Summon – Content

One of the issues that has always been a priority for me when looking at resource discovery tools was content.

In order for the service to be successful we need to ensure that relevant appropriate content has been indexed and so far in testing I am encouraged with  the results we have seen.

In the first stage of implementing Summon the main content to be indexed is

• Library catalogue
• Electronic resources – ejournals, ebooks, market reports etc

We have hopes for adding local collections in the second stage.

With  the library catalogue in order to ensure the data is being surfaced in Summon we purchased ‘Capita connect’ and are now working on mapping the data and tweaking the display.

With our electronic resources (approx 100) , once we identified the ones we currently are unable to index (approx 10) , we have then been working through the list and adding to Summon. In some cases its simply a matter of locating it in the knowledge base and switching it on while in others we are having to check our holdings, import data, troubleshoot queries etc.

Summon – Communication

At the end of last year the library and CICT began a project to implement Summon, a resource discovery tool. Summon will allow our staff and students to easily search across the library’s collections from one single search box.

searching summon

We hope to update this blog with news and developments. We also have a number of groups set up to communicate progress and issues wider.

Project group – members of the elibrary team meet regularly with a project manager from CICT to monitor how the project is going and if we are meeting proposed deadlines. Summary highlight reports are sent out regularly to senior colleagues.

Technical implementation group – Mark, Robin, Chris, Trudi and myself meet monthly to work on adding the appropriate collections to Summon.

User champion group – a group is being set up to include members of the library, academics, students and reseacher’s who will help champion and promote the service to their peers

Library Summon user group – a group was set up with representation from all the teams within the library to help the technical implementation team and also to provide an opportunity for feedback from the library.

The types of issues we will be discussing are

• Testing the service – trying out lots of different searches, thinking of user cases
• Authentication – making sure access of and off campus works well
• Marketing – promoting and marketing the service

We hope that communication via these groups and this blog will provide a good overview for those interested in this project as well as providing plenty of opportunity for feedback for all key stakeholders.

Let us know what you think.

Capita briefing

I attended a Capita Briefing event last week in London which provided a good overview of current & future developments of its services. Its always interesting to hear from the company and see what direction they are heading as well as getting the opportunity to feedback.

I was particularly interested to hear about their developments regarding a mobile version of the library management system, Alto, which they are currently calling iLMS. The aim is to provide a ‘lite’ version of the LMS, a web interface, on devices such as a tablet, laptop etc. For example a scenario could be changing a borrowers details  or even issuing an item while out on the library floor via a tablet. At a time when many libraries are looking at moving away from being behind a desk and  finding ways to bring services and information to the user at point of need, this looks like it could be a very helpful service. An area which I think would really benefit from a mobile LMS is  stock management, it would be great if a mobile LMS and RFID could be integrated so stock changes could be made at the shelves. I really liked the idea of focusing on some of the key functions of the modules with the LMS and decoupling them from the client based LMS to provide a web interface opens up some great potential.

Resource Discovery is a topic the elibrary team have been following for a few years so it was interesting to hear about Capita’s augmented search, which allows other collections to be searched alongside Prism 3 (the library catalogue).  I personally see this as providing a similar service to Summon (more on that to come) which we are in the process of implementing. I am however interested to see how this develops especially with regards to the potential integration of the library catalogue services and other collections. Alongside ‘augmented search’ Capita continue to develop Prism 3 and one of their latest features is the idea of ‘community collaboration’ allowing students to tag items, rate books, create wish lists, write reviews etc. I think the idea of ‘community collaboration’ is very timely as we are constantly looking for new ways to communicate and engage with our students, although I can also see the potential for problems in terms of the validity of the recommendations etc. I would however be delighted if our students invested the time in providing critical feedback on our collections.

I am very interested in how resource discovery will develop, I can see potential in providing a customised search ie searching across a borrowers wish list & reading lists for items, although then this does begin to sound like the ‘Google search, plus your world’ feature which has a number of flaws having just read Phil Bradleys blog post on it.

I have also always been interested in exploiting any qualitative and quantitative data gathered on user search behaviour, ie search logs etc and whether this could help improve subsequent searches.

Capita have also recently commissioned some research on – what students want and what they do with the data – and will be sharing their findings which I am looking forward to reading.

It was a useful day with interesting people and I even managed to catch a glimpse of the changing of the guard having got a little lost on the way to the venue.

For further details on Capita

2011 UKSG Conference, Harrogate : libraries and the ‘discovery deficit’.

In 1931 the critic Walter Benjamin described in his essay ‘Unpacking My Library’ the intimate side of collecting books, how each book brings with it a particular memory or association: ‘the whole background of an item adds up to a a magic encyclopedia’. He goes on to develop this idea further in the influential Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction(1936), where he describes how modern works of art (such as photography, film) lose this unique ‘aura’ of association, once they can be copied over and over again,

image credit:Nesster

whereas older forms (such as painting, sculpture) still keep their ‘authenticity’ intact. As a result of this changing mode of production, new relations between author and public develop, the artist loses their separatedness, and readers turn into writers.

This struck me as a good thread to follow through the talks at the UKSG conference I recently attended. In his keynote address, John Naughton (The Open University and Cambridge University Library) referred to what he called the ‘disruptive innovation’ of capitalism, and its effect on markets where ‘the basic unit of communication is shrinking’. He gave as examples both Amazon, that now sells Kindle Singles alongside books, and also iTunes where individual ‘tunes’ are now downloaded instead of ‘albums’ (this is where some of us get misty-eyed and reach for our vinyl). The digital age creates new, sometimes temporary, forms of consumption that have shattered artistic ‘auras’ long ago. What would Benjamin have made of the enhanced e-book, I wonder?

Many libraries and publishers have not yet fully woken up to this yet. Andy Powell’s talk Open, social and linked – A ménage à trois of content exploitation’ showed how Web 2.0 has revealed new forms of social relations that challenge our ‘academic inertia’. He drew on work by Dave White of Oxford University on ‘Visitors and Residents‘,which moved beyond concepts of ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’ to identify new categories of student users.

Whereas the web is social and-behaviour changing (see ‘The Machine is Us/ing Us‘ video); libraries are still content-centric, and we often show a ‘mis-match between repository architecture and real-world social networks’. (And to add to that, I would say we still manage library systems that were built on the book, or a list of books, rather the article or the chapter; publishers still bury content for us in large, unwieldy aggregated e-resources, and some of them even build ‘discovery tools to help us discover their own content – which is nice).

Ejournals: their use, value & impact – report by the RIN

I have had a quick read of this interesting final report on researchers use of ejournals, by the Research Information Network – ‘Ejournals: their use, value & impact’. I recomend reading the summary of the key findings for a good overview.

An interesting aspect was a comment on the increased use by reseachers of gateway sites as an easy way to search across a large volume of material which a single publisher site can not provide. The main use of a publisher site was to access the content once discovered. The gateway sites referred to in the report include Google Scholar, Web of Science, Pub Med etc.

One of the key benefits we recognised when investigating discovery tools such as Summon, Primo etc was this single point of access for staff and students to search rather than being faced with the myriad of search options, features, interfaces etc available from different publishers. At the start of the academic year, Sept 2010, a number of publishers introduced new & enhanced interfaces to their platforms and continue to do so which in turn creates issues of access and usability.

Perhaps there should be more of a focus in making the content discoverable via gateway sites rather than building feature rich publisher platforms or maybe both is needed, what do you think?

23 things that might make the student experience of our e-resources better

The recent student protests have highlighted for me how students will be ‘paying’ even more for the services we offer, and it struck me that improved access to our e-resources becomes more important for those who are already digging deep.

image credit : Matt_Baldry

It’s important we get this stuff right. There is often a ‘dislocate’ between theory and practice when we talk about access to e-resources  and in my view we need to draw attention to this contradiction, when we draw up our strategies. In a nutshell, if the library ignores the student, they have already walked away.

1.One number on the card that is the same as their student number,their library id,their network id,their printing id.Why should they have to remember different password formats?

2.One library place for searching for stuff,not several places. If you have to have several places/portals,then make them look the same as possible by using similar widgets or html.

3.Avoid AtoZ lists that you scroll down,make them searchable because new students will not know what each resource is.

4.Avoid using publisher names and acronyms or technical jargon that mean nothing to the student.(,what’s an ‘proxy’? What does ZETOC mean?)

5.If you use subject headings on your web pages make them relevant to courses taught or don’t use them at all.

6.If you have cataloguers, use them to index your online presence,make sure what they add to your catalogue record is actually useful to the student.

7.If you can control your web presence,don’t make it blocky or overcrowded. Distractions in the form of different fonts,colours that don’t match give a clear message that you haven’t taken the effort to discipline your design enough.

8.Most students have a mobile phone,& many will have smartphones, if not now when? At the very least,communicate library notices using text, & get a mobile friendly site.

9.Your subscribed content has to be ‘quotable/tweetable/bloggable so that academics can easily link to it on their VLE,MLE. Use stable URLs : if not, students will be left at the ‘front-door’ of the resource and will come back to the library to help them find that article again.

10.Use images to make your information engaging – not just lines and lines of text. That’s a throwback to the days of ‘hypertext’ linked page after page – when we librarians thought we owned the web and were the only publishers of content. Students learn differently now. It’s a web platform, not a novel.

11.Students and paywalls don’t mix. They are getting quality subscription e-resources for ‘free’ by paying to study so they don’t expect to run up against a publisher asking for money. If its possible minimize how the student login is seen to the publisher by using a proxy so that the right screens are returned back,to them.

12.Publicise downtimes and interface changes whenever possible. If you not given enough notice routine for scheduled downtime,as opposed to server fail,complain loudly.

13. If you subscribe to a journal that can only manage a username and password login based on a single ccuser,don’t use it. At the very least, they should be offering you IP-checked access.

14. Use a proxy service which you manage yourself to give you access off-campus via IP if your publisher doesn’t support Athens or Shibboleth.

15. CD-ROMs are for loaning out to the student,not for hosting on a network. If the publisher can’t scale up to a web product don’t buy them.

16.Use anything open like DOAJ, they don’t need a password. If its stuff you own the rights to, don’t bury it in a system that is not interoperable and uses an arcane method of access.

17. If your institution hires a consultant to write a report on your identity management, or how poor your business processes are, listen to them. Don’t forget the student has paid for their course, and will expect a minimum level of things to work together. Shout if they don’t.

18. If people aren’t using a resource, bin it. If there is any money next year you can always bring it back. Don’t hang on to it because one member of academic staff publishes in that journal and we can’t annoy them. Or because we think it only might be useful to us librarians for professional developement. Don’t be a squirrel.

19. Your front-line desk staff and your teaching librarians will take the brunt of the system failures, identity mismanagements, and general unfriendliness of the systems you put in place. If it’s hard to explain, then it usually means we or the publisher have made it difficult to access.

20.Students will go to Google or Wikipedia for information because they are comprehensive, easy and quick. They are prepared to sacrifice some of this ease of use when they try and get through to an e-journal article or chapter of an e-book but only just : they will quickly walk away.

21. If you put up information about anything, be prepared to take it down,edit it almost immediately. Don’t own or feel precious about anything you put up there – or get involved in debates about content/syntax/ownership. Remove it and/or put it back up tommorrow.

22. Work out what your core usergroups are : if you have to spend your energies on groups of students that are not fully registered, do so sparingly. When resources are tight, know your audience.

23. Make your resources discoverable – if the student can’t search across them, they will lose the will to live in navigating across native interfaces. Each publisher thinks they have the answer,and even if more and more are becoming ‘googlized’ and have the obligatory ‘Web 2.0 add-ons’ – the big ones still hide their content away in silos that are hard to reach.

Librarians: gatekeepers or sneck-lifters?

I recently attended the JIBS-Eduserv Seminar, ‘Where next for resource licensing?’ – and it struck me that unfairly or not, librarians have always attracted the label of ‘gatekeepers’. The issues discussed here (live blogged on the day) were no exception. We have to deal with an increasing fragmentation in our user base, and at a time of budget cuts, universities will continue to recruit from every where and anywhere just to pay the bills. Several speakers including Jenny Carroll from Eduserv  (‘It’s all a question of scale – joint initiatives in HE institutions’) and Louis Cole from Kingston (“Thorny issues in licensing: an institution’s view”) covered the increasing number of partnerships, validations, alumni, walk-in users,’ non-doms’ etc that are now part of our licensing landscape – and the contradictions that ensue from these.

The technologies for managing these different users is already here : in his talk Ed Dee from EDINA  told us how Shibboleth authentication can be exploited for granularity – although interestingly he said that its potential was under-developed : not many institutions had gone beyond releasing basic attributes.  Matt Durant from Bath Spa took us through a demo of how Open Athens LA 2.0 would manage differing user-groups.  He focussed on the student experience, which was overlooked in my view by some of the designs of pop-up screens for e-journal articles shown by Mark Bide, from EDItEUR in his presentation on machine-readable licences.

But expressing complex licenses in XML isn’t easy : though the forthcoming JISC Collections’ online Licence Comparison and Analysis Tool will definitely help. And it also struck me that the further removed some of these user groups are from our home brand, the questions ‘What is Athens, (etc.) how do I log-in’ will be naturally even more insistent.  Once upon a time, for most a students a library was just a building, but that model is challenged not least  by the rise of mobile devices. Owen Stephens’s keynote speech Where are you: Does physical location matter in the digital world? showed how the old definitions of ‘walk-in user’ may need rethinking – and I would agree it is a confusing concept. What does walk-in really mean when most institutions have a VPN or use EZProxy to emulate their institutional proxy? When the numbers of students with smartphones wanting access to our services will soon start to take off?  When those courses who ask for ‘walk-in’ are often many miles away?’

You might be wondering what all this has got to do with the picture alongside – this particular tipple (which I can warmly recommend to you by the way) was named after ‘a man’s last sixpence, allowing him to lift the pub’s door latch and purchase a pint, whereupon he hopes to make enough friends that they may offer to buy him further rounds’ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennings_Brewery).

A wise investment methinks –using limited funds to allow us to discover more resources to share with a wider audience is better than barring the door to that audience altogether.

UKSG 2010 : two tribes ?

desk fan from UKSG

Why my title ‘two tribes’ ? Some of us might remember the Frankie Goes to Hollywood video of ‘Two Tribes Go to War‘ – and there certainly were two ‘tribes’ of librarians and publishers in evidence upstairs on the conference platform, (whilst downstairs the real horse-trading was being done over coffee!). But there have been other more complex divisions : a librarian called Meredith Farkas blogged recently on whether EBSCO was the new ‘evil empire’ over its practice of exclusivity (’you can’t have the journal if you’re not in the club’ approach) – a practice which earlier this year drove Gale/Cengage to publish an open letter to EBSCO.

A time of war is usually a time of increased technological consumption and certainly the librarian-technologists were out in inspirational force: Richard Wallis (Talis) flagged up early on in his talk that that the ’student doesn’t care where resources come from’ & we should be using technology to bring the resource directly to them; a theme taken up by Tony Hirst (Open University) and Lucy Power(Oxford Internet Institute) as they showed how researchers use social networks and other Web 2.0 tools for resource discovery.

Looking ahead, Richard Padley also pointed the way to the benefits of the ‘semantic web‘ of open, linked data (highlighted by the recent release of free government data – an event significant enough to draw comment from EDINA, who in a recent press release seem to be holding back details of their new DIGIMAP deal whilst they absorb the impact of this.) In this session, Richard spoke tellingly for me about how commercial pressures could lead to an  ’arms race’ as each publisher creates ‘big silos of content’, with a different interface.

In terms of resource discovery, though they are all looking much the same: from what I saw of  Proquest’s new interface (for all CSA and Proquest databases) it adopts the standard ‘one search to rule them all’ ; facets down the left and a googlised ‘did you mean’ search.  The market is still dominated by the big deals, the big aggregators & their even bigger business lawyers. Ted Bergstrom spoke of the case last year when Elsevier attempted to block public release of license terms by taking Washington State University in court. Closer to home, we’ve had Murdoch’s paywall leading to titles being taken off Lexis- Nexis. It’s a shame Denis Potter is no longer with us – I would have like to have heard him respond : he was good on Murdoch.

Where are librarians in all of this? Do we retreat to the warm, comfortable bunker of the catalogue cave, to measure, count and classify? Sue White and Graham Stone gave an excellent presentation on how they had used statistics at the University of Huddersfield to ‘maximise use of their library resources’ – showing how good results correlate to good use of e-resources. One starting point for Huddersfield was their logins to ExLibris’ Metalib (doing this sort of stuff is so much easier when an institution has a login-point for e-resources).

There were other useful debates on metrics – and it was said more than once that statistics achieve a kind of ‘fetish-like status’. Hugh Look (Rightscom) drew on  Claude Levi-Strauss (the ‘father of modern anthropology’), and linked his theories of the  ’raw and the cooked’ in early societies to the ‘unmeasured’ and ‘measured’ in the world of  library metrics. He spoke of the ‘rise of the managerial class who are the main beneficiary of a measurement culture’.

It struck me that the losers in any such Cold War are the students : and the few sessions that focussed on their experience were immensely valuable. Alison Brock from the Open University looked at e-book readers – though even here the publisher’s favourite weapon  (propietary format control: you can download library content on a PC not on a Sony reader : put me in mind of why I don’t like Apple but that’s another story). The other breakout session I attended was from Philippa Sheail – a brilliant reality check: how the student doesn’t really care where this stuff comes from , and who publishes it – they just want access.

So is the case –  as Winston Churchill said – more recently in Doctor Who – of  ’KBO ‘ , doing nothing? We like the Daleks – they are our friends ? The last word went to satire and to Marc Abraham’s presentation on the IgNoble prizes – one of their ‘winners’ for the Peace Prize managed to get the following published in the Journal of Forensic Medicine for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle : “Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull? “.

Note the publisher. But before you click on the PDF, (isn’t that helpful, that the link to it comes up first) – you probably won’t get in. We’re not in that particular club.  Or, put it another way : that journal is not in our collection. It’s not the first paywall we’ve seen and it won’t be the last.

As Frankie says, ‘When two tribes go to war/A point is all you can score’.

Super-size EBSCO ?

Yesterday we had a return visit from EBSCO showing their Resource Discovery solution – along with colleagues from Wolverhampton. It was good to see a live demo and they told us that most of the major publishers were on board – with current exceptions being JSTOR and Proquest Dissertations ; Lexis US Academic (but not yet Lexis UK).

I felt the key question was unanswered though : when we saw the pre-indexed search return interface, one of the limiters was ‘items electronically or physically in the library already‘ : and we wanted to know: how did their Resource Discovery tool know about our subscribed e-collections? Was it from our catalogue (where it took regular updates from) or our link resolver knowledgbase ? EBSCO may well answer this later but I was disappointed they couldn’t confirm where the data was being sourced from. It made think that for all of these products – sorry for the image – ‘opera isn’t over till the fat lady sings’: ie until the user gets to our ’stuff’.

The quality of the link resolver becomes key – after all Serials Solutions  seem to be building their Summon case on 360 Link, not 360 Search – and the nature of the metadata agreements that allow all this nice sharing of thin and not so thin data between publishers to go on. For the time being EBSCO seem to have got deals with nearly everyone – I just hope they don’t carry their reputation for signing exclusive deals into the resource discovery marketplace.

Also I think their interface looks like it needs to go on a diet…maybe EDS version 2.0 (due out in June 2010) will be a bit more easy on the eye.

image credit :jblyberg

Primo 3

We recently had a demo of Primo 3 and it was interesting to see how quickly new developments and functionality had been added since the last demo in November

The issue of coverage is still a concern so it was good to hear about the Primo Publisher Program to encourage publishers to allow access to content. The success of these massive indexes is on the content they contain and with products from publishers such as proquest & ebsco I was keen to see what Primo could offer.

One of the most interesting features of Primo was the integration with the library catalogues. In the demo we saw availabilty information of items & the option to place a request from the Primo interface. I especially like the function of limiting your results to only view items which are shown as on the shelf. This however raised an interesting  question of whether a sepearate catalogue interface was really needed.  I can see a real benefit in reducing the number of front end interfaces to maintain although the key is if it can develiver the appropiate functionality. They have this functionality working with Aleph, Voyager and Unicorn to date.

Our next step is to try and talk to Primo customers and find out more about thier experience with the product.