NeoArch

I was playing around with Yahoo Pipes today, and I decided to make a pipe that would let you search Google Books. It’s simple, but effective. With a little work, one could probably use it to embed a Google Book search in a website or Facepage. If you’re really creative, you can tweak one to embed in your OPAC. Enjoy. If you find any nifty uses for it, let me know in a comment. I would be interested to hear about it.

I’ve been reading a little Carol Kuhlthau lately (as an assignment, not by choice), and I’ve actually enjoyed some of what she says about the information search process. Some of her ideas seem to be similar to things expressed by some of the Library 2.0 crowd, especially the idea that realizing where library users have uncertainty should help us design systems that actually help researchers get past the uncertainty. That’s a very user-centered idea of libraries (imagine that concept) and library services. I really wonder how much Kuhlthau has influenced other writers that I enjoy reading such as Jenny Levine, Michael Stephens, Michael Casey, and John Blyberg? They seem to say many of the same things, although all of these are much more readable than what I have read from Kuhlthau.

A library in Ohio just migrated to KohaZoom, the open-source version Integrated Library System. This particular version of Koha appears to be developed by a vendor, LibLime. You can see The system in action here.

Notice anything about it? That’s right, folks. It looks just like Amazon, and it uses Amazon images. Bye, bye, usability problems. Hello instant street cred with patromers.

Needless to say, I want one.

I will continually be updating this post during the webinar. Tamar Sadeh is leading the seminar. If you miss the webinar, Ex Libris is archiving it.

• User expectations
  • Users expect sites like Google, Answers.com, Del.icio.us
  • Google ranking helps users find what they need quickly
  • Google provides links to resources that they think are unessential
  • These type of sites have high tolerance, spelling correctors, did you mean, etc.
  • Amazon has personalized results
  • Sites like Scirus let you drill down into results
  • Del.icio.us allows you to tag, offers alternative ways of viewing results.
  • Amazon suggests what similar items other users have viewed
• Facts about users
  • Users typically begin searching for information with a search engine, especially college users.
  • They believe this is so because
    • user information is outdated
    • information is not consolidated
  • Karen Calhoun of Cornell has called for change in OPACs
  • UCal says something similar

[Drat! I lost the feed. This thing takes forever to get back into!]

[Drat again. I can't get back in. No, wait, I am in. Just picking up where I came back in now.]

• Primo harvests information from several types of sources and is in one interface.
• It allows you to group similar items. You can ignore, view all, etc.
• Simple display. It has more curves than a 55 Chevy!
• Provides an interface where users can find, not just search.
• Will take users to homepage of online journals using SFX
• Integrates with DigiTool to provide images and digital repository content
• Can provide covers, tables of content in conjunction with Syndetics
• Can provide links to Amazon.com from OPAC (important for reviews, etc.)
• Allows for personal tags and allows you to see the tags the community used!
• Lets you drill down with a column on the right hand side (like clutsy or aquabrowser)
• Suggests different results and recommends different searches.
• Washes dishes, Bakes cornbread–no, wait. That's my beautiful wife Michele.
• Offers alternative items that appear to be only partially relevant (Think Google offering books or maps at top.)
• My buddy Paul is firing questions left and right at them already. I'm just a notetaker.
• Quick results and more results separated
• Paul says "Hi, everyone. I am the world's foremost authority on IM."
• EL believes social computing is important to users.
  • Primo has a view most popular tags page.
• A few words about Primo
  • focused on end-user. User centered design.
  • social nature enriches experience of user
  • Can be used with any type of digital repository, deep-linking service. Not just EL's products
  • Exposes hidden collections
  • It is a "total solution"
    • integrated
    • scalable
    • something else
  • Uses four layers to accomplish all this.
• Q&A
  • would it replace OPAC?
    • new paradigm. shift from OPAC. OPAC part of ILS. Primo is "decoupling front end from the back end." OPAC front end for lib collections. Primo finds all collections of all types.
  • What is relationship between Primo and Metalib?
    • Primo discovers local and digital content. Gives library option of discovering remote resources. Metalib finds remote stuff. Primo displays it. Primo doesn't search it like ML does.
  • Do you offer Primo in non-English interfaces
    • Yes. Several languages. French, German, Korean, and it is can be translated.
  • What technology is used? How resembles NCSU OPAC.
    • goal to be comprehensive product for delivering scholarly content. Not just a search engine. Has powerful publishing platform.
  • Do catalog and metalib searches have to be in separate tabs
    • Takes more time to get metalib results than local
    • remote sources not normalized
  • Will it work with other systems than MetaLib
    • plan to make it work well with ML.
    • Doesn't say that it will work with others.
  • When will it be available
    • One partner in Europe and two in US are testing.
    • One partner in US will launch next week.
    • Several offering to participate at different levels (Man, I want to be one of these. I've been blogging this thing to death. Throw me a bone!)
    • Will be released in first quarter of next year (2007) for several institutions.

Sorry, folks, I did miss a couple of things, but that is the gist of it all. I hope I missed nothing important.

Well, enough fun. Off to a staff meeting.

Kudos to the folks at Ex Libris for jumping into the library 2.0 discussion. Many librarians are currently complaining about the slowness of vendors to react to changes within computing culture. To be fair, the employees for some vendors are doing the same. For example, Stephen Abrams, SirsiDynix's VP for Innovation, bemoaned this slowness during his section of the Dead & Emerging Technologies Forum at CIL2006. It looks as if Ex Libris is working to at least stay close to the curve, if not ahead of it.

Patrons today probably expect that all library resources should be able to be found in one place. Federated searching and link resolvers are a nice start, but Ex Libris has gone one step further. Today, they officially published that they are developing a tool called Primo, "a complete solution for the discovery and delivery of diverse content types." I had a chance to speak with the folks at Ex Libris during the recent CIL2006, and I have to admit, they have my curiosity peaked. I like the fact that they are trying to bring all of a libraries resources into one place. I am extremely excited that they decided to make a fopac-like product that allows for tagging and comments. I cannot wait to see how this functions, and I think I would love to be in on the testing of this product.

I do have a few questions, though.

• Will Primo work in conjunction with other Ex Libris products such as MetaLib, or will it be a total replacement for it? I know the newsletter says, "Primo uses the metasearch capabilities of MetaLib to perform the searches on remote databases," but I am not exactly sure whether this means Primo has MetaLib built-in, or whether MetaLib will be separate. I think it means that one has to have MetaLib as a separate product, but I am not sure.
• Will institutions be able to add online resources to Primo? I assume they can. What if I want to use Primo to access several search engines? Can I do that?
• Will it generate RSS feeds and permalinks for searches?
• I know it is customizable, but can it be OpenSearch-like? Or can it be incorporated into OpenSearch?
• Given Paul Miller's recent article on the death of the OPAC, will Primo soon be unnecessary? FWIW, I highly doubt it, but I just thought I would throw it out there.

If anyone has any other questions, feel free to leave them in a comment. Perhaps someone from Ex Libris will come over and discuss all this. Whether they do or not, kudos to them for trying to give librarians what they say they want!

My administrator had a great idea recently. He wanted to be able to discuss important books and ideas with the staff, and yet he did not want to overly tax our time. So, he enlisted the help of a bright, active patron to write brief book reviews and present ideas that our staff could discuss a couple of times a month. Since he started this activity, we have discussed such books as Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and Oliver O’Donovan’s Common Objects of Love and discussed the potential impact they could have on our library. He recently had the patron, Matt Crawford, research the concept of Library 2.0 for the staff. Some of our staff were very familiar with the concept, and others were not. I thought Matt did a pretty good job of presenting the idea, so I asked his permission to publish his piece on my blog. So, if you would like to read a patron’s summary of Library 2.0, you can download it at the link below.

Library 2.0: A Summary of What’s Been Said So Far