CNI Project Briefing, Monday December 10th at 3:15 pm by Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard of the State and University Library Aarhus, Denmark

How should I position my talk? How many in the room are technical, how many are in management?

Exploring integrated search. Trying to change the way that we are serving the information to our users. Why do we want to to do this? Our integrated catalog project called is Summa, which will be open sourced this coming Friday (December 14th).

Behind the search program: user expectations and a survey – tried to observe users. had them fill out diaries for 28 days. Statements tested with a questionnaire. Determined 3 different personas of libray users:

• library enthusiasts: know about resources and databases, these are the ones we like. the minority.

• drive-in users: we don’t see them, spand as little time in library as possible, they think they know how to search, they think they are expert

• working students: students who sit in library to study, but don’t use resources. Feel they work better in the library. want peace and quiet and books on shelves to surround them.

Results of study: library users don’t use resources as we expect them to, they use other tools to locate resources. library catalog best only at finding a known item, rather than discovery. Students use amazon to find books then come back to the catalog to search for specific titles.

Question asked of users n surveyv- how do you discover resources? Google, chaining (using a known source to browse), OPAC, danish union catalog, advice from teacher, advice from peers, advice from librarian. students using Google tend to know about library resouces as well.

How do we capture the appeal of Amazon? Two disparate worlds of research – librarians have a number of tools to use, whereas students have problems, research topics, goals, and tasks. Suggestions, advisement, user involvement, should be part of the blending of these two worlds.

Inhibitors to using licensed library resources – lack of awareness, difficulty navigating library website, students try to search catalog for articles not understanding it’s not meant for this, authentication barriers.

Let users tailor the way search results are displayed. Including different werbservices in catalog searching such as research portals – generally well perceived.

Verificative search (exact terms, federated search) v. exploratory search (approximate search terms, tools to support refinement are essential, need to operate on all available data to make this functional).

Google was used by students more often for factfinding than to identify and locate articles.

How do we liberate the data from catalogs and databases? We need to develop a methodology that has a discovery layer, a logistics laer, and a delivery layer that are kept separate.

Summa – open source catalog project. Idea behind it: A variety of information containers (OPACs a,b,c, e-journal, institutional repositories) that are searched by index using discovery-based and explorative searches. Resource delivery component still needs work.

Summa – what is it? A search engine and front-end, for indexing metadata or full-text, integrated search, modular, open source

What it’s not – it’s not a library system. Nothing to do with federated search. Not another Google. It’s a resource discovery layer on top.

How Summa is structured – Storage layer, then computational layer, then business layer, then presentation layer. White paper that describes Summa in more detail that will accompany the open source release of Summa. www.statsbiblioteket.dk/summa or wiki.statsbiblioteket.dk/summa to try Summa.

Search results – we’ve “stolen” Google suggested alternate search terms, the “did you mean?” feature, basket feature of Amazon, relevancy ranking (or by year or title). “Try to do what people expect you to do.” Subject librarians are integrated in searhc results – survey results showed that people had little knowledge that there were subject librarins. Combines human part of the search with library resources.

“Cluster analysis” – groups search terms by subject, broadly described (not controlled vocabulary). Principle of using different mechanisms to guide a search – suggestions for narrowing searches down.

Nothing in Summa is being done for the first time – “we steal with honor.” Open sourced to gain the wisdom and innovation of the community.

Relevance and Quality – results can be ranked by users, helps us sort out how we define “relevance.”

Protecting the data from obscurity – when corporations digitize books, what information will be made available to libraires and at what cost?

Tim Berners-Lee presenting the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration.

Tim: I’m a “fan of open source and all good things.”

Purpose of the awards is to highlight those who were part of the open source community and involved in moving it forward. Awards limited to Mellon constituencies that contribute to open source development

10 awards given, two levels of recognition – seven at $50,000, three at $100,000. Press release lists recipients of the 2007 awards.

CNI Director Clifford Lynch – New Initiatives in Program Planning

Four Foci of CNI:

advocacy and policy
content
organizations
technology and related infrastructure components

Higher-ed tech networks have gone through a “major technology refresh” in the past few years. Putting switch bandwith in place. What this means for the next gen of netword based aplications (data mining, etc.) that are bandwidth intensive.

Net Neutrality – very important. Must rely on net to provide access on an equitable basis or the goal of providing access to diverse content will falter. Should be paying close attention to net neutrality. “Wireless world”… Speaking to a group of info science grad students and asked about Carter Phone decision… none had. It was the key legal decision that opened phone equipment to other developers. Mobile carriers are having trouble with this idea – mobile networks may be opened to whatever equipment is available.

Raw Hardware – Growing recognition that research computing is a mechanism for converting mass amount of electricity to massive amounts of heat. Electricity is getting very expensive. Google, etc. locating massive computation centers near cheap hydroelectric power.

Cyberinfrastructure – Datanet call for proposals, large scale proposals involving networks and data curation. Due January 7th. Digital Humanities Centers – how might these be structured?

Teaching and Learning Environments and Platforms – We’re at an interesting crossroads. Development of platform technology – Second Life, Sokai, spectrum from immersive learning evironments to traditional learning platforms. Steady and growing investment in content. Open sourceware and open educaiton. Write content that we can expect to be reusable in the long term. We shoudl stabilize interfaces to ensure reusability of content. Are we at one of these points, or is the underlying technology too immature?

Special Collections Material – ARL Hidden Collections conference. Important for all great libraries with hidden collections to make these collections visible through descriptive and digitization strategies. Opportunity to learn with our colleagues in archives and museums. Much of this content is digital narratives and history. Challeged to structure tools and practices to provide content. Large-scale digitization of collections will raise interesting new issues – debtes around repatriation of cultural materials. Role of surrogates in educational use. Impossible to make a surrogate to satisfy all uses, but technology is good enough to satisfy many uses.

ARL Website – recognizing the “celebrating collections” website that highlights digital collections of its member libraries.

Digitization – projects moving forward apace. Making major progress here, but running into substantial challenges. Continued need to integrate these with finding tools and bibliographic apparatuses. Computation on large corpora of literature. As google digitizes on their corpora of literature, they can compute on it, but we can’t. Qusetion of data mining in license agreements, how me manage assets in digital form. This is not solely a retrospective progblem. What kinds of authorial practice and markup can we apply? Resurgence of appliance e-book readers and resurgence of press hype around apapliance e-book readers. This idea stirs up many feelings in the public including “violently luddite ones.”

Repositories. Ongoing challenge of accessioning collections of individuals or small organizations which are often now in digital form. These collections are now often sold instead of donated.

Eletronic Theses and Dissertations – CNI as place where discussions of EDTs were first framed. Time to take a broader look – where are we with ETDs?

I’ll be blogging and presenting at the Coalition for Networked Information Fall 2007 Task Force Meeting tomorrow – I’ve wanted to attend one of these conferences for some time due to their innovative and collaborative focus, and I’m also interested to see how my reference-centric “project briefing” is received amid the other sessions, many of which look excellent. The title of my talk is Moving Communication Forward: Internet Voice and Video in Libraries (slides to come).

I’ve learned that these meetings are typically comprised of senior level administrators from IT/academic library/government/publishing entities, meaning that it will be an audience drastically unlike those I usually present to. A good challenge, and as always I’m all about any initiative that promotes dialogue between libraries and other information organizations.

More about the meeting:

Project Briefings

Meeting Roadmap

About CNI

CNI Member Organizations

From a two-part NPR series on online education, thanks to the Distant Librarian:

The source document for this table is a Sloan Consortium study, Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning.

In Mashing on the Library, Part 1 Jenny over at the Shifted Librarian profiles examples of libraries who have integrated Meebo widgets into their OPAC. Sarah at Librarian in Black has a similar post. Judging from our incredibly positive experience with Meebo reference the in-catalog widget approach couldn’t help but be a success, and Sarah makes the excellent point that OPACs are the “single biggest point of contact with our users.” Our catalog is still somewhat in the dark ages, but hopefully we’ll get something like this going soon:

One quick thought on Meebo reference – if at all possible, don’t bury chat widget more than one obvious click away from the main library site or other service it’s meant to supplement (like a catalog or a blog) – the more prominently they are placed, the better. I’ve run across one too many Ask a Librarian widgets that took ages to find… having them up front greatly increases their legitimacy and ease of use.

EDUCAUSE has an ongoing project worth highlighting – “Photojournalism of Your Learning Spaces” asks students and staff at universities and colleges to photograph positive and negative aspects of their learning environments and and upload them to Flickr, tagged publicly with “learningspaces” or “learning_spaces.” Although many of the photos don’t have explanatory notes that would help the viewer understand what works or doesn’t work in a particular instructional space, it’s still useful to see campuses, libraries, and classrooms from a student perspective, as well as the vast array of often uncomfortable learning configurations available. Several thousand images have been added thus far. Here’s an example of the problematic “packed in like sardines around a giant pole” effect:

This project brings to mind fieldwork and self-documentation research methods used by Foster and Gibbons in Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester.

I posted on a Skype pilot at the University of Canterbury Libraries in New Zealand a while back – it looks like they’re now using Skype instead of traditional AV equipment as an aspect of usability testing for a website redesign… great idea, and one that can save a lot of money and trouble in the process.

Also, EDUCAUSE recently came out with a 7 Things… publication on Skype, link courtesy of iLibrarian.

It’s been a long while since I posted – it’s been snowy in these parts, which is sure to put any Texan off her game for a spell. First off, I’ve lately been impressed with a Firefox extension that lets you edit web images in-browser – snipshot. You can right-click on any web image (or ctrl-click on a Mac) and edit said image online. It’s great at reducing distortion when resizing both high and low-res pictures, which bloggers are likely to appreciate:

Next, something my colleague Chad found at Resource Shelf, the aptly named Add to Search Bar extension (also available in the Firefox extensions page), which lets you add any search box or engine to your Firefox search toolbar. For example, I could right-click on the infomational search box and add it to my browser search engines:

Submitting a search to the infomational search bar above will display search results within the blog’s interface, meaning that this extension is a perfectly budget way to whip up a Firefox toolbar search for an OPAC or federated search function on library computers. The only thing to watch out for when creating browser search bar shortcuts from article or abstract databases is that they may be proxy dependent, meaning that off-campus or out-of-library users may have difficulty accessing results if the library proxy isn’t recognized.

Gmail recently added a new feature – group chat:

It’s simple to use – one click in the chat window to search existing contacts and add another user:

I find that I use Gmail chat more than any other service these days, and this is definitely a welcome addition. Still no voice, video, or easy file transferring in Gmail chat, but all these options are currently available in GTalk.

Of course everyone has been blogging about the atrociously-named ebook/blog reader, the Kindle – billed self-importantly by Amazon as a “revolutionary wireless reading device.” I’ve been putting it off out of sheer ennui, but like many others I believe it’s a step on the long and dreary march towards a usable portable electronic reader, which despite being way overdue is simply a matter of time.

Kindle has so many flaws that I’m more interested to see how people hack it up than anything else – its choking DRM restrictions leave little room for anything but straight purchase downloads from the Amazon store, which is both limiting and short-sighted. That said, the ball is rolling to apparently make it a better product – a Seattle Times blog interview with the Kindle program director reveals that they anticipate future third-party development and are aware that device hacking is inevitable.

if:book reports that, in an unsurprising move, Amazon stopped discounting paperbacks the same day they released the Kindle. Kindle. Kindle? Why Kindle? I can’t get over the name, seriously. It’s awful.

Why not simply make it do what people want in the first place? Among my complaints – it’s $400. It doesn’t read PDFs or other formats without a hack, only offers 256 MB of memory, and sadly gives no opportunity for open URL collaboration with library ejournal and ebook collections. And on and on. Someone is going to get this right someday.