LITA Next Generation Catalogs IG

Saturday 1:30-3:30

Inaugural Meeting – meeting following this session at 3:30 p.m. to decide speakers and topics for next meeting.

Speaker 1

Don Barlow

Westerville Public Library

Serve 86,000 people

Quality program and services made available so people will use it.

Users expect info to be delivered to them with highly personalized interfaces.

Combine quality, convenience and social computing – drive up window, accessible through multiple devices, MySpace and Flickr accounts, tagging, gaming, RSS feeds, pod casting, hot lines (phones throughout library to ask for assistance), e-commerce, and line buster (handheld device to check out while in line).

Develop a NO list – every time you say no to a customer, write it down. The list is reviewed weekly to see if need to revise policies.

One Card – All resources – All the time: search
Ohio. One card accesses everything in the state.

Handheld Compatible

Access to resources must be easy and fun to use! Connect with people and create own community.

Encore is new discovery integration reviews context-sensitive links faceted search. Add to Outlook calendar when schedule class.

Many development partners exist throughout the country. Based on Google searching – has same look and feel. Uses federated search engine.

Relevancy tagging is similar to Amazon.com.

Search other libraries in the area and have the materials delivered.

Did you mean? For if you misspell a word.

Refined by tag cloud. Community can add the tags. Remember this has no effect on the Marc record. It just helps the next patron to come along.

Search words are highlighted within the found items.

Supplements subject headings with specialized terminology.

Programs for program registration – RSS feed to customer when new ones are available.

It brings content, community and discovery together. It transforms the user experience. It is rich in information yet simple to use. It is easily maintainable.

Discovery Services Platform

Booth 4132 Encore

Booth 3205 Innovative

www.iii.com/encore

Speaker 2

Steve Shadle

University of
Washington

36,000 students

Innovative Interfaces ILS & WebPAC

WorldCat Local – what it is, what it does, etc.

It integrates WorldCat with the local delivery environment. A customized view of WorldCat.org

Functionality: single search box, relevancy ranking, FRBR collocation, faceted browse, and citation formatting. It links to local systems.

It searches PubMed, ERIC, GPO, ArticleFirst and WorldCat.

It is not a federated search product. It knows what is held and presents as local information.

Strategic Plan: to build and integrate new tools and services for information discovery and delivery.

It helps to shape the future of the service. It is designed with the user in mind.

Too many silos: content, 3 catalogs, hundreds of databases, delivery silos

Ranked by holdings. Keeps in mind how quickly available to someone.

250,000 searches were done in the first month.

Requests were up for UW,
Summit and ILL borrowing.

Demonstrated Live.

Search UW Libraries and beyond is the name on the search box. It brought up 67 results with items held by UW listed at the top. He used the facet to limit the search. Shows symbol for book, visual, sound recording, etc. It allows you to request through your own library also. They have needed to adjust staff. It uses drop down menus very effectively. It is an easy to use system.

OCLC wanted to include their digital collections also. They use primarily CONTENTdm. Mapped a crosswalk from CONTENTdm to catalog.

Learning what works and what doesn’t work as it is in beta testing mode.

Speaker 3

Dale Poulter

Automation Coordinator/Systems Librarian

Vanderbilt
University

Dale.Poulter@vanderbilt.edu

Primo

User interface was designed for searching, not finding. They wanted to move the library services to the users. The users wanted to get information from where they were at – facebook, myGoogle, mySpace, etc.

All of their staff is involved. Several teams were created.

Implemented Metalib 4.0 in conjuction with Primo. The interface is much simpler. Searches are very quick.

Primo allows RSS, tagging, faceted browsing, and federated searching.

Administration of Primo is very easy. Quickly generate new interfaces for individual libraries or user groups. They will have different default searching.

Staff response has been positive. Any problems were responded to very quickly.

3^rd node searching is much faster than federated searching.

It will be available soon.

New Technical Services Supervisor? Check Here for Help

Based on a book that the committee wrote. Available in the store tomorrow (only 20). ALA discount and no shipping because
ALA made a mistake on the count.

Dr. Joan Giesecke
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries
Dean of Libraries

Getting Started – Command and Control does not work. Trust your staff – go to the experts. It is ok to show emotion. You do not always need to defend your staff – you will mess up. Fix it and continue on. You do not always have to be right – take a risk.

New Roles –
Mentor the staff – put them in positions where they will excel. Be a facilitator for managing conflict. Monitor the units performance – do not hide in your office all day. Be a coordinator of projects – meet deadlines. Be a planner. Be a negotiator with the rest of the library and your unit. Be an innovator – manage change well. Look ahead and plan for changes.

Beginning –

Stage 1 Assessment (3-6 months) – design an orientation, listen with an open mind, fix obvious and easy problems.

Stage 2 In Depth Learning – refine your understanding of your unit, learn more abut the organization, identify more subtle problems, and test assumptions.

Stage 3 Implementing Change – introduce new ideas, revise workflow but involve others, change the culture, and work with your unit (do not impose changes).

Stage 4 Consolidation – assess changes, refine changes based on assessment, and assess again.

Understand your style – you are a leader and a manager. Balance concern for tasks with concerns for people. Adjust your style to work effectively with members of the department.

Skills: Planning – long range, annual, strategic and scenario; Personnel – hire, orientation and training, coaching and motivating, assessing strengths of staff, build teams and evaluations; Communication – begin with your message, understand the audience, and pick the communication method; Time Management – stay organized, use technology, set priorities and remember deadlines; Chairing Meetings – types of meetings, have a purpose, prepare for meeting, and conduct the meeting summarizing key points, evaluate and follow up on meeting agenda.

Use checklists as outlines. Read and try new things. Have fun.

Angie Ohler

University of Maryland
Head of Acquisitions

Libraries struggle to find qualified applicants to replace retiring librarians. There is a difference in culture of new entry librarians. GenX and GenY value “organizational fit” and will leave if not satisfied. New librarians are taking on management positions early on.

Pay attention to the workflow. Examine what works and listen to the staff. Examine written procedural documentation. Poor documentation can cost the organization.

Identify staff strengths and weaknesses and training documentation. Identify timeframe and plan to train staff. Become familiar with software, systems, and hardware used by staff. Become familiar with interdependencies between departments that affect implementation/use of technology. Resist implementation or use of technology that does not meet needs or creates impediments to workflow.

Know when to let go. Know staff skills/knowledge. Periodically review the workflow. Accept that mistakes will happen.

Keep and eye on the statistics you are keeping. Are they still relevant? Will you have the statistics that answer the questions administration will ask?

Measure productivity – identify what should be measured and how to do it, why is it important and to whom, who will record the data, how will it measured, and set an implementation time line.

Measure performance – Learn the difference between positive and negative discipline. Do not ambush staff during evaluations with a list of things done wrong with no prior notification. Manage yourself and be aware of your faults. Ask for feedback. Know how you like to be managed and seek that information about those you supervise.

Communication/Networking – Use both formal and informal channels of communication. Facilitate communication with your staff and others. Ensure that you are accurately articulating your department’s work and its importance to others in the organization. Lobby superiors and peers for support and a place at the table for decision making.

Need to know information that will impact your unit.

Become politically savvy. Develop a network of peers and mentors whom you can trust. Know when to say “no” politely and constructively. Learn how to negotiate and resolve conflict.

Authority Control Meets Faceted Browse, ALCTS Authority Control IG, June 24, 2007

PowerPoints available at the authority control interest group LITA/ALCTS

Kathryn LaBarre,
Science
University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaignklabarre@uiuc.edu

Concept of bringing search and browsing together. We are in the period of experimentation: metadata standards, web 2.0, folksonomy, leverage, and facets.

Look to interconnections available with authority data. Authority data is a conceptual map. S.R. Ranganthan discussed the dynamic theory of classification. He has a set of normative principles.

Facet – information can be assigned to multiple dimensions. The speaker explained the technique of facet analysis. An example was done with Buildings and some potential facets include location, composition, purpose, style, date constructed, and associated persons. Every subject area has its own possibilities for categories. She listed many examples of prior art. We need to examine assumptions: how to support searching/browsing, user tasks, user behavior, and things vs. subjects. She continued by going through some examples of opacs and the facets to refine searches – authors, series, topics, branches, and titles. An example using the Aquabrowser is Queens Library. They use format, author, subject, language, series, corporation, etc. Western North Carolina Library Network uses classification numbers to refine the searches to see what is near by.

Charley Pennell, NCSU Libraries, Charley.pennell@gmail.com

View the Endeca product at his library. We have been able to do filters for quite some time. We are now using technology that has been used by commercial enterprises. It mines metadata already available via MARC record. It re-indexes over night. This process did demand a cleanup of the 6XX subdivisions. It allows for both pre- and post-coordinate limits. Hierarchical data enables drilling down through call number results. He shared statistics about searches using facets. Things he has learned from the project: a single facet need not represent data from a single field. Author facet is less useful in some types of searches than others. Some users haven’t figured out breadcrumbs.

Endeca and Authority control – to make use of available metadata, subjects were split along subdivisions. Authors were not. Problems include wrong delimiter values, hierarchy, context (one way relationship broken, devoid of geographic context, phrase headings expressed in multiple subdivisions, and scope-match cataloging vs. keyword).

Solutions may include FAST, search behavior education, and Web 2 cross referencing to redirect searches. Future directions include additional hierarchies, use of cross reference structure, massage underlying metadata and accommodation of true browse for all indexes.

Mary Charles Lasater,

Vanderbilt
University Libraries

Primo implementation. I apologize she spoke quickly and I was unable to keep up.

Facets include topic, creator, collection, creation date, resource type, language, genre, and classification LCC. With TV News you only get two facets – creator and creation date.

Primo allows much better access to the patrons. Another search had topic, creator, collection, creation date and resource type as the facets. She demonstrated how some of the searches were not as successful as others. She discussed some of the authority control/maintenance issues. We need to reconsider our NACO practices. Authority control, maintenance and consistency are important.

Casey Bisson, Plymouth State University, http://MaisonBisson.com

Casey is a programmer, not a librarian. Scriblio is an open source product. Development has been easy. He is not doing as much faceting as he is doing clustering. He is taking the information from the MARC record. He demonstrated a number of searches showing the search and browse hits. He showed clusters by subject and author. He did not show but it is built with comments and user tag ability.

Question and Answer Session occurred followed by a interest group meeting.