(crossposted at Scriblio.net)

Using the newly released book viewability API in Google Book Search, Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library and Learning Commons is one of the first libraries to move beyond simply listing their books online and open them up to reading and searching via the web.

Take a look at how this works with books by Plymouth authors Bruce Heald and Joseph Monninger. The “Browse on Google” link in the New Features section leads to extended previews of their works where you can browse excerpts of the books and search the full text.

Matthew Batchelder wrote the JavaScript that makes it work, and all the features are incorporated in the current version of Scriblio. To implement it in an existing Scriblio installation, take a look at Matt’s script how it’s included in the theme’s header.php. You’ll also need to make sure your site’s catalog records include ISBNs to link with (I’ll be adding support for LCCNs and OCLCNs soon). If you’re using the standard MARC or III importers and your source records contain ISBNs, you should be all set.

Hat tip to Tim for giving me the hookup.

Take note of the “New Feature: Text this to your cellphone” line above.

Adam Brin of Tricollege Libraries explained that the “text this to me” feature he built to send location information about items in the library catalog as text messages to a user’s cell phone is being used as many as 60 times a day. That was the news I needed to decide to offer the feature in PSU’s Scriblio implementation.

The messages are handled by Clickatell via an API I added to bSuite, my do-everything plugin for WordPress (hmmm…what else can we SMS enable?).

(It’s old, but I just stumbled into it again…) Karen Calhoun’s report, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, included a lot of things I agree with, but it also touched something I’m a bit skeptical about: automated metadata production.

Some interviewees noted that today’s catalogs are put together mainly by humans and that this approach doesn’t scale. Several urged building or expanding the scope of catalogs by using automated methods.

And she highlighted this quote in particular:

If you put the money you’re spending on LCSH in automatic classification, you might get something more competitive in the Google world and get better subject access too.

Whoa.

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t looking carefully at LCSH and our cataloging norms, but the notion of entirely giving up on them is a bit dramatic for me.

For the moment, our rich metadata — primarily the LCSH — is one of the best (and least tapped) assets in our catalogs. If the goal is competing with Google[1] or getting better subject access, then what we should start with is building OPACs that leverage this data first, then figure out how our cataloging practice should evolve to serve that new need.

Our systems aren’t hard to use because our cataloging is bad, they’re hard to use because we’ve not invested in their development and ease of use.

[1] Is the goal really to compete with Google? I’m more interested in how can we leverage those search engines to improve service to our users.

[tags]automation, computer generated metadata, metadata, libraries, lib20, library 2.0, OPAC, library catalogs, ease of use[/tags]

I was honored to join the conversation yesterday for the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast, this one on folksonomies and tags. The MP3 is already posted and, as usual, it makes me wonder if I really sound like that. Still, listen to the other participants, they had some great things to say and made it a smart discussion.

I approached the conversation with the notion that what we were really talking about was whether libraries should give their patrons the opportunity to organize the resources they value in ways that make sense to them. For some time one of our patrons here has been telling us he wants all the books that he’s interested on one shelf, and for years the standard retort has been a chuckle. But, why, he might today ask, can’t our library systems make this possible in some virtual way now?

Tags — specifically user contributed tags — are a big element in this larger question. Though they bring up all manner of concerns from authority to vocabulary control, they’ve shown great value outside libraries and interest in them has been energized with the active discussions about how to re-imagine our library catalogs for today’s needs.

My big question is who “owns” those tags, and what motivates taggers. LibraryThing, has enjoyed some great success with tags, while Amazon has achieved little. Tim Spalding’s theory on the matter echos Josh Porter’s dissection of “The Del.icio.us Lesson,” where he notes that “personal value precedes network value.” That is, people tag for personal, perhaps even selfish reasons. People don’t tag to help the community, they tag because it helps the tagger.

I’ve been tagging my stories at MaisonBisson for some time now, and the effort has paid off by making my content more findable both internally and externally at services like Technorati. Flickr makes tagging even more valuable, as the tags are often the only searchable content for image. How else could I find my library-related photos if not from the tags?

On the other hand, my own experiment in user contributed tags seems to have fallen flat, as I’ve received very few useful tags despite the high number of readers who I’d expect to be familiar with tagging. Meanwhile, del.icio.us tells me that there are 133 tagged bookmarks to MaisonBisson in their database. This leaves me wondering if I should invest more effort in working on user contributed tag system that lives in my blog (or or a library catalog, or other discrete system), or should I instead focus on making those systems support outside tagging systems like del.icio.us? This is easy for my blog, where all the pages are already URL addressable, but bibliographic systems are a bigger challenge.

update: hey, Abby’s talking about this over at Thingology and her headline is way better than mine. Darn. Still, the point remains: we need to leverage our systems to make it easy for our patrons organize the things they like wherever and however they wish. Then, we should look for ways to find value in the aggregate. That’s the del.icio.us lesson.

folksonomies, folksonomy, interview, l2, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalogs, library systems, opacs, podcast, tagging, tags, talis, talking with talis

I just received this email from the A9 OpenSearch team:

We have just released OpenSearch 1.1 Draft 2. We hope to declare it the final version shortly, and it is already supported by A9.com. Uprading from a previous version should only take a few minutes…

OpenSearch 1.1 allows you to specify search results in HTML, Atom, or any other format (or multiple formats) in addition to just RSS. In addition, OpenSearch 1.1 will be supported by Internet Explorer 7, among other software, so we strongly recommend that you upgrade. Also new is the ability to specify suggested searches, such as spelling suggestions and related queries. (link and emphasis addded)

Woot! I’ll be doing something with this soon.

a9, opensearch, open search, amazon, search, libraries, library, opac, library catalog, library catalogs, a9.com, metasearch, aggregated search, search, federated search

I hadn’t seen Ryan Eby’s post at LibDev that connected ILSs with WordPress before I posted that library catalogs should be like WordPress here. It connects with a my comment on a post at Meredith Farkas’ Information Wants To Be Free. My comment there goes in two directions, but I’d like to focus on the technology side now.

Our vendors will inevitably bend to our demands and add small features here and there, but even after that, we’ll still be stuck paying enormous amounts of money for systems that remain fundamentally flawed. Technology marches on, and inevitably we’ll find some new way to use our catalog data. John Blyberg is talking about this in his ILS customer bill of rights post, and that’s what I was getting at when I say the catalog should be like WordPress.

Meredith asks for more programmers, but as a programmer, I’m asking for her help in demanding smart software design from our vendors.

tags: future of the opac, catalog data, coders wanted, future, future of libraries, future of library catalogs, future of the ils, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, library catalogs, library technology, library20, opac, programmers wanted, smart software, software design

Library catalogs should be be like WordPress. That is, every entry should support comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Every record should have a permalink. Content should be tag-able. The look should be easily customizable with themes. Everything should be available via RSS or Atom. It should be extendable with a rich plugin API. And when that fails, it would be nice if it were all written in a convenient language like PHP so we can hack it ourselves.

tags: libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, library catalogs, library20, opac, wordpress

I’m here at the NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference at the College of the Holy Cross today.

The conference is titled “Google vs. the OPAC: the challenge is on!” and there’s quite a lineup of speakers.

My presentation is on “the social life of metadata.” My slides are online, and below is some background.

The Library Catalog…
The catalog is among a library’s most important assets. An unread book offers little value, but the catalog offers the promise that the library’s resources will be found and used, and a well constructed catalog makes the finding easier by offering rich details and easy navigation.

…vs. The Google Economy
One of the most critical differences between the search behavior of librarians search and that of a typical patron is the conscious decisions librarians make to define the question and identify specific resources to search. Many patrons, however, pose their question in simple terms to the nearest search engine, and refine it over successive searches until an answer is found.

Patrons are increasingly unlikely to consider questions of where or what resources to search prior to executing their first search attempt.

The Systems We Build Shape The Search Results We Get
We must remember that search results reflect the resources and metadata indexed by the search engine. Search engines offer us the opportunity for libraries to deliver quality information to patrons who need it, but who have not yet thought to search library systems specifically.

So, in addition to outstanding ease of use and quality search features, a well constructed catalog must optimize the linkability and indexability or our data.

Findability Is Paramount
“What we find changes who we become.” So reads the subtitle to Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability.

The internet and search engines offer our patrons access to more information sources than ever, making our role in the findability equation ever more important. The challenge is to take advantage of how search engines work, to manage the tools that manage our information.

tags: library catalogs, bibliographic services, bibliographic services conference, google, google vs. the opac, libraries, library, library catalog, nelinet, nelinet bibliographic services conference, opac, opacs, social life of metadata, the social life of metadata, worcester, worcester ma

Libraries are known for books. And despite the constant march of technology, despite the fact that we can put a bazillion songs in our pocket, despite the availability of the New York Times and so many other newspapers and thousands of journals online, books are a big part of what libraries are. Books, dead tree books with that rotting paper smell. And though I dare not prognosticate, I expect they’ll be an emblematic feature of libraries for a while now.

Problem is, books are increasingly anachronistic to young patrons who’ve grown up with the wonders of Google and full text searching.

Find a patron who can explain whatever call number system is in use at your library. Find a patron who can locate a book as fast as they can find movie times in any random city.

That’s why I was anxious to speak with Pepper Computer’s Jon Melamut last week. The Pepper Pad (pictured left) is a delightful, but hard to define post-PC device. Take a look at the specs or my hardware review (coming soon) to learn more.

What’s so special about the Pepper Pad? It’s portable, more portable than a laptop. Laptops move from desk to desk, but patrons often leave them behind when they go looking for books or other materials. See it? Books and computers — even laptops — don’t mix. In this age of computers, PDAs, and iPods, a pen and notepad are still one among our best information tools. The Pepper Pad is small enough, light enough to go with the patron among the stacks, around reference, even (god forbid) into the bathroom.

It’s portable, but it has a big bright screen (8.4“ diagonally) that makes web pages (displayed in Mozilla) and other text easy to read. Your library catalog will look great on it, and any maps or location guides will make a lot more sense when patrons can view them in-situ. It will help them find the books they’re looking for, then offer them a lot more once they do. They should be able to use it to mark the book as useful, or not. And if they stumble across something they didn’t expect, they should be able to mark that too — or look up bibliographic details to help decide what to do with it. Got search-inside-the-book going? How better to use it than on a Pepper Pad from within the stacks?

The portability, the touchscreen, and the stand that keeps it upright and available at all times could make it an ideal research companion. Of course, the built in web radio and AIM client help too. Better, it could enable new applications, new modes of accessing library resources that current technology hasn’t yet revealed.

No matter how small laptops get, they’ll still be deskbound. Tablet PCs change that, but they’re expensive and depend on touchy handwriting recognition. Libraries need inexpensive, useful devices like the Pepper Pad. Libraries are rethinking the OPAC, but the way we access the OPAC must change too.

tags: handheld, handheld computer, laptop, laptop computer, libraries, library, library catalog, library catalogs, opac, pepper, pepper computer, pepper pad, ultra portable