University of Michigan education professor David Cohen says that no education occurs until what he calls “inert” assets (books, teachers, rooms, curricula, rules, budgets, and so on) interact with each other and with students. Education is interaction. People in educational organizations, he says, often behave as if the inert assets were essential and the interactions expendable. They fight political wars over budgets, space, and personnel, and spend little time defending and perfecting the interactions among these assets through cooperation, communication, teamwork, and knowledge about students.

The above passage struck me as having a direct parallel to some of the recent changes I've noticed in academic librarianship. Putting it in broad strokes, we are going through a fundamental shift in libraries from being collection-focused to being user-focused. What I like about the above quotation is that spending time "perfecting the interactions among these assets through cooperation, communication, teamwork, and knowledge about students" sounds very much like what good Information Literacy practice aspires to be.

Its from an essay that calls for a fundamental organizational change in health care titled Escape Fire: Lessons for the Future of Health Care [pdf]. I read this essay because of this recommendation to do from Brett Bonfield on the ACRL blog. And I would second the recommendation. Its worth reading for its own merits relating to health care and for reminding us how important transparency and access to information can be in a person's life.

Freedom for our FOIA

While on leave from libraryland, I'm still keeping touch through the library blogosphere. And in doing so, I noticed that none of the Canadian library blogs that I follow had made mention that the Harper government recently told all federal agencies to stop providing monthly updates to the public of all the requests it is answering under the Access to Information Act.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is one of the few tools that ordinary citizens can use to keep their government accountable. In my hometown, a citizen recently took on our excessively secretive city council with a FOIA and now we know the details of an arena contract between the city of Windsor and the local OHL hockey franchise.

When I was in library school at McGill, I wrote a loving profile of Ken Rubin, another private citizen who uses FOIA much to the chagrin to those in power -- and I am glad to say that I am not the only one to do so. But I think librarians should do much more to support the cause. Here's a start: every library's government document's web presence should provide a link and instructions how to place a Freedom of Information Act.

And if the CAIRS database is not reinstated, then I wish and hope that a library out there will create a Canadian version of WhatDoTheyKnow.

A Library Fortress of Silentude? | Ask Metafilter

A Library Fortress of Silentude? | Ask Metafilter:

"There is a war going on in the library. This conflict is between students who seek solitary silent study and those who seek to study or work on projects in groups. An individual student's allegiance to a faction can change from day to day based on their current course load. Because the Grouparians have the advantage of numbers, they tend to win out over the Solitarites. Surely the latter group needs a fortress all their own?"

Watch out for a librarian with cans...

...someone's tagging Toronto with ISBNs

Kill your television

My sibling and I have had an ongoing conversation about the dearth of meaningful volunteer work and share a frustration that more non-profit groups don't make more use of the Internet's potential.

We're not the only one's who have recognized the untapped potential that exists. Clay Shirky has too - but has quantitfied it and put into a historical context in his recent essay, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. It's highly recommended reading.

XO Laptop - beautiful but tragically flawed

So yesterday I entertained my 2 1/2 year old son by bringing out my XO laptop from OLPC.

The XO laptop is designed for children from ages 6 to 12 but there are some activities that a small child can explore. Mats likes making noise with TamTamMini and making B I G L E T T E R S with Write, its text editing program. But it was the ability to capture video that made him scream and drool with delight (thank goodness for the xo's water resistant keyboard).

But like so many times before, my delight in the XO laptop quickly evaporated into pure frustration. After the little one had gone to bed, I turned on my XO to find that I could not view any of the videos I had just recorded of my little guy. I sighed and then, with a growing sense of dread, I went online to see if someone else had experienced the same problem. I had been down this road before - and it wasn't pretty.

You see, there are multiple sources of support for the XO. There is the official OLPC Wiki - which suffers from a severe lack of editorial work. Don't believe me? This is what I mean: there is a community user guide, a new user guide, a workaround section, the "official FAQ" and the support FAQ, the Ask OLPC A Question section (which has its own archive), and of course, separate pages for the various aspects of hardware and software which often have different information than the guides. And supplementing the wiki, there are two support discussion forums: the official one and the OLPC News Forum. And supplementing those are mailing lists (public, community and official ones) and, if you like your help old-skool-stylee, there are several IRC channels on the subject of the OLPC.

Trouble is, not a single person is dedicated to answering any of the questions. Evidently children are going to do the job but in the meantime, its just volunteers.

You see, the founder of OLPC Nicholas Negroponte, doesn't believe in product support for the XO. According to Negroponte, I should be asking a small child to teach me how to use my laptop because, "with all due respect" to those who believe that education depends teachers, schools, curriculum, or content, success is dependent "on leveraging the children themselves".

Except that the XO is buggy as hell.

I *understand* how video should work. But it doesn't. And after hours of searching wikis and forums, I now know that at least one person has experienced the same problem since January and that no one has offered a possible solution yet.

I have a lot of faith in the power of online communities but unlike the OLPC organization, I don't take such groups for granted. The Open Source community is a beautiful one but they are more likely to take the time to answer a question that can be answered in python than to take the time to do the multi-step analysis required to find out why, for a presumed small group of users, playing recorded video doesn't work.

Non-working video hasn't been the first problem I've encountered. When I try to register my XO nothing happens. Evidently, the Write activity is able to save text as html but when I bring up my code in Browse, it refuses to recognize the code (there are TWO pre-installed activities dedicated to learning programming in Python and nothing to create a simple webpage?!?).

Hardware-wise, the XO laptop is a thing of beauty. But until a core group of XO activities can be developed to perform solidly and consistently, I don't think an entire nation should invest in these laptops for their children.

Admit it - you've got a fave to share

Give me your best book of taxonomies. | Ask Metafilter

Ontario Scholars Portal – Yours to a Discovery Layer

(This is a little something I wrote to support this work)

What is a “Discovery Layer”?

To me, a Discovery Layer allows a user to search across a library catalogue (or several), an ebook platform (or several), and a source of articles (or several). 

A Discovery Layer could make use of one or more combinations of the following:

• Federated Searching
• a query is distributed to multiple sources, and responses are compiled, de-duped, and returned
• e.g. Sirsi Single Search
• Metasearching
• a single, regularly complied index is created from the collection of metadata from multiple sources
• e.g. Endeca, Google
• Single host environment
• metadata and content are placed on a common server
• e.g. WorldCat, Ontario Scholars Portal

Why a Discovery Layer?

The pursuit of a Discovery Layer seem to be driven by the need to present one, strong and stable user interface over many disparate sources of information. Some benefits of a discovery layer include:

• users only have to learn one interface, instead of many
• users don’t have to choose from lists of dozens of indexes
• users don’t have to repeat searches depending on format (one search for books, then one for dissertations, then one for articles…)
• users expect simple, effective search tools like Google

What’s the problem?
The challenges that face the construction of a discovery layer include:

• many of our research tools are very difficult to extract data from as they make use of a multitude of non-standard formats and protocols
• most of our research tools (especially the library catalogue) generate search results with poor relevance ranking
• some sources will be rich in text and metadata (articles, ebooks) while other sources will only be represented by metadata (print books)

How much can an improved interface improve things?

At the present time, I would say that there are 3 archetypes of Discovery Layer Interfaces.

• The first uses tabs, like PubMed and Illumina
• The second uses facets, like Endeca, WorldCat, and VuFind
• The third uses page partitions, like Google Experimental and UBC’s OneSearch.

How much can an improved interface, improve relevant results?
Coming up with what a user might deem relevant from 2 or 3 keywords is challenging in a regular search environment. Producing consistently relevant results in a federated or metasearch environment is extremely difficult.

Relevance might be improved through one or more of the following:

• by taking into account the user’s previous searching behaviour
• by weighing results by the number of times an item has been bookmarked, printed, or saved
• by using citation information to determine ‘likeness’ (e.g. based on a percentage of shared citations in item’s bibliography)
• by using user-created lists articles to generate similar items of possible interest
• by knowing what courses a users is currently taking/teaching and emphasizing relevant resources accordingly
  

What is a Good Enough Discovery Layer?
Is it realistic to expect a Discovery Layer to serve both the novice researcher and the expert to access a variety of formats in a multitude of disciplines? Can one size fit all? Should we develop several Discovery Layers with one for each discipline? (Arts, Social Sciences, Medicine). Should we develop one interface for undergraduates and one for faculty and graduate students?

How will we know we have reached the Promised Land?
Most discovery layers are still in the earliest stages of their development and by appearances, they seem more alike than unalike. How should we choose what is an acceptable product? One suggestion is to measure the success of a Discovery Layer by comparing its search results to Google.

Libraries COE

Sun Microsystems, The University of Alberta Libraries and The Alberta Library create Centre of Excellence for Libraries: "SANTA CLARA, CA February 27, 2008 Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc., the University of Alberta Libraries (UAL) and The Alberta Library (TAL) today announced the creation of a new Sun Centre of Excellence for Libraries (COE)."

Digg + Local Library Purchases

Digg + Local Library Purchases: "So here’s my idea: take the engine that runs Digg, the “social news” website, and repurpose it as a web application that allows library patrons to collectively decide which books the library system should purchase. Patrons would “login” to “LibraryDigg” with their regular library card number and password, and then could enter books, DVDs, etc. that they want opened up for consideration." [Distant Librarian]

What I really like about this idea is that this service would provide public feedback illustrating what the library community is interested in and what are their unmet desires. I'm positive that this sort of information would be of interest to more than librarians as in my library, one can always see users check out the responses on the library's complaints bulletin board (which one day I would love to put online like Carleton's Dear Library service.)

But I'm not sure that I would use the Digg engine. I check out Digg and Reddit frequently and its not exactly a secret that the system is constantly being gamed (e.g. "Garbage can be turned into oil through a green method. We dispose of enough garbage per year to create a years worth of usable oil! Why aren't we funding these guys millions! UP VOTE THIS!!").

Instead, I would be more inclined to use something more independent engine to determine popularity.

Digg's Design Dilemma - Bokardo : The result of all these factors is that Digg breaks the cardinal rule of voting: independence. As outlined in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, independence arises when a person makes a decision (votes, diggs) without the direct influence of others, on their own, by making up their own mind. Of course, there will always be influences on that decision…what others have said, where their political party is leaning, their current situation, but in the end they need to have the privacy of their vote. On Digg, no votes are private, and when you make them you can’t help but notice the way others are voting...
The voting on Digg is in contrast to a site like Del.icio.us, where voting (saving a bookmark) is done more independently, often without having any idea whether or not someone else even viewed it, let alone voted on it... On Del.icio.us, the main value is personal, as people use it to store bookmarks that are valuable to them. On Digg, the bookmarking utility is secondary to the voting, in both the interface and the wording used on the site.

This all being said, I do support the notion that a library community can be trusted to select some of the materials that can be found in *their* library.

Riddle me this at your library

The MIT Libraries Puzzle Challenge is a series of puzzles released during the MIT semester. The series began with three puzzles in the Fall 2007 semester, and will continue with three more puzzles during the Spring 2008 semester. Puzzles are produced with the dual goals of being fun for our community and of introducing solvers to resources they might not otherwise know about.

My personal epiphany that there was a natural connection between puzzle games, learning, and libraries happened while I was playing the World Without Oil ARG and read as strangers on a forum thread worked together to identify a foreign language used in a video clue (Bulgarian) and then translate and transcribe the speech within hours.

I'm not the only one to have made this connection.

And MIT has been playing puzzle games with their students for over 25 years.

Read about Griefers. Then be one

I've had a long standing prejudice that if you rely on WIRED magazine in order to understand Internet culture, then you probably are not particularly WIRED.

But two things have happened since I've made this conclusion : WIRED has become a much better magazine (I'm talking since the days from when they would lovingly profile venture capitalists and worship corporate heroes). And I've become older and (more) out of touch.

The article that made me come to this realization is from February issue of WIRED (16.02) and is called Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World. Before this article, I knew that griefers existed but didn't know much more about them than that. After this article, I'm shocked to say, that I have now some small sympathy for their cause : the battle against "The Internet is Serious Business." I can't and won't excuse the worst of their behaviour (the death threats, for one) but now I can see the humour in the crassness and the method in the madness.

This deeper understanding has helped navigate the world of the very offensive and very amusing forumwarz [waxy]. In this role-playing game about the Internet, I'm playing a Troll. Who knew being a griefer was so much fun?

[cross-posted on NJA]

The Big Why About The Big Here

Its early evening. The Toddler is in bed. Right now is a short period of personal time before the promise of sleep will lure me to bed before the rest of the world settles in to watch primetime television. For some days now, this is the time where I begin researching answers to such questions as

Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move?

I've been meaning to complete The Big Here Quiz ever since I first stumbled upon it in an issue of Whole Earth Review years ago and I've finally hit its half-way point. Its 30 questions are meant to inspire watershed awareness but in doing the quiz I've found that it has generated more than just a stronger curiosity and connection to where I live. It is making me a better librarian.

Finding who can delivery pizza to your house is not hard. Finding out whether "the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?" is surprisingly hard. Determining out how water gets into your tap and tracing where it goes after its sent down the drain is largely dependent on how much information your local utilities care to share with you. The information you need to finish this quiz can largely be found online, but in forms that have been fragmented and rebound depending on government level, jurisdictions, and departmental politics. (Watersheds transcend such boundaries).

By doing this quiz, I have been reintroduced to many government document websites that I have not visited in a long, long time. Many of these sites now feature GIS driven datasets which with a bit of trial and error, can usually be cajoled to produce information but the results are usually disappointingly thin. I'm waiting for the next generation of localized collections of data visualizations but I think it will be a long, long time before EveryBlock comes to Windsor, Ontario.

Like a good homework assignment, it is the curiosity that stretches while pursuing the question which is more important than the "answer". Now I'm wondering about the worms in my backyard, whether I really understand the concept of azimuth, and where is that closest fault line...

OLPC and the Library : The Talk

If you are in the Windsor / Detroit area, please consider joining a talk sponsored by MPOW called:

One Laptop Per Child: Open Source, Open Access, Open Library
January 28th, 7 pm, Freed-Orman Centre
By attending, you could win your very own XO laptop!

There's an article about the OLPC in the Toronto Sunday Star. What I found very amusing is that I share the journalist's same sensibility towards simple computers: he used to own an eMate and I used to lust after one.

Today my guest post at OLPC got published

Today the OLPC News blog kindly printed a guest post of mine about the relationship between libraries and the work of the One Laptop Per Child program.

That's the good news. The bad news is that evidently, there were only 4000 orders for XO laptops from Canada and that due to shipping logistics, the Canadian deliveries have been pushed back until February 15th!

OLA wants your picutres of libraries from around the world

The Ontario Library Association's Super Conference 2008 is asking

Do you have pictures of photos of libraries you've snapped in your travels? If you’ve got some hidden away on your hard drive or in a photo album please help us by submitting them to OLA. Photos of any kinds of libraries (or librarians) in any location are good...

Photos will be used in a gallery on the OLA Super Conference Web site, at plenary sessions throughout the conference and, most particularly, at the closing plenary on Saturday, Feb. 2nd during the luncheon in which incoming IFLA President Ellen Tise from South Africa will be speaking. Photos can be submitted in any of the
following ways:

• Send digital photos to superconference@accessola.com (in any format but as high a resolution as possible).
• If you are a Flickr member, you may submit photos to the “Libraries of the World – OLA Super Conference Pool” Flickr group.Again, as high a resolution as possible.
• Send print photos to OLA, 50 Wellington St. East, Suite 201, Toronto M5E 1C8. Photos can be picked up at Super Conference from the Information Desk in the Registration Lobby. Any photos not picked up will be mailed to their owners following Super Conference.

I'll be at this year's Super Conference for Friday only and will be speaking on that day with Stacy Allison-Cassin in Session #1318: Scholar's Portage: Leveraging Social Networking Tools and Scholars Portal Data.

Books that scientists use - an addendum

Some years ago when I started my tenure as Science Librarian at the Leddy Library, I worked on a particularly tedious project that really helped me get a better understanding on what books scientists actually use in their work (as opposed to so many other titles).

Using Web of Science, I would search for a year's worth of articles from Science, Nature and PNAS, download these articles' references into an Excel spreadsheet and try to decipher which ones were books. It was a very very mechanical and time-consuming process. But it made me a better science librarian.

Now, I'm pleased to say, that Scopus makes this same task possible in less than 30 seconds:

1. in search for box type in journal name (e.g. Nature) and select Source Title from drop-down menu
2. limit date range to a particular time period (e.g. 2007)
3. hit search button
4. in the Refine Results box, limit your results to just the journal name in question (e.g. Nature and not Nature Biochemistry)
5. in the Results box, click the Select All box and the hit the References button
6. If your initial search results brought more than 2000 hits, you will be informed that only the first 2000 articles will have their references retrieved.
7. review the list of most cited references of that journal from most cited to least

Here's a list of the 10 most cited books by Nature, Science, and PNAS*. The second number in the list represents where in the journal's list of most cited items can the book be found.

Most Cited Books in Nature, 2007**
1. [1] Molecular cloning: a laboratory manual (1989)
2. [2] Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994)
3. [3] Numerical Recipes (1992)
4. [4] Biometry (1995)
5. [5] Biostastical Analysis (1984)
6. [7] The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates (1986)
7. [13] Principles of Optics (1980)
8. [15] Physics of Semiconductor Devices (1981)
9. [19] Intermolecular and Surface Forces (1992)
10. [21] Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain (1988)

Most Cited Books in Science, 2007**
1. [1] Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994)
2. [2] CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (2005)
3. [3] Biometry (1995)
4. [4] Biostastical Analysis (1984)
5. [5] The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates (1986)
6. [9] Principles of Optics (1980)
7. [10] Computer Simulation of Liquids (1987)
8. [11] Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (1990)
9. [12] Advanced Organic Chemistry (1988)
10. [14] An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications (1971)

Most Cited Books in PNAS, 2007**
1. [1] Molecular cloning: a laboratory manual (1989)
2. [4] Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994)
3. [6] Numerical Recipes (1992)
4. [8] CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (2005)
5. [9] Biometry (1995)
6. [10] Biostatistical Analysis (1984)
7. [12] The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates (1986)
8. [13] Handbook of Mathematical Functions (1972)
9. [22] Stastical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (1988)
10. [23] Statistical Methods (1980)

*Nature and Science published almost 2000 items in 2007 and PNAS published closer to 3000 items in 2007.

I'm planning to use this method to determine if there are any important books my library is missing by reviewing the references of the key journals in various fields for 2007. Its still a largely mechanical process (although the Foxy Leddy LibX toolbar makes book-checking much faster than typing titles into the library catalogue) but its a good task to slowly start the work of the new year.

**Addendum:
I've been thinking further about these lists and I think I am in grievous error.

For example: the approximately 2000 articles in Nature evidently produce 24,660 references. That's about 200 items in each item's bibliography - which sounds high but its in the realm of possibility. But what confuses me is the cited by column which says that the first item in the list, Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual, has been cited 103, 825 times. So that must refer to how many times the item has been cited within the Scopus database. The fact that the some of the books in the list appear in the same relative order when performing the same procedure using the journals PNAS and Science, means that these lists reflect the most popular science books within Scopus and not necessarily within each journal.

Rats.

Scholars Portal Day Presentation

Stacy Allison-Cassin and myself gave a presentation / daytime talkshow chat on our Scholr 2.0 paper last week at the George Ignatieff Theatre, University of Toronto as a part of Scholars Portal Day : slides • video stream (37 min)

Information Literacy Literature Review 2006

For the last handful of years, the journal Reference Services Review has published an annotated round-up of articles on Information Literacy and continuing this tradition, its most recent issue (Volume 35 Issue 4 2007) has the 57 page literature review, Library instruction and information literacy 2006.

A Reading List for PSAG

I recently volunteered to come up with the beginnings of a reading list for the OCUL Public Services Advisory Group to help start our brainstorming on an upcoming user/usability study that OCUL will be commissioning. Here it is:

First and foremost, we need a vision

We suggest clients look five or ten years into the future and ask the question, "What will using our site be like on that date? What experience will the user have?" Team members from the best organizations can answer this question. They have a consistent, clear idea what the user's experience will be like in the future. Having a clear vision lets the team chart a direction for their design, helping identify if any design idea is moving them closer to the vision or farther away... It's critical the vision not focus on future technology but instead on future experience. What are the steps in today's process that makes things cumbersome or frustrating? How could the experience become more delightful? [Thinking in the Right Terms: 7 Components for a Successful Web Site Redesign]

We need to understand our users

"The University of Minnesota Libraries received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a multi-dimensional model for assessing support for scholarship in the context of a large research campus. The project team explored discipline-specific needs for facilities, information content, services,tools, and expertise in the humanities and social sciences. The goal was to develop a model for bringing greater coherence to these distributed resources through physical and virtual means, and also a research support environment that could be modeled, prototyped, and evaluated." [A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Academic Support: Final Report]

"Our first task was to identify one trenchant research question to guide the project. The question we developed was, What do students really do when they write their research papers? Between the assignment of a research paper and the finished, submitted product was a black box that largely concealed the processes undertaken by the student. We wanted to take a peek into that box to see what we could find." [Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester (pdf)]

We need to build something better

"The author seeks to answer the following questions: What characterizes the queries that end users submit to online IR systems? What search features do people use? What features would enable them to improve on the retrievals they have in hand? What features are hardly ever used? What do end users do in response to the system's retrievals? Are end users satisfied with their online searches?" [Markey, K. (2007). Twenty-five years of end-user searching, part 1: Research findings. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(8), 1071-1081.]

"Reading and synthesizing Marcum, Calhoun, Bates, Mann, Hildreth, Borgman, Anderson, etc., should be mandatory for everyone who cares about the future of the online library catalog. The next steps must be to engage all interested parties in serious dialogue, system prototyping, decision making, and action so the online library catalog of the future hits the ground running just as mass digitization projects end." [The Online Library Catalog: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained?]

"Richard Wallis of Talis suggested during his Access 2007 presentation that if the catalogue knew a bit about you, it could present better search results to you. Using the example of the keyword lotus, an engineering student would get items about the car of the same name while the botanist would get items about the genus Nelumbo. Mark Leggot, using his metaphor of the search box as Lego brick, suggested in his Access 2007 presentation that it shouldn't be difficult to embed a library search box into a course-specific page that was already constrained to the sources that were relevant to both the subject of the course and the course level." [Access 2007 Wrap Up Part Three - The Importance of Being Relevant]

We need to get into the places where our users are

For me there are five parts of a strategy for maintaining the library as a vibrant enterprise worthy of support from our campuses...
4. Reposition library and information tools, resources, and expertise so that they are embedded into the teaching, learning, and research enterprises. This includes both human and, increasingly, computer-mediated systems. Emphasis should be placed on external, not library-centered, structures and systems.
5. Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials to curating content. [A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century]

"We suggest three main areas, with specific recommendations for each, where our institutions can help to alleviate these pressures.

• Enhance and improve the user interface
• Connect the citation network to user workflow
• Embrace standards and technologies that will allow present and future network discovery systems to make use of what we offer" [Scholr 2.0]

The Distant Librarian: Some initial thoughts on library advertising in Facebook

The Distant Librarian: Some initial thoughts on library advertising in Facebook

Trying on a new look

Darwins shoes..., originally uploaded by Norma Desmond.

I've updated this blog's template to something more readable. This won't make much of a difference to those readers who take in these words via an RSS reader, but just over half my visitors come to the site directly or stumble in here through search engines, so they might like the change.

The banner photograph is part of this image called Darwins shoes taken by Norma Desmond. The statue of Darwin can be found by the Shewsbury public library.

Blood on the Stacks

ARGNet:

This year marks the second time that the Trinity University's Coates Library in San Antonio has run Blood on the Stacks, an alternate reality game that helps new students to get familiar with the school's library. According to this entry at the SHU - Blogcause07 blog, 'anecdotally the library and support staff reported feedback from students of feeling more familiar, less alien in the environment, the library was associated with fun and the staff were more approachable.' This appears to be yet another neat way that people are using ARGs to assist in a social environment.

One Library Per Child

I had heard about the One Laptop Per Child Project (aka the $100 laptop) before May of this year, but it wasn't until I heard Rochelle Mazar's presentation at the WILU Conference at York that I picked up on the connection between it and the mission of libraries and of its possible educational opportunities for both here and abroad.

Fast forward to today. While the library blogosphere has been weighing in on Amazon's Kindle reader, I've noticed scarce mention of the OLPC's XO laptop. Ah, but there's still time for this to happen, because it has just been announced that the XO laptop will extend commercial sales through its GiveOneGetOne program until the end of the year. (So you should check it out.)

I'm glad for the extension for a number of reasons with one being that it was only today that I finished setting up a display in my library on the One Lap Per Child Program (and what it has to do with libraries).

There are other events that I'm hoping will develop from this. Hopefully more about this soon!

Access 2007 Wrap Up Part Three - The Importance of Being Relevent

Peter Binkley did a simple and elegant comparison of a number of online library catalogues to begin his presentation, Searching the OPAC - The State of Play. He did performed the same search in all the library catalogues he examined; he did a keyword search for the word canada.

Its a ingenious example. You see, if a user types in a one word search in a catalogue for, say, dogs and gets results in which all the books that are entitled 'dogs' came up first, you would be hard pressed to say that those results weren't relevant.

But if you search for the word, canada, in say in most university library catalogues, you don't get books entitled Canada coming up first. Instead, the first result you get will likely be a document with a long name like Emergency food service : planning for disasters (U of A), Post-war Canadian housing and residential mortgage markets and the role of government (University of Windsor), or Progress report by the United States. Environmental Protection Agency. Great Lakes National Program Office and Environment Canada (University of Toronto).

This is because these library catalogues use a scoring system in which search and item word matches are used to assign points to items in order to determine relevancy. So a book by a Canadian government agency (which will frequently have the word Canada in its name twice - once for the English version and one for the French) about something Canadian, will tend to outscore the single word titled books.

Discovery layers don't correct this problem: La sécurité humaine et les femmes autochtones au Canada is the first result from McMaster's library catalogue; NCSU's first response is Compendium of plant disease and decay fungi in Canada, 1960-1980.

Librarians have largely left the responsibility of the library catalogue's search algorithm to the commercial library vendors who (putting this delicately) don't dedicate as much development time to it as, say, Google. But with the advent of open source indexing software such as Lucene some librarians are beginning to tinker with relevancy rules. Is it just coincidence that library catalogues that are running either the open-source Koha or the open-source Evergreen both pass the canada keyword test?

Another means of improving relevancy is to put the most popular items at the top of the list, like Amazon does. Bibliocommons and Koha use circulation counts in their relevancy rankings while WorldCat Local uses the number of global holdings in theirs.

But relevancy is too difficult a problem that can be solved by the simple tinkering of the numbered weights in the search algorithm.

A fundamental shortcoming of the library catalog is that it doesn't (and as currently designed can't) know the why for any given search. A search for the subject "breast cancer" in PVLD's catalog results in over 40 distinct subject headings listed in alphabetical order from the simple "Breast – Cancer" through "Breast – Cancer – Religious Life" to "Breast – Cancer – United States". The catalog doesn't know that one person is searching for books on this subject because she has to write a term paper, and another because his wife has just been diagnosed with the disease – and therefore it gives no clue as to which of these subject headings is most relevant to each person. [PVDL Director via Everything is Miscellaneous]

One of the means by which Bibliocommons addresses this issue is through the resorting of items so that highly rated items by trusted sources appear on the top of the list. This is one way of informing the library catalogue of who you are, at who you are as defined by who else you find trustworthy. Richard Wallis of Talis suggested during his Access 2007 presentation that if the catalogue knew a bit about you, it could present better search results to you. Using the example of the keyword lotus, an engineering student would get items about the car of the same name while the botanist would get items about the genus Nelumbo. Mark Leggot, using his metaphor of the search box as Lego brick, suggested in his Access 2007 presentation that it shouldn't be difficult to embed a library search box into a course-specific page that was already constrained to the sources that were relevant to both the subject of the course and the course level. Addendum: As Shibboleth allows for some attribute-based authentication to be passed to an online source, there may be a potential to tailor the interface or search results based on the user's subject specialty or readership level [Scholr 2.0: 3.2.2 Shibboleth].

That's the last of my Access 2007 wrap-up blog posts. Sorry for the irrelevant ending.

If ebooks light your fire

Why spend $400 for Amazon's new Kindle ebook reader (with a DRM that would kiss libraries good bye) when you could buy 2 great ebook readers for the same price that is open source. Oh yeah, and one of these laptops goes to a child in a developing country. But you need to act fast!

Collegiality as a weapon

Google Scholar Blog: Academic Freedom, Tenure & Collegiality for Librarians

Librarianship is a very collegial profession. This brings post highlights one of the downsides of collegiality.

True story about a library journal that is so sad its funny

So a colleague of mine who has recently graduated from library school recently learned that she had a paper approved for publication in a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the work of library science students on subjects of general interest to librarians. This week she received a 'proof' of her article which looked good except one thing: the article was dated as if it was from the year 2004.

We talked about this on the phone and I tried to reassure her that it*must* have been a typo because it could not be possible that a publication from a library school would back date their publication to a such an extreme. It couldn't happen.

But being curious, I checked the Library Literature and Information Science Index to see when this organization had published their last issue and was horrified to see that it was "Spring/Fall 2003". I urged my colleague to email the editors to see if the 2004 was in error - perhaps the result of some archaic publication management software?

She got an email back yesterday. It wasn't a typo. At one point, she was told, there was a delay in publishing and in order "to avoid confusion over any missing years" they decided to keep the years consecutive.

DID IT NOT OCCUR TO THESE PEOPLE THAT A SWITCH TO A VOLUME AND ISSUE SCHEME COULD REMEDY THIS PROBLEM? DOES THIS PRACTICE NOT DEFY THE VERY NOTION OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY?

But it gets worse. MUCH worse. Guess what that name of this journal is? Come on! Guess!!


It's...

(wait for it)

CURRENT ISSUES IN LIBRARIANSHIP!

You just can't make this stuff up.

In the literature - Librarians and Scholarship

Fox, David, 1948-


• Finding Time for Scholarship: A Survey of Canadian Research University Librarians
  
  
• Abstract:

  More than half the participants in a survey of Canadian research university librarians indicated that scholarship activities were required or encouraged at their universities, yet most university librarians have year-round schedules of assigned duties that present challenges to the engagement in sustained, meaningful scholarship. Full-time librarians reported spending an average of 47 hours per week on all of their responsibilities combined, but most librarians devote less than five hours per week to scholarly activities. Ideally, librarians would like to spend 15 percent of their time on scholarship. Strategies for increasing time and support for scholarship are considered.

• portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2007), pp. 451–462
• University of Windsor link to article
  

Conversations in LibraryLand

Jon Udell of LibraryLookup fame is not a librarian but he has great talks with those from libraryland as part of his podcast series, Interviews with Innovators. Last week, he spoke with Beth Jefferson of Bibliocommons. Other interviews with direct library-content include chats with Stuart Weibel of The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, Art Rhyno of the University of Windsor, Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef, and Dan Chudnov on OpenURL.