Search engine wishlist

Blogging about technology for 23 Things...

I recently read somewhere or other about Wikia search which... is a work in process obviously and thankfully.

But it reminded me of how I'd ranted to a colleague the other day that it's only the complete and utter lack of any programming skills whatsoever (well, Basic and html and a tiny bit of javascript) that stops me creating my own search engine which would search on synonyms automatically: so someone could type in "television" and the search engine would search for "television OR TV OR telly". Then it'd rank the results so that results with more of the synonyms were rated higher. And it'd also know when one word can have two meanings and figure out which meaning was intended according to what other keywords were used, or - if no other keywords are available to disambiguate - can ask the user which meaning was intended.

Okay, it has potential for all sorts of havoc and it'd probably be a bit tricky, but (as a non-programmer) I don't think it'd be *too* tricky; is there really no-one working on something like this?

Other duties as required

I was going to write this post last year; it was going to be very witty and all. But then Christmas came up and now I've forgotten all the scintillating sentences I'd composed while working with two of my colleagues to move several stacks' worth of books en masse one stack to the right. The "other duties as required" part came into it because we had the cleaners' vacuum cleaner out and as the books moved from one stack to the next, the tops of them got vacuumed on the way; this amused me.

The reason I'm writing the post now is that we've just done the same thing again, with another three stacks of books and Bible-weight journals covered in dust thick enough to grow potatoes in. (We didn't vacuum this time due to time pressures.) It's the sort of process that looks incredibly daunting to start with, and 30+ Celsius temperatures don't help, but what does help is:

• teamwork. Everything's more fun when you've got a colleague around to mock for breaking a shelf. (That shelf was trouble, and I got mocked in turn for breaking it myself.)
  
• music. Last year we played the Beatles, this year a mixture of opera and some more modern stuff which the heat has caused me to forget, although a scary rock version of "O Come All Ye Faithful" is niggling at my mind. Music really helps, especially when one of your colleagues can be relied on to entertain us with his dance moves.
  
• a break halfway through. Tea/coffee/water, chili chocolate, plums/crackers, and zoning out.
  
• paper darts. Thoughtfully left for us in the stacks by years of engineering students.
  
• workflow. Last year's effort involved condensing the shelves as we went so one person loaded a booktrolley at one end, another vacuumed, and another unloaded it at the other end. This year we were just moving things straight across, so we worked in pairs, passing books through stack A to the librarian putting them on the same shelf on stack B.
  
• soap. For the hands that inevitably turned black.
  
• sorbets. Brought in for us when we'd completed by our thoughtful manager. Callippo All-fruit (or something like that; here endeth the product placement) mango flavoured; mmm!
  

Online flowchart generator

Last year a new course started here, compulsory for all 700-odd intermediate-year engineers at the university. On the plus side, the course coordinator was wonderful about getting the library involved in their first assignment; on the minus side... well, 700 intermediate-year engineers all desperately needing to know how to cite websites and videos in APA.

So this year I'm creating an ambitious display all about citing. It's going to have whats, whys and hows; a three-step process; links to more online information; possibly a puzzle with prizes (must ransack the drawer of vendors' highlighters to see if we've got anything fun); and a tip of the day with "ingredients", a flowchart, and "here's some we prepared earlier" examples.

So I needed to make flowcharts. I wasn't going to draw them by hand or mess about with Word shapes. I remembered playing with an online flowchart generator which was awkward but workable - I just couldn't remember the name or find it again. This was lucky, because instead I found Gliffy

Gliffy's free demo lets you have five free flowcharts - that means five at any one time, as you can create a chart, save it as a jpg (or png or svg), 'revise' it into a completely new chart, rinse and repeat as many times as you like (or at least as many times as I've needed - 14 so far).

It's all click-and-drag, very user friendly. Far more options than I need or understand, but easy to find the options I do need. Colours, fonts, sizes and styles are customisable. Arrows attach to boxes so things can be dragged about and stay attached to each other. Copy and paste works!

An example of one of the flowcharts I've been making, for how to cite journal articles in APA:

More fun with weeding

Things found today:

• a bunch of 1992 press releases from a company I've never heard of;
  
• a government guide to decimal currency for businesses, prepared when NZ changed from pounds and shillings in 1967 - very cute and absolutely fascinating, but we've got copies in other branches where it's more likely to be used. I read it cover to cover before respectfully disposing of it;
  
• a pair of books which perfectly fit our criteria to be disposed of (another copy in another branch; not quite in our subject area; have had practically no use) - but they were so lovely we couldn't bring ourselves to do it and they're now back on the shelves;
  
• moths. As I pulled down several bundles of journals (tied together with binding tape a decade or so ago and clearly never touched since) a couple of moths flew out at me. I wasn't fast enough to dispose of them along with their erstwhile home, but with luck the tidier shelves will prove an environment too hostile for them to breed in.
  

What, will these hands ne'er be clean?

Our library is soon to be getting a new and much-needed lift, to make room for which we are undertaking a large collection management exercise (aka "weeding", though I personally prefer the "pruning" metaphor - getting rid of both deadwood and of nice enough shoots in order to make the collection as a whole bear more fruit) in part of our collection.

While studying for my MLIS, in a temporary fit of determination to actually study, I came up with a mnemonic for twelve ways pruning could benefit a collection. I can't remember it anymore, but I'm still a great fan of the process, so this post title doesn't refer to any kind of guilt, but rather much more prosaically to the fact that, while we're working our way through this, for approximately 7.5 hours of each day my hands are grey with decades-old dust.

My favourite candidate for deaccessioning so far is Objections to removal of Fendalton shops: shops proposal in doubt (this link may not work for very long...). It was a slim A5-sized thing, the kind of quarter-flushing-type work our bindery used to do decades ago. I opened it up to find the barcode and discovered it wasn't a bound report; it was a pocket. A pocket containing two newspaper clippings. From 1966.

It's now being recycled. The relatively nice books (duplicates and such) we put out for students to browse through, but the really ridiculously thick-with-dust what-were-we-thinking? ones we put in the recycling bin; we're green that way. We've also been dismantling plastic ringbinders to extract the cardboard inside for recycling, and tearing apart spiral-bound reports to recycle the paper and throw out the wire/plastic. Today (possibly a little bored by now of wielding the "cancelled" stamp) I used some spiral-binding wire to make a bracelet for my sister (Merry Christmas!); and my colleague, inspired by the artistic possibilities in the length of wire I tore from another ancient report, made the sculpture you see above, which she's kindly allowed me to name "Lampshade".

More fun things to do with Skype

We've been having a look at possible new designs for our library website and today we've been running usability testing on two favourites. What we do is have the tester in one room with a facilitator beside them, a note-taker behind them, and next door a group of observers watching a) a view of the computer screen and b) a closed-circuit video of the tester. (The note-taker is in the room in case the video link breaks. Testers are told other observers are watching but that we're not recording.)

Normally for the closed-circuit link we use video equipment booked and carted over from the AV department, but today when I arrived to do my duty as an observer I discovered they'd set it up using Skype instead. It worked well: there were problems with sound volume (a function of the hardware: we used our regular webcam, but a clip-on microphone for the tester would probably be better), but quality otherwise was just fine.

(The usability testing was, as usual, fascinating. Although it covered the library website as a whole, there were several points where testers were using the library catalogue (of which, I was recently part of a project group to find and fix as many things as we could fix for free in a short timeframe), and one question asked was if they'd noticed any of the multitudinous changes. Yes: they noticed the new colour scheme. On the plus side, they approve.)

Web 2.0 and Library 2.0

(Rather belatedly: the text of my contribution to our institution's report-back session after the Lianza 2007 conference. I had a five-minute time limit or I wouldn't have composed a speech in such detail. Links are to my blog posts about each conference paper. The papers themselves are at the Lianza website.)

Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 are the buzzwords of the decade. They're all about the new kinds of interactive websites out there, and about the new ideas about getting our users participating in improving our libraries.

Last millenium (I love being able to say that) most web pages were just like a page in a book: someone wrote it, and a bunch of people came along and read it. This millenium, more and more websites are like a whiteboard where the person who owns it hands out a pen to everyone who comes to visit. So you get blogs where visitors can comment. Wikis where visitors can fix typos and add information. Websites where users can create social groups and share information with each other. All of that is Web 2.0.

Library 2.0 is the realisation that a lot of people like this approach -- sharing information instead of just taking it. And it's the idea that if we let people participate in the library like this, then they could help us make our services more useful to them.

This is a huge idea, which is why there's a lot of talk about it, both for and against. At the conference, I went to at least eight papers about it, so most of them I'm just going to skim over.

I'll start with the ones against -- or at least, the cautious ones. Peter Darlington talked about the IT perspective - about how they have to be careful with new technology, planning for the worst. Modern systems are extremely complex, so they have to make sure that anything added to it doesn't compromise its security, and doesn't make everything crash.

Andy Neale talked about how we don't have to jump on every bandwagon. We should focus on what we're trying to achieve: he was very keen on figuring out what you want to do first, and only then working out how you're going to do it technically.

Brian Flaherty and Paul Sutherland were more enthusiastic about Web 2.0. They did point out that there's no use in just setting up blogs and wikis if they don't actually add value to our services. But we can use modern technologies to make our search systems easier to use, for example. And we can use them to get users participating in the library.

Paul Reynolds talked more about users participating and creating content, and about harnessing that. We create subject headings, which is great, but if we let users add information about levels we don't look at, that'd be even better. Or if we let users present search results in a completely different format -- like showing books about Captain Cook on a map according to where they were published; or a Beethoven CD side-by-side with an encyclopaedia article about him; or an email every time a new book about cochlear implants is added to the catalogue. We don't have the time to do all this sort of thing ourselves, but if we made our data openly accessible then our users could do it.

All of this might sound pretty theoretical, so I'll get into some examples of what libraries have been doing. The University of Waikato has been creating interactive tutorials, online library tours, and podcasts (that's essentially blogging by voice instead of typing). A lot of the technology they used to do all of this was available for free on the web.

CPIT have been working on podcast library tours for the same reason as Waikato, so students can listen to them whenever and wherever they need them. They also created a video tour in NZSL, and they're wanting to do a tour in Te Reo. Again, they talked about focusing on the users, not the technology.

And for the same reason I want to mention the Dental Library at Otago -- they didn't use any new technology at all, but it was the same idea of getting students participating in their own learning. Instead of the normal library tour where students trail around listening passively, the Dental Library created a treasure hunt where the students were essentially creating their own tour.

So you don't need to use technology to get users participating in the library - but it can let you do some really amazing things. I'm going to finish up with the Horowhenua Library Trust. Their council asked them to help gather all the pieces of the local cultural heritage that were scattered among small organisations and private individuals. So they created a piece of free web software and they asked the people in their community to participate by adding their own information onto the website.

At the conference they played us a recording of a builder who'd never seen a computer in his life -- but within an hour and a half of going into the library, he was cataloguing images of machinery for them. They were overwhelmed with volunteers -- retired secretaries, people who'd say they could maybe do half an hour a day, and now they're doing it full-time, four days a week. People are logging in and adding information about photos that no-one else could identify.

Their view of Web 2.0 is of "radical trust": trusting their community to create their own library -- and by giving that trust, they're getting an amazing digital library that they couldn't ever have created without that community's participation.