC 2003 enviro scan; info conusumer trends: self-sufficiency, seamlessness (liesure/work overlap) – libraries are not seamless!

-2005 OCLC college student survey; satisfied with what they find through our search

-2009 OCLC what libs/users want; users=seamless flow, immediacy, enhanced content (TOCs, etc), advanced search options for narrowing, but w/ one box, expectations are based on popular sites

-Info now, in one place, and don’t want to have to go to lib to get it (but we’re not entirely digitized, so not there yet)

-Challenge=make catalog wrk for all

-

 

-Netx gen

-features:keyword search, relevance ranking, faceted search, search limits, did-you-mean, item recommendations, RSS feeds, user feedback, cover art, TOCs, reviews, tagging

-Endeca: works w/ existing ILS, simple, relevance and faceted, NCSU using

-VuFind: Open source (Villanova); faceted, author bios (browse search?)

-WorldCat Local: Does not sit on top of ILS, searches WC; single search, can link to ER, multiple languages (U IL-Chi)

-eXtensible catalog: still in development at U of Rochester (rollout in 2010); open source; will be discovery layer as well as converting existing MARC to XML to help prep for RDA’s scenario 1

(she didn’t mention Koha)

-If it metadata isn’t right, none of these will work right!

 

-RDA

-1997: AACR3 began to be talked about due to all the new e-formats, but work didn’t begin until 2004, so even more formats!; quickly realized that print-based ideas wouldn’t work; RDA started in 2005

-online product scheduled for release in 2010 w/ testing, eval, and training by national libs after release

-principles-based w/ more left to catalogers’ judgement (less ridgid rules); new formats shouldn’t flummox catalogers any more;

-content standard, not display standard (MARC, XML, whatever) w/ focus on user

-strusctured v. diff from AACR; still describing items, just adding other things; subjects, concepts; how to connect works, manifestations, etc., with subjects, people, and concepts

-www.rda-jsc.org/docs/5sec7rev.pdf

-

 

-FRBR

-user tasks: find, identify, select, obtain

-RDA is shaped by conceptual framework of FRBR; way of showing relationships to a greater extent than we have in the past

-Work (story, song, etc.), Expression, Manifestation, Item

- challenge is to take use from any expression or manifestation to all the related ones

-writers of FRBR and RDA didn’t dictate how to do it, so it’s up to the softwarre developers (only one company, in Sweden, that has developed a FRBR-based program)

-we currently catalog at manifestation level—wil be moving to datasets for each work, then another for expressions, and another for manifestation, but they’ll link in such a way that they’ll feed in info so things won’t have to be redone each time.

 

Three RDA scenarios

3: “flat file” = OPAC w/ no linking (card catalog)

2: linked bib and authority records (like we have now)

1: relational/object oriented db structure; linked datasets; new infrastructure w/ info based online (future); will we have the infrastructure, will linnked data always be available, “will someone change it like wikipedia?” (URGH! Haven’t we gotten over this yet?)

 

Prepare

-catalog w/ RDA in mind; note rlationships; use authority records

 

Q&A

-we currently spend a lot of time doing authority work; will it be more or less important in scenario 1? More important! But less work because the effort will be more spread out. (LC’s lack of subfield d codes, which they had quit doing to save time but are now going to want to get RDA to work properly)

-Is FRBR more a program than a database? She doesn’t know, doesn’t understand semantic web very well, nor metadata. But the metadata people think that this will work. Q’er is worried that will have to redo work; P’er says programs should be able to do the work to convert MARC to XML

-More on user tags in nextgen catalogs? Can you search by them? Depends on the catalog, but they should be set up that way.

[example throughtout was P&P and various off-shoots]

 

Implementing MetaLib and Primo, part 3

So far, the biggest thing I’ve learned from being on this committee is that technology is never as easy as it appears.

This might seem self-evident to many people, and I’d had a small taste of the concept when working on small web page programming projects for school. But implementing this federated search technology has driven most of my preconceived notions completely away.

Even with technology that’s out of beta and in use in many other places, things can simply not work in an entirely unpredictable way. My assumption had been that because our ILS and link resolver were from the same company as the two new products, there would be no difficulties. But systems get tweaked.

One of the things we’d been having difficulty with was authentication — definitely important! My inexpert understanding is that it had to do with a campus system, not a library one.  Luckily, that was solved by having people use a different login than originally intended. I’m just glad we had the option. Right now, the big “uh oh” is the lack of real-time availability. Then there’s the thing I’m most worried about: holdings information for Periodicals. It isn’t displaying.

These things will eventually get figured out or worked around, and then we’ll be able to start doing things like user testing. In the meanwhile, I’ve been reading some articles on that topic in preparation, even though I don’t know for sure that we’ll do anything formal. I hope so.

 

Saturday reference, homecoming edition

The homecoming parade just went by and it’s rather quiet in the library. I suspect it will be like this until we close, what with all the other activities throughout the day and football game this evening. We are at least saved from the tomb-like qualities of complete emptiness by the students showing their parents around and alumni on nostalgia trips.

* * * * * *

Nearly one o’clock and I just got my first non-directional, non-wireless, non-printing question. Thank goodness for the folks taking the education research class — they’re usually the ones who enliven my reference shifts.

* * * * * *

Thirty minutes later and another research-related question. Wow. Must be something in the air today.

* * * * * *

Or not. Since one o’clock I’ve had two questions, and it’s almost five. There are plenty of folks about, at least. Gotta like a good gate count.