eLibrary

Visit to Huddersfield Library

I had an interesting time at Huddersfield library yesterday, we had a packed programme hearing about their experience in customer service excellence, enquires, staff development, reading lists, marketing, the library catalogue and much more.

We also had a tour of the recently refurbished library which I felt was a very welcoming, light & colourful space with great features, such as shelf ends with pictures of student work to really help define that area of the library floor.

One of the highlights of the day was hearing Dave Patten talk about his work on the library catalogue, where he has been able to tweak, add & remove features. He has introduced some great customer focused enhancements such as

• spell checker
• serendipity search
• RSS feeds for keyword search
• borrowing suggestions
• Email alerts for search terms
• tag cloud of search terms

This constant tweaking and trying out new things on the catalogue is really refreshing to hear about and I think chimes with the type of implementation of  Prism that Talis propose.

A big thank you to the staff at the library for such a warm welcome and useful day, it provided me with lots of food for thought and things to be envious about.

RFID Conference

I attended the CILP RFID in Libraries conference on Tuesday in London, where I got the opportunity to hear some interesting talks and chat to the suppliers.

One of the key issues was the welcome announcement of the adoption of the new standard ISO 28560 which will hopefully pave the way for some  interesting innovations and exploitation of the technology, including the possiblity of using technology/equipement from different suppliers to provide the perfect solution. While excited by the possiblities I am also aware that there is still plenty of work to go in this area before the benefits are appreciated including personally more thinking about what services and development the library would like to achieve with RFID.

One of the highlights of the day was a case study by Sarah Pumfrey, Team Leader (Systems) at Liverpool John Moores University. Sarah talked about the drivers behind implementing self service, the process and lessons learned, it was  a really useful personal perspective which I could relate to.  It also made me realise how beneficial opportunites for libraries to work together in resolving many common issues could be, so will be signing up the the LIB-RFID-UK mailing list.

I attended Track 2 in the afternoon aimed at those libraries which have already implemented RFID and was looking to the future, I particulary enjoyed the talks where there was an element of future gazing  such as library robots to do stock checks, location awareness tags etc. There were some inspirational ideas which helped highlight the potenial of RFID but it also reminded me that I am keen to see it deliver the functionality that is available currently today.

It was an enjoyable day and I was really pleased to meet some twitter folk. I unfortunately didn’t get to meet Mick Fortune but highly recomend his blog for all things RFID in libraries.

Resource discovery: demonstration by Innovative Interfaces

 The 4th of the demos we’ve organised  from resource discovery system suppliers takes place on Friday November 6th at 10:30, when Innovative Interfaces will be talking about their Encore platform, together with their federated search tool ResearchPro.

For examples of Encore sites, see University of Glasgow library’s page ; and also University of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Please come and join us for more tea, coffeee, biscuits and another peek at what resource discovery for our students might look like in the future.

Resource discovery: a new twist ?

Previously we have seen two different solutions to the problem of Resource Discovery:  1) pre-built ‘connectors’ built to allow a federated search across our electronic resources  and 2) a discovery tool that uses metadata that is pre-indexed from the publishers, and also incorporates our local catalogue data. Exlibris say that ideally we would need both solutions; Serials Solutions say that we can run 2) without the need for 1).

I thought the demo from EBSCO last week was interesting as their comments were made from the position of a subscription agent . They cast doubt on publishers’ willingness to open up their data for harvesting – and said that libraries would always need both solutions in place.

What will Innovative say when they come and see us on the 6th November?

image credit: meknits

Digitisation

I attended a couple of  workshops, last month, funded by JISC under the JISC ITT Workshops  & Seminars:  Achievements & Challenges in Digitisation & e-Content strand.

‘Digital Media collection +100 years’

‘High Volume Digitisation’.

Copies of the presentations are availble on each site.

There was an interesting mix of people at both events including librarians, academics, musuem curators highlighting the diverse range of people involved in digitisation.

A number of issues raised at the seminars mirrored those raised at the JISC Digitisation conference early this year, which I blogged about.

The importance of planning for successful digitisation was clear at both seminars. It is important to be considering preservation issues early on in the digitial life cycle otherwise data will be lost and in some cases currently is. For large scale digitisation planning in advance and recognising  common problems would also be more effective.

The question of what to digitise was also raised and for many items out of copyright are the easiest to digitise.  I had also only been thinking about print material so it was really interesting to hear from the National Media museum about the issues they face in preserving new media such as games consoles and computers, not only preserving the technology but also the experience.

Once digitised there is also the importance of adding value  to the collections in terms of metadata and discoverability. It was interesting to hear from the British Library regarding the British Newspaper collection, a free resource to UK HE and they now provide a version for anyone to search with payment options for downloading, thereby opening the collection much further.

Resource discovery: demonstration by EBSCO

The 3rd of the demos we’ve organised  from resource discovery system suppliers takes place on Friday October 23rd at 10:30, when EBSCO will be talking about their Discovery Service, together with their federated search tool EBSCOhost Integrated Search

Please come and join us for tea, coffeee, biscuits and another peek at what resource discovery for our students might look like in the future

image credit: alef

Resource Discovery: a brief summary of what we’ve seen so far…

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We are now halfway through our Autumn demos and we’ve had two interesting presentations so far, Robert Bley from Ex Libris showed us Primo and MetaLib, and Richard Burckitt and Richard Illingworth from Serials Solutions demonstrated Summon.

Both presentations highlighted research showing that readers understand and appreciate that resources offered by the Library are both high quality and relevant. The problem we have is that our readers struggle with the complexity of the systems we provide to lead them to those resources. Although the Library wins hands down over internet search engines as a credible, trustworthy and accurate source of information, students still turn to Google because it is so much more convenient and easy to use than the bewildering array of interfaces that we confront them with. There is a pressing need for us to make premium grade and expensive library approved content available from a single starting point; an interface that matches the expectations of today’s readers.

Both companies offer products that are a significant improvement on what we currently have, and Google is an obvious influence. Primo and Summon both allow searches to be carried out across a range of library controlled and commercial subscription resources. They both offer a single search box, an advanced search option, groups of facets as a means of refining searches and filtering results, “did you mean” functionality and enhanced content in the form of book jackets, tagging, reader reviews. etc.

Behind the scenes the two are quite different – Primo builds a local index with metadata from library controlled resources; the catalogue, digital repositories, content management systems etc, but relies on a federated search engine (i.e. Metalib) to search across commercial e-resources that the Library subscribes to. A single interface allows readers to search either the local data sources, or the commercial database and full text journal services, but the two searches are separated because federated search tends to deliver results slowly.

Summon from Serials Solutions uses a single index that merges local metadata with metadata harvested from commercial publishers. Readers search one index that combines all of the resources they are entitled to access (or, more accurately, the resources that Serials Solutions have been able to index). The search can also be expanded to cover everything in the Serials Solutions index, regardless of whether the Library subscribes to the resource. The results are delivered at Google like speed as the search is pointing at one index rather than multiple targets.

Interestingly, ExLibris are also in the process of negotiating with publishers to harvest metadata directly into a central index, they say that coverage isn’t wide enough yet to do away with the need for a federated search engine, but that over time reliance on federated search will inevitably decline. Serials Solutions on the other hand claim that they no longer need federated search because their comprehensive central index can provide 95% and better coverage of a Library’s resources.

Both products are offered on a subscription basis; Primo is available both as a hosted service or as a locally managed application, while Summon is only available via the Software as a Service model.

The turnout for both sessions was good, but we’d really love to know what you thought of what you’ve seen so far.

image credit: Dutch Nationaal Archief

Thoughts on publishers and where the challenge comes…

A key theme for me that seems to be emerging is the relationship of resources discovery product to the publishers’ content (eg the full-text articles). Solutions to this ‘problem’ – of how to search across publishers’ native databases and harvest content back from them seem to take different forms:  a company like ExLibris will for example still depend on their federated product product (Metalib - either hidden or overt) to search across publishers’ and aggregators’ databases using pre-written connectors, whilst companies like Serial Solutions will by-pass this stage and rely on Open-URL access to publisher’s metadata with a product like Summon, in the same way 360 Link can pick up an article reference from within a third-party A&I database . 

It is interesting that Summon is built using an open-source product  architecture – and ditching the need for a federated search back-end is quite a radical step forward into the cloud.  I’m wondering if this is related to their different approach to authentication: both Summon and Metalib seem to be ’authentication agnostic’ and could work with a variety of authentication systems: but ExLibris seems to prefer the ‘up-front’ password challenge as opposed to Serials Solutions who give you it the other way round: metadata first and only authenticate later.

Is it harder to integrate authentication, as opposed to searching for content, into an institutional login this way round? I don’t yet know as I think it depends what choices we make on identity management. Personally I’m drawn to the ‘up-front’ approach – even though the simplicity of what Serials Solutions are doing is very attractive, I prefer my password challenges at the beginning – rather than at the end of the process. What about others?

Resource discovery: demonstration by Serials Solutions

The second in our Autumn series of presentations is happening in the Training Room, City North on Friday 16th October 2009, at 10.30am when Serials Solutions will be showing 360 Search (federated search) and Summon (next-generation discovery tool).

Here is an example of a Summon site at University of Liverpool who are beta-testing the product.

We hope you can come along, and we’d welcome your comments after the event. 

image credit: pargon

“Discoverability – users can’t tolerate a disconnect

Just picked up a tweet from Lorcan Dempsey’s  (OCLC) and his blog http://orweblog.oclc.org/ - which summarizes a report by the University of Minnesota where they discussed key trends in their users’ experience of services. “Search, once one of the key skills and specialties of librarians, is a now a daily activity for the vast majority of our users”.  They “do not distinguish between discovery and delivery”  and “find it discordant to experience this disconnect “.  That’s my experience exactly : when users who are used to getting hits on Google come asking “why can’t I get through to this full-text?”