7: colour and technology #blogjune

Isaac Newton claimed there were seven colours in the rainbow. Personally I count six - there's barely room for blue and purple, let alone indigo and violet, and Newton only went for seven because it's a nice mystical number. But the association's there.

I long felt that our catalogues should allow users to search by the colour of a book. After all, that's one of the major pieces of metadata they remember. "Hi, I want to borrow the green thermodynamics book," they'll say. I've never quite understood why we painstakingly catalogue ix, 165 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. and don't add #0033cc to the end. (Or, for that matter, why size and number of pages and presence/absence of illustrations aren't searchable fields: it'd be handy to be able to search for a book on geraniums with more than 200 pages and col. ill.)

Some years back I saw a prototype of a library catalogue that did allow searching by colour; if I recall correctly, it took the cover images from [some source] and averaged the hex values. I don't recall whether it let you search by picking a spot on a colour wheel or if that part was just my invention and it only let you choose from a list of colours.

In any case, this never got picked up on. At the time I saw two reasons, but I think now there are three:

• Technology hadn't advanced far enough: That is, while it was technically possible it wasn't technically easy. Most libraries at the time didn't have cover images in their catalogues. Vast amounts of metadata would have had to be added, and custom code would have had to be integrated into at least the public search interface of the library management system.
• The customer isn't always right: As often as not, "the orange risk management book" turns out to be black. Even when new editions and rebinding battered copies isn't in play.
• Technology has advanced too far: Who on earth is going to remember what colour their ebook cover is? Well, some and sometimes, but colour is a much less pertinent detail in the electronic context. And there are a lot of other ways to search now too, from all those "refine" options to full-text searching (a boon for all those "I photocopied this page and now I can't remember where it's from" questions).

I think it's interesting how technological changes make some things possible and others redundant.

Links of Interest 26/8/09

Goings-on
University of Otago Law Library has a new blog to go with their new library.

Massey University Library have added book ratings to their catalogue - when logged in, your ratings show in yellow; when logged out, average ratings show in blue.

Westlaw have annoyed librarians everywhere with an ad that "Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, chances are, you're spending too much time at the library. What you need is fast, reliable research you can access right in your office. And all it takes is West®." They have since apologised.

Useful sites
A Digital Outrigger is a blog covering issues in digital libraries and usability - it posts regular link roundups and is well tagged to allow focusing on specific areas of interest.

The JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool lets you compare journal title lists, databases, and ebook platforms.

Fiction
Heard of Project Gutenberg but don't have time to read all its books? Now Project Twutenberg aims to convert each of these books into a 140-character summary.

Food for thought
After a presentation on Digital Reference, some librarians have started talking about the emerging trend towards the real-time web and the real-time library. David Lee King points out, "remove all the 2.0, digital, online stuff from this idea, and we're simply talking about the real, physical, day-to-day experience of a normal (yet very good) library. Emerging online services are working to make this normal, active experience we have at the physical library the same when we're online."

Links of interest 3/6/09

Resources
Gateway to Scientific Data from the Canadian government.

Emerald Management Reviews Citations of Excellence Top 50 papers

The first time Europeana (a digital library funded by the European Commission) launched so many people visited that it promptly crashed. This time it seems to be stable and is very nice to browse.

Musopen "is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music." (Project Gutenberg and Mutopia also have sheet music; Gutenberg also has music recordings, moving pictures, etc.)

Tools
Have you ever used Tinyurl to make a short link for a long url? Now Krunchd gives you a short link for a collection of urls.

Ideas
David Lee King writes about embedding a link to their virtual reference in their HIP catalogue (including on their Search Results page).

Stephen Abram writes about how phrasing on signage can increase compliance.

Non-English blog roundup #11 - the sharing edition

"Non-English" seems to have turned into French, probably mostly because that's the language I read best. Must remedy this. In any case, today I've got a collection of blog posts sharing data:

The Assessment Librarian was thinking about computer posts in his library dedicated to catalogue research only and wondered how much use these got compared to computers available for any purpose. Data collected over two weeks showed:

• Arts and Sciences branch
  • Catalogue-only - 12% usage
  • 'Open' computers - 51% usage
• Law and economy branch
  • Catalogue-only - 7% usage
  • 'Open' computers - 65% usage

He concludes that, while it's not straight-forward to analyse the results, it's worth considering whether there are other possible uses for their catalogue-only computer stations.

Inspired by this post, Des Bibliotheques 2.0:

• shares Google Analytics statistics for off-campus visits to the library catalogue from 1st April 2008 - 1 Jan 2009 (a good handful of pages in pdf);
• compares numbers of visitors to the homepage (site) vs the number of visitors to the catalogue (OPAC) (note the numbers were gathered using different tools;
• shows the impact of a new website - " the number of visitors has increased from 80-100%; the number of visits has increased from 30-50%; the number of pages seen per visit has tripled".

And De Tout Sur Rien has decided "I will no longer participate in projects in which the publication of my contributions in a digital format and under Creative Commons license [...] is not planned from the beginning," and calls for colleagues and/or readers to make the same decision.

Non-English blog roundup #8

Jeroen van Beijnen (Dutch) links to Idée Labs (English), which is playing with image recognition and visual search software. One of their neat tools is Multicolr, which searches among 10 million Flickr images for those with the colour(s) you select.
[Now, if you combined this functionality with book cover images in the catalogue... I do have to admit that my scheme to take over the world and add cover colour as a MARC field to improve searchability has a subtle yet important flaw: people aren't necessarily any more accurate in their memory of what a book looks like than in what it's called, who it's by, or what the course code is that it's a textbook for.]

Bibliobsession talks about an idea for an express computer station where readers can scan in a book's barcode and find reviews of its contents (French): "It's never been as easy to get hold of a book. On the other hand, it's never been as difficult to make choices among the abundance of titles. Note that this doesn't mean that libraries no longer have the function of providing access, but simply that this can no longer be our main raison d'etre."

Non-English blog roundup #7

Bambou (French) reports back from the 1st Congress of the International Francophone Association of Librarians and Documentalists held in Montreal in August. Part 1 covers the success of the conference (280 attendees) and part 2 is a review of the National Library and Archives of Quebec where the conference was held (62 opening hours a week; 2000 comfortable seats; film and music rooms, services for people with disabilities, distance services, federated genealogy search engine, collection for new arrivals, etc; but on the downside strict lending rules, busy webpage, austere catalogue.)

Marlène Delhaye writes (French) "I love LISTA (Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts) (English), saying "I think it's a shame that it's not promoted more".

Álvaro Cabezas writes (Spanish) about reference management software, "one of the star products in the academic community". "The market offers various tools, both proprietary and open-source software, free or paying, desktop or [...] online". He links to a Wikipedia article comparing the various tools (English) - comparisons include operating system support, import/export formats, citation styles, database connectivity, and more.

Lionel Dujol writes Some noise in our libraries! (French) inspired by the start of Marc Maisonneuve's book "Le catalogue de la bibliothèque à l’heure du web 2.0" (The library catalogue in the time of web 2.0). He (or Maisonneuve) riffs off the concept of librarians trying to keep libraries quiet and trying to keep search results free of 'noise': "A new-generation opac must be able to give our users results, no matter the request and no matter the noise. For a user can always adapt to noise, but not to silence, Maisonneuve emphasises."

Linked from the same post is a document of requirements for the modern website of the modern library of our (modern) dreams (French) found on the French Bibliopedia. "The idea of this page is to gather everything that we expect today from a library on the web." It includes sections covering:

• general recommendations
  
• the catalogue
  
• the user account
  
• social networking
  
• editing / CMS abilities

and additional ideas for user service.

Social MARC

Roy Tennant writes that "Tags, ratings, and reviews should help enrich the whole, not one particular library catalog."

The problem is (after convincing TPTB that tags etc really do enrich the catalogue) how to get the data from one library to another. We're not really set up to share metadata like this with each other. --Uh, no, wait a minute. Isn't sharing metadata what copy-cataloguing is all about?

What if we simply (went through a huge bureaucratic decision-making process and) created some new MARC fields for tags, ratings, and reviews?

Then it'd be (a programming nightmare to allow customers to update these MARC fields and then to allow libraries to update to and from the network, but otherwise) dead simple to share tags, ratings and reviews with other libraries through the standard metadata-sharing networks.

Exploiting library catalogue data

At some point I'll catch up from when I was down with a nasty cold and do a proper non-English blog roundup installment. In the meantime this leaped out at me:

Marlen's Corner (French) quotes from a survey about catalogue use (also French) saying approximately: "[...] we must say that the quality of library data is their advantage compared to other data sources. The problem currently doesn't come from these latter, but rather from the lack of exploitation of the library data's potential by search engines, and from the lack of visibility that the interfaces give them."

Every now and then I talk about how I want a catalogue that lets users search by colour. There's just that tiny detail that we'd first need to catalogue the colour of a million-odd existing volumes and redesign the search interface... But seriously, we catalogue books with all sorts of obscure information -- by size, for example. Why do we do that? More to the point, since we do do that, why don't we exploit the fact that the information's there: why can't users search by size? Why can't we limit our searches by "has illustrations", "has colour illustrations", "includes maps"?

(Is there any catalogue that can do any of this?)

Non-English blog roundup #3

Via betabib (Swedish), RSS4Lib has a list of library web pages that list experimental, beta, or trial web tools and services.

Thomas on Vagabondages (French) discusses CollegeDegree's "25 social networking tools"; I was particularly interested by Daft Doggy, of which Thomas says "If I've understood correctly, Daft Doggy is an application which lets you record a session in a web-browswer and then... replay the [web-surfing] visit, modify it, and add commentary."
Thomas also quotes Fred Cavassa who says, "Have you noticed that the term 'web 2.0' is no longer fashionable? [...] Now we speak of social media."

Dominique, bibl. prof. (French) links to her presentation from the ASTED/CBPQ colloquium about profession wikis in libraries: the example of the University of Quebec network (powerpoint).

Via Deakialli, Desde los Zancos 2.0 interviews Dídac Margaix Arnal (Spanish). To a question about promoting collaborative library 2.0 technologies faced with hesitant managers, Dídac suggests talking about:

1. personal experience - how web 2.0 tools have helped you professionally;
   
2. experiences of other libraries;
   
3. the fact that the tools are free; and especially
   
4. "we have to assume that Web 2.0 is the form in which digital natives communicate, relate to each other, inform themselves, compare information, etc. If we want to converse with them, we'll have to use these tools [...]"

Bibliobsession 2.0 (French) talks about the idea of using Cover Flow for catalogue displays. There are tools for creating coverflow displays: "for the English-speaking library geeks, this post on The Corkboard presents other technical possibilities to do the same thing, and there also exists Protoflow to do the same thing."

Marlène's Corner (French) reports the launch of Hypothèses.org, "a blog platform destined to lodge journal blogs [...] As for the journals, the blogs will be subjected to a selection process [...]" The posts aren't intended to replace articles, but to accompany and facilitate the publishing process.

Linking away from the library

David Lee King's notes from a session by David Weinberger, specifically "a blogger that links to other places tells people to 'go away.' The hope is that readers will find that valuable enough to come back to you." reminded me of something I'd been thinking about yesterday.

There's a bit of resistance to library pages linking outwards to other sites and services. The reasoning goes that "If students wanted to search on Google Scholar they'd go there, not our databases page" and "If students wanted to search on Amazon they'd go there, not our catalogue."

Which is true and in the past I've had no answer for it. But these days there are so many different places to go to and search, who wants to check each one individually? That's why we have rss readers, and federated searching, and Meebo, and social aggregators.

These days, where (to pick numbers at random for illustration purposes) you might have a dozen sites each with an average 40% chance of finding what you're looking for, you don't go to the site which has a whopping 50% chance. You go to the site which makes it easy to go to the other sites and ramp up your chances to 90%.

So if Google Scholar searches 80% of the library databases, and the library databases search 80% of what Scholar gets, but Scholar has the "Full Text @ My Library" link and the library has no link to Scholar -- then where are students going to go?

And if Amazon searches a bazillion books that will require extortionate shipping costs and weeks to reach New Zealand at all, and the library catalogue has a million books that are actually here for free, but you can get your LibX plugin to link from Amazon to the library catalogue, whereas the library catalogue stops with "Sorry, could not find anything matching [your title], the end, have a nice day" -- then where are students going to go?

Okay, it's not quite that simple, if only because most students haven't actually heard of Google Scholar or LibX so they're actually going to be searching sites that don't link back to the library at all. But the principle of the thing remains. Just because a resource or service is outside of the library doesn't mean we shouldn't link to it. Libraries are meant to be all about the added value, aren't we? Well, linking outward adds value -- the sort of value that makes it worth the while of our customers to spend their valuable time using our service.

A bit of colour

My not-so-secret desire is to add cover colour as an official MARC field and allow users worldwide to search the library catalogue by colour. (See the New England School of Law and University of Huddersfield mockups.) It'd be brilliant: you could go to the advanced search screen and select:

• title: Mechanics of Materials
  
• location: Restricted Loan
  
• colour: oh, about there on the colour circle

In the meantime, I'm working up to total World Catalogue Domination by subtle steps. The other day I forwarded "Getting Books to Move" from Stephen's Lighthouse to a colleague, who came up with this display.

Click through to see it on Flickr - we had fun adding notes linking each book through to its catalogue record. (Not the sort of thing I'd want to do for a weekly display unless there was a definite market for it - but lots of fun.)