LlyfrgellyddIt’s Welsh for librarian.

My friend Cliff Landis – Technology Librarian at Valdosta State University – pledged to match donations to Partners in Health (one of the many organizations offering relief to those affected by the earthquake in Haiti) up to $10,000. People donated. People donated over $10,000 in three days. Cliff’s “thank you” video has left me in tears, and I wanted to share it with you. I feel honored to know someone as big-hearted as Cliff, and I hope you will have the good fortune to meet him, too. We are all blessed to have Cliff in our profession.

Amanda Etches-Johnson advocated “liberating search boxes” at the Website Improvement Face-off session at Internet Librarian 2009. I whole-heartedly agree with Amanda – but I’d expand upon her statement by saying I think we should liberate any library content we can get our hands on.

To that end, I am following up on my earlier post about embedding LibGuides content boxes into course management systems. We have moved forward with this – my stellar colleague Emily Frigo & I have been collaborating with Kim Kenward, one of the university’s educational technologists. We are doing workshops this semester for faculty on how to embed library content into their courses. We had our first workshop yesterday and the faculty seemed very engaged and interested.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a colleague at another university wondering how to embed LibGuides content boxes into Blackboard, so I wrote up a tutorial on how to do this. (My tutorial from July just demonstrated how to embed LibGuides content somewhere; this one specifically shows how to embed into Blackboard.) I thought this tutorial might be useful to others in libraryland, so I am posting it here.

If there is interest, I can write up tutorials on how to embed other types of library resources – we’re sharing instructions with faculty on how to embed Summon search boxes, Encore search boxes, and I’ve also embedded the Millennium search box in various places on the library website.

Honestly, I think this is more to the heart of “going where users are.” I think library presence on social networking sites can be effective, but I feel like this is one way to go where our users are in a way that makes a lot of sense contextually. Our students do their academic work – the work that it is (largely) our mission to support – in Blackboard, not in Facebook.

John N. Berry, Editor-at-Large of Library Journal, recently posted an editorial that essential defends the spiteful and nasty rhetoric of the Annoyed Librarian as “free expression.” Apparently, those of us who think that the anonymity of this blogger makes him or her a coward are trying to censor free speech. Right. I believe David Rothman rightly identified this argument as a “straw man.”

John closes his piece by noting, “Professionally, I am obligated to support AL’s rights of free expression and those of anyone else in whatever form or style they choose.”

I too feel professionally obligated to support AL’s right to free expression. However, I will note this: I certainly don’t feel obligated to pay AL for his or her opprobrious cra – er, excuse me, “free expression.”

For the last several months, I’ve been trying to tweak our LibGuides home page – I wanted a collapsible menu that would allow users to view all the guides under a specific subject category. Better yet, if I could get the subjects into two columns, all the better. It took me a very long time – and a lot of struggling with Javascript & JQuery. (The nice thing is I know a lot more about both now.) Finally, I got things to work the way I’d envisioned – with the help of some very kind people on the Code4Lib mailing list & IRC channel.

This is what it looks like:

If you like it and would like to customize your system in a similar fashion, what you will need to do is this:

- First, make sure you have subject categories set up, and guides associated with each of those categories.

- Then you need to decide where you want the content box – with the expandable list – to go. You have a few options. No matter what option you use, I recommend that you first set up a box on a private or unpublished page to see what it looks like. You will create a new “Rich Text/Dynamic Content/Scripts” box. Make sure you click on the “plain text editor” and then paste this code:

- Before you save the code in this box, you need to change one little thing in the code. You need to locate your LibGuides institution ID. This is fairly easy to do – when you log into LibGuides, you should see that the URL of the login screen looks something like this:

https://libguides.com/login.php?iid=54&target=aecontent.php?pid=13029~sid=8728

The part that is important is iid=54.  Now, in the big chunk of code you just copied, you need to go down to the bottom and locate this line:

< script id=”myScript” src=”http://api.libguides.com/api_subjects.php?iid=54&more=false&format=js&guides=true&break=li” type=”text/javascript” >< /script>

Change the iid=54 to the IID for your library – then you can save the code.

- Now you have two options – you can add other boxes and make a custom LibGuides home page (talk to Springshare if you want to do this). Your other option is to “import” this box to your existing LibGuides home page. To do that, click on the System Settings tab on the LibGuides administrative menu page. Then click Customize Homepage. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.Now you’ll need to open another window or tab and go back to the page that has the box you just created with the expandable menu. Make sure you are able to edit that page, and hover over the “edit” link in the upper right hand of that box. You should see a small box come up – the text will read something to the effect of Box 1869175. Write down the box number, and then go back to the Customize Homepage page.At the bottom of that page is a section that reads Ordering of Content Boxes on the Homepage – enter the box number in the box next to Center Column Boxes. You could put the code in a left or right box, but it probably wouldn’t look very pretty.

Anyway, that’s it, in a nutshell. I hope you find this useful! Thank you so much to Michael Klein & Dan Brubaker Horst for their help in writing this code!!

If you have any suggestions on how to make this easier, or clean up the code, please feel free to share. Also, for what it’s worth, Springshare tells me that they hope to build something like this into LibGuides eventually!

The vituperous hag also known as the Annoyed Librarian recently commented that “People like to attack the AL for being ‘negative’ or ‘anonymous,’ but they do that because they can’t address the issues I raise.”

Not can’t; won’t, at least in my case. I have no desire to read his or her blog. Why? Because she or he is widely known to be negative and anonymous. I doubt I would read the blog even if it were not anonymous; judging from the few entries I have read, the author seems to thrive on sowing spite and discord. I daresay that if I took the time to read more of his or her blog entries, I would agree that some, perhaps even many, of her or his criticisms have merit. However, I would prefer to offer my attention to other bloggers and colleagues who are willing to offer criticism in a respectful and collegial manner. Oddly enough? Collegiality is an important part of the criteria for tenure at my place of work…so I would hazard a guess that I’m not the only person who prefers gentler communication methods.

The fact that the Annoyed Librarian is anonymous simply lowers my estimation of him or her; combined with the negativity, I can think of few other reasons for hiding behind a pseudonym other than that the author is unwilling to place his or her professional reputation on the line by putting his or her own name on these scathing criticisms.

He or she claims that “I’m trying to end the culture of nice and introduce a culture of criticism.” If by “criticism” you mean “catty bitchiness,” you’ve succeeded. I agree that there’s a culture of “nice” in libraries and I often think that it does the profession harm. But there’s a line between criticism and crappy behavior, and I think she or he has crossed it, and furthermore, I don’t think he or she is making any strides toward truly ending the culture of “nice” and moving libraries and librarians toward more fruitful and honest discussion.

You know who is, though? Michael Porter and David Lee King. I will be honest – I don’t think I learned much from Library 101. But I enjoyed participating in the video, and being part of a larger community of librarians that participated in the video. The Annoyed Librarian doesn’t think that Michael and David’s enthusiasm and passion matters. I imagine that AL would also say it doesn’t matter that Library 101 has helped build community among librarians. Because, you know, community-building can’t lead to fruitful, honest, and critical discussion.

I have bones to pick about librarianship; I think we all do. But I would discuss these issues with people like Michael Porter and David Lee King over the Annoyed Librarian any day (assuming I knew who he or she was), because I believe they have the power to change things, and can help me change the profession in the ways I want it to change.

The Annoyed Librarian cares what we do and how we make the profession look. Well, AL, some of us care what you do and how you make the profession look. And it’s not good.

I have heard librarians say to students – more than once – that they should use library databases because we don’t really know how Google ranks things. But it occurred to me the other day that I know a lot more about Google Page Rank than I do about, say, Academic Search Premier’s relevancy algorithm. I’ve often wondered why, for example, a catalog search might bring up literary criticism of Tom Sawyer before it actually brings up the text of Tom Sawyer. I would like it if we held our vendors more accountable for things like this.

Another thought that occurred to me today while discussing Summon with some coworkers: should availability influence relevancy rankings? Should items that a library has in full text be weighted more heavily than those we only have citations for? On one hand, I can see the utility to the user – they’re more likely to get things they need more quickly. On the other hand, will they miss good research – seminal works in a particular discipline – this way? I think there’s utility in both approaches. Availability could be a bigger factor in say, Summon, while actual relevance would be more important in a subject-specific database.

That said, I can’t think of any library products or vendors that rank search results based on availability. It’d certainly be tricky…

Earlier this year, I co-wrote an article with my coworkers Emily Frigo & Julie Garrison about our experience using LibGuides for the tenure and promotion process. It was published in this month’s issue of College & Research Libraries News.

Classes started on Monday; there’s no question in my mind that the summer has come to an end. The chilly evenings here in Michigan certainly have contributed the feeling that autumn is here! Anyway, I thought this would be a good time for me to revisit my previous entry about my summer projects, and reflect on what kind of progress I made.

I’m happy to say that I got all of my government documents projects completed, for one. I’m still not quite extricated from the old job; we haven’t hired my replacement yet (though the search committee has been doing their thing), so I’ll be doing some of the government documents instruction this fall.

My technical projects went somewhat, but not totally awry…

• The database list project was completed, and we even did some user testing. Here is what the database list looks like now. (My inner critic notes that the “Whats this” still needs an apostrophe; the breadcrumb should say “You are viewing Popular databases.” rather than “You are viewing Start Points databases.”; the Search Multiple Databases page still needs to be switched over to the new Summon search box. Is any web site ever really complete?)
• One of the things I’d hoped to do is redesign the LibGuides home page. That didn’t happen. I have been working on it for months, and have exchanged numerous e-mails with Springshare’s wonderful tech support – but the simple fact is that I don’t know javascript. I actually did have a working prototype for awhile – before I realized that it didn’t work in Internet Explorer.
• We have switched to Google Talk for our chat services. We’re using a Chatback widget. We’ve already encountered a slight problem – there’s no “alert” when a new message pops up because in Google Talk, the new chat windows are embedded right into the browser page. (There is a sound, but we don’t have sound enabled on the reference computers.) My coworkers are looking at using Pidgin or Meebo on the staff side to see if we can make one of those work.
• The Intranet issue got tabled for the time being. I’m still waiting for IT to make GMail available to faculty & staff, so that we can investigate various Google apps to see if they will suit our purposes. The students are now all using GMail (with a GVSU address, yes) so hopefully it will be soon for us, too.
• Documentation on how to share content boxes from LibGuides – done, as you can read about here.
• Content for Facebook? It hasn’t happened yet. If I can remember, I’ll feed in our Twitter account and our blog there tomorrow…
• Learning Camtasia…also hasn’t happened.

And now for the unexpected projects that came up this summer…

• Summon! I just found out today that we are, apparently, the first Summon customer world-wide to have Summon live in production mode. Dartmouth College and the University of Liverpool have Summon on their websites, but they’ve clearly marked Summon as being in beta (and if you’ll forgive me some brief snark, it’s not clear what Summon does, not from looking at their home pages. Once you get a few clicks in, they explain, but what motivation does the user have to click on the Summon link in the first place?). We have decided to just put it out there; it’s on the library home page (and yes, I tried to explain what it is). I’ve also created LibGuides content boxes that librarians can use and copy. One of the university’s educational technology people has been talking up Summon for us, too, which leads me to another project…
• I created a Blackboard site on how to integrate library resources into Blackboard. It went over really well with educational technology, and we’re going to start doing workshops with them. One of the things I did was include information on how to include Summon search boxes in their Blackboard sites. (I also included code snippets for the catalog search box, for our chat widget, etc.)
• As mentioned in previous entries, we tweaked our article linker results page. Again, I’m still not delighted, but hopefully it’s a little bit more friendly-looking now. Our students said that they don’t much look beyond the fact of whether we have it online or not, so that actually makes me feel a bit better.
• I moved our blog to WordPress MU and revised and refined the categories, which pleased my little librarian brain.

So, what did you do this summer? Did you get everything done? If not, did you at least take a great vacation? (I didn’t. I am taking a vacation next week, though!)

A few months back, I wrote about the difference between federated search engines and unified discovery services. As you may have heard in July, my place of work (Grand Valley State University) is the first commercial adopter of Serials Solutions’ Summon.

My coworkers and I have been working with Summon over the last few months, and I have a few additional observations about how it’s different from federated search:

• One does not have a choice about the content in a discovery service. Serials Solutions has made agreements with various content providers; our content is limited to what those vendors provide. Federated search is also limited, but perhaps not quite so much: federated search engines gather content through database “connectors.” If there’s no connector to a particular resource, that resource can’t be included in the federated search. My impression is that there does seem to be a bit more freedom and flexibility with federated search; libraries can choose how many databases they want included in their search, and which databases they want included.
• To my knowledge, only one index can be searched through Summon. With federated search, you have the capability of creating a variety of searches. You could, for example, create a search that only retrieved information from geology databases. With discovery services, you search all of the content all of the time.
• Because you’re working with a single index, there doesn’t seem to be a way to tell which source a particular search result has come from. For the sake of conversation, let’s say Philosopher’s Index (which is an index; no full text) is included in Summon. Say my place of work subscribes to a philosophy journal indexed in Philosopher’s Index, and that we have the full text of that journal in an Ebsco database. Our user searches Summon, and finds an article from this philosophy  journal. Summon points our user directly to the Ebsco database – Philosopher’s Index doesn’t show up anywhere in the search results. This could cause two problems:
  • It could throw off your database statistics. Maybe our users find the data that has been included from Philosopher’s Index particularly useful, but currently, there doesn’t seem to be a way to discover that. (Unsurprisingly, this was a concern brought up by our collection development librarian.)
  • It limits discovery of specific databases. Using the example above, our user will never encounter Philosopher’s Index through Summon. When the instruction librarians my place of work taught federated search, we thought of it as a discovery tool. The user could benefit by noting that several useful search results were coming from a single source, and then the student could go directly to that source to do further searching. (I admit I don’t know how often this actually happened.)

Now, these all seem to be drawbacks, but I’d like to make two caveats:

1. With the exception of my second point above, these all seem to me to be very “librarian” issues. Yes, they will effect the user – but are these things that most of our users are going to care about? Honestly, I don’t think so.
2. As I noted above, my place of work is the first commercial adopter of Summon. To my knowledge, Ebsco’s discovery product isn’t live yet. My point is that discovery services are still a pretty young technology – there’s a lot of potential for improvement and change in the coming months (and years).

So, to follow up on my previous post about article linking, here’s what we did with our 360 Link pages.

Here’s what our users will see when we do have the article online. (Click to view a larger size.)

Here’s what our users will see when we don’t have the article online. We were limited in how we could link to our print holdings, as you can see below. (Click to view a larger size.)

And here’s what our users will see when they find a book mentioned in one of our databases. We don’t track our electronic book holdings in Serials Solutions (but we do have MARC records for them), so this search should always produce a “failure” (in terms of Serials Solutions logic). However, this is how we’ve framed it for our users:

I have to admit that I am a little disappointed in the limitations of 360 Link’s “results page” customization (the above pictures are a few examples of “results pages”). I would have liked it if we could make these changes ourselves, and I would have liked it if we had a bit more control over the layout – as you can see, there are unnecessary blocks of white space, and we have little control over the size of different headings (which is a bit frustrating for me – my inner designer is very, very keen on using consistent sizes and styles of headings in order to help clarify the organization of content).

That said, the guy my coworker Jeff and I spoke with (Chris at Serials Solutions) was very helpful and happy to work with us to make these changes. Also, I have heard that Serials Solutions has an API that customers can work with to customize these pages (I have not seen or played with the API yet, unfortunately).