The Distant Librarian

3 more mobile-friendly vendor sites

All three now on the M-Libraries wiki page, Resource Shelf points out that LexisNexis, EBSCOhost, and Summon are all sporting fancy new mobile-friendly interfaces.

Apparently people want scholarly articles

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a recently-published study that monitored a file-sharing site where almost 5,500 scholarly articles were traded over a 6-month period, "costing journals about $700,000 in that time, or about $1.4-million a year."  Interestingly, the study is freely available online from The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics.  I call BS on the monetary figure, but you can't dispute there's obviously a black market for scholarly material. 

And that's where DeepDyve comes in.  From their site:

Research - Search across 30 million articles from thousands of authoritative journals.
Rent - Rent premium articles for just $0.99. View open access articles for FREE.
Read - Read the entire article in DeepDyve's Viewer.

It's that rental part that's so interesting.  Your $0.99 will buy you 24-hour access to the article, though "Some of DeepDyve's articles are "Preview Only." DeepDyve does not currently have permission from the publisher to rent these articles."  They'll also link you directly to the publisher's website where you can actually download the article (and where people will be shocked at how much these things actually "cost" - Paul).

I signed up for the two-week free trial to see what the reader looked like, and how well the search engine worked.  As I suspected, you can do screen grabs of the articles (rendered in a Flash reader), so the rental part isn't really an issue.  They do chunk up the articles though, making that process and the subsequent re-reading a PITA.

The search engine is a basic single box, though Advanced Filters does offer more options.  Doesn't seem to respect phrase searching in quotes.  Hmmm, through my Account info I can see my viewing history, which while may prove convenient to researchers, certainly raises a big red flag around privacy and confidentiality.  I don't see an option to turn that off.  Wow, I got 87,333 results on a search for "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"! Which is ten less than my search on "supertramp"...  Umm, I think that search engine needs a little more work. 

Overall though it was a pleasant experience, and I predict that as long as they've actually got agreements with the publishers, independent researchers are going to go for this product.

Internet Librarian days 2 and 3

Didn't take many notes on day three, so I'm combining two days in this post.  Even so, it shouldn't be as long as the day one post.  I took these notes for myself, not necessarily for the blog, so they're most definitely not session reports - hopefully some useful links to explore.

I started the day at the Summon-sponsored breakfast where we heard Peter Jacso speak mostly about how awful Google Scholar metadata is, and how whenever he points out a series of errors, Google immediately removes them from the database.  Some examples include a vast number of records with author:methods or author:password  He's just published an article under the title of "Google Scholar's Ghost Authors" in Library Journal.  Good speaker who reminded me very much of my late Grandpa Pival :-)

Day 2 Keynote was an interview OF Paul Holdengraber, who hosts / moderates / interviews people for the Live from NYPL program - I want to search for audio of these - they should be great. (update: This lecture series is available in audio and video with transcripts AND Conversation Portraits in iTunes)  Start at http://www.nypl.org/LIVE .  Paul feels very strongly that the library should surprise people, not necessarily deliver only what people expect.

First Session - Dreaming, Designing and using mobile platforms - mostly overview stuff in this double session - I left after the first half to go listen to the UMich session (below).  Tom Ipri's slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/Tombrarian/mobile-library-platforms. Also check http://lifeonterra.com/m and compare it to the traditional version at http://lifeonterra.com/.  This is a project of the University of Montana, introduced by Jason Clark. I think Jason mentioned this site makes use of something called meta viewport, which I want to further explore.

Toby Greenwalt mentioned using a combination of Yaz + Z39.50 + PHP = mobile catalogue?  He also talked about using Shoutbomb for SMS alerts.  Red Laser, costs $1.99 in the iPhone app store, but has an SDK so someone may be able to get it to scan our library barcodes...

Designing for content-rich websites - UMich Library
John Creech is the Website Content Manager, Ken Varnum is Web Systems Manager
Use the regular libguides XML data dump to search via Solr, to integrate search results with those from the rest of the Drupal site.
Similar to UT Mississauga, librarians are listed in the catalogue by subject headings (call number ranges) and if there's a high-enough number of matches the subject librarian will appear along with the search results.  In Drupal, taxonomies are assigned to librarians.

An excellent tip picked up from Ken Varnum, Hathi is pronounced "Hot-ty" (that's 98% correct, but a lot better than the way I had been pronouncing it!  :-)

Marshall Breeding on SEO, then Andrew White from SUNY Stony Brook  Scholarly Stats, a service which is supposed to help with COUNTER and SUSHI stats.

Check out Splunk.com - appears to be a real memory and processor hog, but could provide some interesting slice and dice on ezproxy stats.

Kara Reuter, Extreme Makeover - user-centered design of http://worthingtonlibraries.org - they borrowed heavily from the museum world using a "visit" link to contain information about hours, parking, info, etc.   Their navigation choices are Visit / Borrow / Research / Interact / Calendar / About

Char Booth suggests replicating the OCLC User Perception reports at the local level - the survey instruments should be available.  "The more you like libraries, the more likely you are to like library technology" NOT "younger people like library tech"  The report Char was speaking to is Informing Innovation: Tracking student interest in emerging library technologies at Ohio University (147-pg PDF).  Really interesting results, but Char pointed out several times that this is a case study, and that results could be pretty different at your library.

Keynote - Day 3 - Growing up and Grown-up Digital - Net-Gen Speaks
Stephen Abrahms and a panel of teens - see note above about "case study".  Really interesting to hear these three young adults talk about their use of technology and thoughts about libraries, but I wouldn't bet any money that this was a representative sample of America's youth.

Nicole Engard - Library Mashups
http://mashups.web2learning.net (homepage for her recent book, Library Mashups)
http://www.programmableweb.com -- tracks mashups and tools
Mashup Tools - Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com) Jody Fagan wrote an article in Computers in Libraries (2007) that explained it very well for Nicole - also chapter 7 of Nicole's book
http://readingradar.com - NYT bestseller list and merges with data from Amazon.com
http://www.thisweknow.org - interesting local / govt info for locations in the US
Check out "machine tags" on the flickr API
http://mashups.plsinfo.craftyspace.com - Library Mashup Demo site
http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api - Open Library APIs
http://worldcat.org/devnet/wiki/SearchAPIDetails - WorldCat APIs

I could really use an entire session or workshop on Yahoo Pipes! - plenty of reading to do there.

And that's where my notes end.  Overall I really enjoyed the conference this year; especially nice to meet so many twitter friends in person :-)  Might be heading to CIL2010 next April - that'd be my first time there since 1994!

Books of enduring scholarly value

I found a link to this video on the TeleRead blog.  It's a 4:00 overview of how Cambridge University Press and Cambridge University Library are partnering to both bring back OOS press titles and to digitize library titles in a print-on-demand operation.  Nothing we haven't seen before, but a nice look into how some are working even w/o Google.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

An emerging list of the top 100 tools for learning in 2009, as picked by 202 learning professionals (and possibly you!).  Pleased to note that I was aware of 87 of them, with most of the new-to-me ones being related to animation and course authoring systems.  I found it particularly interesting to note the changes between 2007-2009, with some obvious risers like Twitter and Slideshare, but some interesting fallers, such as Facebook drifting from 17 in 2007, to 24 last year, to 33 this year, Microsoft Word dropping from 10 to 22 to 42 this year, and Bloglines falling from 12 to 30 to 73 this year!

Well worth a few minutes to look over the list to see what might be useful to you.

After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about next-generation catalogues.  While the article provides a pretty good background of the issue (IMHO), the comments provide an excellent summary of librarian psychology.  What's only touched upon briefly in the article is the ability for these new "web-scale index searching" tools to search so much more than traditional bibliographic data.  As I mentioned in last week's LJ webcast, at the University of Calgary we want to expose students to the collections of not only our library, but also our museum, archives, and locally digitized material, none of which appear in a traditional OPAC. 

Read those comments.  Where do you fall in your thinking?

Archive now available for Returning the Researcher to the Library: The Summon™ Service in Real Life

This past Tuesday I participated as a panelist in the the fourth and final Library Journal session in the "Returning the Researcher to the Library" series: The Summon™ Service in Real Life.  The archive of that webinar is now available for your listening pleasure.  Let me know how you think I did, and if you have any questions.

Webcast: Returning the Researcher to the Library: The Summon™ Service in Real Life

Library Journal and Serials Solutions are presenting the fourth and final session in the "Returning the Researcher to the Library" series: The Summon™ Service in Real Life.  I'm one of three panelists, joining librarians from Grand Valley State University and Western Michigan University in discussing why we're exploring the idea of Web-Scale Discovery (that appears to be what Serials Solutions has settled upon calling this type of product).  Personally, I'll be talking about our fairly-rare (can't say for certain that it's unique) organizational structure at the U of Calgary and why it begs for such a product, as well as touching upon some of the challenges we've experienced as we're exploring bringing up Summon.

You can find archives of the first three "Returning the Researcher to the Library" webcasts at http://www.libraryjournal.com/webcastsDetail.

Additional observations about unified discovery services

As Grand Valley State U works towards launching Summon, Laura at Llyfrgellydd posts some additional observations about unified discovery services.  I think all her points are valid; well worth the 2-3 minutes it'll take you to read.

Tune In September 2: The Google Book Scanning Project--Issues and Updates

Educause Live presents:
Topic: The Google Book Scanning Project—Issues and Updates
Date: September 2, 2009
Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m. PDT). International participants: You may wish to visit this external time-conversion website to calculate the start time in your time zone.
Duration: 1 hour

For about five years, Google has been scanning and indexing millions of volumes drawn from academic libraries and other sources worldwide. The project has been greeted with high praise but also with lawsuits. In the latter category, a judge will shortly decide whether to approve a settlement reached last year by Google and several organizations representing authors and publishers. The issues swirling around the settlement include the treatment of absent rightsholders, user privacy, and competition. This session will offer a status report on the project and explore both sides of these questions.

The event is free, but registration is required and virtual seating is limited. REGISTER NOW.

Participants:
Jonathan Band, Counsel, Library Copyright Alliance
Dan Clancy, Engineering Director, Google Book Search

Webinar: Defining Web-Scale Discovery: The Promise of a Unified Search Index for Libraries

Received the following email:

Date: August 18, 2009 • Time: 9:00-10:00 AM PDT (12:00 - 1:00 PM EDT)

Please Join Us for Part 3 of Library Journal's "Returning the Researcher to the Library" Webcast Series

“Why can’t I search the library the way Google searches the Web?”

Librarians have been fielding that question for more than a decade as popular general search engines have set new expectations for service, searching and responsiveness. The complexity of multiple formats and the sheer scale of library collections have proven formidable barriers to simple, speedy, single search box interfaces. However, a new technology called a unified search index—the core of the groundbreaker Summon™ web-scale discovery service—offers the promise of answering that question with “You can.”

Join us for an insightful panel discussion that explores the emerging framework of web-scale discovery and what distinguishes the unified search index from existing library technologies. Expert panelists Marshall Breeding and Eric Lease Morgan will define the unified search index, as well as web-scale discovery – both their mechanics and their impact on library users. This intriguing discussion will examine the library’s new ally in taking back its role as the starting point for research and exposing the expanse of its content riches.

PANELISTS
Marshall Breeding, Director for Innovative Technologies and Research for the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University
Eric Lease Morgan, Head of the Digital Access and Information Architecture Department, University Libraries of Notre Dame
MODERATOR
Andrew Nagy, Senior Discovery Services Engineer, Serials Solutions

To view on demand Part 1 and Part 2 of Returning the Researcher to the Library Series, register here:

    * PART 1: Understanding the Next Gen User http://www.libraryjournal.com/webcastsDetail/2140374033.html
    * PART 2: Building ROI through Discovery http://www.libraryjournal.com/webcastsDetail/2140391674.html

Sol on Discovering Discovery Services

Over at the Federated Search Blog, Sol has a great post called Discovering discovery services, where he explains what these new search products are, how they work, and how they differ from Federated Search.  I'll be including a link to this post when I introduce and open up our beta of Summon to our full staff later this week or next...

Summon: And then there were two

Last month Dartmouth opened its instance of Summon to the world, and now you can compare that to Summon at the University of Liverpool.  Read the press release at Library Technology Guides.

Wikipedia in the catalogue?

Image via Wikipedia

I learned from Eric Rumsey that the State Library of Kansas includes Wikipedia articles in their OPAC.  Here are some examples: http://topekalibraries.info/search/awikimedia. About 15 minutes later I saw that Aaron Schmidt posted on the DCPL Labs site that in a recent survey 88% "of people responded that they prefer the content from Wikipedia in the Catalog."  This is news to me - is this a fairly common thing these days?  Would our cataloguing department kill me if I suggested it? :-)

Ready to try Summon? Go ahead!

Dartmouth, one of the first two (I think) libraries to sign on as beta partners with Serials Solutions' Summon Unified Discovery Service, has opened the beta up to its entire campus community.  And you can search it too!  You'll find a prominent link on their home page, or you can jump directly to the search page.  A brief overview of the product for their users is also available.

So whattya think?  About the speed, relevancy, accuracy, or in general?  The University of Calgary is also a beta partner with this product; we've recently had our MARC records loaded, and are awaiting the inclusion of metadata from some of our other local collections before opening it more widely to our clientele.

Summon, Discovery